Chapter 745: It's All Silver

The fighting on the Taizi River grew more desperate by the moment.

The roar of musketry and cannon stretched unbroken for dozens of li.

The longer the battle went on, the colder the heart of Lu Keyong, Jia La Zhangjing of the Haizhou Naval Division, became.

His troops had landed; under the covering fire of the ships' cannons, the infantry attempted to seize the artillery positions atop the river embankment.

That embankment was merely a low slope about a zhang high, yet his well-equipped infantry, clad in bright Ming armor, launched three successive fierce assaults, only to be driven back three times by infantry in red armor stationed on the bank.

Every time they clashed, musketeers on the embankment wielding hawk's-beak muskets fired devastatingly powerful bullets.

In truth, there was hardly any need to fight — at the mere sight of the Marshal's Army's standard-issue equipment in close-quarters combat, the shock troops of the Haizhou Naval Division were already stricken with terror.

Because compared to the Ming troops inside the passes, the Haizhou soldiers, mostly drawn from the New Army, were far better at recognizing quality gear.

They recognized every piece of the Marshal's Army's equipment; only the names and minor details of the designs differed slightly.

The heavy musket was the hawk musket, the lion cannon was the Barbarian-Annihilating Cannon, the field gun was the Red Barbarian Cannon, and everything was complemented by uniform Ming-style armor.

The Haizhou soldiers were thoroughly familiar with this kind of fully-formed new-model armament. Back when Xu Guangqi wanted to train a hundred thousand troops, the court approved thirty thousand, and in the end, a New Army of four thousand six hundred men was trained — in theory, this was exactly the equipment they should have had.

But in reality, that final New Army of four thousand six hundred had mostly used Great General, Second General, and bird muskets as cheaper substitutes for their equipment.

And now, the rebels had actually succeeded in fielding that very New Army!

When those hawk muskets opened fire, they inspired even greater terror in the frontline feint-attack troops than the Red Barbarian Cannons did.

If a Red Barbarian Cannon hit you, you were dead for sure, but at least death was swift and clean.

If a hawk musket hit you, you wouldn't survive either, but you wouldn't die right away.

The pain was excruciating!

As if their equipment weren't formidable enough, the dismounted cavalry on the Marshal's Army's artillery positions fought with an utterly diabolical style in close combat.

Among the troops was a company of Mongol soldiers under a centurion. Because Liu Chengzong had set a bounty for the infantry — one silver bar for every two suits of captured armor — these Mongols, with their hooked sickle-spears in hand, became the backbone of this battle.

The Haizhou soldiers had never seen an enemy so fervently obsessed with taking prisoners.

They themselves all wore bright, shining Ming armor — also a type of cloth-faced armor, but with the plates attached to the outside, mainly to distinguish friend from foe.

As soon as the muskets and cannons on the embankment roared, gunpowder smoke billowed everywhere. The Haizhou soldiers attacked uphill, loosing arrows like rain, while the Marshal's Army fired down, their lead balls scattering like hail.

The height difference was always going to demand a toll in flesh and blood to level out. The Haizhou soldiers' plan was simple: there was a bit of a height difference at the start of the assault, but at worst, they'd pile up a layer of corpses and then charge up to drive out and slaughter the enemy.

Now, here was the problem. Forget those who fell to musket fire — even the soldiers in bright armor who charged upward under the cover of the smoke would, when grappling with the red-armored troops, get snagged by a hooked sickle-spear thrust out from the shadows.

And once hooked, most of those bright-armored soldiers wouldn't even resist, because their minds simply couldn't process what was happening in the moment.

They were supposed to be charging upward, after all. In the heat of battle, blood boiling, they wouldn't even register something suddenly catching onto their bodies. They'd only feel as if their charge was divinely aided, a powerful force yanking them upward along with their own momentum.

Scaling a slope had never been so easy.

Amid the thick smoke, they couldn't see what was happening around them, and even after reaching the top of the slope, they still couldn't react.

The hooked sickle-spear would drag them backward. One step, and a mace would crack down on their head from the left; another dazed, stumbling step, and another mace would crack down on their head from the right.

Once they were hauled to the designated spot and dumped, soldiers would tie them up and load them onto carts, while the Mongol soldiers would carry their spears off to hook someone else.

It was practically an assembly line.

Lu Keyong's attention was not at all on the armored infantry locked in the desperate assault on the embankment at the front line.

