The vegetation distribution of the Neila forest is very different from that of the tropics further south, such as the Ridella wetlands and the Soradin, and the temperate regions are much less abundant in terms of the variety of poisonous insects, and the palm trees and colorful fruits are far less varied. Pen Fun Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 infoNature is wonderful, and a difference in temperature of a few degrees and the average annual precipitation may mean that a plant that is very common in other regions cannot grow here, which is why it shapes the different forest landscapes of Rigal around the world. But it is not an absolute law, and some plants with excellent adaptability can tolerate large temperature and humidity differences, as can be seen in a wide range like the most famous opportunist rat among animals.

These plants, which are abundant in many places, are generally much easier to work with than the high-density hardwoods that grow for a long time, and an iron axe and a sharp machete can quickly convert them into makeshift weapons and traps with the combined efforts of a dozen people.

These militias sent by the Northern Army are all mixed and matched, Rao is a mountainous forest in Yavenella, and they are not nomads of the steppe, and they cannot be all soldiers. Therefore, as the main force of the heavy infantry of the Ottolo, the longbowmen were naturally dominated by mountain people and peasant hunters living in border towns. The ordinary peasants and even refugees of the Acasta Plains, although they were not good at using longbows and had little experience in navigating the mountains and forests, were able to help the longbowmen with difficult tasks that required time and energy.

The hard-working nature of the peasants was on display at this moment, and each brigade of one hundred and fifty to two hundred men was divided into several groups of ten or twenty people. The core of the group is three to five old hunters and old mountain people in their forties and fifties, and the rest of the people are divided in half, and the young mountain people are divided into groups of two with ordinary farmers or refugees who are just beginning to learn to use the longbow. Each group was able to survive outside for a long time with a water bottle made of bamboo or sheepskin, some beans and dry food.

It takes a long time to train a longbowman with a hundred shots, and the mountain people of Avenella have been hunting with their elders in the mountains since they were seven or eight years old, and it was not until they were about twenty years old that they could become hunters on their own after more than ten years of training. But at the moment they don't need to go hunting alone, although they are still novices, and in a state of using the forest as a cover for a condescending ambush and still winning by quantity, as long as they know how to shoot with a bow and arrows and shoot roughly, the rest is just waiting for luck to come into play.

"Uncle Tom, is that all right?" said a young farmer with a brand-new wooden bow and hemp rope bowstring to the old hunter in his fifties—though he was almost a head shorter than him, and thin and swarthy, the young man still did not look down on him in the slightest. "Hmm. "Tom, the core member of the team, is a humble and quiet typical mountain man, even if he is a leader and an elder according to the orders of the superiors, he is very easy-going and close, just like the elders of the neighbors to explain to these young people.

"These are beast paths, the roads in the woods are not easy to walk, and the old people who often go into the mountains know that it will be smoother to follow them, and the same is true for the Ottolo people. His words and rhetoric in dialect were not elegant, but they were easy to understand, and the young people, who had lived in the forests of Neila for a long time, and who had been deeply aware of the warm welcome of all kinds of thorny plants, learned faster with their own feelings. They stepped back a few distances, then confirmed the area where the trap had just been set up, and ran towards the temporary camp.

Carrying only a few items and wearing light clothing, they were guided by an experienced old hunter to move through the forest at an astonishing speed, wearing half-body armor with one-handed swords, daggers, Throwing guns and shields and some personal supplies, the Ottolo hoplites, who weighed more than forty kilograms in battle, could not compete with such lightly armed archers in their long-distance running speed on flat ground, and when encountering difficult terrain with greater physical exertion, as long as they kept their small and flexible forces on their side and did not mess with themselves, it was basically impossible to catch up.

The choice between flexibility and toughness has been a challenge since the birth of the warrior class, and although armor has evolved over time to fit the anatomy of the human body in terms of design, and an empire like Ottoro with excellent metal smelting ability can provide amazing defense at the right weight, it is still a multiple-choice question, and it is impossible to perfect.

