Chapter 753: Maneuvers

Eleven thousand Mongol soldiers struck southward.

Thirteen thousand Eight Banners troops were in headlong rout.

The two colossal armies tangled together, shooting from horseback left and right, charging and slaughtering back and forth.

The dust kicked up by pounding hooves rose unceasingly, like a colossal wave hanging in the sky, churning without end.

The Northern Yuan loyalist elders in the Marshal's headquarters had gone red-eyed with slaughter-lust.

From the final years of the Wanli reign onward, over the past twenty years, whenever the Northern Yuan army and the Eight Banners army met on the battlefield, it was always a rout at first contact, and another rout at the next.

As it evolved, later on, the mere distant sight of the Eight Banners army's disciplined advancing columns was enough to make the Chahar army collapse without a fight.

It was not that Mongols could not fight — the Ming dynasty's barbarian auxiliaries fought fiercely, and the Eight Banners' Mongols fought fiercely too.

It was that the independently developing Mongols like Chahar and Tümed could not fight.

Because they were poor.

So poor they could not properly outfit men and horses, so poor they had no armor.

The poorer they got, the more they fought; the more they fought, the poorer they got. The armor passed down from their ancestors was all lost. On the battlefield, they conscripted herders in droves, who from afar saw the Eight Banners army in a gleaming expanse of bright armor, and up close found that blades and spears could not pierce it, and arrows could hardly inflict serious wounds.

Conversely, at the slightest engagement, they would suffer losses of troops and officers.

All they had left was many horses — at least every man could ride one and flee.

No matter who it was, the only path was defeat and flight.

When a tael of silver could buy several dozen jin of iron and steel, and full-armor outfitting for an entire army became the norm on the Nine Border battlefields, it was no surprise that the old purely nomadic mode of production suffered a hundred defeats in a hundred battles.

Yet now, when the ruler of four hundred thousand Mongols, Chahar, had changed its name and surname, the Northern Yuan and Yanmen battalions, formed from six thousand old Chahar men, overturned twenty years of defeats on the battlefield.

At last, it was the Eight Banners army's turn to fight bitterly and flee in rout.

But even as all three wings of Daicing's army's right flank collapsed, and tens of thousands of troops fled in rout toward the second defense line, within the chaotic, scattering formations, White Armor soldiers kept removing their helmets, drawing their shundao swords, cutting off their queues to hand to others, then turning back against the tide, relying on their sturdy armor and raising their long blades to fight to the death against the Marshal's army horsemen trampling through their formations.

The officer who had punched through the formations of the Plain Blue and Bordered White Banners was Northern Yuan Battalion Assistant Commander Wu Sihu.

This man had formerly been one of the Four Jasag of the Chahar Khan's court, had followed Ligdan Khan in defeat from east to west, and possessed extremely rich experience in losing battles.

The moment he charged and the Plain Blue Banner routed, he could tell from experience whether it was a genuine, unprepared collapse, and so he did not even cut down the fleeing troops, but led his cavalry straight for the next formation, the Bordered White Banner, and attacked.

Once the Bordered White Banner also routed, he wanted to continue south and punch through one more formation, but then he immediately saw the rear army forming up on the spot and beginning to draw a second defense line, with more and more armored Eight Banners troops appearing. Only then did he turn back and order the three chiliarch commands of the Northern Yuan Battalion to spread out, sweep forward from the rear, envelop the great mass of routed troops in a sack, and slaughter them at will.

He naturally saw the White Armor soldiers surrounded in pockets all across the formation, fighting desperately with their lives.

But seeing this scene, Wu Sihu was not alarmed — instead he was delighted, and simply pressed the rout and slaughtered freely.

Counting from the Chahar westward migration, who knew how many taiji-led tribes on the Mobei grasslands had been wiped out in these few years. Extreme natural disasters were certainly a reason, but more of the destruction came from war.

And in those wars, large or small, this scene always appeared — elite soldiers turning back to face certain death, to cover their army's retreat.

In Wu Sihu's eyes, this was an omen that a tribe was about to be annihilated.

When a khan has an army, the first thing he must do is use combat to gradually divide the soldiers in his army into three tiers.

The most courageous, strongest, and most battle-worthy first-rate soldiers are kept at his side as guards; the second-rate become elite troops; the lowest become ordinary soldiers.

When battle begins, ordinary soldiers take the field, and the second-rate elite wait for the chance to break the enemy; if the elite cannot win, he takes the first-rate troops and retreats.

