Chapter 1707: No More Black Guns — Now It's Black Cannons!

Below White Mountain, arrows flew like locusts.

Three or four thousand warriors of the khan's guard, behind more than a hundred shield carts, formed ten square formations and, under the command of each camp's Assistant Regional Commander, loosed feathered arrows in wave after wave at the Chahar warriors forty or fifty paces away.

The Chahar's Shaktu Taiji had also come to the front, leading more than a thousand armored cavalry and driving over ten thousand armed herdsmen, who shot back listlessly with the Mongols' weak bows.

The arrow storms flew back and forth, so dense they were nearly like raindrops, and soon a great stretch of white fletching was planted before the two armies, looking as if a heavy goose-feather snow had fallen.

Though the arrows fell like rain, neither side's losses were great. The killing power of bow and arrow, after all, could not compare with a firelock. If a lead ball from a firelock truly bored into flesh, in this age, that meant certain death, not one in ten survived!

But if an arrowhead lodged in the body, even without iron armor, it was not necessarily death or maiming. Wear a few more layers of oxhide or sheepskin robes, pad the vital spots with a wooden plaque, and one could take several arrows and keep going.

So the Chahar herdsmen, who had neither armor nor good bows and arrows, actually withstood the dense arrow storm from the khan's guard, and could even shoot back.

Judging by appearances alone, the Chahar were not at any disadvantage!

Watching from high above, Ligdan Batur finally let out a breath of relief. He no longer sought a great victory. All that talk of entering Datong, of the Yuan rising and the Ming falling, was nonsense to fool the men below. If he could squeeze a few hundred thousand taels of market bounty from the Zhu emperor every year, and become "Khan of the West" on the Tumed steppe, he would be fully content.

And this great battle below White Mountain, to put it plainly, was war for the sake of peace. However it turned out, it was all bargaining chips for the peace talks and payments to come! For Ligdan Batur, not winning did not matter, so long as he did not suffer a crushing defeat.

Because as long as he could fight the Son of Heaven, who had personally led his army, to a standstill, he would have the capital to demand money. For the Ming Son of Heaven still had to contend with the Later Jin's Tiancong Khan, and so could not remain long in Datong!

So with things as they now stood, Ligdan Batur felt he still held chips in hand. Unless the Ming Emperor could, in two or three quick moves, drive him off White Mountain.

And that was impossible!

Even if the young emperor Zhu Youjian had learned the shield-cart tactics of the Jianzhou Jurchen, it was hardly likely he could break through his kuren defense. After all, Zhu Youjian had few troops — at a glance, only twenty or thirty thousand.

"Good, right here! This spot will do. Men!" Zhu Youjian had by now advanced another hundred and some tens of paces, reaching a point twenty or thirty paces behind the shield-cart line. He looked around, nodded, and began shouting.

This place was hardly safe. Spent arrowheads kept drifting down from midair, swaying as they fell. Wu Sangui and Hei Wentao, the two bodyguard chiefs, were already watching the falling arrows with sweat beading on their foreheads.

Although Zhu Youjian wore heavy armor that arrowheads could not possibly pierce, his "dragon countenance" was bare — he wore no face guard. If an arrow happened to fly true and pierce his face... Because both men were so worried for Zhu Youjian's safety, neither heard the young Son of Heaven's summons. Only when Zhu Youjian roared again did the two snap to attention.

"Your Majesty, are we going to fire the black guns again?"

"Your Majesty, please do not act personally. Let your subjects and Changbo go teach the Tartars a lesson for you!"

Both men feared that Zhu Youjian's blood was up, and that he would plunge into the arrow storm himself to fire a black shot!

"What nonsense are you talking?" Zhu Youjian was displeased. "What do you mean, black gun? We are the Son of Heaven — always open and aboveboard!"

Right — when the Emperor quietly fires a gun, can it be called a black gun?

Wu Sangui and Hei Wentao knew they had misspoken and hurriedly made to dismount and kowtow in apology, but Zhu Youjian waved them off. "Go at once and pass the order: haul all the general cannons over here to Us!"

As Wu Sangui and Hei Wentao received the order, both thought to themselves: This Son of Heaven truly has stopped firing black guns and switched to black cannons — he means to blast the Khutuktu Khan to death with cannon fire!

