national surname chiming

Chapter 208
June [-]th, early in the morning.

Shen Lian and Li Yu led 6000 men and horses. After more than a day of marching, day and night, the soldiers on the ship followed the sailors and took turns to rest and row in three shifts. Finally, they came to the lake dozens of miles northwest of Xiangyin County. .

The location on the lake naturally has no place name at all, but roughly speaking, this point should be on the lake surface route from Changde to Xiangyin——

Changde is located in the west of Dongting Lake, and Xiangyin County in Changsha Prefecture is roughly in the southeast corner of Dongting Lake.Therefore, the route from Changde to Xiangyin is about to travel eastward at a slightly southerly angle from the middle of the west bank of the lake.

Given that the officers and soldiers predicted in advance that Zhang Xianzhong's target was Changsha, it was not difficult to reverse the route to be intercepted. Connecting random lines on the map was basically the same.

"Captain, look at the starboard side! There is a fleet! And a lot of small boats!" On the mast of a light warship of [-] materials, Li Yue of a hundred households looked for a long time with a telescope, and finally found the enemy ship. The words were yelled loudly, reminding the owner Li Yu.

Li Yu, who had been resting in the cabin with her eyes closed, also got out immediately, took out her binoculars and looked in the same direction to confirm, and then immediately ordered: "Quick! Call the flag! Notify Shen Bing!"

Li Yue was already on the mast, so she immediately took out a blunderbuss filled with fireworks, fired a shot into the sky, and then took out the signal flag and waved it a few times.

Soon, Shen Lian Naval Camp, who was searching to the left ten miles away, also immediately noticed this side and began to turn around and move closer.

Not long after, a feast unfolded on the surface of Dongting Lake.

There are only forty warships in each battalion of the official army, and each ship has 80 people, while Zhang Xianzhong's troops on the opposite side have at least several hundred ships!And they didn't get together in one place like the officers and soldiers, but dragged into a long snake, stretching from east to west for at least tens of miles.

This cannot be blamed on Zhang Xianzhong's logistics troops for not maintaining their formation, but they were not in a state of engagement, but were just transporting troops back and forth, transporting the rear troops stranded in Changde to the front lines of Xiangyin and Changsha.

However, the skills of the sailors who operate the boat are always good or bad, and the oarsmen always have strength. After a trip, the speed of each boat will naturally be different. When everyone is rushing for time, the formation will be stretched dozens of miles away. It couldn't be more normal.

They didn't expect the navy of the government army to come so fast, and they didn't even pay attention to the fact that elite warships would appear on the south side of Dongting Lake.

……

"Run, the warship of the official army! Row to the south quickly! It's too late, let the ships form formation!"

At the same time, panic had just begun to spread in Zhang Xianzhong's fleet on the south side of the battlefield.

It was Zhang Xianzhong's other adopted son, Liu Wenxiu, who was in charge of transporting the soldiers of the rear army.However, Liu Wenxiu is also considered to be a high-ranking and powerful person, so it is impossible for him to appear on this part of the battlefield by such a coincidence.

Under Liu Wenxiu's command, there are also several captains who are responsible for each segment.At this moment, the person Shen Lian and Li Yu bumped into was a captain named Liu Tingju.

This Liu Tingju can also be regarded as a confidant who has followed Liu Wenxiu for many years. Historically, until the 17th year of Chongzhen, when the Nanming army recovered Chongqing, he was ordered by Liu Wenxiu to garrison Chongqing. , followed by defeat.

Of course, history has long been changed beyond recognition, so of course there is no chance for it to happen.

At this moment, Liu Tingju originally planned to disperse and flee for his life immediately, so he didn't care about moral integrity.

But seeing that there were at least [-] to [-] miles away from the lake, the officers and soldiers were chasing so fast, it must be too late to run, so they had to temporarily change their minds and turned back to resist.

However, not all of his subordinates are at his command.

Some of the ships in the convoy approached the shore and seemed to have hope of escape.

Especially once a friendly army turns around to fight to the death and delays the official army to buy time, their chances of escaping will be greater.

Therefore, on the vast Dongting Lake, some small boats were still desperately rushing towards the south bank, and some formed an formation to meet them, in a mess, and their combat power became more and more pitiful.

