Chapter 389: Where Did This modao glaive glaive Army Come From?

Xiao Shilu deliberately chose a day with light snowfall to set out.

Because by his estimate, the enemies watching them from the shadows must have relied on one man with two or even three horses to keep getting ahead of them in winter and ambushing the scouts sent toward Yunzhou.

And this kind of weather was unfavorable for cavalry movement.

On his side, with many strong bows and hard crossbows, he had no fear of a cavalry charge in such weather, and he would make sure anyone who came after them suffered badly.

But what this veteran general from the time of Yelu Abaoji never imagined was that the ones watching them from the shadows all along were not some steppe tribe from north of the desert, but the cavalry of the Guiyi Army from Hexi and the cavalry of the Zhe family of Fuzhou.

After leaving the beacon fort and marching over thirty li, the sky had by now stopped shedding snowflakes, and Xiao Shilu clearly felt that this year's winter was not as cold as in the past.

In previous years, a single winter would bring at least two or three white disasters, enough to bury an entire tribe of several hundred people, but this year, not one white disaster had occurred.

The Hun River lay in the distance, and Xiao Shilu ordered the guards beside him to find a stretch where the ice was still thick enough, so the army could cross.

Yet although that sense of unease grew ever stronger, still no enemy appeared.

This was troublesome. If he went back just like this, that great nephew of his would certainly show no mercy.

Fortunately, at that very moment, the sound of hoofbeats suddenly rose from all directions. Xiao Shilu raised his eyes and looked out: on the snow-white ground to the southwest, a stretch of white snowfield was moving at tremendous speed.

Looking more carefully, it was not the snowfield moving, but at least several thousand cavalry in white robes, charging toward them.

Very quickly, these pursuing cavalry clashed with the troops Xiao Shilu had left at the rear as a rearguard, and the cries of battle instantly spread along the entire bank of the Hun River.

"Quick! Don armor! Lead the warhorses away, form the crescent formation!" Xiao Shilu roared. He had placed only a little over three hundred riders at the rear; they could not hold for long.

Hearing Xiao Shilu's command, several thousand elite Pishi Army soldiers began helping one another put on their armor at top speed.

These Khitan people, half fishers and hunters and half nomads, active among the white mountains and black waters, were all excellent warriors.

Those who could enter the Pishi Army were the finest of the fine. One had to understand that in the entire Great Khitan state, the Pishi Army numbered only a little over thirty thousand.

The basic unit organization of the Pishi Army was not the same as in the Central Plains. Following the custom of steppe cavalry, they generally formed a cavalry squad of five men.

In battle, four men charged first, while the remaining one stayed behind to watch the horses.

Because a cavalry charge was not always something that could be settled in one rush; often they had to change horses and go in again.

If no one watched the horses, the advantage of one man with two or three horses could not be brought into play, especially in this kind of evenly matched battle requiring repeated charges.

There was another benefit as well: when the enemy collapsed, the cavalrymen watching the horses could mount at once and launch a charge under the lead of their officers, and they could also serve as fresh troops to cover a retreat.

But this moment was somewhat different. He had the horses led away because Xiao Shilu intended to use bows and crossbows to deal with the attacking enemy riders.

Heh heh! You never expected this, did you? We Khitan won't fight you in a cavalry battle. I'll fight on foot. I have two thousand strong bows and hard crossbows under my command; let's see what cavalry can withstand that.

To be fair, the Khitan of this time, how to put it, were not really like a people from beyond the frontier. One could see it from the two brothers Yelu Bei and Yelu Deguang.

Both of them were fervent admirers of Han culture. Yelu Deguang at first even wanted to become a Confucian scholar.

Yelu Bei, for his part, collected ten thousand scrolls of books, and when he crossed the sea to the Later Tang, he was the sort who still had to write a poem to declare his aspirations.

This was partly because the Khitan were a frontier people who had existed since the time of the Great Tang, and were deeply influenced by the Great Tang.

Secondly, the Da clan's Bohai kingdom, which the Khitan had destroyed, was extremely sinicized among the fishing and hunting peoples of the northeast, almost the same as Han people. The Khitan's annexation of Bohai made them resemble a Han dynasty all the more.

