To hand over the food on which we depend means to starve to death; If you don't pay the prescribed food, you will be shot by the task force, and the whole family will be shot.

With their lives at stake, the starving and cold Kazakhs were forced to flee for many more.

Most of these fleeing Kazakhs fled to Xinjiang Province, and a small number to the mountainous areas of western Mongolia.

Although Northern Mongolia is also under the control of the Soviet Union to a certain extent, its living conditions are better, and food and clothing can still be guaranteed. Moreover, it is difficult for the pseudo-Mongolian political axe to fully grasp the western mountainous areas for the time being.

During the Choibalshan period, the puppet Mongolian political axe also sent people here to search for fugitives, but they were all covered up by Kasimov, and there was even a small-scale armed confrontation with the puppet Mongolian army. Now Kasimov's prestige among the Kazakhs of Muren is extremely high.

After Song Zhewu recovered Northern Mongolia, he learned that Kasimov had been planning to restore the Arash Autonomous Republic, which made Song Zhewu unmoved, so he instructed Wei Guanghui to support him.

Song Zhewu knew that the Soviet Union implemented a collective farm system, and before the mid-thirties, many people starved to death every year. It is said that 1.5 million people died of starvation in Kazakhstan alone during this period. Therefore, Song Zhewu also asked Wei Guanghui to fund and encourage Kasimov to call on the Kazakhs to flee to Northern Mongolia, which made Kasimov and Mulun's Kazakhs very grateful to Song Zhewu. This time, more than 20,000 Kazakhs were organized to leave Mulun smoothly, thanks to Kasimov's active cooperation.

The Soviet army on the western route did not stop at Mulun, but left a division and a tank regiment in Mulun, plus a puppet Mongolian cavalry regiment, and set up a general military station in Northern Mongolia, and the Soviet army on the western route composed of two corps marched at a speed of more than 40 kilometers a day and marched to the southeast again, and their goal was Kulen.

It is more than 400 kilometers from Mulun to the Orkhon River, and if the Soviet army on the Western Front advances at such a pace, then 10 days later, that is, around September 12, the Soviet Army on the Western Front will reach the preset ambush battlefield on the Orkhon River.

However, because the Soviet reconnaissance planes frequently reconnoitred within 100 kilometers south of Kulen every day, it greatly hindered the movement of the troops of the Western Front of the Fourth Route Army, and they had to march at night.

This distance is also the farthest combat radius for aircraft taking off from the two airfields of Ulan-Ude and Vidrino on the territory of the USSR.

In order not to reveal their combat intentions, the troops on the Western Front commanded by Fu Zuoyi had to get off and walk outside the reconnaissance radius of Soviet aircraft, so that they had not yet reached the preset battlefield. It was probably 10 days before the troops of Zhang Yafei and Sun Weiru under the command of Fu Zuoyi, as well as his own 35th Army, could reach the area around the Orkhon River, and there was no time to prepare for an ambush on the battlefield in advance.

In view of this situation, Song Zhewu, after consulting with Tao Rong, sent an urgent telegram to Li Wentian, ordering Li Wentian to find a way to delay the Soviet army on the Western Front for at least five days. However, he also demanded that Li Wentian not forcibly block the Soviet troops on the Western Front, so as not to make the Soviet troops on alert.

Song Zhewu's order made Li Wentian think a lot. Since Chief of Staff Chu Xichun commanded the defense of the eastern road in Wendur Khan, and Li Ruifang led the main force of the mountain division to take cover in the western Hangai Mountains, Li Wentian pondered for a long time before he thought of a way to complete the task. After several telegram consultations with Chu Xichun, chief of staff, and Li Ruifang, commander of the mountain division, Li Ruifang was ordered to make arrangements.

After the Soviet troops on the Western Front successfully advanced more than 200 kilometers to the Great Tamir, the transport line from Mulun to the front was stretched to nearly 300 kilometers.

Because the movement route of the Soviet troops on the Western Front was too long, in order to ensure the effective and sufficient supply of the Soviet troops on the Western Front, the Far Eastern Special Army handed over most of the trucks it could collect to the Soviet troops on the Western Front.

Although the western part of Northern Mongolia is mountainous, there are many river valleys and long river basins. In particular, the Beimeng River Valley has a characteristic, that is, the river valley is very wide, and on both sides of the river are several kilometers, or even tens of kilometers wide, continuous grasslands, or relatively low hills. As a result, although there are no decent artificially constructed roads, most sections of the road are not difficult for trucks and tanks to pass, except for a few sections that require simple construction by sappers. Because it is a dry season, there are some sections where trucks can travel directly in the river. It's easy to travel 100 kilometers in one day.

A section of the river valley at the northern foot of Hangai Mountain.

This is a typical grassland and hilly landscape of the Beimeng River Valley, a wide and cold river flows slowly through the middle of the valley, and the gentle low hills and the grasslands on both sides of the valley are covered with half-man-high green grass like the flat grasslands in the north.

