The flash of the explosion and the light of the torches reflected the small village of Hanhezhuang as bright as day, and the sky was marked with red light from time to time.

On the front line of the position, accompanied by the sound of machine guns, the bullets of the Makqin heavy machine gun continued to fly in the night sky on Li Cungao's head, and the smoke and dust were stirred up at the feet of the opposing direct army.

"Pay attention to the shooting boundary, don't fight indiscriminately, just use point shooting to suppress it!" Li Cungao looked at the light machine gun shooter in front of him.

This light machine gun shooter was not the main shooter before the war, the light machine gun shooter had been killed half an hour earlier, and he was replaced by a very young secondary shooter.

The young private's face was slightly pale in the firelight, and his military uniform was stained with the blood of the previous shooter, and he was so nervous that he kept pulling the trigger so that the bullets in the magazine were all at once, and he was now replacing it with another magazine with the assistance of another deputy shooter.

After hearing Li Cungao's words, Private Dong Daquan breathed heavily, trying to calm himself down, although his hands were no longer trembling, but the tension in his heart was still difficult to eliminate.

Dong Daquan is different from those officers and non-commissioned officers who have been in the army for many years, he has only been in the army for half a year.

He was originally from Shandong, and two years ago, like other people who went to Guandong, he took all his belongings and walked east for several months before coming to Fengtian, and then used the more than ten taels of silver that his family had accumulated for many years, and then borrowed some silver from people in the same village, and bought more than 50 acres of half-ripe land from the Fengtian Reclamation Bureau.

When Dong Daquan's old father, who had been digging in the field all his life, got the land deed of more than 50 acres of land, more than 50 people cried with joy for several hours.

After paying the agricultural tax last year, not only did they have enough food for the family to eat for a year, but also some of the surplus soybeans could be sold in exchange for silver, and they finally dared to buy such a pound of meat during the Chinese New Year.

I saw that I would be able to live a good life, but last year news came from outside, saying that Zhao Dashuai raised troops to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty that exploited everyone and established a republic.

Those who came to recruit soldiers came to the village and said that everyone had such a hard time in the past, all because those big men occupied the land, so that everyone had no land to plant, and now Zhao Dashuai wants to fight with others, once he loses, then the land he has reclaimed before will be taken back, and everyone will have to bear all kinds of harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes.

At that time, Dong Daquan and his father pointed to the deed in the box and said to him: "These are the lifeblood of our family, no one is allowed to rob them!" ”

In addition, several brothers in his family, I heard that the army not only has a settling-in allowance of 20 yuan, but also gives several yuan of silver every month, and more importantly, I heard that the army is full of white noodles and white rice, so Dong Daquan, like many young people in the village, ran to the county recruiting station, and at the beginning of the year, after he completed the recruit training, he was assigned to the Seventh Mixed Brigade.

Although when he first came to join the army, he and his partners who came to join the army boasted that if there was a war, he would definitely be at the forefront, and even imagined that one day he would be able to make great contributions as said in the play, and then be promoted to general by Zhao Dashuai.

But today, he found that fighting a war is not as easy and beautiful as he imagined before!

By the afternoon, he had seen three of his comrades fall in front of him, and he might be next.

In the Feng army, there are quite a lot of recruits like Dong Daquan who came to join the army from last year to the beginning of this year, and it can almost be said that they account for more than 50 percent of the total strength of the Feng army, otherwise Zhao Dongyun would not have swelled from 50,000 troops to 100,000 all at once.

Since October last year, Zhao Dongyun has used various means to tap the population resources of the three eastern provinces, and due to the scarcity of the population of the three eastern provinces, Zhao Dongyun has had to lower the standard of conscription in order to expand the army.

In the eyes of the great powers, the troops under Zhao Dongyun, especially the newly expanded soldiers, were relatively poor, but compared with the troops of other warlords in China, these field troops under Zhao Dongyun were much better.

Although this Feng army cannot be compared with the great powers, it is barely a regular army.

As for the other warlords in the country, the army of the Southern Federation is well known, in terms of the more than 200,000 troops before Duanfang and Yinchang, there are only less than 20,000 backbone of the new army, and the rest are all strong men and people who have been conscripted in the past few months, and they belong to the kind that are given a gun and pulled to the front line to fight, and there is no systematic training of recruits at all.

Zhang Zhidong's Northern Expedition First Army was better, but it was not much better, otherwise it would not have been defeated and retreated under Wang Shizhen's tens of thousands of attacks, and when Wang Shizhen attacked Xinyang from Zhengzhou, Henan Province to the south, Wusheng Pass, known as one of the four major Xiongguan in the world, was conquered by Wang Shizhen in just two days. Later, Zhang Zhidong relied on more than 100,000 troops in the three towns of Wuhan to withstand Wang Shizhen's attack, otherwise the capital of the Southern Federation would have to be lost.

Compared with the Su zhì of the Southern Federation, the troops of the Beiyang warlords are much better, although those newly built provincial armies, such as the Liangjiang Army under Duan Qirui and the soldiers of the Hubei Army under Wang Shizhen, are not better than the Southern Federation, but there are still a large number of backbone soldiers and officers of the former Beiyang Army, so although the combat effectiveness of the provincial army formed by these Beiyang warlords is poor, it is still no problem to fight the troops of the Southern Federation.

