Chapter 479: Blood and Fire, Three Kingdoms Kill (Destiny)

The Jin army retreating south from Yingzhou was not in the least bit panicked.

Because before the great battle at the Hundred Regiments' Wei Village outside Yangcheng, they had been chased south by Khitan cavalry in just the same way, running south all the while, and all the while fighting a decisive battle against the Khitan host.

This time it was again so similar that in the minds of the Jin soldiers, this was not a fearful retreat south, but something more like luring the enemy in deep.

The only exception was Du Chongwei. He was truly frightened, and anyone could see that this was Yelu Deguang's stratagem aimed at the Jin army, meant precisely to draw them north.

This coward, in truth, did not dare to fight Yelu Deguang at all.

At the same time, however, the pursuing Liao army was not all that resolute either, because the Jin army's move of retreating south without engaging also reminded the Liao army of their last disastrous defeat.

Thus the Jin army's retreat south this time was not under much threat. The only fighting that broke out between the two sides was the repeated back-and-forth entanglement and tugging between a small Khitan vanguard in pursuit and the Jin army's rearguard.

Today you catch up, find an opening, and kill a few dozen of my men.

Tomorrow I ambush you once, and also kill a few dozen of yours.

For the Jin and Liao sides, each with around eighty thousand fighting men, such losses could practically be counted as nothing.

However, this entanglement of small detachments gave rise to something unexpected.

That was that the Liao army's pursuit units, formed in squads of a few dozen men, simply could not get near the Jin army's main force.

So they also could not accurately determine whether the Jin main force was heading directly south to Wuqiang in Jizhou, or retreating along the established route from Dingzhou toward the Hengzhou area.

In the end, for the sake of prudence, Yelu Deguang decided to keep advancing along the Dingzhou-Hengzhou line.

Because the Khitans had always come south by this route on their repeated invasions, and since they knew the terrain well, even if they could not win and had to run, they would at least be traveling a familiar road.

In fact, however, Yelu Deguang's thinking was that even if the Jin army did not take the Dingzhou and Hengzhou route, he could still occupy those two prefectures and stand off against the Jin army.

Because those two prefectures had been ravaged badly enough by Du Chongwei, and the local inhabitants treated the Liao army and the Jin army exactly the same, wishing both would hurry up and be destroyed.

So if he took these two prefectures and simply refrained from further burning and killing, they would not strongly oppose the Khitan occupation, and the Liao army would gain a relatively stable rear area.

Even I, the Camel War God, am afraid! Lose one more time, and my entire capital will be wiped out.

But then, Yelu Deguang had been unlucky several times in a row; it was about time his luck turned.

After Du Chongwei withdrew his troops to Wuqiang in Shenzhou, he shook off the Liao army's pursuit, and he was preparing to continue retreating south and wait and see.

It happened that at this moment, Zhang Yanze, the Military Governor of the Yiwu Army, who had been sweeping the Khitan roving cavalry throughout Shenzhou, also arrived at Wuqiang.

Zhang Yanze had lately been thrashing the Khitan roving cavalry all across the prefectures of Hebei, and was not as fearful as Du Chongwei. He immediately entered the camp to pay his respects to Du Chongwei.

At this time, Du Chongwei was already packing up his armor. Zhang Yanze hurriedly stopped him.

"If you, my lord, are still going to retreat south, then you will have to go to the area of Beizhou and Xiangzhou, and in that case, Hebei will once again be left in ruins.

The Son of Heaven has even handed over the palace guards to you. If you still retreat to the banks of the great river, do you not fear the Son of Heaven's rebuke?"

Du Chongwei thought it over and found it reasonable. When Shi Chonggui set out on campaign, he had indeed ordered him to recover Yan-Yun.

Even taking ten thousand steps back, if Yan-Yun could not be recovered, that was because Zhao Yanshou and Liu Yanzuo had made a false surrender. If he, Du Chongwei, could withdraw with himself intact, he could at least claim neither merit nor fault.

But if he retreated all the way to the Yellow River, then the offense would be great. If Shi Chonggui sent an imperial envoy to rebuke him, he would be hard pressed to escape blame.

Seeing Du Chongwei wavering, Zhang Yanze at once pressed on with his persuasion: "At present, both Dingzhou and Hengzhou are in our hands. The enemy cavalry is pursuing us south, and I reckon they are between Shenzhou and Mozhou.

Better that we go west to Hengzhou, gather a great force, and then from Hengzhou march north to Dingzhou and cut off the enemy cavalry's line of retreat.

When the enemy cavalry hear of it, they will surely be terrified and flee back north. We, waiting at ease for the exhausted foe, can certainly win a great victory."

