Kaifeng City.
As the administrative seat of Henan, Kaifeng's city defense facilities are very strong. It has an outer earth wall and an inner second brick wall. The city walls of Kaifeng are twelve meters high and nearly eight meters wide. There are a large number of Watch towers, horse faces and five giant towers.
As for the Zhou Prince's Mansion, which is heavily fortified in the city, it is located on the central axis of the city and can serve as an acropolis fortress in war. Any enemy lacking heavy firepower will have a difficult time breaking through the defenders' defenses through a frontal attack.
Now Li Zicheng led hundreds of thousands of troops to attack and surrounded the city of Kaifeng, making the soldiers and civilians in the city, as well as the Zhou royal family, nervous.
In view of the tragic ending of King Fu in Luoyang City, Zhou King Zhu Gongzhen also offered a huge bounty to the soldiers and civilians defending the city at this time. It was stipulated that those who went out to kill the bandits would receive fifty taels of silver, and the warriors who killed the rogue bandits would also receive thirty taels. , even if you only injure the enemy, you will receive a reward of ten taels.
At the same time, Zhu Gongzhen also advanced a huge sum of money in advance to reward the army, and called on the officials and gentry in the city to actively donate money and materials. In the end, because the number of garrison troops was really insufficient, tens of thousands of civilians were hired at a price of 5 cents of silver per day. Let them go up the city wall and stab their opponents with the bamboo poles in their hands.
The war began immediately. Li Zicheng assembled all the troops from the middle camp, front camp, rear camp, left camp and firearms camp. Only the right camp, led by the commander-in-chief Yuan Zongdi, was operating on the periphery of Kaifeng Mansion.
Hundreds of thousands of bandit troops gathered outside the city, and the camp stretched for more than ten miles, which was a spectacular sight.
Li Zicheng first sent a letter to the city to persuade him to surrender, but the envoy was beheaded by deputy general Chen Yongfu, and the envoy's head was thrown from the top of the city. Li Zicheng was furious and immediately ordered all battalions to attack in turn.
On the fifth day of September, the bandit army 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 blasted the Kaifeng city wall with hundreds of artillery pieces of various types. The defenders at the top of the city suffered heavy losses under the fierce bombardment of the bandit army.
Gao Mingheng, the governor of Henan, led his troops to support the northeastern corner where the war was critical. At the same time, he concentrated the artillery in the city and fired at the outside of the city, causing great damage to the bandit army.
On the sixth day of September, the bandit army continued their fierce attack. At noon, the bandit soldiers used artillery to tear open a two-foot-wide hole in the city wall of Caomen. The bandit army immediately gathered infantry and cavalry and swarmed up.
The commander-in-chief Chen Yongfu saw that something was not going well and quickly led his troops to rush for reinforcements. At the same time, more than a dozen tiger cannons fired at the gap. The attack of the bandit army was defeated, and countless corpses were returned in defeat.
After the bandit army retreated, the soldiers and civilians in the city began to quickly repair the gaps in the city wall. At the same time, Governor Gao Mingheng realized that the bandits' army must be exhausted after days of attacking. Kuang's defenders had been on the defensive. If they could counterattack the bandits' army at this moment, they would be able to inflict heavy damage.
So at midnight that day, Gao Mingheng selected 500 elite soldiers, together with 2,000 young men in the city who dared to die, to attack the bandit army at night.
As Gao Mingheng expected, Li Zicheng was summoning the generals of each battalion to discuss matters in the Chinese army's tent. The battalions of the bandit army were completely unprepared and were severely beaten by the Ming army. When the bandit army reacted and organized a counterattack, , the Ming army quickly retreated into the city. That night, thousands of people were killed in each camp of bandits, and a large number of baggage was burned. Li Zicheng was very angry.
On the sixth day of September, the defenders fought fiercely with the bandits for a whole day.
That night, a fire suddenly broke out in Kaifeng City, causing panic among the soldiers and civilians. After investigation by the defenders, the cause of the fire was that a drunk tenant named Wang Cai was warming himself by the fire and accidentally caused the fire. Wang Cai disturbed the morale of the army and the people, and the official Huang Shu captured him and executed him. This was a warning to the soldiers and people in the city.