At the same time, because of the Tang dynasty's extremely inclusive ethnic policies, the Khitan were not entirely regarded as barbarians at this time.

The identity of "sons of Tang" was very broad. When referring specifically to Han people, one would not use the term "Tang person"; it should be "Han folk" or "Hanzi."

This was also one of the reasons Yelu Deguang felt he could enter the Central Plains.

The Khitan state was more like something strange from the late Tang, a thing hovering between a military province and a foreign vassal.

Their identity as a frontier people was not pure. The Tatars and the Zubu were the true frontier peoples.

Sure enough, the enemy cavalry's charge was ferocious, and the three hundred cavalry Xiao Shilu had left behind were quickly scattered.

And Zhe Deyuan, the younger brother of Zhe Deyi, did not pause either. Chasing right on the heels of the Khitan cavalry, he charged fiercely at the Khitan men by the river.

As he charged, Zhe Deyuan found it strange. Why had these Khitan not mounted their horses? Had they been frightened senseless?

But the next second, from within the Khitan formation, ten thousand arrows suddenly flew out at once. The Khitan in the crescent formation, at the sound of several claps of the wooden clapper, loosed the arrows in their hands simultaneously.

The Zhe family cavalry had not donned armor at all, and in an instant a great swath of them were shot down. Especially the warhorses, which had no protection whatsoever, collapsed screaming all over the ground. Zhe Deyuan was horrified and hurriedly led his men back.

But as he retreated, from the Khitan crescent formation came another roll of drums, and over three hundred riders charged out, all mounted on tall, swift-sprinting horses, throwing Zhe Deyuan's several hundred vanguard troops into chaos in an instant.

By the time Zhe Deyuan withdrew more than a hundred paces and began reforming his ranks, a headcount made his heart ache so badly he trembled.

Having endured two volleys of arrows and been hacked at from behind, in total thirty or forty men had been killed, and at least fifty horses had fallen.

This was truly an eye-opener. Only after Murong Xinzhang and the others arrived did they drive the pursuing Khitan cavalry back. The few of them were also seeing such a situation for the first time.

The Khitan, who had always ranged freely on horseback, had formed a great crescent formation of bows and crossbows by the river, and hidden shock cavalry within the formation. It was entirely the classic Han style of fighting.

While they, these Han men, were all cavalry carrying out a surprise attack, much like a steppe people.

After his shock passed, Murong Xinzhang was immediately overcome with wild delight. Right there on horseback, he cupped his hands toward Zhe Deyi.

"Commander, let us dismount as well. These rotten Xi want to trade bow and crossbow fire with us sons of Tang? They must have gone mad."

"Hahaha!" Zhe Deyi laughed loudly several times. This was truly misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding.

The Khitan opposite them had certainly taken their several thousand men for some kind of steppe people. By a twist of fate, the Khitan were now using their own weakness to strike at the enemy's strength, and would likely suffer a great loss.

"All troops dismount! Commander Murong, take one hundred Divine Arm crossbowmen as the center. We'll fight these Khitan in a battle on foot!"

While Zhe Deyi and the others laughed heartily over here, over there Xiao Shilu's face suddenly changed. The shaven-headed officer beside him let out a great shout.

"No! Supervisor, they are not some steppe riders from who knows where. They are men of the Southern Dynasty! No steppe tribe could produce several thousand sets of white robes!"

Xiao Shilu's nephew Xiao Gan also cried out in alarm, "Could it be a trap laid by the Lord of Jin? The Jin envoy was killed, and it was all just them putting on a show?"

Xiao Shilu, meanwhile, looked at the warhorses that had already been led far away. It was too late to mount them now.

But if it was to be a battle on foot, then a battle on foot it would be. The Khitan often fished and hunted in the mountain forests; they would not necessarily lose a foot battle to the men of the Southern Dynasty.

"It is not the Lord of Jin sending troops. He does not have the nerve. This must again be some so-called loyal subject of the Southern Dynasty, sending troops without authorization!"