First-rate troops, unless absolutely unavoidable, must be preserved to rebuild the army.

This was even more true for every feudal lord.

Therefore in his view, killing these two or three hundred White Armor soldiers who were turning their horses and fighting to the death in pockets all across the formation was a far greater achievement than routing two more formations.

After all, long before the battle, the officers of every unit in the Marshal's army had already learned Liu Chengzong's intent.

The Grand Marshal did not want a death match with Daicing, but wanted to make the enemy fear them, so that his own side could withdraw at leisure with their spoils.

Slaughtering the enemy's most elite soldiers and junior officers was undoubtedly the most effective way to achieve that goal.

In fact, at the same moment Hong Taiji was re-establishing the second defense line, yet another banner had fallen into bitter fighting.

It was Jirgalang's Bordered Blue Banner.

Although Jirgalang was also a son of Šurhaci, unlike Amin, he possessed Hong Taiji's deep trust.

Hong Taiji, a man who would rebuke heaven and punish earth, had scolded his own son Hooge into shutting himself away, yet had never once punished Jirgalang.

Thus Jirgalang was at this moment garrisoning Shengjing, having summoned the banner's remaining able-bodied men to assist in defense.

Leading the Bordered Blue Banner in Hong Taiji's formation was Jirgalang's younger brother, Fiyanggū.

The very same Fiyanggū who had set fire to the mountains along the Isun River, preventing Ajige from returning east.

Unlike the other banners, which were a patchwork of garrison troops scraped together from all over, the troops Fiyanggū led were extremely elite.

Because they had originally been a force taking a circuitous route to attack the Ming, and after withdrawing to Shengjing had summoned their banner troops, they possessed not only nearly six thousand soldiers from the two banners of Bordered Blue and Bordered Blue Mongol, but also over three thousand warhorses and more than four thousand sets of armor within the army alone — arguably the finest of all the banners in this campaign.

The only ones who could match them in armor and warhorses were the two battalions personally led by Hong Taiji: the Bayara, called the Guard Army, and the Bayara Forward Scouts, called the Vanguard.

Only, Fiyanggū's troops had no firearms or cannons, and had brought no shield carts.

According to the military tradition of the Later Jin era, shield carts were extremely important implements of war, their importance no less than that of strong bows and armor.

Nurhaci had once issued an order: if the shield carts had not arrived, commanders could not give battle.

And attacking on one's own without waiting for the shield carts would most likely lead to defeat, and defeat inevitably brought punishment.

Fiyanggū was of course well aware of this, but he and Hūsibu of the Bordered Blue Mongol, the two gūsas, simply had no shield carts.

They had originally brought ten shield carts, but in fighting against the Marshal's headquarters Mongol troops on the western slopes of the Khingan Range, and during the successive movements, eight of the ten shield carts had been lost.

Afraid of being punished if they went back, they dared not report it. The remaining two carts had also been given by Fiyanggū to the banner's artisan slaves to copy, thinking he would pay out of his own pocket and bleed his own resources, secretly making replacements to fill the gap.

Because shield carts were very expensive.

Back in his day, to block bullets, Qi Jiguang had once built the Rigid-Flexible Shield — a long shield made of multiple composite layers of wood, lacquer, paper, oil, and iron, weighing fifteen jin. Its greatest drawback was the extremely high manufacturing cost: one shield cost five taels of silver, making official procurement and production impossible.

Nurhaci's shield carts were similar to the Rigid-Flexible Shield, only larger — six-cun-thick wooden plates covered with cowhide and iron sheeting, forming a composite shield cart, and even more expensive to produce.

Therefore, generally speaking, for losing shield carts, Hong Taiji's punishment would be even costlier than the carts' manufacturing price.

Fiyanggū and Hūsibu would rather pay out of their own pockets than suffer punishment.

In any case, they could always squeeze the reward money of the Mongol banner troops and exploit the slaves.

In this age of rampant war and famine, those who could rise above the rest were few anywhere. For the Mongols after Ligdan Khan's defeat and death, in particular, once the nobles surrendered to the Jin, their status plummeted compared to what it had been in Mongolia before.

Commoners would be reduced to slavery, oppressed by the bannermen — beaten and starved in peacetime, driven onto city walls in wartime. Even if by luck they were the first to scale the wall, the bannermen's jealousy would deny them support, and they would die wretchedly atop the battlements.

