Chapter 514: Rations for Men, Fodder for Horses

The heavy cannons in Gulang Gorge roared, shaking Feng Rang's soul right out of his body.

His spirit seemed to drift to the cloud-shrouded summit of the Qilian Mountains, overlooking the battlefield, and in the shattered wreckage of the Ming army's wagon fort, he saw the future.

In the span of one quarter-hour, three thousand-jin cannons could fire ninety times, while a single Mighty Grand General could only fire three times — but every shell it loaded and blasted forth struck with the force of thunder, piercing through wagon planks as if they were nothing.

Even with the gunpowder halved, using only the ten-jin powder bags Liu Chengzong had prepared, it still punched through war wagons at four hundred paces. Only when the charge was reduced to one-third, a mere seven jin, did Feng Rang finally witness the scene he had imagined of heavy cannon bombarding a wagon fort — the shell flipped a war wagon over.

Within one quarter-hour, not counting the rain of shot the Exterminate-the-Caitiffs cannons poured into the middle of the battlefield, they fired ninety-three rounds in total. Of those, only this single shot with the lightest charge truly inflicted destructive damage on a war wagon — yet it was enough to strike terror into the hearts of the Ming wagon fort troops.

Very soon, this wagon fort from Liangzhou released over two hundred riders from its rear. They streamed forward in file along both wings of the wagon fort, deploying into a loose cavalry skirmish formation to cover the fort's orderly withdrawal.

The main reason for Ding Shaoyin's retreat was the three thousand-jin cannons firing in alternation. The Mighty Grand General, which boomed out only three shots in a quarter-hour, was indeed terrifying, but mixed among ninety seven-jin cannonballs bouncing wildly all over the ground, it was not nearly so conspicuous.

Ding Shaoyin had some understanding of the Marshal's Army's gunners. These artillerymen were far better trained than the gunners of Liangzhou Garrison — they fired more accurately, loaded faster, and especially when operating their own cannons, they could even make three thousand-jin cannons match the rate of fire of two thousand-jin Frankish breech-loaders.

Except for this Mighty Grand General — its loading was truly slow.

During the Mighty Grand General's long intervals between shots, Ding Shaoyin even suspected that the Marshal's Army's heavy cannon had exploded in its position. Otherwise, why had it not fired for so long?

Ding Shaoyin had to retreat — not because too many of his men had been killed by shelling, or because the heavy cannon had crushed his soldiers' morale.

Three days of two wagon forts pecking at each other like novice chickens had been excellent psychological conditioning for the soldiers on both sides. Neither could break the other's defense. After all that fighting, only a few unlucky souls had been wounded or killed by stray shots.

The soldiers' fear of the great threat of cannonballs plummeted. Those who actually got killed couldn't complain anyway.

But the wagon fort carried a large number of draft animals, and these big fellows could not develop excellent psychological resilience. A few seven-jin cannonballs bouncing wildly through the formation, sailing over layers of wooden palisades and chevaux-de-frise, landed in the central area where the animals were penned. A few beasts killed or maimed, and the entire herd panicked.

The terrified large animals charged blindly through the formation. No chevaux-de-frise or wooden palisade could stop them. Ding Shaoyin, left with no choice, could only withdraw for the time being.

Originally, this was no big deal for Ding Shaoyin. He just needed to pull back to Gulang Fort and reorganize his formation. What he never expected was that just as he had gathered his formation at the front and begun an orderly retreat, the two behind him simply up and marched off.

Chai Shihua and Bai Guang'en — it was as if the two had arranged it long ago. The moment they saw the wagon fort pulling back, both encampments, six or seven thousand men in total, one after the other, struck camp and began winding their way toward the mountain pass of Gulang Gorge behind them.

The sight made Ding Shaoyin seethe with rage. You bastards had this planned all along! No wonder Cao Wenzhao didn't trust either of you!

In truth, Bai Guang'en really couldn't be blamed for this. It was simply his nature. Ever since Zhang Tianlin had used a "Liu Guoneng descending from heaven" to wipe out an entire encampment of his elite troops, Bai Guang'en always considered his retreat route first and made thorough preparations before every deployment.

