My younger brother Zhuge Liang

Chapter 151 Battle of Hefei - Part

Cao Cao and Xun Yu sent Ni Heng, a hot potato, to mediate the case of excessive profiteering between Liu Bei and Liu Biao, which was definitely a case of settling personal grudges.

This is not surprising. In history, Cao Cao was upset by Ni Heng's scolding, and he did not want to bear the bad reputation of harming the wise, so he deliberately sent him to Liu Biao. Now it is nothing more than a change of route.

Of course, Ni Heng himself must have seen through Cao Cao's malicious intentions, so just like in the original history, he was very unimpressed with this assignment and even cursed before setting off.

Especially in the original history, Liu Biao, whom he needed to be sent as an envoy, had no grudge against him, but Zhuge Jin, who was now, had some grudges against him. Asking him to go to Zhuge Jin first, wasn't this clearly a way to make things difficult for him?
So when Sun Shao came to Xudu, it took him more than half a month to arrive. When he returned with Ni Heng, Ni Heng was procrastinating and unruly.

Sun Shao estimated the journey and found that it would take at least a month, and Ni Heng would not arrive in Lujiang County until early August. It was really bad luck for him.

Taking into account the subsequent travel back and forth between Jiangxia and Xiangyang for mediation, the entire August will probably be spent on negotiations between Liu Bei and Liu Biao, and results will not be available until September.

Due to the inconvenience of transportation, diplomatic wrangling in this era was so protracted.

……

The envoy Ni Heng will arrive at least in August, and the results will be out in September, which is two months later.

Naturally, Liu Bei and Zhuge Jin didn't have much expectations for such things.

This was originally an extra move deployed during the preparation for the Battle of Hefei. It would be best if it succeeded, but if it didn't, it wouldn't be a big loss.

So let’s split the conversation and bring our attention back to the siege of Hefei in early July.

At the end of June, the parts of Lu Gongche arranged by Zhuge Jin were transported to the Hefei front after a long detour through the Wanshui River, Yangtze River, Rushu River and Fei River, and were assembled in just a few days.

In addition, Liu Ye, who had just joined Liu Bei's camp, also showed his talent in siege weapons. He slightly improved the traditional catapult and built a small batch of them at Liu Bei's instruction to bombard and destroy the sheep and horse walls and other outer fortifications behind the moat of Hefei.

Catapults have long existed in China, dating back to the late Warring States period. The "Thunderbolt Chariot" used in the Battle of Guandu at the end of the Han Dynasty was just the latest improved version of the catapult, using a multi-person towing gun barrel.

No matter how much the Han Dynasty's catapults were fine-tuned and improved, it was still difficult to use them to knock down the main city wall. Basically, it was not until the "Huihui Cannon" in the late Song Dynasty and early Yuan Dynasty, that is, the counterweight catapult that fired stone bullets weighing more than 150 kilograms, that it was possible to do so.

In history, when Cao Cao used the Thunderbolt Chariot during the Battle of Guandu, he only wanted to smash Yuan's army's sentry towers, arrow towers, and rammed earth platforms, and he never expected to hit the city walls.

Therefore, Liu Ye did not expect too much from his suggestion this time, just to clear the outer fortifications. Or to throw a lot of broken stones and suppress the top of the city to cause panic and casualties to the enemy.

The entire Hefei siege battlefield has become a brand new siege weapons exhibition, and Liu Bei’s army is willing to display whatever they can.

Anyway, according to the original plan, Liu Bei hoped to defeat Hefei, thereby intimidating the Shouchun defenders and prompting Yuan Shu to abandon Shouchun and flee back to his hometown in Runan. To intimidate, of course, you have to go all out and not hide anything.

When Zhuge Jin's Lu Gongche was assembled, Liu Bei was the first to go and see it in person. He was amazed and asked casually, "Is this the thing that broke through Wancheng in one fell swoop? Does it have a name?"

Zhuge Jin was stunned when he heard the question. He and his second brother had been tinkering with Lu Gongche for three months, but no one had ever asked them this question before. Maybe colleagues with lower official positions were embarrassed to ask.

Zhuge Jin almost blurted out "Lü Gongche", but when the words came to his lips he realized that this name was originally given in history because a military strategist named Lu invented this thing. Now even the person has been changed, how could the original name still be used?

