Colonel Wallace took out his pocket watch and glanced at it, and then shook the rhinoceros horn mustache on his upper lip and said proudly: "Half an hour, ten minutes earlier than expected!" He Bin, He Bin ......" He began to look back for that obscene and obnoxious Mingren Tongshi.

He Bin was hiding under a mast twenty feet away from him, and when he heard Wallace call his name in that disgusting accent, he ran over with a curse.

"You say, this city was once the capital of six huge empires?"

Wallace stretched out his hand to guide the city of Nanjing looming in the distance, He Bin secretly laughed that the red-haired fan was uneducated, it was obviously the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, and the so-called Six Dynasties were all small courts in a corner of peace, such as Sun Wu at the end of the Han Dynasty, the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen, which is a big empire? It's too much gold on their faces. However, he didn't bother to explain to this guy, just thinking that this errand was done, and he didn't have to endure the disgusting face.

He Bin not only explained, but also praised Nanjing fiercely according to his words: "Yes! A huge empire, even bigger than your Western Rome and Ottomans! He Bin had never heard of these two ministers before, but he only heard them from time to time from the mouth of the Western red-haired fan, and he quoted them.

Wallace rarely put away his disdainful smile and turned thoughtfully, Rome is a huge empire that stays in legends, and it is difficult to give people an intuitive impression. But the Ottomans were different, as the Muslim empire spanned Europe, Asia and Africa, and included the entire Byzantine Empire. It was a powerful and rich empire, and the Ottomans blocked the trade routes to the East, but the European countries had no choice but to search for the legendary East through the Guò Sea Road, the one named Marco Polo once recorded in his travelogues, the East full of gold.

By God's grace, they finally found the sea route to the East, but what they saw was no longer the East in the travelogue. It was full of poorly clothed people, and officials who mistreated them, tyrants who stood up above. The whole East is rife with embezzlement, fraud, robbery, and even crimes that God will not forgive....... chickens. Traitor......

"Oh, God forgive poor sinners...... Wallace thought of this, and involuntarily gestured a cross to his chest. He didn't understand how such a heinous crime could be universally recognized by the upper echelons of the Eastern Empire, and it was still popular......

In Marco Polo's account, the East is full of ornate dwellings, magnificent buildings. The king would be generous to the poor, sending seeds and food to those affected by the disaster, and it was an empire full of wealth and human touch. To this day, Wallace lamented that the legendary vast and wealthy Eastern Empire had fallen into such a decay and degeneration, and that everyone he had seen would speak ill of their neighbors, and that if they took up arms, they all became pirates, robbed, and murdered...... It only takes a few thousand men, equipped with muskets, spears, ships, and cannons, to conquer a province.

You can even conquer an empire, right? Wallace's eyes brightened suddenly, and in an instant he made a decision that even he thought was incredible.

"All soldiers ashore! I'm going to conquer the capital of this ancient Eastern Empire! ”

He Bin was stunned by Colonel Wallace's order, his mouth was open wide for a long time and couldn't close, others don't know, he still knows, Nanjing, as the capital of the Ming Dynasty, is not much better than Beijing, how can it be captured lightly by just a few thousand people? Didn't the red-haired colonel's head have been kicked by a donkey? Such a stupid idea would arise.

Soon, almost all the small warships sent by the Ming Dynasty were wiped out in the river, and only a few escaped. Colonel Wallace pulled out his monoculars and found that the hillside on the south bank was crowded with dense Ming troops, and said to himself: "This is not a suitable place to land, go downstream, there is a good harbor there." ”

Wallace's intentions were clear, he wanted to land elsewhere, to go around the flanks and rear of these Ming defenders and strike them hard. He Bin was just a generalist, Wallace didn't give him a chance to speak at all, and the appearance of the Ming Dynasty sailor was really terrible, no wonder Wallace had this thought.

"The thieves withdrew, the thieves withdrew!"

The Ming army on the river bank shouted, the general soldier Shao Hualong frowned, his own sailors did not have the strength to fight back in front of the other party, if the entire Yangtze River waterway fell into the hands of these people, wouldn't Wei Guogong be in danger of cutting off the grain route? At this time, a sailor soldier was rescued, Shao Hualong personally went to inquire about the situation, and the frightened soldier lost his voice and said: "Red hair, red hair!" I can see clearly, it's a red-haired fan! ”

This statement was agreed upon by most of the escaped sailor soldiers. Shao Hualong breathed a sigh of relief after hearing this, which showed that someone was fraudulently using Zheng Zhilong's name, and his intentions could not be described as sinister. But this kind of thing is not something that he can decide as a martial artist, who can guarantee that there will be no red hair in Zheng Zhilong's army? It's better to report to a few important ministers in the city and let them decide to go, as long as the thieves don't come to land, it can be regarded as an explanation to the court.

