Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 2061 Lian Wu ([-])

In the spring of 1689, outside Guiping County, Xunzhou Prefecture, a large group of refugees poured in from both land and water.

The number of these people was so large that the people from the east bank had to call in the army and use barbed wire to pull out a large open space by the Qianjiang River to isolate these people, and then let the doctors in the city enter one by one to check The physical condition of these people.

Patients with infectious diseases will naturally be taken out for isolation. This is not negotiable. The people on the east bank have already cleared out some old houses outside the city to house these people.In this era, the health status of people at the bottom of the country is not optimistic, and infectious diseases can be seen everywhere, so we must pay attention to it.

"Refugees include locals from Xunzhou Prefecture, and some escaped from Liuzhou and other places in the west. Recently, the battle in western Guangxi has been raging, and the Li Shun court has also torn off the mask of hypocrisy. The order completely collapsed, and a large number of refugees fled to Xunzhou, Wuzhou, and Lianzhou for refuge." Above the city of Xunzhou Prefecture, a senior staff officer was reporting to Army Major Tang Moyu.

The Guangxi battle he mentioned just now refers to a large-scale battle recently organized by the Guangxi and Yunnan Ming armies.And the origin of this war has to start with the Battle of Kunming more than a year ago.

In mid-October 1687, Li Dingguo, king of Jin in the Southern Ming Dynasty, went out to fight due to illness when the war was in critical condition, and defeated the two troops of Dashun Zuoying in succession in the north of Kunming city.Although he failed to turn the situation around, he managed to curb the arrogance of the Shun army a little bit, allowing Li Dingguo to calmly clean up the chaos in Kunming, and then gathered the defeated troops to consolidate the defenses of Kunming, Qujing and other places, in order to change in the future.

But Liu Zhonggui from Zuoying is also a treacherous and cunning person.This person had previously won consecutive battles in Yunnan and defeated tens of thousands of Ming troops. Although he lost two small games now, he was not injured.On the one hand, he dispatched partial divisions from Dali, Chuxiong and other flanks to outflank and outflank, on the other hand, he gathered a large force, and kept holding on to Li Dingguo's main force, avoiding a decisive battle while exhausting his army, and planned to fight a decisive battle after gaining a greater advantage.

He was a little hesitant because of the two battles near Kunming.Although Li Dingguo is old and suffering from serious diseases, he has rich experience in marching and fighting. When the two armies are facing each other, he can always keenly seize the fleeting opportunities and make use of them. Turn things around.Moreover, there are some old-fashioned troops around him, with good equipment and high morale. There are about 3 to [-] troops in total. Every time they go into battle at a critical moment, they can destroy one of their own troops, which is quite annoying.

Liu Zhonggui pondered, if Li Dingguo were ten years younger, had more old battalion troops in his hands, and had better equipment, it would still be a question of whether he would be able to secure victory.But now the problem is not so big, the strength of my side is more than twice that, although there are some problems in logistics and transportation (a lot of military equipment needs to be supplemented from Sichuan), but it is not insurmountable, plus some incorporated Ming troops As long as there are no serious mistakes in the army, Li Dingguo will be exhausted.

But he was also a little depressed.Once upon a time, I was also a brave general who dared to fight. When Zuoying was impoverished in Yunyang Mansion, he was the one who decided to enter Sichuan, and led tens of thousands of horses into Sichuan like a mad tiger. Wu Jun, there are hundreds of battles, big and small, who has ever been afraid of?

But when facing old and spicy people like Li Dingguo, he still felt that he couldn't keep up with the rhythm.When Li Dingguo was sick in bed, he won consecutive victories in Yunnan and approached Kunming, but then Li Dingguo went out to fight in the vicinity of Kunming due to illness, causing Liu Zhonggui to lose more than [-] troops, which made him feel the gap.Although our own side was a little careless at that time, and some thoughts were put on grabbing territory, but it is an indisputable fact that we were defeated in the case of superior forces.Therefore, Liu Zhonggui hesitated a little, and decided to delay the frontal battlefield to avoid a decisive battle, and then sent troops to outflank, seize the territory, and shake the morale of the Ming army.

