Breaking through the long-range fire blockade and approaching the bayonet formation, a bloody battle ensued.

Different from the Mo Dao soldiers, the big killer weapon of "riding on foot" in the Tang Dynasty, although the bayonet array can also "advance like a wall", it obviously will not have the domineering of "the enemy who should be broken". The use of the bayonet is not based on chopping, and almost only specializes in "stabbing".

But to be honest, although Datang Mo's sword soldiers are strong, they have two serious flaws. One is that the manufacture of the Mo knife itself was too "high-precision" at that time, not only the output was extremely low, but also expensive, and it was difficult to equip a large number of people; The second is that the selection of Mo Dao soldiers is also extremely strict, it is polite to say that one out of a hundred, but in fact, it may take one out of a thousand, because Mo Dao soldiers not only need amazing courage, but also need great strength - small strength will definitely not be able to split the effect of "broken human and horse tools".

It is precisely because of these two problems that there is no Mo knife after the Tang Dynasty, and the Mo knife soldier has gradually become a legend.

The bayonet does not have such a problem, although the manufacture of the bayonet is also "high-precision", but the current Jinghua can be satisfied, and the use of the bayonet is far simpler than the Mo knife, the requirements for people are too much lower, but any qualified soldier can use it.

However, the bayonet itself is not a very professional cold weapon, it is actually a companion weapon, and its main role is to compensate for the lack of melee combat ability of musketeers.

In a way, it's an alienated product of the Three-Eyed Gun, designed to allow soldiers to engage in both long-range firepower projection and hand-to-hand combat. From the perspective of its cold weapon attribute against cavalry, the bayonet array is actually inferior to the spear array.

What was the most practical and cost-effective melee cold weapon in the classical period? This is actually basically uncontroversial, it's a spear! It's not some other bells and whistles of cold weapons, or simple spears. This kind of long-handled assassination cold weapon, represented by the spear, is called the "king of a hundred soldiers".

They are all long-handled weapons, and there is still a difference between spears and ordinary guns, lances, beryllium and other weapons, although it is said that the difference between these weapons is a difference in style, for example, the difference between spears and guns is in the style of the head, and the difference between spears and beryllium is in the way they are connected, but the most obvious difference between spears and them is in length.

The length of the spear is generally one to two zhang, that is, three to six meters long (but according to Ichikawa Dingchun's "Weapon Codex", in Chinese history, the longest long-handled weapon weighed by the spear is 5.6 meters, and the long-handled weapon weighed by the gun has a maximum length of 8 meters.

This length may be more than many people imagine, after all, a cold weapon up to 6 meters long may not be common in film and television dramas. Is it easy to operate such a long weapon?

You don't have to think about it, of course it's inconvenient. With a 6-meter spear, you don't have to think about any bells and whistles, such as dancing a gun or something, that's pure dreaming, the way this weapon is used is basically a move, stabbing forward - that's right, just one move: stab!

So does this trick work? Of course it works!

The powerful lethality that can be produced by the stabbing of cutting-edge weapons is something that even primitive people can recognize, and it is precisely for this reason that human beings invented the spear and spear as a cold weapon (wood and bamboo sharpening) very early. To be honest, melee cold weapons are roughly divided into three types, one is the sword, which kills with a blade; the second is the spear, which uses sharp stabbing for killing; The third is to use blunt weapons such as hammers.

Among these weapons, the only one that can be made very long is the spear, and if the other two are too long, there is basically no maneuverability, and the lethality does not increase but decreases.

Does long work? Of course it is useful, as the old saying goes: an inch is long and an inch is strong. The longer the weapon, the greater its attack range, and this is the case with spears. The spear is very long in the first place, so the attack range is large.

Secondly, the lethality is also very strong, don't look at the only one move of stabbing, but this move is the most lethal move, if you want to hit enemy soldiers with armor defense, stabbing is the most effective. The sword, a weapon that uses slashing as an attack method, encounters particularly large resistance when breaking armor, and is at an absolute disadvantage against heavily armored enemies. Of course, blunt weapons can also "break armor", but then it faces the same problem as the selection of Mo Dao soldiers, you must first have this kind of Hercules-level soldiers.

Whether in the East or the West in ancient times, spears were very popular cold weapons, those famous phalanxes in the West, the absolute main force in cold weapons were spears, and spearmen were definitely the most effective troops in ancient times.

In addition to the use of chariots and cavalry, long-handled weapons were also widely used in infantry, and the spearmen in the phalanx were successively behind the shield infantry, using the gap between the shields to make spurs.

Infantry against cavalry, apart from the use of firearms and crossbows, lined up in close lines, with dense spears is almost the only effective way.