But at the start, he genuinely had not intended to retreat directly.

It was because Chai Shihua, positioned behind him, saw that Ding Shaoyin's wagon fort could not hold and immediately struck camp and left. Bai Guang'en thought to himself: a fierce man like Cao Wenzhao left without a word, and that fine scoundrel Chai Shihua looks like he knows something. If both of them are leaving, I'll leave too.

And so he slapped his backside and issued the retreat order.

Chai Shihua knew nothing at all. He had wanted to leave long ago, but figured his soldiers wouldn't obey him, so he had gritted his teeth and stood his ground on the battlefield. Now that Ding Shaoyin was retreating, who cared if it was orderly or not? At this moment, issuing a retreat order was something the soldiers would definitely obey, so if he could retreat, he would.

On the other side, Feng Rang hadn't even reacted. He was still in camp scratching his head in bewilderment: damn it, my Mighty Grand General's ammunition isn't even loaded yet — how come I look up and whoosh, everyone's gone?

He found Wei Qian'er and asked, "Do we pursue or not?"

"We can't pursue, right?"

Wei Qian'er was also stunned, his mouth slightly agape as he stared at the distant backs of the Ming army slowly withdrawing into the gorge. In a daze, he shook his head. "They're coordinating too smoothly — it's probably a trap. Did they bury mines? Or set an ambush in the gorge?"

The two men looked at each other, then at each other again, and finally decided to send cavalry over to take a look. They would seize the fort first and talk later.

At this moment, Feng Rang could not be bothered with anything else. He sprawled beside a war wagon, picked up his brush, and wrote a letter to Liu Chengzong.

He knew Liu Chengzong very well — a fierce general of ancient times, master of all eighteen martial arts. But the eighteen martial arts did not include firearms and cannons, and Liu Chengzong had never systematically studied, trained with, or used them.

The two men in the Marshal's Headquarters who understood firearms and cannons best right now, Cao Yao and Huang Shengxiao, were both holding the line in Ganzhou. Feng Rang's background in the capital army's firearms corps made him the best cannon expert closest to Liu Chengzong, which was why the cannons had ended up in his hands.

Feng Rang had always felt that Liu Chengzong possessed a rather magical ability: as an army commander, he endlessly summarized, synthesized, and proposed new experiments.

He clearly did not understand firearms and cannons, yet he could produce designs for wall guns and artillery, build a heavy cannon weighing five thousand seven hundred jin like this one, and have them test different charge ratios.

By the time Feng Rang's letter reached the outskirts of Liangzhou City, Liu Chengzong already had three other newly cast Mighty Grand Generals in hand. The absurd part was that the cannons were cast, but the gun carriages had still not been built.

Every time a cannon was cast, Liu Chengzong cursed Hong Chengchou once in his heart.

Because Hong Chengchou had cut down every tree and demolished every house on the Liangzhou oasis. The timber for their gun carriages had to be gathered from Shandan and Yongchang garrisons, and timber, unlike iron, could not be cut into small pieces for transport — this made building the carriages extremely troublesome.

Outside the city, Liu Chengzong read the letter Feng Rang had written, chuckling as he went. Feng Rang had practically written him an operating manual for the Mighty Grand General.

From the different power and rates of fire produced by different charges, to suitable usage environments, he explained the reasons in exhaustive detail, and even put forward his own conjectures. Some of these things Liu Chengzong knew; some, he genuinely did not.

Feng Rang was the user, and Liu Chengzong was the designer. The user had the user's experience, and the designer had the designer's pleasure. Liu Chengzong found himself becoming a little obsessed with casting cannons.

Especially after he had personally designed and cast a heavy cannon — he discovered he had thoroughly grasped the modular proportions. The thing was very simple.

For a cannon, using fixed modular ratios and caliber-length multiples, only the caliber and the caliber-length multiple were unknowns. Change the caliber, and the dimensions and thickness of the entire barrel changed. In other words, as long as you used this system, knowing the shell weight and the caliber-length multiple, you could determine the barrel's dimensions and thickness even with your eyes closed.

