The icy rain was still dripping, and Rongcheng had already raised the red dragon flag high.

Although the Japanese commander clamored for "all the jade to be broken", not all of his subordinates were willing to be cannon fodder, and the total number of Japanese troops who finally surrendered, including those who were tortured and half-dead and sick, unexpectedly reached 34,000.

At the moment when the Guards attacked Rongcheng, Dashan Yan committed suicide by caesarean section, and the person who served as the "intermediary" was still Major General Limi Shangwen. Before he died, Oyama Iwa told Tachimi Shangfumi: There must be many captured Japanese soldiers, and in order to ensure that these people can have a leader and fight for the rights and dignity of everyone on their behalf, Lijian Shangwen should be alive, which is an order from Zuihou as his commander.

Seeing that Shang Wen agreed with tears, and then cut off the head of Dashanyan with a knife, the commander of the Shandong Combat Army, who had studied in Europe when he was young, witnessed the Franco-Prussian War, and admired Lao Moltke very much, hoping to be like Prussia, fighting a war of annihilation similar to Sedan, but he didn't expect to be annihilated today.

The commander of the 8th Division, Zeng Youzhun, was wounded in battle and fell unconscious, and when he woke up he had become a prisoner of the Chinese, and he committed suicide while the guards were not paying attention.

Prince Fushimi Miya's Sadae hesitated for a time and wanted to surrender to the Chinese, but Okazawa Sei, a staff officer of the 7th Division, thought that he was a cousin of Emperor Bixia, and if he was captured alive by the Chinese, it would be a great humiliation to the empire, so he hacked Prince Fushimi Miya's Sadae to death, and then committed suicide as well.

Feng Zicai ordered the Third Division to clean up the battlefield and take care of the prisoners, and all the rest of the troops went to Weihaiwei to prepare to go to the northern battlefield by sea, and the target was Incheon!

On the other hand, on March 14, the main Japanese army in the northeast finally could no longer hold on, and they were completely desperate for the rear and could not afford to attack any further.

On March 15, the Japanese army began a full-scale retreat. Having abandoned the occupied cities, the army marched to the Yalu River in a state of panic. By this time the entire Japanese army had run out of food, and they were forced to begin a "bitter march".

Due to the lack of food and the fact that most of them camped in the wilderness, many soldiers died of starvation. Their faces were dark, their bodies stiff, and they were unattended, and their condition was terrible.

This winter came late and went late, and now it is the eighteenth day of the second month of the lunar calendar, and it has passed the sting, and it is still cold, without a trace of spring.

Snowflakes were scattered in the sky, the vast snowfield was pure white, and the Japanese army was like an infinitely long black snake, winding from the distant horizon to the equally distant horizon.

The mountains are high and the snow is deep, the wind is howling, and the sun on the dangerous peaks is like a dusk piece of paper. The snow powder kept coming in front of me, and I couldn't open my eyes. But the team was silent, except for the sound of snow under their feet and wheezing, no one spoke, everyone moved forward silently, except for the long line that was still moving slowly, and the whole shijie seemed to be frozen.

Many people walked and got stuck in the snow and couldn't get up again, while the people behind them ignored it and just stepped over and continued on their way. Hunger, fatigue, confusion, and despair made the Japanese officers and soldiers numb from the inside out.

The guards who followed behind were a different scene, the soldiers were wearing thick cotton uniforms, stepping on woolen grass cotton shoes, and even wrapped the body of the gun with an antifreeze jacket to prevent the rifle from freezing.

In the rear of the troops, there were more than 100,000 people transporting materials, from pork, chicken, vegetables, rice, white flour, fruits, to sugar, tea, spices, honey, tofu, biscuits, cakes, and even cigarettes and alcohol.

China also recruited from the northeast, and even transferred a large number of cattle and horses from Guannai, totaling more than 40,000 horses, and the Guards relied on a large number of ox carts and carriages to travel, and could easily follow the Japanese army.

On both sides of the road were fallen Japanese soldiers, all of them in human shape, some of whose bodies had even their thighs stripped off. These Chinese soldiers had long heard that there were human flesh eaters, and they didn't believe it, but now they saw it with their own eyes, because the wounds were smooth and neat, and they could only be gnawed by knives, not wild dogs.

