A section of the Chikuma River is not wide, ranging from a few tens to a hundred meters. However, for such a short distance, it took more than three hours for the dojo's 20,000 troops to cross the river.
And after such a long time, not all of the army crossed the river, but only the pioneers of more than a thousand people reached the opposite bank.
There are more than 10,000 troops behind, looking eagerly at the bamboo rafts, waiting for them to cross the river in batches.
But although these armies are waiting to cross the river, not everyone wants to go to the battlefield.
The battle to seize and cross the river just now frightened many new recruits in the army.
Although the dojo army is large in number, there are 20 people in total.
But precisely because the number of people expanded so fast, many of the elites who were originally trained in the army were assigned to serve as officers in various newly built armies.
This has resulted in a large number of new recruits being mixed into their respective armies.
The overall composition is probably 2:3 equipment. That is to say, two veterans lead three new recruits, and the two veterans are not experienced battlefield elites. They have only been on the battlefield once or twice and have seen some half-baked veterans.
There are many of these veterans who have never even killed anyone. They just followed the army as they traveled north and south, and their eyesight has opened up a little. They are not too panicked in the face of these killing scenes and can maintain a certain calmness.
Now seeing the scene of crossing the river just now, whether they are veterans or new recruits, they are really frightened.
A total of 5,000 bamboo rafts had been built to cross the river before, but the river was so wide and the army was not that long. It was impossible to send 5,000 bamboo rafts up at once.
In fact, the five thousand bamboo rafts are made in batches, that is, one thousand and one thousand.
Each bamboo raft carries 4 people, and a thousand bamboo rafts means 4,000 people can cross the river. The scale is not small.
However, although crossing the river was quite smooth, the damage involved was indeed staggering.
The reason why the dojo army was able to defeat them in one battle was that they captured the ferry in just one morning, sent the first batch of troops to the other side of the river, and barely managed to drive a small nail in.
It relies on this ruthlessness to ignore losses and casualties of the army under his command.
First of all, the bows and arrows of the coalition forces just blocked the attack.
Although these bows and arrows were shot very haphazardly, they could not effectively cooperate to form batches of arrow arrays, forming a large-scale and efficient massacre.
But after all, there were tens of thousands of archers, even though the bows and arrows in their hands were extremely poorly made hunting bows, not even as good as hunting bows.
In addition, they shot very sparsely, and many people shot the bows and arrows in their hands without even aiming.
This method of using bows and arrows is quite inefficient. It can be said that most of the bows and arrows missed.
Some arrows even hit people, but because they didn't have much force, they couldn't even penetrate the flesh of the human body and bounced away.
But if ten thousand people shoot an arrow once, it means ten thousand arrows. As long as one or two thousand of these ten thousand arrows hit a person, and three or four hundred of them hit the vital point, then this This kind of lethality is quite impressive.
Zhong Yu's dojo army was established not long ago, because it was just for expansion, and the dojo was not suitable for forming an army. Therefore, all armaments and armor are secret savings, and there is not much at all.
Previously, there were 20,000 elite disciples in the dojo, plus 30,000 external personnel. They relied on the reserves seized from those wealthy families, plus some of their own savings, to be able to barely manage a pair of leather armors each.
Many people don't even have leather armor, but just wear a few bamboo armors, which barely gives them some protection.
However, the newly recruited 150,000 troops are far from being considered core elites as newcomers, and the dojo does not have such financial conditions or enough time to equip them with armor.
So basically everyone just took off a few acceptable clothes and dyed them blue, and it was considered a military uniform.
The protective power of this kind of military uniform is quite weak, and it can even be said to be basically non-existent. After all, they were just a few thin and frightening coarse cloth clothes, which could not block sharp swords and guns.
However, even with this kind of equipment, treatment, and uniform clothing, in the eyes of the wealthy Ming Dynasty from all over the world, it is already considered extremely wealthy.
Japan is a place that is so poor that people cannot speak of it. Coupled with the perennial war, basically all livelihood construction has withered. Except for basic production such as farming and fishing to maintain livelihood, everything else is marginalized.
In order to collect enough food for the army, the famous local tycoons ordered the common people to only produce crops that could bring food.
In order to survive, the common people had no time to think about anything else. They all focused on digging food from the ground.
Under such circumstances, raising silkworms and weaving cloth has become a rather rare and even a luxury term.
In many civilian homes in Japan, five or six people often share one or two pieces of clothing, usually worn by whoever goes out.
Under such circumstances, Japan's wars usually involve sending samurai as officers, and then recruiting some farmers from their own territory, giving them a bamboo spear, or even simply asking them to bring their own farm tools, and then they go to the battlefield. .
As for uniforms and other things, don't be ridiculous. With this kind of money, it is better to buy more weapons, buy more military rations, and enrich strategic supplies.
Even many samurai under the daimyo only wore one or two sets of clothes and could only barely change them.
Moreover, their respective styles vary according to the wealth of their respective families, and their appearances are also very strange and varied.
When many daimyo fought, the clothes of both armies were actually similar, and it was basically difficult to tell them apart because they were all clothes of ordinary people.
In order to distinguish, it is just a matter of marking somewhere on both sides, so that the soldiers under their respective command know who is whose teammate and who is whose enemy.
Therefore, Zhong Yu's army could uniformly dress in uniform. For people from all over the Warring States Period, whether they were the Ming tycoons or the untouchables, this was too much luxury in their eyes.
But having said all that, the protective power of Zhong Yu's army is actually very weak.
After being shot by bows and arrows for nearly half an hour, they finally broke through all the obstacles and were only a dozen or even a few meters away from the other side.
But in just such a short time, more than 2,000 people were killed by bows and arrows.
Not to mention the Iron Cannon team coming on stage later.
The power of the iron cannon is much higher than that of bows and arrows. Although it is more troublesome to assemble, it is far less fast than bows and arrows.
But people die with one hit.
After dividing the iron artillery team into three batches, one round can take away the lives of nearly 300 dojo troops.
These iron cannons fired at each other for a full 20 minutes, about sixteen or seventeen rounds.
Under such bombardment, about 4,000 people were completely buried under the river.
Not to mention that while the iron cannon was shooting, there were also those annoying archers who were assisting, making the casualties even more frightening.
With such a distance, when the first batch of coalition forces arrived on the other side, 7,000 people had already died.
This is already 1/7 of the total casualties of the dojo army.
(End of chapter)