If the inner diameter of the muzzle was set at three inches, then the outer diameter of the muzzle was twice the caliber, the outer diameter at the touchhole was three times the caliber, the bore length depended on the caliber-length multiple, and the thickness from the powder chamber to the breech was one times the caliber — the entire form of the cannon was thus calculated.

Beyond this, there was one more variable: material. With good material, thickness could be appropriately reduced; with poor material, thickness had to be appropriately increased. On top of this, different caliber-length multiples would yield different charges and power.

The smaller the caliber-length multiple, the smaller the maximum charge, because the shorter the barrel, the shorter the distance the gunpowder burned and produced gas inside the bore. No matter how much extra powder you added, it would not have time to burn before the shell left the muzzle; the excess powder would only produce smoke and flame.

Conversely, the larger the caliber-length multiple, the longer the barrel, the longer the time before the shell was pushed out of the bore, allowing for a larger charge and a faster muzzle velocity — but by the same token, the pressure the bore had to withstand was also greater.

To Liu Chengzong, this knowledge gained from practice meant that the Marshal's Headquarters' cannon design philosophy had climbed another step. All the cannons they were currently fielding would become obsolete models. The Lion Cannons and thousand-jin cannons used in field battles would all give rise to superior forms.

But he did not intend to cast any more cannons beneath the walls of Liangzhou City, because Cao Yao had sent him a letter from Ganzhou. In it, that old scoundrel Cao congratulated Liu Chengzong on overcoming the technical difficulties of battlefield cannon-casting, while also informing him of a piece of bad news: if they kept casting cannons like this, before the heavy cannons could blast Liangzhou open, Gansu itself would collapse first.

Gansu had abundant mineral resources, with large proven deposits of iron, copper, and lead. But in this era, Gansu was not a normal province. Seventy to eighty percent of its able-bodied men were soldiers, and most of those working in mining and smelting also had military backgrounds.

Under these circumstances, the output of natural resources was appallingly low. In all of Gansu, the iron smelted in a year amounted to only a little over a hundred thousand jin. Liu Chengzong had used over forty thousand jin beneath Liangzhou City in less than half a month.

To be honest, before this, Liu Chengzong had never considered the possibility of running out of materials.

Because in his mind, on the soil of the Great Ming, you might lack anything but iron. In Shanxi, a single county, taxed at one-fifteenth on iron production, could deliver five hundred thousand jin to the imperial court in a year — a microcosm of the Great Ming's steel and iron production capacity.

Projected onto military affairs, this terrifying production capacity meant that a Ming army could lack anything — they might lack money, grain, or soldiers, they might even run out of maintenance funds — but cannons, gunpowder, and iron would always be in ample supply.

And now it was Liu the Lion's turn, and he actually lacked iron for cannon-making. This caught him completely off guard.

Besides this, Cao Yao also brought Liu Chengzong one piece of good news and one piece of bad news.

The bad news was that, after calculations, the fodder and soybeans from the two oases of Ganzhou and Suzhou would be insufficient to feed the expeditionary army's enormous numbers of mules and horses through the winter.

The good news was that the autumn grain that could be collected from the Gansu oases likewise could not feed the thirty-seven thousand field troops and twelve thousand garrison troops.

And so the problem solved itself. The solution put forward by the Gansu Governor's Headquarters was to slaughter an estimated nine thousand donkeys and mules and four thousand two hundred warhorses — this would resolve both the problem of rations for the men and the problem of fodder for the horses in one stroke.

Liu Chengzong had long anticipated the problem of army provisions. In Gansu, their warhorses, mules, and donkeys outnumbered the fighting men, and the fighting men outnumbered the peasants who tilled the land. A shortage of grain and fodder was an inevitable result.

But the solution Cao Yao proposed still made Liu Chengzong give him a mental thumbs-up. This bird of a man truly was a fiendish genius at solving problems — he had calculated Liu the Lion's stinginess perfectly and was prodding him to advance the army.

