At Shajianzi Mountain, Qiao Yiqi, who was in charge of supervising the artillery, finally waited for the best time to attack the slave thieves.
More than two thousand Xianglan Banner Zhenyi warriors were waiting for Baoyi Aha to rush into the Ming army's formation. They lined up in strict order and accelerated towards the Ming army's front amid the loud shouts of Niu Lu'e Zhen.
The Zhenyi soldiers approaching like a wall gradually approached the position three thousand steps in front of Qiao Yiqi, and were about to enter the range of the French cannon.
Standing at Qiao Yiqi's position and looking down the mountain, he had a panoramic view of the battlefield.
The auxiliary soldiers used stone mosses to mark the artillery fire two days ago. The distance points from three thousand steps to three hundred steps were marked with stone mosses of different shapes.
Groups of Zhenyi warriors holding shields and swords were walking past Shizui, chasing the lone Ming army spearmen in front of them. Some of them had bagas with blue flags on their backs and rode on horseback. Guards on the left and right sides maintained the order of the soldiers' line.
Qiao Yiqi came from a family of officials and was a martial arts scholar in the 32nd year of Wanli. Mr. Qiao has been a knight-errant since he was a child. He is good at attacking and talking about war. When Wanli came to aid the DPRK, he recruited local warriors in his hometown and prepared to serve the country. As a result, he was framed by his enemies for treason and was imprisoned. Fortunately, he was rescued by Yuan Keli. He also met the nobles Xiong Tingbi, Zhang Ti and others, and was transferred to the garrison of Xuanfu.
In the original history, after the Liaodong Incident, Qiao Yiqi was recommended by the ministers to supervise the army on the East Road. Liu Wei was defeated and he led the remaining soldiers to retreat from Dishui Cliff. The Koreans wanted to capture him and asked Hou Jin to take credit. Qiao Yiqi committed suicide in anger and died in Sarhu. He completed his legendary life on the battlefield.
This Mr. Qiao is not only skilled in archery and horsemanship, but also proficient in calligraphy. He is from the same hometown as Dong Qichang, Yuan Keli and other big men, and is related by marriage. In the late Ming Dynasty, when party disputes were frequent, the power behind this man must not be underestimated.
The reason why Liu Zhaosun persuaded his adoptive father to arrange for Qiao Yiqi to guard the artillery position and let Mr. Qiao stay in a relatively safe position was partly because he admired Qiao Yiqi as a person, and partly because he wanted to have a good relationship with the Jiangnan civil servants and leave a way for his future development.
"Lord Qiao! The Franchise, General Cannon, and Weiyuan Cannon are all ready! They can fire at any time!"
The thin artillery commander trotted up to the supervisor, stamping his feet and shouting. These Ming army gunners often fired cannons and their ears were hard to use. They usually shouted like this.
Just now, Baoyi Aha suffered a disastrous defeat in the battle. Qiao Yiqi saw it and couldn't help but sigh that a man should be like this. Just when he was immersed in the classical fantasy of going straight to the Yellow Dragon and sweeping holes and plowing the courtyard, he was suddenly awakened by this boss and was frightened. A jump.
"Boom! Give me a hard blast! Kill all these wolf-hearted Tatars who have failed the emperor's favor! Don't save your artillery. After Amin is destroyed, sir, I will go to Hetuala and kill the slave chief with my own hands. !”
The thin man was shocked by the awe-inspiring righteousness exuding from the General Supervisor Army, and said quickly:
"Sir! We still have some pikemen fighting with the Tatars. I'm afraid if the cannons hit them..."
After hearing this, Qiao Yiqi stepped forward and grabbed the collar of the chief mandarin duck coat, and picked him up directly:
"As a general, you must not be benevolent as a woman. If the Zhejiang army's formation is broken, we will definitely die! Do you want the Tatars to break our army's formation? Do you want me to join you and kill your nine tribes? ?If you don’t want to, just fire quickly!”
The thin man had never encountered such a fierce civil servant before. He was almost strangled to death. He gasped for air, his head shook like a rattle, and he turned around and trotted away.
"fire!"
The 12 Weiyuan cannons were like violent behemoths, emitting a low roar and spitting out tongues of fire and white smoke. The 3-pound 6-tael cannonballs rotated at high speed, passing over the slightly messy pikemen square in front, and hit the blue-flag battle heavily. On the military front.