"Your Majesty," Hei Wentao volunteered, "this subject learned to fire cannons at Shanhai Pass. Perhaps this subject could command them for you."

Zhu Youjian glared at Hei Wentao. "What do you know about firing cannons? Do you know what ranging is? What angle of fire is? What a trajectory is? How much powder to load for what kind of shot at what distance?"

Huh? What did that mean?

Hei Wentao was dumbfounded. Firing a cannon — was it really that complicated? What was His Majesty talking about?

Seeing he could not answer, Zhu Youjian asked again: "Then do you know how to build a gun emplacement?"

"A little," Hei Wentao replied. "It's just digging earth and piling a rampart."

Zhu Youjian nodded. "Then go to Man Gui and ask for some camp troops, all with shovels, and come dig earth and pile a rampart."

Well — a fine great general, and just like that he'd become a dirt digger.

Wu Sangui and Hei Wentao no longer dared to remonstrate, and could only take Zhu Youjian's order and go fetch cannons and men. After about half a shichen, one after another of the "black cannons" was pushed up by the gunners under the Datong garrison command.

These "black cannons" were the so-called general cannons — in fact a kind of smoothbore cannon, some muzzle-loading, some breech-loading (like the Folangji cannon), with barrel weights mostly between one and two thousand catties. In field combat, these great guns were generally mounted on a three-wheeled carriage called a rolling cart — truly a design that opened a great hole in the brain! Because the carriage had three wheels, the recoil from every shot sent the cannon rolling far backward. To counter this recoil, iron claws, iron shackles, and such had to be used to fix the cannon to the ground, while earth was also piled behind the cannon to build a rampart to block it.

Moreover, the earth rampart piled behind the cannon also protected the gunners from injury if the cannon burst.

Besides the poorly designed carriage and the perfunctory casting, the third reason Ming artillery could not bring its power to bear was that the gunners were simply too poor.

Firing cannons is a technical craft!

Ranging, computing trajectories, computing angles of fire, computing powder charges, even preparing the propellant — all of it is learning.

And in the Ming, few people studied such learning. Civil officials did not understand it, military officers did not bother with it, and the gunners below were left to play with it themselves. If there was fighting every day, that was fine; the fear was long peace, when the craft of gunnery would be lost.

Fortunately, Zhu Youjian knew a bit of the trade. Practical experience he of course had none, but book knowledge he understood a little. So now he could personally command the dozen or so general cannons hauled out from Datong's city. Seeing these cannons, Zhu Youjian could not help frowning!

The shoddy workmanship went without saying, and they were of uneven sizes, so the shot weights naturally differed too. Worse, the shot they used also differed — some iron balls, some stone balls, some iron pellets.

Zhu Youjian summoned the gun captains of each piece and questioned them. Basically none of them knew the correct powder charge, and the powder they used looked off as well. The formula was likely flawed (not that they did not know the formula, but that they cut corners), and the sulfur and saltpeter used had probably not been refined. So Zhu Youjian had no choice but to order on-the-spot testing — using a general cannon of about a thousand catties, before Zhu Youjian's own eyes, load powder and fire a test shot, first with a little powder, then gradually increasing. After half a day of fuss, he finally estimated the gap between the powder used by the Datong garrison and standard black powder, and from that worked out a fairly accurate charge.

Then Zhu Youjian selected from the eighteen general cannons hauled from Datong city twelve bronze cannons that looked passable — all of them looked very ancient, likely antiques left from Zhang Juzheng's time in office. Though old, the Ming court of that era had been comparatively rich and comparatively diligent, so the bronze cannons cast then should not be too poor.

But these twelve bronze cannons were of uneven sizes, and their shot came in two kinds, iron and stone, so Zhu Youjian still had to calculate the charge for each one, and test-fire each one to find its angle of fire. He kept at it until around lunchtime before all twelve "black cannons" were properly seen to.

By this time, the archers at the front had already been rotated several times, and the arrows loosed numbered a hundred or two hundred thousand.

Looking at the stretch of "white fletching" before him, Zhu Youjian smiled and gave the order: "Let the khan's guard cavalry fall back thirty paces. Now it is time to see Our general cannons display their divine might!"

(End of Chapter)