Chapter 510: Ghost Soldiers

The garrison of Liangzhou City witnessed an agricultural revolution.

The local Liangzhou garrison watched the Marshal's Army carrying farm tools and working the fields — they saw the spectacle; but Li Hongsi, who had actually clashed with the Marshal's Army, was an expert, able to see the real craft behind the Marshal's Headquarters expeditionary force.

In just a few days, the Marshal's Army went from the earliest hoes and manual sowing to fully equipping with animal-drawn mechanical seed drills — the three-leg drill — and soon after, more plow oxen and donkeys joined in, adding six-leg drills, boosting sowing efficiency enormously.

The two battalions shifted from the initial day-night alternating guard rotation, taking three days to finish one patch of land, to the Ganzhou Battalion sowing by torchlight before dawn and finishing an entire patch by noon, then pulling straight back to the rear; the Suzhou Battalion that relieved them simply moved camp to a different spot, starting work at dusk, sowing madly all around Liangzhou City.

The Liangzhou troops watched the Marshal's Army working feverishly outside the city and were quite pleased at first, but Li Hongsi recognized the problem — these farm tools were all newly made.

Each leg of the seed drill had an iron plowshare; a donkey-pulled three-leg drill had three iron plowshares, an ox-pulled six-leg drill had six iron plowshares — and yet Hong Chengchou had clearly carried out a thorough scorched-earth policy within a hundred li of Liangzhou, which raised a question.

The timber for the seed drills certainly came from places like Yongchang and Shandan, where there were large numbers of military artisans and ample stocks of farm tools — most likely manufactured at the guard posts and hauled near Liangzhou for assembly. The critical problem lay with the iron plowshares.

In a matter of days, the Marshal's Army had fielded several hundred seed drills around Liangzhou, which meant they had to cast several thousand iron plowshares in a short time. Either these plowshares had already been cast in places like Ganzhou before Liu Chengzong reached Liangzhou — or Liu Chengzong had opened an ironworks near Liangzhou.

The former was nothing to worry about; the latter meant that Liu Chengzong possessed large-scale iron-casting capability very close to Liangzhou City.

As a commander who had faced the Marshal's Headquarters head-on, he had long ago tasted Liu Chengzong's heavy firepower and knew well that in cannon-casting technology, the Ming army had no edge over the Marshal's Army — in some respects, Liu Chengzong's cannons were even better.

The garrison held an optimistic view of the Marshal's Army farming beneath the city walls, but Li Hongsi's sole fear was that Liu Chengzong had come fully prepared, casting heavy cannons right on the battlefield.

His fear was well-founded.

While Fengweizhen's and Ding Guodong's battalions took turns farming, Liu Chengzong had set up a cannon foundry at Fengle Fort fifty li away and opened three material supply routes.

The farthest route hauled iron and copper stock from the Longshou Mountain Ironworks in Shandan to the front, where Liu Chengzong personally supervised the artisans casting heavy cannons at Fengle Fort.

Designing cannons was unfamiliar work for Liu Chengzong, but he simply had no one at hand who had mastered modular design, and even sending word to ask Shi Chengwo in Hehuang would take too long.

Because the modules Shi Chengwo had mastered were, first, the thousand-catty cannon module taught by Wang Zheng back in Sanyuan years ago, and second, the Lion Cannon module worked out through calculations and experiments together with Gao Yingxiang in Shanxi.

For heavy cannons exceeding a thousand catties, even if Shi Chengwo's people were here, they would not know the proper proportions — it could only be achieved through calculation and experiment, which for Liu Chengzong was far too slow.

So he decided to take charge himself, hauling out a thousand-catty cannon, taking measurements, and obtaining the complete module set for that cannon.

The work was not difficult. Liu Chengzong had bronze cannons cast strictly according to modular design; once measured, he found the thing was extremely rigorous — every part had its proportion, and the most critical was the bore diameter.

Using the bore diameter, one could work backward to derive the proportions of every part of the cannon body.