The gun body of this kind of artillery is like a huge vase. In order to reduce the weight, the gun body has no iron hoops. It is mounted on a wooden gun cart in the field and can be moved with the army. The gun cart is equipped with an anchor hook and is fixed to the ground when firing, ensuring a huge Recoil does not harm the gunner.
Each Weiyuan gun is equipped with three gunners. There is a piston on the fire door to prevent rain and rain. When the big cannon is installed, it can effectively aim within two thousand steps and can kill within three thousand steps. When it is equipped with small lead, it can 100 pieces are made, the small lead can reach 500 steps, and the bullet spreads over about 40 steps.
This kind of firearm, which was improved by Qi Jiguang during the Jiajing period, was considered a veritable antique by the end of the Wanli period. It had no other advantages except a slightly longer range.
At this time, the Ming army's artillery battalions were generally equipped with Fran cannons with higher firing speed, higher accuracy and better heat dissipation.
This time, Liu Wei led his troops from the south to come thousands of miles to come for reinforcements. It was inconvenient to carry firearms. When they arrived in Shenyang, what Yang Hao sent to the Eastern Route Army were old antiques like the Weiyuan Cannon. Franji also sent some, but the quantity was far less than that of Juniper and Marin.
Qiao Yiqi looked at the direction of the Weiyuan cannon with a complicated expression. He had seen various Franco cannons in the south and expressed disdain for these old cannons in front of him.
In this round of firing, two artillery pieces misfired, but fortunately the barrels did not explode. All the remaining ten shells were fired, of which only three shells fell into the Houjin army, and the remaining seven flew to unknown places.
The two shells directly hit the Jin Army formation behind the back row, plowing out a long bloody groove in the dense crowd. After penetrating the bodies of five or six Zhenyi armored soldiers, they finally landed next to a white armored soldier supervising the formation. , the lucky white-armored soldier was so frightened that his face turned pale.
The remaining shot hit a spearman, breaking his calf, and continued to roll into the Houjin army. A Houjin sword and shield hand raised a cowhide shield to try to block it. The shell penetrated the shield and smashed his head to pieces. , flew away diagonally.
It was as if a piece of the originally tight front line was suddenly cut off. After a brief period of confusion, a dozen real barbarians came up from behind to fill the gap left by the dead and continue to charge forward.
Qiao Yiqi looked at the results of the shelling at the foot of the mountain. He put aside his displeasure and showed a proud look. He did not expect that the Weiyuan Artillery could be so sharp against the dense battle formation.
"Keep bombarding, don't stop!"
The thin man hesitated for a moment, and then he was sure that the supervisor was calling him, and he quickly ran to Qiao Yiqi with a smile on his face.
"Sir! What did you just say?!"
Qiao Yiqi felt that her eardrums were about to be deafened, so she suppressed her anger and said to him:
"I told you to keep firing!"
There was a strange cry of blue flags charging into the formation in the distance, and there was some noise around them.
"What did the master say?"
"I say, you continue to fire!!"
Qiao Yiqi's neck turned red from suppressing the pain. From the corner of his eye, he saw the pikemen still retreating, and felt very anxious.
The commander of the artillery battalion finally heard clearly this time. He cupped his hands to Qiao Yiqi, shook his head and said:
"Master! The barrel needs to dissipate heat, and the barrel is still being cleaned. It will take a while,"
Qiao Yiqi was anxious and angry, and said angrily:
"Where are the other guns? Use the Franchise,"
The general hesitated for a moment, then realized that the military supervisor knew very little about artillery, otherwise he wouldn't have dared to stand so close for fear of being blown away.
"Sir, the Fran machine gun Shenyang gave us in the artillery camp has a range of only 1,500 steps. We don't have enough guns. We have to wait until Jiannu gets closer before we can attack. The random attack is long gone!"
"Keep firing! Otherwise I will kill you now! Get out!"
Qiao Yiqi pulled out Shang Fang's sword, which scared him so much that he trotted away.
Qiao Yiqi was in a irritable mood. If he returned to the capital alive, he would definitely impeach Yang Hao and kill his whole family.
