Chapter 479: Beat Up a Few More People

Tang Mingshi, the Mobile Corps Commander of Zhenyi, discovered that the heavens seemed to be playing a joke on him.

His troops had risked being bombarded, endured countless hardships to advance to within forty paces of the enemy, thinking they could rely on their numerous light cannons to shatter the enemy forces — and then the enemy hauled out dense rows of hawk arquebuses from behind the earthen mounds?

If he'd known, he never would have come!

The Ming dynasty's individual firearm technology tree had one clear main line: from the earliest fire-lance, to the arquebus copied during the Jiajing reign and issued as standard during the Wanli reign, and then to the hawk arquebus copied and directly issued as standard in the first year of the Chongzhen reign.

The development of the fire-lance was relatively lengthy, with indigenous innovations like the short multi-barrel fire-lance three-eye gun and the quick-spear with attached bayonet.

The arquebus's prototype was the Portuguese light matchlock; copied alongside it was the Frankish breech-loader. On this foundation, innovators represented by Qi Jiguang and Zhao Shizhen created the multi-long-barrel thunderclap gun, the Frankish-style lightning gun, and introduced the Ottoman-style matchlock, the Rumi arquebus.

Here, Qi Jiguang's role was to improve corned gunpowder and promote it on a large scale, increasing the power of gunpowder.

After Qi Jiguang, corned gunpowder burned more slowly and more controllably; for the same powder charge, the bore pressure the barrel endured at any given moment was lower than with serpentine powder, creating the possibility for heavier charges and greater power.

During the same period, the powder charges of Western nations' firearms were all one-half or one-third the weight of the ball, while Ming firearms used a charge equal in weight to the ball.

On this foundation, the more finely crafted Rumi arquebus earned the title of "farthest-reaching and deadliest," because its construction was more refined, while its external shape and caliber were no different from the arquebus — the only difference lay in its longer barrel, which allowed it to shoot farther and with greater power.

The trade-off was that an arquebus cost seven mace to one tael of silver, while the Rumi arquebus cost more, at one tael and two mace of silver.

The above covers the progress in firearm technology up through the Wanli reign.

The turtledove arquebus, or hawk arquebus, was something new to the Ming army. The greatest difference lay in its changed caliber. This was the term for the Spanish heavy musket, a new item that only began to be equipped at the end of the Tianqi reign and the beginning of the Chongzhen reign.

Tang Mingshi's knowledge of heavy muskets came from leading troops into the capital's defense in the third year of the Chongzhen reign. At that time, he happened to be present when the Grand Coordinator of Dengzhou and Laizhou, Sun Yuanhua, was equipping a new army. Along with the red-barbarian cannons, two hundred copied Spanish heavy muskets were transferred from Guangdong.

"Turtledove" and "hawk arquebus" were two names for the same gun. "Hawk arquebus" originated from Xu Guangqi's direct translation; "turtledove arquebus" originated from the Viceroy of Liangguang, Wang Zunde's, semantic translation of "sparrow hawk." Soldiers or officials who didn't understand Western languages commonly called it the "large-caliber arquebus."

There was also the Grand Coordinator of Fujian, Xiong Wencan, who had co-opted Zheng Zhilong. He called it the "turtledove-foot arquebus," because a turtledove's foot has three toes, and the middle claw is especially long, just like the fork rest of a Spanish heavy musket.

In short, all these terms referred to the heavy musket modeled on the Spanish heavy musket, primarily distinguished from the smaller-caliber arquebus.

At that time, the turtledove arquebus was already being copied on a large scale in the capital, serving as a supplement to the individual firepower of newly trained armies. It was issued alongside arquebuses at a ratio of one to five, and the court was counting on this thing to retake Liaodong.

Although at the time he thought this large-caliber firearm might not work well against the Mongols, the main opponent in the northwest defense zone, watching soldiers drill with the turtledove arquebus — the immense power brought by its large caliber and heavy charge — still left a deep impression on Tang Mingshi.