If their families could find Hong Taiji to lodge a complaint, they would naturally receive lavish rewards and have their names vindicated... But this was just like finding the Chongzhen Emperor to complain, finding Liu Chengzong to complain, finding any ruler to complain — it crafted the illusion that the emperor was always a wise sovereign and only the underlings were wicked.

Many Mongols surrendered to the Jin, starved and took beatings, then fled — defected to the Great Ming — and still starved.

The Mongols who fled to Xuan-Da fared no better. They were treated as futures-traded heads: whenever a battle was lost, they'd be used to impersonate Jurchen heads for rewards.

The Great Ming had no shortage of soldiers.

South of the Great Wall, in times of peace, barbarian soldiers were treasured because they likely already knew how to ride and shoot. Put armor on them and they were soldiers — compared to recruiting peasants directly, this skipped the costly training phase of feeding and funding them, allowing immediate deployment.

But ever since the Chongzhen Emperor ascended the throne, the Great Ming had, through systematic taxation, created refugees; by exterminating refugee leaders and pacifying refugee armies, then continuing to raise taxes to create new refugees, it had completed the militarization of the northwestern peasantry.

The amnestied peasant armies, through years of mobile warfare and living by the blade, had learned to ride and shoot. They could farm if farming was needed, fight if fighting was needed — a far more cost-effective choice.

Only the Mongol soldiers under Zu Dashou had it somewhat decent.

Fiyanggū's calculations were excellent; the one thing he hadn't foreseen was that Hong Taiji would give him no time.

The shield carts hadn't even been built yet when, under a single edict from the Chongde Emperor, he was dispatched on campaign once more — a rushed redeployment with no preparation whatsoever.

On the other side of the battlefield, Liu Chengzong had long since seen Hong Taiji re-establish his battle lines. Relying on experience, he guessed the enemy intended to spread both wings for an encirclement. Thus, before the Daiching Army's wings could spread, he had already issued orders to both of his own wings.

He sent messengers galloping to the formations of Zuo Guangxian, Tang Tong, and Subadi, ordering the left and right wings to launch a fierce assault the moment they saw the enemy's wings spread.

Liu Chengzong's objective was a central breakthrough.

But Daiching's forces were numerous. Even though he still held the First Brigade's most elite two battalions — the Main and Surprise, eight thousand men — in reserve, he dared not act rashly.

So, to once again shift the enemy's forces, he had to try his luck on both wings.

The Marshal Army's right wing had a very hard time against Daiching's left wing.

The right wing was Subadi's Mobei Army. Though they had six thousand cavalry, their armor-wearing rate was inferior even to the Eight Banners' garrison troops — a very primal combination of Mongol nobles and herder cavalry.

Only by relying on the collapse of both the enemy center and right wing, and the fact that Jin Yuhe's Han Banners battalion was in the process of relocating its cannons, had they been able to break through Jin Yuhe's formation in one stroke.

Afterward, the two battalions of Shoduu Taiji and Wu Sihu hurried south. Subadi also wanted to push south, but he crashed into Ma Guangyuan's Han army formation. One charge — it stood utterly unmoved. Another charge — the Han formation still did not move.

Subadi understood.

He could only circle at a distance, his will to carry out Liu Chengzong's attack orders willing but his strength weak.

Seeing this, Liu Chengzong issued him a second order from the rear: spread out in a wide "Sea of Children" formation at a distance, and on no account let the enemy charge forward.

At the same moment Subadi received Liu Chengzong's second order, the man he had sent to convey a suggestion to Liu Chengzong also reached the central army.

This Khan of one of the Three Mobei Tribes had arranged things well for his own troops. He requested that Liu Chengzong allow the right wing to temporarily halt its advance, waiting until He Huchen arrived so they could advance together with the Han troops in coordination.

Liu Chengzong expressed his approval of this, then immediately sent orders to the First Brigade's Surprise Battalion, directing them to shift to the right flank of the Main Battalion, linking up with the frontal Zongren and Liaoyang battalions.

Transferring Li Hongsi to the right flank was not because he wanted to protect Subadi.

Rather, Liu the Lion felt that the Mobei Army's battle line might well get pierced before long.

If it did get pierced, he needed Li Hongsi's battalion to protect his own and Gao Yingdeng's Main Battalion, lest the enemy deliver them a flanking breakthrough as well.

For Liu Chengzong, this battle was about trading time for troop strength.

In a sufficiently short span of time, strike repeatedly and at multiple points against the Daiching Army's forced shifts in formation, hammer the weak points, and break through, causing a multi-point collapse of their battle array.

