Chapter 203: 201: Bitter Battle

Three days before the bitter battle, the situation on both sides was as follows:

The Jiangxi government forces numbered over 28,000 men, with 738 killed in action and over 3,700 wounded.

The fatality rate was 2.63%, and the casualty rate was 13.5%.

Though the casualty rate appears high, most injuries were minor — falls and sprains sustained while fleeing in rout down the mountain.

A twisted ankle counts as wounded too, and a real headache at that — you can't very well send soldiers hobbling up a mountain to charge.

The Great Unity Army numbered over 5,000 men, with 6 killed in action and 47 wounded.

Though the casualty rate appears very low, their rolling stones, rolling logs, and ten-thousand-man bombs were all expended. Their crude fortifications had been breached in many places, and the Great Unity troops were far more exhausted than the government soldiers, because the government forces, with their superior numbers, could fight in rotating shifts.

The truly bitter fighting was only just beginning.

The Great Unity naval force had just returned to Ji'an at that moment, so the stretch of river between Zhangshu Town and Fengcheng County was entirely the domain of the government fleet.

The four hundred armored soldiers brought by Zhang Tieniu and Liu Zhu could only disembark at Linjiang Prefecture and march overland to reinforce the Lion Mountain battlefield. The Prefect helped recruit a thousand civilian laborers to carry the armor and provisions for the four hundred armored men. Though the straight-line distance was only forty li, they still had to cross several small rivers.

At noon on the third day of the Lion Mountain siege, the four hundred armored soldiers crossed the last river and entered the hills, making contact with the peasant association members hidden among the peaks.

After ascertaining the situation, they also made contact with Li Zheng and Fei Yinggong further north.

"When do we strike?" Zhang Tieniu asked.

Fei Yinggong said, "No rush. Huang Yao hasn't lit the beacon fire yet — he can still hold out for now."

Once the beacon fire was lit atop Lion Mountain, it would mean they were on the verge of collapse.

Li Zheng also said, "Every extra day we drag this out is a gain. The longer it drags on, the lower the government troops' morale will sink."

And so Zhang Tieniu and Liu Zhu, with their four hundred armored soldiers, also joined the ranks of spectators watching the show, observing from afar as the government forces assaulted Lion Mountain.

The west side of Lion Mountain faced the river, but on the other three sides, further out, there was also a man-made canal.

The entire mountain, along with the surrounding land, could be regarded as a large-scale water-control installation — its specific function comparable to that of Dujiangyan.

Several centuries later in another spacetime, Commander Liu would annihilate an entire regular division of the Nationalist Army on this very mountain.

For Li Zheng, Fei Yinggong, Zhang Tieniu, Liu Zhu, and the others to attack the government forces below the mountain, they would still have to cross that man-made canal — making them highly vulnerable to being struck by Zhu Xieyuan mid-crossing.

That very evening, Jiangxi Regional Commander Zhu Guoxun dispatched two hundred government naval troops to support the battle.

To be precise, these were Zhu Guoxun's personal troops, all trusted men he had brought from Fujian, and half of those two hundred knew how to operate cannon.

"Supreme Commander, the cannon are here!"

"Quickly, carry them over!"

Twenty Folangji cannon, all purchased at high price from Zheng Zhilong. After more than half a year in transit, they had finally reached Jiangxi, and Zhu Guoxun promptly sent men to deliver them.

The morning of the fourth day.

Some of the crude fortifications damaged on the mountain had been repaired overnight.

The twenty Folangji cannon were carried halfway up the slope and assembled, then began firing at the fortifications and positions.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

The first volley was ranging fire — only a single shot struck its target.

Several hundred paces from Hu Dinggui, in another company's defensive sector, a crude fortification was blasted open with a breach.

Though the Folangji cannon had limited power, the Great Unity Army's fortifications were not sturdy either.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Another volley rang out. The Folangji cannon had a very high rate of fire — the standard configuration for one cannon was five sub-chambers. Each sub-chamber could be loaded with powder and shot in advance, then swapped in and fired directly, somewhat like a rifle magazine.