Back then, Tang Mingshi thought to himself: if this thing proves effective against the Later Jin, then by the time he might be posted to Jiliao, the army would already be equipped with it on a large scale.

Unfortunately, the turtledove arquebus met with misfortune from the start in the Great Ming. The new army Sun Yuanhua had painstakingly trained turned into a rebel army at Wuqiao in Jingzhou, Hejian Prefecture, all because of a chicken. The western-learning bastion of the eastern frontier that he had built was smashed to pieces in the chaos of war. The first unit to be heavily equipped with turtledove arquebuses was nearly annihilated by its own side's forces, with only a little over ten thousand battered remnants crossing the sea to defect to the Later Jin.

Given this history, in Tang Mingshi's subconscious, hawk arquebuses and the Shandong rebels were synonymous.

He never imagined he would see rebels using heavy muskets in organized formations in Gansu, and the equipment rate of these heavy muskets looked far higher than that of the Dengzhou and Laizhou rebels!

On a battle line no more than seventy or eighty paces wide, atop waist-high earthen ramparts, nearly two hundred heavy muskets were set up on the front alone, with two more rows of soldiers clearly waiting behind to fire in rotation. Tang Mingshi had no time to distinguish the jingal guns placed alongside the heavy muskets, and he was already sick with regret.

In reality, he was not the most panicked person on the battlefield. The Left Division commander of the Zhenyi Mobile Corps, a Brigade Commander named Cao Yingxuan, was also an officer who had seen hawk arquebuses before. He was leading the left-wing Company Commander forward when he suddenly spotted the Marshal's Army's heavy muskets and immediately spurred his horse toward the central army.

But before he could arrive, the Marshal's Army's first volley of heavy muskets had already come.

At the instant the heavy muskets fired in unison, Tang Mingshi, mounted on his horse in the central army, only felt puzzlement... The muzzle flashes and gunpowder smoke were far less than he had imagined. Two hundred heavy muskets should not have produced only this much noise.

But the next moment, he had no time for puzzlement. Heavy lead balls weighing one tael and five mace sprayed forth, tracing terrifying shrieks through the air, and in the blink of an eye sprayed across the front of the Zhenyi army's formation, bringing with them the sound of large wooden shields shattering to pieces.

Shields and armor seemed pathetically fragile before this thing. In just one instant, Tang Mingshi saw dozens of soldiers fall. Unlike the great chorus of wails and cries that rose after being hit by an arquebus, the vast majority of soldiers struck by this thing could not even cry out.

Brigade Commander Cao Yingxuan tumbled into the central army. His mount's head had been pierced through by a lead bullet, and the inertia of the warhorse's heavy body pitching forward carried him several steps. The moment it crashed down, Brigade Commander Cao rolled right into the central army.

"General, retreat quickly!"

"Retreat my ass!"

Tang Mingshi roared, "If we take one step back, we'll all die without a burial place!"

He knew best that the army was not facing the most dangerous situation right now. The most dangerous situation would be if they began to retreat.

He did not know the specifications of the Marshal's Army's heavy muskets, but a hawk arquebus, with its barrel slightly elevated, could send a lead ball two hundred paces away. Although there was no accuracy to speak of at that distance, his troops would face the threat of death during the retreat, and it would be very difficult to maintain formation.

This was a simple calculation problem.

Maintain formation, and two hundred paces was enough for the enemy to finish three rotating volleys. They would have to pay nearly two hundred casualties. Even if the formation didn't break, the soldiers would not be willing to close in on the enemy again and could only retreat.

Fail to maintain formation, and they would still have to endure three rotating volleys, suffer over a hundred and fifty casualties, and lose the protection of the battle formation, to be trampled and driven by enemy cavalry. Once a rout took shape, rallying the troops again would be difficult.

Therefore, Tang Mingshi judged that the best choice at this moment was to engage the enemy in a firefight, relying on the advantage in rate of fire at close range to suppress the enemy, doing everything possible to prevent the enemy from shooting and disrupt their reloading.

