Now that preparations were made for the battle in Gucheng, the entire Zuowuguan became busy on the second day.
Zhao Yu took a hundred Qingqi to Langyan Mountain.
The 3,500 old soldiers under the seventh captain and the 2,000 new soldiers under the left and right captains came out.
Strong walls and clear fields!
There was a Jiuhu Youqi in the valley, and Su Ce never wanted to hide it from the Jiuhu Youqi from the beginning.
The forests around Zuowuguan suffered a lot. The thicker trees were cut down first and were transported back to the pass. In addition, the thinner trees were also cut down. The army passed by like locusts washing the ground.
The forest trees were turned into timber, and the processed miscellaneous wood was turned into firewood. Su Ce and his generals were busy planning and deploying defenses.
Zhao Yu, who was on horseback, changed horses and kept delivering messages to Langyan Mountain.
The matter was urgent. Three days later, Zuo Wuguan's request for help arrived, and Zhao Yu also arrived with a letter from Su Ce.
Gongsun Zong, the Protector of the Three Passes, knew about the plan of the old commander Li Sizhe. This was the layout of the Twelfth Army in Anbei for the first two years. Now it was time to collect interest, so naturally he could not hold back.
Zhao Yu, who arrived at noon, didn't even have time to rest. After driving all night, Zhao Yu had blisters on his inner thighs. While the Protector Gongsun Zong was drafting a transfer order, Zhao Yu took off his pants in the hall, and Qin Shanming took an iron needle to thread the cotton thread.
Passed through the blisters on the inner thigh of Zhao Yu.
"Get the transfer order and set off immediately. The two guarding cities on the left and two on the left can get as much food, grass and weapons as they can. The guarding men of the two cities will help you transport them. In this battle, the isolated city is outside, protect the army leader, and go
." Gongsun Zong used a seal on the written silk, stuffed it into a copper tube, sealed it with fire paint, and stamped his private seal.
The other two deputy governors and the chief historian stamped the copied documents and put them in iron boxes for storage. If there was an incident in court in the future, it could be said that the three governors were provocative.
"Here!" Qin Shanming helped Zhao Yu out of the Sanguan Protectorate. Zhao Yu climbed on the horse with a grin on his face. A cavalryman tied Zhao Yu to the horse's back with a cloth strip.
Qin Shanming shouted: "Come out!"
Five hundred Qingqi rushed out from the west gate of Langyan City where the Sanguan Protectorate was located.
Behind them were four thousand new soldiers, led by the new army captain from Langyan Mountain, heading west.
The cavalry had orders to walk in front. They needed to inform the guards on the left and the second to take the city to transport grain, grass and weapons to Zuowuguan to take the lead, while the new army following behind escorted the convoy coming out of Langyan City.
The twenty-fifth day of the fifth month is here. This is a military order. Anyone who misses the deadline will be killed!
Three hundred people from the general's battalion went into battle, and the logs were divided one by one. The bed crossbow components in the arsenal were used. Under the general's hand, a bed crossbow was formed. The apprentices used tools to cut the crossbow arrow shafts used for the bed crossbow...
…
In the north of the valley, an army of 200,000 people stretched across the land for dozens of miles, with cavalry, infantry, and sheep moving at a leisurely pace.
Gu Nan, one on the left and two on the left, dispatched 8,000 guards to the city to escort grain, grass, weapons, and herbs. The horses struggled to pull the carts and sent the carts of supplies into Zuowuguan.
Today's Zuowuguan can be said to have no place to stay. The Cao Cao and the army are so busy that they only sleep for three hours a day. The four hundred-meter-long and wide warehouses opposite the prison will soon be filled up in more than ten days.
Stones the size of human heads were built on the three-mile long street, and two thousand infantry were divided into the left and right fortresses. The left and right captains became empty-headed generals. However, after a few days, four thousand new troops arrived, and they had soldiers again.
There are three main archery towers in Zuowuguan, two and a half feet high, divided into three floors, occupying a thirty-meter city wall, two feet wide, with a ten-foot passage behind. There are also six turrets, both long and wide.