Xiao Shilu roared. Even if the Lord of Jin, Shi Jingtang, had truly turned against them, they could not admit it now, lest it shake the army's morale.

Fighting a military province of the Southern Dynasty that had sent troops without authorization, and going to full-scale war with the Southern Dynasty, were two entirely different things.

"Murong Dalang, raise our banner! The lord instructed that we must let these Khitan and the sons of Tang of the northern lands see who has returned!"

Li Cunhui roared at Murong Xinzhang, and the latter immediately had the several elite riders of the Hanshan Capital who had been following him raise a sun-moon-stars tricolor banner that unfurled in the wind.

Xiao Shilu felt as if he had been struck by lightning. He stared fixedly at that tricolor banner, then violently shook his head.

"Impossible! The Great Tang has been gone for decades. Hah! Wrapping yourselves in a tiger's skin to raise a great banner — this old man will not fall for your trick."

The two sides' formations were similar, and their tactics were similar as well: both concentrated strong bows and heavy crossbows in the center for direct exchanges, then spread out on both flanks like the wings of a crane, using a small number of archers and crossbowmen to form enveloping fire.

Hidden within the formation were several hundred shock cavalry, with armored riders but unarmored horses, held in reserve to deliver the decisive blow.

The Khitans left several hundred men to guard the horses, and the Guiyi Army likewise left several hundred men to guard the horses.

At noon, with the cold wind biting but no snow falling, the attacking Guiyi Army, crunching over a thin layer of white snow, launched its assault.

"Dong!" went a drum. Each squad leader immediately struck the small drum in his hand, and the fire leaders and deputy fire leaders took positions at each end of every row, controlling the pace of the formation and making the soldiers march in relatively straight lines.

Every twenty paces or so, the small drums in the squad leaders' hands would stop, and the great army would halt instantly, then adjust its ranks to make them neater, ensuring no unit had advanced ahead of the whole formation.

Then the commander-in-chief's great drum in the central army would sound again, the squad leaders' small drums would resume, and only then would the army continue forward.

A full three thousand infantry, bearing bows and crossbows and carrying infantry lances on their backs, marched with remarkably uniform steps.

And the oppressive feeling of this slow approach was immense.

A drop of cold sweat rolled down Xiao Shilu's forehead, even though in his heart he believed the Great Tang could not return.

But this formidable tactic of heavy infantry coordinating with cavalry was precisely the Great Tang's most characteristic method of war.

Moreover, he had spotted in the enemy's central army heavy infantry carrying gleaming modao glaive glaive glaives on their backs.

One must know that after the late Tang, the modao glaive glaive glaive corps — a troop type that consumed vast wealth and was built purely on silver — had gradually disappeared.

Military Governors certainly would not raise modao glaive glaive glaive corps. Raise them for what? Spend all that money so that when they rebelled and stirred up trouble, they could be hacked to pieces more neatly?

Better to take the money for training a modao glaive glaive glaive corps and distribute a bit more to the soldiers, to make their loyalty a bit higher.

At least when trouble broke out, for the sake of all the wealth given before, they would merely drive you away instead of slaughtering your whole family.

The rapid decline of fully armored cavalry in the Five Dynasties was partly due to this reason as well.

Why spend such a great sum on fully armored cavalry? Dreadfully expensive, and only useful for delivering a decisive blow on the battlefield. Better to share that money around and build goodwill far and wide.

And in this age, anyone still able to raise a modao glaive glaive glaive corps and fully armored cavalry — that was truly extraordinary!

Li Cunxu had several thousand fully armored cavalry, and with them he unified more than half the realm, prompting Zhu Wen to sigh that in having a son, one should wish for one like Li Yazi.

Yang Xingmi dominated the Jianghuai region, building the Black Cloud Longsword Capital on the foundation of a modao glaive glaive glaive corps, and fought unmatched across the southeast, earning the finest reputation among the Ten Kingdoms.

In short, at this time the realm was divided among several states, and the Military Governors everywhere rebelled and submitted by turns, but those who could afford to maintain fully armored cavalry and a modao glaive glaive glaive corps in their armies were rarer than phoenix feathers and unicorn horns — surely the strongest of the strong.

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