In September, in the Central Plains, the grass still grows and the warbler flies, and the autumn is a good season, but in the northern part of the Mongolian Plateau, the temperature has dropped a lot, especially at night, and the temperature has reached below zero. As a result, the grass here has begun to turn a little yellow.

The grassland here is full of about one meter high wolf needle grass, it is the family of S. spurifera, also known as S. long-feathered S. or S. wolf, which mainly grows in the north in Northern Mongolia.

In later generations, it was rare in Inner Mongolia because the grasslands with needle grass grew very well, and it showed that the grasslands here showed no signs of degradation. In later generations, Inner Mongolia, because for a long period of time, violated the laws of nature and blindly expanded the number of livestock, which overloaded the grassland, and most of the grassland was seriously degraded.

The reason why the grassland grass with needle grass is very luxuriant, this is because after the wolf needle grass matures in autumn, it has a hard tip and long mang, which will stab cattle, sheep and horses, and the herdsmen will not drive their livestock to graze in such grasslands during the autumn to the spring of the next year, which makes the grassland have a good recovery period.

In fact, during this period, there was no problem that there were too many cattle and sheep in a certain area in the grasslands of Northern Mongolia, which overburdened the pastures, and gradually degraded the grasslands, and even desertified.

This is because, although more than 2 million people have been relocated through the Taiyuan Administration in the past year or so, their newly built settlements are in the southwestern part of Northern Mongolia, where there are few herders, mainly in mountainous areas, woodlands, wetlands, and near the Gobi, where they have built towns, built canals, and cultivated land.

Even though a small number of Han Chinese have newly built villages and towns that occupy a small amount of river valley grassland, they do not graze.

Although the Han people also raise a large number of livestock, they do not scatter them, but follow the guidance of the Agricultural Committee of the Northern Construction and Development Committee to implement a new way of captivity, and the forage is also alfalfa.

Captivity can not only raise more livestock, but also do not harm the natural ecology of the grassland, and raise more livestock in the same area of grassland.

Although the Autonomous Political Axe Agriculture Department led by Zhuo Ren and Chu Feng also wanted to implement the captive breeding method so that the herdsmen could settle down within a certain range as much as possible, it was difficult for the herdsmen to change the nomadic habits they had developed for thousands of years in a short period of time, so they did not implement it.

If we do not count the newly relocated Han victims, the total population of the various ethnic groups in Northern Mongolia, mainly the Mongolian nationality, is less than 800,000, excluding a small number of settled farmers, there are less than 600,000 people who live by herding, and only raise more than 3 million head of livestock. In Northern Mongolia's 2 million square kilometers of land, the average is less than two per square kilometer. Therefore, during this period, the grassland vegetation in Beimeng was well preserved, far from the source of sandstorms in later generations.

At this moment, in this valley with a total length of more than 30 kilometers, there is no other kind of unnatural sound except the sound of gurgling water and the rustle of the breeze blowing the half-human-high grass.

However, if you are an attentive shepherd, you will still find something different about it. That is, the flocks of alert yellow sheep that used to haunt this fertile grassland, which are now gone.

In the middle of the valley, this is the widest part of the valley, with a width of five kilometers from east to west, and the clear water of more than 100 meters wide flows almost exactly through the middle of the valley, and the beaches on both sides are very flat.

Stretching from the river beach to both sides, the terrain rises gently, and there are many small hills with a horizontal height of only a few tens of meters, and in the distance, there are endless mountains.

A hill more than 500 meters away from the river beach, from a distance, there is nothing special about it. However, if you follow the path to the top of the hill where the path is barely visible under the long grass, you will find that behind the ridge of the hill is covered with camouflage nets, under which 12 80mm mortars painted in grass green are lined up and crouched quietly, all pointing at the river beach. The gunners, dressed in grass-green uniforms, silently stood by in their respective gun emplacements.

This was precisely the position of the first battalion of the regiment that the mountain division had left behind enemy lines.

After receiving Song Zhewu's somewhat tricky order, Li Wentian discussed with Chu Xichun and Li Ruifang, and the result was that the only way to delay the advance of the Soviet army on the western route was to cut off the supply line of the Soviet army on the western route and cut off the logistical supply of the Soviet army.

And this regiment, which remained behind enemy lines, came in handy at this time. The regiment was ordered to cut off the Soviet supply lines on the western route for five days at all costs.

According to reconnaissance, a transport convoy of 120 trucks of the Soviet army on the western route, escorted by a battalion of infantry and 12 tanks of a T-18 tank company, set out from Mulun yesterday and will pass through the valley where the Soviet troops on the western route once passed today, and deliver ammunition and supplies to the front.

This valley had long been reconnoitred by the regiment left behind enemy lines, and was a good place for ambushes.

In order to avoid being discovered by the Soviet reconnaissance planes that often appeared, the whole regiment began to move from the mountains to the river valley to build an ambush position yesterday evening.

At the top of the hill there was a very well-camouflaged very low small shelter, where the command post of the first battalion was located.

Battalion commander Shi Zebo and deputy battalion commander Wang Dehuan were holding binoculars to observe the ambush position of the first battalion through the observation port covered by long grass at this moment.

(To be continued)