The muzzle wall thickness was twice the bore diameter; the thickest part of the cannon body, at the vent and powder chamber exterior, was three times the bore diameter; the thickness from the powder chamber to the breech equaled the bore diameter; and the overall length of the cannon body was eighteen times the bore diameter.

It was precisely this hands-on measurement of cannon modules that made Liu Chengzong realize that the two sizes of cannons fielded by the Marshal's Headquarters, in terms of caliber-length ratio, were actually a bit low for field guns.

However, Liu Chengzong was not in the habit of arbitrarily altering parameters without understanding the principles. For the newly built siege cannon, he still chose the eighteen-caliber length — he simply enlarged the bore, having them cast a twenty-catty iron cannonball.

Then, based on the diameter of this iron cannonball, he added three fen of windage, set the bore at four cun eight fen, calculated all the cannon's parameters, and handed them to the artisans to make clay molds and iron molds, preparing to cast cannons using both methods simultaneously.

The iron mold had another name: the iron form. Its use could be traced back to the Warring States period for casting farm tools, and right up to the Ming dynasty, most farm tools were cast this way — including the iron plowshares Liu Chengzong used beneath Liangzhou's walls.

There was only one reason this technique had not been applied to casting cannons: farm tools were cheap consumables with low toughness requirements. Iron-form casting, because it cooled faster, produced very brittle cast iron, which fully met the needs of most farm tools. Iron-form casting could produce large quantities of farm tools quickly and in bulk.

Cannons, however, were an entirely different thing — they desperately needed toughness.

So the moment Liu Chengzong proposed iron-mold cannon casting to the military artisans, the artisans voiced their concerns.

They said the technical difficulty was not great — it just required a bit of ingenuity, since no one had ever used iron forms to cast something this large.

The biggest problem was that cannons cast with iron molds would burst.

The iron form itself was simply not a technique for casting high-quality, high-value, high-demand objects.

The military artisans held great respect for Commander Liu Chengzong, who was willing to stand among them, and they also knew he valued technique, so they did not mind explaining a bit more.

They told Liu Chengzong that the Marshal's Headquarters' clay-mold cannon casting produced very good quality and was the most common cannon-casting technique in the Great Ming. There was also the clay-mold lost-wax method, which produced cannons even better than plain clay molds — smooth inside and out, needing no further finishing — but the lost-wax method was best used in winter.

These two cast-iron techniques produced iron cannons of quality far surpassing iron-mold casting.

And the best cannon-casting technique in the world was in Shanxi. Shanxi had crucible steel. Years ago, Liu Chengzong had captured a counterfeit bin steel goose-quill saber from Bai Yingzi — it came from a Shanxi swordsmith.

Liu Chengzong had never investigated how the raw material for that blade was made. It was crucible steel — cast. Some Hongwu-era iron cannons made in Shanxi also used this technique: cast steel.

Liu Chengzong noted this information, but he did not change his mind because of the artisans' objections. Iron-mold cannon casting was imperative — otherwise his army would have no heavy cannons capable of battering city walls.

The greatest advantage of iron molds was speed and volume in a short time. This technique was perfectly suited for wartime cannon production. After all, even in summer, a clay mold needed a month to dry in the shade before use, whereas with iron molds, once the iron kiln was built, it could be put to use immediately and repeatedly.

In his view, there were no bad techniques in this world — only techniques applied in the wrong place. Bronze cannons had good quality, smaller size, and greater durability, making them ideal as field guns; their drawback was high cost.

Cast-iron cannons were of poorer quality; to achieve the same performance, they naturally had to be heavier and thicker, which made them perfectly suited as assault guns, defensive guns, or even cannons on warships.

And iron molds could enhance the iron cannon's advantage from another direction: production speed.

Since the client had this requirement, the artisans no longer hesitated. Strictly following Liu Chengzong's specifications and parameters, in just three days they cast the cleanest, most beautiful heavy cannon since the Marshal's Headquarters began making cannons.

This cannon's body was smooth and clean, not pitted and rough like clay-mold castings needing finishing — though, of course, sand holes and blowholes were unavoidable, problems inherent to the casting process itself. Even four hundred years later, cast parts would still have sand holes and blowholes.