Those soldiers in bright armor were all treasures. Back in the Great Ming, you never felt that way — after all, with a vast territory, astronomical resources, and the world's unrivaled population supporting you, raising a battalion and outfitting it with one or two thousand sets of armor was as easy as drinking water.

But once you left, every suit of armor you had was all you had; it was incredibly difficult to increase that number.

The Heaven's Aid Army was not the Eight Banners Army. The Eight Banners had fought at Sarhu and seized Liaodong, capturing so much armor that they could comfortably live off their past spoils.

The Ming army and the Eight Banners had the highest armor-wearing rates. Compare that to the Mongols: when the Later Jin captured Guihua City and took a census of the Mongol population and armored soldiers, out of seventy-eight thousand able-bodied men, they had only five thousand four hundred and fifty-six suits of iron armor.

If the Heaven's Aid Army wanted more armor, they'd have to go ask the Liaodong troops on the west bank of the Liao River. The problem was, the Liaodong troops weren't agreeing to that.

Without fighting a full-scale battle, even the Eight Banners soldiers didn't dare go wandering over to the opposite bank. After all, no one knew if a trip to the other side would lead to an encounter with Zhang Dadan, whose monthly pay had been docked by four qian by his commander, or with the tiger-like, bear-like Wu Sangui.

If you ran into Wu Sangui, you'd certainly be slaughtered, but if you ran into Zhang Dadan, you still couldn't win. That Liaodong grunt was also sharpening his blade, eager to hack off some heads.

Lu Keyong's landing force of over a thousand men had only a little more than six hundred suits of armor, and that was after he had brought out every last piece of his reserves.

But he was naval division; everything the naval division could bring out was a treasure.

Armored infantry and cavalry were treasures, but weren't the warships and cannons treasures as well?

Yet his ships were sinking!

To be honest, Lu Keyong felt like his head was about to explode.

At first, he had thought the Marshal's Army had twenty-four Red Barbarian field guns, with two batteries rotating their fire. So he hadn't been sensitive to their rate of fire, nor did he feel the two armies were mismatched in any way.

It was only after the landing force reached the shore and charged the embankment, and the ship cannons switched from canister shot to solid iron balls, that a four-volley salvo successfully hit one enemy cannon, the cannonball slamming viciously into its barrel.

That should have been a good thing.

But the enemy's second volley came as an eleven-gun salvo.

This caused Lu Keyong's expression to change drastically.

Eight Red Barbarian Cannons and sixteen breech-loading Great General Cannons were being suppressed in rate of fire by twelve muzzle-loading cannons on the other side!

The sky was falling!

The enemy had lost one cannon and suffered some artillery casualties, but he had already lost four ships.

The sinking ships themselves weren't a huge problem. The Taizi River's channel was shallow; even if a ship sank, the soldiers wouldn't drown. It was just that the troops, rations, and cannons on board would be soaked and would have to be hauled ashore to dry after the battle.

But with those four ships sunk in the river, the channel was completely blocked, making it impossible for him to retreat.

If he wanted to regroup, he had to drive the enemy forces from the riverbank. But, as luck would have it, his ship cannons were beginning to lose their punch.

One moment, the mainmast of the rear ship snapped and it took on water, beaching itself; the next, a ship cannon's barrel was struck by a cannonball and silenced; then, a cannonball would sweep across a deck, smashing and killing several artillerymen.

Breech-loading cannons, in terms of rate of fire, were being outright suppressed by muzzle-loading cannons, getting hammered relentlessly by the enemy's booming fire.

There was nothing to be done.

The Invincible Great General cannons of the Haizhou Naval Division were indeed designed for a fast rate of fire.

But there is no perfect weapon in this world; there are only designs and trade-offs people make to adapt weapons to local conditions.

This cannon was designed by Qi Jiguang when he went north to defend against the northern barbarians, intended for beacon towers and field battles. By specification it was originally made of bronze and should weigh one thousand and fifty jin.

Because one large cannon was paired with three sub-chambers each weighing one hundred and fifty jin, all pre-loaded with ammunition in advance — mount one and it could fire, with the first three shots being the fastest.

Against Mongol cavalry raiding south, three shots from the beacon tower basically settled the matter.

Not by killing the Mongol cavalry, but by posing enough of a threat to scare them off.

Even if it couldn't settle the matter, one could still reload at leisure on the beacon tower after pulling up the ladder.

But when Shang Kexi first surrendered to the Jin state, he had no bronze on hand, so he switched to iron casting, nearly doubling the weight.

