Chapter 95: The Triangular Bayonet

Since the Qing army entered the pass at Dushikou in Xuanfu town in early July, they had broken through nearly fifty cities in succession, killing countless Ming commoners and plundering incalculable wealth and goods.

Zhu Cilang felt the situation growing ever more dire. He first inspected the Yongwei Camp—its current state was excellent. Especially after the rewards and commendations, the officers and soldiers were brimming with fervor, eager to take the field once more.

The Yongwei Camp's manpower had been replenished and expanded to six thousand men. The more than two thousand newly added were all outstanding soldiers selected from the new camps—top performers in routine training who only needed the baptism of a real battle.

The state of the Yongwei Camp pleased Zhu Cilang greatly. Next he went to the Armory Bureau and the Amnin Factory, inspecting the research and production of firearms.

The Armory Bureau nowadays, through high salaries and vigorous recruitment of craftsmen, had grown from its original two hundred-plus men to twelve hundred.

Zhu Cilang implemented a system of old hands mentoring new ones among these craftsmen. Each veteran craftsman took on several apprentices to pass on his skills; for every qualified firearm the apprentices produced there were rewards, and the veteran additionally received a cut.

Likewise, if a new craftsman produced a substandard firearm, the veteran would also be penalized. Under this system, the veterans could only teach their apprentices with full effort—more work, more reward.

Because the Armory Bureau's research and development rewards were extremely generous, more and more spontaneously formed research groups emerged among the craftsmen, and the enthusiasm and atmosphere for innovation were quite good.

Just recently, an old craftsman, following Zhu Cilang's conception, repeatedly studied and reverse-engineered the wheel-lock musket and finally achieved an improvement—greatly reducing the weight and size of the originally bulky wheel-lock, giving it something of the prototype form of the later revolver.

However, it was merely a reduction in volume and weight; there was no major breakthrough in performance. The greatest improvement was increasing the original four shots to six, while loading remained largely unimproved—still just as troublesome and time-consuming.

Zhu Cilang understood that to replicate the later revolver, one had to develop the primer and the modern cartridge. The cartridge was the main body; the gun was merely the carrier.

For example, the rifled musket—more advanced than the flintlock, the rifle proper—its spiral rifling allowed the projectile to spin stably through the air, improving accuracy and range, reaching over nine hundred meters.

Though manufacturing a rifled musket was somewhat troublesome, given Zhu Cilang's knowledge and the Armory Bureau's production capability, it could certainly be made. Yet making just the gun was almost entirely useless—the core and most difficult part was the cartridge.

In the relationship between cartridge and firearm, the cartridge determines the gun—whatever cartridge exists, a corresponding gun will follow. Only when the cartridge achieves fundamental breakthroughs in new principles, new structures, new materials, and new technologies can the gun undergo a qualitative leap accordingly.

The current smoothbore musket ammunition, primarily steel balls and lead balls, was utterly unsuited to rifled muskets—in use it was no better than the self-igniting Lumi musket.

Italy already had spiral-rifled firearms in 1476, and in the early 17th century the Danish army was the first to equip rifles. Yet it was not until the latter half of the 19th century that rifled muskets became mainstream, precisely because the problems of loading and ammunition had never been solved.

Because rifled muskets of this era, when loading (with the bullet wrapped in oil-soaked cloth), had to be hammered down the barrel with a wooden mallet—loading was extremely time-consuming, far slower than the Yongwei Camp's self-igniting Lumi musket.

To use the advanced rifles of later ages, one had to solve the problems of breech-loading and primer cartridges. These problems were not complicated, and Zhu Cilang had discussed them in detail with Sun Heding—only the research and manufacture of the cartridge was quite difficult, not something that could be casually produced.

From his rough understanding of later times, Zhu Cilang recalled that the tolerance between cartridge and bore diameter had to be within one millimeter. As for the specifics, he wasn't entirely clear—after all, he wasn't omniscient, knowing everything.

With the ideas Zhu Cilang provided, if the Armory Bureau continued its research, the successful development of breech-loading guns, spiral rifling, and cartridges was only a matter of time.

Zhu Cilang wasn't anxious either, because anxiety was useless. The cartridge could be said to be a product of civilization combining physics, chemistry, materials science, aerodynamics, and craftsmanship—everything required time to resolve.

Technology and civilization were not conjured at will. Zhu Cilang's advanced ideas could only bring them about earlier and avoid detours—they could not be achieved overnight.

