Chapter 150: Blood flowed in Wumingzhou
Ye Chen has made up his mind to fight against Luoyang. The decisive battle will not take place in Luoyang.
Just like when Li Shimin fought against Luoyang, the real decisive battle was at Hulao Pass.
Ye Chen also decided his fate with Fu Youde here. So we must first capture Guangwu Mountain.
Just fighting a tough battle is never a simple matter. And Sheng Yong is not an ordinary general. Before the war started, there may be a fog, but after both sides started taking action, the fog dissipated little by little.
Sheng Yong was not sure about Ye Chen's general attack direction at first. But just like that, Guangwu Mountain is also a key defense area. After the Northern Army launched a fierce attack on Guangwu Mountain. Naturally, Sheng Yong didn't know what Ye Chen was thinking.
As a result, Guangwu Mountain has reached the surface of the Yellow River near Guangwu Mountain. A fierce battle ensued.
Although it is not as rapid as the northwest battlefield, it is not without some progress.
On a Yellow River sandbar just north of Guangwu Mountain.
Union troops were counting the bodies.
The Union Army's own corpses were packed in sacks and transported to the rear, either burned to ashes or transferred to the rear. That is this person's official position.
If you are an officer, you can generally enjoy a coffin. The body is laid to rest at a nearby temple, waiting for family members to pick it up in the future. If they were soldiers, they were usually burned. The cremated ashes are also stored in a nearby temple.
After the war, they will probably find a geomantic treasure here and bury these ashes here, together with the bones of unclaimed officers. Then hundreds of acres of land were allocated to local monks and asked to take care of them.
This is actually an important business of ancient monks.
This is actually good enough. After all, the logistics lines in the rear are being opened up little by little.
The dozens of miles of railway connecting Weihe to Qinshui have been opened. Several trains and carriages were also transported from Beijing with great difficulty. They even searched for coal mines locally. There are coal mines in many places in the north, not to mention Huaiqing Mansion.
You must know that Huaiqing Prefecture was an important source of coal for Kaifeng Prefecture in the Song Dynasty.
In this way, after the logistics line is opened, many things can be tolerated. Otherwise, unless it is a general, the body cannot be kept. As for ordinary soldiers, they don't get the treatment of ashes. They are buried wherever they die. It's hard to even tell the cemetery.
Just like the corpses of the Southern Army today, the Northern Army was thrown directly into the Yellow River one by one.
After all, this nameless sandbank is located across the Yellow River. It is only more than a mile away from the north bank of the Yellow River and can be hit by artillery. It is also quite strong and capable of deploying artillery. As the forward position of the Confederate Army.
Both the Confederate and Northern armies exhausted their power during the battle.
The Northern Army soldiers could only crawl into the small boats, suffering huge casualties, and rushed onto the sandbank in waves. Fight for your life. This time, they used hundreds of death squads to rush in at night and create chaos. The Northern Army will put down small boats from the upper reaches, go down the river, and even attack the sandbar from the south. This was taken down in one fell swoop.
You can't blame these people for not being prepared.
In fact, they had only considered ships coming from the north shore, because this sandbar was facing the mouth of the Qinshui River. Even the formation of this sandbar is likely to be the result of the interaction between Qinshui River and the Yellow River.
In the upper reaches of the Yellow River, they had no boats.
But they didn't know that this time, Ye Chen tried his hand at land boating. After all, the ships in Qinshui were not big, so he simply dismantled them into parts. They had people use horse-drawn carriages or simply use manpower to drag them to the upper reaches of the Yellow River, and then they launched this desperate attack.
This is actually one aspect of Beijing’s industrial development.
This kind of ship is dismantled into parts and then reassembled at the destination. It seems very simple. But in fact, it was He Xi who unified weights and measures in Liaodong and imposed requirements on the processing system to reduce tolerances. Otherwise, after such disassembly and assembly, you won’t know what a lot of things look like.
This is also the reason why the ancient army did not use this method much, and more often made tools on the spot.
In this way, if the soldiers of the North and the South who died fighting for this small sandbank where hundreds of people could be deployed were buried on this sandbank, they would be able to
This sandbar was hollowed out.
