Chapter 10 Jungle Guerrillas vs Cobra Special Forces

As mentioned last time, Meng Shu used elephant soldiers in front to attack Liu Hou's landing troops, but Liu Hou reacted in time, and the loud sound of muskets and thunderbolts disturbed the elephants, and the elephants scurried wildly and scattered the brutes.

Seeing the collapse of the barbarians, Liu Hou was not polite, and ordered the musketeers to mount their bayonets to pursue. Unfortunately, the pursuit did not go far before the brutes were found to have fled into the woods. Guan Xing, who led the troops, was more cautious, seeing that the front was full of woods and no road, he did not dare to chase again, and collected his troops and came back to Liu Hou.

"Feng Lin Mo enters" This is originally one of the ancient military common sense, and Liu Hou is not easy to blame Guan Xing. Therefore, Liu Hou asked Guan Xing to lead his troops to strengthen the vigilance and protect the other troops from crossing the river.

It was not so easy for 100,000 people and countless materials to cross the river, and the entire river crossing time took three days, during which there were several incidents of falling into the water and damage to the pontoon bridge, which made Liu Hou feel that his head was big, but fortunately, Fei Yi and Guo Youzhi helped organize and deal with it, so that Liu Hou was not tired.

Counting logging, building pontoon bridges, and crossing rivers, the Shu army was delayed in Lushui for 10 days, which made Liu Hou feel very aggrieved and often shouted that life was too short. He is extremely dissatisfied with the fact that he wasted his life here, just a river, he wasted 10 days on himself, the whole world is so big, if he wants to recover it one by one, how many years will it take to be enough? Can you still unify the world in your lifetime?

In addition to arranging the necessary vigilance forces and scouts to explore the way, he also asked the people who had crossed the river in the early stage to hunt, fish, and pick wild vegetables, wild fruits, and mushrooms. Anyone will get bored of eating military rations all day long, so it's a good time to improve their lives.

Finally, all the people crossed the river, and Liu Hou gave an order, and the large army started again and continued to drive towards Qike County. From here, you enter the wooded area, and the road becomes very difficult to walk, with forest paths on both sides, with lush vegetation on both sides, interspersed with a narrow and winding path.

The road was so narrow that sometimes the gun trucks could not pass through Guò, and at this time, the team in charge of opening the road used their axes to cut down the vegetation on both sides of the road a little, so that a path wide enough for the army to pass through.

This kind of primeval forest-like environment made Liu Hou feel very novel, and he would not have many opportunities to enter the primeval forest in later generations. There is only one time in my memory, that is, when I was traveling in Siguniang Mountain, Sichuan, I entered one of the ditches, which was a muddy, crooked, and narrow forest path like now. The big trees on both sides were lined with vines, and the most surprising thing was that many of the big trees had a lot of fat moss growing on them, and from a distance they looked like squirrels lying on the trees.

The pioneer is still Gao Ding and his old and weak remnants of only 25,000 left. As they moved deeper into the forest, the troops were constantly attacked. There are various ways to attack, including cold arrows and blow arrows from the forest, various traps laid on the road, swarms of poisonous snakes, poisonous insects, and so on.

At first, only the forward troops of Gaoding were attacked, and later, the main forces that followed behind were also attacked. Liu Hou couldn't bear it anymore, and sent an elite squad to sweep back and forth in the forests on both sides, and started a guerrilla war with the barbarian army.

Liu Hou's troops were usually trained in jungle warfare, but unfortunately the newly recruited soldiers did not have enough time for training, and they were not of great use at this time. But those veterans who returned from Jingzhou have been training for several years, and their combat level in the jungle is not much worse than that of the barbarians.

In the jungle, it was not suitable to use muskets with long barrels, loud noises, and smoke, so Liu Hou equipped each of them with a crossbow machine that Ma Jun improved from Zhuge crossbow, and Liu Hou named it a horse crossbow back then.

So, the jungle battle finally began, only to see green ghosts roaming on both sides of the army, shooting crossbow arrows from time to time, and the barbarians in the distance fell to the ground in response.

The Hong Army's green uniforms are a great way to do it in jungle combat, and these veterans are all trained to tear off some weeds and weave them into grass rings and put them on their heads, so that they can really find them from a distance as long as they drill into the grass.

