In mid-March, Wu Sangui's army entered the Luan River Valley, but all they saw along the way was the ruins of the Great Wall of Northern Mongolia.

The Mongol tribes were either forcibly moved into the pass by the Ming army or were killed during the resistance, and the few remaining tribes fled far north or west, far from the Ming Great Wall.

The cavalry of the nine-headed bird set fire to all the tribal villages within a hundred miles north of the Yanbei Great Wall, leaving not a single sheep, a grain of grain, a room, or a tent.

The closer Wu Sangui's soldiers and horses got to the Great Wall, the more difficult they became. They didn't find any supplies, and even the birds and beasts seemed to have been taken away by the Ming army.

The march on the side of the Qing monarch has only been carried out for more than a month, but the Liao army has been reduced by more than 40,000 people due to illness, falling behind, missing, and fleeing.

Wu Sangui desperately needed a battle at this time, and he hoped to be able to engage the Chu army immediately, rather than continue this endless and disastrous march.

Before the battle began, he had already lost forty percent of his troops.

The horses were exhausted, the soldiers were demoralized, and they barely managed to maintain the march by half-buying and half-robbing along the way, but the grain and grass in the army never exceeded the ten-day margin.

For this war, Wu Sangui was already desperate in his heart. It was all by the last bit of luck in his heart that he kept holding on. In other words, Wu Sangui has already opened the bow and has not turned back, and it is difficult to ride a tiger.

If it weren't for the 50,000 Qing cavalry behind him, Wu Sangui would definitely not be able to hold on.

Wu Sangui urgently needed a battle and a victory to boost the morale of the army.

"The firearms of the Chu army are powerful, but we have cavalry." Wu Sangui is self-anesthetizing.

The north bank of the Chaohe River.

A forward scout of the Liao army searched all the way here.

If they weren't too hungry, they wouldn't have dared to run to a place only twenty miles from the Great Wall. But they were so hungry that they chased after a fox wolf by accident. A hundred scouts followed their prey closely. Before I knew it, I came to the edge of the tide river.

They were immersed in how to share the food after catching the wolf and killing him.

As a result, when the pursuit was gaining momentum, a volley of firearms suddenly came from the front, and the Liao scout cavalry who hit it turned on their backs.

Although Zhang Wannian is an old Beijing army, he already has a good fire gun shooting technique before joining the Chu army. After joining the Chu army, he received a new type of training from the Chu army.

By now, he has completely become a qualified officer of the Chu army.

In order to ambush this Liao army, Zhang Wannian adopted the standard tactics of the Chu army of lining up to shoot, rather than chasing with cavalry.

He had arranged the two hundred light horsemen in four columns, each with fifty men. All dismounted. They did not rush to draw their saber spears, but put the flintlock rifles weighing seven and a half pounds in their hands.

The rifle used a fixed paper bullet, a cylindrical paper cartridge soaked in lard, which contained a ration of gunpowder and a round lead bullet. Standardized production is adopted, and the caliber of the barrel and the caliber of the lead bullet of each gun are very standard, which greatly improves the accuracy of shooting.

Before the arrival of the Liao army, Zhang Wannian had already loaded the first bullet with the soldiers.

They bit through the shells of the paper bullets and poured some of the gunpowder into the pool. Close the lid of the fire door, then pour the remaining gunpowder into the gun, and then poke the lead bullet in the paper bullet into the gun tube together with the paper shell.

The oil-soaked paper shell can be easily poked into the gun, while the paper shell wrapped by the lead bullet is the outer layer of the shell. It can also hold the lead bullet in the gun tube without slipping out.

The soldiers of the Chu army, in the training assessment, there is a hard standard. It is that each soldier reloads bullets during combat, and the standard time is twenty to thirty seconds. Twenty seconds is excellent, and thirty seconds is qualified. More than thirty seconds are unqualified.

The flintlock rifles that the Chu army is now equipped with can reach a range of 150 to 200 meters. However, with the exception of some excellent marksmen, most soldiers are unable to maintain a high hit rate, and flintlock pistols are highly susceptible to factors such as wind direction. In particular, the Chu army has expanded rapidly in recent years, with a large number of recruits, and in order to maintain the hit rate, the Chu army has gradually developed to rely on numerical superiority to make up for the problem of low hit rate.

In order to ensure the maximum hit rate and maximum firepower of the infantry, the Chu army used a volley of queues.

When fighting, they will line up in a neat line, divided into three major tactical volleys: horizontal formations, columns, and hollow phalanxes, depending on the target.

With the support of artillery and infantry companies' mountain grenade light artillery, the firepower of the Chu army was extremely fierce, and under this tactic, the armor and shield could not be stopped.