If that proved impossible, he had to retreat as quickly as possible with the spoils of victory.

But the moment the left wing clashed, what emerged was that Fiyanggū had no shield carts.

The first to strike was Tang Tong.

His Reinforcement Battalion was originally positioned to the rear flank of Daiching's right wing. Together with the Zongren Battalion on the same flank, they used firearms to shear off a corner of Hooge's formation, allowing Wu Sihu's Northern Yuan Battalion to pour into the breach.

After the Plain Blue Banner collapsed, the Northern Yuan Battalion continued its penetration. With firearms rendered useless to avoid friendly fire, they too continued south, moving to the flank of the Bordered White Banner's formation.

Though it was hard to say whether the Northern Yuan Battalion's cavalry charged too fast, or the Plain Blue and Bordered White Banners collapsed too quickly — in any case, Tang Tong's two thousand infantry and cavalry had been chasing the front line the entire time, never finding an opportunity to fire their guns and cannons without risking friendly hits.

His two thousand men were, by the grand camp's organization, a mounted firearms battalion. They carried only four Lion Cannons, but were armed with two hundred jingal war-carts and eight hundred eighty heavy muskets — their projection power was immense.

Although the carts also carried bows, sabers, and spears, not using their firearms was undoubtedly like tying their own hands and feet.

Just as Tang Tong's heart was filling with despair at how fast the enemy was routing, he was astonished and delighted to see a unit advancing from the enemy's rear, moving in his direction. Overjoyed, even the entire battalion's pace quickened by a few degrees.

The Marshal Army's morale was at its peak at this moment. Even the Liaoyang Battalion, a newly surrendered unit, upon seeing Liu Chengzong lavishly reward the soldiers and bestow rewards on officers like Sun Long, was so spurred on that they drew their blades and hacked at the enemy under the cover of the wagon fort.

The Zongren Battalion at least had the cover of war-carts, and those imperial kinsmen in python robes had some chainmail or similar armor. The Liaoyang Battalion, however, was bona fide light artillery — and surrendered troops at that — yet they had all resorted to hand-to-hand combat for silver.

Let alone the main soldiers of the First Brigade.

In fact, at this moment, all the officers' exhortations to boost the soldiers' morale were very simple: they just told the troops that if they didn't beat these men into submission, those men would rob them of their silver on the road.

To other armies, such words might have been a deceitful lie.

But for the Marshal Army, every word was true.

That silver really was theirs. Before crossing the border, Liu Chengzong had distributed over twenty thousand jin in one go. Every man's horse-rump pouch was stuffed with silver bars, and some who had distinguished themselves earlier had even more.

At a time like this, the Daiching Army's advance didn't even count as blocking their path to wealth. In the eyes of the Marshal Army, the Eight Banners troops were the path to wealth themselves.

Just then, the order Liu Chengzong had sent from the rear arrived, commanding the left wing's Tang Tong to strike the enemy ahead.

Tang Tong glanced back at the rear with a puzzled look, thinking to himself: What divine foresight does the Grand Marshal possess? The enemy hasn't even advanced yet, and he's already sent a man from the rear with orders.

But that didn't matter; it perfectly aligned with Tang Tong's own intentions.

The jingal war-carts were immediately dragged galloping across the Gobi by warhorses. They drew up broadside three hundred paces from the advancing Bordered Blue Banner's marching line. One by one, the jingals swiveled their muzzles. Then the dismounted gunners behind secured their mounts, set up tall shields under the cover of the carts, and rested their heavy muskets on the long shields linked between the carts.

Tang Tong spurred his horse past the very front of the line, drew his bow and nocked an arrow, loosing three great eagle-feathered arrows at different elevations to mark the approximate distances for the forward line, then withdrew into the cart formation.

Officers in red armor, their goose-quill sabers drawn, rode out past the flank of their respective lines.

The brims of their helmets cast shadows, shielding their eyes from the direct glare of the setting sun. They raised their clear, cold sabers high toward the distant advancing enemy formation, holding the pose until the enemy's vanguard roughly passed the farthest of the feathered arrows.

Swish!

Goose-quill sabers slashed down through the air in unison.

Bang! Bang!

Guns and cannons roared in unison, and waves of gunpowder smoke billowed up before the formation.

And within the gunpowder smoke, flames burst forth as thousands of bullets fell like hail, sweeping across the enemy formation like a gale.

?? Good afternoon!

? (End of chapter)