Cannonballs whistled all around, and the sharp whistling sound was like a dance music of a death feast, cheerful and agile, while the British and French soldiers in the field were ravaged by artillery fire. General Collino issued the order to retreat at the first time, because he keenly found that the Qing artillery was all heavy smoothbore artillery, and the range and power were almost similar to the 12-pounder heavy smoothbore guns still used by the coalition forces.

The British general Sutton hesitated for a moment, he once wanted the soldiers of the reconnaissance team to rush forward in the face of artillery fire, as long as they spread out into a linear formation, the lethality of the Qing army's smoothbore guns could be minimized, but then Sutton denied his idea, because they were marching on a 7-meter-wide embankment, and both sides of the embankment were muddy, and it was impossible to expand the formation, and Sutton saw through the telescope that more and more soldiers began to gather behind the Qing army's camp in the distance, maybe two thousand or more, Therefore, after hesitating for a moment, Sutton also decisively issued an order to the British to retreat.

When the allied reconnaissance team was out of the range of the Qing artillery, the French scouts found some strange facilities on the embankment, almost every 500 meters, there would be a stone pillar built with a stone barrier on the side of the embankment, at first they thought it was used to observe the water level of the embankment, but later realized that the Qing artillery was to measure the distance through guò, and then General Colino ordered the destruction of these stone pillars.

The French lost 12 killed and 37 wounded in this frustrating reconnaissance operation. The British lost 19 killed and 36 wounded, most of whom were hit in the legs by bouncing shells. Many wounded soldiers lost their legs as a result. After returning to the starting position, the wounded soldiers were quickly taken to the field hospital, where General Collino prayed that the soldiers would not be reinfected due to the poor sanitary conditions in Beitang, but he knew that the soldiers would need to undergo a second amputation or they would not survive the infection.

General Collino remembered what the Allied Doctor Castano had said that in the scientific chamber of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Shanghai, the Frenchman Pasteur was working on a penicillin drug. The penicillin was said to be very effective against bacterial infections, but no way to produce it in large quantities had yet been developed, and Castano had spent £300 on a penicillin sample. But it's a pity that the trick is only enough for practical use, and the patent for penicillin was preemptively registered by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom early, and Castano bought samples just for research use.

Montauban and Grant rushed to the front as soon as they received the news, and the two allied commanders visited the wounded soldiers and the frightened soldiers who had fled back. At the Beitang Bridge, they listened to the reports of Collino and General Sutton.

"The tactics used by the Qing army are the same as the last time they fought at Dagukou. They hid their artillery in a position between the battery and the embankment, covered with Chinese straw mats and other camouflage, and judging by the density of this artillery attack, there were at least thirty or more 12-pounder guns on the Qing positions leading along the embankment to the Dagukou Fort. The commander-in-chief of the Qing army was a madman, and instead of concentrating heavy artillery on the batteries, he moved the artillery to the infantry positions, and it seems that they had prepared for our landing in Beitang! Damn the British, who believed the intelligence of the so-called Qing Dynasty, they should be hanged! General Collino was furious. The resentment of being ridiculed by the British Navy in the past few days was vented, but fortunately, there were French people all around. There were no reporters or pastors present.

General Montauban frowned, ordered the adjutant to open the map, although the reconnaissance team suffered heavy casualties, but they still found out the deployment of the Qing army, it seems that the Qing army has been prepared, the embankment road from Beitang to Dagukou was blocked, it seems that the navy's warships are needed to come to help in the battle, but this beach between Beitang and Dagukou is a large section of shallows, large warships can not approach, small warships are close and afraid of being bombarded by the Qing army's heavy artillery, it seems that the only way to let the allied artillery use a new rifled gun to destroy these artillery. If that doesn't work, the coalition forces will have to consider other routes.

At noon, Grant and his British generals arrived at the French camp, and the two sides held a combat meeting. At the meeting, the French accused the British of intelligence mistakes, and the British vigorously defended themselves, and the meeting quarreled endlessly, even turning over the case of the French shooting of Indian soldiers.

Montauban and Grant finally put a stop to this ungentlemanly behavior, and Grant first generously admitted that there was a mistake in intelligence, but he still firmly believed that this was not their internal behavior on purpose, and it may be that Neiying's actions were detected by the Qing Dynasty government and made some arrangements in advance. And Grant's words were confirmed by Wu Shili, the British intelligence staff officer, not long after the reconnaissance team returned, the Qing Dynasty sent someone to send an important piece of information, which detailed the deployment of the Qing army's adjustment, because the Qing Dynasty government suspected that there was an internal response, so the Qing army commander Seng Greenqin used fraudulent means at the beginning of the deployment, and now it has been ascertained that most of the artillery on the Dagu battery is fake, and most of the real artillery was concentrated in the flank position by Seng Greenqin, The way of the coalition forces was blocked from three directions, that is, there were positions of the Qing army in three directions in Beitang.

The intelligence also mentioned that after the landing of the coalition forces, the Qing army even dug up the Baihe River, diverted the river water to flood part of the road and a large area of land, and turned the road and most of the open land into mud ponds and swamps, behind these swamps and mud ponds were several lines of defense of the Qing army, and the Qing army concentrated nearly 80,000 infantry and 50,000 Tatar cavalry to guard the defense line, with the intention of trapping the coalition army in Beitang after the coalition army came ashore.

The reason for the late arrival of this information was due to the tight blockade of the Qing army, and there was a special request for the allied forces to speed up their actions, since the Qing government had already sensed that if the allied forces could not open the road to Tianjin for a long time, then the Qing government's internal affairs would be eradicated, and the allied forces would be isolated and helpless in the future, without the support of the opposition in the DPRK and China.

