Chapter 26 In the fourth quarter, large-scale weapons are fully displayed in the Lantian Camp

Tian Dan never imagined that before he had time to change his property and gather money, a big battle would start on the day of Lidong! This sudden and unpredictable battle was the surprise attack on Wei carefully planned by Bai Qi and Wei Xie. After the four people in Xianyang Palace agreed on the big plan, Bai Qi buried his head for three days and drafted a "Book of Seizing Wei and He Nei War", which listed in detail the major joints of this war.He did not submit this plan directly to Queen Mother Xuan and King Qin Zhao, but first came to discuss with Prime Minister Wei Xun.Wei Xun was negotiating with several officials of the prime minister's mansion about the distribution of food and grass, and when he saw Bai Qi coming up, he immediately broke up the meeting and asked Bai Qi to come to the study for a secret talk.Bai Qi directly took out a scroll of parchment from his big sleeve: "Prime Minister, please have a look."

Wei Xun unfolded the parchment, and the big characters clearly came into view: Wei Xun slapped the desk with a "snap!", and suddenly stood up: "It's nothing! It's a big deal!" He took the crackling parchment and strode around the hall several times before turning around. "I think it's feasible! You and I have to worry about the details, and then I can present it to the Queen Mother of Qin." "Bai Qi wants to ask the prime minister to sign the letter, what does the prime minister think?" "Half the credit for me?" Wei Xun was a little displeased, "Bai Qi, even though the old man is tyrannical, there are still rules for standing."

"I just thought about how to make Queen Mother Qin Wang more confident." Bai Qi smiled, "If the prime minister hesitates about this battle, the joint signature will naturally be given up." Wei Xuan laughed loudly: "Stupid! How can you forget this layer?" Then he strode to the desk, picked up a big pen and looked at it, and laughed again, "I mean, your name How about this big blank space in front? Good! Put it in the front. If the King of Qin disagrees, there is an old man to talk to!" "The prime minister has a responsibility, and Bai Qi has confidence."

"You are an expert at war, and all I can do is hold your back!" Wei Xie waved his hand, "Stop talking nonsense, come on, let's do a careful calculation, county magistrates, civil servants, craftsmen, volunteer soldiers, iron materials, How much wood do you need? The King of Qin is young, but the Empress Dowager is as careful as a hair." Bai Qi agreed, and then readily stated his various estimates. The two discussed for more than an hour. Seeing that the sky was getting dark, Bai Qi hurried away After that, Wei Xun immediately ordered the clerk to transcribe and engrave the numbers of the items listed just now on the slips. He took the opportunity to eat dinner hastily, and took two copies of the slips, jumped into the cart and went straight to the palace.

After the third watch, Bai Qi was checking the siege equipment stored in the treasury with the officials of the Guowei Mansion in the study, but Wei Xun rushed there, and before he could take his seat, he waved his hand: "Okay! Let's do it! Except fighting , I will handle everything for you. You are not familiar with the stall of the Guowei Mansion." Bai Qi cheered up and cupped his hands and said, "Okay! I will go to Lantian Daying, and the Guowei Mansion will be handed over to the prime minister. !” After saying that, he immediately stepped out of the hall.Wei Xun hurriedly got up and rushed to the corridor, and said with a smile, "Are you in a hurry? You have to tell the old man: Miss Jingmei is here, let her find you, or stay in Xianyang temporarily? This is the empress dowager's special order, but it is not the old man. Gossip." Bai Qi said without thinking, "When a general joins the army, he will not meet his family. This is military law. If she comes, stay here for a few days and wait for me." Wei Xie said quickly, "Understood. Don't worry. Go, someone will take care of her." Bai Qi cupped his hands and said, "Farewell." Then he strode out of the courtyard in a hurry, and within a moment, he heard the fire at the front door, thunderbolt, neighing and horseshoes neighing like rain, and they gradually went away.

