Zhong Xiahuo stared sullenly at the coffin in front of him that was piled with paper horse wreaths on both sides, and did not say a word.

One shell, one dead and one wounded, division commander plus regiment commander.

On the afternoon of 5 June, Major General Qian Zichen, commander of the 1st Praetorian Guard Division, was the first general to die on the battlefield since the establishment of the new military rank system in the empire, and Colonel He Fengqi, the commander of the guard regiment who accompanied him on his tour of the front line, was seriously wounded.

There was still one last step left in the mourning ceremony, and the master of ceremonies glanced at Zhong Xiahuo inquiringly, and Zhong Xiahuo nodded to him.

"Buried—"

The deliberately elongated voice seemed to urge the haunting ghost to hurry on the road.

Zhong Xiahuo put on a military hat.

In the bumpy "Violent Tiger" car, Zhong Xiahuo crossed his arms and stared directly at the back of the driver's head.

"He ran out of luck in Moscow Vitino." Deng Jian said coldly.

"What?" Zhong Xiahuo didn't react for a while.

"I mean Master Qian."

"Oh, I'm not thinking about him, I'm thinking about the gold in that clearing, and the tanks I saw at the Little Tangshan Research Institute—or as they call them, armored fighting vehicles."

"It's not a good thing to miss gold, Wu Dingguo alone is enough. If you miss tanks, why don't you ask Wu Weigong for a few to come over and have fun? ”

"Nonsense, of course I asked, but Captain Liu didn't give it, saying that there are only a few experimental cars now, and the production line of the factory has not yet started, and it will take at least another half a year to mass production."

"Where's the Janissaries' steel helmets? Is it approved? ”

"It's approved, but it won't be available until the end of the month, Captain Liu said that the first batch of steel helmets should be sent to the front line of Vladivostok first-Bailiang's boy, the time limit has already passed, why haven't you taken the broken fortress yet!"

With an expression of "if it was for me a long time ago", Zhong Xiahuo lit a Hade door and handed another one to Deng Jian, Deng Jian declined: "I don't smoke." ”

"It doesn't matter, great writer, I will continue to tempt you in the future."

Deng Jian looked polite and polite, and from time to time he would write some popular military treatises according to Liu Yun's request, and it was not once or twice that he was ridiculed as a "great writer".

"After all, this battle has been fought for ten months." Zhong Xiahuo's chance of being sentimental is equal to zero, which was said by Deng Jian.

"It's only ten months, it's nothing, I still want to fight for ten years...... In fact, if according to the original war mobilization concept of the General Staff, this battle should be fought in July and August this year, who knew that Lao Maozi himself sent it to the door, and did it in Hailan Pao and Weiyuan, giving us such a good excuse...... "Zhong Xiahuo actually didn't intend to sigh anything.

"Imagine that if this war can really be carried out according to the original plan of the General Staff, our losses should be much smaller, and the course of the war may not drag on for so long......

"Not necessarily, at that time, the enemy's strength will also be strengthened accordingly, there will be gains and losses, this kind of problem is still left to the glasses guys of the War History Research Institute." Zhong Xiahuo obviously didn't care about the fact that Deng Jian was also wearing glasses.

"I should be able to eat that annoying 19th Army in one go today, I think the weather is good today, do you want to go up to the sky to see it together?" Zhong Xiahuo seems to have become addicted to flying airships.

"If you run into an enemy flying unit......"

"What are you afraid of, wrap it up on me!"

Two hours later, the "Western Division Zhizhi No. 2" command airship, which was converted from a "Ziyun" medium-sized attack boat, carried General Zhong Xiahuo and Admiral Deng Jian in a swaggering airspace over the besieged Russian troops.

"Good weather, I said it was good weather." Zhong Xiahuo slapped the huge water-cooled holster of the heavy machine gun of the side boat, and the general's next action stunned everyone.

"General Zhong suddenly opened the hatch without warning, and one foot stretched out, and we were all stunned! No one knew what to do, so we had to watch him unbutton his pants and take out a few CC liquid pills poured from 1,500 meters into the position of the enemy's 19th Army......"

- "Purple Cloud 226", 1939, Wenyan Society.

The airship circled around the positions of the Russian 19th Army for three or four hours, during which time thousands of Russian soldiers became prisoners of the Janissaries and the Fifth Army.

At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, just as the "Western Division Zhizhi No. 2" was preparing to return home, a Russian airship about two-thirds the size of the "Purple Cloud" approached.

"Damn, you're the one waiting for!" Zhong Xiahuo, who had just finished soaking urine for the second time, was in a state of refreshment, and without hesitation, he ordered the captain to turn the rudder and move closer to the enemy boat.

"Do you really want to fight?" Chief of Staff Deng Jian did not have the consciousness to die at any time, as a commander in command of hundreds of thousands of troops, he had to fight the enemy in a meaningless air battle, which he could not accept in any case.