Of course, these provincial armies are actually a bargain in the Beiyang system, and the main forces of the major warlords are basically the old Beiyang troops of the Yuan Shikai era, that is, the original Beiyang Standing Army Six Towns, Beijing Banner Standing Army One Town, and Fengtian Standing Army Two Towns. As for those mixed brigades, they were basically formed in formations and transferred from the old Beiyang troops, and the most obvious example is the Li Chunbu of the Seventh Mixed Brigade under the command of Zhao Dongyun, whose predecessor was the Fourth Brigade of the Second Town of the Fengtian Standing Army \ the Twentieth Brigade of the Tenth Division.

As for Zhao Dongyun's provincial army, which was only expanded this year, it has only been organized into two regiments, and the rest is still on paper.

Although the number of Chinese civil wars in this year is very important, in fact, many times the number is often useless, and it is only a small number of elite troops in the hands of the major warlords that can be relied on.

The two armies of Zhifeng in today's Hanhezhuang are the elite troops under the command of Zhao Dongyun and Wang Yingkai, and the first division of the Beiyang army, known as the cradle of Beiyang expansion, and the seventh mixed brigade, one of the main infantry brigades of the original Fengtian standing army under Zhao Dongyun.

The fierce course of this fighting was completely different from the north-south civil war that took place in the direction of Liangjiang and Hubei.

"Damn, where did they get so many shells, it's been a day, can't they use up all their shells?" Li Cungao looked at the shells that kept falling on his position, and was very depressed, the comparison of artillery firepower between the two sides in this battle was too great.

Although a battalion of the 7th Mixed Brigade was equipped with a new type of retreat mountain artillery, and the rate of fire was fast enough, there were at least four artillery battalions of the direct army opposite, and at least half of them were field artillery.

The 7th Mixed Brigade could only rely on a large number of mortars as the main artillery support force.

Although the firepower of the artillery bombardment weakened after evening, they still maintained the suppressive artillery bombardment of their own positions, which made Li Cungao and other front-line troops very restricted.

"It's not okay to do it like this any longer, if we retreat their cannons, we can directly hit Fuchang, in that case, what are we going to do!" Li Cungao frowned and said: "Company Commander Han, look here, there shouldn't be many direct troops on both sides, and it happens to be in our machine gun suppression firing range, you see if we have a counterattack, otherwise, when they gain a firm foothold, it will be even more difficult to fight if we are threatened on the right side!" ”

"How many troops are there over there?" Han Wuduo said: "We have a relatively large attrition now, and I am afraid it will not be easy to counterattack!" ”

Li Cungao on the side said: "They are at most a platoon that is not satisfied, just now our No. 2 machine gun suppressed them, they left at least a dozen people before, and now it would be good to have thirty people over there." ”

Han Wuduo said suspiciously: "Now our first task is defense, and it will be difficult to explain it if we appear rashly on the battalion headquarters!" ”

"Offense is the best defense!" Li Cungao said unceremoniously: "If you can recapture this section of the defense line, then a light machine gun will be set up here at that time, which will be enough to contain hundreds of enemy troops!" ”

Han Wuduo had the heart to object, but looking at the eyes of Li Cungao and several other officers, he could only say: "Then Lieutenant Li, you take your first platoon over, and Lieutenant Chen, your second platoon firepower covers the first platoon!" ”

After Li Cungao heard this, he turned to Lieutenant Chen and said, "When the time comes, give me your light machine gun shooter, you want a veteran!" ”

Lieutenant Chen's face was embarrassed: "One of my two machine gun shooters has been injured, if there is only one left!" ”

Li Cungao said: "Brother Chen, you know, the light machine gun can suppress the enemy army in the old hands, otherwise it will not be of much effect!" ”

Lieutenant Chen said: "In this case, I will let him go to your side first, but you should also take it easy, don't lose this main shooter again, now we don't have a few skilled shooters in our entire company!" ”

Although the light machine gun is a continuous firing weapon, it is mainly based on point fire in actual combat, and only novices will pull the trigger and not let go of the magazine to run out at once, as for the film and television dramas, those 'heroes' stand up from the trench with a light machine gun, and then shout 'Hooray' while holding the trigger for strafing, not to mention how many seconds will run out of bullets in the magazine, after all, it is also possible for people to have unlimited bullet magazines. It is only said that the person who does this is actually a second goods and a fool, and without the enemy beating him into a hornet's nest, the officer who supervised the battle behind him would directly shoot him.

This light machine gun, like the grenadier canisters of the Japanese army in later generations, is difficult for novices to use well, and generally has to be used by veterans.

There is also the same problem in the use of mortars in the Feng army, which is not that mortars need soldiers to train for several years, what kind of feel they have, etc., but that they need gunners to know how to sight and calculate shooting yuan, and this kind of soldier is a real technical soldier in the domestic army full of illiterates, which is enough to become the backbone of an army.

Li Cungao soon led his first row of more than 40 people over the trenches, and at the same time, Han Wuduo also ordered the mortars of the company to fire mortar shells appropriately, and the heavy machine guns also began to suppress the fire of the direct troops in that area.

A moment later, Li Cungao led his troops along the trench, and he was already less than 100 meters away from the direct army, and at this time he had already pulled out his saber, and the copper whistle hanging on his chest was also in his mouth.

He silently counted the number of mortars falling on the position of the direct army in front, and after more than ten mortar shells fell, he blew the copper whistle and brandished his saber to lead his subordinates to charge in less than 100 meters.

Wielding a saber in one hand and a 1904 revolver in the other, Li Cungao ran forward in the flames of the explosion, shouting incessantly: "Rush! ”

Just as he was struggling to rush forward, his right shoulder was suddenly hit hard, and in an instant his eyes were black, and he stumbled and fell to the ground without standing still.