Sanzhang is located at the corner of the city wall. In addition, there is a horse face protruding from the city wall every fifty meters. There is an arrow tower on the horse face. It is three feet long and wide. It faces the enemy on three sides. It is two feet high and is divided into two floors.
Half, the lower two floors are brick and stone structures, and the upper half floor is an open-air wooden parapet. This kind of horse-faced archery tower has fifty seats on the left and right, and fifty seats on the left and right.
In the ordinary city wall section, the generals and apprentices were transferred by the generals to instruct the border soldiers to make wooden corridors. The so-called wooden corridors were fixed with wooden frames on the basis of the original parapet wall, and were divided into two layers and one floor.
It is composed of the original city wall and wooden rafts. The upper part is connected by wooden boards and iron nails to form a dome. On the top is a wooden parapet. There are no soldiers to defend here. Only when the enemy troops come up, troops will be sent here to defeat the enemy troops.
Rush down.
The wooden corridor can prevent enemy arrows from being thrown, and can also be used as a standing position for crossbowmen. There are holes every one meter for crossbowmen to defend. In the open space behind the wooden corridor is the fighting position of archers. They can
Here you can throw arrows outwards, and you can also climb up to the second floor of the wooden corridor to attack the enemies who have climbed up.
In addition, a lot of chapai, arrow racks, forks, pole poles, iron hooks, and city defense wooden stands were also made.
As for the bed crossbows that were made before, they were moved to each building on the 19th.
The main archery tower has twelve bed crossbows, and another six bed crossbows are in reserve. The turret protruding from the city wall has sixteen bed crossbows, and another eight are in use. The arrow tower above the horse has two bed crossbows, and another one.
Useful.
There are three main arrow towers, six turrets, and 112 horse-faced arrow towers, totaling 534 crossbows, one third of which are spare crossbows.
When the construction on the city wall began to take shape, each army began to select troops, and the defenders were divided into three levels.
The first class was crossbowmen. There were originally 600 armband crossbows in the pass. Later, the general made 400 crossbows, making up a total of 1,000. The 1,000 crossbowmen were mostly from the old frontier troops.
The second class consisted of archers, sword and shield men, lance and shield men, and bed crossbowmen, a total of three thousand people.
The third class is the auxiliary soldiers, with a total of 1,500 people. These people are basically the 2,000 new soldiers.
On the 23rd, Zhao Yu and Qin Shanming rushed back to Zuowuguan, along with 4,000 new soldiers and the third and final batch of supplies. The two defensive cities were evacuated, except for
One quarter was reserved for himself for the defense of Hulukou in the southern section of the valley, and the remaining three quarters were given to Zuowuguan, which made Zuowuguan more and more crowded.
Qin Shanming's 500 cavalrymen were transferred by Su Ce to temporarily take charge of the city. They joined the cavalrymen from the left and two guards to patrol the southern foot of Langyan Mountain to prevent a small group of Nine Barbarians from sneaking over the mountain.
The vacated cavalry quarter was bulldozed with stables, and a two-story wooden building was built with lumber. Only then could 4,000 new soldiers be crammed in. The flat ground where the horses were raced became a camp for wounded soldiers. More than a hundred soldiers came from the left side of Langyan City.
The military doctor guarding the city on the second left is stationed here. The military doctor and four thousand new soldiers gave Su Ce the confidence to defend the city alone.
The previous 6,000 defenders were on the city defense, with 500 soldiers on each side of the fort, 500 soldiers on the outposts, 500 soldiers on the front and back, 1,000 soldiers on the left and right, and 1,500 auxiliary soldiers scattered everywhere in equal proportions.
, there are also a thousand soldiers for rotation.
The four thousand new troops who arrived became the fourth-class soldiers of Zuowuguan, and they were replaced by each class.
On the 24th, the Jiuhu cavalry no longer concealed their presence, and were 500 steps north of the pass, looking at Zuowuguan in the distance.
Zuowuguan has been strengthening its defenses day by day for the past twenty days.
The people of Jiuhu are anxious, but not stupid. There are fifty thousand Shiwei people at hand. How can they use their lives to fill the flesh and blood millstone of Zuowuguan?
On the 27th, the Jiuhu army entered the valley. On the 29th, the Jiuhu troops reached two miles north of Zuowuguan and set up camp on this boundary.