It should be said that his strategy is very clever, and it is also the choice that is most in line with Liu Zhonggui's warlord instinct.Therefore, the war in Yunnan turned from a quick decision to a tug-of-war. The Dashun Zuoying, which had recruited a large number of surrendered troops, began to sweep remote prefectures and counties and expand its territory. At the same time, it maintained a low-intensity tug-of-war with the main force of the Ming army in Kunming.

During this period, Li Dingguo's health was up and down, which seriously affected the strategic deployment of the Ming army, because they should not have been trapped in a corner. However, after Liu Wenxiu's son Liu Zhen was defeated and died in Dali, the morale of the Ming army became weak again. Extremely depressed, he didn't dare to take the initiative to attack, so he could only defend passively, or wait for Li Dingguo's condition to improve before making other plans.

The war in Yunnan dragged on for several months. In May 1688, Li Dingguo assembled more than 5 people to fight against the Shun army that was pressing from Chuxiong.Although this battle repelled the Shun army, regained Chuxiong's prefecture, and opened up the connection with the western Yunnan area, Li Dingguo fell ill again and never got up again.

In August, the Shun army, which had obtained a large amount of supplies from central Sichuan, made a comeback, and the two threats went straight to Kunming.The Ming army organized several counterattacks, but the results were not satisfactory. On the contrary, they lost troops and generals, and their morale was low.At this time, chieftains in Lin'an, Xinhua, Yuanjiang and other places also killed officials and rebelled and surrendered to Shunguo, which made the people of Kunming even more panicked.

In September, Li Dingguo died of illness, the last pillar of the Ming army fell, and the hearts of the people and the army were in turmoil.The Shun army took the opportunity to attack fiercely, and some Ming troops resisted desperately, inflicting great damage on the Shun army.However, they drove the surrendered soldiers to be the vanguard, the casualties in the headquarters were not large, and the morale was always maintained at a relatively high level.Husband war, courage too!Without courage, this battle will naturally fail.

At the end of October, when part of the Ming army defected, soldiers from the Left Battalion entered Kunming.The Emperor Yongli of the Southern Ming Dynasty did not know where he was going. Li Sixing, the son of Li Dingguo, and some generals led his troops to break through and enter the Qujing Mansion, intending to join forces with the local Ming army and then plan to counterattack.However, when the capital was destroyed and the emperor disappeared, all the generals were a little disheartened.Seeing that there was nothing he could do, Li Sixing once again led his troops eastward to Guizhou, then joined some local Ming troops, and then entered Guangxi.

In November, more than 11 Ming troops who stayed at Qujing Mansion surrendered.So far, the last stronghold of the Nanming court, Yunnan, which has been operating for decades, has basically fallen after a year-long war.Dashun Sichuan Jiedu envoy Liu Zhonggui entered Kunming with his head held high. While searching for Yongli's whereabouts, he seized the time to recruit troops and rectify the place.As for sending troops to pursue the fleeing Ming army remnants, to be honest, he was not too enthusiastic, and only sent some troops to mean it, that's all.

And just when Li Sixing led more than [-] people (converged with some Guizhou Ming troops) into Guangxi, the competition between Dashun and Dong'an for the eastern Guangxi provinces was also entering a fierce stage.When the Dashun court learned that the people on the east bank basically controlled the two prefectures of Lianzhou and Wuzhou, and began to eye Mianzhou, Nanning and other places, they had to change the existing combat strategy and began to mobilize troops and horses to advance eastward and launch a new campaign against them. scramble.These actually helped the Ming army in western Guangxi objectively, so that they were not completely wiped out in the past year, and retained a little vitality. At the same time, they also relieved the pressure on the Ming army in Yunnan.

During this period, a remarkable incident occurred, that is, the army on the east bank shelled Guixian County, the capital of Mianzhou, which was occupied by the Shun army first, and then the Fifth Division of the Zhejiang New Army attacked the city, throwing the recalcitrant silver guns into the city. All the men and horses commanded by Xiaojiedu No. 1 were wiped out.The impact of this battle was so great that it almost provoked a war between Shun Kingdom and the East Coast!Wang Wanchun, the general of the Shun Army who presided over the battle, couldn't hold back the excited subordinates, and dispatched troops again and again, gathering more than [-] people, intending to wrestle with thousands of people from the Fifth Division of the Zhejiang New Army.Fortunately, the generals on both sides were more sensible and did not further intensify the conflict, so that the incident was finally dealt with in a low-key manner: the Shun army withdrew from Guixian, and the people on the east coast kept the spoils, but they did not go west to pursue them.