Standing on the porch, Wei Xun couldn't help bowing deeply to the vast starry sky: "Heavenly good generals are like this, the blessings of the common people of the Great Qin Dynasty, and the blessings of the community!" Turning around and striding into the study, "Crack!" A large piece of parchment was slapped on the desk, "Tell me everything: Within ten days, the listed items must be mobilized to the listed place, but if there is a delay, the national law will punish you!" "Hi!" The officials shouted like soldiers in a military camp. But in vain, he went eastward quickly, and when he arrived at Lantian Daying, the sky was as white as a fish belly.Entering the camp of the Chinese army, Bai Qi immediately gorged himself on the ready-made military food—two cold yellow rice balls and two large chunks of sauced beef, and drank a leather bag of cold boiled water. Then he immediately ordered: "Gather the generals and raise the account!"

In a short while, outside the tent, one could hear horseshoes like a gust of wind and rain, armor clattering and footsteps pounding, and twenty-six generals stood in the tent like iron pillars.Bai Qi stood in front of the commander-in-chief table as usual, leaning on the fifteen-jin iron eagle sword, and said solemnly: "By the order of King Qin: After one month, our army will fight a big battle! Today I will issue four Dao General Order: First, the entrances and exits around the Lantian Camp are immediately sealed off, and pedestrians and business travelers are allowed to detour for 30 miles, and are not allowed to approach the barracks! The scout battalion is in charge of this order."

"Hi!" Chilihu, the leader of the scout battalion, took the order loudly. "Secondly, all the siege weapons such as the siege carts, ladders, and crossbows in Lantian Daying must be inspected and repaired within 20 days. There are at least five craftsmen following at any time! General Lan Tian is responsible for this order." "Hi!" General Mi Rong of Lantian, who was already the title of Lord Huayang, took the order solemnly. "Thirdly, all the infantry will go out this time! Within one month, you must be proficient in all kinds of siege weapons. For each large-scale weapon, at least three groups of skilled soldiers will be dispatched to ensure that they can take turns to attack! This order is issued by the infantry general. take charge."

"Hi!" Hearing that all the infantry troops were going out for the battle, Shanjia, the general of the infantry army with white beard and hair and lean and dark, was extremely excited, and his voice was extremely urgent. "Fourth, in this war, if the number of troops to be dispatched is less than 100,000, each army must select the elite to fight within 20 days. At that time, the whole army will be selected, and whoever is the most prepared will go to battle!" "Hi——!" All the generals roared in unison, and the big tent was buzzing and trembling.The people of Qin respected military merit in the first place, and after Shang Yang reformed and rewarded farming and warfare, they took military merit as their foundation. As soon as they heard that they were going to choose to join the war, the generals rushed to their blood, for fear that they would be left in the barracks and would not be able to participate in the war.

After gathering the generals, the Lantian camp immediately became busy, and the military lights were brightly lit at night.The cavalry battalions were busy inspecting the horses first, and more than a dozen veterinary doctors were sweating profusely. The knights were also extremely nervous, following around the veterinary doctor, for fear that their horses would be pressed by the veterinary doctor with a big red "" Then there is the inspection of horse gear and weapons. All horse scales and iron armor, horse head armor, saddle bridle, girth stirrup, bow and arrow and long sword must be inspected by military engineers one by one. If they were injured secretly, they would be immediately replaced or sent to the artisan camp for repairs; the last step was to select knights, those who had not recovered from their injuries would be eliminated and stayed in the camp to heal their wounds, and non-command knights under the age of 20 and over 40 were also kept in the camp together. , the rest of the strong knights were judged and selected one by one, but none of the knights were willing to stay in the camp. They were so impassioned that the cavalry leader Ying Bao frowned.The infantry battalions were another busy scene: all kinds of large-scale siege weapons were pulled out from the armory, the engineers explained, the soldiers and equipment were reorganized, and the drills were repeated.At the same time, all kinds of chariots and horses supervised by Wei Xun also rushed to the city, and various siege equipment such as rams, columbine chariots, and crossbows arrived in an endless stream, and 300 master craftsmen from Xianyang Shangfang also rushed with the carts It turned out that the entire Lantian camp was steaming hot, and there was no bleak winter weather.

