There is no such thing as the Kangxi and Qianlong eras

Chapter 81 Invulnerability

Fu Zhi is not a fool like Hui Ling. Although he is short of soldiers and food now, he knows how to fight the war.

The Han army left the camp and lined up along the river, while the Qing army also regrouped near the river. Both sides sent out cavalry to harass and spy.

However, due to the gap in combat power and armor, the Qing cavalry, even though they had more people, did not dare to confront the Han cavalry head-on and were basically driven away by the Han cavalry.

Fu Zhina ignored the casualties of the cavalry and used the boats along the river to unload and reload the cannons one by one.

The Qing army left behind their food and supplies and used all the ships to load cannons. This was also Fu Zhina's winning weapon when he was short of soldiers and food.

What’s the point of fighting a war without artillery!

Xingzhao, far away in Changde, also made every effort this time. Of the 20 artillery pieces sent to Fuzhina, 6 were the renowned Red Cannons. The other 14 artillery pieces, though not Red Cannons, were superior in terms of their number and mobility. With 14 artillery pieces mounted at the front of the position, firing in unison was more than enough to deal with ordinary rebels.

The artillery was pushed out, and the Qing army's gunners immediately quickly dug the artillery position to prepare subsequent positions for the artillery.

The Qing army was digging, and the Han soldiers were also digging.

The Han soldiers had the assistance of civilian laborers, so they dug the artillery positions much faster. Moreover, the Han soldiers' artillery was not the red cannons of the Qing army.

"Boom boom boom!"

As the two sides were marching, the Qing army fired first, as they were more professional artillerymen.

Fortunately, the first wave was just test fire, so there was no need to worry about its accuracy. Moreover, the test fire were all small artillery pieces, so their power was obviously not enough.

The Han army's vanguard was startled and a commotion broke out, but fortunately it was quickly suppressed by officers at all levels.

Chen Younian was holding the telescope given by the general and cursing, "These sons of bitches, the Qing dogs, actually fired cannons to scare us. Where are our cannons? They should be erected!"

Not long after, the messenger from the artillery battalion reported: "General, all the artillery positions have been dug and the red cannons are in place!"

Nie Yu said: "Then fire!"

"Order!"

The messenger delivered the news to the artillery battalion.

The captain of the artillery battalion was called Wu Ma. He came from a very ordinary tenant farmer family. Although he could hardly read or write, he was very sensitive to arithmetic and learned very quickly. He was then assigned to the artillery battalion for training and command.

Wu Ma shouted, "Brothers, what's that scholarly saying? 'Raise an army for a thousand days, deploy it for a single moment.' Today is the day for our artillery battalion to make its debut. Let those Qing dogs from the south see that there are no cowards in Jingzhou!"

"it is good!"

The artillerymen who could hear the calls shouted in unison, and those who couldn't hear clearly were also ignited by the emotions of the brothers around them, and their blood boiled.

A total of 20 red cannons, named "Red Cannons", were all pushed to the front of the position by the gunners and fixed inside the gun platform.

Soon, Fu Zhina of the Qing army saw it through a telescope and was immediately surprised: "The rebels actually have artillery? But why are the barrels of these artillery so slender? Aren't the rebels afraid of explosions?"

Fu Zhi was the general of a town after all, so he naturally knew that it was very troublesome to cast a cannon, and the thinner and longer the barrel was, the easier it was to explode.

I’m afraid that the artillery of the rebels on the opposite side will not be able to fire any shells and will have to explode themselves.

Sure enough, rebels are still rebels. No matter how well they train their military formations, casting cannons is not something that can be done by accident. Without professional craftsmen, just copying others is courting death.

Fu Zhina smiled contemptuously and was about to put down the telescope.

Suddenly……

"Boom boom boom!"

The Han army's artillery fired, and the deafening sound scared Fu Zhina.

Not only was I startled, I was also blown away!
But the explosion did not hit the Han army's artillery barrel, but the Qing army's Green Camp front position.