In that position's thirty-man company, two men were instantly struck dead by cannonballs, and a third had his arm torn off.

The remaining soldiers scrambled for cover.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Another volley.

This time only one man was killed, but the defending Great Unity troops' morale was plummeting fast — the fact that they had not collapsed on the spot already marked them as elite soldiers.

"Defend our homeland, protect our fields!"

The xiucai Wan Huaxin, leading the local militia he had personally recruited, began storming the mountain. After joining the battle on the first day, he had now rested for two full days and nights.

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

Just as the government troops charged, another volley of cannon fire slammed into the position.

The militia, well-rested and brimming with fighting spirit, were at the same time genuinely uneasy, terrified of being accidentally hit by their own side's artillery.

The cannon, of course, dared not fire again. They seized the moment to disassemble and carry them off, letting the barrels cool in the process, and planned to aim at a different position before opening fire.

"Up, up! Form ranks!"

The fortifications here had been largely blasted apart. Over twenty Great Unity soldiers scrambled to their feet and formed up to defend.

Huang Yao received the urgent report and dispatched a thirty-man reserve squad to reinforce them.

Wolf-spears jabbed chaotically, and the militia storming the mountain dared not advance.

"Rope hooks!"

Wan Huaxin bellowed, and the militia suddenly produced a newly invented weapon.

This weapon consisted of a length of bamboo pole with a rope tied to it, and a stone tied to the end of the rope. Simply by swinging the pole, the stone would spin the rope around, easily tangling a wolf-spear. In plain terms, it was a gadget specifically designed to deal with wolf-spear troops.

Under violent dragging, one wolf-spear soldier was caught off guard and pulled down, man and weapon together, and was instantly pierced by multiple spears and killed.

The other wolf-spear soldiers whose weapons were entangled either abandoned their wolf-spears or braced themselves with all their might to hold steady.

"Kill!"

The rest of the militia seized the chance to charge. Rattan-shield men hurried to block them, and spearmen began thrusting back and forth with the militia.

"Kill the rebels, protect the fields!"

"Farm the land, fill our bellies!"

Soldiers on both sides roared their slogans and fell to slaughter with cold steel.

"Aiyo, my hand!"

"Run for it!"

After barely a dozen deaths, these village braves began to rout.

The battle overseer squad stood ready to block their continued flight, while another squad of village braves immediately moved up to fill the gap.

But the Great Unity troops had no chance to rest. After successive rounds of fighting, every man was utterly exhausted.

Huang Liangying, who had followed Zhao Han since Wuxing Town, lacked ability and was still only a squad captain commanding thirty men. Both hands gripping his spear shaft were trembling as he hoarsely warned his subordinates: "Hold fast, hold on a few more days, and the garrison commander's relief troops will arrive!"

After repelling three waves of attack in succession, a gap suddenly opened on the flank — a rattan-shield man had lost focus from sheer exhaustion.

"Kill!"

Eight village braves stormed the position, and in an instant three Great Unity soldiers fell.

Huang Liangying immediately plugged the gap, raising his spear and stabbing one man dead, but he himself was stabbed in the thigh. Another spear thrust at his waist, yet his cotton armor blocked most of the force. Huang Liangying withdrew his spear and thrust again, toppling another man on the spot.

They broke — this squad of village braves broke again.

While the battle overseer squad checked their rout, another squad of village braves bypassed the fleeing men and charged in from the flank at once.

These village braves had very low morale — let a few more die and they would break.

Yet at the same time their morale was very high: even as their comrades were routing, they could charge forward and keep fighting.

"Kill!"

Huang Liangying, wounded in two places, seized the moment before the newly arrived village braves could steady themselves and led his men straight out of the position in a charge.

The other squad captain fighting alongside him, seeing this, also led his men charging out.

Forty-odd Great Unity soldiers, fierce as tigers descending a mountain — the three hundred newly arrived village braves were so terrified they turned and fled on the spot, sweeping the battle overseer squad into rout along with them.

