After receiving the battle report sent back by Mulan, Ran Min was very dissatisfied, but he also knew that it was no wonder that Mulan, because throughout the ages, there were countless heroes and heroes who suffered losses on the war elephants!

Elephants are the largest mammals on land. An adult Asian elephant is four meters tall at the shoulder, weighs three to five tons, has tough skin, good obedience, and is easy to train.

The advantages made people realize its role in warfare, the thick skin protected it from cold weapons such as arrows and swords, and even the lead bullets fired from early smoothbore flintlock pistols when added to the armor; The tall elephant's back provides the elephant rider with a commanding height from which he can see and is not vulnerable to infantry strikes; Elephants can reach speeds of up to 30 kilometers per hour when charging, and cannot be neutralized by ordinary spearmen, making them an effective charge and counter-charge class.

As far as Ran Min knew, the ancestors of the Indus Valley were the first to discover and cultivate war elephants. Subsequently, the Shang Dynasty domesticated the Yellow River elephant into a war elephant and incorporated it into the army.

The role of war elephants is different from that of traditional cavalry, and it is specially used to trample enemy formations and break up enemy formations.

Just imagine, when a group of four-meter-tall behemoths rushed towards them at high speed, what army could still maintain its formation? Even if you stand still, you can give a powerful deterrent to the enemy.

In 331 B.C., Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire fought the Battle of Gauramira, and the Macedonian army was greatly shocked by the fifteen war elephants placed in the center of the Persian army's array.

It happened that night that a meteor shower was prominent, and the Macedonian soldiers were terrified, thinking that they were under siege by the Persian army.

Alexander stayed up all night and prayed earnestly to the heavens. The next day, the Macedonian army suffered the heaviest losses since the Eastern Crusade, the center of the front was broken by war elephants, the two flanks were outflanked by the enemy, and the large battalion was also lost to the enemy, and the front was crumbling.

At the critical moment, Alexander personally led 2,000 cavalry to launch a surprise attack, shooting Darius III's coachman with a javelin to win the Battle of Gauramira.

After Alexander's death, his successors brought war elephants back to the battlefields of Europe, and the Carthaginians and Egyptians began to domesticate African elephants, which became the mounts of kings on the battlefield.

In the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian commander Hannibal crossed the Alps and attacked the Roman legions.

The horses of the Romans were frightened and galloped at the sight of war elephants, and the formation was in disarray, and only 10,000 of the 40,000 men survived. More than a decade later, at the Battle of Zama, the Romans left a gap in the array to prevent the elephants from attacking, leaving Hannibal's war elephants in vain.

Hannibal was defeated, Carthage was razed to the ground!

More than a hundred years later, the Roman Civil War broke out. The mad Caesar commanded his soldiers to attack the elephant's leg with a heavy axe during the Battle of Tapsus, blocking the elephant's onslaught.

This was the last classic example of the use of war elephants on the Western battlefield. Since then, the role of war elephants in warfare has become less and less, and the Megarans used to use live pigs to storm the elephant formation, because war elephants were afraid of pigs and fire.

Due to the serious weaknesses of the war elephants themselves, especially the inability to overcome their fear of fire, they have played a counterproductive role at the critical moments of many battles and brought great losses to their own side.

After entering the era of hot weapons, in the face of powerful gunpowder weapons, the role of war elephants became smaller and smaller.

Ran Min knew that the weakness of war elephants was fear of fire and the barking of pigs, so he wrote two handwritten letters, one to Hua Mulan, who was far away in Mukechuan City, and the other to Wei Zheng, who was attacking Cham.

There are many war elephants in the southwest, especially in the South Asian subcontinent, and if you want to take these places more smoothly and incorporate them into the empire's territory, you must restrain the enemy's war elephants.

In fact, artillery is the most effective tool to fight war elephants!

In August of the thirteenth year of the emperor's reign, the 300,000 southern army led by Wei Zheng finally arrived at Cham.

