Nanchang, Jiangxi.

In the field of the Zhenhu Military Academy outside the city, Lin Chengting was watching the exercise of the Zhenhu Army with a group of high-level officials of the Zhenhu Army!

In the exercise ground ahead, rows of soldiers of the Zhenhu Army wearing blue-gray military uniforms were rapidly changing formations, and they were seen trotting into the exercise ground in a very standard three-column column, and the officers next to them were following on horseback.

A few minutes later, I saw that the Zhenhu army, which was originally a column, was rapidly dispersed, and the front row of soldiers was the keynote, and it quickly became a horizontal line of three rows.

Then, under the orders of the officers, the soldiers quickly reloaded, and then raised their guns to aim, and as the crackling sound came, a burst of white eyes floated at the same time, and the planks that were quickly erected as imaginary targets on the periphery were smashed to pieces.

At the same time, on the other side, the artillerymen were rapidly reloading and firing!

"Congratulations to the commander, you have trained a strong army again!" Before the exercise ended, several generals next to him stepped forward to congratulate them.

Lin Chengting also nodded slightly, but he didn't have too much joy in his heart, on the contrary, there were still a lot of worries, the new unit in front of him had reached the training level of the old army from the perspective of the exercise, but Lin Chengting was still dissatisfied with them.

He has personally fought with the Chinese army many times, and he has a personal feeling of the strength of the Chinese army, and the unit in front of him is politely said that it is at most equivalent to the early stage of the Chinese army, that is, the quality of the Yu Shengjun era.

And it's inferior in weapons!

Lin Chengting, who is entrenched in Jiangxi, has been accumulating strength in the past two years, trying his best to train more new troops, but Jiangxi is too barren, and because Jiangxi is a region surrounded by all sides, the Chinese army in the east, the Qing army in Guangdong before and the current Chinese army. will not let him easily obtain a large number of foreign guns.

As a last resort, he could only follow the example of the Hunan army and the Qing army and began to make his own foreign guns.

But to make a Mini firing rifle, it was too difficult, and the rifling alone was not something that those blacksmith workshops could do, so he also embarked on the path of imitating the flintlock pistol.

It's not just a matter of Zhenhu Jun. In fact, the Hunan army, the Qing army and the Taiping army all have the same problem, if you want to make a Mini rifle, it is quite difficult, if you want to mass-produce the Mini rifle, you must have a large number of matching machinery and equipment, and only rely on the handicraft workshop, those skilled masters have no problem making a few or dozens of hand, but if you want to produce thousands or even tens of thousands, there is no such possibility.

In addition to the problem of rifling the barrel, they could not solve it in the existing handicraft workshops, there was also the problem of the firing mechanism of the fire cap.

Here we have to popularize the development of modern rifles a little. Modern rifles range from arquebuses to flintlock pistols, to the primer pistol, which was popularized in the early nineteenth century, and to the present, the firing pin rifle used in rear loading rifles in the mid-nineteenth century. The above classification of rifles refers to the special firing method, not to the presence or absence of rifling or front and rear loading.

Among them, the arquebus has basically been eliminated in the mainstream army, and now there are only some third-rate armies, such as the Green Battalion and the Taiping Army in the Qing Army. Well, including the Chinese Army's Auxiliary Defense Forces, which still retain these weapons. However, it was generally produced in the past, and nowadays, even in China, no one produces arquebuses.

In the case of flintlock pistols, this thing has been the mainstream rifle for the past hundred years, in fact, one by the time of the First Opium War, Britain and France and other foreign armies still retained some flintlock pistols.

And then it's time for the firing pistol. The so-called musket, that is, a rifle fired from a fire cap made of mercury ray'anoate, has rapidly become popular since its invention in the early part of the century, whether it is a front-loading smoothbore rifle or a rifle. Front-loading rifled rifles are massively applied to this firing mode.

For example, the 1851 Linde rifle modified from the brown bass rifle in the Chinese army, and the 1856 Linde rifle of the small-caliber Mini rifle designed and produced by the Chinese army all use this firing mode.

Then come over is the firing pin mode, the firing pin is developed from the traditional firing mode, the first application is the German Dresser rifle, and the 1858 Linde rifle in the Chinese army also uses the firing pin mode, it can be seen that generally only the rear rifled rifle uses the firing pin mode, even in the later era of metal bullets, the firing pin mode is still used.

The above-mentioned firing and firing pin two modes have a very important technical difficulty, that is, the fire cap, and the fire cap requires the use of mercury thunderate.

Don't look at mercury thunderate this thing is a very simple thing for later generations, but for the contemporary chemical level, it is a veritable high-tech product, Linde Machinery Factory in order to be able to produce its own fire caps, but spent a lot of money to introduce technical equipment, but also hired a large number of foreign engineers, and even so, in fact, it took two or three years to build, until 1856, the Chinese army was completely used to produce its own fire caps, and before that they were heavily dependent on imports.

