Chapter 698: Night Maneuvers at the Camp

On the first night after the two armies clashed.

The Ming army's vanguard officer, Xiang Xiyin, fled in utter disarray into Zhang Yingchang's main camp at Gold Silver Beach.

Bursting into the command tent, Xiang Xiyin threw himself to the ground and kowtowed, then reached for his blade to slit his own throat and atone for the defeat.

He was not putting on an act — in fact, even right after the defeat, suicide had not crossed his mind; all he had wanted was to flee back as fast as possible.

But the longer he rode, the angrier he grew, and the more he felt life was no longer worth living.

His troops were no spineless cowards who crumpled at the first setback — the Marshal's Army cavalry had charged four times in waves, three times breaking into his formation; one could say his battle array was smashed to pieces.

Yet every single time, the cavalry were forced back by the Ming infantry fighting with cold weapons — long spears, waist sabers, and bone maces.

On one hand, the Ming infantry's ability to form small fighting units after their main formation was shattered was very strong; on the other hand, the reason was almost laughable — the Oirat cavalry's close-quarters combat ability was unremarkable, so much so that while mounted, they struggled to fight one against three or four Ming soldiers in close combat.

The combat width cavalry require far exceeds that of infantry.

The Oirat cavalry's advantage lay in their powerful shock charge, but charging with couched lances is not the same as close-quarters melee — chaotic melee was their weakness.

The cavalry under Wen Lianggai equipped with the best armor wore protection roughly equal to what the Ming frontier infantry wore.

But armor of that quality, he had only equipped two shock-troop squadrons with it, while on the opposing side, Ming soldiers in such armor were everywhere.

It was not that Liu Chengzong was stingy and refused to issue armor to his soldiers — the frontier army's armor plates filled an entire warehouse at the old Guanzhong Academy site in Xi'an, and no one even wanted them.

It was simply that the Roving Battalion, by tactical design, was a light cavalry unit.

Carrying one long and two short lances — three in total — plus a bow and two quivers of arrows, the Oirat cavalry, beyond their standard marching rations, clothing, and felt blankets, could choose very limited protective gear, usually iron-studded leather armor and hide coats with a heart-protector mirror and other loose pieces tied on.

Liu Shizi's drill manual stipulated that those skilled at couched-lance charges belonged to the Mongol Division, Oirat Department of the Roving Battalion, where the Oirat cavalry were stationed; their role was to serve as horse archers during skirmishing while seizing opportunities to trample and pursue routing troops, and to use their lances to collide with approaching enemy cavalry, protecting the even more lightly equipped Monan Department.

What they were to collide with was enemy cavalry, not a tight, orderly infantry formation.

After all, charging an infantry formation may be brave, but in Liu Shizi's eyes, it was purely a hot-blooded, impulsive act.

But design is one thing; adapting on the fly in battle is another.

At least in this engagement, Ma Ke, Li Fengji, and Wen Lianggai coordinated superbly — the cavalry's repeated charges pinned the Ming army in place, ultimately allowing the dismounted infantry and gun-carriages to close in and deliver the decisive blow.

Xiang Xiyin's three-thousand-man standard battalion, with its fierce and valiant fighting spirit, had repeatedly driven back the cavalry charging into their formation, yet under the threat of large-caliber firearms, their courage shattered.

Men fled in swarms, and in the end, fewer than four hundred Ming soldiers followed Xiang Xiyin into the Gold Silver Beach position.

Faced with the disastrous news of the front line's defeat and loss of troops, Zhang Yingchang did not, as Xiang Xiyin had expected, utter any reproach or mockery.

Come on — who was Zhang Yingchang? What storms and tempests had he not seen?

He had witnessed an army of ten thousand, without even engaging the enemy, dwindle to not a single man left in the span of a single day.

You, with three thousand men, fought a battle against Liu Chengzong's troops and still managed to flee back with over three hundred — what do you call that? That's a capable commander! If Grand Commandant Hong didn't make you a Regional Commander, he's done you a grave injustice!

After hearing the account of the battle, Zhang Yingchang, with the magnanimity of an elder brother, gently consoled him: "It's merely a defeat. No one expected to run into the enemy here."

Inwardly, he thought, fighting to this result is already not bad — did you actually expect to win?

Even if he himself had led the troops, ambushed suddenly on the march, he was not confident he could have fought any better than Xiang Xiyin.

"Your subordinate is incompetent and lost the vanguard. Should our army withdraw into Lingzhou, or..."