They could not defend against bullets, but they could weaken the enemy's attack with their own attack.

His gaze swept across his own battle formation. The Zhenyi army, having endured the first volley, had not been greatly shaken in morale. After he gave the order to change formation, the banners of the three columns waved, and behind each column, a Captain led his troops out, filling the gaps between the columns with hundred-man lines, transforming the columns into a line formation.

Tang Mingshi had done the calculation problem quite well and arrived at the correct answer under the given conditions.

The problem was that his given conditions were wrong.

The Marshal's Army's front line had two hundred firearms, yet the volley had only hit thirty or forty men. Why?

Because what Tang Tong led was a standard Brigade of the Marshal's Field Camp. The smallest unit was not the squad of ten, but rather, below the squad, a three-man team of one combat soldier and two auxiliaries, very characteristic of the Lion Camp.

In the Lion Camp era, the auxiliaries, drawn from peasant rebels, mostly lacked the physical strength to wield strong bows and were usually equipped with three-eye guns and arquebuses; only the combat soldiers used war bows.

But in the Field Camp era, the Marshal's Manor had its own arsenal and could produce firearms on a large scale. The auxiliaries, after several years of service, had also developed the capabilities of combat soldiers. Now the auxiliaries used cold weapons and war bows, while the combat soldiers were the ones using large-caliber firearms.

Because the Marshal's Manor's self-made firearms were defined by one word: heavy. A heavy musket weighed fifteen jin, a jingal gun thirty jin.

Therefore, their firearm equipment rate was only thirty percent. That is to say, the entire Brigade had only four hundred firearms — each squad was equipped with one jingal gun and three heavy muskets.

Three hundred heavy muskets formed a relatively loose three-rank volley formation, meaning that at any one time, only one hundred heavy muskets were firing.

Of the two hundred firearms Tang Mingshi saw, one hundred were jingal guns that did not fire in the first moment, because these things were too slow to reload, so they used rotating fire rather than volley fire.

After the heavy muskets fired in unison, the front rank of heavy musketeers withdrew, letting the second rank of musketeers take their place. Only then could one see that the Marshal's Army's heavy musket line was standing in a staggered formation, with a jingal gunner positioned between every heavy musketeer.

Because the Marshal's Manor's heavy muskets still used matchlock mechanisms, a dense formation was not very safe, whereas the jingal guns used flintlock mechanisms. Moreover, they had tripods mounted on carts, which could effectively separate the burning match cords within the line formation.

During the process of the heavy musketeers changing ranks, the jingal gunners fired in sequence from left to right. One jingal gun after another, through the lingering gunpowder smoke, sent huge bullets slamming into the enemy formation.

This made the sound alone seem as if the Marshal's Army's fire was scattered and disorderly, as if the soldiers' training was very poor.

But in reality, this was precisely the result of their extremely high level of training, enabling them to effectively combine volley fire and rotating fire.

On the other side, the Zhenyi army, taking casualties, did not just stand still and get hit. The three columns quickly deployed into five, forming a line formation of three ranks deep with a wider frontage than the Marshal's Army, and returned fire with their firearms.

It must be said, in terms of the imposing sound of their volleys, they far outdid the Marshal's Army.

The Zhenyi army used chevaux-de-frise to support long shields, forming basic defensive works. The front rank of gunners used three-eye guns, while the rear ranks used small-caliber arquebuses like the Rumi and the lightning gun, and employed forty "rolling-bead" and "capture-the-caitiff" cannons for close-range bombardment.

The rolling-bead cannon sprayed dozens of projectiles in front of the formation; even with the earthen ramparts in between, it could always wound or even kill a few soldiers. On small carts, three capture-the-caitiff cannons fired in turn, bombarding without pause, hurling one-jin lead balls at the earthen ramparts one after another, easily piercing through the wooden planks and making the ramparts, filled with wet sand, totter on the verge of collapse.

