The sound of horse hooves alerted the soldiers who were on guard. They were shouting. There were not many soldiers on guard here, only a dozen of them. Guo Song roared in like a violent wind and split their heads instantly. The other soldiers were so frightened that they turned around.
He ran for his life while shouting, "Someone broke into the camp! The enemy is coming!"
Guo Song didn't care about them. He rushed into the enemy camp. His halberd passed across both sides. The two big tents collapsed. His men threw fire sticks at the big tents. In an instant, more than twenty big tents were set alight.
.
At the early stage of the storm into the camp, there was no strong resistance, so it was the best time to set fire. Guo Song's men lit torches and threw them at the tents, and soon more than a hundred tents were set alight.
"Follow me!"
Guo Song shouted and rode towards a group of soldiers who had just escaped from the tent. The soldiers stopped lighting their fires and urged their horses to follow the general, wielding their spears to kill the enemy troops on both sides.
There was a commotion in the camp. The sleeping soldiers were awakened one after another. When they came out of the tent, they saw flames rising into the sky in the south. It was unclear whether it was a fire or an attack. Thousands of soldiers gathered together and talked about it.
At this moment, a cavalryman rushed out from the slanting bayonet and rushed into the crowd. Thousands of soldiers were caught off guard and were killed and their corpses were scattered all over the ground. The casualties were heavy. The soldiers were frightened and fled in all directions. Guo Song led his men to kill
After breaking through the siege, they ran towards the northwest. There were not many troops here. The soldiers took the opportunity to take out the fire sticks, lit them in the wind, and threw them towards the big tents.
Their fire sticks are specially made and have handles that can be thrown twenty or thirty steps away, just like small torches.
At this time, Li Zhongchen came out of the Chinese army's tent and found that fires were burning in the southeast and northwest directions. In the camp, the soldiers fled in all directions and became a mess.
He was taken aback, thinking that the imperial cavalry following them were attacking the camp, but it didn't feel like it. It didn't seem that the entire military camp was under attack. The south was in chaos because of the fire, and the shouts of killing were only from the northwest.
"What's going on?" Li Zhongchen asked angrily.
A general stepped forward tremblingly and said: "It seems that a cavalry team of several hundred people entered the camp, coming from the southeast and heading northwest."
"What?"
Li Zhongchen was furious that a cavalry of hundreds of people could rush into the camp so unscrupulously, "Surround them, kill them all, and don't let any of them go!"
Li Zhongchen's roaring orders were still echoing in front of the commander's tent, but Guo Song had already led his cavalry out of the enemy camp. They threw the last dozens of fire sticks into the cart and disappeared into the darkness like a gust of wind.
No one of the three hundred cavalry was injured, and no one stayed in the camp. They all followed Guo Song and fought out.
However, the Huaixi Army suffered thousands of casualties, and more than 300 large tents were burned down. Especially the fodder tents in the south were set alight. Tens of thousands of loads of fodder and thousands of stones of grain were burned. The originally sufficient military rations became tense.
This time the Tang Army's attack on the camp was a huge shock to the soldiers of the Huaixi Army, which greatly weakened the morale of the soldiers. The morale of the soldiers began to become unstable. Every soldier was thinking about how to keep the looted property.
At dawn, news came that was even more unacceptable to Li Zhongchen. More than a hundred large ships he was preparing to cross the Huaihe River were burned to pieces by an army of unknown origin, and the 1,500 soldiers who were left behind were wiped out.
Only then did Li Zhongchen realize that the problem was serious. Now he couldn't even go back to Huaixi, let alone Yangzhou.
Li Zhongchen paced back and forth in the room with his hands behind his hands, feeling upset for a while. He now faced a dilemma: whether to go east to Haizhou and find a way to go south, or to evacuate west and find a boat to cross the river back to Huaixi.
After hesitating for a long time, Li Zhongchen finally decided to evacuate westward. He ordered a few soldiers with good water skills to swim across the Huaihe River to ask for help from his son Li Chao, who was staying in Hefei, and asked him to raise ships to the north bank to meet him.
But Li Zhongchen did not expect that the news that the ship was burned and that he could not return to Huaixi had spread quickly among the army. People in the army were panicked. Most of the soldiers were carrying looted property. How could they bring the property back home?
, has become their biggest concern now.
War-weariness quickly spread among the army.
Li Zhongchen led his army to the west for a day. When they camped at night, they discovered that more than a thousand people were missing. This was definitely a bad sign, which frightened Li Zhongchen. He ordered the news to be blocked and all the generals to be strict.
