Chapter 171: Attack and Defense (Ten)

"The Tartars are coming again! The Tartars are coming again!"

A harsh gong rang out from the gate tower, and with it came the soldiers' screams.

What?

Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong, who had been about to descend from the wall, stopped abruptly and looked out beyond the city. In their sight, several thousand Qing soldiers surged toward Xinhui like a tide amid the beating of war drums.

"This..."

Song Xianggong murmured to himself, his face turning extremely grim.

Only moments ago he had confidently told the officers that the Qing army would not attack again, yet no sooner had the words left his mouth than the Qing came charging back, their momentum and numbers several times greater than before.

The old scholar was both ashamed and furious, and at the same time faintly worried.

"Soldiers come, generals block them; water comes, earth dams it. Since they've come, we fight." Zhou Shixiang clapped the grim-faced Song Xianggong on the shoulder and shouted an order at the stunned officers: "Prepare for battle!"

"His mother's cunt!"

Ge Yi spat a thick wad of blood-flecked phlegm onto the bloodstained wall bricks, gripped his long saber, which he had not yet had time to wipe clean, and strode up onto the wall. Those nearby saw clearly: the hand gripping the saber had only four fingers left.

The severed finger bone was covered in thick fresh blood, and a small shard of bone the size of a fingernail dangled from a strand of sinew, swaying as its owner moved.

"The dog Tartars are coming again! All of you brothers, keep your spirits up! Hack off more Tartar heads and let these sons of bitches know that our Taiping Army is not to be trifled with!"

Ge Zheng, his face covered in blood and his fleshy jowls quivering, stood there like a god of slaughter, terrifying to behold. His already ox-like eyes opened even wider, and all that shot from his pupils was murderous light.

The surviving platoon leaders and squad leaders cursed and shouted as they mustered their men to fight the Qing in bloody battle once more. The Han Banners captives manning the cannons also scrambled again to clean the barrels.

Before the battle, Zhou Shixiang had drawn two squads of musketeers from the Guard Battalion to support the Zhenlu Battalion, led by Probationary Centurion Zhang Erjiang.

These two squads of musketeers had suffered few casualties and were essentially at full strength, but the musketeer unit had only recently been formed and had barely undergone any shooting training before the battle.

As a result, when the Green Standard had attacked the city earlier, the musketeers had performed very poorly, unable even to suppress the Green Standard's archers.

After this round of real combat, the gunners still had not mastered the essentials of firing, and their powder-loading speed was still very slow, but at least they no longer fired wildly as before, nor did they blow up their barrels by loading too much powder in a panic.

Therefore Zhou Shixiang ordered Zhang Erjiang to lead his entire unit up onto the east wall as the largest reinforcement for the Zhenlu Battalion.

The Taiping Army, after all, had only a little over 2,500 men, while the Qing army outside the city probably numbered over ten thousand.

The disparity in strength was severalfold, so until the final moment, Zhou Shixiang did not dare drain the defenders from the other three gates, lest the Qing attack the east gate as their main thrust while simultaneously sending troops against the other three.

Of Xinhui's four gates, losing one meant losing the whole city. All four gates were matters of life and death for the Taiping Army, and none could be lost.

Since he dared not empty the other three gates, the only reinforcements for the east gate were the Guard Battalion standing by for deployment, the security corps members formed by the rear camp, and even the captives and able-bodied young men.

At present, the Zhenlu Battalion defending the east gate had not suffered heavy attrition; its nearly five hundred officers and men could still hold.

With Zhang Erjiang's two hundred musketeers, the security corps members and captives who could be brought up at any time, the total defending force at the east gate had reached a thousand men — one could say this was every bit of capital Zhou Shixiang could produce.

As long as the fighting remained, as before, one side attacking and one side defending — a situation clearly favoring the defender — Zhou Shixiang had absolutely no worry that Xinhui would be taken by the Qing army.

"Brothers, the Tartars are coming again, and this time there are more of them than before.

Are you scared? Don't be!

These Tartars were also born of fathers and raised by mothers. They haven't grown an extra head or an extra leg, and one slash of a blade won't give them an extra life!

As long as we don't panic, no matter how many Tartars come, they won't take this city of Xinhui!"