But when they pursued further down, two thousand village braves stood in tight formation, and the routed men could only flee around the edges of the battle array.

Huang Liangying dared not pursue further and led his men back to the position. This kind of attrition warfare could not produce a mass rout.

While the enemy reorganized for another assault, Huang Liangying counted heads. His squad of thirty had lost eleven killed, with several more wounded — a casualty rate approaching fifty percent.

Had the village braves fought with a little more desperation, the Great Unity Army might well have broken.

This position was a focus of attention, because it had been chosen as the first target for the cannon assault.

Zhu Xieyuan had been watching the whole battle through the telescope delivered the day before, and the sight made his scalp crawl. Under normal circumstances, they should have been routed long ago!

Each time, three hundred village braves attacked a position held by sixty men in rotating waves — and that position had also taken several rounds of cannon fire.

And the result? The government troops had been routed in wave after wave, yet the rebels could still hold fast and refuse to retreat.

They had the advantage of terrain, true, but that morale was simply absurd.

How was one supposed to fight a battle like this?

Zhu Xieyuan had never encountered rebels like these. He concluded his own tactics were at fault and immediately gave the order: "Cease the attack on the northwest face. Encircle on three sides, leave one open — give the rebels a way down the mountain to flee by the river."

After beating back yet another government assault, Huang Liangying had taken one more wound. At last, two full companies arrived to relieve his position.

"Old Huang, pull your men back and rest," the newly arrived squad captain said.

Huang Liangying gritted his teeth. "No need. I can still fight."

The new squad captain laughed. "The government troops on the northwest side have pulled out. Huang Beiyuan has freed up quite a few men."

The Folangji cannons were still firing — a burst, then a pause, a burst, then a pause — to keep the barrels from overheating and to ensure the residue was properly cleared.

Chen Fugui was too badly wounded; no one knew if he would survive. His entire squad was pulled back to rest.

Hu Dinggui was resting too. The man was even snoring loudly — the sounds of slaughter and cannon fire could not wake him.

He had no idea how long he had slept when someone suddenly slapped him awake: "Get up, back to the fight!"

Hu Dinggui sprang to his feet and led his men back to the position. The officer of this position had been killed by a cannon blast.

Another wave of village braves charged up, wielding those strange weapons. Though they were of little use in open-field combat, when assaulting a hill they made the wolf-brush spears far less effective.

Both sides could only use their shields for cover and then trade thrusts with their spearmen.

The Great Unity Army, holding the high ground, liked to stab at the government troops' heads, while the government troops liked to stab at the Great Unity soldiers' legs and feet. Both sides' shield-bearers adjusted their protection accordingly.

"Kill!"

The sound of slaughter rose again from the northwest — the encircle-three-leave-one tactic was not working.

Zhu Xieyuan decided to turn the ploy to his advantage. Since the Great Unity Army had pulled some troops away, he would exploit the gap and launch a major assault there.

Hu Dinggui's arms had gone limp and sore. He had no idea how many enemies he had beaten back. He was numb now, thinking only of when he might sleep a while — even lying down to rest a moment would be good.

"Ugh!"

Hu Dinggui was jolted awake — by pain. The shield-bearer had failed to protect him, and his calf had been stabbed.

Two of the men under his command had already fallen. The enemy stormed the position once more. Hu Dinggui, enduring the pain, thrust at an angle and speared one village brave dead. The other soldiers together stabbed the remaining village braves to death.

Seeing the assault fail, this squad of village braves promptly routed.

"Kill!"

Hu Dinggui, limping, led his men charging out, struck down several village braves in pursuit, and swiftly ordered a withdrawal back to the position.

"Attack there!"

Zhu Xieyuan pointed at Hu Dinggui, who was retreating to his position.

Two thousand Governor-General's elite guards stepped forward. This was a force Zhu Xieyuan had been nurturing for six years, recruiting Miao slaves aged fifteen to twenty as soldiers. Though called Miao, they included Yi, Zhuang, and other minority peoples as well.

These minority youths, ground down by the exactions of the native chieftains, lived in bitter hardship.

