Chapter 697: The Long Lance

The roar of guns and cannon thundered across the open field.

You never know until you fight — the moment the two armies' gunners first clashed, Xiang Xiyin realized they had a serious problem.

The Ming army had always excelled in firearms, with an emphasis on large numbers of rapid-fire light cannon and arquebuses.

This rapid-fire-oriented firearm configuration was highly scientific, capable of effectively blocking the enemy at multiple layers and exerting an extremely strong stopping effect against nomadic cavalry.

The killing gradient of their firearms was densest precisely at thirty to fifty paces beyond the maximum range of nomadic horse archers.

At this distance, the ceaselessly firing breech-loading cannon, light "Barbarian-Slayer" and "Bead-Gusher" cannon, arquebuses, and bows and three-eyed guns could all inflict effective casualties and pose a massive threat.

This meant that in terms of individual soldier quality, the Ming troops might not be much stronger than the Mongol soldiers, but as long as they formed ranks, at the distance where the Mongols could bend their bows and shoot from horseback, they would encounter Ming firepower several times denser than their own.

This was also the reason the Ming army achieved a dimensionally superior strike against the Mongol forces.

Yet this firepower configuration became awkward when facing the Marshal's Army, which also excelled in firearms.

When the breech-loading cannon opened fire, although they could not inflict substantial damage on the war wagons, they could indeed completely suppress the Marshal's Army, giving the Ming forces an advantage in closing the distance.

But once they approached within a hundred paces, the problem arose.

Just as Xiang Xiyin's gun and cannon units neared a hundred paces from the enemy, they saw a man step out from the Marshal's Army's battle line, draw a bow to full, and loose a feathered arrow in a high-angle arc forward.

Several sharp arrows, their tail feathers still quivering, stabbed into the ground, marking the distances of twenty to thirty paces, fifty to sixty paces, and eighty to ninety paces respectively.

The Ming troops hurriedly quickened their pace, carrying their tall shields and chevaux-de-frise.

According to their thinking, the fifty-to-sixty-pace mark was the most dangerous zone, where every type of firearm would unleash its full fury.

But just as they accelerated into a fast march for two steps, the Marshal's Army's guns and cannon preemptively opened fire.

Hearing the gunfire erupt in front of the formation, Xiang Xiyin initially felt a surge of joy.

To a seasoned veteran like him, this act of firing prematurely before reaching the predetermined distance was a clear sign of poorly trained gunners.

But that joy had barely risen in his heart before it was crushed by a far greater puzzlement.

Because premature firing usually began with a few scattered shots, which would then trigger the other nervous gunners to fire.

Yet the gunfire from the Marshal's Army's front line... was somewhat too orderly.

Xiang Xiyin hurriedly looked in that direction and saw that atop the war wagons where the long guns were mounted, neat rows of arquebus smoke had completely obscured the wagon tops, though beneath the wagons one could still see clearly.

Squads of soldiers were methodically swapping guns on the wagons — and their arquebuses were bigger than his!

Looking back at his own formation, Xiang Xiyin could not see clearly from his position, but by instinct, he felt as though his infantry had lost an entire layer.

Moreover, the over four hundred cavalrymen making a flanking maneuver to the rear, just as they were about to close with the enemy's three hundred-odd cavalry who were at a numerical disadvantage, and on the verge of entering cavalry charge range, the detachment commander leading them had reined in his horse.

They seemed somewhat shaken and fearful, and actually wheeled around, chased by the Marshal's Army cavalry who had already launched their charge, and fled toward the northwest of the battlefield.

This cavalry detachment commander was called Ma Ning, a man from Ningxia.

No one had a clearer view of what happened in the middle of the battlefield than he did.

He watched helplessly as the Marshal's Army's arquebusiers were pinned behind the wagons by the breech-loading cannon, until the Ming troops approached within a hundred paces, whereupon they filed out in succession and formed ranks in front of the wagon barricade.

