Chapter 783: Pressing the Attack

The twelfth day of the eighth month in the ninth year of Chongzhen — White Dew.

The sand willows along the Yuxi River had withered; white light from the horizon spilled over the sand ridges. Against the iron-gray sky, migrating geese were startled into flight by circling vultures.

The morning mist blanketing the siege camp was driven off by the sun's rays — a new round of assault on the city was about to begin.

War drums thundered. Siege engines creaked heavily as they crawled across the Gobi. On the eastern wall, the defenders swung the Great General cannons on the barbican around. Amidst roaring gunfire, hundreds of shot hurtled as before toward the collapsed walls of Haichao Temple.

On the gate tower of Zhenwu Gate, the hip-and-gable roof had already been smashed in by cannonballs.

Wang Shiqin, defender-general of the eastern wall, stood among the ruins. He peered through a shell-hole toward Haichao Temple at the southeast corner, but all he could see was the brown moat — drained, buried under timber, stone, sand, and earth, and stained dark by corpses and blood.

The Marshal's siege army had seized Haichao Temple inside the moat nearly half a month ago.

In that half-month, the assaults above ground and on the walls had gradually weakened, while the tunnel war beneath the earth — where every inch was bitterly contested — had grown ever more savage.

The senior officers of both armies were far too rich in combat experience and military knowledge. Each side had over thirty high-ranking commanders capable of serving as Assistant Regional Commander, Vice Regional Commander, or even full Regional Commander.

Beneath the southeastern wall of Yulin City, seven tunnels connected the inside of the city to the outside, riddling the ground beneath the wall like an ant nest. Not only were the besiegers digging — the defenders had also buried over a dozen listening jars at various points inside the wall and assigned troops to monitor them day and night.

The moment they heard movement, soldiers and civilians dug straight toward it.

They even pushed gushing-bead cannons into the tunnels; the instant the enemy broke through, they'd fire two thunderous blasts right into them.

Later, the besiegers realized the tunnels were too hard to fight through, so they changed their plan: they enlarged the tunnels, propped them up with wooden pillars, and once the tunnels were big enough, they meant to use gunpowder or set fire to the pillars to collapse the wall by burning.

The defenders immediately changed their plan in turn. First they dug into the enemy tunnels and fought hand-to-hand; later they simply channeled water from the city's reservoirs into the tunnels, flooding them. They not only drowned the besiegers' hundred-man underground work squads beneath the wall, but also completely destroyed the several coffins' worth of gunpowder the enemy had stockpiled.

But in the end, all of this was merely hopeless resistance.

Outside the city, Zhou Qing and Hui Dengxiang, enraged by their losses, dug back open the moat they themselves had filled. They channeled water from the Yuyang River at the higher Sanguan Temple, not only flooding and destroying all seven tunnels, but even causing the southeastern reservoir inside the city to overflow.

Wang Shiqin knew the foundation of the city's southeast corner had been soaked to ruin. This city could not hold much longer.

The day before, Wang Shiqin's younger brother Wang Shilu had led their household troops down ropes at night, attempting a night raid on Haichao Temple to retake this pivotal point in the siege.

Wang Shiqin knew such a raid was useless — there was not even a chance of success.

But he did not stop him.

Without Haichao Temple, there was still Jingang Temple; without Jingang Temple, there were still the rows upon rows of civilian buildings outside the city.

Even without those buildings, the besieging army of tens of thousands could, under covering fire from guns and cannons, pile up a fort right outside the city inside the sheep-and-horse wall.

It was useless. Nothing they did mattered.

From the moment Liu Chengzong arrived outside the city in person, the outcome of this battle had already been decided.

Forty thousand troops were committed to the assault on the eastern side of the city, while nearly twenty thousand more circled the western side. What was even more outrageous was that Liu Chengzong's elite forces never even approached the city walls; instead, they had opened a massive trade market on the other side of Red Stone Gorge to the northwest.

The Wang generals of Yulin, from their father Wang Wei — who had worn the commander's seal nine times and governed garrisons for fifty years — down through brothers and sons who had commanded posts across all Nine Frontiers, had never seen a market of such scale.

This was, without question, contempt. Liu Chengzong was fobbing them off with his second-line troops.

Every idle Regional Commander inside Yulin City felt the humiliation.