But at the same time, it was also the shortest-lived cannon since the Marshal's Headquarters began making cannons. During a three-shot proof test with equal-weight charges, on the third shot it burst into three pieces with a thunderous boom.

Fortunately, it was only a test fire — one cannon ruined, but no casualties. It was a close call.

The accompanying military artisans were badly frightened. Liu Chengzong, recovering from the deafening blast, was not angry. He simply smiled and waved his hand at the artisans, saying, "You all followed my requirements to the letter. This cannon bursting has nothing to do with you — the fault is mine."

He stared at the large iron chunks blown apart for a long time, and finally slapped his thigh as he realized the problem — the Marshal's Headquarters' thousand-catty cannon was bronze. He had taken the module of a bronze cannon and, like the fool who marked the boat to find his sword, applied it to an iron cannon, and on top of that used iron-mold casting, which produced poorer-quality cast iron. If it didn't burst, what would?

With the experience of this failure, Liu Chengzong quickly revised the design, increasing the proportions of every module except the bore diameter, changing the caliber-length ratio to twenty-two, and at the same time strengthening the powder chamber and breech in the external design.

After all, Liu the Lion was a man who knew with certainty that something called bore pressure existed. Between the burst cannon's proportions and the new design, he chose a thickness ratio of one to one-point-one for all parameters except bore diameter, and for the rear third of the cannon body, he went straight to a cylindrical shape.

After all this reinforcement, this cast-iron cannon — over ten feet long and firing a twenty-catty ball — saw its weight leap directly to five thousand seven hundred catties.

This time, the proof test went extremely well. It withstood three test shots with equal-weight charges and, at a high elevation, achieved a range of four thousand two hundred paces — one shot blasted nearly twelve li.

And in a test fire at a slightly elevated angle for normal use, it likewise achieved an astonishing range of one thousand one hundred paces — an effective range of three li.

The cannon was superb — arguably the best cannon Liu Chengzong had ever seen in his life. It just could not move.

A dead weight of nearly six thousand catties, paired with a sturdy, shock-resistant gun carriage, plus a limber or auxiliary cart to carry the ammunition — what did this monster mean?

It meant this gun crew needed at least eight Hequ great horses to pull it, along with two teams of horses to rotate, plus spare draft horses in case the warhorses dropped dead from exhaustion — so the entire gun crew had to prepare twenty-four to thirty-two horses.

Following the popular cannon-naming conventions of the day, Liu Chengzong even felt like naming it the Majestic Great General Zhu Shou. As the saying went, two horses made a carriage, four made a team, eight made an imperial chariot — it demanded the travel retinue of an ancient emperor.

With the new cannon cast, Liu Chengzong immediately ordered camp struck and marched toward Liangzhou Guard, which was locked in a battle of wits with the two Gansu battalions.

On the night of the seventh day of the sixth month, the long-suppressed Liangzhou ghost soldiers finally noticed that the Marshal's Army had basically sown every patch of arable land around them, and had moved their camp back outside the west gate, their daily schedule back to normal.

So they decided to sally forth and properly blunt the Marshal's Army's edge. In the dead of night, six hundred ghost soldiers, led by Garrison-Suppressing Mobile Corps Commander Tang Mingshi, wearing the same uniforms and combat dress as the two Gansu battalions, doffed their helmets and armor, and slipped silently out through the west gate's barbican gate, which had been left open the whole time.

The ghost soldiers' sortie was extremely difficult, because over the past eight days, the two Gansu battalions had set up eight camps west of the city — each camp marking the farmland they meant to till.

Although the army broke camp as soon as they finished tilling, and equipment like tents and wooden ramparts were all taken away, the trenches they had dug were never filled back in.

That night the ghost soldiers advanced with extreme caution. The Marshal Army's camp was over five li from the city, but they had set out many campfires between two and three li to guard against a night raid, so the ghost soldiers had to detour around the fires.

At the same time, the ghost soldiers could not light torches of their own. Having barely skirted the campfires, they could only walk nervously through the pitch-black night, terrified of falling into the trenches the Marshal Army had dug.

