Chapter 394: Firing the Cannons

The Oirat troop formation on the southern face of the wagon fort, suddenly battered by cannon fire, was smashed into disarray. The massive defensive line of several thousand infantry and cavalry, like a spiderweb torn apart by a violent storm, was ripped open with gap after gap almost instantly.

The two cavalry companies that had charged forward to intercept also broke before the trench. Seized by terror as cannonballs tore through them and rockets blanketed down, they frantically wheeled their horses and retreated.

Seizing this moment, the cavalry led by Ma Ke thundered up to the trench and hurled the sandbags carried on muleback into the ditch, filling out several narrow crossing paths in an instant.

Rockets sprayed into the sky, cannonballs boomed beside them, and heavy muskets hurled massive lead balls across the battlefield into the distance. Ma Ke's border troops, clad in crimson cotton armor, crossed the trench, reformed their ranks, and launched a headlong charge against an enemy ten times their number.

The commander defending the Oirat left wing was Taiji Dorji of the Khoshut tribe, the sixth son of the Güshi Khan.

As early as when rolling clouds of dust first stirred within Liu Chengzong's formation, Taiji Dorji had sensed that the Han army was likely about to break out.

However, due to a misjudgment on his part, the six thousand Oirat troops on the southern face of the wagon fort could not form a complete defensive line. Their defense was tighter in the southwest, while a sizable gap existed directly to the south.

Taiji Dorji's prior assessment had been that the Han army would withdraw to the west, where the encirclement was not yet closed.

Every Oirat chieftain, including the Güshi Khan himself, had judged the situation the same way — this was their very tactic.

Enveloping the Han wagon fort from east to west in a crescent-moon formation to force a westward retreat, then pursuing and striking them as they struck camp and withdrew.

Everyone knew the wagon fort would have counterattack strength, but no one thought that counterattack would come from the south. They believed this wagon fort had come from the south in the first place and had been cut off by them while retreating north.

The Oirat chieftains therefore all believed this Han army would retreat either north or west.

It never crossed their minds that the Han army's assault would be aimed south, and that they would deploy massed artillery to deliver suppressive fire before charging the formation.

Suddenly caught in a furious cannonade, with dozens of cannonballs large and small and five or six hundred rockets slamming into their ranks in a short span, the entire camp was instantly thrown into chaos. The Oirat soldiers, their morale shattered, were utterly incapable of mounting an effective interception.

Taiji Dorji was so furious with his men that his teeth itched, yet he was helpless. To prevent his main camp from being scattered by the enemy cavalry charge, he hastily gave the order for his soldiers to mass together and set up a camel-wall and cart-wall.

From his vantage point within the formation, he could see most clearly that rockets and cannon fire, in this environment of windblown sand stretching to the horizon, had no accuracy to speak of and could hardly kill more than a handful of men.

Yet with hardly anyone dead, the artillery was the single greatest cause of the army's collapse — the soldiers were terrified and panicked, and even the officers dared not mass their subordinates together.

With the soldiers scattered like loose sand, how could they stop the enemy's charge?

Taiji Dorji had just managed to think this much, still in a fluster, when he saw a troop of men burst from the Han wagon fort, rapidly fill the trench, and come galloping straight at him. His three ethereal souls and seven corporeal spirits nearly fled his body in fright, and he frantically ordered his guard unit forward to block the enemy.

His cavalry guard numbered only a hundred or so men, but from physique to equipment, they were the finest warriors of the Khoshut, virtually beyond reproach.

Unlike the other Khoshut cavalrymen clad in leather armor, these hundred-odd riders each wore mail and four-mirror armor obtained through trade. Their mounts also wore mail barding and beast pelts, and they were equipped with lances, sabers, short axes, bows, and muskets. Lavishly maintained and favored, they were the apple of Taiji Dorji's eye.

Receiving the order, the guard cavalry swiftly assembled. Under the command of a Darkhan, they spurred their horses, whooped, and galloped forth to meet a Han cavalry formation six times their number.

Taiji Dorji clenched his jaw. Giving such an order, he knew full well in his heart that the guard unit he had nurtured at great expense was unlikely to return.