The Invincible Grand General's rapid-fire advantage still existed, but it was far less pronounced — because it was heavy.

While firing, the detached sub-chambers had to be reloaded. Each sub-chamber was equivalent to a small cannon, requiring the sub-chamber bore to be washed and scrubbed, dried, then loaded with powder and shot.

For the Marshal's Army's thousand-jin cannons, a single cannon crew had fourteen artillerymen, with a primary and a secondary man at every position.

In practice, only six men were needed to handle one cannon properly during battle.

The remaining men served as musketeers, did odd jobs, drove the livestock, filled in as replacements when casualties occurred — there was even a veterinarian.

But for the iron-cast Invincible Grand General on the ships, the minimum manpower to keep one cannon operational was eighteen strong, able-bodied artillerymen.

Suffer even slight losses, and the rate of fire would drop.

Moreover, as the Invincible Grand General fired six shots in succession, the iron-cast barrel began to glow red. The constant cooling made the bore excessively hard and brittle, until finally the first Grand General cannon burst while firing, blasting several nearby artillerymen to death.

Their own cannon exploding sobered the Haizhou artillerymen far more than the Marshal's Army's field cannon heavy shot ever could. No one dared fire at a breakneck pace anymore.

The Marshal's Army's thousand-jin field cannon, with an iron core and copper jacket, was far superior. The wrought-iron inner bore resisted wear; the cast-copper outer shell had good ductility and conducted heat quickly, and it carried no risk of cracking from becoming too brittle while cooling.

Most critically, the iron-core copper-jacket design had a lower risk of bore burst, because copper was softer and had a self-tightening effect when cooling, pressing tightly against the wrought-iron inner bore.

When the inner iron bore deformed and was about to burst, the outer copper shell would generally bulge first.

This technique made excellent use of the strengths of both copper and iron while avoiding their weaknesses.

Reversing it would not work — it would only combine the weaknesses of both: a copper core with poor wear resistance that deformed easily, and an iron shell that dissipated heat slowly and was overly hard, liable to burst after only a few shots.

As the shipboard cannons proved unable to suppress the field cannons, and the warships sank into the river or beached upon it one after another, Lu Keyong's heart sank slowly along with them.

And his hope that the landing infantry would seize the artillery position had clearly come to nothing as well.

Not only had they failed to seize the artillery position — when he raised his telescope and looked before the lines, the entrepreneurial talents from the Mongol Plateau were using hook-sickle spears to rake over his soldiers lying on the ground.

On the contrary, it was his armored soldiers who had been seized!

Lu Keyong could never have dreamed, even in his wildest dreams, that one day a word like "seized" would be used by him to describe his own army.

Neither infantry nor artillery could beat the enemy. Though he had not seen the cavalry engage, no matter how confident he was, he dared not delude himself that his cavalry could prevail over the Marshal's Army.

He was at his wits' end.

Withdraw the army!

Lu Keyong immediately summoned his trusted aides on the ship and gave the order: "First have the cavalry pull back, covered by the infantry at the shore. Once they board the ships, the whole army will retreat."

The sequence could not be wrong.

A retreat after a lost battle — the slightest misstep would turn it into a rout.

And the problem of a rout was utterly fatal for the marine corps. The shipboard gunners and sailors would sail for the opposite bank first, leaving the rest to be drowned at the shore under enemy pursuit.

Because the reason they were fighting fiercely now was that no one had retreated yet. Once the retreat order was given, everyone would fear being stranded at the shore.

In truth, however, beyond the long embankment where Lu Keyong could not see, compared to the artillery being completely suppressed and the iron-armored infantry being captured in batches, the Haizhou naval cavalry had fought with considerable merit.

At least, at the very beginning, they had not only been able to match the Mobile Cavalry Battalion blow for blow, but had even held a faint upper hand.

Infantry, after all, had firearms. Even if their bodies were fatigued, as long as their fighting will was sufficient, superior weapon performance meant superiority on the field.

Cavalry was different — this was an arm that relied purely on the body. Zuo Guangxian's Mobile Cavalry Battalion was exhausted, men and horses alike. Though they had a slight numerical advantage, the soldiers could no longer draw their bows to full, making it very difficult to gain the upper hand in skirmishing combat.

But their armor-wearing rate was high. The occasional arrow hit either failed to penetrate the armor, or if it did, caused only a flesh wound. Even if it took them out of the fight, it was rarely fatal.