As we have been trying to illustrate, weapons, armor, infantry and cavalry are all born for specific situations on a specific battlefield.

There has never been an army or equipment in the world that can adapt to all terrain and all battlefield environments - if there were, there would be no need for a commander, as long as the number of soldiers reached the standard and the soldiers could be pushed up, and any tactical and strategic maneuvers would be a waste of time.

The thing that determines whether a commander is good or not is whether he or she can come up with a supposedly brilliant idea with a slap on the thigh - in fact, almost every person who thinks he knows a lot about military affairs has constructed it in his imagination. It is true that an excellent commander cannot only know how to eat old books and play those rigid textbook-like commands, but before innovation, it is more important to understand everything that is originally written thoroughly, if this cannot be done, then the so-called "novel ideas" and "unique opinions" are just a kind of wishful thinking dangling in half a bottle of vinegar, and there is no practical meaning except for rhetoric and rhetoric on paper.

After reading through 10,000 books, and then summing up the laws and elements of the battlefield from them, and understanding the essence and principles of the battlefield after understanding them thoroughly, until this point is actually still at the level of talking on paper, and anyone can talk about the big truths, but the real difficulty is how to turn beautiful words into reality that can be put into action. To achieve this step, the commander needs to have a meticulous observation and understanding of the current information of the enemy and the environment of the battlefield.

True strategic command is not about copying a template and forcing your soldiers to execute it, as if they were just pieces on some emotionless chessboard. A true strategic command must know oneself and one's opponent, understand the strengths and weaknesses of both sides and know the environment around oneself -- and then use all of this to make the most of one's strengths and avoid weaknesses.

This is exactly what our Sage Monsieur did to Avenella's Northern Army.

Ottolo's hoplites could not keep up with the native Avenella in the jungle, and although their longbows could hardly penetrate their armor to deal effective damage, the heavy defenses in the dense forest provided a sense of security but also constrained, making them always half a beat slower to effectively complete their planned objectives and encircle their opponents.

-- Words go back to where they came.

What Tom's scattered team did was to search for the nearby beast path and then block it, if possible, it would be better to attack the Ottolo with a trap, but the other party was not the kind of stupid low-level mercenary, after a few injuries, the advance of the Ottoro people became cautious, and the slightest trace of dirt turning leaves and falling leaves would attract their attention, so the greater function of the trap was to delay the time of the Ottolo people, so that the preparation time for evacuation or ambush was longer。

Of course, they couldn't block all the approaches, after all, it was safer to try to set traps than to keep moving, so the spike traps made of cutting bamboo and peeling and sharpening were only placed on a few easy paths, and the heavily armed Ottolo people could not walk the steep paths like them, so a few simple traps could effectively block or delay most of their movements, so they would not be caught in a long drive during the break.

"But that adult's trap is really terrible, it works well and is easy to do. They made their swift return to camp in silence, and perhaps out of a sense of reassurance, one of the young men sighed in relief.

"Well, yes. The other chimed in, saying that the lord they were referring to was naturally our Sage - that time was of the essence to these guerrilla soldiers of the Northern Army, and that it was impossible for them to set traps such as large traps and falling logs, which were more efficient but had much longer preparation time. And Henry's solution to this made even our Mira, who was very familiar with him, shudder when she realized the tendency of the trap.

The structure of the trap is actually very simple, it is a miniaturized spike trap, just a large wooden stake and a pit several meters deep enough to severely damage the prey, and Henry's modified version uses countless small bamboo skewers or wooden skewers and shallow pits that only reach above the surface of the feet. A knife can sharpen a bamboo stick dotted the tiny, imperceptible trap - it was designed for Ottolo's hoplites, not to kill the enemy but to hurt them.

Even knights with full plate armor have only a thicker layer of hard skin under their feet to facilitate their travel, and no one will add steel plates to the bottom of their plate armor and shoe armor. Not to mention the Otolo hoplites who were only wearing half-body plate armor, with no protection on their upper arms and lower legs, but only a pair of leather boots.