The leader of the Nine Hus, Aragbaz, knew that this was the last chance to return to the North Plains. After this victory, according to his alliance with the Ross principalities, the Ross people would raise millions of troops and go south, at the cost of the North Plains ceding the central part of the north and the south.
Then he can return to the hands of Jiuhu.
But the premise is that the Jiuhu people can clear a passage across Langyan Mountain, and Zuowuguan is an obstacle on this passage that the Jiuhu people have to crush.
Aragbari rode his war horse and took his fang guard to a hillock more than ten meters high one mile south of Guan Guan. He looked at Zuowuguan with its fangs exposed, and the stone rocks tens to hundreds of meters high.
There are wooden barriers all over the veins, and there are also iron caltrops in the gaps.
The pass is a dangerous one, but Aragba is not in a hurry.
The Jiuhu people did not send troops to knock on the pass at the end of May, but just repaired the camp, which was six miles wide from east to west and stretched for twenty miles from north to south.
Su Ce also enjoyed stalling time with the Jiuhu people. The Anbei lineage could delay it, but the Jiuhu people could not.
Only Aragbaz knew that he was not stalling for time, but that the 200,000 troops in his hands were Jiuhu's last hope for returning south, so he had to be cautious.
At night, Aragba took the map of Zuowuguan drawn by Jiuhu Youqi, and his brows did not relax. He didn't even finish his favorite Baiguo Zong, so he gave it to his personal guard Mengbatu Su Ce.
If he saw this scene, he would probably praise Li Chang very much when he returned to Chang'an. Wine has been a luxury product since ancient times, and he didn't even know that Li Chang could sell wine as far north as Langyan Mountain.
At this time, Zuowuguan was very quiet. The border troops in the fighting positions were sleeping on the ground with their weapons in hand. The sentries on the archery tower, in groups of three, stared sharply at every move under the city wall.
A team of five auxiliary soldiers were patrolling the city. There was a lot of food, grass, weapons and ammunition in the city, but they did not dare to catch fire. Su Ce did not sleep at this time, and led his guards in Guanzhong to inspect the city's defense and reserves.
A few days ago, pools of several meters square were paved with blue bricks at various springs in the city center. Su Ce picked up a handful of water and drank a few sips. It smelled like bricks, but it would be gone after a few days.
These springs in the city have large and small amounts of water. They are concentrated in the Houguan area. The springs have been expanded and the amount of water has increased a lot. In addition to supplying tens of thousands of people and hundreds of horses with drinking water every day, there are also many that overflow.
Dark brick passages connect the huts everywhere.
Since ancient times, food shortages, epidemics, and fires have been the main reasons for the destruction of the city. There is no shortage of food and grass at Zuowuguan. More than 10,000 people will have enough to eat until the beginning of next spring. However, they are afraid of epidemics and fires. Large wooden barrels are placed every fifty steps
, the auxiliary soldiers would add water to these wooden barrels every day, and the small fire would be extinguished by putting a few barrels of water in it.
Moreover, the four thousand new soldiers in Guan are not idle in the barracks. More than two thousand people who have seen blood in suppressing bandits in the Xiang army have been transferred to a thousand people and a thousand veterans to live in the townhouses under the city wall, and they can be replenished at any time.
When arriving at each battle camp, there were more than one thousand left, and one thousand were taken out as reserve camps.
In the end, 2,000 emperors were left, and 500 were assigned to military doctors, who were responsible for transporting the wounded during wartime. Now they are learning to deal with external injuries from the military doctors.
In the 500-person Hutou camp, 200 people specialize in cooking, 100 people specialize in heating hot water, and 200 people carry food and water bags to the city wall and hand them over to the auxiliary soldiers, who then distribute them to the soldiers.
The 500-person Guan Defense Battalion is responsible for daily patrols in the city to prevent fires. The 500-person Transport Battalion assists the generals in conducting military operations and delivers weapons and equipment to the city walls.
Su Ce patrolled all night, visiting Guancheng and the left and right fortresses. Su Ce did not need to be reminded of the pre-war patrol to boost the morale of the troops. This is the way to be a commander. The old commander had already warned him about this when he was in Chang'an.