Xiang Xiyin did not finish his sentence. The pursuers were hard on their heels, and enemy reinforcements would surely arrive soon.

He felt that with their remaining three battalions fighting a field battle outside the city, their odds of winning were slim.

"There's no time to enter the city."

Zhang Yingchang caught his implied meaning but did not agree, saying only: "The bandits have more men and horses and can run faster than us. Moreover, our vanguard has just been defeated — if we march at night and get intercepted, once the main army is caught, it's over."

"I have already sent word to Ningxia, though we likely can't count on them. The request for aid sent to the rear guard, however, might bring relief by tomorrow."

Just then, from the south came the faint, mournful sound of horns.

Under the night sky, among the bonfires the Ming army had set on the Qin Canal mudflats, the shadows of cavalrymen stretched and twisted in the firelight flickering in the wind.

Gunfire flashed intermittently in the distant darkness, sounding a few reports before falling silent again, only to erupt abruptly once more, now near, now far.

It was not hard to imagine the terrible things hidden in the night — you strike, I retreat; you pursue, I encircle — step by step, staking lives in the struggle.

The Marshal Army's pursuers had arrived.

The sound of gongs and clanging metallophones from the main camp rang out, carrying far across the cold, desolate plain of the night.

Zhang Yingchang said, "No need to pursue."

A man knows his own household's affairs.

His reconnaissance cavalry were outmatched in skill and outnumbered in strength; even in daylight they could barely screen the battlefield — fighting blind in the dark of night would only be throwing lives away in vain.

Ever since Ningxia Regional Commander He Huchen was defeated at Yellow Dragon Mountain, defeat after defeat — where in the northwest Ming army could you still find proper reconnaissance riders?

What Zhang Yingchang had on hand were merely scouts and mounted spies hastily scraped together to make up the numbers; some did not even carry the reconnaissance banner, and those issued one did not know banner signals — the flag was purely decorative.

Regular cavalry, when dispersed, are easy prey in pursuit battles against well-coordinated reconnaissance riders; massed together in a cavalry formation, they cannot screen the battlefield, and besides, they cannot catch the reconnaissance riders anyway.

And if they actually did catch up, they would either be surrounded by the reconnaissance riders or led straight into an ambush.

It was pointless.

In the night not far away, atop a makeshift mound hastily piled from grain sacks filled with sand and gravel, Ma Ke peered through a telescope at the Ming main camp, his expression displeased.

"They've got some luck!"

Racing at full speed the whole way here, upon seeing the terrain advantage and the enormous camp, Ma Ke knew — he would not be taking Zhang Yingchang's position.

The reason his pursuit had been somewhat slow was the large number of surrendered troops.

Not counting the dead and those who fled, Xiang Xiyin's battalion had left over nine hundred captives on the battlefield, more than eight hundred of whom were wounded.

Over three hundred men — those unharmed or with only superficial flesh wounds — were organized into companies on the spot by Ma Ke and forced to march with the army; the five-hundred-plus wounded were left on the battlefield, with word sent to the rear for the Reinforcement Battalion's Commandant A Liu to take them in.

The Marshal's headquarters' method of distinguishing serious from light injuries was born of the battlefield, so the criteria were rather crude — just two standards.

The first was based on treatment: injuries like broken limbs from bone maces or horse hooves, or large wounds from several saber slashes — the kind where a man could patch himself up and not die, or could still regain combat effectiveness after healing — were all called light injuries.

Those where, left unattended, the man would be dead in moments, or where even after the best treatment and recovery, permanent disability or lasting impairment remained, rendering him unable to fight — those were called serious injuries.

It was not that Ma Ke, greedy for glory, recklessly abandoned the wounded; it was that the field surgeons under his command simply lacked the capacity to treat large numbers of seriously wounded men.

The Marshal's headquarters had always been short of both military surgeons and medicine. Their army had expanded too fast — originally, only the main camp had a single surgeon brigade; after the reorganization into garrison brigades, each brigade had only one surgeon brigade stationed at the Regional Commander's main camp.

In wartime, a roving battalion like Ma Ke's was only allotted two medical officers, two physicians, and twelve army surgeons — half of them veterinarians.

At the Marshal's headquarters, which had enormous numbers of horses and livestock, aside from one designated smallpox doctor and an internist, all the remaining surgeons who studied external medicine also had to learn veterinary medicine, so their skills were generally crude but their experience was vast.

