After Zhu Shuren had fully released the last round of smoke bombs through Wang Gonggong, he could only do as much intelligence deception as he could.
The follow-up part can only be left to God's will and the natural progress of other counterparties.
For example, if Chongzhen suddenly changed his temper, became timid and cowardly, and admitted that certain parts of the Ming Dynasty's territory could be given up, then Zhu Shuren would have no choice but to admit defeat and temporarily change his life to be a loyal minister of the Ming Dynasty. Xu Tu would plan later.
Wait for the weather.
For another example, if Li Zicheng suddenly gained his temper and stopped being a coward and picking on soft persimmons, and instead became as tough as Chongzhen, then Zhu Shuren's plan would also be greatly affected, and he would be helpless for the time being.
However, human nature is not so easy to change.
Chongzhen's three views were too rigid, and Li Zicheng's three views were too flexible. Both of these points seemed to have been brought out from the mother's womb and were deeply ingrained in their respective bones.
…
Everything that needs to be done in terms of deception has been done, but a busy person like Zhu Shuren will definitely not waste time waiting.
So after dealing with the princes, he quickly shifted the focus of his work to the defense of Dashanguan and Baoji County, trying to lure the enemy deep into the city and bring peace to the Hanzhong area for a year.
Zhu Shuren knew very well that so far, Li Zicheng, who was opposite him, still didn't know that Zhu Shuren had arrived in Hanzhong. He probably felt that there was only one Cao Bianjiao in Hanzhong, and Cao Bianjiao might not come to Dashan Pass in person.
This cannot be blamed on Li Zicheng's poor intelligence work, but on the fact that the road to Shu is difficult. When the side that occupies Sichuan has closed the border, it is difficult for the warlords who occupy Guanzhong to understand the current situation in Shuzhong——
To give a random example, during the Three Kingdoms period, after Liu Bei's death, Zhuge Liang chose to close the country and not trade with the Wei people. After sending Chen Cangdao a letter, the Wei people did not know about Ji Han's side for several years.
Due to the situation, I thought Zhuge Liang would remain autistic forever, which was why he was so sudden when he first left Qishan.
Now Zhu Shuren has only blocked the news for two months, which is not a long time at all in comparison, nor can it be said to be difficult.
These are just basic operations.
Such a gap in information made Li Zicheng very confident. The First World War would bring peace to Guanzhong on the southern front for several years, preventing Guanzhong from having to separate troops at all times to guard against harassment by the army from Sichuan.
Compared with the benefits of this strategic goal, Li Zicheng felt that even if there were 30,000 to 50,000 temporary casualties, it was completely acceptable as long as they were not veteran elite soldiers but newly recruited cannon fodder.
As early as July 24th, Li Zicheng sent one of his trusted generals, Yuan Zongdi, to besiege Baoji County.
[A book-chasing app recommended to me by an old book friend I’ve known for ten years! It’s so easy to use. I rely on it to pass the time while driving and before going to bed by reading and listening to books. You can download it here ]
Yuan Zongdi mobilized 40,000 to 50,000 troops, of which more than 10,000 were old battalions who returned from the battlefield in Henan last year (some old battalions are not very old, but if they can come back from Henan alive, they are considered to be upgraded to "new and old battalions"), and the remaining
The ones are the young men of Xinla after the Henan War.
Among the major generals under Li Zicheng, Liu Zongmin is still the strongest, but Liu Zongmin has other uses. Li Zicheng needs him to further develop in the direction of Shanxi and ensure that the forces of the government and army are completely driven out of the Fen River Basin.
In this way, Li Zicheng could ensure the complete security of the northeastern direction of his territory, occupy the scenic spot in Shanxi, retreat and defend, and advance further to try to break through the Eighth Line of Taihang and enter the Hebei Plain.
Therefore, the Baoji County battlefield in the southwest corner of Guanzhong can only be ranked second in Li Zicheng's priority. It would be good to send Yuan Zongdi to take charge.
In last year's Battle of Henan, among Li Zicheng's top generals, his nephew Li Guo and his general Tian Jianxiu were both on the battlefield of the decisive battle in Chen County. Therefore, historically, Li Zicheng was able to achieve the level of Commander-in-Chief of the Five Armies.