To be precise, it did not explode, but the huge kinetic energy impact generated by the conical shell hit the Qing army's rattan shield wall, just like a bullet hitting a piece of hot tofu just out of the pot.

Snapped!
The Qing soldiers holding rattan shields were fried into pieces like tofu.

The explosion didn't stop there, the kinetic energy of the shells didn't decrease, and it directly demonstrated what it means to kill ten enemies at once.

20 red cannons fired in front of the formation, and the battery almost couldn't hold on. The shells didn't miss at all, and all of them hit the densely packed Green Camp front-line positions, killing hundreds of Qing soldiers on the spot.

Fuzhi was dumbfounded. What the hell was this traitor firing?

In fact, the red cannon is also called a muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon, but this is a product of imitation in the Ming Dynasty. By the Qianlong Dynasty, it had long been out of date.

This is normal. Even Lord Macartney, the British envoy who had just failed in his visit to China two years ago, probably could not have imagined that just forty years later, the British fleet would blast open the closed and blockaded borders of the Qing Dynasty.

In short, all the red cannons of the Han army have reached the stage of war, even if they are just low-end versions, without rifling and explosive shells, and the propellant is still black powder, because they are afraid that these ordinary seamless steel pipes cannot withstand the explosion of white powder.

In this way, the range and power were greatly reduced, but when hitting the dense shield wall of the Qing army, it was still like a bullet hitting tofu, with amazing destructive power and penetration.

The Green Camp's front army didn't even have time to collapse. Many Qing soldiers were holding up rattan shields and turned into human fragments without knowing anything.

With one shot, most of the front troops were wiped out, and the remaining Qing soldiers retreated on the spot.

"Hold on! The central army will push forward. Anyone who dares to retreat will be killed without mercy!"

Fu Zhina was horrified, but the general's excellent reaction made him immediately order the central army to take the lead.

Fortunately, most of the Green Camp's vanguard troops had been wiped out by a single artillery shell from the Han army, and the remaining retreating Qing soldiers were unable to break through the Qing army's central formation.

The central army of the Qing army was mainly composed of Zhenxiang soldiers and Manchu soldiers. They rushed forward quickly. It was not because they were not afraid of death, but because the people in front of them died too quickly. They didn't know what was happening and could only draw their swords to drive away the retreating Green Camp vanguard.

"fire!"

"Boom, boom, boom!" Fu Zhina waved his hand and gave the order, and this time it was the Qing army's red cannon that fired.

The shells were fired at a very crooked angle, and as expected, all of them went missing because there were too few of them.

It was less than one-third of the Han army, and it was the first wave of test artillery. It would be a miracle if it hit the target.

"Boom boom boom!"

The Han army gunners did not give in and fired directly at the middle door.

The Green Camp's vanguard troops, who were forced back to the front, were bombarded again by twenty cannons, and this time they were finally unable to hold on.

The Green Camp in the front collapsed instantly, and the Central Army advancing from behind was unable to stop the retreating Green Camp at all.

Those in the Green Camp have also become smarter. They know that charging forward means death, and retreating also means death, so they run to both sides.

The central army lost its cover and became the front army, and also saw clearly what was on top of the Han army.

Fu Zhina was a little frozen, he didn't know how to fight.

It is true that he had made great achievements in the Miao battlefield and had rich experience in mountain warfare, but now it was a flat land by the river, with no way to go around.

Moreover, it is only the first year of the Jiaqing reign, and the Qing Dynasty has long been in decline militarily. The generals who can fight well have either died or retreated.

The elite and capable combat troops were almost completely depleted by the continuous wars during the Qianlong period. For example, among the Qing troops under Fu Zhi, the only ones who could actually fight were the 1500 Zhenxiang troops.

The Manchu soldiers are unreliable, and the militia are even less reliable.

Fu Zhina forced himself to make some tactical changes, letting the small artillery in the position push forward while the red cannon continued to fire from the back.

"Boom boom boom!"

The two sides continued to fire artillery at each other. Although the number was about the same, both had twenty cannons, but the Qing army had less than one-third heavy artillery, while the Han army had all heavy artillery, and they were long-barreled cannons.