The armor on the lower leg and upper of the shoe was usually worn by cavalrymen, as they were also vulnerable to attack on horseback. In addition to the parts of the armor that we mentioned earlier, such as the shoulders, the armor of the lower body usually only defends to the thighs and does not continue to extend, because the calves and feet are rarely attacked by the enemy, so most of them will abandon this defense in exchange for the flexibility of running on foot.

Henry devised a trap designed to hurt the opponent's feet rather than kill them, but instead of making it more merciful, it was more terrifying - those who walked outside understood that their feet were the life of their soldiers, and that Ottolo's hoplites were burdened with heavy armor and shields, and that if their feet were injured and a burden, they would only cause more trouble to the whole army than if they were to die outright.

Counting the soldiers who are equipped with more than 100 kilograms, if their feet are injured and they can't walk independently, they need at least two companions to take care of them, and if they die directly, it will be easy, and if they become this virtue, they can only drag down the team, and the internal contradictions that will be caused are also a major factor affecting combat effectiveness. Even with discipline, soldiers are still human beings with emotions and desires, and the negative emotions of feeling themselves as a burden to soldiers and the disgust that develops over time from the people responsible for their care can lead to a decline in morale. And considering the labor cost of digging a shallow pit and inserting an easy-to-process spike to make such a trap, the effect is amazing.

"Go to the east, supplies are coming. "The explanation from the core leaders of the brigade was simple and straightforward, the entire temporary camp was more of a relay station than a camp, and the team of more than 180 people was divided into several small groups to enter and exit the neighborhood. Everything is the most simple and lightweight, and it can be easily taken away, and there will be no traces of stationing here after a day.

"Let's go. Tom turned around and led the group, an old hunter like him didn't need a magnetic needle, and could effectively judge the direction by looking at the sun during the day and the stars at night. These lessons learned by word and deed can quickly lead to the growth of the novices under their command - provided they don't die in the war, of course.

They moved forward rapidly, and as we entered June, the weather in the south of Avenella became hotter and hotter. All of them carried only a small bamboo tube, and the drinking water was quickly consumed in such weather and difficult terrain. The Ottolo people are not idiots, and although they are not familiar with the forests, and some of the visible streams in the vicinity are monitored or controlled, it takes too much time to travel to and from the upstream source and it is easy to get lost, but it is still difficult for the native mountain hunters to live here.

Tom's team stopped, and they were going to fetch water from a small puddle in front of them, which would have a lot of bacteria and dirt, such as the excrement of monkeys and small creatures that came to drink here. Therefore, the result would be very bad if they were quoted directly, but they did not have time to collect firewood and boil it, and due to the shortage of supplies, the entire brigade only had one iron pot to use.

But the old hunter who knew nature had his own plan, and Tom used the same way that many people who had been away for many years knew - he dug a pit next to the puddle on the ground, and a group of people rested for a few minutes and waited for the water to slowly seep into the pit next to it. After the dirt on the surface was scraped off, the soil in the forest was very clean, and the sand and soil were extremely effective as a filter, and when they brought it to fill their respective water bottles, they took out some small charcoal from the bag they carried, crumpled it and threw it into the bamboo tube, and then shook it to let the charcoal play a clean role.

After all this was done, the team continued on its way, and after a long distance, they met the native farmers of the south who had been waiting for them. They didn't talk much nonsense, and after handing over supplies such as grain and beans to the militia of the Northern Army, they began to reveal some things about the movements of the Ottoro people and the Southern Coalition.

The reason why the Northern Army was able to ambush Otolo's heavy infantry everywhere, and how to know the location of the Southern Coalition Army, is quite obvious at this point.

The advantage of having home field advantage is not only that the soldiers are more combat-effective, but also that their intelligence advantage is unmatched by the armies of the Ottolo and Ahibourne II.

"Take care. After a brief memorization of the information, Tom said goodbye to the peasants on the other side, and then began to rush back with supplies and news of the enemy's movements. (To be continued.) )