Finally, seeing that he was a little hesitant, Liu Bei went with the flow and named this thing "Ge Gongche".

This will be the official name from now on.

After Liu Bei confirmed the preparations, he personally gave the order:
"This car is more than three meters high, almost as high as the top of the Hefei city wall. Now the trench has been filled in many places, and the sheep and horse walls, deer horns, chevaux de frise, and pits behind the gaps have also been mostly destroyed. It's time to see the power of this Ge Gong car.

Tomorrow, let Yunchang attack the east gate, Xingba attack the south gate, Ziyi attack the west gate, and Yide attack the north gate. Forty thousand troops will move at the same time and work together to annihilate Liu Xun!"

When Liu Bei's army went to Lujiang, the three southern armies had a total of only 30,000 soldiers. Zhuge Jin had 15,000 soldiers, Guan Yu had 10,000 soldiers, and Zhang Fei had only 5,000 soldiers because he had fewer combat missions and only needed to capture Liyang and Wujiang.

Now that the fighting has been going on for more than two months, the number of soldiers deployed to the Hefei battlefield has not decreased but increased, reaching 40,000. This is obviously because a large number of Yuan army soldiers have surrendered, as well as bandits from Danyang and Chaohu.

The surrender of the entire armies of Zhang Duo and Xu Qian, two former Chaohu pirates, brought in five to six thousand people, and the rest of the bandits who surrendered to Guan Yu brought in several thousand more.

In addition, with the collapse and surrender of Yuan's army in Wancheng, Shucheng, Lu'an and other places, by eliminating the dross and retaining the essence, and after a month or two of reforming the prisoners, it is completely possible to pull out 10,000 combat soldiers to feed back to the front battlefield.

Now the total strength of Liu Bei's army in Lujiang, counting only combat troops but not auxiliary troops, exceeds 50,000. A little over 10,000 troops can be dispatched to guard various places and eliminate the remaining bandits.

The fact that more and more troops were able to fight in the war also shows how disloyal the people under Yuan Shu's rule were and how cruel Yuan Shu was.

However, even if Liu Bei had 40,000 siege troops, Liu Xun on the opposite side was not without the ability to fight.

Liu Xun also had a large number of Yuan army defeated soldiers who had fled back from previous battles. The troops that had fled back from all over Lujiang now had nowhere to retreat and all gathered in Hefei city. There were a total of 20,000 Lujiang soldiers.

In the rear, Yuan Shu also allocated an additional 7,000 men from the Huainan Yin's troops to him, asking him to hold out in Hefei, a total of 27,000 men.

Although Liu Xun himself was not a famous general, if he had been surrounded and beaten by Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Gan Ning, and Taishi Ci in a field battle, he would have been defeated long ago.
But now they have a strong city to rely on, and Hefei is the throat of Yuan's army on the southern line after all, and the food stored before the war has been very sufficient, so the situation is completely different. Liu Bei's army can't really besiege the city for more than half a year, starve the Hefei defenders to death and then force them to surrender, Liu Bei can't afford it.

In this case, the only option is to let the newly surrendered troops take the lead and serve as cannon fodder, while the main force waits for the right opportunity to launch a general attack.

……

The next day, early morning of July 3rd.

Liu Bei's army, which was fully prepared, did not launch a feint attack, but launched a main attack from all sides, thus kicking off the siege of Hefei.

The 40,000-strong army pushed a total of eight Gegong vehicles, eight well-slam vehicles, more than twenty traditional ladders, hundreds of ordinary flying ladders, dozens of trench bridge vehicles, and eight battering rams on the top of the slope, and attacked in a mighty manner.

A quarter of the siege weapons were evenly distributed in the four directions of the city.
Make sure that each main city gate has a battering ram to hit it, and another as a backup, so that if the main battering ram is burned or smashed, it can be used as a substitute. And on the left and right sides of each main city tower, there will be a Ge Gongche and a well-shaped siege tower for shooting arrows from a high position,

There were also ladders that were easier to build and save time to build next to Ge Gongche to help share the pressure. Liu Bei and Zhuge Jin had discussed before the battle, and they didn't expect the ladder soldiers to be able to take the lead in the first battle. But as long as there were more ladders, the attention and long-range firepower of the defenders would be shared, and the chances of Ge Gongche rushing up to place the planks would be greatly increased.