Originally, Cham was a small country, and it was not worth Wei Zheng to send so many soldiers and horses to attack, so Wei Zheng simply left Ran Ke to lead 100,000 soldiers and horses to destroy Champa, and he led the army to advance into Zhenla country.

Historically, after the Champa Kingdom became independent from the Eastern Han Dynasty at the end of the first century AD, it was at war with various Chinese dynasties in the north and Cambodian kingdoms in the south for a long time, and did not lose much.

However, after the rise of the Annamite people, the Cham people were gradually eaten away after hundreds of years with their glue, and a few monarchs who wanted to cheer up were produced, but they only lost even more.

In the end, it completely collapsed under the conquest of the Hou Lê pilgrimage of Annam, became a vassal state of Annam, and was finally quietly assimilated by the Vietnamese.

This ancient kingdom existed for almost 1,500 years, and its situation was quite similar to that of the Byzantine Empire. It can be said that a history of Vietnam is actually a history of the struggle between Vietnam and occupation, in other words, a history of the struggle between Chinese and Indian cultures!

The country of Cham is also known as the country of Linyi.

The founding of Linyi was the process of secession from the Han Dynasty. Zhanren (called Xianglinyi at this time) originally lived in the area of Xianglin County, Rinan County, and repeatedly rebelled at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, plundered the state and county, and Jiaozhou assassinated the history of the annoyance.

One of them in the second year of Emperor Yonghe of Han Shun (137 AD), the conscription of Jiaozhi soldiers to quell the rebellion, the result is a rebellion, the situation is very dangerous, the court to transfer Jing, Yang, Yan, Yu 40,000 people to collect, fortunately the famous minister Li Gu force resistance, send people to surrender, and then Xia Fang two Jiaozhou assassin history, the prestige is extremely high, occupy the name of the people and surrender.

In the early peace period of Emperor Xian of the Han Dynasty, the Xianglinren District killed the county order to stand on its own and became the king of Linyi, and Linyi finally became independent.

At this time, Ran Ke led the army across the Red River and entered the territory of the Cham Kingdom.

Ran Ke was very curious and asked Geng Ji, the deputy general beside him: "Geng Ji, I heard that there are strange treasures in Linyi, there are gold mountains, and there is gold juice flowing out, and Linyi Kingdom casts a statue of a god as a golden man, and there are tens of thousands of catties of gold!" I wonder if it's true? ”

Geng Ji shrugged his shoulders and said, "Who knows?" But most of the time it's a non-existent thing. The land of Linyi is a remote place in the south, there are no grains, there are miasma, and it is not surprising that there are some mineral resources, but to say that the land is full of gold, I can't believe it! ”

"Hey, hey. In any case, there will be no fake that this Cham has a statue of a golden man, and when we destroy the Cham people, we will sacrifice the golden people to Your Majesty! ”

Not long after, scouts came to tell me that the Cham army had been spotted ahead.

Ran Ke then ordered the Wei army to form a formation and be ready to attack at any time.

Although Linyi is a small country, it is not a small country with a vast land and sparse population, on the contrary, there are still a lot of people, with more than 100,000 people, so it can pull out 30,000 soldiers and horses at once, but this is already the limit.

The Cham people speak Chinese, so they sent a team of soldiers out to scold, Ran Ke was not to be outdone, and directly let people scold the ancestors of the Cham people for eighteen generations, and reprimanded Lin Yi for being a chaotic minister and thief, and everyone was punished for it.

When the scolding was almost over, the two sides began to fight.

In front of the Cham army there are fifty colossus statues, which look very scary.

At this time, Ran Ke didn't know how to deal with these war elephants, so he was a little cowardly, so he sent an army of 10,000 people to rush forward, but he was soon rushed by the war elephants of the Lin Yi army and collapsed.

Ran Ke was frightened, and hurriedly ordered Mingjin to collect his troops, withdraw the army to the vicinity of the Red River, and build a trench.

When the Cham people saw that it was getting late, they did not attack the camp of the Wei army, so they set up camp on the spot.

The war seemed to be stagnant for a while.