In an instant, the small red-barbarian cannon on the two-wheeled carts, the arquebuses, and the extra-long guns on the wagons all fired in unison.

The force was like a thunderclap.

The Ming arquebusiers and infantry still accelerating forward in front of the formation collapsed in a neat layer, like wheat before a scythe.

Even the infantry shielded by tall shields and heavy armor were no exception — after the volley, few of the front-rank soldiers could remain standing.

This single volley of gunfire so terrified Ma Ning that his mind reeled. What the hell kind of guns were these? With this range and density, even if he drove the Marshal's Army cavalry from the field, he would not dare charge the infantry formation head-on.

Not to mention that on the other side, the Mongol horse troops had already begun a frontal assault on the Ming formation.

Mongol horse troops charging a formation head-on — the border troops had seen plenty of that, but it usually only happened at the very end of a battle when they got desperate and threw their elites at the formation. Mongol horse troops crashing into a formation this early in the fight was something no one, no matter who you asked, had ever seen.

What the hell was there left to fight for!

Was he really supposed to throw his life away for Hong Chengchou?

Even if he were to throw his life away, Hong Chengchou would have to buy it — no selling on credit.

On the other side, Xiang Xiyin was also dumbfounded, not because of the Marshal's Army's firearms — he had no attention to spare for that — but because of those Mongol cavalrymen in heavy armor, leveling their long lances.

Had these men gone mad?

The breech-loading cannon had only managed to fire two sub-chambers when those Tartar soldiers, disregarding all fear, came on — a mere ten-odd riders per wave, scattered in all directions, each hiding in the stirrup and charging obliquely with leveled lances, while riders farther back who could not close in showered the artillery with arrows.

Then they charged into arquebus range. The three-eyed guns' rotating volleys sprayed lead like hail, and bows and crossbows flew, yet none of it could slow their formation-shattering momentum in the slightest.

At first, some Tartars did fall from their horses — either struck themselves or their mounts wounded — but those who fell simply scrambled up, drew their blades, and slashed their horses on the rump, driving the warhorses to crash into the formation.

Not a shred of pity for their warhorses — were these still nomadic cavalry?

Of the first wave of ten-odd riders, only three managed to crash into the formation. One was shot point-blank in the face while tearing at the chevaux-de-frise and fell flat on his back. The remaining two slammed into the formation, throwing a section of the battle line into chaos as soldiers frantically hacked at them with maces and sabers.

Immediately after, another wave of cavalry crashed in. The lead rider hauled on his reins, and his mount, hooves raised, trampled straight into the formation.

The cavalry behind him, one after another, leveled their long lances and smashed through the gap toward both flanks.

Seeing the Ming battle line already wavering, with just two more waves needed to break the formation, Xiang Xiyin drew his blade and led his household troops to charge into the breach in a bloody melee, barely stemming the rout. The Mongol soldiers behind, seeing they could not break the formation, slowly withdrew.

Xiang Xiyin breathed a genuine sigh of relief. He thought to himself, these Mongol Tartars' morale is certainly high, but after giving them a bloody nose, they probably won't dare charge again.

Turning his head, he saw his household troops and regular soldiers dragging corpses and horse carcasses into the formation, and then quarreling over the seizure of heads — fury surged up from nowhere.

Little did he know, these cavalrymen from the roving-battalion Mongol chiliarchy charging the formation were not driven by high morale.

It was because the charging cavalry all came from the Oirat, and a large portion were men of the Khoshut tribe.

A major tactical hallmark of Oirat cavalry was their habitual use of the long lance to charge formations.

The Mongol tribes of Inner and Outer Mongolia, the Russians, the Kazakhs, the Nogais, even the Crimean Khanate and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — they had charged them all, and overturned every single one of them on the battlefield.

With nothing but a long lance, in the first eighty years of the seventeenth century, they were the undisputed finest light lance cavalry under heaven.