But none of them could do anything about it.

Because Liu Chengzong's second-line troops were, goddamn it, Ming soldiers!

Same equipment as theirs, same firepower — and the training and physical condition of Xu Yong's Changping troops and Wang Yuncheng's Liao troops were even slightly better than the Yulin Guard troops and old household soldiers under their command.

How were they supposed to fight that?

Wang Shilu never even made it into Haichao Temple. Following the sheep-and-horse wall, before they could even reach the outer perimeter, soldiers stepped on steel-wheel landmines. Immediately, from a trench three or four hundred paces outside the city, several pre-positioned Great General cannons fired blindly at them.

The cannons on the wall fired back right after, and the night raid turned once again into a nighttime artillery duel. The defenders had no time to provide support for Wang Shilu, and their ammunition reserves were nearly exhausted. When the cannons outside the city shifted positions, the firing died away.

The night raid didn't even make a splash. Of over two hundred men, only sixteen fled back onto the wall — Wang Shilu was not among them. A crushing defeat.

Wang Shiqin felt little grief at all.

Because early in the siege, his other younger brother, Wang Shiguo, had already been killed by rebel cannon fire at the southeast corner of Yulin City.

He had also lost two nephews in this siege.

One had the bad luck to be struck by shattered brick from a cannonball and died of his wounds; the other had died in close-quarters, blade-to-blade combat a few days ago, during a night assault on the city by Zhou Qing's rebel troops.

In the span of a single month, Wang Shiqin had lost the capacity for grief.

The only thing to be thankful for was that he had one more younger brother, Wang Pu, who was not in Shaanxi, so the entire clan would not have to be buried along with Yulin City.

The last wisp of morning mist in the sand-willow land dispersed.

With a thunderous boom, smoke and dust billowed from the southeastern wall of Yulin City, its foundation soaked for days by the river water.

As the smoke and dust gradually cleared, a breach three zhang wide gaped open in the wall.

On the wall and outside the city, both armies were momentarily stunned by this turn of events. Everywhere, heads turned and whispered; everywhere, people ran about in chaos.

In the very center of the siege camp, Liu Fangming was shaving in his tent. He had no time to don his armor — still clutching his small razor and wearing plain clothes, he dashed out of the tent, shouting orders for the soldiers to beat the drums.

The camps erupted in a clamor; drums and horns thundered. Tens of thousands of soldiers pushed cloud ladders and drove tower carts, arrayed wooden mantlets and lined up cannon carts, hoisted long ladders and formed great battle arrays, launching an assault on the eastern wall.

For a moment, on the wall and below it, war cries shook the heavens.

Even Liu Chengzong up on the Garrison North Tower was roused. He walked out of the official residence and gazed toward the smoke-shrouded southeast corner of Yulin City, smiling. "Commanders Zhou and Hui have some skill!"

He had long known this wall would collapse.

The earthworks outside the city were handled by the Hengshan miners under Zhou Qing and Hui Dengxiang — men thoroughly familiar with digging tunnels, erecting supports, and breaking through mountains with fire.

Their methods were extremely archaic, one could almost say siege tunneling that had not advanced in a thousand years: digging a cavity beneath the rammed-earth dam-style wall, propping it with wooden pillars and planks, gradually enlarging the cavity until a layer spanning several zhang in every direction was hollowed out.

The detonation method they had originally intended to use relied not mainly on gunpowder, but on fire attack.

They would set a blaze, and with the gunpowder from a few small coffins, blast apart a few key support pillars. The remaining pillars would then topple, causing that section of the wall to collapse.

But the Ming troops inside the city flooded them, cutting off Zhou Qing's fire attack. So the besiegers outside switched to a water attack, channeling river water into the wall's foundation.

The cavity beneath the wall had long since been dug; once enough river water was channeled in, the rammed-earth layer being soaked to ruin was only a matter of time.

Liu the Lion was full of praise for the earthwork skills of Commanders Zhou Qing and Hui Dengxiang.

But behind him, Zhang Xianzhong's face was full of disdain. "Good heavens, I've gone gray waiting — the wall's finally collapsed."

In Zhang Xianzhong's view, the fact that the siege had only now broken open one corner of the city was partly due to the many Regional Commanders inside the city, with their wealth of experience and ability to counter every move.

