The winter of the Little Ice Age has finally arrived. After several heavy snowfalls, the great plains of western and northern Shandong were covered with a vast expanse of white snow. The Canal, the Daqing River, the Tu River, and the Old Yellow River, all the large and small rivers that stretched across the land of western and northern Shandong, were all frozen, and they could no longer stop the iron hoofs of the Qing army.
Just when Kong Youde committed suicide, sacrificed his life for righteousness, and drank arsenic wine, a hundred or so miles away from Liaocheng, in Yucheng County and Jiyang County under Jinan Prefecture, a group of eight-color cavalry and green riding horses (mules) The infantry, as well as the long marching dragon composed of the horse-drawn Hongyi small cannon and the one-pound general cannon, are rolling forward, with an unstoppable trend, all the way to Jinan, the capital of Shandong in the Ming Dynasty!
This army was the army that attacked Jinan led by Bolo, Prince of Duanzhong County of the Qing Dynasty. They were all "four-legged". They might not be able to travel seventy or eighty miles a day, but walking fifty miles a day in this ice and snow was no problem. None.
Of course, Zhu Cixiang's new army to overcome difficulties can achieve this marching speed, but the prerequisite for a fast march is that it cannot be frequently harassed and blocked by the enemy, and the road conditions are good and unimpeded. Putting aside the road conditions, not being frequently harassed and blocked by enemy troops while marching on the front line is a difficult goal to achieve. On the North China Plain, to achieve this goal, you must have powerful cavalry that can suppress the enemy!
And the cavalry is precisely the weakness of the Ming army and the strength of the Qing army!
In the Daqing River and Tu River basins in Jinan Prefecture, the territories of the two sides are intertwined and become a mess!
What the Qing Dynasty placed in this area were twenty or thirty Niu Lu from the Zhenglv Banner, while the Ming Dynasty had armed landlords under Gao Hongtu's command - both sides had sword handles, and they also had deep hatreds! The land in this area originally belonged to the wealthy landlords in Shandong, but now so much of it has been circled by the Qing Dynasty's green flag. You can understand how deep this hatred is when you think about it with your heel.
Therefore, in the past two years, in the Daqing River and Tuhe areas, there was a small fight every three days, and a big fight every five days. The thugs on both sides have experienced it.
Now that the green battalions of the Qing Dynasty are shrinking, aren't they the Ming Dynasty's landlord armed forces with their tails raised?
If there is no strong cavalry to clear the way, just dealing with harassment and ambush by small groups of troops along the way will greatly slow down the march of Bolo's clear troops.
But how can a small group of landowners be the opponent of Bolo's old Eight Banners cavalry?
The Eight Banners Cavalry may not be considered very good as shock cavalry in this era, but as reconnaissance cavalry and light cavalry, they are definitely one of the best.
Moreover, Laoba Banner is equipped with an all-horse team, and everyone can juggle on horseback, enough to undertake the very important "chores" of reconnaissance, search, and pursuit. The main body of the Zhenglv Cavalry who followed the old Eight Banners were also the frontier troops in the northeast and northwest of the Ming Dynasty. There were many excellent cavalry among them. Basically, everyone could ride a horse and everyone had a horse to ride on.
Therefore, there are a lot of rangers who can be spread out in Bolo, thousands of them. Not to mention the small groups of landlords, even the large groups of New Army cavalry who can overcome difficulties dare not compete with them for battlefield control!
How many cavalry does Zhu Cixi have? It's just two regiments of heavy cavalry, plus seven battalions (each battalion has more than 300 people) of light cavalry (attached to the division), and the total cost is just over 5,000.
Half of them are not good at horseback skills and cannot defeat the elites of the Old Eight Banners. They are even worse than the horse soldiers of the Zhenglu Banner. This is because there are a large number of elite soldiers with better horseback skills (mostly servants and rogues from the old camp). ) has been promoted in the past few years and became an officer leading troops.
And Emperor Zhu didn't have many good horses to use. More than half of the 5,000 cavalry in service do not have decent war horses.
The Ming cavalry was not good at riding on horseback, nor were the horses under their crotches. Naturally, they had no capital to start a fierce outpost battle with the Qing cavalry on the vast battlefield.