Tang Mingshi was a brave and battle-hardened commander. He had led the ghost soldiers on this camp raid to wipe away past shame, but his fight with Gao Yingdeng had already taught him that the Marshal Army was no easy foe. He proceeded with extreme caution, and noticing that the Marshal Army seemed to have posted no sentries around their camp gave him a bad premonition.

Yet the camp, with its gate firmly shut, was right before his eyes — he could not bear to retreat now. What if they're just worn out from farming? he thought.

So he sent two men to slip quietly into the camp and scout.

In mere moments, the camp gate was opened from the inside. The two scouts ran back and, keeping their voices low, exclaimed in alarm, "General, there's no one in the camp! The armor and bedding have been taken from the tents, but the tea is still warm!"

"This..."

Tang Mingshi racked his brain. What the hell is this, are we seeing ghosts? We never saw them leave camp!

Two hundred paces beyond the camp, in the fields, Bee-Tail Sting stood quietly leaning on a Marshal's Office officer's goose-quill saber, gazing at the dark outline of the distant camp and the figures moving there.

In truth, the surrounding land was not yet fully planted. He had simply wanted to toy with the government troops, so after finishing work today he had moved the camp back here.

Bee-Tail Sting was now a Brigade Commander of the Ganzhou Battalion, but originally he had been a roving bandit from Shaanxi — and not a very successful one at that. He had followed Old Jackal Li, and that batch of old bandits under Old Jackal Li had a distinctive trait: they hid by day and moved by night, their eyes gleaming like wolves in the darkness.

And the battle that made Bee-Tail Sting's name, fighting under Zhao Kebian, had also been a night battle. So during this period of farming outside Liangzhou, he and Ding Guodong rotated shifts — both starting to till at dusk and returning at midnight — deliberately training the soldiers' ability to operate at night.

They slept in the rear during the day and were full of energy come nightfall.

Watching the large blurry mass of shadows standing outside the camp, Bee-Tail Sting let out a contemptuous chuckle and looked around. "Ghost soldiers? Let's see who the real ghosts are."

To his left and right, rows of soldiers crouched behind the field ridges. Three Hongwu general cannons and six Wanli Nantang cannons were arrayed in a line, aimed at that patch of shadows in front of the camp.

And behind the enemy, another mass of shadows was slowly closing in — in the fields between the ghost soldiers and Liangzhou's walls... they had dropped prone. Those were the soldiers led by his subordinate, the Squad Commander.

In the silent black night, Bee-Tail Sting raised a hand and waved it above his head. Behind the field ridges, the artillerymen took out their fire sticks, blew them alight, and touched them to the fuses on the firing hooks. Then Bee-Tail Sting used his hand to blow a piercing whistle.

One after another, the firing hooks jabbed at the cannons' touchholes. The nine cannons, averaging a hundred years old each, roared at the ghost soldiers sent out from Liangzhou. A swath of grapeshot sprayed through the night, scattering the bewildered ghost soldiers in panic. Immediately after, the garrison troops on the wall, long prepared, fired their own cannons, attempting to blast the brimming-with-energy Bee-Tail Sting awake.

The night raid had unquestionably failed. Tang Mingshi fled with his ghost soldiers toward Liangzhou's west gate. They were still two or three li from the gate, already within the Marshal Army's ring of campfires outside the city, when a soldier running beside him asked as he ran, "General, don't you think we have a bit too many men?"

Now that they had reached the campfire-lit area, their surroundings were much clearer. Only then did Tang Mingshi realize that the number of people running with him was indeed too large. Even if they had not been shelled, they could not possibly have had this many men — at a rough glance, at least over a thousand.

The fine hairs on the back of Tang Mingshi's neck instantly stood on end, because he suddenly realized that the soldier who had just spoken to him — he did not seem to have seen him bef— Thud!

Before he could turn his head, an iron mace struck his helmet. The last sound he heard before losing consciousness was the hoarse cry of the soldier who had struck him down: "The enemy has infiltrated our ranks!"

Good evening!