He raised his head and looked ahead. The black and blue-flag-encrusted Zhenyi continued to charge into the pikemen's line. They were unstoppable, and the Zhejiang army's formation was in danger of collapsing.
Guerrilla general Deng Qilong, who was wearing the uniform of a fourth-grade military attache, was rushing anxiously between the camps, shouting for his subordinates to form formations to defend against the enemy. A few white arrow feathers were vaguely visible outside his chainmail.
"A fierce general should be like this!"
In a blink of an eye, I looked down at the foot, where the North Korean gunmen who were hiding under the mountain were calmly firing their guns. Seeing that the situation was not good, they were like panicked birds. They screamed and climbed up from the trench, preparing to escape. Liu Jing's family Dinglian was behind him to supervise the battle. After killing a few people, he returned to the trench.
In front of the trench, Liu Zhaosun stood on his horse, looking up at the results of the artillery fire in the distance, feeling quite satisfied.
After the first round of shelling, the surging blue-flag soldiers were killed and injured fifty, and their morale suddenly dropped a lot.
Just when Liu Zhaosun was feeling proud, he suddenly heard a dull explosion from behind.
The artillery camp behind him was in chaos. The barrel of an Invincible General's gun exploded. The two gunners were riddled with bullet holes and were killed on the spot.
Several gunners at the nearby gun emplacement were hit by sawdust from the collapsing gun truck. They covered their faces, howled in pain, and rolled around on the ground.
In the blink of an eye, the Ming army lost more than a dozen gunners. The remaining gunners stood far away, not daring to fire anymore despite being whipped by Master Qiao with a riding crop.
Liu Zhaosun had long known that the Ming army's firearms were of poor quality, but he didn't expect to be so unlucky to encounter them.
The Invincible General's cannon is a Fran type breech-loaded cannon, and the internal gunpowder is black powder. Because the quality and efficiency of the black powder preparation in this era were not stable enough and the explosive effect was low, some unskilled gunners often increased the dosage in order to increase the range. Coupled with the casting defects of the gun body, it was often easy to cause the barrel to explode.
As a time traveler, although I was well prepared for the explosion, I was still a little uncomfortable with it actually happening next to me.
These were all skilled gunners recruited from the south. Some of them had learned how to fire cannons at the Bogarao Cannon Foundry in Macau. They belonged to the most sophisticated talents of this era. One by one they died.
More than a dozen gunners were killed and injured. The losses were too great. Moreover, the gunners on our own side were bombed, and the impact on the morale of the troops was self-evident.
A terrifying thought suddenly flashed into Liu Zhaosun's mind. Time travel may not necessarily change history.
If the military system of the Ming Dynasty cannot be completely reformed and the combat effectiveness of this classical army cannot be improved in a short period of time, it will be impossible.
The cheers of mountains and tsunamis came from the array of blue flags. The real barbarians who had been suppressed by artillery just now waved their weapons and cheered, shouting barbarian words such as destiny.
The panicked pikemen were disturbed by the explosion behind them, and the formation began to become chaotic.
To be fair, the strength of these Zhejiang soldiers was far from the Qi family army at its peak. Their military discipline is even different from that of Qi's army, but their high morale has supported them in fighting until now.
After suffering repeated blows, the barely maintained front finally collapsed.
The Xianglan Banner Zhenyi are all veterans of old wars, and they keenly seize fleeting opportunities on the battlefield. Seeing that the Ming Army's pikemen showed signs of loosening, they immediately attacked like vicious wolves and continued to expand the breach.
In the middle of the line, the casualties of the pikemen suddenly increased. The corpses of the Ming soldiers killed by the Zhenyi soldiers piled up like a hill. The Zhenyi soldiers behind them continued to rush towards the center of the position along the opened gap.
Zhenyi, who broke into the center, was not in a hurry to charge forward, but turned sideways to outflank the two wings.
Their combat intention was very clear, which was to surround the Ming army in front of them and completely annihilate it.
At this time, the two sides were mixed together. The Ming army's artillery misfired and the gunmen did not dare to fire. Only Liu Wei's servants and those brave Korean soldiers were still shooting with bows and arrows, providing limited support to the Zhejiang soldiers.
Liu Zhaosun closed his eyes in pain. Is this really destiny?
