Early the next morning, the army of the traversers, who had rested all night, assembled again, and with the joy and anticipation of the whole city, they marched out of the city of Gloucester and prepared to go to the fortress of Barton Hill in the northeast of the city, to give a message to Romulus, the last Western Roman emperor who was trapped there? Augustus relieved.

In addition to them, Princess Theophanus also tried her best to recruit strong men from the city, and gathered a small army of eighty men to accompany her.

Due to the lack of a sufficient number of means of transportation and the poor road conditions, Wang Qiu did not let the soldiers advance in trucks or vans, but ordered them to rush to the battlefield on foot with heavy loads - it was also a practical test of long-distance training in the field.

Of course, just in case, mainly to guard against a possible ambush by the Anglobarians, Wang Qiu released the drone early and preliminarily determined the enemy's movements. It was also arranged for some people to accompany them in off-road vehicles equipped with machine guns, in case the soldiers encountered a battle when they ran out of strength during the long march. And Wang Qiu himself naturally did not share the joys and sorrows, but sat comfortably in the passenger seat of an off-road vehicle.

Judging from the footage taken by this drone, the Anglobarians seem to have been completely frightened, and have already fled from the city of Gloucester far away, and several abandoned camps are all messy and empty, and the fortress on Barton Hill still flies the Roman eagle flag.

Next, almost as soon as this mercenary army walked out of Gloucester City, they could fully feel the loneliness and desolation of this shijie.

-- About twenty kilometres from Gloucester to Barton Hill, only a small piece of arable land near the outskirts of the city is located. There are a few farmsteads scattered here and there. For the rest of the journey, there were hardly any people, except for the occasional sight of birds and beasts. Even if you see a few trails once in a while, they are usually already submerged in the weedy jungle and difficult to distinguish.

As far as the eye can see, there is a vast expanse between the vast heaven and earth, the vast fields are overgrown with wild grass, and the forests and grasslands are all uninhabited. It can be seen that Britain at this time was really sparsely populated and not widely cultivated. Wilderness is everywhere...... It seems to fit the ideal beauty of those environmentalists.

But in the eyes of Wang Qiu, a black-hearted colonist, it was an extremely sad scene - obviously there are so many natural resources, but there is not enough population to exploit them! This is simply a living life, "ask how sad you can be." It's like a group of eunuchs going up to the Qinglou, "Ah!

Of course, for colonial development, there are benefits of being densely populated, and there are benefits of being sparsely populated. Britain is a sparsely populated place. This means that it is difficult for the enemy to assemble a huge force with absolute superiority. Use crowd tactics to overwhelm the advanced armies of the traversers.

- If there are more enemies than your bullets, it will be difficult to achieve a miraculous conquest of a large land by a small expedition.

Moreover, judging from the backward metallurgical jishu of this era, even if the local vassal army recruited by the time-traveler (in principle, only equipped with cold weapons) went to war with other shili, it was enough to take advantage of the battle by virtue of their absolute superiority in weapons.

On the way to Barton Mountain, Wang Qiu had been playing with a Romanesque dagger that had been captured yesterday, and was deeply surprised by the poor workmanship and low hardness of this weapon. He had heard that ancient Roman soldiers fought with iron swords made of wrought iron. As a result, when fighting, you will bend as soon as you stab, and you have to step straight with your feet and stab again. At first, he didn't believe it very much, but now that he looked at the Roman short sword in his hand that could be broken, Wang Qiu finally had to believe it.

- According to the experiments he did with his own hands, this short sword can be cut with a small axe with a single blow! It's easier than cutting down a tree!

No way, the ancient Romans did not have a good grasp of blowers, furnaces, quenching, and coal iron smelting, and although they built large-scale iron-smelting workshops that could produce tons of iron nails and rings, the quality of steel weapons was really poor.

Thanks to the great martial arts of the Roman legions, the ancient Roman short sword was called the "sword of conquest", but despite such a resounding name, in fact, its quality is very poor by modern standards. First of all, the blade of the sword is unquenched, so it is very soft, and it is generally only thirty or forty centimeters long - if the blade is too long, it will easily break or bend, and it will not be effective to stab.

Moreover, because the material of the ancient Roman short sword was not hard enough, the blade could not be sharpened, resulting in the Roman short sword basically only being used for stabbing, like the scene in the movie where the head of the enemy is cut off with a sword, which is almost impossible. When the Roman senators collectively assassinated Caesar, the reason why Caesar did not die for a while after dozens of swords was because of the lack of power of the Roman short sword.