And the brute soldiers have no concept of protective color at all, they like to dress in fancy clothes, and even many people like to put a few pheasant feathers on their heads, and the coquettish appearance is simply for fear that others will not know their position, and deliberately want to mark it with eye-catching colors.

In addition, there is a big gap between the weapons of the two sides, most of the barbarians use bows and arrows, although their shooting speed is faster than that of ordinary soldiers, but no matter how fast it is, it is not as fast as the crossbow in the hands of the Shu army, which can fire 50 rounds of repeating crossbows. In this era, it was a machine gun, it was an automatic rifle.

As soon as the brute reveals the target, he will attract a dozen or even dozens of crossbow arrows, and their only fate is to turn into porcupines. Even if both sides find each other at the same time, the result is the same, in the jungle, the arrows shot are easily blocked by various plants, but one arrow is easy to block, and a dozen arrows will always hit the target.

So it can often be seen: a brute soldier and a Shu soldier are cautiously exploring and advancing, and suddenly, they spot each other in the distance at the same time, so they fire arrows at the same time. However, the arrow shot by the barbarian soldier was blocked by a tree vine in front of the Shu soldiers, and the direction flew a little off, and it did not hit the Shu soldiers.

As soon as the Shu soldiers raised their hands, they shot more than a dozen crossbow arrows in a row, some of these crossbow arrows were blocked by vines, some were deflected by weeds, and some were nailed to tree trunks, but there were still a few that could successfully drill through the gaps of various plants and hit the brute, and the barbarians screamed miserably, and fell to the ground, and in just a few seconds, the battle was over.

The Shu soldiers immediately found a hidden place, filled up the consumed crossbow arrows, reinstalled the mechanism, and made the crossbow arrows in a state that could be activated at any time, and then began to carefully search the surrounding places......

There are also times when a Shu soldier is lying motionless in the bushes covered in grass, and from a distance it looks like it was originally a clump of weeds. Half an hour passed, a snake passed in front of him, and he didn't move, and after an hour passed, a spider crawled on his head, and he didn't move, and an hour and a half passed, and the centipede came, and he still didn't move.

In the end, there was a brute soldier sneakily walked past him, and he didn't even find the Shu soldiers who were close at hand, until the barbarians walked past the Shu soldiers, and the Shu soldiers suddenly made a difficulty, jumped up, and cut down from the back of the barbarians......

Such sneak attacks and counter-sneak attacks in the jungle, guerrilla and counter-guerrilla dramas were staged until five days later, when the Shu army finally walked out of this forest. Liu Hou was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief, not only him, but the entire team had tensed their nerves in the past five days, and they didn't dare to relax for a moment, always vigilant against sneak attacks from all directions, and anyone with such a high level of nervous tension would not be comfortable for 5 days.

Liu Hou ordered to rest for a day before continuing to walk, otherwise if he continued like this, everyone would have to go crazy. Counting the number of casualties, it turned out that there were 2,000 casualties, most of whom were killed by the sneak attack of the brutes in the jungle, among which the Gaoding vanguard army suffered the heaviest losses, and more than 1,000 people were injured by their team.

The team behind also suffered hundreds of casualties, and two or three hundred were veterans who entered the jungle on both sides and carried out anti-sneak attacks with brute soldiers, Liu Hou called them the temporary Cobra special forces.

These are the elite of the army, and they are also the robes that followed Liu Hou to death in life, and the loss of these two or three hundred veterans was more painful for Liu Hou than the loss of two thousand in other troops. Liu Hou packed up his sadness and ordered them to be sparked, intending to bring their ashes back to Chengdu for burial.

Liu Hou felt that he had suffered a big loss in this jungle operation, and since entering the Nanzhong region, his troops had never suffered such a big loss. It can be said that the losses of all the previous battles combined are not as many as this one.

Although it is said that under the strong counterattack of Liu Hou's temporary Cobra special forces, the losses of the brutes are even greater, but who cares about their losses? Liu Hou could only feel sorry for the loss of his own personnel, especially the veterans, and every one of these people made him feel very uncomfortable.

