It is said that ten thousand bones will wither, Yang Deming received Zhao Dongyun's "he fought okay", but the 14th Division paid as many as 2,000 casualties.

More than 800 people were directly killed, and the rest were more lightly and seriously injured, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the breakthrough of the 14th Division was paved with the bones of those soldiers along the way.

However, many people chose to ignore the many casualties of the 14th Division, especially the senior generals, including Zhao Dongyun, Meng Enyuan, and Yang Deming, who actually didn't care much about the deaths and injuries of thousands of people.

Needless to say, Zhao Dongyun is the supreme commander of a military and political interest group, and since the Feng army entered the customs, he has been reported to have many casualties every day, hundreds or thousands, and since the Feng army entered the customs last year, the cumulative number of casualties has exceeded 60,000, of which more than 10,000 were killed in battle.

There are also tens of thousands of wounded, many of whom have been forced to amputate their limbs with serious injuries.

These tens of thousands of casualties represent the loss of tens of thousands of families to their breadwinners, wives to their husbands, and mothers to their sons.

But the pain of these families has never been taken to heart by Zhao Dongyun and the senior generals.

Those living lives are just a number in their eyes.

If there is a profession that is the most cold-blooded, there is no doubt that it is a soldier, and the soldiers are not those soldiers, but those officers who are bent on winning a big battle, especially high-ranking generals, and those famous generals from ancient times to the present, most of them are cold-blooded animals.

They see each life as a kind of consumable, and bullets and shells are undoubted.

In the Russo-Japanese War, the so-called meat-bomb tactics of the Japanese army were even more vividly embodied in this thinking, and in Nogi Noshinori's view, soldiers were just consumables used to consume the enemy's bullets.

Although the senior generals in the Feng army are not as perverted as Nogi Noshinori, they are not much better, and the higher the background, the more so, Yang Deming don't look at him Swenwen, but the whole person is a war machine, when he personally commanded the 14th Division under his command to launch an attack, all he cared about was the victory and the improvement of the combat effectiveness of the 14th Division, and it was completely acceptable to pay thousands of casualties for the sake of victory, in order to make the 14th Division quickly grow into the same army as the 3rd Division, even if it was ten new recruits killed or wounded, It's worth it to get back a veteran who has been through the baptism of war.

Some people may say that it is a kind of reason, but reason is often the most cruel.

Some people may say that war is an art, something worthy of praise and praise, but war is actually a cruel thing that ordinary people do not want to face.

Maybe ordinary people see how glorious war is in novels and movies, but you really let him go around the battlefield in reality, see the corpses all over the ground, and the broken body, I guarantee that this will be a nightmare that he will never be able to shake off for the rest of his life.

Fortunately, when the Feng army was cleaning the battlefield outside Jinling, there were no ordinary people, and those soldiers wearing masks piled up the dead soldiers, including Feng soldiers in blue-gray military uniforms, and Anhui soldiers in dark blue military uniforms.

Although the Feng army cleaned up the battlefield relatively early, it is now April, and in this hot and humid land in the south of the Yangtze River, the corpses that have lost their lives are decomposing very quickly, not to mention the many pieces of meat that are so broken that even the human form can't put them together.

After the battle, and the sun had set, the land under the gray sky was like hell on earth.

Next to this hell on earth, there were many Fengjun soldiers in blue-gray military uniforms walking in line ahead, their expressions were mostly calm, occasionally someone would glance at the corpses next to them, and then quickly took them back, these were the veterans of the Third Division.

Unlike the soldiers in the 14th Division, who are all new recruits, most of the soldiers in the 3rd Division are veterans who have been in the army for many years, and have gone through one battle after another, and death is commonplace, and most of them know that they may one day become one of those corpses, but so what, who knows what will happen in the future.

In addition, although the overall casualties of the Feng army were relatively large, in fact, the vast majority of the casualties were new recruits, like these veterans of the Third Division, in fact, the proportion of casualties in smooth battles is quite low, as long as they do not encounter any hard battles, and the troops are not defeated or even encircled, these veterans have a very good chance of surviving to the end of the war.

These veterans walked ahead with a calm pace, and there were more fierce battles ahead of them.

Since yesterday when the 14th Division took the lead in breaking through the outer defense line of the Anhui army and attacking the Jinling urban area, in order to strengthen the defensive strength of the Jinling urban area and at the same time to prevent the troops on the outer defensive line from falling into a semi-encircled situation, the Anhui army also contracted the defensive line and took the initiative to abandon the other half of the outer defensive line outside the urban area, and then withdrew all its troops into the Jinling urban area and the peripheral defense area in the southeast of Jinling.

This is equivalent to giving up all the several kilometers of defensive positions in the southwest of the periphery of Jinling City.

The Anhui army took the initiative to withdraw, and the Third Division advanced nearly four kilometers without a single force, while the 14th Division paid more than 2,000 casualties in order to advance these four kilometers a few days ago.

When the 3rd Division advanced rapidly directly by the method of march to keep up with the pace of the 14th Division, it was in the temporary headquarters of the 4th Army in the rear.

Many of the high-ranking generals of the Feng army who participated in the Battle of Jinling once again gathered together to discuss the follow-up Battle of Jinling.

As before, Meng Enyuan still sat in the main seat, and on the left and right were Gu Lanyu, commander of the Third Division, Lin Yongquan, commander of the Ninth Division, Yang Deming, commander of the 14th Division, Bao Guiqing, commander of the First Mixed Brigade, and several brigade commanders of the infantry brigade, and several operational staff officers of the Fourth Army headed by Gu Qizhi, chief of staff of the Fourth Army.

