The attacking Tang Imperial army continued to bombard for 30 minutes, pouring more than 20,000 shells on the front-line positions of the Dutch defenders, which was simply inhumane.

Due to the lack of range, the Dutch artillery positions were only sporadic counterattacks, and the Dutch soldiers on the front-line positions suffered a large number of artillery casualties, with casualties amounting to three to four thousand.

If it weren't for the muzzles of the white overseers in the second-line position on their backs, these indigenous servant soldiers on the first-line positions would have collapsed long ago.

Many of these indigenous servants participated in the encirclement and suppression of the Asian rebels, and they had a variety of combat experience, and many of them were old fritters.

Even so, no one has ever experienced an overwhelming artillery bombardment, it is simply the end of the world, and the enemy has been bombed with heavy casualties without even touching a single hair.

Needless to say, it is already on the verge of collapse, and any more wind and grass can be defeated.

See this scenario

After assessing the situation, General Michels had to grit his teeth and replenish more than 2,700 people from two infantry regiments to the first-line breastwork position in an attempt to stabilize the third-line defensive posture in the interval when the artillery fire stopped.

Although the position of the first line of the breastwork has been damaged by enemy artillery fire, and most of the barbed wire and the civil and wooden fences of the breastwork have been blown to pieces, it still has a certain defensive capability.

After the reinforcements went up, they were basically able to stabilize the floating military spirit.

Who knows

After a lapse of 15 minutes, when the attacking Tang Empire army was about to move, it was urgently stopped, and the artillery position roared again.

This move was so unexpected that General Michels almost vomited a mouthful of blood.

It's too bullying not to bring such a play.

Originally, it was expected that the all-out attack of the infantry of the Tang Empire did not wait, and the hateful artillery bombardment began again, and the sad front-line Dutch soldiers could only die in despair.

Bursts of exploding flames, mixed with dust and severed limbs, flew into the sky, making the brutality of war extremely real.

Not surprisingly, the unexpected happened......

The indigenous officers and soldiers who were still stuck in the chest position of the first line of defense ran backwards in the shelling of their heads and faces, throwing away their armor and throwing their armor back, they could no longer bear this cruel place of death, and collapsed in an instant.

Now these indigenous officers and soldiers have only one thought in their hearts, to escape from this terrible hell.

The blackened soldiers in front emerged from behind the mud breastwork, the craters and horns where they were hiding, and ran backwards with their legs drawn, and the rout soon became unstoppable.

The exploding shells still rained down, and every time they exploded violently, the shrapnel whistled and swept across, instantly emptying the people within a radius of seven or eight meters around the explosion point.

The sudden mass rout caused a sharp increase in the casualties of the Dutch soldiers.

"Damn it......" General Michels clenched his fists and slammed the wall hard, he could endure the losses of the native servant army, but could not endure such stupidity and rout.

It can be seen with the naked eye that on the battlefield ahead, the Dutch officers and soldiers who were originally densely routed and fled were beaten into speckled and sparse appearances under the cover of dense artillery fire one after another.

The effect of artillery coverage is several times higher than that of hiding in the position?

"Raise your gun, aim, shoot"

"Bang bang bang...... Bang bang bang bang ......"

The white soldiers from the second line of the Dutch army carried out the mission of the Warlord on the battlefield at the same time.

Under the officer's order, they raised the muzzle of the black hole in unison, and pulled the bolt without hesitation.

In the era of line infantry lined up to be shot, military law was extremely harsh, and it was a mortal crime to retreat without an order, no matter how many people there were.

If they can't be defeated and flee, then the second and third line defensive positions are like paper paste, and the enemy will break through as soon as he stabs them.

You can only move forward, not backward.

It is okay to die on the defensive front, but it is absolutely not allowed to flee, which has trampled on the bottom line of the military.

Therefore, European armies generally set up supervision teams, and the same was true of the Royal Dutch Army, which did not hesitate to enforce battlefield discipline when the fleeing soldiers approached the 150-meter red line of the second-line position.

Having just escaped from the dead area covered by artillery fire, the indigenous officers and soldiers watched the Dutch soldiers raise their guns with black holes, and their expressions of extreme horror added to their deep despair......

The dense volleys of guns rang out one after another, and the scorching projectiles slammed the bodies of these embarrassed retreating Dutch soldiers, and the blinding blood shot out, and they fell weakly in front of the second-line position, only seventy or eighty meters away from the nearest one.

The artillery fire of the enemy in the rear was covered, and the dense platoon of guns of the Dutch warlords in front fired round after round, which caused the fleeing native soldiers to be flanked from both sides, and they were knocked to the ground like leeks.

