The ground trembled.
On the distant horizon, a Qingqi dressed in black began to accelerate.
At first there were only a few riders, then dozens of riders, hundreds of riders...
The infantry marching in the field suddenly stopped.
The soldiers looked pale and looked at the officers in panic.
From this alone, it can be seen that they are somewhat organized. If they are a mob, they will not even look at the officers and just run away - at the end of each dynasty, the rebels who started the uprising were at this level.
The officers swallowed dryly. They didn't understand, where did the scouts go? Why didn't any of them come back?
"Form up!" the leading military governor shouted, and then drums sounded and flags were fired continuously.
After receiving the order, the junior officers immediately led their troops and acted under the golden drum banner.
The messengers rushed back and forth, conveying the subtle adjustment orders to various places.
The sergeants, with their mouths dry and their whole bodies trembling, piled the only vehicles in the front, and then piled various sundries and even anti-horse rifles in other directions.
While he was busy, he looked at the cavalry getting closer and closer, and his hands and feet became more and more inoperable.
Among the entire team of more than a thousand people, only the three hundred or so people in the center were relatively calm.
They came from Wuxing County and were part of the Qian family, a local tycoon in Wuxing.
Soldiers have a deep-seated respect for their superiors. Even if their superiors do not retreat, they do not dare to retreat even if they are very frightened.
The equipment in their hands was also good. Some of them were wearing iron armor and holding long spears. There were also infantry archers and crossbowmen. Judging from the way they worked together, it looked like they had not practiced before.
Overall, it's actually okay.
These people are the basis of the Jiangdong regime's separatist rule since Soochow: the wealthy private soldiers.
After entering the imperial dynasty, Zhang Chang and Shi Bing started a rebellion, and the governors of Jingzhou and Wancheng who suppressed them were severely defeated. King Xinye even died in battle. The final pacification was mainly due to them.
A typical example is the Yixing Zhou family, which sent out more than 10,000 private troops every time to put down the rebellion. Zhou Qi even gained the reputation of "Three Destinations of Jiangnan".
Today, the main force in suppressing Du Tao's rebellion is still powerful tribes from Jiangzhou, Xiangzhou, and Jingzhou, and even barbarian chiefs.
Of course, Sima Rui was also trying to build his own troops. After all, he couldn't always rely on the powerful families in the south of the Yangtze River, right? But time was still short, and he only recruited a few fifteen thousand people to defend Jianye, so he could not be dispatched easily.
Moreover, Sima Rui also encountered difficulties when recruiting sergeants...
Most of the population in the south of the Yangtze River was in the hands of powerful nobles. There were no peasant farmers, but they were relatively few and difficult to recruit. In the end, we had to find a solution among the refugees and noble villagers in the south. It was really difficult - in history, the Beifu soldiers
Therefore, it is not without reason that the northern refugees who migrated south are mainly the ones from the north. It is not easy to recruit locals from Jiangnan.
"Anyone who retreats will be killed!" Qian Ci, the commander of the army, stepped forward quickly, thrust his sword in front of him, and shouted fiercely.
"Behead those who retreat!" Qian's tribe, led by the officers, shouted with weapons in hand.
The slightly chaotic soldiers who were walking around gradually stopped commotion and stared wide-eyed at the cavalry that was getting closer and closer.
The tremors on the ground became more and more violent, and the cavalry charges became faster and faster.
The infantrymen were in some commotion again.
There's really nothing I can do about it, the big horse charging up is so scary, I'm scared just looking at it.
Some people have already started to sneak back.
Qian Ci immediately assigned several small officers and asked them to go forward with their men and kill more than ten escaping soldiers on the spot.
When the bloody heads were thrown to the ground, the commotion subsided again.
"Boom..." The sound of horse hooves continued.
However, when approaching the enemy's position, the horse's speed slowly slowed down.
The officers skillfully changed their formations. Hundreds of cavalry were divided into two groups within a stone's throw, and each moved to the left and right to outflank the enemy. This did not frighten the enemy, indicating that the enemy in front of them was not a mob, so execute it.
The second step is to ride around and shoot.
"Whoosh! Whoosh!" The dense arrows shot through the air and were thrown into the crowd of infantry.
The people on the outermost fringe started crying and running around.
Qian's tribe killed more than a dozen soldiers who were running around, and then the shield men stepped forward, and the archers took the time to shoot, taking advantage of the range and power to cause damage to the cavalry.
The crossbowman was also clumsily loading the crossbow arrows, but he was too nervous, his hands were shaking, and the loading movement was very slow.
The riders kept screaming and falling off their horses, but the arrows fired from the riding bows also kept killing people.
If it's not powerful enough, just use quantity.
The five or six hundred horsemen who rushed up were all archers. They kept spinning in circles on their horses, picking up their bows and arrows, and they were as dense as locusts.
At this time, if there were three hundred archers, under the cover of shieldmen, they would have shot these cavalry to death, but it is a pity that they did not...
The first thing to go wrong was at the rear.
After all, this was an encounter. The infantry encountered the enemy in a hurry and failed to make complete preparations. The three hundred infantry sent to set up obstacles in the rear were natives of Xuzhou. They had only been in the army for a short period of time and were not as elite as Qian's tribe. They were shot by the cavalry.
After two rounds, there were no casualties.
At the critical moment, more than a hundred cavalrymen suddenly rushed out from behind the cavalry archers, holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, and directly scattered the crumbling Xuzhou infantry.
"Jienu!" someone shouted.
