New Book Collection: The Rise of Great Powers 1900

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Escaping Hong Chengchou made Xie Fei very frustrated, the reason why he was so patient with Guangzhou was because Hong Chengchou was here, and he had fought with Hong Chengchou many times, he had already given up playing strategy with Hong Chengchou, and wanted to take this place with a strong attack, and then capture Hong Chengchou, you must know that Yang Chao has confessed many times that he wants to take Hong Chengchou at all costs, but when he was in Jiujiang, Hong Chengchou ran away from Xie Fei's hands, and let him run from the palm of his hand in Guangzhou, which made Xie Fei extremely frustrated.

Song Kun was in a good mood, and he was very positive in his hope of continuing to march into the army, and he was willing to be the vanguard to attack Wuzhou and Guangxi.

But Xie Fei only asked him to go south to capture Leizhou and other places, and capture the whole of Guangdong, and Xie Fei would personally lead his troops to attack Guangxi.

Song Kun was naturally a little dissatisfied with this arrangement, but Xie Fei was the boss, and he didn't dare to disobey the military order.

They took their armies and marched south.

With Song Kun's advance, most states and counties had little resistance, but in Xinhui it hit a big nail.

Xinhui is just a county seat, backed by mountains and water, there are Gudou Mountains in the west, and it is the Yamen Haikou of the Pearl River water system, and the Yashan Naval Battle of the last battle of the Southern Song Dynasty took place here, so although it is a small coastal city, there are actually some strategic positions.

However, its importance is also limited, after all, after Guangzhou has been captured by the Yang army, Xinhui's role as a barrier against attacking Guangzhou from the sea has actually been greatly weakened.

So Xie Fei just asked Song Kun to attack here, and he himself took the main force and rushed to Zhaoqing to rest and recuperate, ready to enter Guangxi to fight at any time.

And Song Kun didn't have much dissatisfaction in the end, because he had enough prestige and ambushed Geng Zhongming's record. Let his name instantly be on par with Wang Pu, Li Wuliu and other veteran generals, if he is competing with Xie Fei, a junior, for the opportunity to attack Kong Youde, he himself will not be able to see it.

Therefore, he stayed in Guangdong and divided his troops in multiple ways, mainly recruiting and surrendering, supplemented by attacks. After taking all the prefectures and counties, who knew that a month later, until all the cities in Leizhou Mansion surrendered, Xinhui held on, and Song Kun could only gather the scattered troops everywhere and began to gather the main force to attack Xinhui.

Back and forth, Xinhui had been surrounded for three months, and at this time Song Kun was ready to attack. At this time, he still did not think that the Xinhui would be able to hold out for long, because he judged that three months would definitely make the city run out of food, and the defenders would definitely be hungry and have no combat effectiveness.

At this time, Song Kun didn't take Xinhui too seriously, but after the battle began, he finally found out that this was not the case, and the battle of Xinhui broke out in an extremely rare situation in the history of human warfare.

Song Kun first bombarded with artillery. As a result, the Qing army tied a large number of people to the city wall and made him throw a rat trap. Although Song Kun was the hardest one of Yang Chao's generals, he couldn't bombard the shield made by the Qing army on the city wall.

Then he chose to dig tunnels, wanting to blow up the city wall from under the city wall, Yang Chao's army, which had a large number of artillery, rarely adopted the tactics of Li Zicheng and other peasant armies, not because they didn't know how to use it, but because it was too wasteful of time. If you dig a tunnel, it is difficult to dig under the city wall in ten days and half a month, and it is often destroyed by the enemy.

Song Kun had no choice but to bomb the city, so that at least he could reduce the casualties of a large number of civilians when the artillery bombarded the city. However, when he dug tunnels and blew up the city walls, and pushed a large number of cannons to the gap to prepare for a strong attack, the Qing army suddenly expelled the people to plug the gap, and asked these people to move stones to plug the gap.

It was impossible for Song Kun to aim the cannon at the dense crowd of people, so he forcibly climbed under the collapsed city wall with a siege ladder, wanting to climb the city wall and launch an attack directly from the city, but at this time, the Qing army asked the people to dig a gap in the city wall and climb out and burn the ladder.

At this time, the war had reached the end of the fourth month, and Song Kun was fortunate to besiege the city for a long time, directly besieging it for a month.

Until the end of the sixth month, the Qing army suddenly began to break through, at this time Song Kun where was willing to connive at these people to leave, as early as the dense excavation of the siege offensive, because of the emergence of artillery tactics, the level of civil engineering operations of the Yang army rose sharply, digging trenches has become a standard tactic, and the Qing army has been repulsed many times.

Feeling that the Qing army was at the end of the road, Song Kun chose to storm the city, this time he successfully attacked the city, because the Qing army finally lost the fighting spirit, there was a large number of surrenders, and finally captured 1,000 Manchu Han troops, 300 Mengbaqi, and 10,000 green battalion soldiers.

At this time, Song Kun could finally send a good news to Nanjing, but his mood was very low, and he didn't want to send this good news.

When Yang Chao saw the good news, he was eating, holding his daughter, and the family was happy to eat, but after glancing at the good news, he immediately left the dining table and found a place to vomit in the dark.

An irrepressible anger gushed out from the bottom of my heart.