He cast one deep, lingering look at their unhesitating backs, then turned and shouted himself hoarse at his tribesmen: "Form ranks! Form ranks!"

The several thousand Khoshut tribesmen in the chaotic southern camp hurriedly massed to the southwest, using camels and lele carts to set up a crude circular formation, deploying men and officers to hold the perimeter with muskets and bows.

Only when the formation had begun to take shape did Taiji Dorji finally feel a measure of safety amid his thousands of followers. But when he raised his eyes to look north, the battlefield where a brief clash had just occurred once again made his heart leap into his throat.

The guard cavalry, only a hundred-odd riders, had no choice but to spread out into two thin horizontal lines to buy time for the thousands of tribesmen to form ranks. Facing Ma Ke's six wedge formations arrayed in a single line, they executed a charge that bordered on suicide.

With lit matchcords clenched between their teeth, they loosed arrows from horseback at a hundred paces' distance, firing off three or even just two arrows at breakneck speed before the two forces were only thirty to fifty paces apart.

Only a very few managed to pull out their muskets and fire a shot at point-blank range. In the blink of an eye, lances and muskets crossed, gunshots and war cries flew together, and the battlefield erupted in a chaos of tumbling men and horses.

Ma Ke's six wedge formations, after piercing through the Khoshut guard cavalry's horizontal line, continued their charge forward without losing momentum.

Behind them, a few guard cavalrymen who had been lucky enough not to fall from their horses slowed down, looking left and right. Having barely survived, their faces were blank with shock as they slowly drew near one another.

From somewhere, a furious roar rang out. Several Han cavalrymen who had been knocked off their horses either strung their bows, charged with lances, or even seized riderless warhorses, and the two sides erupted into combat once more.

Ma Ke had no time to look after the soldiers who had fallen behind him. Galloping onward, he raised his long saber high to rein in the charging pace of each unit, steadying their cadence back to a slow trot.

Facing the hastily assembled circular formation a hundred paces away, he led his troops in a slight veer to the east, but dared not cut directly across it, for the main Oirat camp massed to the east was likewise churning with dust, making that gap look very much like a giant net.

What he did not know was that Huang Shengxiao, south of the wagon formation, was watching his back, fists clenched, nearly frantic with anxiety.

The enemy was forming ranks right before his eyes — the perfect moment for the artillery to shine — yet Ma Ke's six cavalry companies were stuck right in the middle, leaving him unable to make up his mind.

As Cao Yao's successor in charge of artillery at the Marshal's Headquarters, Huang Shengxiao was accustomed to coordinating with cavalry commanders like Yang Yao and Zhang Tianlin.

On a small battlefield where heavy artillery could cover several li in every direction, the Marshal's Headquarters training camp, through long-term joint drills at Juer Bay, had built a foundation for combined-arms operations.

If the ones charging ahead were Yang Yao's trained cavalry battalion, they would keep an appropriate distance from the enemy. Huang Shengxiao would then, without a word, let the twelve heavy cannons hurl shells over their heads at the enemy, and the cavalry would launch their charge the moment the shells struck.

But now, with Ma Ke, who had never drilled with them, and with most of the troops under his command being surrendered Ming soldiers, the distance between them was wrong, and Huang Shengxiao could not give the order to fire.

Huang Shengxiao realized that panicking was useless. Ma Ke's men were fast one moment, slow the next, and had finally edged a little eastward, which made him resolve: no coordination.

They lacked the capability anyway. Rather than risk attempting coordination, it was better to simply have Ma Ke clear the field of fire. He could then bring the thirty-two lion cannons, with a maximum range of six hundred paces, into play as well and just let them all loose at once.

He simply called a man over and said: "Go, quickly! Tell Ma Ke to pull back east for me. Is his cavalry company just standing there waiting to get shelled?"

With only two hundred paces between the two sides, the messenger cavalry quickly caught up and delivered Huang Shengxiao's order. Only then did Ma Ke remember the artillery behind him. He glanced back, then led his troops to veer east out of the way, taking the chance to tally his casualties.

