01 Yongzhou
In November of the second year of Yongli in the Southern Ming Dynasty (1648), Huguang Yongzhou Mansion.
Under the watchful gaze of the Ming army, more than a thousand hungry Qing cavalry rushed out from the Yongzhou city gate and launched the final group charge towards the weakest point of the besieging Ming army.
In this year, He Tengjiao, the governor of the Southern Ming Dynasty, and Qu Shiyun, who stayed behind in Guilin, swore in Guilin to swear to the Northern Expedition. The Ming army was able to conquer Quanzhou in May. Subsequently, He Tengjiao did not stop, and urgently ordered Cao Zhijian, Lu Ding, Jiao Lian, and Zhao Yinxuan to go to Yongzhou and continue to storm Yongzhou City.
There are no more than 10,000 Qing troops stationed in Yongzhou City, and the troops under He Tengjiao are ten times that of the enemy, and he has never fought such a rich battle in his life, so he has been attacking Yongzhou City for several days, and he will never give up if he does not take Yongzhou. The Qing court was shaken by this and urgently mobilized the surrounding Qing troops to rescue Yongzhou.
He Tengjiao had already taken precautions and sent a strong force of more than 20,000 people to ambush reinforcements in the middle of the road, so that the Qing army lost its armor and fled. At this point, Yongzhou City has completely become an isolated city.
After more than three months, the Ming army besieged the city of Yongzhou, and the two sides launched a protracted fierce battle, both of which paid a huge amount. However, the Ming army relied on the advantage of troops to exhaust the Qing army in Yongzhou, and Yongzhou City had run out of ammunition and food, and the city was only broken overnight.
The situation has reached the most critical moment, and the Qing court Guangxi governor Li Maozu, the general soldier Yu Shizhong and others in the city decided to abandon Yongzhou, lead the remnants to break through the siege, and fight a bloody way.
For the final crazy counterattack of the Qing army, He Tengjiao was obviously prepared, he ordered several Ming troops to attack according to the plan, and began to encircle and intercept.
Once the protection of the city was lost, the Qing army instantly fell into the siege of the Ming army, and the cavalry suffered countless casualties under the fire of the Ming army's guns. Soon, this Qing army was annihilated by the Ming army one by one, and the general soldier Yu Shizhong was also beheaded by the Ming general Sheng Mao in the chaos, and the governor Li Maozu was captured alive by the Ming army, and then executed by five horses in front of the battle.
The Qing army was mourned, He Tengjiao took the city gate, and after a hundred days of siege and hard fighting, the Ming army finally recovered Yongzhou.
However, when the Ming army entered Yongzhou City, what they witnessed was a human purgatory.
At this time, in Yongzhou City, the streets and alleys were empty, and the corpses of people who died on the side of the road could sometimes be seen. In the barracks of the Qing army, the bones of the people were piled up, and during the 100-day siege, the people of Yongzhou had already become the military rations of the Qing army and were slaughtered.
What's even more terrifying is that in the Yongzhou Mansion, the Ming army cleaned up the woman's human organs as many as fifteen stones (one stone in the Ming Dynasty is equivalent to one hundred and eighty catties now), because the Qing army felt that this thing was unlucky, so they abandoned it and did not eat it.
The country has changed generations, the vicissitudes of the world, and the most bitter is always the ...... of the people at the bottom
Qing Dynasty Army. 02 Xinhui
In July of the eighth year of Yongli in the Southern Ming Dynasty (1654), Xinhui, Guangdong.
Collapsed! Collapsed! ”
Seeing from afar that the Xinhui city wall was finally torn open by his own artillery fire, Li Dingguo, the commander of the Ming army, couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief, he believed that it was only a matter of time before Xinhui City was broken.
With Li Dingguo's order, thousands of death squads charged at the gap in the city wall with dense arrows. But this time, Li Dingguo miscalculated, and in addition to dodging the Qing army's arrows, the death squad also had to face a moat that they could not cross.
There are always more solutions than difficulties.
After summoning the generals to discuss, Li Dingguo quickly ordered to gather the soldiers to cut down trees. Soon, bundles of trees were transported to the city to fill the moat, and the Ming army hoped to pile the trees at level with the city walls so that they could run into the city.
When the Qing army saw this, they were all shocked.
After a while, when the Ming army was working hard to build wood, a large amount of fire oil poured down from the city, and with the roar of several rockets, the trees instantly burst into flames, and this plan was a failure.
Li Dingguo was furious, and naturally refused to give up.
Subsequently, a general proposed that the sunflower tree was fire-resistant and could be used. As a result, the sunflower trees around Xinhui were cut down by the Ming army and transported to the city.
The Ming army had Zhang Liangji, and the Qing army also had its own ladder over the wall. On this side, the Ming army desperately filled the river, while on the other side, the Qing army ordered the people in the city to dig out the city and pull away the trees that had been filled in the river one by one. As a result, the Ming army's plan to reclaim the river was once again in vain.
At this point, Li Dingguo besieged Xinhui for more than two months, which was not small, but there was no progress, and the Ming army was helpless against this fortified city. At this time, the spies in the city came to report that the food in Xinhui City had been exhausted, so Li Dingguo made up his mind and turned to besiege Xinhui instead of fighting, and decided to trap the Qing army in the city.
Li Dingguo's siege, the soldiers and civilians in the city were cut off from supplies.