Lance cavalry existed everywhere; the Oirat were by no means the most skilled in combat technique. The issue was that in this era, powers with more cavalry than them tended to favor horse-archer caracole tactics, while those more proficient in the couched-lance charge tended to have far fewer cavalry than they did.

The Torghut tribe alone, having migrated west, could at any time and on any battlefield muster over two thousand light cavalrymen, each carrying three long lances, and with a single thunderous rush, smash any opponent to pieces.

However, limited by their scale, that was all they could do — at most, forcing the cavalry of Eastern European nations to undergo tactical reforms in the seventeenth century and steal the essence of their tactics.

Even their new master, Liu Chengzong, had once been charged by their cavalry with leveled lances.

This was the Oirat way of war.

But it was also exactly as Xiang Xiyin had thought — so long as arrows, lances, and sabers could not break the formation, and a single charge failed to move it, the Oirat commander would have to think of something else.

This was the common failing of nomadic armies: even if they were just a hair from success, they had to abandon it, because while the lower limit of casualties and losses a feudal nomadic noble could bear was high, the upper limit was rather low.

But they were no longer a nomadic army now.

Just as the troops who had failed at the front withdrew beyond bowshot and the Ming army reformed its ranks, the Mongol chiliarchy of the Second Mobile Brigade was also regrouping in front of the line, and Chiliarch Wen Lianggaizheng was delivering a speech.

Wen Lianggaizheng was Tuba, of Uriankhai origin, formerly a Jaisang under the Sixth Taiji Dorji of the Khoshut tribe.

The office of Jaisang was a steward's post that could be as large or as small as one liked — it all depended on whom one followed. The Jaisang of Ligdan Khan was the chancellor of the Northern Yuan Khanate; the Jaisang of the State Preceptor Khan was merely a minister of the Khoshut tribe; and the Jaisang of Dorji was, at best, a township official.

Yet this office was the highest position that Wen Lianggaizheng, born a commoner, could ever reach.

Because he could only manage the small herds of his own homeland. Any higher, and no matter how brilliant his natural gifts, his birth and experience would have boxed him in for life.

He did not know the nobles of other tribes, nor did he have any personal ties with the Jaisangs of other tribes. Once he left the environment he lived in, he knew nothing of geography, pasturelands, and such matters. The petty Jaisang of a petty Taiji — that was the end of his road in life.

But the Oirat expedition changed all of that.

The Grand Marshal employed men without being bound by bloodlines.

He, a Jaisang of commoner birth, became a chiliarch under Dorji, the Khoshut Battalion Adjutant General. He was wounded in the siege of the high platform against Yang Jiamo, and on the strength of that merit entered the Tiger Guard Camp, and then in Guanzhong became a chiliarch in the Grand Marshal's Second Mobile Field Brigade.

His official rank had not changed — he was still a chiliarch.

Yet Wen Lianggaizheng, who had risen from Jaisang, understood better than anyone: all were Jaisangs, but serving under different nobles meant a world of difference in power and honor.

And he — at this very moment he was serving under the most exalted Great Khan under heaven!

In the Grand Marshal's army, the only thing those nobles possessed more of than the sons of commoners was the right to carry a banner onto the battlefield.

"They can't hold out many more times — what is there to fear? Don't begrudge the warhorses, pull aside the chevaux-de-frise and charge in, take the first merit, and the Great Khan will allot you fine horses from the Tianshan Mountains!"

Soon, the cavalry of the Mongol chiliarchy swarmed together again amid Wen Lianggaizheng's shouts. Banner after banner representing each tribe, each clan, even each large company was furled, as they circled and probed the perimeter of the Ming formation, splitting and converging.

In truth, cavalry that had not yet launched its charge unnerved the Ming troops far more than a headlong collision.

Because in just the interval of a single charge, the front division of the Ming army, which had split into forward and rear formations, had nearly been shattered.

Liu Chengzong's newly organized brigade was itself a military reform. Though dispersing and reorganizing the troops of various units had to some extent reduced the soldiers' ability to coordinate with their officers, it had also re-forged the Marshal's army — veterans of campaigns east and west — into a single whole.