"The Tartars have come to die, so let's oblige them! This city of Xinhui is ours, and no one is going to snatch it from our hands!"

"......"

Zhou Shixiang loudly encouraged the soldiers as he led men on an inspection of the wall, checking the breaches caused by the Green Standard's assault.

At the same time he ordered the able-bodied young men to bring up all the defensive equipment from below the wall, and had Song Xianggong draw off part of the security corps to stand by at the east gate.

He also sent word to the other three gates to prepare for battle, so that if the fighting at the east gate grew desperate, men could be drawn off in time to reinforce it.

………

In the distance, the Qing army's horns grew ever more urgent, and several thousand Qing soldiers pressed toward the wall in a dense black mass.

"Fire! Fire! Fire!"

Cannons great and small on the wall fired in unison. Black smoke shrouded the sky above and filled the distant Qing ranks with haze.

Amid the bombardment, iron balls large and small bounced and reaped lives. The first to bear the brunt were still those unlucky Green Standard soldiers — those bastards who, like the Han Banners, had forgotten their ancestors — and they were smashed down in swathes.

Severed limbs, spurting blood and brain matter, sticky and revolting organs, and wretched screams turned the battlefield into a hell on earth.

The same ghastly scenes unfolded again and again, without pause, without interruption, repeated until no one even bothered to look twice.

Human life, worthless in these troubled times, was cheaper than weeds on this battlefield.

After enduring the maddening bombardment, the Qing soldiers finally stumbled and staggered to the foot of the wall. As before, dense rows of scaling ladders were set against the wall, and the surviving shield carts, pushed by groups of soldiers holding shields, charged into the gate tunnel.

"Take cover from arrows! Take cover from arrows!"

The officers on the wall shouted without cease. The soldiers, who had suffered enough from Qing arrows, needed no reminder this time — they instinctively crouched behind the crenellations instead of standing foolishly as before, letting arrows strike them.

After a volley of arrows rained down, the Taiping soldiers poked their heads out from the crenellations, using the large forks in their hands to push away the scaling ladders set against the wall, and using their long spears to stab the Qing soldiers climbing up.

Where the ladders were thickest against the wall, logs began to be hurled down.

One falling log often brought down several ladders with it, and the Qing soldiers on those ladders plummeted to the ground like kites with cut strings, while those below screamed pitifully as their comrades fell on them from above.

The old stench in the air had not yet dispersed when fresh reek of excrement and the smell of boiling oil spread once more. The scalding-hot "golden juice" once again made the Qing soldiers below suffer unbearably.

From south to north, the entire east wall of Xinhui was a stage for bloody dramas of killing and being killed. Every kind of killing tool reaped lives at will. On the wall, the Taiping Army's heads swarmed; below the wall, the Qing soldiers' heads were just as densely packed.

With their earlier victory and experience, the officers and men of the Zhenlu Battalion now handled these Qing assaults with ease. Though casualties were unavoidable, the losses they inflicted on the Qing army were even greater than before.

Lacking siege equipment, the Qing soldiers who tried to scale the wall with ladders alone would, if they had no other means, give Zhou Shixiang confidence that Xinhui could become a meat grinder for slaughtering the Qing army of Guangdong.

As a battalion commander, Zhou Shixiang never had the mindset of hiding in the rear while his brothers and subordinates fought the enemy to the death.

After leading his personal guards to reinforce several spots where Qing soldiers had climbed up, he suddenly noticed that the Qing soldiers climbing below no longer seemed to be Green Standard troops, but a different force.

"What troops are those?"

Zhou Shixiang was puzzled by those Qing soldiers wearing double armor with blue trim on their uniforms.

He wanted to ask someone, but Song Xianggong had already gone down from the wall, and none of the personal guards around him knew the origins of these Qing troops, so for a moment he could not get an answer.

Who cares what troops they are — as long as they're Qing soldiers, they can go to hell!

Zhou Shixiang shook his head and stopped thinking about it. He thrust out his long saber again, stabbing a Qing soldier who had just poked his head over the crenellation clean through. With a scream, the man fell backward and vanished in an instant into the pile of corpses below the wall.