Roughly in the current era of alternating hot and cold weapons, such as the historical Great Pole Soldiers, Swiss Spearmen, Spanish Phalanx and other famous armies, all rely on spears to deal with cavalry, among which the Spanish Phalanx also needs to rely on spearmen to protect the musketeers, which is very close to the current concept of Gao Shishi.

The practicability of the spear is very strong, during the period of the Northern and Southern Dynasties of China, the classical long weapons such as halberds and ges were basically eliminated, and the long weapons used by the army soldiers on a large scale gradually only left the spear class. In Europe, too, from the 14th century onwards, the infantry used spears and axes (a combination of a cold weapon and an axe characteristic of the Swiss, commonly translated as "Swiss halberd" in Chinese), which led to the decline of feudal knights. (Cheap restraint is expensive, and the expensive will inevitably show a trend of decline.) )

When hot and cold weapons alternated, musketeers and spearmen usually used together, and there were already spearmen who used arquebuses, and because muskets were single-shot, they were vulnerable to enemy infantry and cavalry attacks between shots and shots, and musketeers who only had the butt as a blunt weapon for self-defense were too weak when the enemy attacked. Therefore, the musketeers at that time were often protected by spearmen armed with spears, which was the real core of the Spanish phalanx.

It was not until the invention of the bayonet that changed the situation. With bayonets, musketeers also had strong melee capabilities, and could fight against enemy cavalry and infantry in close combat alone, so some countries began to form troops with all musketeers, greatly increasing their combat effectiveness.

The earliest Chinese record of the bayonet is the 1606 record of the knife in He Rubin's "Records of Soldiers", and the West first appeared in the West in the 17th century during a peasant dispute in Bayonne, France. Peasants at that time inserted knives into the muzzles of rifles and used them to attack the enemy. In the eighteenth century, the socket bayonet appeared, a type that protruded from the right side of the barrel of the musket, because the musket at that time was front-loading and did not interfere with the loading of ammunition.

The musket currently produced by Jinghua is still front-loaded, but it is only a flintlock front-loading and equipped with a paper shell fixed charge, so the bayonet made by Gao Pragmatic is also a socket-type bayonet. It uses the lance's stabbing attack, replacing the blunt weapon attack of the three-eyed gun, and combines it with the musket to form an alternative Spanish phalanx.

The advantage is that the weapons and equipment are more uniform, which is convenient for logistical support and training, which is in line with the highly pragmatic and consistent simplification of logistics thinking, and doubles the efficiency of individual combat capability training. The disadvantage is that at the moment when it really resists the cavalry charge, its combat effectiveness is inferior to that of the spearmen.

However, when the impact of the charging cavalry was exhausted and the two sides began to engage in a scuffle, a bayonet of a more reasonable length was more useful than a spearman.

In short, the biggest feature of the bayonet is that it is "far and near, and its power is not weak". In other words, it's a jack-of-all-trades, and it can do anything.

The 800 Mongol heavy cavalry, who had suffered heavy casualties and had finally rushed to the front of the bayonet array, suddenly pulled out a hood when their horses approached about 20 paces in front of the bayonet formation, and the men leaned forward, stretched out their left arms, and put the hood on the horse's head.

The problem of loud noise, this group of elite heavy cavalry relied on superb equestrian skills to forcibly control the horses to overcome, but the habit of the war horses automatically avoiding "bright and pointed" items was not easy to overcome by equestrianism, so they temporarily prepared cloth hoods.

A well-trained and excellent cavalry horse can ignore the line of sight for a short time and march entirely on the knight's command. The Mongols had a dwindling heavy cavalry for economic reasons, but this in another way made the riders who could be selected for the heavy cavalry more elite and more equestrian, and they clearly had such abilities.

Zhang Wanbang's originally calm and calm face became a little ugly at this time, but he was not afraid, he just took a deep breath, drew his saber and scolded: "Two thousand heavy cavalry for Lao Tzu's two thousand infantry? Tumen, this old boy is afraid that he doesn't know arithmetic! Then he raised his sword and roared angrily: "Brothers, we can't lose this battle, and the wife and shadow are in this dynasty - fuck it!" ”

The group of people in the bayonet array, no one or the guards, all of them were victorious over the Mongolian cavalry, and their morale was indeed high, and in such a situation, none of them were cowardly, and they roared and promised: "Fuck it!" ”

It's too late, it's too fast, and the Iron Rider has come to the present. The Mongol heavy cavalry did not use long cavalry spears, although their charging formations were not as fierce as those of the Western knights, but the impact of the horses was still there.

