Chapter 493: The Second Surrender

On April 20th, six days before Liu Chengzong planned to launch the general assault on Gaotai City, an unexpected turn of events emerged on the Gansu battlefield.

West of Gaotai, Gansu Chariot Battalion Mobile Corps Commander Lin Chengdong, besieged by Feng Rang's forces, made up his mind and led his army in a breakout.

Lin Chengdong had fought this battle feeling utterly stifled. The chariot battalion was not some ineffective, worthless tactic — it was the most expensive and most powerful type of battalion soldier, an iron hedgehog built from silver. On a battlefield with equal troop strength and equal command ability, possessing a chariot battalion meant invincibility under heaven.

The chariot battalion was essentially an ancient combined-arms battalion. It had cavalry, artillery, baggage trains, and screening forces. In terms of mobility, it far surpassed a large infantry column carrying chevaux-de-frise on parade. Its guiding doctrine was to pour in massive resources so it could independently solve most problems encountered on the battlefield.

The chariot battalion truly delivered — high attack, thick armor, able to fight and endure. Its battlefield performance was brilliant, so brilliant that the only way an enemy could destroy it was with the crudest method and means: encirclement.

Although this did make the chariot battalion's manner of death look very miserable, always surrounded until it collapsed, in reality, only a chariot battalion could be surrounded until it collapsed.

Would three to five thousand infantry in open country be surrounded by three times their number until they collapsed? Impossible — three days of field combat and they'd break. Would three to five thousand cavalry in open country run into three times their number? They could only choose between routing the enemy or being routed by the enemy, or else be driven from the battlefield — the very day battle began, they'd be out of the picture.

Only the chariot battalion, surrounded in open country by many times its number for thirty days, might still not necessarily collapse.

What does it mean to go thirty days without reinforcement in field combat? The entire battle line has already disintegrated into rout. The chariot battalion stays motionless — the battle line moves on by itself, shifting from the front line to deep behind enemy lines. This means the two sides' operational maneuver is completely mismatched. Long before the chariot battalion collapses, the war is already lost.

Liu Chengzong's method for dealing with the iron hedgehog was also a crude one: cage it under an iron coop and wait for it to starve to death.

From start to finish, Lin Chengdong fought several engagements, but none of them were real battles — they were struggles attempting to perceive information from the outside world.

The Marshal's Headquarters built rammed-earth walls and dug trenches beyond the chariot battalion's firing range. From the third day of encirclement, Lin Chengdong's chariot battalion lost all sensory perception of this battlefield. The iron coop formed by earthen ramparts and deep trenches was like an iron curtain, blotting out his field of vision.

On Liu Chengzong's side, the battle line advanced eastward across the Gobi very clearly from Clearwater Fort to Camel City. Gao Yingdeng, Zhang Tianlin, and Ming army commander Li Hongsi's forces charged eastward like unleashed huskies, while the main force steadily and solidly besieged Gaotai.

But for Lin Chengdong, who had been surrounded by triple his strength for ten days, double his strength for five days, and finally by slightly fewer troops than his chariot battalion for fifteen days, he had always believed Vice Regional Commander Li Hongsi was still at Camel City.

"Camel City is right next door — why won't they come rescue me?"

Revolving around this single conjecture, Lin Chengdong, his five senses sealed off, was nearly going mad. What was it actually like outside? He had no idea at all.

Surrounded for ten days, he wasn't afraid. By twenty days, he was a bit panicked. From twenty to thirty days, he counted the days one by one. Provisions dwindled by the day, and soon it would be time to slaughter horses to stave off hunger — but in this environment, did he dare slaughter horses?

He absolutely did not dare. Once the horses were killed, breaking out would become utterly impossible.

Then no time to lose — break out. At least open his eyes and see what was going on outside.

In the early hours of April 20th, Lin Chengdong's unit handpicked fifty elite soldiers, who crept to the earthen ramparts carrying chisels and laid gunpowder charges. As dawn light blurred the sky, a thunderous boom erupted. Abandoning their baggage, the entire army struck camp and burst out through the breach, startling Feng Rang's besieging forces.

Siege warfare was no easy task either, especially when troop strength was insufficient. There is no guarding against thieves for a thousand days.

Since five days earlier, Feng Rang had sensed that the enemy was preparing to break out. The Ming army chariot battalion trapped inside the earthen ramparts had sharply increased its consumption of cannonballs, gunpowder, provisions, and baggage. From day to night, they endlessly seized every chance to fire off cannons — this was definitely a sign they intended to break out.

