Chapter 255 New Formation
Liu Bei's pupils were dilated. He was thinking about Zhang Fei's words and felt that they made sense, but he always felt that something was wrong.
Does Zhang Fei really not know the importance of the lower-level people in Guizhou?
Without them, where would the taxes, soldiers, and food come from to feed these so-called warriors?
Didn't Qin Neng mobilize these leaders when he unified the world? At that time, there were many famous figures in the Six Kingdoms, but not all of them were reduced to nothing in Qin's iron-blooded army.
So Liu Bei retorted with intention, but he stopped again because he thought of the second meaning of Zhang Fei's words. Does Zhang Fei really not know the importance of Guizhou?
He thought about his and Zhang Fei's identities, their ranger team, and a series of people like Gongsun Zan. They all have a common identity, that is, soldiers. In an era like this, if these soldiers don't rely on each other and form a team, then who can they rely on?
Relying on those ministers who have made a bad reputation in Kyoto? It seems that no matter how much powder these people apply, they still can't cover up the unique smell of their old people.
"Brother, eat quickly. This biscuit has just come out of the pan. It will not crisp when it is cold."
Zhang Fei's words interrupted Liu Bei's reverie. He lowered his head and looked at the golden cakes, and suddenly asked:
"Where did we get the sesame oil?"
Zhang Fei shrugged his shoulders and said:
"Before we set off, we came out of the warehouse in the east city of Xingyang. Brother Gongsun and the others took the lead in opening the warehouse. It is said that at that time, many people ran out of Xingyang City and said that the warehouse belonged to them. Later, Brother Gongsun gave him a whip. Crying. These people cried and said, "Do you know who we are? It's really a joke. We came all the way to Xingyang to help them fight the thieves. What's wrong with getting some sesame oil?"
Liu Bei frowned and interrupted Zhang Fei:
"How do you know so clearly? Did you go too?"
Zhang Fei choked, and his original words became:
"Isn't this sesame oil robbed by these people? That stuff in the warehouse is not from the hands of the state."
Liu Bei said nothing and only ate the Hu cake in his hand, but it was cold and tasteless.
——
Guanghe six years, August 28th.
The Taishan Army continued its march north after defeating the Kaifeng Army and capturing their flag. The two front groups, Li Damu and Dian Wei, arrived near Xingze first.
Along the way, Taishan's army maintained strict discipline and blocked all directions without disturbing the people. However, the Youzhou Tuqi who went south felt that they were foreign soldiers and ran rampant. Along the way, they robbed and raped, killed pigs and cattle, and demolished people's houses. Every township they visited was empty.
The two armies formed a sharp contrast. Now these comparisons will not have any impact on the upcoming Battle of Xingyang, but the people in these troubled times will eventually vote with their own feet to choose who to support.
Li Damu and Dian Wei had already reached Yanshi before. There, I learned from the soldiers and horses on the right who stayed behind that Zhang Dan, the right captain, had led the main force to ambush in order to resist the Han army going south. But so far no news has been sent back to the camp.
When Li Damu and Dian Wei heard about this situation, they guessed that something had happened to Zhang Dan's department.
They are very close to Zhang Dan, and they all need to go to the rescue whether they are public or private. The two discussed it, and after sending a feather letter to the main force of the Chinese army behind them, they replenished a batch of supplies from Yan's camp and led the army to the army.
Li Damu and Dian Wei are both lion-like heroes, and the two battalions under their command are the oldest battalions of the Taishan Army. They have high morale and elite armor, making them a first-class force. Therefore, Li Damu and Dian Wei didn't think much about the rescue and just did it.
With the two of them, you can go anywhere in the world.
When the two troops arrived outside Xingze, they saw the smoke curling up from the burned reeds.
Then they were surrounded by an overwhelming amount of cavalry.
Li Damu and Dian Wei had never seen such a swift and windy cavalry group. Really, they were covered in sweat now. If they hadn't ordered their troops to march in armor before joining the battlefield, they would have collapsed with two thousand elites.
Under normal circumstances, if an infantry encounters a cavalry attack on the march, it will be devastating. Because during the march, in order to reduce the load, all the armor was mounted on baggage vehicles. And once they encounter a cavalry charge at this time, these infantrymen have no time to put on armor or form a formation. They can only be slaughtered by the charging cavalry.
Li and Dian's second battalion of 2,000 people were directly arranged into a large square array according to Cao Dian. But this phalanx was completely different from anything the Han army had ever seen.
This phalanx is a new formation compiled by Zhang Chong based on his experience during the Changshe War. At that time, during the Changshe Battle, the Taishan Army also encountered a charge from the main cavalry force of the Han Army. The victory at that time was mainly due to Zhang Chong's good coordination and Guan Yu's personal bravery.