Hmm, actually, this plan did have some feasibility.

If it were Great King Zhang's Liangzhou army, it would be entirely possible. Their discipline is strict, and their mobility is no worse than the Khitans'.

If the Khitan host were between Shenzhou and Mozhou, the Liangzhou army could well cut off their route home, then simply wait and slaughter them.

But although the Jin army had high morale and no small fighting strength, its discipline had long been chaotic, its soldiers and officers came from all over, and it was not easy to maneuver.

More importantly, the Jin army was mainly infantry, and the infantry in turn depended on cavalry cover, so it simply could not carry out this kind of high-speed maneuver.

Zhang Yanze in fact knew this very well, but he was the Military Governor of the Yiwu Army at Dingzhou, and he was deathly afraid the Khitans would go and besiege his Dingzhou. His family was all in Dingzhou.

If he could get the great army to move west to the Dingzhou-Hengzhou area, then besides genuinely drawing the Khitan main force, it would also protect his family.

Du Chongwei did understand a bit of military matters. He knew that Zhang Yanze's plan placed no small demands on the troops and officers.

But after hesitating just a moment, Du Chongwei immediately agreed.

Because his greatest need right now was that he could not retreat south any further, lest he incur Shi Chonggui's punishment.

If he brought the great army to the vicinity of Hengzhou and relied on Hengzhou's strong walls, perhaps he could fight another great victory like the one at Baituanwei Village.

And so Du Chongwei at once summoned all the generals to discuss the matter. Once the officers understood Du Chongwei's thinking, they all felt it made no difference.

They even felt that fighting a decisive battle with the Khitans right at Wuqiang would be fine too.

Since you, Du Chongwei, are the commander-in-chief, and you want to go to Hengzhou for the decisive battle, then to Hengzhou it is.

Among the generals, however, there were three who thought there was a problem.

The first was Fu Yanqing. He had an extreme lack of trust in Du Chongwei's military ability, and felt that this childish dash west was something he absolutely could not approve of.

To say nothing of anything else, the consumption of army provisions and the difficulty of transporting them alone would be greater than retreating directly south or defending in place.

The second was Gao Xingzhou. He had not taken part in the great battle at Baituanwei Village outside Yangcheng, and so he was somewhat clearer-headed and did not underestimate the Khitans too much.

Moreover, Gao Xingzhou felt that the battle of Baituanwei Village outside Yangcheng could not be replicated, because the reason the Khitans had been defeated so badly was actually a command error by Yelu Deguang, and a very serious one at that.

In a war between states like this, you cannot always rely on the enemy commander making mistakes.

The third person was Wang Zhou, but the place where he saw a problem was neither that he looked down on Du Chongwei's military ability, nor that he did not underestimate the Khitans.

Rather, he felt that in rashly advancing west, the Hengzhou garrison was utterly unprepared and had stockpiled no grain, so they should not rush there.

Although Du Chongwei avoided battle and feared battle, and even had something like PTSD toward Yelu Deguang, his own character was not that of a meek, submissive man.

Mentally, this man may have had some kind of bipolar disorder.

On one side he was timid; on the other, manic and quick to anger.

Toward these three men who raised objections, Du Chongwei's reactions were each different.

Fu Yanqing, though courteous to others and gracious to his subordinates, had deep in his bones the pride of a warrior and of a family that had produced generals for generations.

He ordinarily looked down on Du Chongwei, and Du Chongwei had long found him an eyesore.

Seeing Fu Yanqing speak out in opposition, Du Chongwei flew into a rage and, in his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front Headquarters, stripped Fu Yanqing of his post as Right Wing Chief Commander and dispatched him south to garrison the Hengshui area of Jizhou.

The terrain around Hengshui is slightly undulating, with many low hills and depressions, which can to some degree impede the movement of Khitan cavalry.

Du Chongwei sent Fu Yanqing off to Hengshui, at the same time ordering him to collect grain and fodder. The disasters in Jizhou over the past few years had been relatively mild, so a little something could still be scraped together.

Second, in the event the Khitan army did not go to Hengzhou, Fu Yanqing could serve at Hengshui as a screen protecting the key Yellow River north-bank towns of Beizhou, Yedu, and Chanzhou.

Toward Gao Xingzhou, Du Chongwei was far more amiable, because early that year Gao Xingzhou's second daughter, E'niang, had married Du Chongwei's son Du Hongsui. Toward an in-law, Du Chongwei naturally had to show some courtesy.

