Siege warfare can establish the advantage of war, but the besieging side often has to face a greater dilemma than the defending side.

Charles, Earl of Plymouth, was no exception.

Their army was not a standing army, and their allegiance to his noble families and other invited lords was limited in their service, and many nobles from the west lost their lives in the battle to aid him, which was a great blow to morale.

If the war seemed unprofitable, what was the purpose of the nobles by conscripting an army of freedmen and serfs in their domains and driving a hundred miles to Plymouth?

The biggest dilemma, and the most important issue, is money.

Often in war they were able to plunder the area, and once the siege camp was established, the soldiers went out to incite the peasants to resent the lord and looted in a trap.

The question is that this is Plymouth, the domain of the Earl of Charles, how do they incite the people and rob themselves?

With no additional financial resources, the Earl had almost scattered all his wealth to reward the reinforcements that had arrived from all over the country, and all hopes were to capture the city and plunder the Ming merchants.

At least the merchants were still rich in the eyes of the people, but no one knew how rich they were, but now there were only these uncertain amounts to offset the worries of the nobles about the hundreds of pounds a day in military expenses.

The siege had been going on for a long time, and they desperately needed a victory, especially for Earl Charles, who had already deserted from the camp with cavalry and infantry, and in fact it was good to desert, and even more so that some people began to plunder the place, rob his people, and reduce the workshops and farms that belonged to him to ashes.

Their tentative assault failed, the bravado around the city on three sides did not cause the defenders to relax, the hastily constructed catapults and ballistas were always under the focus of the enemy's artillery in range, and the siege towers were damaged by the enemy with boom cannons and a defensive weapon capable of firing rockets.

In regular siege battles, the Ming merchants who were guarding the city seemed to have more willpower than they did.

In fact, Earl Charles knew that if he could get all the siege troops to attack in unison, relying on troops several times larger than the defenders, they could easily launch numerous assaults on the siege area that was miles long, and eventually the city with a severely insufficient number of defenders would definitely fall.

But he couldn't, and no one of the other reinforcement nobles was willing to brave artillery fire or the strange rain of rockets for Plymouth, except for a few families who were directly loyal to him.

At first, it was possible to tempt them with the wealth of the Ming merchants in the city, but now the tricky problem is that many nobles pay more attention to the women in their families than the wealth of the merchants in the city.

They started fighting in the spring, which also made it very difficult to raise food.

All this made the Earl of Charles doubt that the siege would last until the moment when the tunnels were dug.

Fortunately, reinforcements arrived from the sea, and the news that his brother Howard and Drake had arrived off Plymouth with eight Galen ships and twelve armed merchant ships turned the tide for him.

"Tomorrow we will launch a general assault, the confrontation has been long enough, our tunnels have been dug under the cathedral with certainty, but the workers say that they hear the conversation and the chaotic and non-stop footsteps above, and they are likely to use our church as a barracks."

"So we have to dig in three directions, the two streets where the untouchables live and my manor, and the two sir Miller and Nice lead the troops to enter the streets from the ground with weapons, control the untouchables in the houses, give them weapons, and create chaos in the streets; Sir Harry leads his soldiers into the manor, where the enemy commander is likely to rest, and you control them. ”

"It's better for them to declare their surrender."

"If not, you will make as much movement as possible to attract the attention of the defenders, or find a way to open the gates, whether your operation is successful or not, just hold on for a while, and we will launch a general assault on Plymouth."

The nobles who received the order gathered their men, and the whole besieging camp began to pray again on this night, the people knelt and kissed the hilt of their swords, and then the levies with short weapons followed the brightly armored nobles into the narrow tunnels and attacked the city of Plymouth.

Whatever was on the minds of the nobles, they didn't want to show their incompetence in front of the great nobles from the court, so they had to move ahead of the curve, preferably taking Plymouth before the navy defeated the merchant ships, or at least in a tug-of-war with the defenders in the city.

Otherwise, rumors of incompetence would have spread throughout London with the return of these great nobles of the court.

And in the underbelly of Plymouth, the Great Ming sailor, with his wide-belted axe, was holding a porcelain bowl upside down on the wall, leaning sideways and putting his ear to it in the tunnel, until he heard the sound of chain mail colliding, and he turned his head and made a few gestures to the sailors holding the three-eyed guns at the end of the fire rope behind him.

People squeezed out of the passage, and sailors wearing mille-feuille shoes crawled quickly down the tunnel to the ground, informing the generals stationed on the ground of the discovery from underground.

In front of the Beiyang cavalry at the outpost, there was a sketch map of the area drawn, and the soldiers who listened everywhere reported to this place that according to the sound heard by the soldiers, he used charcoal to draw the direction of the enemy's march underground, and a route extending from outside the city into the city gradually became clear, and the cavalry summoned his subordinates and quickly wrote a letter, asking to hand it to a general of Makino Baojia stationed in the defense area.

The news was quickly transmitted, and Bao Jia gathered all the tiger men under his subordinates, and asked angrily at the location mentioned in the letter: "This is in this place?" It's all ready, if there is a rocket rising, they will dig up and collapse, blocking the way out! ”

In other parts of the city, wellheads were dug and culverts were dug; Some people started fires and made chimneys out of wood; They all waited for Ying Ming to launch a signal in the city.

If the caravan sailors with the Three-Eyed Gun can't defeat the enemy underground, they will first dig up the tunnel near the wall to block it and block it, blocking the enemy reinforcements, and if this does not allow the sailors to defeat the enemy, everyone will retreat to the surface, use chimneys to channel the smoke into the tunnel, and then flood the tunnel.

No matter how well-armed and powerful the enemy is, as long as they enter the tunnel, this is a dead end to the Nai He Bridge.

The tunnels continue to be excavated.

The soldiers at the front tried their best to suppress their smiles, they could feel that the road was getting easier and easier to dig, and the knights behind were whispering to them that they were not far away, and that they would soon reach the cellar, and they must be careful and quiet.

With the last blow of chiseling, the earthen wall made a sound of gold and stone, revealing pieces of masonry and stone, and people's hearts were lifted, and someone let out a forced cheer, and turned back and said, "My lord, we have dug into the wall of the cellar!" ”

Someone pushed the loose masonry, trying to get a little light out of the cellar, and the levies with short swords and axes behind them buckled their helmets and gathered around the knights, ready to break through.

On the other side of the wall, the cross-legged sailors were alarmed by the sound of the chiseling of the wall, and they raised their beloved three-eyed guns with their fists, and some of them pointed to the wall behind them with a thumbs up, and the brick was slowly being chiseled and pushed outward.

The torch ignited the long rope, and the moment the brick hit the ground, two three-eyed guns ran down the gap to the frightened eyes that wanted to look out.

The sailors heard the man on the other side of the wall muttering something to himself, but they couldn't understand it.

"My lord, the cellar is so dark that I can't see anything...... What is this, it's cool like iron, it smells of sulfur. ”