However, the development of the firing pin mode is because the fire cap technology has matured, and then it is a matter of course, and it does not take much effort.

Rifling and fire caps, these two technical difficulties are enough to stump those handicraft workshops in China, whether it is the Tianjin Machinery Bureau of the Qing Dynasty or the Hunan Machinery Bureau of the Hunan Army, or the handmade gun workshops of the Zhenhu Army in Nanchang and the Taiping Army in Wuchang, Hubei, they cannot solve the above two problems.

When they can't make their own rifles and can't buy them from outside, they just retreat, and the fact that they can't get this rifled rifle doesn't mean that they can't even make a flintlock rifle.

Therefore, in the past two years, the Qing court, the Hunan army, the Taiping army, and the Zhenhu army have all been large-scale self-made flintlock pistols, and their respective outputs are very impressive!

As for the more backward arquebuses, although there is no longer a mass production of that force.

He can only use flintlock pistols, but Lin Chengting knows very well that the Chinese army in the east uses mini rifles!

The Chinese army has been using mini rifles on a large scale since the Yongying era in Yuyao County, and Lin Chengting and Shi Dakai or Zeng Guofan and other domestic military commanders, even if they are backward in information, all know that the Chinese army uses mini rifles on a large scale, and even these people have more or less obtained a small number of mini rifles from various sources, and after testing, they know some of the performance of mini rifles.

And the more you know about the performance of the Mini rifle, and then compare it with the flintlock rifle at home, the more you can feel the difference.

When the troops he sent to Fujian last year fought with the Third Army of the Chinese Army, which also marched into Fujian, he suffered heavy losses and was finally forced to withdraw from Fujian on his own initiative.

Although Lin Chengting knew that there was a certain gap in the training of the two sides, he did not think that this gap had a decisive impact, and the real reason for the successive heavy defeats of his own troops in the hands of the Chinese army was because of the gap in weapons.

Now that he heard that the Chinese army has defeated the British and French coalition forces in southern Jiangsu, Lin Chengting is very worried that the Chinese army will advance westward in a big way, and once the Chinese army moves westward, the primary target is of course the Taiping army in the direction of Jiujiang, but they will definitely be their goal in the future, after all, the geographical location of Jiangxi determines that if the Chinese army wants to continue to enter the two provinces of Huguang and Guangzhou, it must first take Jiangxi, so that the Chinese army can integrate Guangdong, Fujian and other directions, and not leave a large piece in the middle.

Faced with such a crisis, Lin Chengting naturally became more urgent.

Now, the new army, which he has trained for more than two years, has expanded to 20,000 people, and there are nearly 30,000 auxiliary troops using cold weapons, but everyone knows that these auxiliary troops can only be used by local security forces, and they cannot be relied upon when they really fight.

And can the new army, which relies only on 20,000 men, hold off the attack of the Chinese army?

Lin Chengting himself does not have this confidence!

Maybe it's time to send someone to Changsha to talk to Zeng Guofan!

If Lin Chengting was worried that the Chinese army would advance westward, then the current Qing court in the north is really facing the northward offensive of the Chinese army.

Since the end of the war between the southern Jiangsu Union and the British and French forces in August, the Chinese army has not stopped its pace, but has quickly adjusted the direction of its troops and material supply, not only dispatching the Sixth Army to the north, but also passing north through the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal with ships full of artillery shells, bullets and other logistical supplies.

In order to solve the problem of long-distance inland waterway navigation, the Admiralty even ordered a number of steam tugs to tow unpowered wooden barges for inland navigation.

This mode of transport is much like a train, with a locomotive in front and a row of carriages in tow.

In this way, although the speed of running is relatively slow, but the amount of one-time transportation is relatively large, and these are inland river vessels, the requirements for inland waterways are very low, basically there is a water depth of two meters is very sufficient, if the load of goods is less, even in some one-meter-deep rivers can be barely transported, but the probability of stranding is very large.

At the same time, this mode of transportation is also to get rid of the trouble of wind direction and retrograde, and the only trouble is that the supply of coal along the way is not very convenient.

However, the Jiangnan Mining Company has carried out preliminary mining in Xuzhou, although there is no machinery and equipment, and it is still digging coal by hand, but in the case of the urgent demand for coal for the navy, the Jiangnan Mining Company in order to support the military's actions, it is also not taking into account the high cost, which can be mined as much as possible.

It's just that the quality of the mined coal is not very good, and it must be transported with Shanghai to transport some imported good coal, and then the two are mixed.

In any case, it is much easier and faster to transport barges by steam tugboat than by sailboat, and this has a great positive effect on military operations on the front line.

In fact, the Sixth Army went north on this kind of barge, and although the speed was not very fast, it was much better than walking hundreds or thousands of kilometers on foot.

On September 26, the Sixth Army, which had been heading north and resting for a few days in Yangzhou and Xuzhou, arrived in Jining, Shandong. (To be continued......)