When he heard Gao Xingzhou worry that the great army might not defeat the Khitan, Li Shouzhen and the other generals all laughed. Du Chongwei, for his part, assumed that because Gao Xingzhou had nearly died at Khitan hands the last time, he now feared the Khitan in his heart.

This he could well understand, for had not Du Chongwei himself been given a stress reaction by the Khitan beneath the walls of Jinyang?

For a time, the more Du Chongwei looked at this in-law, the more satisfied he felt, until he had a sense of shared suffering and mutual sympathy.

So he made an exception and ordered Gao Xingzhou to withdraw with his troops to the Yedu area, to supervise grain and fodder for the great army.

As for Wang Zhou's worries, Du Chongwei quite agreed with them. He allocated Wang Zhou three thousand cavalry and appointed him vanguard of the great army, sending him ahead to Hengzhou to set up defenses.

Sometimes in war there occur astonishing coincidences that cannot be explained by ordinary means. This was one of them.

The reckless meddling of Shi Chonggui, Du Chongwei, Feng Yu, and the others finally met its retribution at this moment.

With neither the Jin nor the Liao side knowing the other's situation, both chose the road to Hengzhou at the same time.

Compared with the Liao army, however, the Jin army was even more unfortunate.

From the time Fu Yanqing and Gao Xingzhou marched south and Du Chongwei struck camp and advanced west, the Hebei land, already into the tenth month, unexpectedly began to rain again in a steady drizzle.

That month, there was great flooding across the land, with continuous rain for more than twenty days. Du Chongwei led his army through the mire, struggling westward, and the soldiers and officers were full of complaints.

Along the route, in order to supply the great army's needs, the officials of the prefectures and counties made the residents tear down wood for cooking fires and chop up straw mats to feed the oxen and horses.

At the end of the tenth month, the weather just cleared, and the Jin army of seventy thousand reached the Zhongdu Bridge over the Hutuo River. This bridge was the key passage into and out of Hengzhou.

But when they arrived and took command there, the Jin army discovered that the Khitan troops had come earlier than they had, had already surrounded Hengzhou completely, and had also occupied the Zhongdu Bridge.

Seeing from the east bank of the river that the Khitan had seized the Zhongdu Bridge, Zhang Yanze was extremely frightened.

He worried both that the main Khitan force had already taken Dingzhou, and that Du Chongwei would blame him.

So, eager for merit, Zhang Yanze did not wait for the great army to finish deploying. He directly led his own force of more than four thousand men in a fierce assault on the Zhongdu Bridge.

Holding the Zhongdu Bridge for the Khitan was Gao Song, the one who had slain Liang Hanzhang.

Both forces were elite troops. One had not experienced the disaster at Baituanwei Village; the other was frantic to take the Zhongdu Bridge at once.

A bloody battle erupted in an instant.

Before the fighting had gone on long, the Khitan on the Zhongdu Bridge ran into trouble, because on the bridge they could not bring their cavalry advantage to bear, forcing them to fight on foot, and thus they were very much on the back foot.

Zhang Yanze seized the chance to use armored heavy infantry as the vanguard, then sent crossbowmen out into the river to wade through the water and shoot at the Khitan troops.

For a time he held every advantage. In less than two ke, Zhang Yanze led his troops to take control of the Zhongdu Bridge.

Most regrettably, his attack had gone too fast. By the time he took the Zhongdu Bridge, the bulk of the Jin army had still not reached the riverbank, and Du Chongwei was unable to provide Zhang Yanze with much in the way of reinforcements.

Yelu Deguang, who was nearby the Zhongdu Bridge, heard of this and personally sent fresh troops to support Gao Song. The Liao troops that reached the bridgehead at one point numbered over ten thousand.

By then Zhang Yanze's Jin troops had used up their crossbow bolts and the armored soldiers were exhausted. Unable to hold the Zhongdu Bridge they had occupied, they were driven back to the east bank by the Khitan.

Immediately after, Yelu Deguang personally hurried to the Zhongdu Bridge to guard against the Jin army.

And Gao Song, who had fought a bloody battle for two shichen and nearly been broken by the Jin army, also realized that in infantry combat, the Khitan troops could never defeat the Jin army.

He therefore suggested that Yelu Deguang simply burn down the Zhongdu Bridge, then use the cavalry advantage to cross the river at a shallow point upstream and cut off the Jin army's retreat.

Yelu Deguang thought this deeply sound and at once ordered the Zhongdu Bridge burned.

Only after the great fire on the Zhongdu Bridge had nearly died out did Du Chongwei finally arrive, but by then nothing could be done.

The Jin and Liao sides thus faced off across the Zhongdu Bridge.

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