At the beginning of the morning hour, hundreds of cowhide drums in the Han army camp were beaten at the same time. The low, muffled sound extended for more than ten miles. Forty thousand troops pressed forward in batches, and the atmosphere was solemn and murderous.

"Shoot! Shoot quickly!" Liu Xun, who was personally dealing with Guan Yu on the top of the east gate, felt a pressure that made it difficult for him to breathe when he saw Guan Yu's troops coming in a mighty force. He then impatiently ordered his subordinates to shoot arrows in advance.

Arrows flew through the air like rain, and after flying over a hundred steps, they landed on the wet mud outside the moat. It was obvious that the defenders had been overwhelmed by the momentum of the attack from all sides and could not even estimate the effective range.

Fortunately, this problem was not a big deal. As the Han army launched a charge, when Liu Xun's troops fired the third round of arrows, the Han soldiers finally came within range.

However, most of the soldiers in the front row were carrying large shields and were only responsible for covering the advance of friendly forces. There were no casualties despite the exchange of arrows.

In contrast, the Han army's chariots took advantage of this opportunity and were pushed to a position only seventy or eighty steps away from the city wall. They then began to shoot arrows from a high position, in turn suppressing the archers on the city wall.

On some of the carts, the officers in charge were quite courageous and even used flags to signal the soldiers pushing the carts below to hold on a little longer. They pushed the carts until they were only fifty or sixty steps away from the city wall. Only then did they allow the soldiers holding the shields to retreat and start shooting down at the city wall.

The structure of the Jinglan carriage was much weaker than that of the Gegong carriage. It only had a few wooden pillars and diagonal supports to support a carriage that could carry more than ten archers.

However, due to its simple structure, the well-locked cart can be built faster, higher and at a lower cost than the Ge Gong cart. The Lü Gong cart is only a little over 30 feet high, just level with the Hefei city wall, but the well-locked cart can be more than 40 feet or even higher, and even more than 10 feet higher than the Hefei city wall.

It's a pity that there are not many archers who can climb up the well, only a dozen of them in total. They can't suppress the thousands of archers on the city wall. It's more of a blow to morale, making the defenders dare not stand up and shoot arrows easily. They can only hide behind the battlements and shoot obliquely.

And because the number of people who could climb over the well was relatively small, the Han army carefully selected them before the battle, and only allowed the soldiers with the best archery skills to board the chariots, basically one in a hundred.

The archers selected in this ratio can almost shoot wherever they point. There is no blind shooting or projectile shooting at all. They will aim at a Yuan army archer who shows his head and shoot directly.

In this way, once the archers on the city wall choose to hide behind the battlements and shoot arrows, they will not be able to attack long-range targets.

Anyone who knows a little about trigonometric functions knows that the range is equivalent to the hypotenuse of a triangle, and the vertical distance of the enemy from the wall is equivalent to the right angle. The greater the angle of the oblique shot, the closer the enemy is to the wall.

Originally, the soldiers pushing the Ge Gong cart and the ladder cart would start to be hit by arrows when they were pushed more than a hundred steps outside the city wall. But now, they were able to push the cart to only fifty or sixty steps before they started to be hit by arrows, all because the defending archers were cowardly.

"Hold on! Don't hide and shoot! Aim and shoot at those people pushing the carts! There aren't many people on Liu Bei's ledge! Even if all our soldiers stand up and shoot at him, we won't be able to kill many! It's not my luck to be so bad that I just picked you! Anyone who is afraid of fighting will be killed!"

Liu Xun was naturally anxious when he saw this scene. He asked his trusted generals to go to the front line to supervise the battle and urged Yuan's much larger number of archers to stand up and aim and shoot.

In fact, if Liu Xun's soldiers could have no morale and no free will like the soldiers in the game, letting everyone stand up and shoot would indeed be a mathematically optimal solution.

Because there are thousands of people on your side standing up, and there are less than 30 archers on the opposite side, even if every arrow hits the target, how many people can they kill? The chance of being killed is less than 1%, and the chance of being killed is actually very low.

If only one hundred warriors stand up among thousands of people, then these one hundred people will become the enemy's main target of defense. In the end, Yuan's army will still lose one hundred people after several rounds of arrow rain, but their own output efficiency will be greatly reduced.