This time, Bai Qi personally sat in the infantry, checking whether the infantry is really proficient in all kinds of large equipment one by one? In the Warring States period, the siege equipment was already very complete, and all large-scale equipment regarded as "invincible weapons" by later generations had generally been used in actual combat.However, since field warfare on foot and cavalry has just matured and its momentum is in the ascendant, wars among nations are often carried out in the form of decisive field battles. Even if a city is attacked, it is often one city and two cities, and it is mainly the enemy's capital or army. There has never been a large-scale siege war targeting dozens of cities in a region.It is precisely because of this situation that ordinary armies do not carry large siege equipment in field battles.Especially for the Qin army, most of the long-term battles were field battles with the combined armies of the six countries.Back then, Sima Cuo rushed to Fangling and Bashu, and what he fought was not a siege, but a field raid, first destroying the main force of the enemy, and then forcing him to flee or surrender.This kind of combat experience made the Qin army necessarily unfamiliar with large-scale siege equipment. After the Hewai War, Bai Qi's ambitions grew rapidly, and he was keenly aware that the time for Qin to make a big move to the east was at hand.At the first moment after he was promoted to the rank of Guowei, that is, the night he returned to Mei County, he issued the first order to the Guowei Mansion: within three days, find out all the siege of the treasury. instrument! When he returned to Xianyang in a hurry, Shi, the governor of Guowei's mansion, immediately sent him a roll of checklists, which clearly listed: It was precisely because he had a bottom line in his heart that Bai Qi carefully planned this siege battle to capture Hanoi in one fell swoop. For the battlefield, Baiqi's fineness is amazing.He never takes the enemy lightly because of various shortcomings, and would rather take the enemy's strength as an established fact and make careful preparations.Right now, the first thing he has to solve is for the infantry soldiers to fully master these long-lost large-scale equipment.The difficulty in the use of such large equipment lies not in skill, but in coordination.Because among these equipment, apart from the arm tension crossbow and kick tension crossbow, which are operated by a single soldier, each of the other equipment is coordinated by tens of hundreds of people, but if it is messy, it will lose its power.For a charging cart, there are at least a hundred soldiers on the cart and the soldiers pushing the cart; for a rocking chariot, more than 80 people are required to pull the rope violently at the same time in an instant, and with the addition of stone transportation and protection, it is almost impossible. It was two centuries.And so on, if there is no strict practice, it must be exhausting, and maybe it will also entrap the strength of the army. What Bai Qi knows is that since the new Qin army was trained, whether it is Shang Jun, Che Ying, or Sima Cuo, every general in charge of the army has paid attention to training the tactics of formation and coordination.The fundamental reason is that the Qin army's strength is always at a disadvantage, and it must rely on quick and agile overall cooperation to defeat the six-nation army that has hundreds of thousands more troops each time.As a result, the Qin army had a tradition of forming an entire formation to fight in coordination. Whether it was cavalry or infantry, as long as it was not a single soldier, there was a long-formed set of large formations and small formations for fighting in various situations.It is precisely because of this tradition that it is now possible for the infantry to practice a set of effective city-breaking tactics centered on large equipment within a month. Even so, Bai Qi still visited the infantry in person, watched and made it himself, carefully evaluated the power of each sharp weapon, and discussed with the soldiers how to do it better.Bai Qi was born in the army, and he is proficient in almost every skill, tactic, and method of infantry and cavalry. He is also talented and calm. Improved tactics.It is also for this reason that although Bai Qi is young, he is deeply respected and trusted by soldiers in the army.He personally sat in the town, and the soldiers were not only not restrained, but their morale was even higher. The large school field is full of all kinds of large sharp weapons, all made of fine iron, it is really magnificent. The first is this rush car.Chongche is an ancient siege tool.When he was a vassal of the Yin and Shang dynasties in the Western Zhou Dynasty, King Wen of Zhou attacked the Chongshi state and conquered