After listening to Wu Shili's information, the French began to complain that these Qing affairs should be too secretive, and the Qing government noticed it early on, resulting in an extremely difficult situation after the landing of the allied forces. The British, on the other hand, are optimistic, believing that despite the difficulties ahead. But the coalition forces can overcome it, and now that they know that the Dagukou Fort is now weak in artillery defense, they can let the fleet turn to attack the Dagukou Fort. Attack from the front.

The meeting was held in a quarrel, but in the end it was decided that some of the soldiers would reload the ship and besiege the Dagukou battery with the coalition fleet. General Montauban thinks the plan is too risky, but he doesn't have anything better to do it for the time being.

At the same time, the meeting also decided on the plan for Beitang's troops to dispatch sappers and artillery to cooperate with a small number of infantry to attack and advance to the Dagukou Fort, to build bridges and roads, to use rifled guns with a range of two kilometers to clarify the artillery firing points of the Qing army, and to cover the sappers and artillery. Although this method was somewhat slow, it was still necessary as a supplement to the fleet's plan to attack the Dagukou Battery. So the French army took on the land attack. The British fleet, on the other hand, was stronger and undertook the task of attacking the Dagukou fort from the sea.

In fact, after the last battle of Dagukou, the Qing army strengthened the defense of the Jintang area, and most of the heavy artillery of the Qing army was concentrated in the Jintang area. General Montauban remembers the Qing artillery vividly. During the Taiping Army's capture of Guangzhou, the Qing army installed 500 heavy artillery pieces along the Pearl River, such as Humen Fort and Shajiao Fort, of which 200 were heavy artillery guns, and the largest was 68-pounder coastal heavy artillery. The largest gun of the coalition fleet was also a 68-pounder gun. But at that time, the Qing army did not use these artillery well. Because the Taiping army adopted the combat method of sneaking up on the forts, the Qing army's artillery failed to play its role and fell.

Later, Montauban visited an exercise of the Taiping Army in Guangzhou, they used the Qing army's 8,000 pounds of iron model cannons, the range is the same as the 68 pound coalition naval guns, the range of the 6,000 pounds iron model cannon is far from the Portuguese coast heavy artillery, most of the rest of the artillery is the French 12-pound heavy Napoleon artillery, 4,000 pounds of cannon is an imitation of the 12-pound heavy Napoleon artillery, except for the newly cast 6,000 pounds. 8,000 catties, 10,000 catties of giant artillery and Portuguese extra-long coastal artillery. The firing range is within 4 miles.

It can be said that the artillery technology of the Qing army is actually not weaker than that of the coalition army, and the biggest advantage of the coalition army is that they have a faster rate of fire rear-loading rifled artillery, which is almost the same as the modern artillery structure.

The Qing army was repeatedly defeated by the Taiping army in the Jiangnan region, and the use of artillery was not scientific is a major reason, in addition, the coastal areas have convenient transportation, such as Guangzhou City, which concentrated a lot of heavy artillery defense but did not play a role, and the failure of the rest of the cities is that the artillery is scarce, like Yunnan, Guangxi and other places are using their own artillery, and the local self-cast artillery is not as good as the coastal and northern artillery, so in the later artillery battles, the Qing army has been suppressed by the Taiping army.

The bad luck did not leave the coalition forces, and the day after the plan was finalized, a sudden torrential rain and strong winds prevented the coalition forces from taking any action. The rain made all roads impassable, and all heavy military movements were blocked, and it took two days for the weather to improve.

In the past two days, the coalition soldiers have suffered enough, and the supply of drinking water has become a problem, and in Beitang, a place with a large palm, basic life is barely maintained. The British had plenty of food for the day, but the French could not. Seeing the French soldiers catching pigs and chickens everywhere in the streets and alleys and stinky ditches of Beitang City, the British soldiers were dumbfounded. The pigs were robbed, and the "poor Frenchman" had no choice but to go to the vicinity of the Beitang Fort, fighting to hunt dogs and cats to satisfy his hunger, and once again lost his ugliness under the noses of the British.

Lieutenant Colonel Wu Shili, an intelligence officer of the British army, also said that for a whole week, the dry rations brought by the French army were not enough to eat, and some of them had deteriorated. I saw them in groups, armed with shovels, woodcutters and sticks, going around to catch "dirty" big pigs and small pigs. For several days, from morning to night, there was a constant sound of pigs being slaughtered. And the few roosters and hens also disappeared quickly. Many French soldiers even rushed into the British camp, put their hands in their pockets, and looked around, and found an old sow, which immediately rushed up and quickly grabbed her.

It was in this maddening situation that the French army began to fight on land, and the day after the weather improved, General Collino led a French army of more than 1,000 men to start the offensive along the river embankment again. In the face of adversity, the French soldiers burst out with tenacity and indomitable fighting spirit, and the sappers opened a new path for the follow-up troops despite the dirty bridge-building and paving, and behind them were artillery and infantry, the artillery was shifting positions almost all the time, shelling suspicious targets in front, General Collino ordered two battalions of artillery to alternately cover the advance, and along the way they destroyed a target that could be done.

The French infantry repeatedly repelled cavalry harassment, and the muddy roads also caused problems for the Qing cavalry's own cavalry, and the Tatar cavalry failed to take advantage of the speed advantage of the cavalry, so they were quickly routed. To the satisfaction of the French infantry, the range of their rifles was much higher than that of the Qing infantry, and the Qing army's muskets could hardly hurt them, and the few rifles that were carried were quickly suppressed by the rifled muskets of the French infantry.

The French army broke out with an astonishing speed of advance, advancing two kilometers on the first day, and it was less than ten kilometers away from the Dagukou Fort, perhaps the French soldiers wanted to leave this damn Beitang City earlier. (To be continued......)