But on the other hand, it was also plainly because the surrendered-officer troops' siegecraft was too poor, and Zhou Qing's and Hui Dengxiang's equipment was too shoddy — and besides, they had no real resolve to fight to the death.

If any of the garrison brigades — First Brigade, Second Brigade, or the Marshal's Army — had launched this attack, based on their earlier experience fighting in Guanzhong, they would have stormed the walls in three to five days at most.

Li Zicheng's view, however, was even more interesting.

On the surface, Huang Wager nodded along with Zhang Xianzhong's opinion, but deep down, he was mostly puzzled by Liu Chengzong's approach.

At first, he had assumed Liu Chengzong fought this battle to purge dissenters within the army.

Yet ever since he came north to join them, this siege had dragged on for nearly half a month, and the troops east of the city showed no sign of being driven into a desperate assault.

At most, it was just that Liaoyang's Sun Long — who commanded a battalion of fake Tatars — came to headquarters every day to complain, sounding as if he was constantly pressing Liu Fangming and the others.

And Liu Chengzong simply let it be, never urging them to attack, merely watching as Liu Fangming, Zhou Qing, and the rest exhausted every method, trading offense and defense with the various commanders inside the city, unhurried and unruffled.

So much so that the generals commanding the front lines were not even fighting with their lives on the line; each held heavy troops yet merely waited for the floodwaters to collapse the city walls.

At root, people begrudged the lives of their soldiers and refused to commit deadly force.

If this went on, wouldn't they just be waiting for these men to build private power through their troops?

But Li Zicheng's greatest grievance was not that others were building private power — it was why, when it came to his turn, the moment he reached the Marshal's headquarters, Liu Chengzong stripped him of his command.

Truth was, Li Zicheng simply couldn't stand the swaggering Zhang Xianzhong, and in half a month he had never gone to learn from Director Zhang.

Otherwise, Zhang Xianzhong would surely have empathized with his confusion — this was the Great Marshal's regard!

Building private power through troops might be a major problem in the Great Ming.

But in the Marshal's headquarters under Liu Chengzong's leadership, that trouble simply did not exist.

Every last one of them already held private power through their troops.

Never mind Liu Chengzong's own veteran generals — that was pure cronyism, picking the worthy among kin.

Even among the branch officers, which peasant army man was not once a chieftain? Which surrendered general did not still command his surrendered troops? And what of all those tribal chiefs and feudal tusi — which of them was not an aristocrat ruling over his own people?

Throughout the entire Marshal's headquarters, every officer great and small was a ruling entity that had won recognition and allegiance from the bottom up in the chaos of Shaanxi.

Let them loose and worthy lords would cover the land.

If Liu the Lion feared that, he might as well quit.

The reason he did not press the attack was simply to see clearly the true capabilities of Liu Fangming, Ma Xiantu, Zhou Qing, and the rest.

At the same time, while his main army was stationed at Yulin, aside from the First Brigade that had gone with him on the expedition east of the ridges, no one else was truly idle either.

The First Brigade had earned battle honors, guarding the market pass on the other side of Red Stone Gorge, ensuring the trade caravans of the Three Khans of the Northern Desert could exchange goods with the soldiers and civilians inside the border — a matter of universal satisfaction.

Meanwhile, Ren Quan'er's Second Brigade drilled as they should, knocking the battlements off Yulin's western wall; the troops' artillery skills had improved considerably, and their ability to coordinate musketry and cannon to suppress the walls had also made great strides.

Liu Chengzong himself, during this period, summoned Chen Qihuang, the Magistrate of Jingbian, and pondered the fate of Yulin Garrison.

With the victory in the expedition against Daiching, the importance of the Southern Desert Commandery had risen further; large forces would all be advancing toward the line from beyond Shanxi's border to the Xing'an Mountains. The Yulin military garrison no longer had a basis to exist.

On the other hand, although the campaign east of the ridges had succeeded, giving the Marshal's headquarters a psychological advantage in the coming struggle with Daiching along the Xing'an Mountains, Liu Chengzong was not dizzy with victory.

The land east of the ridges was still a place beyond the reach of his whip.

This further demanded that Yansui Garrison, devoted purely to military force, must, after changing its banners, undergo a transformation into a prefectural administration, abolishing the garrison and trimming the guard posts.

Yulin Prefecture.