After the war, Zhang Chong saw that the main force of the Han army he would encounter in the future was either an elite cavalry corps or an elite infantry corps like the Xiliang Army, so he used Li Damu and Dian Wei as a pilot to form this new formation. In Zhang Chong's plan, this kind of large formation of thousands or even ten thousand people will become the main force in future joint wars, and their success or failure will determine the success or failure of the joint war.
The passing phalanx of Han soldiers has a wide front. The first row has both spearmen and swordsmen. But now in the new formation, the first row is composed of two narrow spear formations.
In the square formation composed of Li and Dian, the spears in the front row can no longer be called spears, but to be precise, they are foot spears, because they are a full five meters long.
Originally, the spears of Han soldiers were generally more than three meters long. The spears of this length consolidated their advantages of flexibility and resistance to enemies. The Han soldiers had only two enemies, one was the Qiang people in the northwest, and the other was the Xianbei in the north.
The Qiang people are both on foot and on horseback, but they are mainly good at walking in cavalry. The three-meter-long spears in the hands of Han soldiers were enough to withstand the impact of the Qiang people. When facing the Xianbei cavalry, the grassland cavalry were all peripheral shooters and would not rush into formation, so a three-meter-long spear was enough.
But now that the main enemy of the Taishan Army is the Han Army, the whole situation has changed. Most of the cavalry of the Han Army are sudden cavalry and can charge into formations, while the main infantry of the Han Army are also well-organized divisions that can stand up to the Taishan Army.
At this time, the length of the Han army's standard spear in the hands of Taishan Army was not enough. Because of the need for infantry square formations and resistance to cavalry charges, Zhang Chong decided to take the lead in using five-meter-long rifles in Li and Dian's second divisions. In this way, the infantry fighting on the front line will have a longer space to resist the enemy, and can also hit the enemy earlier.
Moreover, this trend of lengthening the spear also appeared in the Taishan Army's assault cavalry. Zhang Chong also lengthened the horses of Yan Gang's centurion. In order to balance the lengthened lance during the charge, Zhang Chong ordered the craftsman battalion to specially build hooks on the armor to hang the lance. The lance can reach further.
In addition, the earliest military formation of the Taishan Army was arranged according to the Han method by Army Deputy Yang Mao, so the wide formation was used in the front row. The advantage of this is that it can defeat the enemy with a narrow face on the right side first. However, as the Taishan Army's need for confrontation with the infantry formation deepened, Zhang Chong decided to use a narrow-wide, large-depth strip formation to fight against the Han Army's formation.
Because Zhang Chong discovered in the first-line confrontation that when elite military formations confront each other, both sides will show a very strong sense of combat and well-equipped fighting tools. Therefore, it is difficult to say whose military formation will be defeated in a short period of time. It is often a stalemate on the military line.
The key to victory at this time is squeezing. This squeezing comes from the pressure from the rear robe. It's like a tug of war. There is a huge difference between pulling out with one person and pulling out with two people. At this time, the longer military formation has stronger squeezing force, and is more able to overwhelm the opponent and then defeat it.
When this kind of confrontation reaches a certain level, the weapons in hand are even useless. Because everyone in the front row is a soldier, the more you squeeze the spear, the harder it will be to save the spear. There will even be people in the first row crowded with each other, cheek to cheek.
In other words, the brutal confrontation of the infantry phalanx even became a squeeze competition to compare strength.
In addition, the first row of the new formation is all pure troops, one-level infantry soldiers. In normal times, Han soldiers would actually put a few particularly brave soldiers on the front line, wearing several layers of armor and wielding halberds and axes to kill the enemy. Some elite shooters will also be on the front line, so that they can have a wide enough field of vision to accurately strike against the soldiers in the enemy's lines. Even brave people like the Qiang people who are not afraid of death will even arrange lightly armed dagger warriors on the front line. When waiting for the line, they will crawl under the Han army's spears and stab the Han army's private parts with daggers and meat knives. sinister.
Zhang Chong has the ability to reform military formations better than any general in this world. Ever since Zhang Chong had no choice but to get involved in this troubled world four years ago, he has always been fighting on the front line.
The generals of the Han army focused on winning a decisive victory thousands of miles away. They decided on the plan for the battle in the big tent, and even drew formation charts for the leading generals before the battle. These people are educated and innovative, but they have never fought on the front line. They don't know what the front line is like. As for those who are fighting on the front line, although they think this is not good and that is a bit problematic, they do not have enough quality to adapt the military formation. As a result, the Han army's military formation cannot adapt to the current specific war development.
But Zhang Chong was different. He was more educated than anyone else, and he was better at summarizing. He had been fighting on the front line for many years, so he took the lead in adapting the military formations under his command.
In fact, Zhang Chong's adaptation of his subordinates was exactly the adaptation of various families in the Three Kingdoms period. At that time, the military fighting skills of the three kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu were at their peak, and they all unanimously valued the ability of the starting army to fight.