From the 15th to the 24th, the Japanese army walked for more than ten days to cross the Yalu River, and the Xu Bangdao Brigade, the vanguard unit of the Guards, regained Andong with its tail, and in the center of Andong City, the huge sign "Andong Civil Affairs Department of the Great Japanese Empire" was still hanging there.

Some soldiers took off the sign and wanted to smash it, but Xu Bangdao stopped: "Stay!" This is the evidence of Japan's aggression against China! ”

With the blowing of the Pacific monsoon, a hint of warmth has come to the frozen Korean Peninsula, and spring is coming.

On March 25, the Japanese army suffered another major strategic blow, and the 40,000-strong Southern Chinese Army began to land at Incheon. Six escort warships, including the Suzaku, Xuanwu, and Longwei, used dozens of naval guns to bombard Yuewei Island fiercely, and the small number of Japanese troops guarding the harbor were directly bombarded into slag.

Subsequently, the Guards landed in Inchon one after another, and on the 26th, the Zuo Guigui Brigade began to attack Seoul, there were only 2,000 Japanese troops and hundreds of Korean puppet soldiers in Seoul, and they were already too hungry to walk, and the puppet government of Kim Ok-gyun also fled to the north last night, and the Guards solved the battle with a charge.

But the sight in Seoul still surprised the soldiers of the Guards.

Once a thriving city of hundreds of thousands, it has been ravaged by many wars and is now dead on a desolate ruins. The bodies of the war dead can still be found everywhere, and ferocious wild dogs with skin and bones roaming the streets with flesh torn from corpses in their mouths.

Before that, the Japanese army had looted all the food in Zuihou, and most of the buildings were demolished and burned in order to keep warm, even Gyeongbokgung Palace was no exception, and the whole city became a ghost town and empty.

Zuo Guigui made a long round before he found a surviving North Korean civilian in a dilapidated house. It was a middle-aged woman with two skinny legs supporting a swollen belly, and she got up from the floor and lifted the quilt next to her. I saw a dead old man lying there on his back, his throat slit, his face cut in half, his beard stained with blood, navy blue, and sinking like a block of lead.

Zuo Guigui looked disgusted, shook his head, and said to his subordinates: "Go live outside the city, this place is about to be haunted." ”

The main force of the Japanese army was caught in a two-sided attack.

On March 26, the new Imperial Minister, Iwakura Gushi, as well as Ito Hirobumi and Inoue Shin, entered the palace to meet the emperor, and made a bitter statement, tearing down his face, and confessing that the empire could not wait any longer. Now that the country is in a difficult situation at home and abroad, the defeat of the war is decided, there is no power to return to heaven, and international negotiations are even more nonsense and useless. While the public resentment in the country was boiling, riots and riots broke out one after another, revolution was imminent, and the entire imperial regime was facing an existential crisis.

The only solution now is to send an envoy directly to China to sue for peace with China and end the war at an early date, so as to concentrate on dealing with the crisis at home.

The emperor was silent after hearing this, and Iwakura and the others looked at each other, knowing in their hearts that the emperor was worried that if he sued for peace with China, his already shaky prestige would completely collapse.

At the beginning of his ascension, he once vowed to "open up the waves of thousands of miles and spread the power of the country in all directions." "Moreover, for a long time, the Japanese government has completely deified the emperor and portrayed him as a wise and powerful great monarch, and once someone is sent to sue for peace today, the supreme dignity of the emperor will be gone, and I am afraid that this seat will not be able to sit still.

After a while, Iwakura Gushi said: "This matter has been discussed by Weichen and others, Weichen will go to Beijing with Wenduo to sue for peace, and all the responsibilities will be borne by us and others, as long as we can save the empire, sacrificing ministers and others is also loyal." ”

Then he turned to Hirobumi Ito and said, "The future state affairs will depend on Shunfu-kun." ”

Shunsuke is the common name of Ito Hirobumi (Bowen is a secret), and Wendo is the common name of Inoue Xin.

In the end, the emperor had to make a painful decision: to officially send a delegation to China for peace talks. Iwakura Gushi served as the head of the group, Inoue Shin served as the deputy leader, and he was accompanied by Masayoshi Matsukata and Kiyotaka Kuroda.

On March 28, under the guidance of the British Minister to China, Pashali, the Japanese delegation secretly departed from the port of Shinagawa in Tokyo.