"If I don't fight, what do I want this air battleship to do?" Zhong Xiahuo, who is energetic, is more stubborn than a cow with his tail lit.

"What are you doing! the guys and get ready to the fight! "At the sound of an order, four heavy machine guns were ready for battle in five seconds.

At a distance of 1,000 yards, the two machine guns on the starboard side of the "Purple Cloud" opened fire first, and a few seconds later, one of the machine guns of the Russian airship began to return fire.

The exchange of fire lasted only a minute or two, and the two airships passed each other at relative speeds of more than 150 kilometers per hour, and the closest distance between them was less than 500 yards.

When General Zhong Xiahuo ordered the boat to turn around and pursue the Russian airship, he found that the Russian airship was busy throwing off ballast.

"We also threw away the ballast and chased after it, I said I would knock it down with my own hands!"

"Report to the Commander, engines 1 and 2 on the starboard side have stalled, and we can't catch up." The captain reported that in fact the two engines were quietly turned off by himself.

"Let's go back." Zhong Xiahuo said unhappily.

After this air battle, the ground crew found more than 60 holes in the hull and pod of the "Western Division Zhizhi II", but fortunately, there were no casualties among the crew.

According to the information of the Russian side, what appeared in the sky over the 19th Army that day was a Zeppelin numbered "L2" commanded by German Navy Captain Gurnofi, and only two machine gunners among the five crew members of the boat were Russians. Captain Gurnofi, who was mortally wounded in the day's air battle, insisted on directing the airship until landing, after which he had to amputate his right arm. After the fact, the L2 airship had more than 100 bullet holes punched, and the crew had no idea what a dazzling and red-hot aerial barbecue their hydrogen airship would be if the other side had incendiary bullets......

This is General Zhong Xiahuo's second and most reluctantly last air combat experience, because Deng Jian secretly sent a secret telegram to the base camp that night, and a few days later, the "Western Division Zhizhi No. 2" airship was confiscated by the base camp, which made Zhong Xiahuo depressed for more than half a month.

Two days later, on June 8, Zhong Xiahuo and Deng Jian jointly sent a telegram to the base camp: "Our Praetorian Guard and the Fifth Army have confirmed the annihilation of most of the enemy's 19th Army and a part of the 24th Army before noon on the same day, and the results are as follows: 12,457 enemies were killed, 29,368 were captured, 71 artillery pieces, 113 light and heavy machine guns, and 13,556 rifles were captured. In addition, the enemy's offensive on all fronts that began in late May has now been completely defeated, and our troops have basically returned to the situation before the enemy's offensive began, except for the planned plan of mobile annihilation of the enemy on the Onohoi side...... It is understood that since the fall of Chita, the morale of the enemy in front of our army has become weaker and weaker, and the wave of desertion has swept the whole army......

This was the end of what came to be known as the Battle of the Four Rivers (also known as the Battle of Selenga-Uda).

According to post-war data, from May 23 to June 8, the Russian army suffered more than 75,800 casualties, missing (including captured) in the Sihe area except Chita, while the Western Front of the Chinese Army and the Mongolian Front lost more than 29,000 people.

Before the afternoon of the 9th, the base camp sent a telegram back to Zhong Xiahuo: "I am very relieved to receive the telegram, and I am specially commended, because the enemy has retreated to the original position, and our army has consumed a lot of materials and personnel during the war, and the main supply road of the western front has long been fully loaded, so it is necessary to act cautiously, and it is necessary to find out the reserve and transportation capacity of the supply as soon as possible, and quickly report the relevant figures such as the full manning rate of each division, especially the reserve and transportation capacity of heavy artillery ammunition, so as to facilitate the planning of the General Staff and the decision of the base camp." ”

"Supplies? Chief of Staff Deng, I'll leave it to you. Zhong Xiahuo was busy with other things.

Before dinner, Deng Jian handed Zhong Xiahuo a depressing report: due to the influence of the Chita and Selenga-Uda battles, the average ammunition reserve of the front army was only 20 days, while the reserve of heavy artillery shells above 105 mm was only 3 to 5 days, and because the railway facilities around Chita had been completely destroyed, the railway track change between Chita and Petrovsk had not yet been fully completed (due to the different railway gauges between China and Russia at that time). It was not possible to expect trains to reach the forward supply center of the Front in Petrovsk for a month or two, that is, for at least a month, the supply of hundreds of thousands of troops on the five or six hundred kilometers of dirt roads between the front line and the train unloading point in Chita would have to be maintained mainly by horse-drawn carriages, mules and a very small number of very unreliable cars. Even if the railway between Chita and Petrovsk can be successfully opened to traffic, there is still a problem that will be difficult to solve, that is, the newly laid railway from Manchuria to Chita, which was built in two or three months by a large number of civilian workers and soldiers, has frequent accidents, and its carrying capacity is only about one-third of that of ordinary commercial railways in China.