After walking through this forest, the road is much better, and it is said that it is easy to walk, but in fact it is only a dirt road that can only accommodate one carriage, or a dirt road with potholes. Although the road is still not easy to walk, there are fewer sneak attacks from the jungles on both sides, and there are fewer dangers that will appear at any time, which still makes the Shu army feel a lot easier, and the marching speed is also much faster.

From now on, the Shu army entered the siege mode. Along the way, the Shu army encountered many stockades, some of which were specially set up by Meng Shu relying on the terrain or topography, just to block and delay the Shu army.

Some of the villages are originally stored, that is, the local barbarian tribes are located, every time they encounter this kind of village, the barbarians are almost all soldiers, even the 60-year-old woman with a bamboo pole dares to charge, and the five-year-old child holds a small firewood knife I don't know when it will come out from the unknown, and it is a mess against people.

No matter how strong the wall, how steep the terrain, as long as the cannon is sacrificed, a random bombardment, or a hot air balloon is summoned, and an air attack is dropped from the sky, nothing will not be captured.

If it is a cold weapon unit, it often takes ten days and half a month to attack such a stockade, and if the countless stockades in this area are knocked down one by one, it is not known that it will be fought until the Year of the Monkey. However, when encountering Liu Hou's firearms troops, basically every stockade could be taken on the same day, so the stockades encountered on the way of the large army could hardly cause any delay to the Shu army.

Siege is not a problem, but for the barbarians, the Shu army feels a headache. Kill, in the face of a group of old and weak women and children, I can't bear it, I can't do it, don't kill it, they seem to be weak, and they don't know when they will suddenly jump out and give you a fatal blow.

Later, Guo Youzhi came up with an idea, that is, to use power first, and then lure it to benefit. This method was a bit bloody at first, but later it became much easier, and here's how it works:

First slaughter all the men and women of a fiercely resisting stockade, men, women, and children, and then cut off their heads, pickled them in lime and used as props. Of course, the grain must be snatched up, and the livestock will also be snatched up to be used as military rations.

After going to the next stockade, these heads are built into a pyramid in front of the stockade, which has a proper noun called "Jingguan". Then, the Shu army began to conduct military exercises in front of the village, performing thunderbolts to blow up stones, as well as hot air balloon air strikes to blow up the gate of the village.

Usually at this time, everyone in the village will be scared to pee their pants, and most people will kneel on the ground to worship the hot air balloon. At this time, send envoys who know the local dialect to persuade them to surrender, these envoys are usually the barbarians who were captured before, they are all locals, they know the roots of the barbarians, and some of them are even from the village at all.

And these captives have been following the Shu army for a period of time, and have seen the thunderous methods of the Shu army, and have been subdued by the Shu army, so there is no problem in terms of loyalty.

After these barbarian envoys entered the stockade, they usually described the Shu army as a heavenly soldier who had mastered the thunder and lightning, saying that if he did not obey the will of His Royal Highness the Prince, he would be blown to pieces by the divine thunder, and swore that he had seen with his own eyes who else in Yonghong was smashed by the divine thunder.

Then persuaded the owner and elders of the village to surrender, saying that because the village refused to surrender, it hindered the prince from quelling the chaos, and was killed without leaving a chicken and dog, and the landscape outside the village was the head of the whole village. Usually when it comes to this, everyone present will be pale with fright.

There was no benefit to them in luring them to profit, Liu Hou only promised not to pursue them for sending troops to help Meng Huo and Yonghong rebel, and verbally promised to pardon their sins. At the same time, he also promised that he would open up trading with them in the future, and there would be no restrictions on controlled items such as salt and iron. Although this is contrary to the policy of the imperial court, it is a blank check anyway.

I didn't expect the effect to be surprisingly good, and since then, the Shu army has made most of the stockades surrender and submit without abandoning a single soldier, and only a few of the leaders of the stockades have a brain twitch and refuse to surrender. Of course, Liu Hou would not be polite to them, and ordered these villages to be razed to the ground, and the heads of the whole village became new props, so the Jingguan piled up in front of the next village would be much higher.

The good thing about this method is that not only does the Shu army quickly take down those villages, but the key is that there will be no scattered Yi people, all the soldiers and their own desperate efforts. In this way, the casualties of the Shu army were greatly reduced.