Back here, Zhang Chong was the first to discover that in an infantry confrontation of the same level, the original fancy troops were no longer viable. In the first few rows, the spearmen, swordsmen, axemen, and archers are mixed together, and the damage to the impact of the line is far greater than the damage to the enemy.
Zhang Chong used his own personal experience to conclude that the most fundamental aspect of the infantry formation is the squeezing ability of the intensive infantry hand.
Of course, Zhang Chong would not arrange all the battalion heads under his command like Li and Dian. Because both wide and deep formations have their own advantages. The former is good at outflanking the two wings, and the latter is good at squeezing the enemy's lines. A good commander needs to have a lot of toolboxes in his hand, instead of only having a hammer in his hand and using it to hammer everything he sees.
It's war, it's a combination of art and science, but it's not just art or science.
And now, at the edge of Xingze, an infantry army of two thousand people hastily formed such a new formation. There were twenty people on the first side of the formation, and fifty people stood in each line. In other words, the depth side is almost three times as wide as the wide side. Then the other section is arranged in the same way.
So what was placed in front of the Han army's Youzhou sudden cavalry were two long military formations like this. The sky-high steps are weird and full of intimidation. The horses under the Han cavalry snorted and circled their front hooves uneasily when they thought about charging at these terrifying monsters covered with giant thorns.
The Han knights each had their own way of comforting their comrades, and their hearts were full of uneasiness.
But little did they know that the mighty military formation of three thousand Han cavalry at this time also made the Taishan Army in the front row anxious and frightened.
These three thousand riders were located in the southeast of the military formation, with the sun at their backs. They were bathed in the sunshine and exuded endless golden light.
In this ray of light, these three thousand cavalry were divided into three huge square formations of one thousand cavalry. The red general flags had the names of their respective generals written in black, and more big flags had the word "Han" written on them. , announcing their identity to the group of moth thieves opposite.
Naigong is the strongest cavalry regiment in the Han Dynasty - Youzhou Tuqi.
At this time, there was a sound of horns from the Youzhou Assault Cavalry Formation, and then each of the three thousand-man cavalry regiments separated into two hundred-man cavalry groups. They were all wearing Hu clothes and whipped hair, and they were obviously Wuhuan people.
These Wuhuan men rushed two hundred steps in front of Li and Dian's army formation and began to separate to the two wings, and then roared and fired along the outside of the Taishan army's formation.
On the one hand, the Taishan troops on the left and right endured the rain of arrows, and on the other hand, they had to listen to the ghostly screams from the Wuhuan people from time to time. At this time, the Taishan Army archers in the formation also began to fight back at the Wuhuan cavalry cruising outside, but in the face of the high-speed moving cavalry, the effect was not great.
But in fact, the Wuhuan cavalry's arrow rain had little effect. The sergeants of Li's and Dian's 2nd Division all wore four-flap helmets, which were iron helmets made of four shaped iron pieces connected by ropes. This kind of iron helmet has a brim around it. It has very good protection against arrows.
Therefore, the Wuhuan cavalry seemed to be very powerful and did little harm to the Taishan Army, which was armed to the teeth.
The commander of the cavalry on the opposite side obviously saw this. Then the flag on the opposite side was waved, and another Han army's sudden cavalry slowly marched towards the Taishan Army's front line.
The Taishan Army in the front row couldn't stop sweating from the palms of their hands at this time. If these rifles didn't have grooves for gripping, I guess many of them wouldn't be able to grasp the rifles. Of course, the heavy weight of this step is also a reason. The five-meter-long step can only be held vertically at this time. Once it is put down, it will no longer be lifted.
Seeing that the Han army's sudden cavalry on the opposite side began to speed up slowly, the two high-ranking generals in the front row of the Taishan army began to give orders:
"Let it go."
Immediately, the person in the front row, Ru Lin's Bu Shu, was smashed down. Then the Taishan Army infantryman in the front row took out a layer of wood from his back, then struggled to lift the tail end of the infantry from the ground, and stood the wooden board as a frame for the infantry.
After doing this, the high-level commander in the front row ordered again:
"Get up."
Following this order, the Bu Hao in the first row relied on the principle of leverage to lift outward at a low angle. For a moment, the giant Taishan Army opened its fangs towards the Han Army cavalry.
Just as the Taishan Army in the front row gritted their teeth and prepared to withstand the first wave of Han Cavalry charges, there was a loud golden sound from the opposite side. Then these Han cavalry who were about to charge circled around and returned to their own military formation. After that, these Han cavalry retreated towards Xingyang.
Li Damu and Dian Wei were still wondering about the behavior of the Han army in their respective military formations, when they saw a puff of smoke and dust rising from the southeast, and a large banner with the word "田" on it swaying towards them.
The cavalry support of Taishan Army came.
(End of chapter)