"Kill! Surrendered to the Qing army, not a single one was left, and all of them were killed. That's right, the Green Battalion soldiers were killed too! ”

Yang Chao rarely kills and surrenders, not for the utilitarian purpose of killing and surrendering will make the enemy not surrender, but he insists that preferential treatment of prisoners is a kind of civilization, and he wants to inject this new atmosphere into Chinese civilization, but this time he can't help but kill, because he believes from the bottom of his heart that these people are no longer human.

The last time I had this feeling was when I heard that Zuo Liangyu was slaughtering Da Ming's own city, but at that time, it was far less angry than this time, making him feel fear of human morality.

The Qing army defending Xinhui was Shang Kexi and Geng Zhongming's henchmen, and the generals were Yunlong and Wu Jinzhong, the general of the right wing, who led the elite 2,000 Han troops under Shang Kexi and Geng Zhongming, plus 300 Mengba Banners and 10,000 local green battalion soldiers in Guangdong who surrendered.

Yang Chao also reprimanded Song Kun, and also got Song Kun's feedback, that is, the Qing army wantonly drove the people as meat shields, and Yang Chao could only instruct Song Kun to kill less people and save people's lives as much as possible.

Who knew that Yang Chao's order made Song Kun even more careful, and in the end, such a tragedy happened.

This tragedy is not just a barbaric act of expelling the people to attack or defend the city, but an even more terrible and terrible act, cannibalism!

Basically, during the siege of three months, there was already a shortage of food in Xinhui City. At this time, the Xinhui Qing army ordered the people in the city to contribute one person from each household as a "human ration".

At this time, in order to protect their husbands and families, there was a heroic tragedy in which many people voluntarily climbed into the oil pot and let the Qing army eat it. There is a daughter-in-law surnamed Mo and her mother-in-law depend on each other, and the guard is about to kill and eat the mother-in-law, Mo kowtows and asks to die for the mother-in-law, and the guard will say: "What a good daughter-in-law who is filial!" He agreed to her request and cooked Mohs and ate it. Another woman surnamed Li, whose husband was captured by the guards and was about to be killed, Li cried and said, "My husband has no son, and if I kill him, I will have no descendants of his family, and even if I live, what is the use of me?" Please eat me! The guard also agreed, cooked Lee, and gave her bones to her husband to take home for burial. There was also a poor scholar surnamed Liang who was to be cooked, and his ten-year-old daughter asked to be replaced, and the guard was moved and released the father and daughter together.

Yang Chao saw this, he couldn't help but feel touched by the behavior of Guangdong women, he had been to Guangdong in his previous life, the women in Lingnan are a little different from the women in the north, the more women in remote places, the more they maintain this custom, that is, local women love men very much, and men in many places can do nothing, and women carry children on their backs to farm and work. Locals explained that it was because the men had to go to the sea that the farm work was given to the women, and that the fisherman's profession disappeared, but the customs remained the same.

At that time, Yang Chao was still a little envious of his Guangdong male compatriots, but this time he was really angry with Guangdong men.

How can you watch your wife and daughter voluntarily sacrifice themselves and not fight, when they are about to be eaten, they don't even resist, they are so cowardly, are they still a man.

At the same time, those women made this kind of behavior, not because they were so brave, but because of the etiquette culture they accepted, which is how to make women pay unconditionally, but the man who was supposed to be the protector asked women to protect with this behavior, Yang Chao was really ashamed.

It is one thing to criticize their own people, but the culprits are still these Qing troops, including the green battalion soldiers who surrendered.

Therefore, Yang Chao insisted on killing more than 10,000 people, even if his Huang Fengfu and others had ominous words such as killing prisoners, Yang Chao was unswerving, not only to kill these people, but also to immediately publish the newspaper and declare the world.

At the same time, the first righteous words were announced, and in the future, if there is an expulsion of civilian participants, on the day the city is broken, no matter the officers and soldiers, there will be no forgiveness!

Jiangnan newspapers are now circulating in Jiangnan, but Yang Chao knows very well that whether it is the small court or the Qing court, they are collecting these newspapers through various channels, trying to get information about Jiangnan from them, Yang Chao said this to the small court, but also to the Qing court.

There are also opposing voices, such as Liu Zongzhou, who has always stood on Yang Chao's position, but he did not get a response this time, and many scribes reprimanded him for being very indistinguishable, firmly supporting Yang Chao, and supporting Yang Chao's statement that those who surrendered to the army were no longer people, and the people applauded even more, this kind of person should be killed.

Liu Zongzhou and other scribes believed that the Qing army was a Tartar, and the Tartars did not obey the rites and religions, and they should be moralized, and should not be killed to stop killing, and they brought out a lot of big truths, which can be described as pedantic, or only to oppose for the sake of opposition, and it has reached the point of ignoring right and wrong, just like some experts in later generations, and the dregs of culture have always been passed on.

This made Yang Chao disgusted with people like Liu Zongzhou, but he also felt very sad for this kind of person, and he didn't know what the meaning of their life was? Just for fame? Desperate for fame? There is no sense of mission in their hearts, or is their sense of mission to be famous in the world and leave a name in history? And it doesn't matter if this name is incense or notorious!

But Yang Chao will not have any suppressive actions against characters like Liu Zongzhou, he has always been not afraid of others talking, he flaunts enlightened autocracy, you say yours, I do mine, no one interferes with anyone! (To be continued......)