Liu Chengzong had in fact considered cutting away Yansui Garrison's military function with one stroke, but after mulling it over, he decided to let the future Yulin Prefecture retain a portion of its garrison function.

This was, after all, Shaanxi's northern gate; through the long ages of Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang, it had been a key military stronghold under the names Yuxi Fortress and Yulin Pass. Even now, with the guard posts abolished, it still held immense military value.

Though at present, Liu the Lion could not imagine what respectable foe could invade Shaanxi from this direction.

But then, maybe if he removed the border defenses here, one would appear?

The Southern Desert was exceptionally empty at the moment; forces in Ordos, Guihua City, Jining, and elsewhere were all shifting east toward Golden Lotus Plain, Shangdu, and the Pine Desert Prefecture area. It remained very necessary for Yulin Prefecture to maintain deterrence over the steppe for a short while.

The candidate for prefect was Chen Qihuang, younger brother of Chen Qiyu.

News from the battlefield came back in sequence via the mounted scouts' observations; arriving below Zhenbei Tower, it was compiled by the headquarters' scout cavalry section. Battalion Commander Ma Xiang ascended the tower to report: "Marshal, urgent news from the front — the southeast corner of the city has collapsed. The Left Division under Zhou Qing's camp... the Palm-Banner, Yi Zhangqing, has already led troops in the first assault, attacking and killing the enemy through the breach."

Hearing the utterly incongruous terms 'Left Division under the camp' and 'Palm-Banner' jammed together, Liu the Lion could not help but smile.

This was a sign of the incomplete incorporation of Zhou Qing's and Hui Dengxiang's forces into the Marshal's Army. The officer corresponding to a Division was a Company Commander.

But because Liu Chengzong had only granted two Regional Commander posts, and the Military Office had yet to confer military ranks on the officers under their camps, it had created a situation where official army and militia ranks were jumbled together.

"Once this battle is over, they'll have proper ranks — Zhao Jifang, Zuo Maodi, note that down."

Liu Chengzong spoke the words offhandedly, then straightened his expression and called the names of Zhao Jifang and Zuo Maodi.

Zhao Jifang, ever at his side, was naturally prepared and set brush to paper at once. The bitter-faced Zuo Maodi was a different story; already distraught at the city's fall, being suddenly called by name left him flustered for a moment before he managed to gather his paper and brush.

He was the man Liu Chengzong had specifically summoned to publicize to the Great Ming, after the battle, the tale of Yulin's discarded generals swearing loyalty unto death.

Had it not been for that, Zuo Maodi, who had not thrown in his lot with the Marshal's headquarters, would not be present here.

With that great boom and the dust cloud blotting the sky, Zuo Maodi knew: the last border-city stronghold in Shaanxi loyal to the Great Ming could not, in the end, withstand Liu Chengzong's assault.

"Bingzi year, You month, Chengzong besieged Yulin. Regional Commander Hun Tianxing, Hui Dengxiang, tunneled to assault the city; the defenders flooded the tunnel, foiling the attempt. At White Dew, Regional Commander Man Tianxing, Zhou Qing, breached several zhang of Yulin's eastern wall. Regional Commanders Liu Fangming and Xu Yong, and Mobile Corps Commander Ma Xiantu, mounted the wall to fight hand-to-hand. The eastern gate opened, and Regional Commander Zuo Liangyu led elite cavalry into the city for street fighting..."

Zuo Maodi, who had been recording with his head down, abruptly looked up at these words: "Great Marshal, Commanders Liu, Xu, and the others have not yet mounted the wall; the wall is not yet breached, and street fighting is even more... how can this be?"

Liu the Lion thought to himself, What a fuss. If we weren't going to fight it this way, why would I have called you here?

Did you really think I was single-mindedly setting up military monuments for those Ming generals in the city?

Liu Chengzong ignored Zuo Maodi's question, merely shifting his gaze to Zuo Liangyu, who stood in attendance to one side, and then to the messenger bearing back-banners: "Go, deliver the order to General Sun — press the attack."

With that, he paced to the battlements of Zhenbei Tower and gazed out at the southeast of Yulin, where the corner tower was aflame. Only after a moment did he turn back and meet Zuo Maodi's eyes: "Brother Zuo, a little patience. Soon."

?? Good morning!