Thus, leveraging the large build and fast charge of their Hequ great horses, they seized every chance to close into melee with the enemy cavalry under a hail of arrows. The Mongol Division cavalry used hook-sickle spears to latch onto them, and then the Oirat Division cavalry ran them through with long lances.

They fought until the naval cavalry grew desperate and massed into a large formation.

They had been beaten senseless.

By all accounts, though the Haizhou naval forces had not served for very long, their combat record was rich. They had fought the eastern invaders and rebels at sea, but they had never seen such an outrageous tactic — hook a man so he couldn't move, then spear him to death.

What kind of thuggish tactic was this?

Taking advantage of the fact that naval cavalry found it inconvenient to carry long weapons, was that it?

Who could have known that not massing into a large formation would have been better? The moment they massed, the Mobile Cavalry Battalion massed too. The two sides stared each other down, and suddenly someone among the opposing Han cavalry took off his bowl helmet, revealing his hair wrap, and raised his hand to point at their mounted formation.

The originally grim cavalry unit suddenly erupted into a roar of laughter.

The naval cavalry were furious.

Staring at me is one thing, but damn it, you're laughing at me too!

But when they looked at themselves, they knew exactly why they were being laughed at.

Half of their cavalry had no armor or wore only scattered pieces of armor. Many men wore only warm hats or broad-brimmed hats on their heads.

As a result, in the course of galloping and chasing in combat, the warm hats and broad-brimmed hats fell off, revealing the little queues at the backs of their heads.

The naval cavalry thought the other side was mocking them for shaving their heads and defecting to the eastern invaders.

In the capital region, this hairstyle could sometimes be used to frighten people — after all, communications were poor, and it symbolized foreign invasion. Seeing such hair meant the enemy army had already broken through the passes.

But that was the feeling of the common folk of the Central Plains, with their clear division of labor.

What kind of good birds could the Marshal's Army possibly be?

In reality, the Han soldiers of the Mobile Cavalry Battalion were indeed mocking them, but not for defecting to the invaders — they weren't even mocking the hairstyle.

The soldier who took off his bowl helmet was merely lamenting that Liu Chengzong didn't want heads, otherwise he could just chop off the queue and tie it to his belt.

But right beside him was a Khoshut cavalryman, who also took off his bowl helmet to reveal his own little queue, and said, "This is the Great Khan's wisdom. If he wanted heads and picked mine, what would I do?"

Everyone burst out laughing.

The territory under Liu Chengzong's rule was a land of hairstyle freedom. Queued hair was everywhere in the Marshal's headquarters, and in a dazzling variety of styles.

Shaved bald, braided at the nape, braided at the crown, the distinctively Mongol style with braids by the ears and a tuft left on the forehead — the bulang'er — and even the Oirat style with no braid at all, the hair on top swept to one side. There were Han soldiers with cropped hair and Mongol soldiers with grown-out hair — every kind you could imagine.

The shaven pate with a queue was not a Later Jin peculiarity, nor did it have anything to do with the Tungusic peoples of Outer Manchuria.

Those Tungusic folk were too busy battling the elements to spare a thought for their hair; they just let it grow wild.

The queue was a custom of the Eastern Hu line. As early as the Han dynasty, Han people in Liaodong were saying the Wuhuan were all bald-heads.

Everyone's living habits were remarkably tenacious. The Han-Qiang line had grown their hair long for millennia. The Eastern Hu line had changed names countless times over the millennia — Wuhuan, Xianbei, Rouran, Khitan, Mongol — but the bald pate and queue never changed.

The laughter among the Marshal's Army cavalry died down. One by one they fixed their eyes on the enemy cavalry formation, their faces full of scorn. "They couldn't beat us as skirmishers — in a tight formation head-on clash, they've got even less chance!"

The naval cavalry, stung by the mockery, were seething with rage. In fury they hurled their warm hats to the ground and, queues bared, spurred their horses and raised their blades, determined to fight the Marshal's Army to the death.

Just then, a messenger rider from the rear rounded the embankment — the order to withdraw had arrived.

But the two lines were already locked in combat. The messenger never even reached the naval cavalry; he was hooked off his horse by Mongol soldiers patrolling the perimeter, dragged all the way to Zuo Guangxian's horse.

"Withdraw? Withdraw my ass!"

Zuo Guangxian pressed down on his saddle, eyes wide. "Since you've come, every last one of you is silver — don't any of you think about running!"

Good evening!

(End of chapter)