The time of half a stick of incense passed quickly.
"It seems that the person in charge of Tanjiazhai is ready to fight to the end. Let our artillery team take action! Didn't there also be artillery in the village? It's just time for a gunners' showdown." Qin Qi said in a relaxed tone.
Hearing this, Xu Guang smiled and said: "You really think highly of them. A local strongman knows how to use artillery. If he can fire a cannon, he is considered to be good at how to use artillery."
He had never looked down upon the local tyrants who formed strongholds to protect themselves.
Maybe these people had money and were willing to spend it on soldiers and armor. They were even better than many Ming troops in building strongholds and defense, because they were willing to spend money at critical moments.
But when it comes to playing with cannons, he fought all the way from Datong to Shanxi, then to Shaanxi, and finally to Shandong. He encountered a village with cannons more than once, but not many people really knew how to use cannons. At most, they were from the Ming army. Get two soldiers who can handle cannons.
It's not that he looked down upon him, but he had never met one who could compare professionally with the gunners in their Tiger-Character Banner army, except for the Tiger-Character Banner's own men.
"Haha, even if you know how to fire cannons, that's okay." Qin Qi laughed.
For artillery, a more professional branch of the military, many local forces do regard firing artillery as a criterion for whether they can operate artillery.
"Send the order and let the artillery team take action. No mercy, pull out all the cannons and let me fire into the stockade." Xu Guang asked someone to send the order to the artillery team.
The gunners are all in front of the battle line.
The current artillery fires more directly, and the target is basically within the line of sight.
When two armies confront each other, artillery is usually placed in front of the formation, or near the front of the wings, and is rarely too far from the target.
The reason for this is that the first is the range issue, and the second is the hit rate issue.
Due to limited conditions, many technologies have not yet been developed. The hit problem of cannons has never been too high. After all, the power of black powder is not particularly powerful. In addition, the problems of cannons themselves are also not small.
Beep!
A rapid copper whistle sounded.
I saw someone in the artillery team waving the flag hard, and then one cannon was fired.
The cannonballs left the barrel one after another and fell towards Tanjiazhai in front.
Xu Guang came to Jinan Mansion and brought thirty or forty cannons, and they were all slightly lighter four-pound cannons.
These cannons might be less effective if they were used to bombard a fortified town like Jinan Fucheng, but against a small village like Tanjiazhai, they could easily collapse the surrounding earthen walls.
Even several residential houses near the village wall were smashed into ruins by falling artillery shells.
Behind the earthen wall of Tanjiazhai were some young men from the village, who were used to deal with the Tiger Flag army outside the village.
When the earthen wall collapsed, people from two villages were buried inside, and more than a dozen Minzhuang people were killed or injured under the cannon.
Seeing that the situation was not good, the remaining Minzhuang dispersed and ran toward the inner wall.
Tanjiazhai is divided into inner and outer cities.
Of course, calling it a city is an exaggeration, but the layout is indeed similar to the scale of an inner city and an outer city.
The outer city is larger, and mostly poor people live there. In addition, there are also several influential people from Tanjiazhai who also live in the outer city.
However, although these big shots in Tanjiazhai live in the outer city, they live close to the inner city and are only separated from the inner city by a wall.
In the inner city, only the family of the patriarch of Tanjiazhai lived, and the rest were the servants of the patriarch's family and the thugs raised at home.
A large village like Tanjiazhai is already considered a relatively large town.
It is impossible to make everyone in the village honest and obedient by relying solely on the prestige of the clan leader. At this time, thugs need to come forward to deal with some of the thorns in the village.
As the earthen wall outside the village collapsed, those who could escape quickly escaped.
Those left behind were either corpses or people who were injured and unable to walk.
"Send a team of people in to clean up the battlefield and eliminate threats to the artillery team." Xu Guang ordered.
A team of several hundred soldiers entered the village through a gap in the earthen wall.
The remaining gates of the stockade were opened, and the resistance forces in the surrounding stockades were cleared so that the artillery team could safely transport the cannons into the stockade.
There is also an inner city in the stockade. If you want to open the inner city, you will inevitably need cannons to move forward.
"Would you like to follow me and have a look?" Xu Guang asked Qin Qi who was standing aside.
After hearing this, Qin Qi glanced at the village, then shook his head and said: "There is nothing interesting to see. I have seen a lot of villages with weak resistance like this. Without the city wall to rely on, they are no different from bandits and bandits."
No matter how bad the Ming army is, it is still a regular army. As long as it is a regular army, it needs training, and the Ming Dynasty has its own training methods for so many years.
A village like Tanjiazhai seems to be able to defeat bandits and guard against insurgents. In fact, there is no formal training method in the village. It relies entirely on the bravery of some people who dare to fight. The people who fight are those who have been killed. A raised thug.
Villages like Tanjiazhai are more for self-preservation. Most of the young people who guard the village are usually either long-term workers from large families, short-term workers, or tenants.
These people have to work for big companies, and there is no training at all.
In the eyes of the people in the village, they can defeat bandits and rebels, which is already very powerful. However, in the eyes of Xu Guang, an officer from the Tiger Flag, the so-called Ming army in the Tanjiazhai Company Guard Station is Rather, it can at best be regarded as a larger bandit village.
Regarding the cottages that deal with bandits, Xu Guang led troops to suppress bandits many times in Datong and Shanxi, so he is no longer familiar with what he is familiar with.
Once the outer city of Tanjiazhai was broken, some of the young men fled back home, and more people fled into the inner city, especially those thugs raised by the Tanjiazhai. As long as they survived, they basically returned to the inner city.
"What's going on? Why are everyone back?"
The chaotic sounds in the inner city attracted the idea of the patriarch Tan Qingchun, who walked out of the room with the men of Tanjiazhai.
At this time, the housekeeper trotted over.
"Master, I heard from those who escaped that the tiger thieves used cannons to destroy the outermost wall of the village, and many people died. The others all fled back when they saw that the wall was gone."
"Nonsense, even if the outer wall collapses, you have to stay outside and retreat without firing an arrow. Wouldn't it give the tiger thieves the opportunity to directly surround the inner city." The clan leader Tan Qingchun said with an annoyed look. .
The butler was speechless.
The loss of the outer city was a matter of those young men. He was just a housekeeper, and the success or failure of defending the city could not be blamed on him.
At this time, the old man with white hair and a crutch in his hand said: "I heard it. The reason why they escaped so quickly is because the tiger thieves have cannons. Don't we also have cannons? Why don't we use them to fight back!"
Tan Qingchun, the elder of the clan, looked embarrassed when he heard this.
He had to explain: "We don't have many cannons. It's not enough to keep them outside, so I took the initiative to move all the cannons here in the inner city to protect everyone."