This seemingly brutal battlefield discipline ensured the tenacious fighting style of European armies, which has become the golden rule of the army since the 17th century, and has been clearly reflected in all major wars.

Germany, France, and Russia, the European army powers, are the countries that are the most resolute in enforcing battlefield discipline, and they are also the countries with the most powerful armies.

The second round of shelling lasted about 12 minutes before it came to an abrupt halt.

The strong smell of blood on the battlefield spread, and between the first and second positions of the Dutch army, there were dense corpses everywhere, and the fields were stained red with red blood, and the scene was extremely miserable.

After dawn, the main army of the Tang Empire that gathered was still in a lot of formations 3.5 kilometers away, and the Dutch positions on this side were already full of devastation, with dead and wounded.

Needless to say, the first line of defense of the breastwork was completely destroyed by enemy artillery fire, and the officers and men were killed and wounded.

The Dutch army filled in nearly 13,000 people in front and rear, and under the enemy's second-round artillery fire and the Dutch army's dense platoon of guns, nearly 10,000 people were killed and wounded, which can be said to have suffered a devastating blow.

The rest of the Clever Points were either still hiding behind the breastwork line, hiding in the pile of corpses, or fleeing to the flank, unable to take care of them for a while.

The three-line defensive position arranged by General Michel is now only two lines of defense under the bombardment of the superior artillery fire of the Tang Empire.

At this time

The loud military horn sounded, and the army of the Tang Empire began to fully press the ......

It's weird

After the official attack was launched, the originally neatly arranged queue was loosened, and some of the advancing soldiers lagged behind in the attack, and some protruded, and from a distance it no longer looked like a clear horizontal "one" queue.

As the soldiers' attack formations advanced, the distance between them also widened, presenting countless loose triangular formations, which was the latest skirmish line attack tactics of the Tang Empire.

This skirmish tactic allows soldiers to be spaced wider apart from each other when encountering enemy artillery fire, without having to maintain a tight formation.

There is no doubt that this new tactic is more flexible.

The artillery regiments under the Tang Empire, under the traction of mules and horses, quickly transferred their artillery positions to the front, and the artillery of the enemy and us quickly entered the range of covering each other.

The commander-in-chief of the Dutch army, General Michels, held the binoculars with a blue face, and did not order the artillery positions to be opened hastily, but patiently waited for the enemy artillery positions to be settled.

The Dutch army was generally armed with breech-loading steel hoop guns, with Napoleonic field guns of various calibers of 6-pounder, 9-pounder, 12-pounder, and 18-pounder.

This is a relatively advanced artillery popular in the 70s and 80s of the 19th century, which is derived from the early bronze Napoleonic cannon, and the two are in the same vein.

The use of steel pipes and steel hoops to reduce weight, can withstand high chamber pressure, has been a large number of equipment in the British Royal Navy.

The famous Armstrong gun equipped by the British Royal Navy is a very representative manufacturer of breech guns in the world, and its steel hoop gun developed at the end of the 60s inevitably affected the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and other European countries.

The famous Colt artillery of the Tang Empire represents another major school of army equipment in the world, that is, the breech loading school, which uses a wedge or screw gun latch, which is the representative of the world's advanced artillery today.

General Michels was patiently waiting for the artillery regiments of the Tang Empire to take place, and with the level of artillery currently equipped by the Dutch army, the accuracy of shelling fixed targets was a whole order of magnitude higher than that of shelling moving targets.

The Dutch army didn't have so many shells to waste, they had to be spared.

on the battlefield

The all-out attack on the advancing Tang Imperial army set out from a distance of 3.5 kilometers from the chest wall position of the first line of the Dutch defenders, and slowly approached with a normal number of steps.

Ten minutes later

When the attacking soldiers entered the 2.5-kilometer best artillery strike range, a total of more than 220 artillery pieces from 6 artillery positions of the Dutch army opened fire one after another, and carried out artillery strikes on the officers and soldiers of the Royal Janissaries of the attacking Tang Empire.

For a time, dense shells fell, causing varying degrees of casualties to the attacking officers and men.

As a result, the skirmish lines of the attack became more loose, and the Imperial soldiers braved artillery fire to advance.

meanwhile

The field artillery of the Tang Empire Expeditionary Corps, which had arrived at the new artillery positions one after another, quickly fired back with their guns, and focused on the Dutch artillery with more fierce and scorching artillery fire.