The only generals left were Liu Zongmin, Liu Fangliang and Yuan Zongdi.
Liu Fangliang's troops also participated in the Chen County War last year. Although he himself suffered no casualties, the losses among his troops were definitely not small.
In contrast, Yuan Zongdi, who was defeated by Huang Degong in Shangqiu before the decisive battle last year, was a blessing in disguise. Although Huang Degong killed and wounded more than 10,000 prisoners, he escaped the Chenxian battle.
Finally, when Li Zicheng withdrew to the west of Hulao Pass, the troops were counted and it was found that Yuan Zongdi's troops had surpassed Liu Fangliang in size and combat power, ranking second among Li Zicheng's generals.
In addition, while Liu Zongmin and Yuan Zongdi came out together, Li Zichen himself was still stranded in Xi'an until the end of July and early August. His own troops and horses, plus Liu Fangliang's troops, were also stationed in and around Xi'an respectively.
Tongguan, Heluo.
Li Zicheng was instigated by Niu Jinxing and Song Xiance to consider establishing his own country, so he wanted to stay in a big city like Xi'an for a period of time.
Historically, it was during the winter of the 16th year of Chongzhen that Li Zichen began to consider establishing his own national title, and it was not until the New Year of the 17th year of Chongzhen that he officially announced it.
It's only July and August now, so I started thinking about this matter a little bit one or two months earlier than the same period in history. This may seem a bit exaggerated, but it's actually reasonable - because Sun Chuanting's defeat and death were also two months earlier.
About a month or so, for Li Zicheng, it was a month and a half after Sun Chuanting's death that he started to think about this idea.
In his opinion, Chang'an and Luoyang were the ancient capitals of the Six Dynasties. The two capitals in history, the East and the West, are now in his hands. It's not too much to build a national title, right?
There is no need to rush to become emperor, but it is necessary to first decide on the name of the country and prove that you want to change the dynasty and not become a traitor.
When Chen Sheng and Wu Guang took action, Chen Sheng did not dare to call himself the King of Chu at first, but the name "Zhang Chu" was established first.
Li Zicheng's current thoughts are similar, so he stayed in Xi'an and was not eager to personally fight in all directions. He kept the main force of the Chinese army and could reinforce the various fronts of his subordinates at any time.
…
After Yuan Zongdi's troops initially besieged Baoji County at the end of July, they spent three to five days preparing siege equipment, digging camps and fortifications for siege, and then organized a tentative attack.
The person guarding Baoji County is a guerrilla under Cao Bianjiao, named Ma Guanglie. His name is unknown in history. He just fought with Cao Bianjiao for many years, worked hard, and gradually accumulated achievements.
He only has 3,000 veterans under his command, and 2,000 new troops added by Cao Bianjiao after returning to Taiyuan last year. A total of 5,000 people. It is still a bit difficult to resist Yuan Zongdi's 40,000 to 50,000 troops including cannon fodder, so he can only choose
If the Cage City is defended, it is absolutely impossible to leave the city for a counterattack.
After killing Sun Chuanting, the Chuang army also seized a batch of poor quality and outdated firearms, so when they attacked Baoji County, the number of Folangji was barely enough to make a big impact——
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the armaments of the Ming army were slack, so before Sun Chuanting's death, the quality of his Shaanxi army's firearms was not good, otherwise it would not have been so easy to defeat the war. Li Zicheng did not engage in production and only relied on robbing Sun Chuanting for use, which of course would have further reduced the
A level up.
The defenders of Baoji suddenly heard that the bandits were attacking the city with artillery, and they were a little worried. However, Ma Guanglie soon discovered that the firearms of the bandits were of poor quality, so he asked the defenders to counterattack with the firearms that Cao Junmen had previously reinforced.
The firearms allocated by Zhu Shuren to Cao Bianjiao's defenders were also not of high quality, but they were still much better than those of Sun Chuanting and Li Zicheng. They were just a bit old, but they were inspected and confirmed before being sent to the front line. Those that were prone to explosion were directly returned to the furnace and destroyed.