"Rush up! Hit and sink them directly!" Among the Ming army, Shen Lian, who was born as an old seaman, was very brave. With a rear-loading double-barreled musket, it looks very imposing.

Following his young master from a servant to a guard gradually, he already felt that it was worth it, so he dared to bet.If you win, you will continue to get promoted and make a fortune, and if you die, you will live the addiction of being an official for the rest of your life.

Anyway, he was also born as a servant. He was bought and trained to be a seaman since he was a child. He didn't know his parents, and he had no family concerns.In these years, there are only a few maids that the patriarch rewarded him, and the newly married wife after becoming a military officer. Such people have no desire to pass on the family line, so they are not afraid of death.

The warship of the Ming army slammed into it fiercely, knocking down several small boats that were originally planning to jump up and join the gang.

Teams of gangsters from Liu Tingju's department lost their heads and fell into the water. Among them, the veterans from Shaanxi and Henan were not good at water, so they sank into the lake and drowned.

After Zhang Xianzhong arrived in Huguang, the newly recruited men were better at swimming than the northerners, but their fighting spirit was obviously worse. Seeing the momentum of the Ming army, they immediately became timid.

The few who jumped onto the Ming army's big ship were quickly reimbursed by the crossbows and muskets fired by each other.Very few can stand firm, and they are outnumbered. One person has to face three or five spears and sabers, and they will soon become a hornet's nest.

There is no doubt that this is a one-sided massacre.

All the ships mobilized by Zhang Xianzhong's army can theoretically transport more than 2 people at a time, while the total strength of the army on the opposite side is actually only [-].

But these 2 people are scattered on a long battlefield, and it is impossible to gather at one point and form a force after being raided. Therefore, on a local battlefield, the government and army can always guarantee that they will not be at a disadvantage in terms of numbers.

The number of people is equal, the equipment, warships and water warfare tactics are all superior, and it is easy to crush.

On the other side of the battlefield, Li Yu, who was born in the prison of the North Korean Bird Battalion, was not as brave as Shen Lian.

These Korean soldiers were mainly from gunplayers. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Korean soldiers were notorious for their timidity and inferior martial arts, but they were relatively disciplined.

Therefore, it is absolutely impossible to expect the North Korean gunmen to dare to rush ahead, or even sink the enemy's ship with a boat.However, he still has the courage to hide aside and shoot coldly, and it is very big.

On Li Yu's side, he also used the light-weight blunderbuss Flang machine assigned by Shen Shuren to the extreme. Originally, in the naval battles of the Ming Dynasty, the Flang machine was rarely used to sink enemy ships, and he had to rely on the Hongyi cannon. .

That's because the Francophone has serious air leakage, the range is too short, and the penetrating kinetic energy is not enough.Francophones are more often used in boarding battles, using grape shells to kill and injure enemy deck personnel.

But today, on the battlefield of Dongting Lake, Li Yu learned a new tactic without a teacher, and naturally played a new tactic-in any case, most of the warships of Zhang Xianzhong's army were just awning boats, and at most they were medium-sized eagle-billed boats, so Horizontal protection is very poor.

The eagle-billed ship is a medium-sized warship commonly used in the Ming Dynasty. It is famous for its shuttle-shaped streamlined shape and the same shape of the head and tail.Therefore, when sailing, it can be used head to tail. It is very convenient and brisk to row forward and backward. It can carry dozens of people. When it is specially used for troop transport, it can stand nearly a hundred people densely.

There is no solid roof on the boat, but the dense bamboo nailed to the sides of the ship is used as a cover, and sometimes a few bamboo-width holes are left as shooting holes.

Whether it is an eagle-billed boat or the smallest awning boat and net shuttle boat, the common feature is that there is no "deck" or "multi-layer cabin", and there is only one bottom in the horizontal direction, and the soldiers are standing directly on the bottom of the boat. .

This kind of weak structure, as long as it is approached by the Frang machine, it shoots obliquely downward at a lower depression angle, and after a direct hit, a big hole will be made in the bottom of the ship, and the ship will sink directly, and it is impossible to save it.

Of course, the traditional Frang machine does not have the ability to "shoot at a depression angle", because the traditional Frang machine uses divided ammunition, and the shell is an iron ball. The ignited iron ball shell rolled out directly.