This is also the reason why the Chu army is less and less equipped with heavy armor and cloth iron armor, no matter how heavy the armor is, it can't do the whole body defense, even if the whole body is defended, the dense lead bullets and fierce artillery shells are also useless.

The infantry of the Chu army was only equipped with a piece of cotton armor, or cotton armor without iron sheets.

Under this tactic, the Chu army paid more attention to queue training, emphasizing maintaining the formation and maintaining fierce firepower.

After being equipped with cassette bayonets, the infantry formed an array, which could attack from a distance and fight in close combat, which was equivalent to a bow and crossbow phalanx and a spear phalanx, especially when they formed a hollow phalanx, the outer layer was a row of bayonets, followed by a row of rifle volleys, plus the artillery surrounded by the array, which could give a fatal blow at any time, which made the Chu army no longer the original army that was afraid of field warfare.

When the Liao army was hit by a volley, the people turned on their backs and couldn't figure out what was happening.

The Chu army, which had emptied the chamber of the gun, had already begun to quickly reload the second bullet.

In just twenty seconds, it was just an instant, the Liao army was still in chaos, and the four columns divided into two hundred light cavalry had already completed a wave of four salvos, and then the second wave of shooting began.

There was still a mixture of lard and gunpowder on the cartridge shell in his mouth, Zhang Wannian was calm and calm, this was not the first time he had been on the battlefield, but it was the first time he had fought so happily.

In the past, if you encountered hundreds of Qing troops, then even if you had a battalion of Ming troops, you might only have to fight and retreat. Although the Guanning Iron Cavalry was inferior to the Qing army, it was not comparable to the original Beijing army.

After firing the second shot, Zhang Wannian once again took out a custom-packed paper bullet from the paper bullet bag. Each Chu army had a bullet pack on its body, which could hold up to three hundred rounds of paper bullets.

Normally, however, they carry only 100 rounds of paper bullets.

These paper bullets have been inspected and audited layer by layer, and they come from the Jiangnan manufacturing factory, and Zhang Wannian used this kind of paper bullets during training. He fired hundreds of paper bullets, and there was never a problem with the quality of the paper bullets, he never jammed or exploded, and there was no discrepancy in size or the amount of gunpowder was not in place.

With a handful of seven and a half pounds in his hand, within a hundred steps, he will hardly miss it.

"Forward!" It took Zhang Wannian less than twenty seconds to reload the third round of paper bullets, and he quickly shouted the slogan. Then march forward with the team.

Shooting while advancing is also the standard infantry tactic of the Chu army.

The speed of progress is not fast, the Chu army does not need that kind of wolf rushing to the rabbit, in the training again and again, the instructors of the Chu army are emphasizing a key point.

"Keep the formation not chaotic, the speed is not a problem, as long as the formation is not chaotic."

After three rounds of shooting, the hundred cavalry Liao army. At least thirty or forty people fell. They retreated in disarray, leaving corpses all over the ground, and many Liao soldiers fell to the ground screaming before they were killed.

Zhang Wannian stared at the fleeing Liao cavalry. Instead of giving the order to immediately pursue on horseback, an order was given to form a phalanx.

"Form a hollow phalanx, quick!"

Ma Bao glanced at Zhang Wannian and did not refute. "Hollow phalanx!"

The hollow phalanx, the magic weapon of the Chu army to ride on foot.

The infantry of the Chu army had four teams per company. Each team has four rows. At the battalion and company level, it is a three-three system, but when it comes to the team and platoon, it becomes a four-four system, and this kind of establishment is precisely because of this hollow phalanx.

In battles above the battalion company, the Chu army often has artillery support, and there will be a lot of light fire support, but below the battalion company, the firepower is insufficient, and it is often afraid of the impact of cavalry.

Therefore, the four-four formation can form a four-sided hollow array most quickly.

Zhang Wannian is experienced and experienced, Ma Bao is also a veteran on the battlefield, and he has also studied in the martial arts hall, and both of them chose to form a formation at the first time.

Sure enough, as they expected, the dozens of Liao troops who left the battlefield did not escape. They went around in circles and came back to kill.

Those Liao cavalry are not collected at night as scouts, and they are also the elite of the Liao army.

Caught off guard, they were beaten by a group of infantry and suffered heavy casualties, they were not convinced in any way, they did not know that they were not facing infantry, but the same cavalry, and they were the elite light cavalry of the cavalry.

In the minds of many Liao troops, infantry could not defeat cavalry. Even infantry armed with muskets could not defeat cavalry unless they had artillery.

But the infantry in front of me who suddenly encountered was obviously just a patrol infantry, and they had no artillery.