the fortified stone city with a chariot.By the time of the Warring States period, the Chongche had become a heavy weapon made of refined iron.In fact, Chong chariot is a kind of deformed chariot, such as 轒辒, wooden donkey, and wooden ox cart, which are all types of Chong chariot. Most of them are made of iron canopy, iron cast shaft, iron wheels underneath, and armor inside. The soldiers pushed and violently hit the city wall! The second is the columbine car.The columbine chariot is a lookout cart used in sieges. The roof of the cart is high and the watchtower looks like a bird's nest. People at that time called it the "nest cart".The purpose of the shape of the nest cart recorded in the later "Tong Dian Siege War Equipment" is: "Use an eight-wheeled cart to mount a high tree pole, install a pulley on the pole, and use a rope to pull the head of the wooden house on the pole to see the city. The plank house is four feet square. , nine feet high, with twelve holes, cloth on all sides, the car can advance and retreat, and go around the city." In fact, it is a siege command car.This columbine car has been widely used in the Spring and Autumn Period.In the Battle of Yanling between the Jin and Chu Dynasties, the King of the Communist Party of Chu and Dazai Bo Zhouli boarded a chariot to look at the enemy's city together, which is a good story left behind.The largest nest car can be more than ten feet high, much higher than ordinary city walls, so it is called "cloud car". In addition to nest cars, there are even more hopeful building cars.The watchtower car is slightly shorter, about five or six feet high, but its shape is simple. It only needs to set up a tall pole on four huge iron wheels, and install a fixed watchtower on the top of the pole.For an ordinary small castle, this kind of watchtower car is enough to look down from the heights and issue orders to the siege army. The third is 礟.This "cup" is actually a hair stone machine.Its shape is similar to that of oranges hanging water from the well. The three-foot-high pillars are either buried in the ground or mounted on a frame. Then there are two shoots, and as many as twelve shoots. The more shoots there are, the heavier and farther away the stone will be. "Fan Li's Art of War" says: "The flying stone weighs twelve catties, and it is sent out by the machine, and it can walk two hundred steps."In actual combat, tens of people with single poles and more than a hundred people with double poles pulled the rope suddenly, and ejected the boulder installed on the pole tip, smashing it against the city wall or the defenders.If there are hundreds of densely packed blocks lined up at the foot of the city, and all of them are launching boulders weighing more than 10 or 20 jins, it will be truly formidable!Now there are 300 towers in Baiqi, which is enough to deter any city. The fourth is Feiyi Liannu.Yi Zhe shoots with a rope tied to an arrow.At ordinary times, an arrow cannot be retracted when it is shot. This so-called bow has no turning back.Hidden arrows and short arrows are fine, but it would be a pity if they were long arrows made with precision workmanship, but the good wood arrow shafts and fine iron arrow clusters are rare.Later, clever barracks craftsmen made a long arrow with a rope. If it misses after being shot, the arrow can be taken back for reuse.This kind of flying arrow with rope is called "Yi".In the Yin and Shang Dynasties, Yi was only a weapon for hunting and shooting birds. In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, skilled craftsmen gradually made "Yi" into a machine-firing big arrow. The launch frame was fixed on the ground, and dozens of people pushed the winch to launch With a full bowstring, you can shoot a ten-foot-long giant arrow, and the enemy's towers, iron armor, towers, shields, barriers, etc., can be pierced by an arrow!What's even more amazing is that there is a rope at the tail of this kind of large arrow, which is labor-intensive and costly. If it misses, it will be pulled back by a windlass winch for reuse.Mozi, who was good at military affairs, called the machine-fired big arrow "Yi She", and the army called it a crossbow. The crossbow is a revolution in bow and arrow.Bows and arrows purely rely on human physical strength to draw the bow and shoot arrows. It is necessary to aim at the same time as the bow is drawn strongly. "Shooting" records: Nine catties and four liang are one "force", and ten "forces" are one stone. The strongest sharpshooter can open a hard bow of ten stones and shoot nearly two hundred steps.However, with human physical strength, it is impossible to draw the bow for a long time without firing it, and the aiming time is very short, and it is usually difficult for a long arrow to shoot fifty or sixty steps away.In actual combat, this kind of brawny