But the problem is that people are not NPCs in the game. Even if the chance of winning is only one percent, they still hope that others will stand up and shoot arrows and attract the fire from the wells, while they just row the boat.

Especially since the morale of Yuan Shu's army was so low that no matter how the supervising officers whipped them, some archers still did not dare to stand up. In the end, the generals patrolling the city had to draw their swords and beheaded the archers who were completely frightened and curled up there, refusing to stand up no matter how they were pulled. In order to enforce military law, the archers of Yuan's army nearby were slightly frightened and reluctantly stood up and shot their arrows.

However, at this moment, a rain of arrows flew over and killed a captain who was supervising the killing of a cowardly archer. The archers of Yuan's army who had just been whipped up by him returned to their old ways upon seeing this and hid behind the battlements to shoot arrows again.

During this struggle, Lu Gongche and the ladder truck were generally pushed to only 50 or 60 steps away from the city wall. Liu Xun was extremely anxious watching from the top of the city wall, and quickly issued a new order:

"Let all the archers on the tower shoot at Guan Yu's siege! The top floor of the tower is higher than the siege, so they can shoot down and suppress the sharpshooter on the siege! Move all our most elite sharpshooters to the top floor of the tower!"

The height of the well is higher than that of ordinary city walls, but due to cost and stability issues, it has not yet been built higher than the city tower. In theory, there is no problem with Liu Xun's order.

However, one of his officers who commanded the archers came over to complain immediately:

"General, Guan Yu's siege tower is a bit far from the city wall. They attacked from both sides. Although they are only sixty or seventy steps away from the city wall, they are already more than a hundred steps away from us! It is impossible to aim when shooting arrows from the city wall. We can only throw them. The siege tower has a roof, so most of the thrown arrows must be blocked by the roof!"

Liu Xun roared at the top of his lungs: "We have to shoot even if the projectiles are blocked! We have to shoot even if they are blocked! The key is not how many people we kill, but to suppress the momentum of the Han army!"

Yuan Jun could only carry out Liu Xun's orders unconditionally. Then a new strange scene appeared on the battlefield:
The Han army's sharpshooters on the lintels were staring at the enemy's archers on the city walls, who were at most 70 or 80 steps away, and suppressing them. The Yuan army's archers on the city walls, however, were firing randomly at the Han army, who were at least 150 steps away.

Moreover, when the long-range firepower on the city wall was attracted by the siege tower, the suppression of the rain of arrows faced by the Han army's rams on the slope at the main entrance of the city wall was suddenly reduced by more than half.

Soon, the Han army's battering ram was pushed to the gate before Ge Gongche and the ladder, and began to hit the outer city gate with a huge hammer equipped with a cast iron hammer head weighing hundreds of pounds.

The giant hammer pole on the battering ram is made of a specially selected trunk of a whole tree that is hundreds of years old. It is so thick that several people can hold it together. A four-meter-long section is cut out and dozens of hemp ropes are tied to the side. Dozens of people pull and shake it at the same time according to the rhythm of slogans, and then release it heavily. The principle is similar to that of ringing bells in ancient times.

With loud "bang bang" noises, wood chips began to fall off the city gate of Hefei.

The defenders on the city wall also began to throw rolling logs, stones, and even smaller sheep-head stones at the battering ram in a panic, hoping that they would reach as far as possible and hit the weak points of the battering ram.

However, the Han army's battering rams had a sloped top design that was definitely advanced today, causing the rolling logs and rocks to "bounce". Even a boulder weighing over a hundred pounds that was smashed down by several people together only made a dull sound before sliding to the ground nearby.

"The rolling log is useless! Throw the swallowtail torch! Pour the boiling oil!"

　Many thanks to the two leaders of the Malaysian book friend "Zhang Jiahui of Malaysia"! I will choose a time to update three more times in six days later this month!

　　I am really ashamed that "Malaysia's Zhang Jiahui" has been following books for nine or eleven years. Most of the books have a leader. I am really ashamed and don't know what to say. In fact, the quality of several of my books is really not worthy of the leader. If I have time to come to Hangzhou in the future, I will treat you to a meal, or if I have time to go to Malaysia, you can treat me to a meal.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)