"General, please rest assured, our party has already assured the teacher before going down to Yunnan that this time we will cross the river with the state, and our Biyun will do everything possible to ensure that the Fourth Army will cross the river smoothly, and will never delay our army's Jiangnan attack!" Fang Biyun said with a stern face.

Meng Enyuan nodded after hearing this, he was quite satisfied with Fang Biyun's attitude, and at the same time, he also believed that this Fang Biyun was capable of leading the task force engineering team to successfully erect a pontoon bridge.

The difficulty of erecting pontoon bridges, especially on the Yangtze River, which is several kilometers wide, and which is required to be completed in a short period of time, is conceivably difficult, not to mention that it is extremely difficult for the army in 1908, and even for the army of the 21st century.

In order to erect a pontoon bridge in Hezhou and ensure the crossing of the river by the Fourth Army, the Feng Army successively transferred a large number of technical officers from various engineering units, most of whom were from professional engineering departments, and the best of them was Fang Biyun.

Fang Biyun, a native of Zhengzhou, Henan, like most young people, he was originally a reader of the Four Books and Five Classics, but with the Gengzi Incident, the Qing court began to educate and reform, he just followed the public to study in the new school, and then went north to join the army, of course, he did not go to be a big soldier, but to the army to enlist as a staff, and successfully entered the third mixed brigade at that time and became a Qing book.

Immediately after he was admitted to the Third Mixed Brigade Camp School, because of his outstanding talent in German, he mastered German in just one year, and then was recommended by Zhao Dongyun to study in Germany, becoming one of the many Beiyang military students who studied in Germany, and many students who studied in Germany liked to study in the infantry department, riding department and artillery department, he chose the relatively unpopular engineering department, after two years of his career in Germany, he returned to China in early 1907, and went directly to the northeast to join Zhao Dongyun like many students studying in Germany.

At that time, the Feng army was extremely short of technical officers, especially the engineering department, telecommunications department and other technical officers due to the scarcity of numbers, so Fang Biyun's career was broader than those who studied infantry and riding in Germany at the same time, first served as the chief of the Boat Bridge Section of the Quartermaster Department of the General Headquarters and the General Staff, and then transferred to the Third Division as the commander of the Third Engineering Battalion, and then transferred to the Second Army Headquarters, serving as the director of the Engineering Department of the Second Army, and receiving the rank of colonel.

During his tenure in the Third Division and the Second Army, he organized the erection of a large number of pontoon bridges, opened many temporary roads, and even proposed to build a temporary military railway from Zhengzhou, Henan Province to Xuzhou during the Jiangbei Campaign.

This time, in order to cross the river in Hezhou, the Feng army transferred a large number of elite engineering and technical troops from the Feng army, organized into a 'special engineering regiment' directly under the jurisdiction of the general headquarters and sent to fight in Hezhou.

Although this person is naturally not as famous as those outstanding infantry officers in terms of reputation due to the technical position he holds, not to mention anything else, even Fang Qingkun's reputation in the army is far better than Fang Biyun's.

But then again, there are more excellent infantry officers in the Feng army, and there are not many more than one Qingkun, and there are many less than him, but there are really few who can compare to Biyun in terms of engineering and technical ability!

After leaving the Fourth Army Headquarters, Fang Biyun did not stop too long, but went directly to the riverside, where his task force engineering team was already preparing to carry out pontoon bridge construction operations.

A large number of wooden planks, steel bars and other materials were continuously transported from the rear, and thousands of soldiers of the task force engineering regiment were carrying out high-intensity operations.

Before and after Fang Biyun, a middle-aged officer with a lieutenant colonel on his shoulder walked up quickly: "Regiment leader, the river is even more breathing than we expected, it is difficult to carry out the stake operation!" ”

After hearing this, Fang Biyun looked at the operation in the river in front of him, and then he still didn't speak, but took out the design drawings he carried with him, and said after a while: "First suspend the wooden pile operation in the center of the river, fill the sinking river with sand and gravel and fix it with iron cables, and then you go and urge the people behind to let them hurry up and transport the wooden box over!" ”

Fang Biyun did not show any surprise about the many technical problems that have arisen now, to erect a pontoon bridge on the Yangtze River several kilometers wide, to be completed in just one or two days, and this still needs to be able to allow up to a ton of more than a ton of artillery to cross the river along the river, the technical difficulty required is conceivable, from the beginning he did not think that the construction process will be how smooth it will be, and various problems in the construction process have long been expected.

However, Fang Biyun has been prepared for this, for the erection of the pontoon bridge this time, he has arrived in Hezhou more than a month ago, led several technical officers to personally and repeatedly investigate a number of rivers within the scope of Hezhou, but also to find out the water level, according to this information he is the final design of the pontoon bridge design drawing, at the same time, in order to deal with the various problems that may arise in the process of erecting the pontoon bridge, he is also with many technical officers to prepare a number of emergency plans, plan A does not work to use plan B, and then do not work on plan C.

Fang Biyun personally went into battle to command, not only to coordinate the construction arrangement, but also to solve the many technical problems that appeared at any time, in this case, time passed bit by bit, and a small section of the bridge deck began to appear on the originally flat river, and this bridge deck continued to extend to the south bank.

In short, this pontoon bridge is divided into two sections, one is connected to Xiao Huangzhou on the north bank, and the other is connected to the south bank from Xiaohuangzhou, and considering that Xiaohuangzhou is only an alluvial sandbar, the soil is soft, and there are muddy sections, and if the seventy-five mm field gun weighing one ton walks on it, it is possible that the wheels of the gun truck will fall into it, which will affect the overall speed of crossing the river. So we have to solve this problem at the same time.

