On 19 May, the French Fifth Army and the German Second and Third Armies engaged in an all-out confrontation on a front of more than 70 kilometers. This was also the time when the French troops attacking from the center were engaged in a desperate struggle with death and destruction in the foggy Ardennes forest. Artillery roared, bullets whistled, and aerial bombs exploded like volcanic fury.

In order to get a first-hand picture of the battle at the front in time, the commander of the French Fifth Army, Langlezak, set his headquarters directly in the city of Meitai, which was almost at the forefront. Listening to the continuous rumbling sound of thunder in the distance, Langlezak finally understood why the two supposedly impregnable fortresses of Liège and Namur in Belgium had fallen in such a short time. It's not that their fortifications aren't strong enough, it's that the German firepower is too fierce!

In the sky above the battlefield, a kind of giant airship with a beige body swayed high in the sky, cruising and cruising, like a god patrolling. Although their numbers were small, the lineup that appeared in front of the French army every time was two-handed or even one-handed; But the bombs it dropped were so terrifying that the French officers and men were all distraught and heartbroken. The ferocious shark mouth paint and the long, narrow bloody eyes full of murderous tyranny have become the most feared pattern marks of French officers and soldiers.

In contrast, the German heavy artillery units were even more frightening to the French.

Although the Belgian army's destruction of railroad tracks and roads meant that the Germans' most powerful 420mm superguns were still trudging in the rear and unable to support the frontline battles, their 305mm siege guns were not among them. Built in 1910 by the Austro-Hungarian Skoda military industry, this army cannon is both powerful and maneuverable: the entire cannon can be split into three parts. That is, the gun body, the gun carriage and the base that can be moved. This type of gun can be moved without tires. Not to mention the traditional horse traction. Instead, it is mounted directly on a tracked chassis and driven by an engine, which can travel about 30 kilometers per day (historically). After arriving at the gun position, first place the movable steel cast base, fasten the gun carriage to the base with bolts, and then frame the gun body, the whole process only takes 40 minutes; Dismantling can also be done at the same speed, so that it is guaranteed not to be captured by the enemy. It can rotate 60 degrees from side to side. The maximum firing range is 11.5 km.

In a way, the 305-mm gun developed by Skoda Military Industry is even better than Krupp's 420-mm cannon; In view of this, Germany appropriately reduced the manufacture of its own super-heavy siege artillery and devoted more energy to the production of this less powerful, but more maneuverable weapon. Although the Belgian army destroyed the road, the dozen or so 305-mm guns in the Büloh and Hausen armies were never out of touch with the front-line infantry because the tracks were also well adapted to the field terrain. When they were removed from the tracks and installed in place, they erupted into a deafening roar: a shell of more than 300 kg was like a meteor, breaking through the wind and causing a raging red fire on the French position. Due to the fact that the characteristics of this siege gun were close to mortars, the explosive charge coefficient of its shells was quite amazing. Therefore, the power is even greater than that of ordinary aerial bombs!

In addition to this, there were a large number of heavy howitzers and cannons among the German army; As the core soul of Schlieffen's plan. The artillery strength of the right flank corps was superior to that of the Qing Ying's Fifth Army. When these cannons began to fire at the French troops, the sound was like a river of heaven and a tsunami and landslide. Under the intensive bombardment of thunder and artillery fire on this day, the crappy defensive position built by the French army was shattered and collapsed, and the fire was in full swing. The German infantry, in loose formations, covered by craters from shells and the various terrain of the battlefield, quickly pushed into the French positions. In trenches or street battles, the Germans' light machine guns, submachine guns, and grenades took advantage of them, inflicting heavy casualties on the French army, which had low infantry tactics.

In the city of Meitai, Langlezak and his staff officers could not stay in the headquarters due to irritability, and they paced anxiously back and forth in the square. Seeing the groups of seriously wounded people who were covered in blood, bandages, and incomplete limbs carried down from the front line, Langlezak was even more uncertain and anxious. A car carrying a seriously wounded and dying officer entered the square, and Langlezak's eyes sharpened to see that the officer was actually General Boe, a division commander of his 10th Corps. Listening to the rumbling of cannons in the distance, for the first time, a deep fear rose in Langlezak's heart.