You won't cheat your own people.
Moreover, most of the old-fashioned muskets in Zhu Shuren's army have been eliminated, so it doesn't hurt to give them out at all, as the number is sufficient. Ma Guanglie has more than 2,000 guns, and dozens of Folang machines.
Every time Yuan Zongdi launched a charge, there were dense volleys of guns firing in turn, overwhelming the siege cannon fodder and unable to lift their heads.
Baoji County has always been an important military location, which is the ancient Chencang Fortress. The city is small but sturdy, and the terrain is very advantageous.
The city is sandwiched at the intersection of the Qinling Mountains and the Longshan Mountains. One side is adjacent to the Wei River, and the other side is adjacent to the Qishui River that flows into the Wei River at the eastern foot of Longshan Mountain.
With mountains on two sides and rivers on both sides, this terrain has been easy to defend but difficult to attack since ancient times. During the Three Kingdoms period, the Wei defender Hao Zhao blocked Zhuge Liang's several offensives here.
Although Ma Guanglie was just an ordinary general and was not as good at defending as Hao Zhao, Yuan Zongdi's offensive and defensive methods were far inferior to Zhuge Liang's. The officers and soldiers also had the advantage of firearms, which put Yuan Zongdi into a quagmire.
The war of attrition lasted until the beginning of August, when the prince in Hanzhong had just met Zhu Shuren and delivered the order. Yuan Zongdi finally asked Li Zicheng for instructions and changed his tactics.
He chose to besiege Baoji County with 20,000 people, and then led more of the main force southward, entered the valley entrance of Chencang Road, blocked Dashan Pass, and planned to try to attack Dashan Pass instead, while encircling Chencang instead of attacking, which was a waste of money.
His material ideas are slowly getting tired.
What Yuan Zongdi thought: If the official army left more defenders in Baoji County, but Dashan Pass did not have enough troops and firearms, it would be best if Dashan Pass could be captured directly.
If Dashan Pass is also tightly defended and difficult to capture, as long as the Chuang army blocks the valley entrance to the north of Dashan Pass and establishes a strong camp, then the army will have to forcibly break through the Chuang army's camp if they want to support Baoji County.
At that time, the offensive and defensive situation will also be reversed, from the attack of the invading army to the attack of the official army.
The road from the Qinling Mountains to Sichuan is steep. Obviously, whoever plays the role of the attacker will suffer a lot. The invading army will switch from offense to defense, and the battle pressure will be greatly reduced. If the official army fails to save them, sooner or later the defenders in Baoji County will have gunpowder and food.
On a bad day, the enemy will be surrounded and defeated without a fight.
Of course, Yuan Zongdi was considered a bit of a general, and he also knew that if the army wanted to reinforce Baoji County, there was more than just Chencang Road - a little further east, there were also plank roads such as Baoxie Road and Tangluo Road that they could take.
But the plank road is definitely several times more difficult to walk than the Chencang Road. If the officers and soldiers dare to drag the Long Snake Formation into Guanzhong through those roads, they will definitely suffer losses. Yuan Zongdi will also divide his troops to block the two valley entrances, and he is absolutely confident and sure to wait for his work.
After changing his mind, Yuan Zongdi officially began to launch a tentative attack on Dashan Pass on the sixth day of August.
It's still the same routine, first dig a ditch to build a stronghold, build a flying ladder, rush a car, and dig a wooden donkey for a city.
Dashanguan Pass is located in a valley and the terrain is relatively high, so there is no moat, so there is no need for trenches and bridges.
The defenders only had some dry ditches, which were covered with camouflage paving, and bamboo guns were inserted in them. These traps did not require trench trucks. They only needed to get some cannon fodder, the old and the weak, to carry sacks of earth and earth, or even use shoulder poles to carry soil and throw it into the pits.
Just fill in the path.
This is a trick that he is very familiar with. When Li Zicheng attacked the city of the army in the past few years, he always temporarily brought the local refugees who were about to starve to death and "promised that each person would carry three shoulder poles of soil to the gate of the city wall."
, and then give him enough food for ten days and half a month.”