The serious cavalry of the Ming army were no match, let alone the armed landlords in the Daqing River and Tuhe areas.
If this is not worse, what is even worse is that not only can they not delay the actions of the Qing troops, they can't even defend their own fort wall - there is a Hongyi small cannon Niulu on the Bolo road, equipped with 6 guns Three-pounders and six one-pound cannons are not enough to attack a fortified city like Jinan, but how can an ordinary landlord's fort withstand it?
Fortunately, Bolo's purpose here was not to demolish the landlord's house, and he didn't have time to attack the forts one by one. So as long as those villages that he likes hand over a certain amount of grain, they can escape...
After escaping the disaster, of course he tried his best to seek help from Jinan!
The main force of the Qing army seems to have arrived in Jinan!
Huang Degong's Huaibei Town and Gao Jie's Xuhai Town also suffered similar experiences to Jinan Prefecture.
The 10,000-strong Nine Flags force led by Mandahai also took advantage of Zhu Cixiang's main force to besiege Liaocheng, went south from Guide Mansion, and entered Suzhou in Huaibei Town. They were equally unstoppable!
In Suzhou, Huaibei Town, there are Zhuangzi who confer field soldiers, and they also live in villages. The military households of a battalion lived together in one place, but the forts they lived in were much stronger than those of Shandong landlords. They were all made of wood for bones, rammed earth for meat, and sandbags for skins. There are trenches on the outside, and a general cannon is mounted on the bastion.
Moreover, Huang Degong also guarded his home base from being ravaged by the Tatars, so he reserved a hand when gathering, leaving at least a hundred regular soldiers in each village. Adding in the women and young men among the military dependents who could go up to the city, plus the tenants from each family, a village could always gather three to five hundred people to go up to the city.
There were not many of them, but it would be difficult for the Qing army to break them, and they might suffer heavy casualties!
However, Mandahai was also a famous general in the world, and he could see the shortcomings of Huang Degong's deployment at a glance - there were too few villages! The distance between the various villages was also too large, and it was impossible to block the invading Qing army.
So Mandahai simply passed through these simple bastions and headed east along the Suishui River, directly to the disputed Suining County boundary between Huaibei Town and Xuhai Town. There is no bastion for the landlords here, and because Suining County is far away from the front line, it is not particularly important, so no bastion reconstruction was carried out. As a result, they were defeated by the Qing army in Mandahai in one fell swoop!
Now the problem is serious! Suining County is located in the southeast of Xuzhou. It is only separated from Suqian and Pizhou, two canal strategic points, by a river (the Yellow River), and it is also a frozen Yellow River!
The Xing family (Gao Jie's wife) who stayed in Pizhou gathered troops and organized defense, and at the same time dispatched 600 troops to call for help from Zhu Cixiang who was far away in Liaocheng.
And Zhu Cixiang was a little dumbfounded after receiving urgent military reports from Jinan and Pizhou at the same time!
He thought he was advancing step by step, but he didn't expect that the gap left behind was so big...
"Your Majesty, Jinan Prefecture is not in a hurry, but Xuzhou and Haizhou cannot be lost!" When traveling in Liaocheng, military advisor Li Yan immediately suggested to Emperor Zhu Da, "Your Majesty, please move to Xuzhou immediately!"
Zhu Cixiang acted with two infantry divisions, two cavalry regiments, two artillery regiments and a guard battalion. If he moves to Xuzhou, it means that the large corps currently gathered in Liaocheng will be divided into two.
Zhu Cixiang asked hesitantly: "Do you know how many Donglu troops broke into Suining? Are they Dorgon's main force?"
Li Yan shook his head: "We don't know! Even the beacon fire in Huaibei was not ignited in time... The enemy's strength is even more unknown. But they can attack Suining County in one fell swoop, so they obviously have some strength. According to reports, the enemy The Donglu used a lot of artillery during the siege. The Donglu now only have eight Hongyi small artillery pieces in total. The troops that can carry the artillery must not be a small group, and we must not take it lightly!"
Zhu Cixi stood in front of the map and looked at the seventeen or eighteen bastions along the canal that stretched for more than 400 miles from Liaocheng to Peixian County. He just sighed: "I didn't expect that Dorgon would bypass all the 400-mile bastion lines." Already..."
