Kaifeng City.

Kaifeng as the seat of Henan, the city defense facilities of the city are very solid, at the same time have the outer earthen wall and the inner layer of the second brick wall, the city wall of Kaifeng City is 12 meters high, the width is mostly close to eight meters, and there are a large number of enemy towers, horse faces and five giant city towers.

As for the palace of the king of Zhou, which has a strong wall in the city, it is located on the central axis of the city and can be used as an acropolis fortress in battle. Any enemy who lacks heavy firepower will have a hard time breaking through the defenders' defenses with a frontal attack.

Now Li Zicheng led hundreds of thousands of troops to kill and besieged Kaifeng City, making the soldiers and civilians in the city, as well as the Zhou Palace, nervous.

In view of the tragic ending of King Fu in Luoyang City, at this time, Zhu Gongfang, the king of Zhou, also issued a huge bounty to the soldiers and civilians defending the city, stipulating: Those who go out of the city to kill the Kou can get fifty taels of silver, and the warriors who kill the Liukou also have thirty taels to take, even if they only injure the enemy, they will be rewarded with ten taels.

At the same time, Zhu Gongfang also advanced a huge amount of money to reward the army, and called on the gentry in the city to actively donate money and materials. In the end, because the number of garrisons was really insufficient, tens of thousands of people were hired at the price of 5 cents of silver per day. Let them walk up to the city wall and stab their opponents with the bamboo poles in their hands.

The battle then began, and Li Zicheng gathered all the forces of the middle, front, rear, left and firearms battalions, and only the right battalion, under the leadership of the general Yuan Zongdi, operated on the periphery of Kaifeng Mansion.

The army of thieves and hundreds of thousands of horses gathered outside the city, and the camp stretched for more than ten miles, which was spectacular.

Li Zicheng first sent people to the city to send a letter of persuasion, but the envoy was beheaded by the deputy general Chen Yongfu, and the head of the envoy was thrown off the city.

On the fifth day of the ninth month, the army of thieves began to launch a wall cutting offensive on all sides at the same time. At the same time, Li Dingguo commanded the firearms battalion to go into battle, and used hundreds of artillery pieces of various types to bombard the Kaifeng city wall, and the defenders at the head of the city suffered great losses under the fierce bombardment of the army of thieves.

Gao Mingheng, the governor of Henan, led his troops to support the northeast corner of the battle, and at the same time concentrated the artillery in the city and bombarded it outside the city, so that the army of thieves also suffered great casualties.

On the sixth day of the first month of September, the army of thieves continued to storm fiercely, and at noon the wall of Caomen was torn open by the thieves with artillery, and the army of thieves immediately gathered infantry cavalry and swarmed up.

Seeing that things were not good, the chief soldier Chen Yongfu hurriedly led the army to rush to help, and at the same time, more than a dozen tiger cannons bombarded the gap, and the army of thieves was defeated, and the corpses were defeated and returned.

After the army of thieves retreated, the soldiers and civilians in the city began to quickly repair the gaps in the city walls. At the same time, Governor Gao Mingheng noticed that the army of thieves must be tired from attacking for days, and the defenders have been on the defensive, and if they can counterattack the army of thieves at this moment, they will be able to inflict heavy casualties.

So in the middle of the night, Gao Mingheng selected 500 elite soldiers, and together with 2,000 young and strong people in the city, they attacked the army of thieves at night.

As Gao Mingheng expected, Li Zicheng was convening the generals of the battalions to discuss in the big tent of the Chinese army, and the battalions of the thief army were completely defenseless, and were severely beaten by the Ming army. That night, thousands of people were lost in each camp of the thieves, and a large number of baggage were burned, and Li Zicheng was furious.

On the sixth day of the ninth month, the defenders fought fiercely with the army of thieves for a whole day.

That night, a fire suddenly broke out in Kaifeng City, causing panic among the soldiers and civilians. According to the investigation by the defenders, the cause of the fire was that a tenant named Wang Cai accidentally started a fire while he was drunk and warmed up. Wang Cai disturbed the hearts of the army and the people, and the official Huang Shu captured and executed him, which was a warning to the soldiers and civilians in the city.