However, let’s take a look at the sandbank. The second step of the Northern Army began. That is to build a pontoon bridge to connect the sandbar with the north shore. This isn't too difficult.
But once the construction is successful, the cannons from behind will be continuously deployed on the sandbank.
After these heavy artillery were added to the battlefield, the biggest advantage was that the Northern Army's artillery could bombard the foot of Guangwu Mountain.
The artillery placed on Guangwu Mountain naturally has a long range from its high position. It can even hit the sandbank. However, the Northern Army's artillery can be located near the foot of Guangwu Mountain. The biggest advantage is that the Southern Army's fortifications originally at the foot of Guangwu Mountain are difficult to maintain.
In other words, the problem of Northern troops landing on the south bank is no longer a big problem.
The biggest question is whether we can seize a beachhead on the south coast. Then we can attack Guangwu Mountain.
The Guangwu Mountain offensive and defensive battle seems to have entered its second stage.
But Sheng Yong quickly returned the favor.
Sheng Yong remained calm and just bombarded the sandbank with artillery every day. It's just determined by the soil quality of the sandbank, and solid shells are not very powerful. After all, if it fails to form a ricochet, a cannonball will crash down and sink directly into the sand.
As long as you're not unlucky enough to get a big hole punched out directly, the problem isn't too big.
After the pontoon bridge connecting the sandbar to the north shore was built.
Sheng Yong also sent death squads.
Dozens of fire ships rushed directly onto the pontoon.
The pontoon was burned into several sections overnight. Countless boats were scattered on the Yellow River and were washed downstream by the Yellow River water.
After all, floating bridges are easy to build. Just connect the boats with a few pieces of twine. But it's also easy to burn.
However, this situation is not a big deal to the Northern Army.
Almost a few days later, a new pontoon bridge appeared on the Yellow River. First of all, this pontoon bridge used iron chains, not two iron chains, but more than a dozen iron chains. That kind of chain that's miles long. On the sandbank, bridge piers were made with cement and locked with iron chains on the north bank. Forming an iron lock bridge.
In order to strengthen the load-bearing, many ship piers are used. This would allow access to the cannon.
But these ships are not important.
As long as these dozen iron locks are in place, these ships can be replaced at any time.
This kind of operation shocked Sheng Yong.
For a moment, I couldn't even believe it.
That feeling is similar to the feeling when the volunteers faced the U.S. airlift iron bridge during the Watergate Bridge.
Large iron chains such as iron ropes, which are several miles long, were difficult to process in ancient times. The famous Marco Polo Bridge is an iron-locked bridge. It was built with the efforts of a whole place and many people who spent all their wealth to build it. Nowadays, many historical materials can be found.
Soochow's original important measure for upstream defense was to block the river with iron cables.
In fact, there is not much difference from today's iron rope.
Such a project consumes too much manpower and material resources. In Sheng Yong's heart, he actually knew that he would burn the pontoon bridge. The Union Army could easily be rebuilt. They even decided to have a battle on the sandbank.
Without him, Sheng Yong's idea is very simple, that is, to hold the opponent back.
Don’t seek victory. The sandbank area was beaten so brutally. But the battlefield is small. At most, more than a thousand people are put into battle, and more troops cannot be deployed. Such casualties are bearable for Sheng Yong.
However, he never expected that such a result would occur within a few days.
As soon as this iron lock bridge came out. It is impossible for ordinary fire attacks to cut off the connection between the sandbank and the north shore and burn the ships that serve as bridge piers. But as long as the two sides are tightened and the planks are laid, the connection can be made directly, and the whole project does not take a day.
After all, it doesn't mean that a cable bridge cannot be made with ships placed underneath. But if it is a chain bridge, it cannot transport cannons or heavy carriages. If the soldiers support us, there won't be any problem at all.
Such a bridge exists. The sandbank can no longer be taken away.
Sheng Yong had no idea how developed Ming's steel industry had become. He used the standard of Daming Iron and Steel Industry in his impression.
Judging from the current situation, these iron locks needed to be hammered out one by one manually, which was naturally very slow. Not even for a year and a half. In fact, Ye Chen wasn't too clear about it. After all, he leads troops to fight all year round and doesn't pay attention to these things.
But he has advisers.