Slaughtering horses treated the symptoms but not the root cause. Annihilate the Ming army forces in the Zhuanglang River Valley, and the problem of rations for men and fodder for horses would be solved at the root.

But as for the specific way to strike the Zhuanglang River Valley, Liu Chengzong racked his brains and still had no plan. He had no choice but to convene a council of war beneath the walls of Liangzhou City, summoning Yang Yao, Yang Qi, Gao Yingdeng, and others. He asked them, "I want to annihilate the Ming army in the Zhuanglang River Valley as quickly as possible, so as to link northern Gansu with the Hehuang region into one contiguous territory. But with Liangzhou City behind us and Gulang Gorge ahead, do any of you have a good plan?"

Hearing this question, the commanders all lowered their heads in silence. After a brief pause, Yang Qi, seeing that no one else would speak, opened his mouth: "Great Commander, Gulang Gorge is full of narrow mountain paths, easy to defend and hard to attack. Heavy weapons and baggage cannot be transported up. We can only split into small squads, advancing along ridges and ravines to strike from all sides. A direct assault will inevitably mean fighting outnumbered."

"And with our current troop strength, we cannot spare many men for a frontal assault on Gulang Gorge." Yang Qi said with difficulty, "Liangzhou City is both large and sturdy. Even if we dig a thirty-li-long trench to besiege it, we must still leave behind sufficient forces. After all, there are over ten thousand troops inside the city. Unless we take Liangzhou City first, the troops cannot be freed up."

Liu Chengzong slowly shook his head and said nothing.

That was exactly what he had been thinking — as good as saying nothing at all.

"Great Commander." At that moment, Gao Yingdeng looked up and asked, "What if we don't besiege Liangzhou City? Would that work?"

"Not besiege it?" Liu Chengzong asked. "What do you mean, not besiege it?"

"Pull all the troops away, leave just two thousand men west of the city to keep an eye on them and stop them from coming out to trample the crops."

Gao Yingdeng said, "I'll go south and strike Gulang Gorge. If the troops inside Liangzhou City come out, our army outside the city will withdraw westward to Yongchang. If it comes to it, we can withdraw all the way to Shandan Garrison or even Ganzhou. Then they'll be the ones in trouble."

Having said this, as if feeling his words lacked credibility, he added another line: "I wager they wouldn't dare come out anyway."

Liu Chengzong initially thought Gao Yingdeng's words were indeed a bit absurd, but after careful thought, they seemed to make a good deal of sense: "They're inside the city. The reason we don't attack isn't that we can't take this city, but that the cost of taking Liangzhou would outweigh the provisions we might gain... That makes sense. Hey, what you're saying makes sense."

Liu Chengzong paced a few steps inside the tent, then turned back: "Even if I withdraw all the troops, even if Li Hongsi dares to come out of the city, the most he could do is trample a few of my crops. He wouldn't dare go ten li beyond Liangzhou."

"The Great Commander is right!" Gao Yingdeng, having gained Liu Chengzong's approval, said excitedly, "This humble general meant exactly that. If he dares to go ten li out, even better — I'll immediately bring troops back from the south and wipe him out. A bunch of crippled soldiers and defeated generals."

"Admirable courage!"

Liu Chengzong praised him with a smile, then turned to Yang Qi and asked, "Heavy cannons can't be transported up to Gulang Gorge — but can horses run and carts travel there?"

"Naturally they can. There are several post stations along the way; it's a vital communication route." Yang Qi thought for a moment and said, "It's just that as the throat of Gansu, there are a few strategically critical and difficult spots."

Hearing this, Liu Chengzong felt assured: "Mountainous terrain doesn't scare me. I, Liu the Lion, came out of northern Shaanxi — I've gone up onto the high plateau and come back down. If we can't take the Zhuanglang River, we'll have to slaughter thirteen thousand mules and horses this autumn. I figure that if warhorses must die, they should die on the battlefield. As long as this road allows horses to gallop, we'll just charge right over them if we have to!"

Good evening!