But sensing it was useless. Feng Rang couldn't tell fortunes; he had no way to predict which day the enemy would break out. Relying on his three thousand men to surround four thousand, every single soldier was on high alert at every moment. As the commanding general, he could not pile pressure on the soldiers at a time like this. On the contrary, he had to find ways to relieve their pressure.

When the many surround the few and conflict erupts, people die. Three days straight without proper sleep and soldiers are on the verge of madness — if the commander adds more pressure, what awaits him is a camp riot.

Strategy and tactics can determine the upper limit of a battle, but what determines the lower limit is organization. What we call organization relies on management, and management is a discipline far more complex than strategy and tactics. The physical and mental state of every single soldier will be reflected in the collective combat capability the moment battle begins.

Thus, the breakout was difficult in Lin Chengdong's plan. He imagined he would face a vast sea of troops from three battalions, but in reality, directly east there was only one Chiliarchy headquarters; directly south, directly north, northeast, and southeast each had a Company Command post; and west there was no one at all.

And among these besieging units, two-thirds of the soldiers were asleep. The defensive line was penetrated in the first moment.

Lin Chengdong's breakout was toward the northeast. Once the breach was blasted open, his four thousand troops split into four columns, infantry and cavalry rolling forward, and sprinted headlong toward Camel City.

Feng Rang urgently mustered six hundred cavalry and followed close behind. He only caught up to and routed one column at Camel City. However, the person who played the greatest role in the battle was not him, but Wang Ziyong, who happened to be at Camel City.

Wang Ziyong had brought over two hundred men — two squads of artillerymen from Huang Shengxiao's battalion, twenty-four men in all. The rest were civilian laborers transporting cannons to Gaotai, including Suzhou Guard banner soldiers and members of the Three Tribulations Society.

They had no new or old grudges with Lin Chengdong. Their appearance at Camel City was merely along the way. Crossing the Gobi desert between Clearwater Fort and Camel City, the Hequ horses dragging the cannons were so exhausted they foamed at the mouth and could only rest briefly at Camel City.

And so, after this one night of rest, when they rose in the morning they saw wave after wave of Ming soldiers charging toward Camel City. Never mind the Three Tribulations Society members and banner soldiers — even the twenty-four soldiers of the two Marshal's Headquarters artillery squads were scared out of their wits.

Camel City had long been a ruin. The place where they were resting was a defensive position built by Li Hongsi's troops.

If the Ming soldiers overran them, their little lives were certainly forfeit. And if Huang Shengxiao's twelve newly cast cannons were lost, he wouldn't spare them either. Holding the twelve thousand-jin red-barbarian cannons and ammunition, and seeing Feng Rang's troops racing up behind them in clouds of dust, they didn't need to think twice — they loaded the ammunition and opened fire on the Ming soldiers.

In the haste, the twelve cannons were loaded and aimed from different positions. The twelve shells, fired at very long intervals, all missed their mark.

But the message they hammered into the will of Lin Chengdong's breakout troops was crystal clear: the battlefield situation was not what they had imagined. The troops stationed at Camel City were not friendly forces. Camel City had fallen. They were now deep behind enemy lines.

They did not know that Li Hongsi had led superior forces in pursuit of Gao Yingdeng, nor that Gansu Regional Commander Yang Jiamo was at Gaotai Battalion City. They only knew that Vice Regional Commander Li Hongsi had already withdrawn his troops — and hadn't even called for them.

In the instant the breakout army, cut off for thirty days, had just regained its battlefield perception, although they were still an organized, formed military unit, their morale collapsed at lightning speed.

The four thousand troops fell into bewilderment. They abandoned scouting the garrison at the Camel City position amid the rolling yellow dust and focused single-mindedly on fleeing eastward, chasing Li Hongsi's main force.

When Liu Chengzong received accurate word from Feng Rang's unit, the entire main force besieging Gaotai City was still immersed in the bafflement of "what just ran past?"

Since the route from Clearwater Fort to Gaotai City had become the Marshal's Headquarters' supply line, a four-thousand-strong army cutting straight across it brought Liu Chengzong reports from seven or eight sources in different locations. Realizing it after the fact, Liu Chengzong grasped a very important issue.

This army fleeing eastward like a big black rat very likely had no idea at all that Yang Jiamo was on the battlefield.