Early in the morning on the seventh day of the ninth lunar month, the army of thieves drove hundreds of women to the outside of the city, and the thieves forced those women to shout and curse to the city, and forced hundreds of women to turn their backs to the city wall, bend over and pout, exposing the yin ~ part, Li Zicheng proudly called it the "Yin Gate Array", thinking that it could shake the hearts of the defenders.

Li Yan and Li Dingguo on the side shook their heads when they saw this, and their faces were very ugly.

Although the two think that Li Zicheng is a generation of heroes, Li Zicheng acts very out of line many times, and it is not uncommon to kill the people. Li Yan and Li Dingguo had dissuaded the "Yin Gate Array" set up today, but Li Zicheng insisted on going his own way, and even because of the continuous obstruction of the two, they looked at each other coldly, which made Li Yan and Li Dingguo feel very uncomfortable.

Prior to this, Li Zicheng also fell out with Luo Rucai, ignoring the obstruction of Li Yan, Li Dingguo, Niu Jinxing and others, attacked and killed Luo like this, swallowing up his subordinates, which made many thieves and generals feel cold.

These things made Li Dingguo reacquaint himself with Li Zicheng, and understood that this person was just a hero in troubled times, not a hero of Anbang and Dingguo, so he also had a different idea in his heart.

Only Li Yan was still thinking about how to assist Li Zicheng, wanting to change the unbearable behavior of the army of thieves, and he was exhausted for this.

The day's fighting lasted until the evening, and from the next day, the army of thieves again dispatched tens of thousands of horse infantry to besiege Kaifeng with tactics that bloomed on all sides. Governor Gao Mingheng and adjutant general Chen Yongfu came to the city to command the counterattack, the defenders' artillery, bricks and stones were fired together, and the earth-shaking thunder became a sharp weapon to defend the city. Because of the lack of support, the small army of thieves who temporarily climbed to the head of the city became a lone army, and were captured by the defenders with long hooks, and their heads were hung on the head of the city to deter other army of thieves who dared to come forward to send them to death.

However, although the several sieges of the thief army failed, they were not for nothing. At this time, the Kaifeng city wall has been scuttled down several places by the army of thieves, and the army of thieves hit the weak point of the city wall with a rushing car, making the city wall precarious. According to the position of the thief army's hole, the defenders cut through the corresponding wall from top to bottom, and then killed the thief army in the hole with spears and throwing gunpowder.

The army of thieves could not dig the wall, Li Zicheng under the suggestion of Song Xiance, and mobilized troops to build a high platform outside the city, which was almost the same height as the city wall, and then ordered Li Dingguo's department to move the artillery up and directly bombard the defenders at the head of the city.

After the defenders took advantage of the pause in the offensive of the thief army at night, they rushed to build a women's wall several miles long on the city wall, which was three zhang higher than the high platform of the thief army outside the city.

After several days of siege battles, the army of thieves lost nearly 20,000 troops, but they were never able to conquer Kaifeng Mansion, which made Li Zicheng very annoyed.

So in order to demoralize the defenders in the city, Li Zicheng ordered the corpses of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong to be carried out, tied to a large wooden shelf, and then whipped under the city to deter the defenders in the city.

At the head of the city, the deputy general Chen Yongfu glared angrily, almost crushing his steel teeth, and Gao Mingheng, the governor of Henan, also scolded, and he had no demeanor as a civil official.

Chen Yongfu is the deputy general of Kaifeng, the highest level of military generals in Henan at this time, and Gao Mingheng is also a celebrity in history, in history, after the Qing army entered the customs, Gao Mingheng also fought against the Qing Dynasty, which is very high.

Gao Mingheng was originally the commander of Rugao County, Jiangsu, and later because of his outstanding political achievements, he successively served as the commander of Xinghua County, the imperial history of Yunnan Provincial Trial, and the governor of Henan.

