Chapter 150: The Fall of the City

When the explosion went off, the fully assembled Taiping Army soldiers and the Qing troops on the wall reacted exactly alike — nearly half the soldiers were stunned by the tremendous noise and the sight before them, staring in disbelief at the wall that had vanished into thin air.

Many new recruits were so frightened by the blast that they threw themselves flat on the ground, and no small number trembled all over.

After all, this earth-shaking terror was something they had never experienced in their lives; even the thunder and lightning of high summer could hardly have been more staggering. In the face of a power they had never known, instinctive human fear was nothing shameful.

"It's down, it's down — the wall's down!"

So overwrought was Ge Zheng that the flesh of his face twisted into a most grotesque shape; while most of the soldiers behind him were still lost in the terror of the explosion, he was already brandishing his blade and charging toward the wall.

"Storm Xinhui and kill every Tartar!"

"Big Brother!"

Seeing his elder brother rush forward alone, Ge Yi was startled and hurriedly raised his blade to follow. The moment the two of them moved, the officers and men of the Zhenlu Battalion snapped awake: the wall had fallen — if they did not charge now, when would they?

"Storm Xinhui and kill every Tartar!"

One, two, three — countless Zhenlu Battalion soldiers surged after their company commander toward the shattered wall of Xinhui.

The men who had been lying on the ground also sprang to their feet; now that they had come to their senses, they knew that anyone who did not charge now was a fool, and anyone who charged but failed to get in was an even bigger fool!

With its wall gone, Xinhui was a woman stripped bare — any damned man could have his way with her!

The ones straining hardest in the charge were the newly surrendered Green Standard troops, for they knew just how strong Xinhui's defenses were, and they knew how Li Dingguo's great army had sighed at the walls last year.

Having been forced to surrender to the Taiping Army, each of them had assumed they would be used as cannon fodder in the assault and that Xinhui could never be taken — who could have imagined the Taiping Army would blast the wall down!

The moment the wall fell, the surrendered troops were dumbstruck; the moment the charge began, not one of them lagged behind. They knew better than the Taiping Army what good things lay inside Xinhui!

The moment the Zhenlu Battalion moved, the Xiongwei, Hujie, and Jinwei Battalions reacted as well. No command was needed now; everyone raised their weapons and charged toward the wall by sheer instinct.

Seen from below Xinhui's walls, more than two thousand Taiping Army soldiers converged like countless streams into a single torrent, their blades aimed straight at the breach.

"Sir, the wall has fallen, the cannons are blown over — we can't hold it. Run!"

The surviving Qing troops on the east wall, having endured a terror unlike anything in their lives, were utterly unmanned. They could not imagine how the Taiping Army outside the city had blasted down a wall as solid as iron, still less how that towering black smoke had formed.

All they knew was that the wall had collapsed, that countless brothers had been buried alive beneath it, and that cannon after cannon had been hurled into the sky, then come crashing back down onto the wall.

Flying stones, falling cannons, severed limbs, black smoke...

The east wall had become a hell on earth, and no one wanted to live in hell. The Qing troops collapsed without surprise, shouting and screaming as they fled desperately down from the wall; not one man tried to block the Taiping Army swarming in from outside.

The able-bodied conscripts ran, the Green Standard troops ran, the banner artillerymen ran too — they no longer had the courage to hold, for that great blast had stolen the fight out of them.

Watching the dense mass of Taiping soldiers pour through the breach into the city, Su Xianting slumped to the ground in despair, his mind a blank, his lips murmuring two words over and over: "It's over."

This time there was no loyal slave like Zhao Quan to shield Captain Su and carry him to safety. By the time the Taiping Army surged through the breach, Su Xianting could not have fled even if he wanted to.

At that critical moment, he too had to show his loyalty to his master — he gritted his teeth and leaped from the wall.

That leap preserved not only Su Xianting's name for loyalty, but also the lives of his entire family!

The first to charge into Xinhui was the Zhenlu Battalion. As the vanguard of the Taiping Army, equipped with all the armor the army possessed, the Zhenlu Battalion's fighting strength stood first among all the battalions.

Before the battle, Ge Zheng's orders had been to be the first wave into the city after the blast, to cut down any Qing troops daring to resist, and to hold the breach firmly so the follow-up forces could come through.

Once the battle order was issued, the whole Zhenlu Battalion fell silent. Officers and soldiers alike knew full well what the first wave of an assault meant.

The first troops to charge would surely bear the defenders' fiercest counterattack; no one knew how many would be killed or wounded in a single battle — the entire battalion might even be wiped out.

Yet what filled the Zhenlu Battalion, including the Green Standard surrenderees among them, with wild joy was that the defenders on the wall offered no counterattack at all. No cannonballs came during the charge; no bullets or arrows flew as they reached the wall.

They entered the city almost without a single casualty.

Bursting out of the thick smoke and finding themselves already inside the city, the Taiping soldiers' eyes turned savage.

The eastern sky was still the pale white of a fish's belly, but inside Xinhui all was now a blaze of firelight; war cries, musket fire, and screams rose and fell in waves. As with any city taken by storm, chaos inevitably swept through Xinhui.

The moment the wall collapsed, Zheng Guodong grabbed his horse and fled toward the south gate. He knew that once the wall was breached, all was lost.

Xinhui had no crack troops or fierce generals left; the soldiers worth anything had all been taken to Guifeng Mountain by Wu Jinzhong. How could the thousand-odd troops now in the city possibly hold off the rebels' assault?

But it would be more accurate to say Zheng Guodong was frightened into flight than that he fled for lack of troops — the earlier explosion had truly terrified him.

So desperate was he to save his own skin that Zheng Guodong did not even send word to the Qing troops at the other gates, nor did he try to rally the scattered remnants to flee together.

Apart from his own trusted personal guards, every Qing soldier in the city — including the banner troops — was heartlessly abandoned. In Assistant Regional Commander Zheng's eyes, no banner soldier's life, precious as it was, weighed as heavily as his own head.

After the Zhenlu Battalion entered the city, Ge Zheng led his men deeper in while Ge Yi held the breach with a detachment.

As the Hujie, Xiongwei, and Jinwei Battalions poured into the city, Xinhui at last fell completely into the hands of the Taiping Army, and the resistance of the remaining Qing remnants could be ignored.

Unfortunately, as Ge Zheng advanced into the city, he ran into several groups of Qing troops fleeing for their lives.

The killing fever took hold of him and could not be reined in; from then on he killed anyone he met, so that many surviving commoners of Xinhui who had escaped the Qing blades ended up dying under Taiping blades instead.

The collapse of the east-gate defenders meant the Qing troops in the city could no longer hold out behind strong walls, and Zheng Guodong's flight stripped them of command.

After Zheng Guodong fled through the south gate, the south-gate defenders followed close behind out of the city.

At the west gate, the gates had been blocked with boulders, so the Qing troops could not flee through the gateway and had to lower themselves down from the wall by ropes, a dozen or more of them falling to their deaths.