In a battlefield environment with limited resources, although the field medical manual did not state it explicitly, unless a special exception was made, they normally would not administer medicine to severely wounded surrendered soldiers.

Those with surgical value got an operation; those without were left alone. If someone was in too much agony, they were given a blade to send them on their way.

Even bandaging was done under the army surgeon's guidance — lightly wounded surrendered soldiers tore their own clothes, boiled water to disinfect, and bandaged the other wounded.

The battlefield is all about making do. Medicines and medical instruments sit around unused in peacetime, yet are perpetually in short supply once a major battle begins.

In the face of war, preparations are never enough.

Having dealt with the surrendered troops, Ma Ke learned the enemy's commanding general, the officers at every level, and the disposition of their forces. He relayed the intelligence to the rear on one hand, and on the other continued pressing forward in pursuit with the reconnaissance cavalry.

He knew there were still ten thousand enemy troops ahead, and he also knew that if it came to a real fight, those ten thousand men, each throwing a single punch, would crush his roving battalion of under two thousand.

But Ma Ke was not afraid.

This fearlessness was not founded on courage.

When you are a common soldier, a squad leader, or even a company commander, courage and martial prowess matter enormously.

But once you reach battalion commander and above, military problems must be solved through management, technical skill, intuition, experience, coordination, decision-making, and execution.

It was intelligence from the rear that let Ma Ke know friendly forces had already spread out after exiting the pass, that the plains of southern Lingzhou were already occupied, and that his flanks were completely secure — he could confidently and boldly press his troops forward.

They controlled the battlefield, so their room for tactical choices was very broad.

It was just that on this second armed reconnaissance, Ma Ke had to admit he had still been a bit too slow. The unprecedented glory of a single battalion routing Zhang Yingchang's four battalions of the Right Garrison — he simply did not have the luck to claim that.

Although visibility was very poor at night, Ma Ke could still roughly make out the Ming army's disposition. This was because the Ming army, to guard against raids, had lit bonfires every few dozen paces across the mudflats outside their camp.

Gold Silver Bank was a triangular riverbank, split by two Qin canals flowing north-south to its east and west, spanning five or six li wide east to west and eight or nine li long north to south, broad in the south and narrow in the north.

The riverbank was all fertile irrigated farmland, interspersed with a few villages.

From the positions of the bonfires on the mudflats, Ma Ke could basically confirm that the Ming army had pitched camp directly in the center of the riverbank.

Because defending against night raids followed fixed methods — all Ming troops had studied them, and Ma Ke was naturally no exception.

Inside those bonfires were sentry posts and watchtowers. The watchtowers were constantly manned by scouts called "gazers" — soldiers with superb eyesight, one tower every hundred paces in every direction.

Below the towers were stations where a few soldiers called "listeners" were specially chosen — men who could not sleep soundly, which is to say neurasthenic soldiers. They gathered in tents equipped with hollow gourd pillows made of tough wild boar hide, capable of detecting the sounds of large bodies of troops moving in the distance.

The camp's location was cunningly chosen. Zhang Yingchang had left open ground two to three li deep all around the mudflats, clearly a precaution against the Marshal's army's artillery.

This distance meant that any field cannon attempting direct-fire bombardment of his camp would have to cross the river.

But heavy cannon, carts, and horses that crossed the river would be at risk of ambush.

Terrain like this, easy to enter but hard to leave, is called "hanging ground" in military doctrine.

Sun Wu's advice for such terrain was to exploit the enemy's lack of preparedness and win by sudden assault; if the enemy was already prepared, and an attack could not succeed, retreat would be difficult — that would be disadvantageous.

And terrain where setting out was disadvantageous for both the enemy and oneself became "branching ground." Sun Wu advised feigning a withdrawal to lure the enemy halfway out, then turning back to counterattack — thus turning disadvantage into advantage.

So Ma Ke did not act rashly. He merely ordered his roving cavalry to advance north along both the eastern and western Qin canals, completely severing the Ming camp's contact with the outside world.

By this time it was nearly the second half of the night. Ma Ke's chiliarch Li Fengji had wanted to camp nearby, but Ma Ke, using the excuse that sleeping in village houses and courtyards was warmer, enticed the troops to march five li southwest through the night and occupy a hundred-household garrison post and civilian dwellings the Ming army had abandoned.

In the end, there were not enough courtyards to go around, and the walls of the hundred-household post had mostly collapsed, letting the wind howl through. Many men ended up pitching tents in the open after all, enduring a miserable night.