In the battle of Kaifeng in history, it was Gao Mingheng who ordered to dig water to break the enemy, defeated Li Zicheng's army, and then in the winter of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, the Qing soldiers broke through Yishui City, Gao Mingheng led the troops to resist for a long time, and saw that the general trend of the Ming Dynasty had gone, so he committed suicide with his wife Zhang. Although he is a civil official, he is also strong enough.

At this time, Chen Yongfu's atmosphere was unbearable, so he wanted to organize the elite to go out of the city to snatch the corpses of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong, but was stopped by Gao Mingheng: "If you go out of the city at this time, you will have no return, and Li Chuang will use this method to lure our army out of the city!" ”

"Do you just watch the bodies of the two governors being humiliated!"

Chen Yongfu gritted his teeth and said, while Gao Mingheng sighed and said, "What else? Now that the grain and grass in the city are almost exhausted, and the troops are not enough, I hope that the reinforcements will arrive soon, otherwise there will be only one way to dig the Yellow River to flood the enemy army! ”

"Reinforcements?"

Chen Yongfu punched the city angrily, and said angrily: "Where are there any reinforcements? All the elites of the imperial court are in Liaodong, and there are no soldiers available in the entire Central Plains! ”

On the same day, the bodies of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong were whipped to pieces, and then discarded outside the camp of thieves.

Li Dingguo remembered that Lu Xiangsheng had fought a bloody battle against the Qing army, and he was also a hero, so he collected the body for Lu Xiangsheng, and buried the mutilated body twenty miles east of Kaifeng City, and set up a monument for it.

As for Fu Zonglong's body, it was lost a few days after it was discarded.

A few days later, the siege battle was still fierce, but an even more terrible disaster had befallen all the people of Kaifeng.

As the city's grain stock was almost exhausted, there was a market for grain of rice and gold in the city. The hungry defenders began to disobey orders and ransacked the city's bazaars, and the hungry officers and soldiers had to search for rations even if they dug three feet into the ground. Many people also tortured the people and extorted money, destroying other buildings in the city except for the palace of the county king.

Some greedy officials also took this opportunity to make a fortune in the country, and even forcibly requisitioned grain from the wealthy families in the city at the price of five taels of silver and one stone, knowing that the grain in the city was expensive. If he could not deliver so much grain, he would have to pay it at the price of three hundred taels per stone. In the end, all the rich families in the city went bankrupt, and the ordinary middle class fell into abject poverty.

The officers and soldiers defending the city and the wealthy families were still like this, and the ordinary people were even more desperate for their families to die. Because the lack of food in the city was not caused by the hoarding of individual profiteers, there was no way to buy food with their life savings. They ate all the birds and animals, and began to gnaw on the bark and roots. Others picked out maggots in the manure pit and ate them mixed with rotten cotton, torn leather and paper.

In just a few days, many of the people in Kaifeng have died due to unrest and disease. Soon someone openly sold a strange kind of meat, although it was purported to be horse meat, but in fact one pound of meat was mixed with half a pound of corpses. The price of such meat is extremely high, and it can be sold for silver taels per catty.

Although everyone was suspicious of the strange color and texture of the meat, the situation was not willing to delve deeper, and the whole city has been completely reduced to hell on earth. In the face of such a chaotic situation, although Governor Gao Mingheng and Deputy General Chen Yongfu knew about it, they were powerless to do so, so they could only stick to it one day at a time.

However, on the sixth day, the young men who defended the city, who could not get food rations, no longer obeyed orders, and began to rob people of food in groups, and even openly killed people and ate meat in the streets. The people of the city also united to defend the neighborhood, and often openly fought with the young men who guarded the city. The dead and prisoners in the clashes will naturally become the rations of the day for both sides.

Under such a chaotic situation, Huang Peng, the governor of Kaifeng, together with Yan Yunjing, the imperial official of Hebei, and more than a dozen officials in the city, found the governor Gao Mingheng together, and asked to send someone to dig the embankment of the Yellow River and flood the army of thieves to save Kaifeng City.

Gao Mingheng couldn't make up his mind for a while, and closed his eyes in pain.

Some people died, but not completely......