War is a very interesting and cruel game, and he wins and loses at the cost of countless lives. Since it is a game, it will always be played by two people, and no one will stop until the last moment to admit defeat, even if the Chinese side has a great advantage in the situation now, but this does not mean that the Russians are willing to give up the fruits of victory.

As General Kizerosky said, the Russians still have a chance, as long as their 500,000 troops can reach Kulen, as long as Akmiril can guarantee the stability of Kulen, they will not lose at least.

On December 27, 1907, four days before the Grand Ceremony of the Republic, the Eighth Division of the First Army, the vanguard of the Fourth Front, captured Burhastai, south of Kulen, and the more than 200 Russian troops defending it were crushed at the touch of a button, as if the battle had never happened at all.

Qu Tongfeng and the soldiers of the Eighth Division were busy arranging fortifications here, and his task was to build a strong position in this place, so that when Zhang Zuolin's large army arrived at Kulen, he could have a base point to settle down and make a simple supplement.

When he came, Zaitao had already told him that the Russians would definitely launch a counterattack, but it didn't matter, first of all, Stersall's large army had been routed by the Fourth Front, and now it was resting, and it would definitely not be able to enter the battle for a while. And Akberlil's army not only wants to maintain the stability of Kulun, but also encircles and suppresses Wu Peifu, and there are not many people to draw.

Lao Maozi has 10,000 people at most, or 20,000 people.

Qu Tongfeng doesn't need to hold on here for too long, two days at most. The First Front is definitely here. At that time, Qu Tongfeng's Eighth Division would be drawn out of the operational sequence of the Fourth Front Army and assigned to the First Front Army.

Qu Tongfeng himself thinks that there is no problem, after nearly a year of fighting, his team is already very different from before, the elite firepower of the soldiers is fierce, not to mention that the Russians come to 20,000, even 30,000, he is sure to hold it for two days!

Sure enough, Akberil reacted immediately after seeing the Chinese troops enter Kulen, this is the bottom line of the Russians, and he is unwilling to let the Chinese troops take root here.

The Russian army took advantage of Qu Tongfeng's arrival. When the position is not yet fully built, he does not hesitate to launch a counterattack. The result was a fiasco. Qu Tongfeng fought well, he guessed that the Russians would come, so he pulled the troops to the front and arranged an ambush circle, and more than 10,000 Russian troops were hit by surprise. He was beaten hard by the Eighth Division. Returned to the starting position.

But the tide of the battle changed unexpectedly in the future. When Qu Tongfeng routed the Russian force and prepared to return to Burhastai, he found that a Russian cavalry had cut off their retreat.

Cossack cavalry divisions!

The Cossack cavalry of Lao Maozi was also one of their trump cards, only this trump card was from the beginning of the war to the present. Fate is a bit sad. On the battlefield of Beijing, the Cossack cavalry had no chance to show their bravery in the face of the ferocious firepower of the Chinese position, and the same was true in the battle against Wu Peifu, who was defeated by the two-pole tank unit in several encounters.

They could never find a way to fight that suited them, so that they would be transferred to Beijing and Mongolia, constantly playing a supporting role for various group armies.

Now their chance has finally arrived!

Major General Mardinov calculated the defensive strategy that the Chinese might adopt, and also guessed that Qu Tongfeng might replace defense with offense at the beginning of the battle. So he used an army of Russian troops to attract at the front, waited until the guns were fired there, and then adopted a preemptive strategy, outflanking the Cossack cavalry with four-legged speed before the Chinese troops returned.

The two sides met on a steppe, a terrain that was clearly carefully selected by Martinov, and it was flat all around, and there were no obstacles to stop the cavalry from attacking!

Later, many Western scholars believed that the Chinese forces made a very serious mistake in this battle, that is, they fought an inappropriate battle in an inappropriate place.

But for Qu Tongfeng, this battle is really incomprehensible.

Qu Tongfeng regretted his carelessness to death, but there was basically no possibility for the enemy's cavalry troops to escape. So he hurriedly formed a battle formation and began to fight.

Other Russian troops also arrived one after another, and soon formed an encirclement of the 8th Division, and the whistling shells caused great casualties to the Chinese troops who had not covered their positions. Then, the Russian Cossack cavalry, relying on their absolute superiority in numbers and speed, launched a fierce attack on the 8th Division.

The battle made a great impression on Major General Martinov. He knew that the Eighth Division could only be regarded as a quasi-first-class unit in China, and before the battle began, he saw Qu Tongfeng fall into his trap, and he thought that maybe just one charge could solve these Chinese, but the battle lasted a whole day!

The will of those Chinese to fight was tenacious to the extreme, they were fearless in the face of the charge of the Russian cavalry, and some of the Chinese troops in the battle obviously looked like they had all fallen, but as long as the Russians charged again, there were always those lying down among them who stood up and continued to fight.

In the evening, the Russians had formed a tight encirclement of the 8th Division, and Major General Mardinov believed that there was no hope for the Chinese troops, so he handed Qu Tongfeng an ultimatum to the Russian side, limiting the 8th Division to lay down all arms and surrender within half an hour.

