Having said that, after the Chinese expeditionary force advanced into the Kazakh steppe, it still fought several large-scale battles, because the so-called "fighting people" generally have the characteristics of irritability and irrationality, especially after drinking, even if they know that they are invincible, they dare to show their swords, well, they can only show their swords, and then there is no more......

In less than 10 days, the Chinese expeditionary force that entered the Kazakh steppe was killed and maimed (it is inconvenient to accept prisoners of war when moving behind enemy lines, and it is afraid that the Russian army will resist in the future, waste ammunition and cause unnecessary casualties, so the captured Russian soldiers can only cut off their thumbs so that they cannot shoot and then release, and the officers can always be with them because of the small number. The pen www.biquge.info) more than 70,000 Russian troops, and also used captured weapons and ammunition to win over some steppe tribes, anyway, because of the different models, they can't be used, just waste use. It is said that Maozi's conquest of Central Asia is all about violence, and it has not been more than two generations, and the steppe tribes that are still hostile to it are not one or two, and now they see that the Chinese Expeditionary Force has beaten the Russian army to the ground, and the courage suddenly increases, and after the Chinese Expeditionary Force has been subdued by some tribes, it has also begun to target those pro-Russian tribes, which has further accelerated the speed of change in the grassland.

In this process, the expeditionary force is not just blindly fighting and killing, what they do the most is actually to collect materials, especially horses, although the expeditionary force has brought more than 100,000 heavenly horses, so that one person and two horses, but the headquarters still requires the troops to take away all the horses that can be taken away everywhere, on the one hand, to save the physical strength of the horses, so that they will not lose weight obviously without feeding concentrate feed, on the other hand, they are regarded as a mobile grain depot, giving priority to drinking mare's milk and eating horse meat, so as to save a little less field dry food. Although horse meat and mare's milk are not as delicious as beef and milk, only horses can keep up with the speed of the expeditionary force's movements, and the commanders and fighters from the big foodie empire can only be aggrieved......

Such a desperate collection of horses inevitably dealt a devastating blow to the horse breeding industry in the Kazakh steppe, and the Chinese expeditionary force also cut off the eastern section of the Central Asian Railway for a long time (Note 1), which made Tsar Nicholas II completely unbearable. At the same time, by the way, block the back road of the expeditionary force.

However, to the surprise of the Russian High Command, in the process of assembling the Russian troops on the two routes, the Chinese Expeditionary Force did not seem to care about the risk of being cut off at all, and instead of turning back to meet the battle, they advanced all the way to the west, and unconsciously approached the dividing line between Asia and Europe!

This immediately caused Tsar Nicholas II great anger and panic, although the European part of Tsarist Russia still has more than 1 million troops, but most of them are deployed in the west to defend against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the army deployed to the Asian part of the center of gravity is eastward, although the Russian army on the middle line of the eastern front is not many troops to attack, but in order to prevent China's counteroffensive, there are not many troops left, all of which add up to more than 400,000 people, plus the army that has just completed the assembly at the north and south ends of the Central Asian Railway, the total strength is almost 1.5 million, it is conceivable how many garrisons there can be along the Eurasian border of Russia......

In other words, intentionally or unintentionally, the Chinese expeditionary force has entered a vacuum area of the enemy's forces, and the geographical location of this area is extremely important to Russia, if the Russian high command cannot complete the transfer of troops as soon as possible, if the Chinese expeditionary force really crosses the Eurasian border and enters the European part of Russia, the consequences will be unimaginable.

After discovering that the 3.5 million army was still insufficient, the Russian high command had no choice but to issue an order for further conscription, intending to expand the total number of the Russian army to 5 million, but this obviously could not be saved, and it was still necessary to squeeze out mobile forces from the existing forces to deal with the Chinese expeditionary force that was already spreading in the Russian hinterland. And the tsar's anger made the transfer of troops more urgent and irrational, the north and south armies had not yet begun to attack, and they invariably received an order to immediately transfer the main force to the west, well, after the Chinese expeditionary force went west, even if only a small part of the troops remained, it should be able to complete the task of opening up the eastern section of the Central Asian Railway, but so many troops had just been transferred from the east and were tired and tired, and now they were about to rush back again, which was not an ordinary drain on their physical strength, spirit and morale!

Although he felt that something was wrong, the tsar was angry, and the consequences were very serious, and the commanders of the two military regions did not dare to make jokes about their black gauze hats or even their heads, so they could only send back hundreds of thousands of troops who had worked so hard to come......

However, the accident happened again, and when more than 800,000 troops from the north and south began to return west by train, the Russian high command suddenly received an urgent report that shocked everyone, "What? The 27th Army was attacked, and it may have been completely annihilated? ”

This 27th Army is the unit left behind by the hundreds of thousands of troops that the Russian Siberian Military District was originally preparing to use to attack the Chinese Expeditionary Force to open up the eastern section of the Central Asian Railway; because some baggage troops have not yet had time to move westward, the strength of the 27th Army is as many as 100,000 troops, which is more than the normal two armies. Unless, unless the Chinese Expeditionary Force still has a large force left or they send reinforcements from within their country......

"Reinforcements from within China? This is absolutely impossible, because all the field troops in China's garrison in Xinjiang that can go out to fight have already been dispatched, and there is no railway connection to Xinjiang in Chinese mainland, so even if the expeditionary force is transferred immediately after leaving Xinjiang, it is impossible to arrive in time. Moreover, with the state of infrastructure in Xinjiang, the Chinese government cannot afford to send another army to Central Asia. The latter possibility was immediately ruled out, but the faces of the generals of the General Headquarters became more solemn, because if it was the former, it would mean that the westward advance of the Chinese Expeditionary Force might be a scam at all!

Note 1: In addition to the line built in history, the railway also continued to extend north from Tashkent to the intersection with the Trans-Siberian Railway, in a sense, it is equivalent to the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, which was built in advance during the 15th Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union (of course, because of technical constraints and the needs of the war against China, The specific route direction is still a little different from the historical Turkish-Western Railway. ）。 Therefore, the Central Asian railway in this time and space is no longer a half arc and two is a complete big "U", and it is precisely because of this eastern section that the Tsarist government can invest more than 500,000 troops at once in the battlefield on the western front, which was not easy to supply. (To be continued.) )