Zhu Xieyuan recruited them and gave them enough to eat, and every one of them was willing to fight to the death out of loyalty.

They wore rattan armor from head to toe, with rattan helmets on their heads, as if the rattan-armored soldiers from Romance of the Three Kingdoms had reappeared in the world.

In truth, there were no rattan-armored troops in the Three Kingdoms era; they were, rather, common in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Ming-era Treatise on Military Preparedness even specifically records the method for making rattan armor.

Moreover, once soaked in tung oil, rattan armor had a very high ignition point and was not nearly as vulnerable to fire as depicted in Romance of the Three Kingdoms — though, of course, if it did catch fire, it was harder to extinguish than ordinary rattan or wood.

The rattan strips had to be repeatedly soaked in water and then dried in the shade, a process that took a full year. The rattan armor produced this way was both light and sturdy.

These Guizhou soldiers climbed the mountain with astonishing speed, scaling the slopes as if walking on level ground. Two thousand men, split into four columns, attacked the four positions simultaneously, including the one held by Hu Dinggui.

"Go request reinforcements, quickly!" Hu Dinggui cried out in alarm.

Hu Dinggui did not even need to ask; Huang Yao had already dispatched the reserve force. Huang Yao himself even came over with his personal guard.

"Stab at their arms and throats!"

These rattan-armored soldiers had large areas of their necks, arms, and legs exposed, mainly because the rattan armor was inconvenient to wear.

But they were extremely agile; a full suit of rattan armor weighed less than ten jin.

Huang Yao thrust his spear and wounded one man in the arm. This rattan-armored soldier was ferociously tenacious; wounded, he still charged onto the position, only to be stabbed in the rattan armor by another common soldier. Unable to withstand the force, he tumbled down the slope. The bastard was thrown into a daze, shook his head, and then actually scrambled up and continued charging upward.

Hu Dinggui drove his spear into a rattan-armored soldier's throat, but two of the soldiers beside him were cut down.

More and more rattan-armored soldiers surged up, and the position gradually showed signs of being overrun.

"Light them!"

There were still twenty "Ten Thousand Foes" bombs left; these were what Huang Yao had kept as his last resort. These bombs, along with the reserve troops, were specifically held back to deal with unexpected situations.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The upper bodies of the rattan-armored soldiers were not afraid of the explosions—the force was too weak—but their legs suffered all kinds of injuries. Those closest had their legs blown clean off.

At the same time, the spreading cloud of chili powder caused the rattan-armored soldiers extreme discomfort.

Huang Yao and Hu Dinggui seized the opportunity to counterattack, driving back the rattan-armored soldiers who had breached the position, and then each went to support the adjacent positions.

They had barely managed to drive the rattan-armored soldiers back when those defeated soldiers began organizing another assault.

"Withdraw quickly, withdraw up the mountain!"

Huang Yao immediately ordered the defensive line to contract. After repelling the enemy, all positions pulled back toward the summit, where a second defensive line was established.

However, the pool halfway up the mountain was lost. The Great Unity Army soldiers could now only drink from a few small mountain springs and some water stored in advance.

Hu Dinggui had two wounds on his legs and one on his chest. Had it not been for the protection of his cotton armor, he would likely have been dead already.

He ordered a headcount. Of his own thirty-man squad, only sixteen remained.

But after abandoning the first defensive line, the second line was even more defensible, and the problem of insufficient drinking water could be ignored for the time being.

Although the government troops had seized the first defensive line, seemingly achieving a major breakthrough, the main camp at the foot of the mountain had already erupted into quarreling.

"Supreme Commander, we cannot fight on! Any more and deserters will start appearing!"

"That Luling rebel Zhao knows sorcery! He must have summoned a spirit to possess his men. Those rebels, every last one of them, throws away his life!"

"Indeed, they do not retreat even with over half their number dead or wounded. It must be sorcery!"

"Supreme Commander, permit me to report: the local militia I recruited are no longer willing to fight. In that last assault, they jabbed a few times half-heartedly and then collapsed. The militia are utterly terrified!"