The forty-four light and heavy cannons at the rear roared to life again. Through the billowing gunpowder smoke, the shells clearly traced two distinct firing angles.

The light cannons had their elevation adjusted nearly to the maximum, hurling shells high into the air like a goddess scattering blossoms, letting them drop into the formation by sheer weight. The terrifying display sent every Khoshut tribesman in the circular formation tilting their heads back to dodge.

At this distance, however, the light cannons were little more than a token gesture. The weight of the shells was what it was — with luck, a hit might kill or wound an enemy; without luck, it merely gouged a small pit in the hard, unyielding Gobi.

In contrast, the flat-trajectory fire of the twelve heavy cannons shone brilliantly. The heavy cast-iron balls tore through the smoke and slammed into the enemy formation, sending the tall, powerful camels flying in a spray of blood and flesh and reducing the protective lele carts to splinters.

These sacrifices spared most of the Khoshut soldiers from being struck by cannonballs, yet one shell slipped through a gap between the lele carts and the large livestock, landing squarely at the head of a Mongol column that was redeploying.

The column leader was a Khoshut shijin armed to the teeth — a term derived from the Han Chinese sheren, meaning a prince's close retainer.

He wore thick leather armor, and his large fur cap, with its rolled brim, had slipped down to the nape of his neck, revealing a Kazakh-style helmet with a face guard and a tall crest-spike at the crown. His mail aventail gleamed dazzlingly in the sunlight.

Faced with the threat of a seven-catty iron ball, the mounted archery skills he had honed since childhood on the steppe were of no avail, and the armor of steel and fur was equally meaningless.

His steel helmet burst into a mist of red and white. The soldiers behind him in the column had only time to scream uncontrollably before the cannonball, its force far from spent, struck the ground and immediately bounced up.

Rolling and ricocheting, it snapped three legs belonging to two men, then continued forward, grinding a bloody path through the column, until finally it slammed into a sand dune before Taiji Dorji, blasting a cloud of sand into the air and into the Taiji's eyes.

Nobles of the tribe raced over to Taiji Dorji's side, showering him with anxious concern. Seeing that he was completely unharmed apart from sand in his eyes, they all began offering counsel.

Some volunteered to charge the enemy formation and seize the cannons, just as they had done when fighting the Russian expeditionary force.

Some advised the Taiji to withdraw beyond the range of the enemy artillery, while the majority urged Taiji Dorji to propose to the Güshi Khan that the entire army pull back to a distance of two li and simply besiege the enemy.

For a moment, a chaotic clamor of voices rose, unbearably vexing.

Taiji Dorji heeded none of these suggestions. He merely picked up the seven-catty iron ball that had rolled to his feet, his heart still pounding with residual fear.

In truth, he had calculated it very clearly. Two salvos of artillery fire, over a hundred shells landing in the formation, and the casualties were minimal — fewer than twenty dead in total.

Yet those fewer than twenty casualties drove the army's morale to rock bottom.

The purpose of battle is not killing and wounding, but victory; killing, wounding, intimidation, confusion, terror, and even battle itself are merely the means to achieve that end.

For Taiji Duoerji, these large-caliber, long-range cannons brought him a fear of death he had never known before.

In the eyes of nobles who issue commands, war has always been a low-risk, high-reward affair. As a son of the State Preceptor Khan valued second only to his eldest, Taiji Duoerji was precisely such a noble.

He possessed the finest armor and sharpest weapons north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, over a hundred warhorses of his own, a guard of over a hundred warriors armed to the teeth, and more than a thousand well-trained, obedient nomadic soldiers.

So long as he did not flaunt his might by personally leading a charge into the fray, countless brave men were willing to fight and die for him — what kind of battle could ever kill him?

To put it bluntly, before the blood of those several thousand soldiers ran dry, he could do as he pleased and fight to the very last moment.

But that iron ball that rolled to his feet shattered this common wisdom of war. A weapon's deterrent power lies in its range, and the cannon is the master of such deterrence.

It is not a common man's rage spilling blood five paces away, nor is it like a lead ball weighing a few mace that pierces men and horses within thirty paces; this seven-jin iron ball means that within two li, all men are equal — one hit and you are either dead or maimed.