The facts were exactly as he guessed. Along the chariot battalion's escape route, commoners who had already submitted to the Marshal's Headquarters repeatedly reported to Artisan Camp Chiliarch Yin Ruyue that Ming soldiers had questioned them many times for intelligence, the focus of their questioning being which way Li Hongsi's main force had fled.

Only half a day later, that very evening of the chariot battalion's breakout, Feng Rang sought an audience with Liu Chengzong outside Gaotai City. "Commander, shall my unit advance into Ganzhou and continue the pursuit toward Zhangye?"

Liu Chengzong pondered briefly, then said firmly to Feng Rang, "Pursue into Ganzhou. Did the chariot battalion take their guns, cannons, and war chariots with them?"

"They left everything behind on the battlefield. I left one Company Commander to guard it — by now it should all be inventoried."

"Good!"

Liu Chengzong's tone was visibly elated. He immediately set down the intelligence reports sent from various places and said to Feng Rang, "Go back, bring all the chariot battalion's equipment, and advance into Ganzhou."

Feng Rang blinked, stunned for a moment before asking, "Commander, do you mean for us to become a chariot battalion? If we go back to push those war chariots, we won't be able to catch the Ming army."

Liu Chengzong waved his hand. "No matter. Forcing them to abandon their heavy equipment already counts as a minor victory."

He did not say it outright, but in truth they already could not catch Lin Chengdong. That fellow's troops had eaten their fill for a whole month — the army ran with boundless vigor and had bolted over a hundred li in a single day and night. When something is hell-bent on fleeing, asking anyone to pursue it is asking the impossible.

As long as the chariot battalion's heavy equipment was all left behind, in Liu the Lion's eyes, surrounding them for this month had already broken even.

Even if it cost a month's provisions for three battalions, crippling Lin Chengdong's unit's combat capability was well worth it. Not to mention, the two to three hundred cannons of various sizes alone were enough to offset the gap in expended provisions. Add in nearly a thousand vehicles and scattered supplies, and they had not lost out in this battle.

But it was also no great profit, so Liu the Lion did not appear too pleased. He simply planned to have Feng Rang also form a chariot battalion. The imperial court had delivered the equipment right to them — it would be a waste not to use it.

However, just as Feng Rang went back, collected the equipment, and advanced toward Ganzhou, something Liu Chengzong never expected occurred. With Lin Chengdong's breakout, the Gansu theater unfolded in a very strange way.

The moment Ganzhou City saw Feng Rang's unit... it opened its gates and offered surrender.

When the news reached the central army camp outside Gaotai City, Liu the Lion was dumbfounded. He had been single-mindedly determined to crack Gaotai City by storm, precisely to serve as a rehearsal for storming Ganzhou City in the future, to avoid suffering even greater losses later.

And now, before the storming of Gaotai City had even begun, Ganzhou City surrendered first — and what absolutely floored him was that this was already the second time Ganzhou City had surrendered.

In fact, unbeknownst to Liu Chengzong, the armies on the Zhangye oasis had already dissolved into a chaotic melee.

When Gao Yingdeng led his troops in their eastward shift, the old generals living in retirement in Ganzhou City mobilized their household retainers to mount the walls and stand guard. Later, Gao Yingdeng did not head toward Ganzhou. The troops had just been withdrawn when they discovered Vice Regional Commander Li Hongsi pursuing them with a great army. At this time, the hearts of the people in Ganzhou City still clung to the officials and gentry.

But Li Hongsi's soldiers were in hot pursuit, and with insufficient provisions their warhorses collapsed and died, so they began to "raise alms" in Ganzhou. He personally entered Ganzhou City and asked the retired veteran generals and local gentry to contribute grain and horses, while his soldiers returned home by company, eating and taking supplies from their own clan settlements.

This behavior was in itself quite normal. The Ming army was the legitimate ruler of this land, and its troops were all drawn from local military households and garrison battalions; going home to resupply before returning to the battlefield was beyond reproach.

The problem was that Li Hongsi had no idea Zhang Tianlin was behind him.

Before his army could reassemble, Zhang Tianlin had already stormed into Ganzhou, instantly plunging it into chaos.

Zhang Tianlin was not only a Marshal's Command general, but had also been an independent peasant-army leader in the past. He had no idea Li Hongsi had dispersed his troops everywhere either; upon entering Ganzhou, he simply spread his forces out in waves. His six Battalion Commander divisions had no intention of holding territory — they just let their subordinate officers use their imagination, scattering all kinds of false information through every village, fort, and stockade along the oasis route.