However, when they circled back, they found that something was not quite right on the battlefield.

The musketeers did not chase after them, nor did they run, but as if they had expected them to kill each other, they had already formed a phalanx.

"Bayonets in the front row!"

Zhang Wannian roared.

The soldiers took the bayonets out of their waists one after another, and the sleeve bayonets were also original to the Chu army.

The bayonet is not a new thing, the early fire gate gun of the Ming Dynasty is a long stick with a section of the gun at one end, this kind of gun has a short range, small power, poor accuracy, and the three-eyed gun is the enhanced version of the fire door gun. Later, in order to strengthen the power of the musket, the sword was designed.

When the gun is fired, the sword is inserted into the barrel, and the gun is transformed into a spear. The three-eyed gun is three guns together, so after firing, there is no need to load the sword, and it can be used as a mace or a small hammer directly when it is picked up.

However, there are still many gaps in the sword, because once the sword is inserted into the muzzle, it can no longer be reloaded and fired.

The Chu army improved the sword and developed a sleeved bayonet, with a hollow grip on one side of the end of the bayonet, when used, the grip was put on the muzzle of the gun, and rotated at a certain angle, so that the falcon outside the barrel could be stuck into the groove on the grip and fix the two together.

In this new bayonet structure, the blade of the bayonet is biased to one side of the axis of the barrel, and the two are separated by a certain distance, so that the shooting and assassination do not interfere with each other.

It seems to be a small change, but it allows the infantry to fight both near and far, and with bayonets, the rifle of the Chu army is as long as one meter eight, which is equivalent to a standard spear, which can completely deal with cavalry.

Zhang Wannian himself also drew out the bayonet, held the handle of the sharp bayonet and turned it vigorously on the mouth of the gun, and then snapped, the bayonet had been tightly inserted and stuck on the rifle.

The four teams formed a quadrangular hollow array, with fifty men on each side and ten men in each row, as five rows.

The soldiers in the first two rows had already put on their bayonets and raised their six-foot-long bayonet rifles, while the soldiers in the back three rows did not have bayonets for the time being.

The bayonet does not affect firing, but it does affect reloading.

Especially at the time of battle, tense battlefield situations, bayonets often bayonet the soldier's own hand. In order to maintain the rate of fire, the hollow array sometimes only the outer rows were loaded with bayonets first, and the rear ones were not in a hurry to load bayonets.

Looking at Na Sensen's bayonet, the cavalry captain of the Liao army almost gritted his teeth.

"My lord, what shall we do?" A scout next to him asked him loudly.

"Don't worry about anything, just rush over and bump into it, and then the Chu thief will collapse and flee!" The captain replied loudly to his subordinates.

The Liao army let out a roar and rushed towards the Chu army.

"Put!"

Seeing that the Liao army had rushed into the firing range, Zhang Wannian was not half afraid or nervous, and some were just more and more calm.

The order was given, and he was the first to shoot.

With a bang, the head of the Liao army scout, who rushed to the front, fell off his horse.

The gunfire continued to be banging, and several Liao soldiers fell off their horses.

The Liao army was still rushing, and they were expecting the Chu army to escape.

The distance is getting closer and closer, the bayonets are getting brighter and brighter, but the phalanx of the Chu army is as solid as a mountain and does not move like a bell

The sun hung in the middle, the shouting and killing on the edge of the tide river had stopped, and the gunshots no longer rang out, only the sound of the rushing tide river remained.

On the battlefield not far away, a hundred Liao cavalry had been wiped out, and they were finally defeated. The phalanx of the Chu army was not chaotic, did not disperse, and did not retreat.

The Liao army kept charging, but in the end it failed to rush into the phalanx of the Chu army, and they all fell on the way to charge, which is worthy of the name of not collecting at night.

They rushed into the Chu army formation in just over a dozen steps, but unfortunately, they didn't know that although Zhang Wannian's company only had about 200 people, he still carried four mountain howitzers, although it was only the lightest four-pound mountain howitzer, but this kind of mountain howitzer was only fifty-five pounds, and two horses could drag the entire cannon, shells, and tools to drag the mountain grenade quickly over the mountains and mountains, and equipped with howitzers, its power was still very powerful.

During this battle, they hid in the woods next to them and waited until the last moment to launch. And they didn't use shrapnels, they directly loaded shotguns, and with a single salvo, they completely shattered their last bit of extravagance.

When a wounded soldier of the Liao army was lying on the ground, breathing hard, and saw the Chu army pushing four cannons out of the forest behind, and after a while, when he brought hundreds of horses, his eyes widened, and he spat out blood violently and stopped breathing, but his eyes were not closed until he died, and he couldn't blind himself when he died! (To be continued.) )