The winter of the Little Ice Age has finally arrived. After several heavy snowfalls, the great plains of western Shandong and northern Shandong were covered with a vast expanse of white snow. Canals, Daqing Rivers, Tuhe Rivers, and the Old Yellow River all spanned the

In western Shandong and northern Shandong, all the large and small rivers in the land were frozen, and they could no longer stop the iron hoof 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 Province in the Ming Dynasty!

This army was the army that attacked Jinan led by Boluo, 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 unobstructed. Let's not talk about road conditions for the time being.

Being frequently harassed and blocked by the enemy 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!

The Qing Dynasty placed twenty or thirty Niu Lu under Zhenglu Banner in this area, while the Ming Dynasty had armed landowners under Gao Hongtu on one side - both sides had knives and deep hatreds! The land in this area was originally Shandong

The landlords and rich people here have now given so many green flags to the Qing Dynasty. How deep this hatred is, you can understand it just by looking at your heels.

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 been trained.

Now that the green soldiers in 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 ambushes 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?

As shock cavalry, the Eight Banners Cavalry may not be considered very good in this era, but as reconnaissance cavalry and light cavalry, they are definitely one of the best.

Moreover, the 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 Zhenglu Cavalry who followed the Laoba Banner were also from the northeast and northwest of the Ming Dynasty.

There are many excellent cavalry in the frontier army. Basically, everyone can ride a horse and everyone has a horse to ride.

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 Cihong have? It's just two regiments of heavy cavalry, plus seven battalions (each battalion has over 300 men) of light cavalry (attached to the division), which together only costs 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 Green 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 has become an officer leading troops.

Moreover, Emperor Zhu didn't have many good horses to use. Of the 5,000 cavalrymen in service, more than half didn't have decent horses to use.

The Ming cavalry was not good at riding on horseback, and neither was the horse under its crotch. Naturally, it had no capital to start a fierce outpost battle with the Qing cavalry on a 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 is not to demolish the landlord's house, and he doesn't have time to attack the forts one by one. So as long as those forts he likes hand over a certain amount of grain, they can escape.

....

After escaping the disaster, of course I tried every means to seek help from Jinan!

It seems that the main force of the Qing army has arrived at Jinan Prefecture!

Similar to the Jinan Prefecture, Huang Degong's Huaibei Town and Gao Jie's Xuhai Town also suffered.

The more than 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 are assigned to farm soldiers, and they also live in strongholds. The military households of a battalion live together in one place, but the fortresses they live in are much stronger than those of Shandong landlords. They are all made of wood.

A bastion made of rammed earth for meat and sandbags for skin. 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 during the gathering. At least one hundred regular soldiers were left in each village. In addition to the women and young men among the military dependents who could go to the city, and

Including the tenants of each family, a village can always gather three to five hundred people to go 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 at a glance the shortcomings of Huang Degong's deployment - there were too few villages! The distance between the villages was also too large, and it could not stop the invading Qing army at all.

So Mandahai simply passed through these simple bastions and headed eastward along the Suishui River, directly to the disputed boundary of Suining County between Huaibei Town and Xuhai Town. There are no bastions of landlord soldiers here, and Suining County

Because the city was far away from the front line and not particularly important, it was not renovated into a bastion. As a result, it was defeated by the Qing army from Mandahai in one fell swoop!

Now the problem is serious! Suining County is located in the southeast of Xuzhou, and is separated from Suqian and Pizhou, two key canals, by only one 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 moved to Xuzhou, it would mean that the large corps currently gathered in Liaocheng would 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 true strength of the enemy 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 operate with artillery must not be a small group, and they must not be taken lightly!"

Zhu Cixi stood in front of the map and looked at the seventeen or eighteen fortresses 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 fort lines."
Chapter completed!