Chapter 175: Attack and Defense (14)

The battle began at the hour of Chen when the Green Standard launched the first assault, and now it was already the hour of Wu. Qing army or Taiping Army alike, both sides were utterly exhausted, each hoping the other would collapse and rout.

Yet as time wore on, both sides knew in their hearts that this bitter fight was still far from over.

The Shang clan's household troops had lost over a hundred men and still had not taken the wall. Watching from afar, Shang Kexi grew vaguely uneasy, but he did not order a withdrawal. Instead he sent word to press the assault harder, to take Xinhui at any cost.

"My prince, the rebels still have strength to spare, and our losses are too heavy. Should we not pull back, regroup, and fight again?"

Ban Zhifu, seeing so many household troops lost while Xinhui remained firmly in the Taiping Army's hands, could not help but urge Shang Kexi to withdraw for the time being.

Shang Zhixin added, "Father Prince, withdraw for now and fight again tomorrow. Your son will personally lead men to take this Xinhui for you!"

"Withdraw?"

Shang Kexi's face was calm, betraying neither joy nor anger. He looked at the two of them and said in a deep voice, "Do you not know that a first drumbeat rouses the spirit, a second weakens it, and a third exhausts it?

If we withdraw now, we will never retake this city of Xinhui!" With that, he said no more to the two, but raised a hand and ordered his guards to relay the command.

Ai!

Ban Zhifu sighed inwardly and exchanged glances with Shang Zhixin, neither understanding why Shang Kexi was so insistent.

The two of them were baffled, and the other officers under the Pingnan feudatory were likewise at a loss, deeply puzzled by the Prince of Pingnan's almost petulant decision. Only Wu Guoli, standing unobtrusively among the crowd, curled his lips in a faint, unnoticed smile.

Clearly he knew in his heart why Shang Kexi had made this decision. If he was not mistaken, the reason Shang Kexi was willing to pay any price to retake Xinhui was very likely connected to the imperial edict that Governor-General Li Shuaitai had received three days earlier.

Shang Kexi was steeled in his resolve to retake Xinhui this very day. His orders quickly reached the ears of every commander, and the Prince of Pingnan's horn sounded once more to press the attack.

The exhausted Qing soldiers, with no time to catch their breath, threw themselves back into the slaughter. Wave after wave of battle cries rose up.

On the wall, the Taiping Army answered the Qing battle cries with low, guttural roars. The soldiers held their posts, while officers ran back and forth ceaselessly, brandishing long blades to relieve the endangered crenels.

The mounting casualties taught Zhou Shixiang and his officers how to defend a city.

The Taiping Army no longer clustered in scattered groups of three or five as before, but divided into small squads of four: one man with a saber, one with a spear, and the other two jointly gripping a fork-pole used to push away scaling ladders. The four worked in coordination.

The moment a Qing soldier was spotted climbing up a ladder, the fork-bearers pushed at the ladder; if the ladder would not budge, the spearman stabbed at the exposed head of the Qing soldier, and if the thrust missed, the saber-wielder immediately hacked at him.

Under this coordination, the household troops' momentum in scaling the wall was effectively checked, and the casualties among the household troops Shang Kexi prized like treasures steadily mounted.

Besides the four-man squads guarding the crenels, the hundred-odd musketeers of the Guard Battalion were no longer dispersed either, but divided into four squads of twenty or thirty men each.

Under their officers' direction, these twenty or thirty musketeers fired down at the city's base in unison. This method of fighting was far more effective than the earlier blind shooting, and inflicted no small casualties on the Qing army.

After descending from the wall, Liao Ruixiang found Zhao Sihai and drew off three hundred Security Corps members to go up onto the wall.

These Security Corps men, working with the able-bodied civilians already on the wall, took charge of boiling and pouring the "golden juice" and dropping the rolling logs.

The extra hands, besides continuing to haul supplies from below the city up to the wall, spontaneously used stones and bricks to hurl down at the Qing soldiers.

With all these elements working together, the Taiping Army's defense became organized and systematic, which gave the Qing army below ever greater headaches and drove them deeper into despair.

To guard against any contingency, Zhou Shixiang ordered the Guard Battalion centurion Baldy Jiang He and probationary centurion Li Fuguo to lead the remaining Guard Battalion troops to stand by beneath the east wall, ready to reinforce the wall at any moment. (Author's note: earlier, the Guard Battalion probationary centurion should be Lin Zaisheng; Zhang Erjiang is the Tiger Valiant Battalion probationary centurion.)

At the same time, he ordered the Tiger Valiant, Line-Breaking, and Heroic Might Battalions defending the other three gates each to detach one squad to stand by, ready to be dispatched to the east wall at any time.

"Think of your wives and children!"

"If the Tartars break through, the first heads they cut will be us Taiping soldiers, and the second will be yours!"

"If you want to go home alive, then rouse yourselves! The Tartars are men, and so are you — fight them to the death!"

"......"

On the wall, officers of the Tremor-Suppressing and Guard Battalions kept boosting the morale of the Security Corps men and able-bodied civilians. These men also knew that at this point, if they did not fight for their lives, there was no way out.

Once the city fell, those with families would surely see their whole households destroyed, and those without families could not hope to escape unscathed either. The Tartars' cruelty was no idle talk.

If the city truly fell, could any man, woman, or child in the city survive?

"I'll bust your lungs! Bust your lungs!"

Fan Si heaved a stone onto the crenel, then with a shout shoved it over the edge. Seized by a courage he did not know he had, Fan Si actually stuck his head out to look down.

At the sight, his face lit up with delight.

"You damned bastard, well done dying, well done!"

As it turned out, the stone had smashed squarely onto the head of a Qing soldier halfway up a scaling ladder, splitting his skull open.

The greatest weakness of ant-like swarm assaults on a city was now laid bare. The densely packed Qing soldiers had become living targets for the defenders above.

A single great log dropped would flatten a swath of them; a stone hurled at random never missed; the scalding golden juice poured down scalded whole patches to death.

The Qing army fought with equal ferocity, and the household troops threw caution to the wind. Men who climbed up fell down, and those below climbed up after them.

Not a single rung of the scaling ladders was ever empty; they were packed full of Qing soldiers climbing upward. Two ladders even collapsed under the sheer weight of the climbers, and the Qing soldiers who fell from them injured many of their comrades below.

At the gate tunnel, the Green Standard's shielded carts still made no progress. Apart from the ceaseless booming of the battering ram against the gate, they had gained nothing.

The Plain Yellow Banner Han troops under Geng Zhongde had not organized any men to scale the wall, only suppressing the defenders from below with archery. This kept their casualties very low.

Had the Plain Yellow Banner not been a guest force, and had Geng Zhongde not been the uncle of the Prince of Jingnan, Qin Guocheng would likely have already lopped off his head to use as a chamber pot.

Most of the Bordered Blue Banner Han troops from Guangzhou had charged to the foot of the wall, but the east side of Xinhui stretched no more than two li from north to south.

With several thousand Qing soldiers assaulting the city in such a narrow space, the crush was unimaginable. Many banner troops could not even squeeze their way to the wall, and merely shouted and hollered on the periphery.

Most of these banner troops who had failed to push to the front and climb the ladders were secretly relieved — relieved that they had not thrown their lives away like those Green Standard cannon fodder, relieved that they had not become living targets for the Taiping Army inside the city like the household troops.

It's been a few days since updates resumed. Begging for subscriptions, begging for tips, begging for votes and clicks. Ai, begging for everything. Oh, right — Bone wants monthly tickets too!