Chapter 12 third chapter

Soldier's story: war lover During the Battle of Agincourt, Feldman Kassad encountered the woman he would spend the rest of his life searching for. It was a cold, damp morning in late October, 1415 AD.Cassad is embedded in that era, playing an archer for Henry V.As early as August 14th, the British set foot on French territory, and on October 8th they encountered a large number of French troops, and then retreated steadily.Now Henry V convinced his council of war that the British could defeat the French after a hasty march and return to the safety of Calais.Yes, they have failed once.But now, in the rainy dawn of October 25th, this army of over 7,000 people, mostly archers, was once again facing the 20,000 Frenchmen crossing the muddy land a kilometer away. Eight thousand heavily armed French troops!

Kassad was cold and tired now, and nausea and fear haunted him too.For a week, the archers lived on half-rotten plums until now, so that almost everyone in the team is suffering from diarrhea.Lying on the wet ground last night, the surrounding environment below fifty degrees Fahrenheit kept him awake for a long time.It was an unimaginable sense of realism, and Kassad was a little shocked that the historical strategic network of the Olympus Command School was far beyond the ordinary holographic simulation system, just as the formed hologram was far beyond the tinplate.Kassad knew he didn't want to get hurt because the physical feel of the network was so real.Besides, there were rumors before that some students were fatally injured in Lizhan.com and really died in the consciousness simulation cabin.

Like the other archers on King Henry's right flank, he watched the Frenchman like this for most of the morning, and finally the pennant was finally waved.The simulated 15th century soldiers howled, and the archers followed Henry's orders and slowly approached the enemy.The British's uneven front line extended more than 700 meters to both ends, in the middle of two forests. The entire front line was full of clusters of Kassad-like archers, and small groups of armed infantry were scattered among them.The British army did not have regular cavalry, and the knights that could be seen were all three or four hundred meters away from Zhan Chengxin, guarding King Henry's command team, or surrounding the right wing where Kassad was. Not far from the hand, guarding the Duke of York.These two teams reminded Kassad of the Army's Mobile Staff Headquarters, but the numerous "communication antennas" (those bright flags and pennants hang limply on the tip of guns) easily exposed their positions.An obvious long-range target, he thought to himself, before realizing that his brilliant tactics were clearly ahead of their time.

He noticed that the French had plenty of horses, and he estimated that the enemy had six or seven hundred cavalry hidden behind each line, and a long line of cavalry behind the main line.Kassad didn't like horses at all.He's seen them before in holograms and pictures, of course he's never actually seen a horse until now, the build, the smell and the sound bother him, especially with the breastplate and headgear covered in these bloody quadrupeds , with horseshoes nailed on their hooves, and on their backs are armored warriors holding four-meter spears. The British stopped their advance, and Kassad felt that his lines were about two hundred and fifty meters away from the French.From the experience of the past week, he knew that this was already within the range of the longbow, and of course he also knew that every time he drew the longbow, it seemed that he was about to tear his arm off his shoulder.

The French started yelling, which Kassad took as a provocation.He ignored the cursing, but took a few steps forward with his indifferent companions around him, away from the place where the long arrow had been inserted just now, and then began to find a piece of soft ground to drive down the wooden stakes in their hands.The stake was almost a meter and a half long, and both ends had been sharpened.Kassad had been carrying the long, heavy, clumsy stake for over a week.When they had received this order when they were marching through some woods somewhere on the Somme, all the archers set out to find the sapling and sharpen it, though for a moment he doubted the point of doing so, but now he understood.

Each of the three archers carried a heavy mallet, and they began to drive the stake into the soil at a specific angle in turn.Then Kassad took out the knife and re-sharpened it and charged at the enemy's end, about as high as his chest.Having done all this, he hid behind the long wall of spikes and waited for the French charge. The French did not charge. The archers are waiting.Kassad's bowstring has been tightened, forty-eight long arrows are inserted in two bundles by his feet, and his feet are in the proper position. The French did not charge. Although the rain had stopped, the cold wind was blowing in, and the weak body heat generated by the short march and the task of nailing the stakes just now quickly disappeared.The only sounds on the battlefield were the trembling sounds of men and horses trampling the ground, or occasional murmurs and nervous laughter, and the clatter of horseshoes when the French knights changed formation, but they still did not charge.

"Damn it," a grey-haired guard a few steps away from Kassad cursed, "These bastards wasted our morning for nothing, they better stop occupying the latrine." Kassad nodded, not sure if he heard Middle English or simple Standard.He didn't know if the guard was another student, or a mentor, or just an illusion simulated by the system, and he didn't even know whether the expression of this common saying was correct, he didn't care at all.He only knew that his heart was pounding and his palms were full of sweat.So he wiped his hands on the tank top. Suddenly, as if King Henry heard the muttering of the guards, the flag was hoisted high, the soldiers began to scream, and row after row of archers raised their longbows, drew full and then followed orders. Cast on command.