In truth, Ma Ke knew there were not enough houses here. His aim was not to keep the soldiers from freezing while sleeping in the open.

The Marshal's army's cold-weather gear was excellent. Camping in the open, they were probably warmer than the Ming troops who had built a fortified camp on Gold Silver Bank.

After all, a camp lets the wind through too.

He was afraid the Ming army would come out and raid them at night. After a full day and night of forced marches and combat, many horses were so exhausted they had stopped sleeping standing up and lay down instead — to say nothing of the men.

Ma Ke felt he could no longer force his soldiers to march and redeploy at night, so he used the fortress walls and courtyard enclosures as shelter from the wind as a pretext to make the troops march another five li.

After all, if he said he was worried about a night raid, not just the soldiers — even his two chiliarchs, Li Fengji and Wen Lianggai, were so exhausted they only wanted to sleep.

Those two opened their mouths and it was all "just one double-hour of sleep — give us one double-hour of sleep and we can mount up and fight the enemy."

But anyone can boast. In the state they were in, dropping asleep the moment they touched the ground, if the Ming army really came charging out, blades hacking at their necks, they probably still would not get up.

In fact, Zhang Yingchang did send troops out that night.

Only, because he did not control the battlefield, they dared not go roaming everywhere. He merely dispatched cavalry six or seven li out in the four directions — east, south, west, and north — who looked around, found no one, and returned.

The order was ten li, but no one dared ride the full distance. They went roughly far enough to bluff it and then went back to report.

Until the next morning.

First, the cavalry of the Raider Battalion, led by Second Brigade Vice Commander Ouyang Gun, arrived at the outskirts of Gold Silver Bank, their warhorses snorting plumes of white breath.

At the same time, Zhang Yingchang's troops began digging trenches in the southern part of Gold Silver Bank, attempting to link the two Qin canals that diverged in the south, turning them into a moat.

During this process, a unit of Western Barbarian musketeers under Assistant Commander A Liu of the Reinforcement Battalion also reached the battlefield. Their thousand-odd men did only two things all morning, and both sent the morale of Zhang Yingchang's Right Garrison Ningxia troops plummeting.

First, they laid gunpowder and blew up the stone bridges over the Qin canals on both sides. Second, they positioned themselves one li south of Gold Silver Bank, opposite the Ming troops digging trenches, and began building a wall facing them.

The idea was Zhang Xianzhong's.

Regarding Ma Ke's suggestion to lure the enemy out, the Minister of the Rites Secretariat declared that such deceptive tricks were far too discourteous.

They, the Marshal's headquarters' fine generals, ought to emulate the Grand Marshal's excellent conduct and noble character, and respect the enemy's choices.

If they don't want to come out, why must you try to lure them out?

The Grand Marshal delights in helping others fulfill their wishes. Let us first blow up the bridges, then build a wall to seal them in — lock them down tight.

Not only would a wall be built on the southern plain, but along the banks of the Qin canals on the east, west, and north, rammed-earth sheep-and-horse walls five chi high and five chi thick would also be raised. Whoever comes out is a bastard.

The Ningxia Rear Guard, to their credit, did not disappoint Zhang Yingchang's earnest expectations. Zhao Huaizheng, the agricultural garrison commander previously appointed by Hong Chengchou, led troops westward to relieve them.

But they had only gotten halfway when they were intercepted by the forces of Vice Commander Ding Guodong, who had marched out from Qingtong Gorge in Huan County with the Yanqing Brigade. The two sides clashed that same day.

Meanwhile, at Red Temple Fort, Liu Chengzong also received the frontline intelligence. He leafed through Ma Ke's report and learned that Ningxia had sealed off three garrison commands, and that a third of their forces were surrounded at Gold Silver Bank by Ren Quan'er.

Like Zhang Xianzhong's reaction, faced with Ma Ke's description of Gold Silver Bank's terrain, the defensive layout of Zhang Yingchang's camp, and his suggested plan of attack, he likewise did not choose to lure the enemy out.

"Go back and tell Commander-in-Chief Ren and General Ma — what's there to lure? And tell Director-General Zhang to stop building that shoddy wall. This Zhang Yingchang has poor connections; he actually doesn't know Bai Guang'en."

The times have changed.

Liu Chengzong waved his hand and passed the command arrow to the Feathered Forest Rider: "Have Governor Zhang send someone to demand their surrender. If they surrender, so be it. If not, we'll wait for the rockets to arrive and blast them... Daring to pitch camp like this — how many lives do they think they have?"