At the beginning, the news was sent to Nanjing, and the thief ship went in the direction of Longtan. Several Shangshu ministers were in a complicated mood and asked Yu Shao Hualong how to deal with it. Shao Hualong couldn't guess the thoughts of these old foxes, when was there a precedent for asking him a martial artist for this kind of thing? So he pondered for a while, and had no choice but to say: "I have never heard of the good water battle, so it is better to send someone to warn and prepare early!" ”

In fact, where to use them to warn, the Longtan military camp has long been a slaughter, and as soon as the battle on the river began, it was detected by the scout rangers of the Three Guards. Now most of the people have been sent out to repair the canal, and at the moment there are only more than 2,000 soldiers in the battalion, which can barely make up two infantry battalions. And the most important thing is that Li Xin, the backbone of the Three Guards Army, was not in the camp, at this time he was inspecting the construction site in Changzhou Mansion and meeting with local officials, and Niu Jinsong also went to Changzhou as a personal soldier officer.

These two thousand people have no fear, the Three Guards have been good at fighting more with less since they became an army, when did they fear whom? Although they are not good at water warfare, as long as the thieves dare to go ashore, they will fight and regret giving birth to their mother's womb.

The highest-ranking general who remained in the battalion was only Heisenberg of the 1st Artillery Battalion, and the officers of the other two battalions were all with the rank of staff general.

The two battalion officers were anxious to get an idea, looking for Heisenberg, a foreign general.

Heisenberg had always been polite to people, and never scolded like other generals, and when he saw the anxious faces of the two battalion officers, he comforted them: "The navy is not good at land warfare, and if they dare to go ashore, they will fight them all over the ground." Now gather your men and horses from your camp and line up the hillside to meet you. ”

The Three Guards were well-trained, but they were in the vicinity of the docks for a quarter of an hour. Scout rangers, running along the banks of the river, to see if the unknown fleet is going to borrow the way back to the sea, or looking for an opportunity to land in Longtan. But it soon turned out that the other party's intentions belonged to the latter.

Many ships began to lower their sails, waiting for an opportunity to approach the riverbank. There was no time to delay, and Heisenberg had already ordered all the twelve pounder guns of the artillery battalion to be pulled to the deep-water dock by the river. From what he knew about seagoing ships, there must have been cannons with a range of more than 2,000 feet on those three-masted galleons, and only the twelve-pounder cannons in the Three Guards gun barracks had a range greater than those of such galleons.

Moreover, there was no lethal deterrent against such a large twelve-pounder gun, Heisenberg did not know much about naval warfare, but he also knew that dealing with such a large sailing ship could pose a serious threat to it if he broke his sail.

"Blacksmith, where is the blacksmith?"

At Heisenberg's insistence, there were many blacksmiths in the artillery camp, and he ordered all the blacksmiths to open the furnace at once, and put a chain several feet long between the two solid bullets, and the more the better.

Seeing that the sea ships were getting closer and closer, Heisenberg was staring at the river with the Yanling knife on his waist, and there were more and more dense ships, constantly leaning towards the river bank, he only frowned and silently counted the distance.

In the monoculars, Wallace discovered that there were neatly lined up Ming troops on the shore of this deep-water port, but compared with the Ming army on the riverside outside Nanjing, there were many fewer than 1,000 people. But he didn't plan to change places. As soon as the fleet was close to a distance of two thousand feet from them, it was possible to smash these seemingly neat formations with the ship's cannons. Wallace had no doubts about this.

"My brave soldiers, as long as you get ashore,......" Wallace paused, and immediately corrected the promise he almost blurted out, "as long as you capture the capital of the Six Kingdoms of the Ming people, you will be allowed to plunder at will for a whole day!" ”

No sooner had he finished speaking, and before the expected cheers had been heard, Wallace heard the sound of the sky breaking, followed by the clatter of cracking and smashing wood. Puzzled, he searched for the source of the sound, and finally locked on to the nearby three-masted galleon. Wallace's mouth was quickly opened in surprise, this could not be, and he saw that the galleon's mast, which was thicker than his thigh, was slowly toppling.

"Akito fired a chain bomb!"

A sailor's exclamation stung Wallace's eardrums, which were more than 2,000 feet from the shore. This meant that he had to stay closer, go through a painful distance, and endure the blows of the riverbank artillery. And to his dismay, he didn't know how many cannons on the riverbank could shoot more than 2,000 feet.

Anger soon overwhelmed reason, and Wallace roared loudly, "Full sails, full speed to the riverbank!" Bombard me with the artillery on the shore ......"

The sound of salvos of cannons rang out one after another, and it sounded like there were dozens of guns. Obviously, the shot was just to correct the target......

Note: Colonel is not synonymous with the modern military rank, and in the seventeenth-century West it simply referred to the person who commanded the team, or commander.