Tongzhou Bali Bridge Qing Army Battalion. In the earth-shattering artillery fire, the Qing soldiers were still braving the artillery fire and constantly filling up the lives of people. There were three trenches outside the Qing army camp, which are now dilapidated, and in addition to the soldiers who fought and resisted in the camp, the remaining soldiers dug out another three trenches in the camp. They seemed to intend to make the last eight miles from here to the capital a position, and the Qing army adopted the tactics of resisting in the front and building fortifications in the rear, which was commonly used against the Taiping army.

The width of the Qing army's camp is three miles, the depth is more than five miles, and almost all of the more than 50,000 Qing army soldiers of the Seng Greenqin Department participated in the construction of the barracks, and the ten battalions of the new army elite and 5,000 Huai army elites transferred from the capital to resist the attack of the British and French forces took turns.

After Peng Yulin led the troops to help, Xingzhen ordered Li Hongzhang to lead 5,000 Huai troops into Beijing. The Jianghuai local regimental training and the Taiping army led by Li Hongzhang and Yuan Jiasan and others fought on the land of Jianghuai for several years, and repeated failures and tempering have made Li Hongzhang grow up, and he is no longer the high-spirited scholar who can only say "Who has written history in 10,000 years, and wants to be a marquis 3,000 miles away".

Standing behind the third trench in the camp, although Li Hongzhang under the banner of the Qing army was very worried in his heart, his face still had a kind smile, his smile seemed to have indescribable magic, and the panic in his heart would disappear after the originally frightened Qing soldiers saw Li Hongzhang's smile. At this time, it was already very hot, and Li Hongzhang was wearing a hat with a veil on the bottom, which looked like a lampshade. A peacock feather is tightly clasped by a pipe made of Burmese jadeite. His robe was covered with a silk muffled gown, and there were openings on each side of the robe to facilitate riding. The front and back complements are embroidered with white cranes according to his official products, which is the symbol of Wen Yipin.

The height of 1.83 meters makes Li Hongzhang very tall among the generals, this dangerous middle-aged man always wears the harmless smile of humans and animals, quite like the spirit of Zhou Gongjin when he talked and laughed.

Monk Greenqin also fell ill, but he was still in the camp to stabilize the army's heart, Peng Yulin had been sent back to the capital to heal, and the actual commander of the entire Baliqiao Qing army camp was Li Hongzhang. But his calmness and cold-bloodedness of ordering the Qing army to step forward to fill human lives made people shudder.

Another group of Qing troops broke up from the outlying positions, and the rear group of Qing troops could not catch up in time. The rice flag and tricolor flag of the Anglo-French army appeared on the positions of the Qing army on the periphery. All the generals under Shuai's banner changed color, but Li Hongzhang said with a faint smile: "The leader of the defeated front team will be beheaded for public display, and the rear team will organize the brave to go up and regain the position!" ”

The words were simple and bloody, and the generals seemed to be a little commonplace. As a result, the Qing army commander who retreated from the defeat of the previous team was beheaded in front of the battle. The rear Qing army organized a death squad of more than 300 people, each with a gunpowder bag tied to his body, and rushed straight up with a big knife in his hand.

When the battle came to this point, the Qing army would use human lives to offset the lack of combat power. In the face of the invasion of the foreign army, the Qing soldiers broke out with an unprecedented spirit of sacrifice, just like the previous suicidal charge of the Monk Lingqin horse team to the coalition position, no one hesitated or hesitated.

Unlike the Battle of Bali Bridge in history, it was due to Xingzhen's will to resolutely resist within the Qing court. Let the soldiers of the Qing army understand that they are the last barrier in front of the capital. They have to stick to it. The appearance of Peng Yulin, Li Hongzhang and others made the command of the Qing army no longer as wrong as in history, and the reinforcements they brought, such as the Huai army, were also old troops who had fought with the Taiping army for many years, and they had a lot of experience in how to fight the enemy army with obvious weapon advantages.

It's not that they can't defeat the Qing army, but that such a strong attack will bring a large number of casualties, and the Qing army no longer fights with them in the field, but relies on fortifications to deal with them, conquering a trench and a trench, laying a camp and a barracks, advancing only a few hundred meters a day, and sometimes the places occupied during the day will be recaptured by the Qing army at night.

The night attack of the Qing army was crazy, all the death squads with gunpowder bags tied to open the way, and the people in the back waited for the front team to blow up a gap before swarming up, the night battle was fair, and the sophisticated firearms would be greatly discounted at night, and many times the allied soldiers had to rely on bayonets and sabers to repel the Qing army, and sometimes they could only retreat if they could not be stopped.

The entire forward position was full of corpses, the weather was hot and stench, and both sides sometimes had to stop and bury the corpses, although the coalition forces had few corpses, but they still paid the price of hundreds of corpses in the past few days, and thousands of wounded soldiers.

Although the Qing army was still resisting, Li Hongzhang knew that it would not be able to stop for long, and the harsh military methods and proper tactics could not make up for the huge gap between the two sides, not to mention that the supplies in the army had begun to run out. The gunpowder has bottomed out, the food is barely maintained, and there is a shortage of medical treatment, but what is worthy of Li Hongzhang's satisfaction is that everyone is paid.