The hand with which Taiji Duoerji clutched the iron ball trembled faintly.

He was not the only one gripped by lingering fear.

North of the wagon fort, the nobles leading the troops had already seized the moment to charge at the fort, but were blocked by trenches of varying depth.

The Khoshut commanders' strategy for dealing with the trenches was to drive a small number of livestock forward to fill them — the quickest method of filling trenches when one lacked sacks and branches.

Compared to the herds of warhorses and mules being held in formation within Liu Chengzong's lines, the cost was not great either.

But just as they had driven livestock to fill a few gaps, before the infantry and cavalry could file through, over a hundred jingal muskets fired in unison before the formation. Amid drifting clouds of smoke, heavy lead balls formed a dense curtain of fire, punching through everything within range.

The enemy troops of the northern camp promptly retreated the way they had come, while the great army of the eastern camp did not even attempt an advance, withdrawing directly eastward on the State Preceptor Khan's order.

The eastern camp's great army retreating beyond cannon range was like an order itself. The Khoshut princes and dukes of the southern camp boiled over in unison, each one urging Taiji Duoerji to retreat.

Yet Taiji Duoerji dared not — because of Ma Ke, who was eyeing him like a tiger watching its prey.

The volley of shells Huang Shengxiao had smashed over had opened a window in Ma Ke's mind, revealing an imagined map of the battlefield.

The battlefield no longer contained only himself and the enemy before him, but also the friendly troops behind him and the enemy's reinforcements.

And on this imagined map, Ma Ke realized that his own force of over five hundred riders not only bore the vital mission of linking up southward with Feng Rang's division, but could also, in a short time, play an even more critical role — for instance, preventing the enemy force before him, ten times his number, from withdrawing out of cannon range.

His five hundred-odd riders moved like a wedge along the eastern side of Taiji Duoerji's circular formation, slowly shifting southward through the gap between the eastern and southern camps, arriving at the formation's southeast.

Taiji Duoerji dared not break camp, fearing that his army would be struck by Ma Ke as they withdrew and redeployed. He could only move his lele carts and accompanying livestock to the north side to shield against the cannonballs.

At the central command post, Liu Chengzong, standing on sandbags, saw the movement of Ma Ke's unit and then observed that Taiji Duoerji's camp formation remained still. Instantly spotting an opportunity, he gave the order: "Load the lion cannons with canister. Shift eight each to the north and east; place the remaining sixteen at the southeast corner."

"Keep the heavy cannons pounding them. Have Huang Shengxiao lead a hundred jingal carts and prepare to sortie for a round."

At this moment, of the three-sided besieging formation, the eastern and northern fronts had already gradually withdrawn beyond cannon range.

Only the circular formation on the southern front, because of the threat Ma Ke posed on its flank, left Taiji Duoerji not daring to break camp and retreat. Their encircling formation had come apart at the seams.

Standing on the sandbags, Liu Chengzong held a telescope to one eye, fixed on Ma Ke, while his other hand was clenched tightly into a fist. He muttered under his breath, chanting softly: "Ma Ke, heed the order. Go behind him, go behind him…"

As if he had heard the command from the King of Biang, Ma Ke indeed led his unit southward around the eastern side of Taiji Duoerji's ring formation, drawing near and shifting to the south, and did not leave, staring at the troop formation like a tiger eyeing its prey.

This move greatly excited Liu Chengzong. He leapt down from the sandbag mound, tossed his telescope to a guard, and shouted: "Yang Qi!"

The sudden shout startled Yang Qi. He then heard Liu Chengzong issue orders in a whirlwind manner: "Take the sixteen lion cannons. Advance from the southeast corner to the trench line. If the eastern camp's enemy advances west, hit their flank with canister at two hundred paces; if the eastern camp's enemy moves southwest to reinforce, hit their flank with canister at two hundred paces as well."

Having said this, a smile appeared on Liu Chengzong's face, but his eyes turned ruthless: "Have Huang Shengxiao take the jingal carts, exit south and advance west, circle half the camp and hit them for a round. Fire!"

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Good evening!