Early in the morning on the seventh day of September, the bandit army drove hundreds of women naked outside the city. The bandit soldiers forced those women to yell and curse at the city, and forced hundreds of women to turn their backs to the city wall, bending over and pouting. , exposing the vagina, Li Zicheng proudly called it the "Yin Gate Formation", thinking that it could shake the morale of the defenders.
Li Yan and Li Dingguo on the side shook their heads when they saw this, and both of them looked ugly.
Although the two of them believed that Li Zicheng was a great hero, Li Zicheng often acted out of line, and it was not uncommon for him to harm the people. Li Yan and Li Dingguo had tried to dissuade them from the "Yin Gate Formation" that was set up today, but Li Zicheng insisted on going his own way, and even treated them coldly because of their constant obstruction, which made Li Yan and Li Dingguo feel very uncomfortable.
Prior to this, Li Zicheng had a falling out with Luo Rucai. Regardless of the obstruction of Li Yan, Li Dingguo, Niu Jinxing and others, he attacked and killed Luo like this and devoured all his tribesmen, which made many bandit generals feel chilled.
These things made Li Dingguo get to know Li Zicheng again, and he understood that this man was just a hero in troubled times, not a hero of peace and stability, so he also had different thoughts in his heart.
Only Li Yan was still thinking about how to assist Li Zicheng and wanted to change the bad behavior of the bandit army, and he was working hard on this.
This day's fighting continued into the evening. Starting from the second day, the bandit army once again dispatched tens of thousands of horse and infantry, adopting tactics that spread from all directions to besiege Kaifeng. Governor Gao Mingheng and deputy general Chen Yongfu came to the city in person to direct the counterattack. The defenders fired artillery and masonry. Thunderbolts became a weapon for defending the city. Combined with firewood to add fuel, smoke immediately rose from the city, burning the soldiers of the bandit army and unable to stand. Because of the lack of backup, the few bandits who temporarily boarded the city were left alone and were captured by the defenders with long hooks. Their heads were hung behind the city to intimidate other bandits who dared to come forward and die.
However, although several attacks by the bandit army failed, they were not without success. At this time, several places under the Kaifeng city wall had been broken down by the bandit army. The bandit army used their vehicles to hit the weak points of the city wall, leaving the city wall in danger. The defenders drilled through the corresponding city wall from top to bottom according to the location of the hole dug by the bandit army, and then used spears and thrown gunpowder to kill the bandit army in the hole.
The bandit army failed to cut through the wall. At Song Xiance's suggestion, Li Zicheng mobilized troops to build a high platform outside the city. The high platform was almost the same height as the city wall. He then ordered Li Dingguo's troops to move artillery up and directly bombard the defenders at the top of the city.
After nightfall, the defenders took advantage of the siege army's offensive to halt on the city wall and built a several-mile-long female wall, which was three feet higher than the high platform of the robber army outside the city. They then mounted artillery mounts to counterattack the robber army in a condescending manner. , once again caused the bandit army to fail in the artillery battle on the high platform.
The siege battle that lasted for several days caused the bandit army to lose nearly 20,000 troops, but it was still unable to capture Kaifeng Mansion, which made Li Zicheng very angry.
So in order to demoralize the defenders in the city, Li Zicheng ordered the bodies of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong to be carried out, tied to large wooden frames, and then whipped under the city to frighten the defenders in the city.
On the top of the city, deputy general Chen Yongfu glared angrily, almost grinding his steel teeth into pieces, and Henan governor Gao Mingheng also cursed loudly, completely losing the demeanor of a civil servant.
Chen Yongfu was the deputy general of Kaifeng and the highest-ranking general in Henan at this time, and Gao Mingheng was also a celebrity in history. In history, after the Qing army entered the customs, Gao Mingheng still advocated resistance to the Qing Dynasty, which was very righteous.
Gao Mingheng was originally the county magistrate of Rugao, Jiangsu Province. Later, due to his outstanding political achievements, he successively served as the magistrate of Xinghua County, Yunnan Road Examination Supervisor Censor, and Henan Governor.