If everything became trivially easy because of a time-traveler, then within a few years the Ming's spaceships would be landing on the moon.

After inspecting the Armory Bureau, Zhu Cilang went to the Armor Factory in the southeast of the capital's eastern district. The Armor Factory was where armor, muskets and cannons, bows, arrows, and gunpowder were manufactured.

The Armor Factory used to be just like the Amnin Factory—prone to explosions. In the thirty-third year of Wanli, officers and soldiers of the capital's Three Great Camps came to the Armor Factory to draw gunpowder. The eunuch overseeing the powder, because the old powder had caked, ordered craftsmen to split it with iron axes.

The moment a craftsman brought his axe down, a shower of sparks was struck, directly igniting the gunpowder. The outcome went without saying—nearly a hundred officers and soldiers waiting for powder were burned to death on the spot, and the craftsmen in the factory and nearby residents suffered countless dead and wounded.

A few years earlier, in this same place, it had exploded again, collapsing many houses—even the great stone roller for making gunpowder was blasted all the way beneath the city wall at Paozi River.

After Zhu Cilang had Wu Zhong take over the Armory Bureau and the Amnin Factory, he also cleaned up the Armor Factory, installing the same set of safety measures as at the Amnin Factory.

On the Armor Factory's proving ground, the factory's director held a flintlock musket fitted with a bayonet, his face wreathed in smiles: "Your Highness, this is the bayonet manufactured according to your specifications."

Zhu Cilang circled halfway around the musket fitted with the bayonet, fairly satisfied with its appearance, then ordered men to test the bayonet's penetration against mannequins of different armor thicknesses.

According to the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming, in the second year of Jingtai (1451), the Great Ming first mounted spearheads on iron muskets for stabbing, fusing the capabilities of firearm and spear into one.

It was not until the mid-16th century, over a hundred years later, that Europe saw the invention of mounting spearheads on hunting guns for stabbing prey.

In later history, the bayonet originated in the French army in 1647. A French musketeer, finding it troublesome to wield a musket in one hand and a short sword in the other during close combat, simply jammed his short sword into the muzzle.

Just such a spur-of-the-moment invention changed the pattern of warfare in later ages—all the pikemen gradually lost their jobs, changed trades, and exited the stage of history.

Ever since the bloody battle at Liangxiang, the moment Zhu Cilang returned to the capital he immediately ordered the Armor Factory to produce bayonets. However, these were not the flat-headed bayonets of the later Anti-Japanese War era, but triangular military bayonets.

Zhu Cilang reasoned that flat-headed bayonets demanded relatively high-quality steel—with the Ming's current productive capacity, that would likely be very difficult. Moreover, the Qing troops mostly wore two or three layers of heavy armor; with such an immature flat-headed bayonet, it would probably snap before piercing a Tartar's armor.

Zhu Cilang also considered the spearheads of the early Ming, but finding them too heavy and obsolete by history, he had to abandon that idea. In the end he thought of the triangular military bayonet from his later days in the army.

The triangular military bayonet's blade was prism-shaped, with lower material requirements than flat-headed bayonets, and structurally it was also somewhat sturdier.

Most importantly, the triangular military bayonet had extremely high lethality. With its prismatic exterior and cold gleam, its fatality rate was very high.

The wound a triangular bayonet inflicted was roughly a square hole. Blood not only flowed out along the grooves on the spot, but such wounds could not be bandaged or closed—especially on the battlefield, where there was no chance to call an ambulance or anything; one simply waited to die!

The triangular bayonet's drawbacks were also obvious: its function was rather singular. Lacking the chopping and slashing capabilities of the flat bayonet, it could only stab, stab, stab—used as a spear.

Due to the short time available, the Armor Factory, working overtime, had so far produced only five hundred triangular bayonets, all manufactured to the barrel specifications of the Yongwei Camp's muskets.

In theory, mounting a bayonet did not affect the musket's firing, but the current flintlock loading method was all muzzle-loading. Fitting a triangular bayonet at the muzzle would certainly affect loading speed.

To avoid this trouble, Zhu Cilang adopted the earliest socket-type mounting method, using a collar and lug to attach the triangular bayonet. In normal combat the bayonet was kept in a scabbard at the waist, mounted only when closing for melee.

Given that the triangular military bayonet was too ferocious, to avoid accidental injuries during training, the Yongwei Camp drilled with unsharpened blades. Only when marching to war were the edges (the points) sharpened—each man carried a small whetstone, and sharpening took about five minutes.