Especially the new army in the capital, after they learned that the Jintang area had fallen, the people there were plundered, and they did not fight for military pay for the first time, because their families were in the capital behind them.

Li Hongzhang is just waiting for one news now, that is, the news of the arrival of the Taiping Army! Whenever he thinks of this, Li Hongzhang will smile bitterly from the bottom of his heart, when will the official army also rely on the army of traitors? But before coming, the Empress Dowager Xi and his analysis were still in my ears, "As long as we can hold until the Taiping army reaches the capital, the situation will become more favorable to us." ”

At first, Li Hongzhang didn't understand what the benefit would be to have another enemy, but then after analyzing it, he understood that this was the queen mother's plan to drive away the wolf, and the bait was the capital!

The Qing army was guarding the capital, and it was not very pleasant to watch the Taiping army and the British and French forces fighting outside the city? But Li Hongzhang felt at first that the Taiping Army would not fight with the British and French forces, because the Taiping Army had always been at odds with the British and French, and the two sides had a lot of cooperation and exchanges in the south. But Xingzhen told him that this is just an appearance, when there are greater interests in front of a wolf and a tiger, the wolf and the tiger will definitely fight.

So Li Hongzhang resisted here, waiting for the opportunity to retreat, and this opportunity appeared today. Three days ago, Li Hongzhang received news from the capital, the suburbs of Beijing appeared in the Taiping army's horse team, today Li Hongzhang got the news that the Taiping army arrived in the capital, so he was ready to retreat tonight, but during the day he must withstand the attack of the coalition army, otherwise after being glued, it will be difficult to retreat even at night, so the Qing army made an exception in broad daylight to send a death squad to recapture the lost position.

The unusually madness of the Qing army surprised the coalition forces a little, but they quickly organized shooters to kill the scattered 300 death squads, but these Qing army death squads were very cunning, they were as agile as rabbits, swift as monkeys, and crawled to the positions of the coalition forces, sometimes they pretended to be dead, and sometimes they tacitly agreed that someone would come out to attract the firepower of the coalition army, in short, the coalition shooters were very headaches.

The front was a mess, with corpses, broken wagons, cattle carcasses, and bomb craters providing natural cover for these people, and soon some people ignited their gunpowder bags and rushed into the trenches where the coalition forces were hiding. With the devastation caused by the explosion, the coalition front was loosened, and eventually dozens of Qing death squads successfully detonated the explosives, and then the Qing infantry launched a charge.

Out of carelessness, the Qing army lost its positions for several days and would not regain it until the evening, because the follow-up soldiers could not make up for it in time, and the forward troops were insufficient, and under the fierce counterattack of the Qing army, the coalition forces had to be forced to retreat. After the coalition forces retreated, a barrage of artillery fire came in, and the Qing army suffered heavy casualties, but at least they recaptured their positions.

After a day of bloody fighting, night slowly came, and groups of Qing troops began to retreat by night, while the coalition forces began to actively prepare to deal with the night attack and counterattack of the Qing army, which was the case for several days, but this time the coalition army miscalculated, they did not expect the Qing army to retreat like this.

In the early morning of the next day, an advance team of the French army approached the Qing Baliqiao camp, but to their surprise, they met no resistance. Then the French army occupied the positions that had been repeatedly tug-of-war in the past few days, and the scene in front of them was full of tragedy, full of mutilated corpses, some of which were still charred, and it was obvious that the Qing army retreated in a hurry and did not have time to collect the corpses.

After completely occupying the camp, Grant and Montauban were amazed at the fortifications of the camp, which were full of trenches, barracks, fences, and even coffin-covered walls, and bamboo sticks everywhere, making it difficult to walk.

The allied forces did not understand why the Qing army had retreated, and they were no worse than the Russians in the Crimean War, but Grant and Montauban were relieved that they had at least succeeded in breaking through the last obstacle to Beijing.

The coalition forces suffered a lot of casualties, and at the same time, the ammunition loss was huge, and they needed to wait here for a day's work, waiting for supplies from Tianjin. While this was waiting, the coalition forces plundered again. Families in the surrounding villages were extorted and looted by the British and French forces. The barracks were wide open at night, and the soldiers and some of the Guangdong coolies who accompanied the army slipped out to rob and rape village women and girls. Enraged, the villagers caught three of the thieves and killed them on the spot. The British used this to shoot the fourth coolie and whip others. Gro again wrote to Foreign Secretary Tuvernell expressing his indignation: "A place of extraordinary abundance has been looted and destroyed. After the Qing army, the coalition army snatched a qiē and destroyed a qiē. The villages and farms were empty. The two commanders claimed that they could not stop the plunder, which really made me ashamed and embarrassed. ”

Fortunately, the waiting time was not long, and the day after the supply of supplies, the coalition army was ready to set off again, and yesterday the coalition army sent a reconnaissance team to the capital to investigate. In the morning, the joint reconnaissance returned, and Major Compnon made a report. They walked 8 kilometers along the stone road, leaving a detachment with artillery as a support point, and after 4 kilometers of progress, they encountered a volley of cavalry sentry at them, this cavalry fire was very fierce, Major Compnon lost eighteen cavalry, and finally it took Major Compnon a day to figure out that it was the Taiping cavalry who shot at them! (To be continued......)