But in any case, the distrust between the two sides has once again intensified, and all parties have begun to mobilize troops to prevent more serious armed conflicts.As a result, the Shun army's offensive in Guangxi suddenly weakened, and progress was slow. Nanming was not conquered until the middle of 1688, and the attack on Guangxi was greatly delayed.

At the end of 1688, Li Sixing led his troops to gain a firm foothold in western Guangxi, and then launched several battles, defeating some partial divisions of the Shun army. Forty to fifty thousand people have become a force that cannot be ignored.

At this time, the people on the east bank also received some reinforcements, and the tense situation was greatly relieved.At that difficult time when they fought against the Shun army, they only stationed one platoon of soldiers in a county, gave up almost all the wilderness, and relied on a small number of temporarily formed servant troops to maintain the situation.It can be said that if the Shun army had made up its mind at that time, it would have been possible to make breakthroughs in some areas and occupy some counties.

But now the situation is different. Throughout 1688, the people on the east bank adjusted the deployment of troops in Denglai and Ningbo, and then squeezed out as much capacity as possible to carry soldiers and supplies southward, and entered Wuzhou through the Xijiang waterway to enrich the troops in various places.Of course, they also sent some of them into Lianzhou, on the one hand to guard against the somewhat incomprehensible Mr. Qiu in Gaozhou area (it is believed that this person was bewitched by Shunguo), on the other hand, they also wanted to be on the border with Nanning Prefecture. Build a line of defense to completely cut off the possibility of Shunguo gaining access to the sea - for this reason, they went through a difficult trek, raided and occupied Sizhou, the prefecture of Nanning, and then raided the surrounding chieftains to consolidate the situation.

The people from the east bank who received reinforcements also occupied more than half of Mianzhou, connecting Shangsizhou, Hengzhou, Guixian, Guiping, Wujingzhou and other places into a line, using natural obstacles such as mountains and rivers to build a shallow line of defense, and completely wiped out the The forces of the Shun Army were isolated to the west.

Of course Shun Jun is not a fool.After the Xijiang waterway was occupied and blocked by the people on the east coast, and the outlet to the sea was determined to be lost, they had no choice but to send some elite troops to the east and stationed in Pingyue Mansion in the northeast of Guangxi to strengthen the strength of the local garrison.To be honest, they are really afraid that people from the east coast will have another "Gui County incident" and provoke troubles in Pingle Mansion, so that they can even block the road to Guangdong across the mountains, what a fart it is!

The above mobilization of the Shun army caused a large number of troops that could have flooded into western Guangxi to be stranded in Pingle, Liuzhou, Nanning and other places.Especially the elite Silver Spear Effect Army, the main force was stationed in Liuzhou Mansion and did not dare to move lightly, so they could only send other troops to the west, and this is the main reason why the Guangxi Ming Army can persist until now.

But their "freedom" is actually temporary.No, the Changsha court couldn't stand it anymore. Li Laiheng issued seven orders in succession, requesting the Dashun Zuoying stationed in Yunnan to send the main force eastward to cooperate with the Guangxi Shun army to attack the Guangxi Ming army.Unable to withstand the pressure, Liu Zhonggui had no choice but to swear an oath in Kunming, leading the main force of the Zuo battalion and more than [-] Ming troops to march eastward to attack Li Sixing's troops in Guangxi.

In Guangxi, Hao Ping stopped talking. He recruited troops and distributed food in Liuzhou, Guilin, Nanning and other occupied areas. Flying dog jumps.Guangxi was already poor, and the common people lived in difficulties. Now, after such a toss, countless refugees were created immediately, and they fled eastward into the east bank control area.

But Shun Jun thinks it's all worth it.Liu Zhonggui's [-] troops had already fought against Li Sixing's troops in western Guangxi, and the results were not bad. Now they put in the troops and supplies they raised.Therefore, suffering is also a bit more bitter, and patience is over!

(End of this chapter)