In order to improve the hardness of weapons, the ancients often used quenching, that is, heat treatment of iron tools. However, after quenching, although the weapon will become hard, it will also become brittle, and it can be easily broken during a fight. The ancient Romans quenched steel knives and chisels were almost as brittle as glass, and could only be used by craftsmen in workshops, and could not be used on the battlefield.

This is also the reason why the Romans "preferred" short swords: some people say that they hold a shield in one hand, so the sword cannot be too long, but in fact this is not the reason at all - the sword body is only thirty or forty centimeters, even if it is not easy to hold a shield, and it is very dangerous to assassinate only in hand-to-hand combat. Because the iron is so soft, if it is a little longer, it is easier to bend and become that kind of movie prop. So the Romans had to use short swords - the shorter they were, the less likely they were to bend.

But the Chinese found a solution to this problem in the Warring States period, that is, local quenching - specifically, the blade and tip of the sword, while the sword body is not quenched, so that it is sharp and sharp enough, but at the same time does not destroy the toughness of the sword body. It's a pity that the Europeans have not been able to find such a trick......

What's even more terrifying is that the steel weapons of medieval Europeans were all forged by hand, and they could not be cast in large quantities!

In the late Spring and Autumn period, they learned to cast iron dings, and it is difficult for Chinese who have already cast iron swords in large numbers during the Warring States period to imagine that it was not until the sixteenth century, two hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance, that they learned to make iron in blast furnaces, and cast a large number of iron tools at one time by pouring hot molten iron into a fan (model). From the ancient Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, Europeans have never seen bright and beautiful molten iron.

Prior to this, the European method of iron-making was to burn iron ore and charcoal together in an iron-making furnace to produce a metal mass mixed with wrought iron and slag, which would be made into the shape of a long rod and sold to a blacksmith, who would patiently hammer it to remove the slag and then slowly hammer it into various iron tools and steel swords...... This method of removing slag depends entirely on the craftsmanship of the blacksmith. It's a pity that in the medieval dark ages when civilization collapsed and Jishu degenerated, there were so many rookie blacksmiths of all kinds that many steel swords, battle axes and armor were actually mixed with a lot of uncleaned slag, which could crack with a stick.

Although the entire Eurasian continent is in the Iron Age, the iron tools of Europe and the iron tools of China may not be said to be the same thing at all.

In short, after actually testing the weapons of the Anglos and Celts, Wang Qiu became even more contemptuous of the various enemies of this era.

-- The conquest of Britain was a very easy task from the very beginning, and the problem was how to ensure that after the war it would be able to return to its roots......

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After a long day of trekking, they finally got rid of the untouched wilderness scenery and saw the outline of the village again.

But this does not mean that they are coming to "civilized shijie" again, but it means that a bloody purgatory is about to unfold in front of them.

This is Barton Hill, the last emperor of Western Rome, Romulus? The edge of the range of Augustus bixiashili, and the bridgehead from which the remnants of Rome, after the collapse of the empire, launched another counterattack on the long-lost eastern province of Britain. In the past, several farmsteads and ranches have been carved out here, and it has a population of more than 1,000 people...... Unfortunately, all of this has long since come to naught......

-- Although the smell of burnt and blood in the air irritated everyone's nose from a long distance, and the silence around the village except for the silence of the woods and the gurgling water, it was by no means a good sign.

Then, skirting a sparse grove and across a trampled field, a number of farmhouses come into view.

On the island of Great Britain, which has been plagued by many years of war, the village is actually quite well defended, with an inner wall made of stones around the village and an outer wall made of thick wooden stakes. Beyond the two walls, there was a ditch filled with water, even in the usual barracks. However, due to the flat terrain and the lack of danger to defend, the village was eventually breached by the barbarians after fierce resistance.

At this time, except for the vultures hovering in the sky, there was almost a dead silence here, and even the barking of dogs could not be heard. The narrow road between the cottages was littered with corpses, mostly peasants dressed in linen, but also Roman soldiers in red uniforms, and Princess Theophanus recognized the emperor's captain, a warrior who claimed to be able to kill wild boars with his bare hands. A few days ago he had triumphantly carried his prey to show off his martial arts to the princess, but now he met again in such a sad way.

Not far behind the body of the captain of the guard, a young girl was lying at the door of the farmhouse with wide eyes, and the princess recognized it as the captain's lover. Her skirt was torn, and the blood that had long since congealed mixed with the dust, forming a strange pattern under her body...... This made the princess feel a pain in her heart, but in the end she had to sigh, and stooped down to close the girl's dead eyes. (To be continued......)