At this time, a lieutenant colonel and staff officer of the Fourth Army held the command list in his hand and gave these commanders a brief introduction to the current battle situation.

"On the northern front, after the 14th Division of our army broke into Jinling City yesterday, the division is currently fighting for the relevant tactical points in Beicheng District and the Anhui Army, but the resistance of the Anhui Army is very large, and the casualties on the 14th Division's side are large, and it is difficult to continue to launch a strong attack to make a breakthrough.

On the southwestern front, due to the active retreat of the Anhui army, the 3rd Division had already advanced to the city without much resistance, and it was expected to be able to cooperate with the 14th Division to launch an offensive tomorrow. The 1st Mixed Brigade is still in the process of detouring and is expected to arrive at the predetermined position tomorrow, while the 9th Division is behind the 3rd Division and the 1st Mixed Brigade to provide strategic support to these two divisions at any time!

As for the enemy's defensive line, we have found the numbers of five enemy divisions in total, but according to our reconnaissance, the numbers of these troops are a little messy, and we cannot know the detailed numbers of the enemy for the time being, so we can only confirm that the three brigades of the enemy's fourth division are all in Jinling. It is estimated that the enemy still has more than 50,000 people! ”

In fact, the Anhui army has invested far more than 50,000 troops on the Jinling front, and in addition to the main force of the Fourth Division, Duan Qirui has been transferred from the entire division, or a brigade or a regiment, and a total of more than 40,000 troops of the Liangjiang Army have been transferred from southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang.

And that's not even counting the people who provide logistical transportation, Zhuangding.

Of course, the Anhui army didn't count this, and the Feng army didn't count either, and everyone generally only counted the active troops when they counted the troops, and they didn't count those strong men.

Otherwise, counting these people, strong men and the like, the strength of the Feng army on the front line of Jiangnan would have to exceed more than 300,000.

The Anhui army has invested more than 100,000 troops on the Jinling and Dangtu fronts, but the total number of people killed, wounded, and missing has exceeded 20,000.

Not to mention anything else, the annihilation of the entire army of the Seventh Division of Liangjiang alone was a direct loss of nearly 15,000 men for the Anhui army.

Subsequently, another seven or eight thousand people were lost in the Battle of Jinling, so that more than 20,000 people were lost.

The Feng army itself was no better, and the ninth and fourteenth divisions were considered to have suffered heavy casualties, and the combined losses of these two divisions exceeded 5,000 people.

Combined with the losses of other troops, the total losses of the Feng army were also close to 10,000 people.

It's just that the Fengjun Education Department has always maintained a high-intensity replenishment of troops to the front-line troops, which has enabled all departments of the Fengjun Army to maintain relatively sufficient troops.

From this point of view, the Feng army is much better than the Anhui army.

Due to the existence of the Ministry of Education, the Fengjun can recruit, train, and replenish recruits in a unified manner, and the front-line generals do not have to worry about recruits at all.

However, the Anhui army is different, the Anhui army and other warlord troops are still stuck in the mode of the old standing army in Beiyang, each unit is quite independent, recruiting, training, and supplementing by itself, and Duan Qirui doesn't care at all, and he can't manage it.

Therefore, you will see a lot of recruiting stations set up by the troops of the Anhui army in various places in the Jiangnan area, and in Jinling alone, there are more than a dozen recruiting stations for various troops, most of which belong to different Anhui army units.

The disunity of the recruits also leads to the fact that when the various units of the Anhui army are fighting, whether they can be replenished depends on themselves, and what is even more cruel is that they often cannot get the replenishment of qualified soldiers, so they can only forcibly recruit strong men and people on the spot.

This leads to the fact that during the war, no matter how strong the troops are, it is difficult to recover once they have suffered losses in strength.

Even the Fourth Division, Duan Qirui's descendants, is unavoidable, if they want to recover and replenish, they can only do so after the war, and there is no way to be the same as the Feng army, the battle has just lost troops, and the Ministry of Education will send the recruits to the front of them the next day, and the front-line generals don't have to worry about it at all.

And this has created a more interesting situation, the generals of the Feng army often do not value the lives of soldiers more than the generals of the Anhui army.

Why? Because the generals of the Feng army only need to think about how to win, and the soldiers will be replenished the next day after they die. The generals of the Anhui army generally pay more attention to casualties, because the soldiers under their command are recruited and trained by themselves, and they have to feel heartache if they die, and if they die, they will be in danger of becoming bald commanders.

"Since the attack of the 14th Division has been stubbornly resisted, then we will slow down for a while, and wait for the third division to be in place, and then launch a certain offensive appropriately, but whether we can take Jinling or not, it still depends on whether the 1st Mixed Brigade can successfully detour back to the east of Jinling, as long as it can occupy the eastern part of Jinling, it will be able to cut off the connection between the Anhui army in Jinling and Zhenjiang and other directions, and then the enemy of Jinling will be completely encircled by us, and if Duan Qirui does not want to be trapped in Jinling, he can only retreat, and he only needs to retreat, Then our Jiangnan strategy is half the battle! ”

After Meng Enyuan said, he set his eyes on Lin Yongquan: "Division Commander Lin, your Ninth Division must keep up with the pace of the First Mixed Brigade in time and ensure the safety of the flanks of the First Mixed Brigade!" ”