Opposite them, the Eight-Gate Lion Cannons sprayed dense clusters of lead pellets and iron shot at close range into one light artillery team after another.

At regular intervals, the Zhenyi Army's two Invincible General Cannons would blast out five hundred pellets each; the Marshal Army's formation also answered with the roar of its thousand-jin heavy cannon, retaliating in kind with thirteen hundred iron balls and sweeping an entire gun crew away.

The colossal firepower of both sides draped an impenetrable bank of gunpowder smoke across the middle of the battlefield. After just a few exchanges, no one could aim anymore. Men could only mechanically repeat the same motions over and over — firing into the smoke, and being struck by stray shots that burst through it.

Amid the unceasing thunder of musketry and cannon, three hundred cavalry on the Zhenyi Army's right wing attempted to charge the flank of Tang Tong's formation, hoping to help the center break the enemy line. They never expected that over a hundred soldiers on the Marshal Army's flank stood ready with firearms, spears, and strong bows in tight formation. Not only did the charge fail to shake the formation, it ended in utter humiliation.

The cavalry only wanted to feint a charge; they never actually dared to crash in. What they feared was not the forest of spears, but their own side's alternating, never-ending gunfire.

Those stray shots formed an almost solid curtain of lead, tightly enveloping the area beyond the Marshal Army's left flank — to say nothing of a trench that warhorses could not cross.

Yet the line of gunfire that the Zhenyi cavalry so feared seemed to be no big deal to the Marshal Army's soldiers.

After withstanding the first few volleys, Wai Liangzi suddenly realized that while the Ming army's firepower from three-eyed guns and bird guns continued without pause, the front of the formation was now blanketed in smoke. The lead shot coming their way seemed... seemed to be growing sparser.

He steeled himself and stood up to look at the field between the two armies. The gunfire from the enemy formation had not diminished, but it seemed that because of the smoke, the Ming gunners could only shoot by feel.

Of course, plenty of lead shot still came toward their front, but just as much struck the ground, flew into the sky, or landed to the left and right of the formation.

The Marshal Army, by contrast, had very weak sustained fire. They would fire roughly three volleys, then pause for a while, with only scattered shots from heavy muskets, then fire another three volleys.

But they shot very accurately. The soldiers even aimed deliberately during volley fire. Apart from the heavy musket men, the soldiers were hardly nervous at all.

After all, during the rotation, a soldier really only needed to step forward and fire once. Only the moment of firing was dangerous. But the heavy musket men, because they stayed at the front the whole time, were actually more nervous than the ordinary gunners using heavy firearms.

Through the unbroken gunfire, Wai Liangzi noticed that the enemy's shots were growing more and more sporadic, the firearms in each volley seemed fewer and fewer, and the two Invincible Great General Cannons had gradually fallen silent. He ran back to the center excitedly and said to Tang Tong, "General, the enemy seems to be out of gunpowder. Shall we charge them and break them?"

Unexpectedly, Tang Tong, who was holding a silk-wrapped cannon cartridge, reacted with complete calm. He shook his head. "They're tricking you. Keep firing. Fight until they retreat. Do not charge."

Tang Tong knew this trick all too well. The moment they charged in, those two Invincible Great General Cannons of the Ming army would blast them right in the face.

This was what it looked like when the enemy realized they had no advantage in a firefight, had run out of options, and were trying to turn the tables.

As he spoke, Tang Tong spread the silk powder bag on the ground. Thirteen hundred small lead pellets scattered across the plain silk. He pointed at the pellets and said, "Break apart five cannon shells and distribute the pellets to the gunners. Load three pellets with each shot."

Wai Liangzi said, puzzled, "But that would make the shot weight two taels and four mace!"

"It's fine. They're close. It won't affect the range." Tang Tong shook his head, grabbed a handful of pellets, and handed them to Wai Liangzi. "Hit a few more of them."