Although the first horses to crash into the bayonet array almost invariably stumbled and fell to the ground, the great inertia caused their corpses to roll forward, and even knocked two or three layers of bayonets across the row, and the knights on the horses had already expected to jump and roll before getting up to fight.

Vaulting and rolling is an extremely dangerous action, especially for knights in heavy armor, but fortunately, the so-called heavy armor of the Mongols is not a full-body outfit like in Europe, but a leather armor with iron plates, which can still ensure people's mobility. However, it was even more difficult to jump and roll on the battlefield, and only half of the knights who jumped and rolled on the wide front were left alive to stand up.

But this wave of onslaught did have a huge effect, that is, the Mongols suddenly discovered that the bayonet array itself was not outstanding for the defense of heavy cavalry! Although the heavy cavalry on the first wave of wide fronts lost almost all of their horses, there were only about 300 men on this front.

In other words, it doesn't take a particularly strong force to really cover the bayonet array at close range. The real root cause of the defeat of the Mongol cavalry in the previous two major battles was that the musketeers and artillery behind the bayonet formation were too powerful, and the Mongol cavalry had already consumed seventy-seven eighty-eight before they could rush to the front of the formation, and lost the most critical concentrated impact force of the charge.

The killing intent of the Mongol cavalry skyrocketed, whether it was the fallen cavalry who got up to fight again, or the horse cavalry who rushed into the formation in the rear, they raised their swords and slashed, intending to vent their anger with killing.

The figures in the distance were also excited, holding up a monocular that was obviously a low-level equipment of the Ming army, and was overjoyed, and when he saw that the breaking of the formation was completed, he laughed and patted Buzhihatu on the shoulder, and said loudly: "Okay, good, Buzhihatu, you really have a set!" This bayonet array is very famous, it turns out to be just a silver-like wax head gun, as long as you resist their firearms, rush to the front of the formation, and immediately blindfold the eyes of the war horse, this bayonet array will not be able to stop my Mongolian iron cavalry at all! ”

The surrounding Mongolian generals also laughed and celebrated each other, and the entire rear of the Mongolian army was full of joy, waiting for the light cavalry to continue to rush forward to massacre Zhang Wanbang, who had already "broken the defense".

Unfortunately, they may have celebrated a little too early. The only one who remained reserved, Burihatu, soon noticed something strange - after the Ming army's bayonet array was broken, the Mongolian heavy cavalry was not able to form a devastating crush on the Ming infantry, and the two armies were very strangely entangled together.

Tumen and the others reacted a little late, and only when they found that Buzhihatu's expression was still serious did they react, and they all looked towards the position of Zhang Wanbang's department, only to realize that something was not right.

Although the Ming army's bayonet array was broken, it did not collapse, but even the musketeers became bayonet soldiers, and began to divide labor and cooperate in a formation of about ten squads to encircle and suppress the Mongolian heavy cavalry, which was accustomed to fighting alone.

That's right, it's encirclement!

Burihatu was the first to cry out: "It's not good, this is ...... Little Mandarin Duck Formation? ”

He's not wrong, but he's not entirely right either. Zhang Wanbang's style of play does come from the "small mandarin duck formation", but Gao pragmatic has always privately called the two kinds of small mandarin duck formations with a dozen and dozens of people "squad platoon tactics".

This is the tactic of an infantry squad or an infantry platoon or so in the future, trained according to the cooperation of small formations, and it does not conflict with the large array of the current era, but only forms many small groups to fight on the large battlefield.

This tactic is too complicated to put it in detail, but simply put, it is to form a superiority in strength in various local battlefields, always keep your own side fighting more and less, encircle and suppress the enemy forces fighting each other at the fastest speed, and finally accumulate small victories into big victories.

Although the Mongolian heavy cavalry was elite, no matter how elite they were, they couldn't beat ten, not to mention that they were scimitar cavalry, not pikemen, and they also needed to get close to the Ming army to complete the killing after the impact subsided. The Ming army used bayonets, and the butt of the gun and the bayonet were far longer than the scimitar, which could cause damage to the Mongol cavalry earlier - it was not necessarily necessary to stab people, and the stabbing horses were equally effective, because even if the horse armor could prevent arrows, and even prevent slashing to a certain extent, it was obviously unable to prevent sharp bayonets from stabbing.

The Mongol cavalry, who thought they were going to be overwhelmed, did not expect that after breaking the "myth of the bayonet array", what awaited them was not victory, but a more difficult or even undominant grappling.

Outside the battlefield, the commanders of the two armies, Tumen and Cao Yan, gasped at the same time.

It's just that their feelings of amazement and shock must be completely different.

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