The drums of war were loud and the artillery was roaring.

With their backs to defensive bunkers such as breastworks, the soldiers of the newly established Polish Standing Army clung to their weapons, or drew crosses and prayers on their chests, or whispered words they did not know......

The First Regiment of the Standing Army, which was stationed on the border to defend against the Taiping Army's attack, was formed by the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom with infantry from the old army, city guards with combat experience, veteran mercenaries, veteran militiamen who had participated in wars, and a large number of mountain hunters.

It can be said that in addition to the elite of the Polish hussars, the source of this first legion is definitely the best in the current Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, and the elite of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom that has been defeated repeatedly has been lost, and even the original number of veterans is stretched, and the first corps that can form tens of thousands of people can be regarded as the result of the bankruptcy of the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom.

Not only was the shared treasury emptied, but also a large amount of donations from the nobility, and the First Legion was formed and equipped with sufficient weapons.

It's just that the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania is not Hong Tiancheng, and the heavily armed soldiers directly raised from the system, tens of thousands of muskets, not to mention the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, which has lost more than half of its territory, no country can create so many weapons in less than a year.

Therefore, the soldiers of the First Legion can be described as a variety of armor and weapons, the best weapons are the flintlock smoothbore rifles modified from arquebuses, and many soldiers also use crossbows and bows, which is one of the reasons why there are a large number of mountain hunters in the First Legion.

The recruited mountain hunters basically have several years of experience in using bows and arrows, and they are enlisted with weapons, which can directly provide a large number of long-range archers with initial combat effectiveness for the First Legion, and with a little discipline training, they can be pulled into the battlefield.

Of course, this is by the standards of soldiers in feudal times.

In modern warfare, when muskets and artillery are gradually dominating the battlefield, it is still unknown how well these courageous mountain hunters can perform.

The First Army of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania had only just completed the integration of its formation, and its training time was very short, and most of the soldiers were only proficient in the use of weapons, and the queue was still at the point where they had just distinguished between the left and right feet......

Fortunately, relying on the offensive to fight a defensive war, this first legion still looks competent.

At least, before the Taiping Army, most of the aristocratic magnates in the Sulm Council of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania thought so.

"Wait for the enemy to enter the firing range before listening to the order to shoot, without an order, you are not allowed to shoot in advance! Crossbowmen need to wait until the enemy is within 100 paces before shooting, the effective range of the bow is shorter than that of the musket, so don't let Lao Tzu see the soldiers with the bow and crossbow attacking with the musketeers! ”

Junior officers, who were held by knights and other minor nobles, shouted their final reminders as they walked past the group of soldiers.

Later generations have always believed that the range of bows and arrows is greater than that of muskets, and this idea is theoretically correct, as long as the pull force is hard enough, the effective range of bows and arrows will naturally be greatly increased, just like the English longbow.

However, not all soldiers can use a hard bow!

A soldier with insufficient arm strength could not pull a hard bow at all, and even if some strong man with outstanding arm strength could pull out a hard bow, it was still a question of how much strength he had left to control the string to shoot arrows......

Of course, there is no shortage of talented warriors who have been trained for a long time to use the hard bow without barriers, but how many such people can there be?

A few or even dozens of long-range hard bows, on the battlefield with thousands of people at every turn, are just a drizzle, and this is not counting the defensive power of the armor!

Individual crossbows that can be used by ordinary soldiers, some of them have a range of only 100 paces, and this is still in the case of bow and arrow throwing, and the distance is even lower if you shoot directly!

The crossbow can provide a stronger pulling force through mechanical force to increase the effective range, but the crossbow with complex mechanical force is not as frequent as a musket, and it also requires manpower to step on and stretch, so it is better to simply use a musket.

Therefore, the only cost-effective ones are the individual crossbow and the ordinary rifle, but these two weapons are completely incomparable in range and armor-piercing ability compared to flintlock pistols, coupled with the superiority of simple musket training, the bow and crossbow weapons are naturally eliminated.

As for the longbow and hard bow with an advantage in range, the requirements for the human body are too high, and the training cost is increased geometrically, with the development of firearms, soldiers have become war consumables, and they have worked hard and spent a long time to train a group of elites who can pull hard bows.

On the other hand, the musketeers can go to the battlefield in a month, and the two sides are really incomparable.

The ruling group of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania naturally knew this truth, but they had lost too many battles, and all the weapons had become trophies of the Taiping army, and there was not enough money to rebuild them, not to mention that time did not allow it, so they could only pull out decades or even hundreds of years of collectibles from the inventory and replace the missing muskets with bows and crossbows.

Fortunately, the production of crossbows is not complicated, and when firearms were not popular, crossbows were produced in large quantities because of their simple training, large stocks, and sufficient quantities.

Since the Taiping army used captured old-fashioned artillery, and the gunners who used the artillery were similar to the level of the Manchu army, in fact, the Qing army in the 19th century was not much different from the European army in the 17th century.

Therefore, the combat effectiveness of the Qing army lagged behind that of the West for a full 200 years, but at that time, the Qing army did not lag much behind in terms of weapons due to the purchase of a large number of advanced firearms, and the Manchu army was not defeated in weapons in the two opium wars, but mainly due to human factors.

Soldiers are afraid of death, the upper echelons are corrupt, and no matter how good the weapons a country has, it is just a courier material.

Due to the backwardness of the artillery and the amateurism of the gunners, when the slender red line of the Taiping Army appeared in the field of vision of the soldiers of the Polish First Army, the sound of artillery gradually stopped, and later generations lined up to shoot the common infantry forward artillery in the movie, which was not possible for the Taiping Army, mainly because the artillery accuracy of this era was too poor, the probability of accidental injury was too great, and the artillery would stop shelling when the infantry attacked.

After the sound of the artillery stopped, the Polish soldiers rose from their defensive bunkers at the shouts of the officers, and the wooden stakes piled up haphazardly in front of the bunkers did not hinder the advance of the infantry of the Taiping line, which were more used to organize cavalry assaults and hinder the charge of infantry groups, and were of little use to the troops marching in formation.

The Taiping Army, to the beat of the drums, gradually approached within 100 meters of effective firing range, when scattered musket fire rang out from behind the bunker of the Polish First Army.

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