Due to the urgency of time, it is impossible to say that the transportation of yarn and soil covers the road, and finally Fang Biyun proposed to directly use wooden planks to pave the road, and it is more convenient to transport wooden planks than to transport sand, and the erection of pontoon bridges also requires thick planks as bridge decks, although the overall number of planks required is larger, but these timbers can be prepared, long before the successful formation of the Fourth Army, the construction department of the Ministry of Munitions has organized people to prepare a large number of planks in Hezhou, in order to obtain the wood needed to erect pontoon bridges and manufacture boats for troops to cross the river, The Feng army almost cut down the fine timber of Hezhou and the surrounding area.

While the task force was erecting the pontoon bridge, soldiers from the 34th Regiment, another regiment of the 17th Brigade on the other side, boarded the boats and rowed towards the opposite bank.

In the Fourth Army's Hezhou River Crossing Operational Plan, the Ninth Division was the first to cross the river, and the Ninth Division was divided into two batches, and its 17th Brigade would be responsible for crossing the river first with light equipment, and they would only carry guns, heavy machine guns, and 80 mm mortars to cross the river, but they had no way to carry artillery, even if they crossed the river with mountain artillery, they could not carry war horses across the river.

After the 17th Brigade crosses the river, their task will be to use the rifles, mortars, and machine guns they carry with them to establish preliminary beachhead fortifications and expand the strategic depth of the beachhead by about five kilometers, so as to avoid artillery strikes on the pontoon bridges erected by the Anhui army and the troops crossing the river after the arrival of the reinforcements of the Anhui army.

The transport of the 17th Brigade across the river may have to continue until the early afternoon, and among the subsequent ships, some of the larger wooden boats will be used as piers for the pontoon bridge, while the remaining small and medium-sized boats will continue to transport bullets, mortar shells, and other combat weapons back and forth to maintain the combat needs of the 17th Brigade on the south bank.

In this process, in fact, the efficiency of the use of ships is relatively low, not to mention the time spent crossing the river itself, and often after the boats return from the south bank to the north bank, they have to rely on manpower to pull them upstream, and then they can cross the river for the second time.

Because the water of the Yangtze River is flowing, the boat crossing the river is not a straight line from the north bank to the south bank and back to the north bank, but in an oblique motion, the ship obliquely to the south bank, and then from the south bank to the north bank, often several kilometers away from the original starting point, at this time the boat must be pulled or moved to the upstream departure point, so that the next round of river crossing transportation can be carried out.

Therefore, don't look at the small boats used by the Feng army, there are a lot of bamboo rafts, but their own load is extremely low, and many bamboo rafts are not suitable for carrying ammunition, so using ships to maintain supplies is quite troublesome and inefficient.

If you only rely on these improvised small wooden boats, the bamboo rafts can support the combat materials of an entire division, Meng Enyuan has already sent the entire Ninth Division over, why only send a 17th Brigade first, it's not that he doesn't want to cross the river with the Ninth Division, but the transportation capacity is really limited.

After transporting the 17th Brigade, the remaining ships are poor enough to transport supplies and maintain the 17th Brigade, if a part of the ships is also allocated to transport the 18th Brigade of the 9th Division, then the soldiers of the Feng Army fighting on the front line can get even less combat materials, the bullets are okay, and the dozens of rounds carried by the soldiers can still support the battle for a period of time, but the machine gun bullets and mortar shells will be very troublesome.

In this way, it is not a good thing for too many troops to directly light equipment.

Based on this consideration, the Ninth Division only arranged for the 17th Brigade to cross the river, and the 17th Brigade was limited by the lack of ammunition after crossing the river, and even more considering that if it continued to penetrate deep into the interior of the south bank, it would not be supported by its own artillery firepower, after all, the Fourth Army did not have a 100-mm cannon, and the two heavy artillery battalions in the Feng Army were one in Anqing and the other in Jinling. All that the Fourth Army had was the usual 75-mm field guns, and although there were some differences in models, the range was generally around 8,000 meters.

Such a firing range also determines that even if the artillery of the Feng army directly sets up positions along the river, the distance that the artillery units of the Feng army can support is quite limited after being separated by the Yangtze River, which is several kilometers wide.

Therefore, although the 17th Brigade, especially the 33rd Regiment, quickly launched an offensive after crossing the river in order to seize a number of tactical points, their range of activities was still limited to a range of five kilometers from the landing site, and after seizing the tactical points of the above-mentioned range, they did not continue to advance, but one by one the soldiers of the Fengjun Army brandished their sapper shovels, and then began to dig trenches and build machine-gun positions.

They want to block the 7th Division of the Liangjiang Army or other Anhui Army troops that may be reinforced here!

As long as the 17th Brigade can block the counteroffensive forces of the Anhui Army, then the task force engineering regiment will be able to continue the construction and erect the pontoon bridge, and once the pontoon bridge is erected, then the main force of the Fourth Army will immediately cross the river, and the cavalry, artillery, and a large amount of ammunition and baggage will cross the river, and only at that time can it be said that the Fourth Army's crossing of the river has been successful.

And now, although the 17th Brigade has passed a 33rd regiment, it is far from saying that the plan to cross the river has been successful!

The Feng army was so prepared, and the Anhui army did not disappoint them too much, just a few hours later, at one o'clock at noon, Fang Qingkun saw a large number of Anhui troops from the north from his binoculars!