"..."

Over the previous three days combined, the government troops had suffered only a little over 700 fatalities.

Yet in the bloody fighting on the fourth day alone, the government troops lost over 3,100 killed, with several thousand more wounded in various conditions—again, the majority were injured while fleeing in rout.

The fatality rate had already exceeded ten percent. The only reason a large-scale rout had not occurred was purely because both sides were dispersed across the slopes on all four sides of the mountain. Had the two armies been massed for a head-on clash, this fatality rate alone would have sent the entire government army fleeing in total collapse.

On the Great Unity Army's side, casualties in the strategically difficult terrain were light.

The truly severe losses were on the positions where the slope was less steep. The casualty rate for individual picket squads there had already exceeded fifty percent. In particular, that charge by the rattan-armored soldiers had cost the Great Unity Army dearly, forcing them to yield the first defensive line.

In a single day, the Great Unity Army suffered over 1,200 casualties.

Of these, 441 were killed, 106 were severely wounded, and the rest sustained light injuries of varying degrees.

The casualties stemmed mainly from sheer exhaustion, which slowed reaction times and loosened formations, as well as from the impact of the rattan-armored soldiers.

Otherwise, with the Great Unity Army holding favorable terrain on the defensive, and the government troops prone to collapse at the slightest provocation, how could they not have achieved even a one-to-ten kill ratio?

"Supreme Commander, we cannot fight on!"

The main camp was in an uproar. Zhu Xieyuan hesitated, unable to make up his mind. He was now riding a tiger and could not dismount.

The situation in this siege of the rebels had completely defied Zhu Xieyuan's expectations. He had never seen an army like this; he could not even have dreamed that such a fearless army existed in this world!

If they withdrew now, even if they could return safely to Nanchang, the government troops would inevitably tremble at the mere mention of the rebels from this day forward.

The government troops had been beaten into a state of terror—fear on a spiritual and psychological level.

In any future battle, who knew how many would flee at the first sight of the enemy's banners!

Yet if they did not withdraw today, they would be unable to fight on tomorrow. The rattan-armored soldiers could still be used, but the local militia were already sick of battle and afraid to fight. Those last few assaults in the evening were all feints and play-acting. To engage and then flee was already considered brave; many militiamen turned and ran halfway through the charge.

"Beat the drums at every point, and withdraw the troops at the third watch!"

One point was roughly twenty-four minutes, meaning every twenty-four minutes, the drums would sound once to harass the Great Unity Army soldiers.

While beating the drums, they prepared to withdraw. Zhu Xieyuan wanted the entire army to slip away.

This battle was truly impossible to fight. Never mind besieging them for eight days; if they kept this up for two more days, deserters would start appearing among the government troops every night. Besiege them for five days, and half the army would desert under cover of darkness.

Wang Tingshi, after all, had served as a Governor. Zhu Xieyuan kept him behind alone.

"Why is it that every rebel soldier fights to the death, while our own government troops shrink back in fear?" Zhu Xieyuan gazed at Lion Mountain and murmured to himself.

Wang Tingshi said, "The rebels have all been allotted land. To protect their land, they will naturally fight to the death."

Zhu Xieyuan pointed at the military camp and said, "But these militiamen are mostly sons of respectable families. They fight to protect their own family property as well."

Wang Tingshi said, "For the common folk, protecting their fields is protecting their very lives. For the gentry, protecting their fields is merely protecting their wealth."

"No, no, it is surely more than just that." Zhu Xieyuan shook his head repeatedly.

It was not only the militia who had been beaten into terror; Zhu Xieyuan himself was afraid now, a mixture of inner fear and helplessness. He truly did not know how to fight a war from now on.

With the same terrain and the same troop strength, if they had been campaigning against the chieftains of Sichuan and Guizhou, those tribal soldiers could have held out for three days at most!

This mountain assault had shattered Zhu Xieyuan's confidence.

If even the Regional Commander had lost confidence, what could be expected of the common soldiers below?

(End of Chapter)