bow and arrow can only shoot dead horses at close range, but cannot cause damage to city walls, iron armor and shields. Crossbows are different. "Wu Yue Chun Qiu" says: "Crossbows are born from bows." The principle of launching is the same.However, the crossbow is a large bow equipped with a time-delay mechanism, which relies on the greater strength of the feet, waist, and knees to draw the bow. The machine-delivered crossbow gathers the strength of dozens or hundreds of people to draw the bow with a winch; after the bow is wound, there is a fixed mechanism. First put the arrow on the string, then aim calmly, and shoot at the same time.In this way, the giant arrows that grow sharp and break the fortifications are born in due course, and the strength in attacking fortifications is great.There are many records in the classics of the art of war, and the powerful arrows are astonishingly powerful!The crossbow is strong but fired, "The arrows are like the spokes of a car, the clusters are like a giant axe, and you shoot five hundred paces!" The shaft of a ten-foot-long giant arrow is like a thick wheel spoke, at least thicker than an ordinary person's arm, and the arrow clusters are like Huge tomahawk!Such a weapon, bigger and sharper than a warrior's spear, comes roaring with immense force, what can't be destroyed? Large machine-fired repeated crossbows are relatively cumbersome, so there are strong crossbows operated by individual soldiers.When light soldiers rush or ambush, they use single soldiers and strong crossbows.In the battle of Maling in the Qi and Wei Dynasties, Sun Bin ambushed his troops and fired ten thousand crossbows to kill Pang Juan.There are two types of single-soldier crossbows: one is to open the bow with the arm, which is called the arm-stretched crossbow;Arm-stretched crossbows have limited weight when opened, and are not as powerful as kicked-off crossbows. Therefore, single-strength crossbows have gradually become mainly kicked-stretched crossbows. In the middle of the Warring States Period, South Korea was the most famous for making bows and crossbows. The crossbows made by the four archers of Xizi, Shili, Julai, and Shaofu all had a range of more than 600 paces.As a result, Su Qin said: "All the strong bows and crossbows in the world come from Korea." However, with the decline of Korea, Korean craftsmen, attracted by Qin's decree rewarding immigrants, gradually flowed into Qin with Shandong business travelers.The skills of making strong bows and crossbows in Xianyang's official workshops have surpassed each other with each passing day.At present, the more than ten thousand crossbows and crossbows lined up in the Lantian camp are all made by Xianyang workshops. The last is the eight thousand barrels of fierce fire oil.The fierce fire oil is what later generations call oil.This kind of thing that can burn violently has many names in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, such as stone paint, stone liquid, stone water, naphtha, fierce fire oil, etc. Some people simply call it "combustible water".During the Warring States Period, Gaonu on the Hexi Plateau in the Qin State was the place where the natural fierce oil seeped the most, so the fierce fire oil in the Qin State can be said to be unique.At that time, this kind of thing could not be used for more purposes, except that the locals used it to cook and cook, and the military camp took it to pack barrels and seal it. Come to make things of fire attack.But in a battle of siege, thousands of wooden sticks soaked in kerosene are thrown, thousands of burning rockets are fired, and they all rush to the top of the city, gates, suspension bridges, trenches and other vital points, and the sky will be ignited. There are tens of thousands of troops. Wei Xun's affairs are like thunderbolts and fierce fire.Just three days after Bai Qi arrived in Lantian, a team of bullock carts brought in the 8,000 barrels of kerosene stored in the Xianyang treasury in the starry night.For a World War I, this is the richest preparation. It was the first time that these large-scale sharp weapons were practiced intensively in the Qin army. The soldiers were extremely excited, fearing that they would not be proficient in handling skills and would be eliminated before the battle.Shanjia, the infantry leader, was even more old and hot. He patrolled back and forth violently, and within ten days his voice became hoarse and his eyes were red and swollen.Bai Qi was in a hurry, and strictly ordered all soldiers to perform in accordance with the unified order, and those who violated the order were eliminated immediately!Only then did the infantry soldiers stop the endless crazy drills. At the beginning of October, everyone in the university was proficient, and no soldier was eliminated due to equipment reasons.