The length of the four waves of bows and arrows connecting the front and back exceeds six kilometers. The long arrows shining with cold light are like a cloud of black clouds, rising in front of the British army and then falling towards the French. Then came the neighing of horses, and the tinkling of a thousand frenzied children against ten thousand pewter chamber pots.The French heavy infantry leaned their bodies, bearing the onslaught of arrows with their steel helmets, breastplates, and shoulder armor.In military terms, Kassad knew that such long-range strikes would have little effect.But there are always small consolations, like a ten-inch arrow piercing some hapless soldier's eye, or a horse that stumbles, leaps, and crashes while the cavalry scrambles to clean their backs and Flank wooden arrow shaft.

But the French still did not charge. The firing order continued, and Kassad raised the longbow, drew it fully, cast it, and repeated, and repeated.Every ten seconds, there is a shower of arrows covering the sky and blocking out the sun.He felt his arms and back ache with the tiring rhythm, but he was neither happy nor angry, it was just work.Sore forearm.Arrows fly out, and the cycle repeats.When the first fifteenth arrow was shot, the comrades around him began to shout, and he held the bow and glanced forward. The French began to charge. The cavalry charge was something Kassad had never experienced before.Seeing 1,200 fully armed knights rushing straight towards him, the fear in his heart began to churn.Although the entire charge lasted only forty seconds, Kassad felt that it was enough to make his mouth dry, enough to make his breathing difficult, and even enough to make the thing shrink back into his body in fright.If the rest of his body could find a passable refuge, he would crawl into it without hesitation.

However, the situation at the time was that he was too busy to escape. The firing order continued, and the archers in his line fired five flat shots at the charging cavalry, plus a free shot, after which they took five steps back. Naturally, the horses will not be so stupid as to rush towards the wooden spur wall. No matter how hard their master controls the reins and lashes hard, begging them to charge forward, these animals just stand still by the wall.However, the second and third batches of knights rushing up couldn't stop as abruptly as the first batch.So in that chaotic moment, the horse who was knocked to the ground screamed incessantly, the knight who was thrown into the air screamed in terror, and Kassad galloped bravely and howled loudly.He rushed to every fallen knight in front of him, sometimes bent down and swung his deadly hammer, and sometimes he couldn't swing it due to the crowd, so he cut to the gap of the armor with his long knife.After a while, the guard who was cursing just now and a young man who lost his helmet formed an efficient killing team with him. They surrounded the fallen knights from three directions. Kassad first knocked these pleading guys unconscious with a hammer. ground, and then the three swords end up with these poor creatures from different angles.

One of the knights stood up, facing them with his sword drawn.The guy lifts his visor and clamors for a one-on-one duel of honor.Then old soldiers and young men surrounded him like hungry wolves, Kassad stepped back ten paces, and shot an arrow through his left eye. And so this sleight-of-hand opera, full of death, continued, in line with all the hand-to-hand combat since the duel of stones and femurs in the old land.Just as the first wave of 10,000 French armed infantry rushed to the British position, their cavalry had already begun to turn around and break up.The hand-to-hand combat broke the rhythm of the battle just now, and the French regained the initiative. At this moment, Henry's infantry held long spears and tried to stalemate the French, keeping them at a distance of one gun, while Kassad and other archers were at close range. A volley of arrows rained down on the outnumbered French army. That wasn't the end of the battle, nor was it a decisive moment at all.In fact, the turning point of the entire battle, just as it came, disappeared in the din of hand-to-hand combat.Like all battles at that time, tens of thousands of infantrymen fought one-on-one with weapons in the dark.The main theme of the three-hour battle was repeated, albeit with occasional minor variations: inefficient assassinations, clumsy counterattacks, and one inglorious moment when King Henry ordered the captives to be executed instead of leaving them in the rear.But heralds and historians later agreed that the outcome was sealed in the chaos of the first French infantry charge.Thousands of Frenchmen were killed, and the English rule over that part of the Continent continued for a few more days.Heavy cavalry, noble knights, and the embodiment of chivalry, their era is over, and they are forever nailed into the coffin of history by thousands of ragged civilian archers holding longbows.For these decapitated French nobles, the greatest insult is that if the dead can really be insulted, these British archers are not only ordinary people, so ordinary that they can only be compared with a large number of fleas, but also Known as Conscripts, Fried Dough, Government Soldiers, Gollum, Epp, Speights, Microtricks, and Jerboa. That's what Kassad was supposed to learn in Battle.net, and he didn't learn anything.Because, he encountered that encounter that changed the rest of his life.