On the night of 20 May, the French line of Charleroi in the north was already crumbling: the 10th Corps reported "heavy losses" and the 3rd Corps telegraphed that it was engaged in "bloody battles with the Germans, with heavy casualties among officers". The two Algerian colonial divisions were even more shattered by the thunderous German heavy artillery: an infantry battalion launched a counter-charge against the Germans, and only two of the 1,000 and 30 men in the battalion were able to escape in one piece. The French were shelled everywhere, and the German artillery positions were either out of sight or out of reach of the French 75-mm guns. Some people were beaten so angry that they hated to stab the Germans to death with a flagpole; And many more were beaten into a panic and depressed. For the German planes circling in the sky, the French officers and soldiers hated and helpless them; Everywhere they went, they either strafed and bombed, or attracted an overwhelming burst of thunder and bombardment.

On the eastern side, the French army was also on the verge of collapse under the ferocious onslaught of the German Third Army: the commander of the German Third Army, Hausen, had realized that the troops in front of him were the main force of the French army, and committed all the forces he could to assemble in the attack. Eight hundred heavy artillery pieces roared like thunder, and the 170,000-strong army swept across the French positions like a hurricane and tsunami. Less than three days after he had been in Meite, and before he could even sit in a hot chair, he was forced to move his command from the front line of the war to Philipville in the southwest. Receiving the shocking casualties and losses sent by the various departments, Langlezak was terrified: the strength of the German army on the front had far exceeded his expectations, and if he had taken the initiative to launch an offensive, he would have been beaten to the point that there was no scum left!

Just as Langlezak was struggling to hold on on the northern front, extremely unfavorable news came from his right flank. The defeat and retreat of Dranger's Fourth Army, located on the central axis, not only exposed the left flank of Luff's Army Group in the south, but also opened the right flank of Langlezak in the north. Forty-three years earlier, the French army had been surrounded by German legions under the city of Sedan that had led to the irretrievable collapse of the Second French Empire. And once the Duke of Württemberg's troops fought out from the southeast and cut off the retreat of Langlezak, the French Fifth Army would inevitably be encircled.

In order for France to avoid a second color, it is necessary to save the Fifth Army from destruction. At this time, Langlezak knew very well that as long as the army remained, there would be no irreparable defeat like the Battle of Sedan, and he could continue to fight. And if the Fifth Army were annihilated, the entire front of the French army would collapse with a bang; No matter how valiantly he fought in the flanking attack of the three large German armies, it was impossible to redeem the situation of complete defeat!

On 21 May, the German Fourth Army entered Honeje, which strengthened the resolve of Langlezak to retreat. Due to his clear knowledge of the Dao, it was impossible for the stubborn Xia Fei to agree to his retreat. So Langlezak made his own decision: after sending a report to the general headquarters, he ordered his troops to withdraw from their positions during the night and move at full speed towards Ilson and Lecato to the west.

With this order, France's worst hopes of defeating the old enemy in a short-term war came to naught. With the exception of Alsace, the southernmost point, where the line could be maintained, the French troops in all areas were retreating in a hurry. The whole plan of the French army was falling apart, and no one could predict what the future would bring, and the specter of the Battle of Sedang haunted, and everyone except the determined Xia Fei was worried. After receiving the report from Lang Lezak, Xia Fei sat in silence as if petrified, neither raised nor withdrew his objection, and acquiesced in this most sensible decision in the present situation; However, he will not forgive Langlezak for the single-handedly burial of the seventeenth plan.

At the same time, the British Expeditionary Force, fortified on the Mons Canal further north, received a thunderous blow from the German First Army. Compared with the French, who "have ideals and a sword in their hands", the British Army, which had just been taught a hard lesson in the Boer War ten years ago, knew very well how many pounds and taels they had; Under the command of Sir French and fearing a major drain on their strength, the British Expeditionary Force began to dig trenches and hold on to Mons from the day they left for Mons, and the British were far superior in fortifications to the French.

With the advantage of the trench and the canal less than ten meters wide in front of them, the British army resisted Crook for a day's time in this area. Although they gave the Crook Army, which had been invincible since the Battle of Liège, the first taste of the blocked attack, they could not stop the advance of the German army. When a large number of heavy artillery and Kirov airboats were dispatched, the British army, which had been hit by unprecedented firepower, still had to retreat in the face of the attack of the Germans, who were three times their size.

Although the British Army's combat effectiveness was not strong, their ability to retreat was indeed the best in the world. Historically, they had miraculously withdrawn hundreds of thousands of troops unscathed from the sights of the Turkish army at the Battle of Dardanelles, and this retreat was not far behind, and the British army, which had nearly 2,000 dead and wounded, could be said to have turned its way through the night at night. By the time the Germans prepared to launch another offensive the next day, they found that the British on the other side of the canal had already fled without a trace. (To be continued......)

PS: Thank you for the reward of the book on February 30~~~