In the historical Battle of Kaifeng, it was Gao Mingheng who ordered to dig water to defeat the enemy and defeated Li Zicheng's army. Then in the winter of the 15th year of Chongzhen, the Qing troops attacked Yishui City. Gao Mingheng led his troops to resist for a long time. Seeing that the Ming Dynasty was over, he and his wife Zhang committed suicide. Although he is a civil servant, he is still strong enough.
At this time, Chen Yongfu was in an unbearable atmosphere, so he wanted to organize elites to go out of the city to snatch the bodies of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong, but he was stopped by Gao Mingheng: "If you leave the city at this time, you will never return. This is how Li Chuang wants to lure our troops out of the city!"
"Are you just going to watch the bodies of the two governors being humiliated!"
Chen Yongfu gritted his teeth and said, while Gao Mingheng sighed and said: "What else can we do? Now the food and grass in the city are almost exhausted, and the troops are not enough. We hope that reinforcements will arrive soon, otherwise we will have to dig up the Yellow River and flood the enemy." There’s a way!”
"Reinforcements?"
Chen Yongfu angrily punched the city wall and said angrily: "Where are the reinforcements? All the elites of the imperial court are in Liaodong, and there are no more troops available in the entire Central Plains!"
On that day, the bodies of Lu Xiangsheng and Fu Zonglong were beaten to pieces and then dumped outside the bandit camp.
Li Dingguo remembered that Lu Xiangsheng had fought a bloody battle against the Qing army and was considered a hero, so he collected Lu Xiangsheng's body, buried the mutilated body twenty miles east of Kaifeng City, and erected a monument for him without mentioning it.
As for Fu Zonglong’s body, it disappeared after being discarded for several days.
A few days later, the siege battle was still fierce, but a more terrible disaster had befallen all the people of Kaifeng.
As the city's grain reserves were almost exhausted, there was a market for every grain of gold in the city. The hungry defenders began to disobey orders and ransacked the market in the city frantically. The hungry soldiers even dug three feet into the ground to search for rations. Many people also tortured the people, extorted their property, and destroyed other buildings in the city except the prince's mansion.
Some greedy officials also took this opportunity to make a fortune from the national crisis. Even though they knew that grain in the city was worth tens of thousands of dollars, they forcibly requisitioned grain from wealthy families in the city at the price of five taels of silver per stone. If you cannot hand over so much grain, you will have to pay three hundred taels per stone. In the end, all the wealthy households in the city went bankrupt, and the ordinary middle class fell into abject poverty.
This is true for the officers and soldiers guarding the city and the wealthy households, but the common people are waiting for death with their whole families. Because the food shortage in the city is not caused by the hoarding of individual profiteers, there is no way to buy food even if you spend your life savings. They had no choice but to eat all the birds and animals, and began to chew the bark and roots of the trees. Others picked out maggots from the cesspools and ate them mixed with rotten cotton, torn leather and paper.
In just a few days, many people in Kaifeng City had died due to unrest and disease. Soon someone started to openly sell a strange kind of meat. Although it was claimed to be horse meat, one pound of meat was actually mixed with half a pound of corpses. This kind of meat is sold at an extremely high price, and can be sold for several taels of silver per catty.
Although everyone was suspicious of this meat with a very strange color and taste, they were unwilling to investigate further due to the situation. The entire city had completely turned into a hell on earth. Faced with such a chaotic situation, although Governor Gao Mingheng and Deputy General Chen Yongfu knew about it, they were powerless and could only stick to it day by day.
But on the sixth day, the young men who were unable to get food rations in the city stopped obeying orders and began to rob people of food in groups, even openly killing people and eating meat on the streets. The people in the city also united to defend the neighborhoods, often openly fighting with the young men who defended the city. The dead and prisoners in the conflict will naturally become the day's rations for both sides.
In this chaotic situation, Kaifeng's official Huang Peng, together with Hebei's patrol official Yan Yunjing, and more than a dozen city officials, went to the governor Gao Mingheng and asked for someone to dig up the Yellow River embankment to flood the bandit army. Save Kaifeng City.
Gao Mingheng couldn't make up his mind for a moment and closed his eyes in pain.
Some people died, but not completely...