.
At dawn, Su Ce moved to the outpost. The outpost captain Xie Kaizheng was inspecting the main archery tower at this time, tucking the soldiers in quilts from time to time. Little did he know that the weather was getting hot at the end of May, and it was hard to cover people with quilts while sleeping.
"Captain!" Xie Kaizheng, the outpost captain, saw Su Ce and called out in a low voice. Su Ce waved and walked outside the main archery tower. Su Ce asked the sentry on guard to go back to sleep for a while, and walked up with his bodyguard and Xie Kaizheng.
On the terrace, Su Ce held on to the thick wooden parapet and looked at the dimly lit Jiuhu Camp two miles away.
Xie Kaizheng stood behind Su Ce, and Su Ce slowly said: "The Nine Hu people are quite big, but they are just grasshoppers after autumn. They can't jump around for a few days. I won't come to the outpost in the future. I'll leave this place to you."
, I don’t know if this is an opportunity or a dead end. There are a thousand troops in Wengcheng. They are given to you. Use them sparingly! The Ministry of War gave me only 10,000 general cans in Anbei. The important task of outpost is given to you. Don’t let you.
Father, we will be disappointed in Anbei!"
After Su Ce finished speaking, he sighed and looked at the Jiuhu people's camp. In this battle, the Jiuhu people would only fight to the death. I don't know how many good men died here.
Outpost Captain Xie Kaizheng took a breath of the air with the chill of dawn, looked at Su Ce's back and replied: "Captain, I understand."
Su Ce looked at the Jiuhu people's camp for a while. It was neat and orderly. It seemed that the Jiuhu people had learned a lot of skills from Daqian and Ross. This battle was not easy to fight. This was how Su Ce established his position as military leader.
It was a battle, and it would be fine if he became famous in one battle. If he lost, Su Ce never thought he would lose!
The sky was getting brighter, and a layer of dew accumulated on Su Ce's body. The dew gathered along the armor plates and dripped to the ground. The dew left by the iron armor on his head woke Su Ce out of his reverie.
Su Ce turned his somewhat stiff body and looked at Xie Kaizheng, the outpost captain who had been standing with him for almost an hour. Thinking that there was a bag of candied fruits in his arms, he reached out and took it out from his arms and handed it to Xie Kaizheng: "Lingnan bought from Dongshi
Candied fruit, eat one when it tastes bitter."
Outpost Captain Xie Kaizheng took the bag and saluted: "Thank you Captain!"
Su Ce patted Xie Kaizheng's shoulder and said boldly: "Back to Chang'an, I'll treat you to a drink!"
When Su Ce walked off the terrace, he heard Xie Kaizheng shouting from behind: "Captain!"
Su Ce turned to look at Xie Kaizheng. Xie Kaizheng raised the cloth bag in his hand and shouted loudly: "Captain, a certain family is in Yipingfang. It's been almost ten years and I haven't been back yet. Before guarding the border, Aye took a certain person there.
Deshenglou, the mutton there is delicious, I want to eat it! I also want to take a sip of Baiguo craft beer!"
Su Ce was stunned for a long time, and shouted to Xie Kaizheng with a slightly trembling voice: "Okay, I will make sure you eat and drink enough when you get back!" After saying that, Su Ce turned around and pulled down his chin.
, walked down the outpost city wall without even scratching his head.
Walking along the three-mile long street and walking through the Qianguan city wall, each battalion of border troops along the way performed their duties, and Su Ce did not bother them anymore. When the war broke out, the city gates at Qianguan would be sealed, and the frontier and Zuowuguan gates would only be closed.
The remaining two brick corridors are connected.
Back at the Captain's Mansion, it was daybreak, and only Su Ce and Li Huaimin were left in the noisy war hall. Li Huaimin lowered his head and held a copper basin, and whispered: "Young Master, please cleanse your face!"
Su Ce lifted up his visor, and with tears streaming down his face, he gave Li Huaimin a smile that was uglier than crying. He stretched out his hand to wash away the embarrassment on his face, wiped it with a towel, and returned to his usual cold expression.
This is just a move on the chessboard, so how can we not see others suffering?