At this time, Qu Tongfeng negotiated his terms with the Russians, and the Chinese troops agreed to surrender partially, and asked the Russian side to treat the Chinese surrendered soldiers in accordance with international practice as prisoners of war.

Martinov was quite stunned by the Chinese resolution, and he thought that there might be a disagreement within the Chinese army about whether to stick to the fight. I agreed immediately.

What shocked the major general was that the so-called willing Chinese soldiers sent to him by Qu Tongfeng immediately were all seriously wounded! And apparently the Chinese general did not seek the consent of the soldiers when he made this decision. Many of the seriously wounded chose to shoot themselves when they saw their comrades handing themselves over to the Russians.

That scene moved even the Cossack cavalry, known for their bloodthirsty brutality.

Qu Tongfeng put people in front of the Russians' positions. Then he gave a military salute to Major General Martinov: "Please give them the best treatment according to the treatment of prisoners of war, and as for us, goodbye on the battlefield." ”

In the evening, the 8th Division discarded all its baggage, and Qu Tongfeng took his starting unit in the 8th Division, the 94th Regiment, as the vanguard, and wanted to take advantage of the night to make a gap in the Russian encirclement, but Mardinov had already prepared for his intention, and as soon as the 94th Regiment made a move, the Russians immediately reacted and surrounded it from all sides.

A raging fire burned the entire grassland. In the bloody storm, the corpses killed by both sides were all over the field.

After all, the 94th Regiment was not able to break out of the encirclement of the Russians. After breaking through five lines of defense in a row, only thirty-eight people remained in the entire regiment, and there was no longer the ability to break through. The Cossack cavalry at this time entered the positions of the Chinese troops, and this night they finally found an opportunity to show themselves.

The next morning. When the sun rose, the Russians began to clean up the battlefield. And the results are counted. In addition to more than 100 people in the Eighth Division, Qu Tongfeng was sent to surrender. There were less than thirty Chinese soldiers still alive on the battlefield.

At the height of last night's fighting, Major General Martinov saw Qu Tongfeng's body. The Chinese general holds a Chinese submachine gun in his hand and his eyes are still looking ahead. His uniform was stained with blood. The steel helmet on his head was chopped off, and half of his head was a blur of flesh and blood.

Martinov's heart was a little sad, war is like this, although he didn't spare his hand at all, but there was always a little melancholy after the fight. The performance of these Chinese shocked the major generals, from Jin Yunpeng to Qu Tongfeng, what happened to these Beiyang generals?

Martinov could not find an answer. If he could, he wanted to return Qu Tongfeng's body to the Chinese side as he did with Jin Yunpeng at the beginning. But not anymore, even if he didn't want to insult a general who had died in battle.

"Major General, can I take a picture?"

The Russian reporter, who had been waiting on the side, was obviously a little impatient, and Mardinov nodded lightly: "It's okay." ”

With that, he turned his head and walked somewhere else. I heard the Russian reporter behind me shouting: "Hey, you, yes, it's you!" The one with the knife, you stand in front of the person's head. Oh no, your knife can't be so clean, it has to be a little bloody. ”

"Poof."

There was a sharp sound of a blade coming into the body, and then a guy said, "Is this okay?" ”

"Okay, stand still."

The Russians won. This was the first time since Yang Xiaolin's reorganized Chinese troops that they completely annihilated a Chinese reorganized division! The news was quickly sent to newspapers in St. Petersburg and Beijing, as well as to various countries around the world. At this time, such news not only shocked Western countries, but also made the Russians feel ecstatic.

After the victory in this battle, the Russian top brass actually had a rather unrealistic idea, they believed that as long as the Russians had enough war materials, they could quickly crush the Chinese troops with a powerful counter-assault, so as to turn the whole situation of the war.

Among them, the tsar and his uncle Nikolayevich were the most enthusiastic. Nikolayevich even questioned the previously developed defensive strategy at a high-level military meeting in Russia: "From this battle we can see that our troops have the ability to cut through the Chinese defense!" We can't do it in Beijing just because we can't supply war materiel, but in Kulen these problems will no longer exist! We believe that our army has reached a turning point! ”

According to the Tsar's idea, it was to let Akberil attack from Kulen, and at the same time supply them with combat supplies as quickly as possible, first crush the Chinese First Front Army that had been forcibly marching for a long time, and knock out the fists of the Chinese attacking them.

Then when the supplies arrived, hundreds of thousands of Russian troops in Mongolia attacked together, so that the military forces of those Mongols also cooperated in the battle, and swept Yang Dagui out of Mongolia with twice the strength of the Chinese troops! At the very least, drive them back to Daqingshan.

However, before the tsar could pass this resolution to the Russian military troops, news came from the battlefield that Wu Peifu had blown up the only railway track leading to Kulen, and the supply channel for the Russian troops in Mongolia was completely cut off. (To be continued......)