This is also an important reason why neither the East nor the West developed the tactic of "shooting at a depression angle and blasting through the bottom of the enemy's boat" at the same time.

But the situation of the Shenshu army is obviously different.

Although Shen Shuren also knows that the Frang machine is an old-fashioned cannon that is behind the times and has appeared for more than 100 years.

He doesn't need to make the Frang machine gun itself, but it doesn't prevent him from spending a little bit of brainpower to optimize the existing Frang machine and improve the efficiency of use.

Therefore, during the preparations for the previous few months, during a process of mutual inspiration among Shen Shuren, Song Yingxing, and Fang Yizhi, they thought of using the ammunition of the mother and child blunderbuss Flang machine, which is also the same as the "rear-loading spray wax shell ammunition" , made into iron balls and gunpowder packaged together to make a cylindrical tube shape.

In this way, the reloading speed of the empty sub-gun can be much faster.And another unexpected joy of doing this is that when the ammunition becomes a frictional cylinder, the projectile will no longer roll out when the depression angle is lowered like when it was spherical.

After testing, the Franc machine with cylindrical ammunition, even if the depression angle is pressed to minus thirty degrees, will not fall out, and the gun will fire soon after being inserted, and the time affected by gravity will not be too long. long.

This function is useless at ordinary times, because who will blast the muzzle downwards during field battles or sieges?

But at that time, some navy generals discovered the magical effect of it, because when fighting on the water, when using a big ship to fight a small boat, if you can shoot at close range, directly shoot at the bottom of the opponent's ship from a low angle, and smash a hole in the bottom of the opponent's ship, then the small ship without multiple decks will instantly sunk.

Now, this trick is finally used by chance.Zhang Xianzhong's ships were all temporarily recruited from the territory of Changde Mansion, and there were no professional warships with multi-decks at all.

Being approached and shot, even if the two sides of the hawk-billed boat could have been blocked by rows of nailed bamboo bunkers to block the shotgun shells and bows and arrows, as long as it encounters a Francophone diving down, it will undoubtedly die.

Moreover, in the water battles at the end of the Ming Dynasty, apart from setting fire to the small boats, there was no way to sink the big ones.The two sides would often fight and jump gangs, even if they approached within twenty steps, or even directly next to each other, they would not be too close.

At such a face-to-face distance, there is no need to consider the issue of aiming at all, which is equivalent to sticking the barrel into the opponent's mouth and blasting it.

If any future players of "Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought" or "Great War" or "World of Warships" see this scene, they will definitely shout: I can't beat your main outfit, and can't beat your level!
In a short while, thousands of people and hundreds of warships under Liu Tingju were killed by the officers and soldiers.

Only those who were determined to sell their teammates to flee for their lives from the very beginning reluctantly took advantage of the time bought by the killing of their teammates to hide in the reeds on the south bank, abandon the ship and go ashore to escape for their lives.

Liu Wenxiu's rear army, seeing that the transport fleet in front was completely wiped out, tried to turn around in a hurry, regardless of whether they could transport people to the Eight Great Kings, and went back to Changde to hide.

As for those fleets that were in a dilemma and located east of where Liu Tingju was intercepted, of course it was impossible to return to Changde. They could only bite the bullet and continue to rush to Xiangyin County.

It's a pity that Shen Lian and Li Yu's boat was faster than them, and the sailors who steered the boat were more professional.The two chose to chase eastward by coincidence, and chased all the way to the mouth of the Xiangjiang River.

Along the way, the small boats of Zhang Xianzhong's troops who were too late to land were bombarded and killed one after another, or they were named by birds in turn, and the soldiers on board were killed.Seeing that the situation was not good, the rest desperately tried to turn south and dock early. If they were still caught up, they would abandon the boat and jump into the lake.

The bloody massacre on Dongting Lake lasted for most of the day, and in the afternoon of that day, a bandit officer who managed to escape ashore took his horse and returned to Changsha to report.

In the evening, Zhang Xianzhong, who was still immersed in the joy of winning Changsha yesterday and was counting the property of Prince Ji's Mansion, received this terrible news.

(End of this chapter)