Generally speaking, Li Zicheng would fulfill his promise. Anyway, there is a high chance that these cannon fodders would die under the city and be filled directly into the ditch, and they would not be able to eat the military rations distributed after the war. The existence of cannon fodder can also disperse the firepower of the official army in large quantities.
This greatly reduces the pressure on the veteran soldiers.
In the land of Shaanxi, after so many years, almost no one can be found alive who has enough to eat. A few days of food can buy enough people to take risks.
Yuan Zongdi repeated his old tricks and quickly eliminated all the traps outside Dashan Pass, all at a cost of thousands of Shaanxi people who were about to starve to death.
After clearing the pits and trenches, the invading army's siege weapons began to approach the wall, and the firearms and crossbow teams also engaged in bloody exchanges with the defenders on the wall.
There was a loud roar on the battlefield. The number of muskets only accounted for less than 30% of the long-range weapons, but the momentum was astonishing. It overwhelmed the much larger number of crossbows and shocked the morale of the troops on both sides.
On the first day of the strong attack, Yuan Zongdi observed coldly and felt that he had gained some information.
"It seems that the defense of Dashanguan is not as tight as that of Baoji County! At least I didn't see a few Folang machines, and there were no Hongyi cannons. If it was just fire cannons, the Tengpai fire cannon team might not be able to withstand it.
But another day, use the city-digging donkey to dig holes, and bury a few coffins with gunpowder, and they should be able to blow up a few slopes. This wall is also made of rammed earth, not even covered with bricks, let alone bluestone..."
After carefully observing the strength of the defenders, Yuan Zongdi secretly planned in his mind and continued to adjust his tactics in the following days.
But he didn't know that this was Cao Bianjiao's army. He had been given instructions a long time ago: the troops in Baoji County should use all their firepower as soon as they encounter a strong attack, trying to scare the enemy away as soon as possible and change their targets. As for the troops on the Dashanguan Pass,
, because you have no worries about your back, you can show weakness at the beginning to lure the enemy, and seduce the invading army to feel that there is hope, and invest more troops into this meat grinder.
This is what Zhu Shuren had taken care of before the battle broke out. After all, Baoji County may be completely surrounded by the enemy and cannot withstand the consumption of a long and fierce attack, and Dashan Pass can replenish supplies at any time.
The other party did not know that Zhu Shuren himself was here, and they did not know the strength of the material support provided by the Huguang army to Dashan Pass. Of course, they had to take this opportunity to make them misjudge.
In one day of Yuan Zong's fierce attack, more than a thousand people were killed and even more injured. Some of them were temporarily brought in by the hungry people. Once they were seriously injured, they had no intention of treating them and just threw them aside as consumables and left them to fend for themselves.
.
Starting from the next day, Yuan Zongdi gathered the gunpowder in the army, loaded a full seven or eight coffins, and dispatched a full thirty hardwood carts. The top of the slope was covered with bark and wet with mud.
Under the cover of a few Fo Lang machines, the intruders pushed towards the Dashan Pass wall.
The officers and soldiers continued to lose stones like rain, but the musket bullets hit the wooden donkeys digging the city were completely useless, and the rolling logs thrown down were all bounced off by the "inclined armor" ricochet on the top of the slope.
Only a very heavy boulder could directly hit it, and it would be possible to directly collapse the city-digging wooden donkey on the top of the hardwood slope. However, most of the stones prepared by the defenders were sheep's head stones, and there were very few boulders weighing more than a hundred kilograms.
"When you dig deep enough, you can bury gunpowder inside. Although Cao Bianjiao is a famous general, Sun Chuanting is dead. The dog court is short of weapons and ammunition. All the weapons and equipment must have been corrupted by those dog civil servants! They deserved to be defeated!"
Yuan Zongdi became more and more eager. When he thought of those corrupt officials in the Ming Dynasty, he couldn't stop feeling hatred.
Although King Chuang also killed people indiscriminately, he killed more dog officials after all. As long as he killed the dog officials, he would continue to do it to anyone.
——
PS: This week I will write about Chongzhen’s last moments... It’s not a spoiler, but some book friends have sent private messages asking about the writing progress, and I want to give everyone a promise.