The powerful and effective tactics each unit had used on the battlefield were also spread, as the officers of the Tiger Guard Camp took up their posts, to every single company in the two field brigades.

For example, the heavy musket, which had previously existed only in Gao Yingdeng's camp, required disassembling the artillery canister cartridge and using the firing trick of one large and three small lead balls — four in total. This had now become the standard firing method for the Marshal's army's heavy muskets.

This Han chiliarchy, responsible for firearms in the Mobile Camp, had a paper strength of just over a thousand men. It carried only a single thousand-catty field gun and ten two-hundred-catty "lion guns," yet it was organically equipped with over five hundred firelocks.

Among these were one hundred musket-carts, and on paper, four hundred and forty heavy muskets.

However, since equipping the troops took time, the heavy muskets in every brigade of the Marshal's army were in short supply. In practice, only a portion could be allocated at first; the remainder were made up with captured birding guns by the local garrison, and replenished at a rate of a dozen or so per chiliarchy each month.

Even so, at a distance of one hundred paces, they still unleashed terrifying lethality.

In an extremely brief instant, the thousand-catty gun hurled a solid shot at the enemy's great banner; the ten lion guns fired canister; the one hundred musket-carts fired two-ounce lead balls specifically at the heavy troops carrying tall shields; over a hundred birding guns fired a volley; and more than two hundred heavy muskets, each firing four balls in a dense pattern, sprayed over a thousand projectiles at the enemy line.

The firepower of this thing could match twenty lion guns.

The sky-blotting hail of bullets was like King Yama swinging his wheat-harvesting scythe, scything down a swath of the Ming formation in neat unison.

So much so that the Ming soldiers did not even react. The officers in the rear were only watching the great banner that the thousand-catty gun had missed; amid the sound like tearing cloth, the men still walked forward by inertia.

After a few steps, someone looked down and saw a few faint blooms of blood seeping through the cloth-faced iron armor on his body. He touched the fresh blood streaming down his face, blinked, and glanced left and right in slight alarm. The strength rapidly drained from his body — he could not even register where it ought to hurt first — and then his legs gave way, his head drooped, and he pitched forward.

That counted as lucky.

The heavy-armored soldiers carrying tall shields were not so fortunate.

The two-ounce lead ball from a musket-cart struck a tall shield with matchless force. The lead ball deformed and shattered, making it look more like it had exploded upon a small hole. As the fragments tore through the shield, they were cut again by the shield's broken edges, breaking into several tiny lead chunks that bored into the soldiers behind it.

Where it hit a man, and on what part of the body — nothing was certain.

A single volley was enough to make the Ming troops collapse in swaths. Some, in their panic, continued forward in a daze; others sought to flee from the flanks, only to realize after a few steps that they had already been hit, and fell to the ground.

Even among the officers in the rear, some wheeled their horses to turn away.

Because the commanding officer was dead.

The Ming army's formation had always placed the principal junior officers at the front of the line, their deputies at the rear, and the chief commander in the middle.

A single volley had nearly toppled every principal company commander at the front. How was this battle supposed to be fought?

Watching the enemy's forward companies turn into rear companies, fleeing squad by squad back to their main line, Ma Ke was not anxious. "Send word to Li Fengji: no rush to pursue. Fire troops, reload. Steady advance — press them. They can't run!"

Of course they couldn't run.

Wen Lianggaizheng was watching from the rear. His cavalry had long since massed in preparation for a second charge. Seeing the Ming forward line flee back, he immediately raised his voice to rouse morale, raised his lance high, and galloped past the front, ordering his men to unfurl the various military banners and clan flags.

The banners streamed out. Amid the low, mournful sound of the bili pipes, the galloping cavalry leveled their lances once more, carved out an enormous arc, and using the cover of the routing forward troops, charged slantwise at the formation again.