Increase the discipline of the soldiers and click Mao every other hour.
Although the alert was strengthened, it was still to no avail. Early the next morning, Li Zhongchen discovered that the army was missing by more than 2,000 people.
Li Zhongchen's army had been reduced to 25,000 men, and the news could no longer be blocked. News of a large number of deserters secretly spread throughout the army.
Li Zhongchen paced back and forth in the big tent with his hands behind his hands. He stayed up all night and his hair turned white in anxiety.
He began to regret that he had sent troops to plunder Songcheng County. If he hadn't made a big mistake in a moment of enthusiasm, how could he have angered the prince, sent cavalry in hot pursuit, and blocked his way south.
Otherwise, now that he had entered Yangzhou and realized his long-cherished wish, Li Zhongchen lamented in his heart that he had made a wrong move and lost the best opportunity to capture Yangzhou.
Now these soldiers have gotten the benefits but have to run away, and have to bear all the consequences themselves. Li Zhongchen gnashed his teeth in hatred.
Another thing that made Li Zhongchen anxious was that he received an express letter from his brother-in-law Zhang Huiguang last night. The letter said that he was raising ships, but the hundreds of ships he had raised were taken away by his nephew Li Xilie overnight.
Whereabouts unknown.
This made Li Zhongchen's heart sink into an ice cave. Two years ago, his staff Jiang Wen once advised him that his nephew Li Xilie was a very ambitious wolf and should not be allowed to take over the military power. He did not take it to heart.
Two days later, Jiang Wen slipped and fell into a well due to drunkenness, and Li Xilie's matter was settled.
Only now did Li Zhongchen realize that Jiang Wen's death was probably related to Li Xilie. His clan nephew Li Xilie was really ambitious. He obviously didn't want him to go back, so he took the ship away.
If he had any shortcomings, would his son Li Chao and brother-in-law Zhang Huiguang be Li Xilie's opponents?
Li Zhongchen was going crazy with anxiety. He seemed to see his family falling under Li Xilie's butcher knife.
At this time, a soldier reported at the door of the tent: "Commander Qi, General Zhu is back and has brought back a lot of wood."
Zhu Hui was his cavalry commander and commanded two thousand cavalry. He went to pursue the deserters under his own orders. How did he bring back the wood?
Li Zhongchen walked out of the tent and saw a large number of logs piled up in the open space, with as many as a thousand logs.
He walked up and asked, "What are you doing harvesting so much wood? Where are the deserters?"
Zhu Hui stepped forward and bowed and said: "Commander Qi, we chased hundreds of deserters and captured a group of them. Some others refused to come back and were beheaded by us on the spot. As for the wood, I consider it humbly, can I do it?"
Build a raft to cross the river?"
Li Zhongchen's eyes lit up. He didn't even think that he could build a raft. The Huaihe River is not the Yangtze River. Let alone building a raft, you can swim across the Huaihe River even if you hold a log. Didn't you think of it?
He saw hundreds of deserters kneeling beside him and ordered coldly: "Behead them all and hang their heads to see who dares to be a deserter again?"
The soldiers dragged hundreds of deserters down like wolves and tigers. The deserters cried and begged, but in the end they could not escape death.
Li Zhongchen immediately ordered Zhu Hui to lead five thousand soldiers to cut down trees and then build rafts to cross the river.
Finally having hope of returning home, the soldiers immediately mobilized their enthusiasm and went to cut down trees in the woods to the north.
Guo Song led a thousand soldiers thirty miles north of Li Zhongchen's army. They captured more than fifty deserters. From the confessions of these deserters, Guo Song judged that the morale of Li Zhongchen's army was on the verge of collapse and launched an attack.
The time was ripe, and he immediately ordered a soldier to deliver a message to Ma Sui's army following behind.
Guo Song and a dozen of his men immediately stood on a hill in the distance and watched the soldiers of the Huaixi Army cutting down trees in the woods from a distance. In just two hours, they cut down more than 20,000 trees.
"Your Majesty, do you want to take advantage of their unpreparedness and annihilate this logging army?" Yao Jin, the captain next to him, whispered.
Guo Song shook his head, "Don't alert the enemy just yet!"
"I'm worried that when Marshal Ma's cavalry came, they missed the 5,000 logging troops!"
"Won't!"
Guo Song smiled slightly and said, "They are going back soon, and they probably won't come back to cut down the trees."
Everyone looked at the felling soldiers and saw that they were tying the logs with ropes and preparing to drag them back. Yao Jin asked again: "Then how should we prepare?"
Guo Song said confidently: "Let's go and lay a net in front!"