Zhang Tianlin and Wang Ziyong were polar opposites. Wang Ziyong was exceptionally skilled at using superstition and ideology to mobilize the lower classes; Zhang Tianlin was exactly the reverse — he excelled at using the rural gentry to spread false information.

This was his signature trick from his days running rampant through northern Shaanxi. He had tried building forts and stockades to become a stationary bandit, but back then he still lacked the ability to fight government troops head-on. The commoners who survived by relying on clan solidarity to build forts and stockades were basically in the same state as Black Dragon Mountain before Liu Chengzong rose in revolt — unwilling to cooperate when government troops came, yet ready to fight to the death when roving bandits came to plunder.

In such circumstances, making village covenants with the gentry or doing grassroots work among the commoners was meaningless. It was far better to keep moving and use them to spread panic, scattering all kinds of false information — that was actually more effective at degrading the government army's organization.

In Ganzhou, Zhang Tianlin picked up his old trade again.

In the blink of an eye, as his army advanced into Ganzhou, rumors flew wildly within days: Yang Jiamo had been captured, killed, surrendered, or fled; Li Hongsi was dead or had fled; the Ming main force had been annihilated, captured, or absorbed; the Marshal's Command's great army had already occupied Ganzhou and was advancing on Liangzhou.

To prevent the rumors from spreading and shaking the morale of both troops and civilians, Li Hongsi had no choice but to abandon his pursuit of Gao Yingdeng, rally his forces, and fight repeated engagements across the Zhangye oasis against Zhang Tianlin's widely dispersed troops.

In a short time, Zhang Tianlin's six-division army was attacked everywhere. There were simply too many Ming troops in Ganzhou; one of his Battalion Commander divisions was ambushed three times in a single day along its route by government forces, its unit cohesion shattered and its men scattered everywhere. The situation only began to improve when Gao Yingdeng turned his army around and came back.

The first surrender of Ganzhou City happened precisely when the formations of Zhang Tianlin's and Li Hongsi's forces had been completely thrown into disarray.

Zhang Tianlin led a hundred-odd riders charging into Ganzhou City through the West Gate and held the city wall for an hour and a half. While fighting street by street inside the city, he simultaneously appointed a county magistrate, a vice magistrate, and a chief clerk. He stormed the government granary and opened it to distribute grain, throwing the city into turmoil. Then he ordered all the cannon touchholes on the wall spiked shut and laid gunpowder charges to blast the West Gate's gate tunnel into rubble.

When Ming troops counterattacked, Zhang Tianlin took his three newly appointed county officials, cut straight across the market streets, and fled out the South Gate, leaving behind only a hand-written Marshal's Command banner planted on the Ganzhou city wall. Once the Ming troops entered the city and threw the banner down from the wall, Ganzhou City was declared recovered by the Ming army.

It would be no exaggeration to say that for over half a month, the Zhangye oasis was ablaze with war everywhere. At this critical juncture, the Marshal's Command's Feng Rang division entered Ganzhou as a fully intact wagon battalion, instantly lending substance to the rumors Zhang Tianlin had spread. Every military fort and civilian stockade along the route — especially those with few or no garrison troops — believed the Marshal's Command had already completely occupied Ganzhou.

Ganzhou City, with its West Gate already blasted shut and its garrison already undermanned, still had its spiked cannons undergoing repairs by craftsmen. Faced with Feng Rang's division advancing in full battle array, the garrison had no alternative but to announce their surrender for the second time.

Receiving this news, Liu Chengzong outside Gaotai City was equally elated. It happened just as Huang Shengxiao's unit arrived at Gaotai escorting twelve cannons. He immediately clapped his hands in great delight and said, "Ezhe, fetch paper and brush. I want to tell Vice General Feng to send the Ganzhou gentry here to urge their surrender."

His adopted son Ezhe, standing in attendance behind him, swiftly brought paper and brush and spread them on the desk. While grinding ink, he asked in puzzlement, "Father, the cannons have all arrived — why still urge him to surrender? Didn't you say this Regional Commander would never surrender?"

Liu Chengzong picked out a brush, let out a laugh as he looked at Ezhe, and rubbed his hands together eagerly. "Urging him to surrender isn't to make him surrender — it's to weaken the defenders' will to resist when we storm the city. Just watch — the general offensive to annihilate the Gansu border army is about to begin!"

Good afternoon!