After several rounds of shooting, the Qing army's artillery suffered heavy casualties, and three of their cannons were destroyed. In contrast, only a few Han soldiers had their gunners killed.

"Bird musketeers! All of you, charge forward!" Fuzhina gritted his teeth and used the panacea tactic.

If artillery is useless, then use all the bird guns, use the dense firepower advantage of the bird guns, supplemented by local elite troops to disperse and defeat the rebels.

The panacea is indeed a panacea. This tactic has been used since Emperor Kangxi pacified the Three Feudatories. The army surrounded and crushed the enemy, and the bird guns used intensive firepower to suppress the enemy. The scientific name is the Nine-in-Ten Chain Formation.

He may be a little dull, but he can win battles without having to use his brain.

Fu Zhina was wrong. Unable to deal with the Han army's artillery, he could only pin his hopes on the bird guns because he noticed that the Han army had no fire guns.

"Boom boom boom!"

Another round of artillery bombardment followed, and the Qing army's artillery battalion was completely crushed and had no way of counterattacking.

"Oh!"

Suddenly, a conical shell flew from the position and hit the Qing army's chief officer who was commanding the gunners.

It was said to be a glancing hit, but this was a low-end armor-piercing bullet, and a glancing hit would have destroyed half of the body.

The commander of the Qing army's artillery battalion died on the spot. Before his body fell, his eyes were still staring at the Qing army gunners around him. The surviving gunners finally collapsed in the face of the Han army's fierce firepower, abandoned their positions and turned around to run away.

After defeating the Qing army's artillery battalion, the Han army's artillery battalion immediately turned its guns around and aimed at the Manchu soldiers on the Qing army's flank and the fleeing Green Camp.

"Speed ​​up!" Fu Zhina hurriedly gave the order.

The Qing soldiers armed with bird guns hid behind the rattan shield soldiers and quickly advanced forward, finally reaching the range.

Because the Qing army realized since the Kangxi period that they could win battles without using their brains, the actual proportion of Qing troops wearing firearms was very high.

But being high doesn't mean they can fight. The Qing army was indeed equipped with a large number of firearms, but they were all backward matchlock guns like bird guns, and there were also red cannons that were used in the Ming Dynasty.

Two years ago, the British envoy Macartney visited China and specifically displayed the latest British ship model, which could carry a maximum of 70 guns, while the main warships of the Qing Dynasty's Guangdong Navy could only be equipped with 10 guns.

Faced with such a huge gap, what did the Qing Dynasty do?

He was arrogant and contemptuous throughout the process, and ignored the warship models displayed by Macartney. At the same time, he carried out large-scale military exercises and put the navies of Guangdong and Fujian into a state of combat readiness.

To put it simply, these bastards have always known that the outside world is undergoing earth-shaking changes, but they don't care. They only care about whether the Han people will rebel and overthrow the rule of the Eight Banners of Manchuria, that's all.

Fu Zhina's Zhenxiang soldiers only brought 1500 people, but one-third of them were equipped with bird guns.

"Bang bang bang bang!"

After three consecutive intensive attacks from bird guns, the Qing army was stunned, and Fu Zhina was also stunned.

None of the Han soldiers on the opposite side fell down. Not only were they all standing there, they were also ready to draw their swords.

Really invulnerable! ?
　Many people are accustomed to thinking that three-stage shooting involves three people and three guns, with the person in front responsible for shooting and the two behind responsible for passing the guns.

　　But in fact, there are such situations, but not all of them, mainly changing with the times.

　　The Japanese Warring States three-stage attack is to choose a sharpshooter to shoot, and the other two to reload.

　　There is also a three-stage attack, which is to fire a shot and retreat, and then the person behind will take over and take turns shooting. It is said to have been created by Prince Mu in the early Ming Dynasty.

　　In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, in order to counter cavalry, the Sandanji technique began to involve intensive firepower exchanges, which was inherited by the Qing Dynasty.

　　But most of them could not fire more than a few shots when facing the enemy and had to switch from muskets to infantry.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)