At the beginning of the siege, the Qing army scavenged grain and rice throughout the city, and the people had to hunt rats and birds everywhere for food, and even used duckweed and straw sandals to satisfy their hunger.
But soon, the Qing army's stock of food was also exhausted, and the hungry soldiers began to arrest the people from house to house, and filled their stomachs by eating people.
One day, the Qing army broke into a people's house and wanted to take the couple away, but his wife Li immediately begged: "My husband has no heirs, if you kill him, the husband's family will be ruined, please let him go, eat me if you want to eat." The Qing sergeant agreed to her request and asked her husband to collect her remains.
Tragic cases like this are rife in the city, in which a wife dies on behalf of her husband, a daughter dies on behalf of her father, and a daughter-in-law dies on behalf of her in-laws. Xinhui was besieged for more than six months, half of the people in the city starved to death, and half of the remaining half entered the Qing army's Five Organs Temple, accumulating no less than 10,000 people.
Afterwards, it is no wonder that some of the surviving people couldn't help but kneel and worship when they saw the Qing army in the city, and said with tears in their eyes: "My parents and wives are buried in your womb, they have no graves, and the Cold Food Festival is coming, can you not worship when I see it?" ”
In the end, Li Dingguo failed to trap the Qing army, and as a large number of Qing court reinforcements moved south, the Ming and Qing sides launched a decisive battle under Xinhui City. After the first battle, the Ming army was defeated and lost, and Li Dingguo had to lead the remnants to retreat to Guangxi.
In a vicious siege battle, Li Dingguo hurriedly threw down more than 20,000 corpses of the Ming army, and then returned empty-handed; And the people of Xinhui were tragically killed, and the Qing army was almost left with an empty city.
Li Dingguo resisted the Qing Dynasty.
03 Lianzhen
In June of the fourth year of Xianfeng in the Qing Dynasty (1854), he was directly affiliated with Lianzhen, Dongguang County.
Under the supervision of the Qing army, tens of thousands of people were working hard along the canal, and they had only one task, that is, to divert the water of the canal into Lianzhen, and at this time it was the main force of the 6,000 Taiping Army led by Lin Fengxiang himself who was stationed in Lianzhen.
Since Xianfeng's three-year Northern Expedition, although the Taiping Army led by Lin Fengxiang and Li Kaifang has been devastating all the way and swept through the six provinces, they are alone in the depths of the army after all, and they have committed a taboo. With the loss of reinforcements and logistical support, the Taiping army gradually became a strong crossbow, and Lin Fengxiang had to retreat to Lianzhen with thousands of remnants in order to make the final battle of the trapped beasts.
It is clear that the Qing army intended to flood Lianzhen in order to defeat the Taiping army. Of course, Lin Fengxiang was unwilling to sit still, so he continued to send troops to attack and harass, although the Qing army was given a certain amount of casualties, but there were more and more Qing troops gathered in various places, and it was difficult for him to reverse the decline on the battlefield after all.
When the time came to August, the Qing army's water attack plan gradually took effect, the flood flooded Donglian Town, and even the granary of the Taiping army was also damaged, and the originally sufficient grain and grass reserves soon began to rot, and the Taiping army had to face the sudden food crisis.
Once basic survival is in question, the ugliness of human nature is often immediately exposed.
The Taiping army consisted mainly of Guangxi veterans and recruits recruited along the way, and in the face of starvation and death, the ranks naturally began to divide. Guangxi veterans have a superior status, and can still eat black beans and other food, but the rest of the soldiers do not have this treatment, they are forced to starve, all day long on grass roots, tree bark, scabbards and other things to satisfy hunger, and even have to eat the corpses of the Qing soldiers and comrades-in-arms who died in battle.
As time passed, the antagonism within the Taiping army became more and more serious, and the dissatisfaction of the recruits continued to ferment, and the Qing army took the opportunity to lure the Taiping army to surrender. Those Taiping soldiers who were already resentful defected to the Qing Dynasty, and a total of more than 2,000 people surrendered to the enemy, which greatly damaged the morale of the Taiping army.
For this reason, the veterans of Guangxi hated the pawns to the core, and the black beans had also been exhausted, so the Taiping army that finally held on to the pawns adopted an extremely cruel way to deal with them: once captured, they were killed on the spot and eaten.
The commander of the Qing army, Seng Gelinqin, once reported to Emperor Xianfeng: "Although the thief army was besieged, desperate, cut off from grain and rice, and began to feed people, they were able to remain calm and unhurried regardless of whether they were fighting or defending, and there was no rout." ”
As Seng Lingqin said, this Northern Expeditionary Army was extremely brave, but it was isolated and outnumbered, and it was still difficult to escape the fate of annihilation after all.
The image of the Taiping Army in Western pictorials.
In August of the fifth year of Xianfeng, the assembled Qing army began to bombard Donglian Town, the last stronghold of the Taiping army, with heavy artillery. Under the shelling for several days, the Taiping army suffered heavy casualties, and the Qing army launched an attack on all fronts, and finally broke through the Taiping army camp guarded by the remnants.
In this battle, the coach Lin Fengxiang was captured by the Qing army, and then escorted to Beijing to be executed by Ling Chi; Half of this Taiping army died at the hands of the Qing army, and the other half drowned in the river, and finally the whole army was annihilated.
When this cannon fodder army was fighting bloody battles in the north and feeding on people, the kings who were far away in Tianjing were enjoying unprecedented glory and wealth, and their eyes were full ......of power and profit, and they had already left this Northern Expeditionary Army behind