But it was too late. The sharp iron sword cut through his belly, and the sharp saber slashed on his neck. Where the blood spurted out, the infantrymen scattered and fled.
The cavalry seized the opportunity, risked the horse's speed to slow down, and advanced again and again, inserting themselves deeply into the enemy's infantry, causing a large amount of chaos.
The infantry made noises everywhere, and the originally orderly counterattack formation instantly collapsed.
The crossbowman gave up loading and was at a loss.
The archer turned around and looked back, subconsciously shooting the Jieren cavalry charging from behind.
But behind them, a denser rain of arrows than before struck quickly, breaking through the shield hand's blockage, getting through the gaps and gaps, and knocking down the infantry archers in pieces.
It turned out that the Xiongnu and Jieren Qingqi who were cruising in the periphery saw their own assault cavalry wedge into the enemy formation from behind, disrupting their rhythm. They immediately boldly approached and shot with better accuracy at a distance of thirty steps.
Jiangdong Infantry.
Under attack from both inside and outside, this infantry force of more than a thousand people immediately showed a tendency to be defeated.
Liu Hezhu, who was fighting outside for more than a hundred steps, decisively committed his reserve team: 300 mounted archers and 200 close combat cavalry.
The five hundred cavalry raised up smoke and quickly approached the Jiangdong infantry who had fled in a large area. They fired with their bows and waved their sabers, easily harvesting lives.
Qian Ci, the commander of the army, led more than a hundred infantrymen and fought desperately from the center of the battlefield where men and horses were intertwined.
They did not run away, because if they ran they would die, but if they fought they would not die.
More than a hundred people formed a formation around the chariot, with shieldmen on the outside, spearmen and archers on the inside, trying to resist stubbornly.
No one paid any attention to them.
Liu Hezhu commanded his light cavalry to pursue the defeated troops and eliminate as many of the enemy's effective forces as possible.
Qian Ci and others saw it with eyes splitting, but there was nothing they could do.
More than a thousand cavalrymen wreaked havoc for a while, and after killing the last Jiangdong infantry still standing on the battlefield, they gathered up their formation and looked at Qian Ci and others from a distance.
There was no persuasion to surrender.
A moment later, a horn sounded, and the group of bloodthirsty cannibals circled around Qian Ci and others again.
The circle was relatively large at first, but slowly began to shrink. When the first arrow fell, it meant that the bloody final battle had begun.
It was almost a one-sided massacre.
There were very few Jiangdong infantry archers surrounded in the center, and they only caused casualties of a dozen or so riders, who were soon nailed to the ground.
The remaining spearmen, sword and shield bearers had almost no power to fight back.
In desperation, they rushed out of the car formation and launched a desperate charge against the Jie cavalry.
It's too late.
The Jie cavalry scattered around and surrounded and fired, quickly extinguishing the last embers.
Liu Hezhu slowly stepped forward and silently looked at the messy battlefield.
For a moment, he found his confidence again.
The tried-and-tested tactic of riding around and shooting failed once, making him doubt his life. Now it seems that it is still useful.
But he soon thought of the overwhelming rain of arrows from the Silver Spear Army, damn it!
What kind of brain is there to train every soldier to be an archer, a sword and shield bearer, and a spearman?
A troop whose members are all capable of archery and close combat is simply the nemesis of light cavalry like them.
In fact, the Jiangdong Infantry Army we encountered today was not too bad.
At least, when Shi Le first arrived in Yecheng, his soldiers were only at this level, as Liu Hezhu saw with his own eyes.
However, these Wu people were not equipped with a large number of archers and crossbowmen. This was their mistake, or it may be that they did not react. After all, there were rarely such large-scale cavalry charges in Jiangnan.
Desolate songs sounded on the battlefield.
The light cavalry had dismounted and buried the bodies of both sides on the spot.
Amidst the singing, the rivers and lakes in the south are faintly visible.
There is Xiapi, a city surrounded by water.
Outside Xiapi City, there were a large number of naval officers and many warships. That was not their home field.
"Report the victory to Commander Xi and kill 1,230 people including Qian Ci, the pioneer general of Zu Ti." Liu Hezhu ordered.
The civil servants accompanying the army spread out their pen and paper and began to write a victory report.
The ancients said that "a boat in the south and a horse in the north" is true.
There is also "use one's own strengths to attack the enemy's weaknesses".
The first confrontation between the two major military and political groups, Shao Xun and Sima Rui, ended twenty miles northeast of Xiapi.
After the victorious party swept the battlefield, they left in a hurry.
The losing side arrived near the battlefield by boat in the evening. After sending people to search, they finally determined the location and results of the battlefield.
Xi Jian and Zu Ti, the frontline commanders of both sides, flew to Xuchang and Jianye as quickly as possible.
In the following days, there was calm between the two sides. Each side reduced its troops and tried to find out the other side's deployment and how to avoid fighting in the opponent's advantageous situation.
Xi Jian tried to use the relatively good field combat capabilities of cavalry and infantry to defeat Zu Ti's main force in one fell swoop.
Zu Ti tried to use Xiapi's terrain surrounded by water and nearby rivers and lakes to defeat the enemy in one fell swoop.
Plus, he's waiting for another advantage.
On May 18, the heavy rain came as expected and lasted for several days.
Between Xiapi and Pengcheng, it seems as if the sky has collapsed, and there is a watery countryside.
At this time, the news also reached Kaocheng via Xuchang.
Shao Xun, who had just met with scholars from all over Yanzhou, opened it and read it immediately.
In addition, he also received another "good news": someone came to look for him because he hadn't been home for a long time.
Chapter completed!