The two sides engaged in a fierce artillery battle, and in the rumbling of artillery, one Dutch artillery position after another was covered by fierce artillery fire, and the powerful air wave produced by the explosion swept by, killing and wounding a large number of officers and men of the Dutch artillery position.

In the head-to-head duel of artillery, the nine artillery regiments belonging to the Royal Praetorian Guard of the Tang Empire, with a total of more than 320 guns, occupied an overwhelming advantage, and soon the Dutch artillery positions were in flames and retreated.

With the passage of time, the intensity of the Dutch artillery fire quickly decayed, and it was clear that it suffered a great loss.

Compared with the artillery of the Tang and Dutch armies, the artillery of the Tang Empire has the advanced level of the 90s of the 19th century, representing the highest level of advanced artillery equipment in the world today.

In particular, it is equipped with a full breech-loading artillery system, and the shells are filled with advanced double-base gunpowder produced by the Colt Chemical Company. That is, the new high-explosive gunpowder developed by using 60% nitroglycerin and 40% nitrocellulose with low nitrogen content is extremely lethal.

The artillery of the Royal Netherlands Army was at the level of the 70s of the 19th century, and the shells were filled with early picric acid explosives, which were much less powerful and less reliable.

Many shells smashed the battlefield and did not explode, which made the imperial officers and soldiers who were lucky enough to escape their lives break out in a cold sweat.

Roughly calculated, about 1/3 of the shells of the Dutch artillery did not explode.

This is because the ammunition stockpiled by the Dutch army, which has been stored in tropical warehouses for more than 10 years, has failed due to the extremely hygroscopic acid, low blast energy, and poor physical stability.

Even if it comes out through a cannonball, it falls on the battlefield like a stuffy fart, and it can only explode, but it does not have much lethality.

It is not at all like the extremely lethal cannonballs of the Tang Empire, which exploded violently after falling, and exploded a large area, followed by a large mushroom cloud composed of fire and dust.

After more than 10 minutes of artillery firing at each other, the six artillery positions of the Dutch army were silent one after another, and most of them were blown up in a mess, and most of the 220 artillery pieces were destroyed, and less than 70 guns were still firing stubbornly.

This is the No. 2 and No. 5 artillery positions of the Dutch army in the dense forest, because it is difficult to observe the specific position, the artillery unit of the Tang Empire can only be divided into two artillery regiments, and the artillery fire is used to cover and suppress probabilitarily.

The remaining seven artillery regiments turned their guns and began to bombard the defensive positions of the 2nd line of the breast wall again, firmly controlling the dominance of the war.

The skirmish line of the advancing Tang Empire army has approached from 2.5 kilometers to 1.5 kilometers in these ten minutes.

The Imperial soldiers, who were stabbing with bright guns, pressed up like a tidal wave, and the artillery fire could not stop their advance, which put great pressure on the Dutch soldiers.

That's when it happened

A loud horn sounded on the side of the battlefield, and soon a large cloud of smoke and dust filled the air, and a large number of ironclad chariots appeared from the flank 4.5 kilometers away from the battlefield, which was covering the position of the Peace Army at high speed.

In the wilderness

These ironclad chariots that came over at high speed were simply a stab in the waist and eye of the stormy Dutch army, and greatly destroyed the morale of the Dutch army.

Moreover, these ironclad chariots were very fast, and in only five or six minutes, the distance between the two had been shortened by half, and it was possible that they could storm the second-line chest wall position earlier than the infantry, which caused great panic among the Dutch soldiers.

Under the dual effect of artillery fire and armor impact, many Dutch soldiers have turned around and fled in fright, which may quickly form a herd effect and trigger another major rout.

Critically

General Michels had to send his only cavalry regiment to meet the attack, this cavalry regiment with a total of about 1,100 men was the only cavalry force of the Dutch army.

In order to stabilize the line of defense, it had to be taken out.

I saw a Dutch cavalry come out from behind the third-line defensive position, and the cavalry regiment quickly changed formation in the gallop of horses, spreading out from both wings like the wings of geese, and killing the ironclad chariot at high speed.

The appearance of such a cavalry regiment on the battlefield greatly boosted the morale of the Dutch officers and soldiers, and also stabilized the precarious defensive line.

In a cheer

The Dutch cavalry, who intercepted the ironclad convoy head-on, once again instigated the high-speed racing of their horses and launched a charge against the ironclad convoy, and the cavalry drew their shining sabers and waved them overhead, and the momentum did not lose to the other party.

Thousands of horses' hooves trampled on the ground like rolling thunder across the field, and the charging cavalry was unstoppable, their eyes full of longing for victory and honor.

Cavalry, charge!