Chapter 675 - Total Annihilation
He rushed to the west and looked—a large crowd of enemies had already pressed up to the trench's edge, throwing debris into the ditch while setting up ladders on top. By then the other two had arrived, and all four opened fire on the western enemies.
They fired shot after shot. A hail of bullets dropped a dozen bandits; those behind turned and fled in panic.
The whistle blew again. Everyone dropped their overheated rifles and ran to the other side. Those who could barely crawl emerged to help reload. This half-hour was the busiest of Wang Wu's life. Running, shooting, running, shooting. The sergeant's whistle shrieked ceaselessly, as if it would never stop. Everyone was exhausted, gasping, nearly collapsing. Finally the enemy retreated once more.
"How much ammunition left?" Wang Wu asked the sergeant.
"Plenty of ammunition—over two thousand rounds." The sergeant's voice was steady. "Plenty of rifles too. Just no one to use them."
"Don't conserve ammunition. Fire as soon as the enemy approaches—don't let them get close enough to the berm to shoot arrows. Our people are too precious."
Now they had only twenty-four people left. Some patients had died successively; the rest were dying. Two more had fallen in combat.
Those still able to pick up a rifle and fight, including Liu Bing who had almost never used a rifle, numbered only seven.
The survivors were exhausted from the fierce fighting. Another day like this and they would be wiped out.
"Bury all the dead inside the camp," Wang Wu ordered. "Collect their personal effects and bury those separately—bury them well."
He returned to the command tent, gathered all the work team's documents, manuals, maps, and everyone's identification papers, and carried them outside to the field stove. He struck a match and set them alight.
Then he threw his own papers and circulation vouchers into the fire. The stove blazed; black paper ash spiraled upward.
Before long, my head will be cut off too. Wang Wu gazed at the flames, lit a cigarette, and thought: I'm going to die.
Unless a miracle happened, the annihilation of their little team was certain.
He thought of his wife and children, of his family's land and house. He was a rich peasant. After Daolu Village was cleared of bandits, without their extortion draining him dry, he had thrown himself into farming and built up a prosperous household. He had become a local model farmer. The Tiandihui had specifically approached him about joining. He had been eager to try, planning to use "Australian farming methods" after joining and make something big of himself.
Wang Wu knew that after his death, he would be honorably escorted by honor guards on a gun carriage to be buried at Cuigang. There would be a rifle salute and funeral ceremony. His wife, children, and parents would receive a large combat-death pension. His family would always be cared for by the Australians: no greedy relatives, clansmen, or villagers would dare seize his property; no one would dare bully his wife and children, because they would be "bereaved family"—a noble designation in the transmigrator empire's civil system. Only the families of the fallen could enjoy this title and its accompanying privileges.
He knew all this—after his death, he would have no worries.
He returned to the tent serving as a temporary infirmary. The air inside was foul, saturated with the smell of death. Liu Bing crouched beside a soldier who had just died, hands covering her face, sobbing.
Wang Wu wanted to say something comforting—but nothing came. He wasn't like Chief Du or Chief Dong, who could always produce a stream of sensible, meaningful words for any situation.
He thought for a long while and walked back out. The sergeant was cleaning his rifle; piles of rifles lay beside him. He had carefully cleaned each one.
"We'll need them soon," he said. "Can't fight with dirty rifles."
Wang Wu said, "If only we had grenades."
"I heard they were all used up at Chengmai. Now only the field army heading for Qiongshan gets them." The sergeant's hands never stopped their methodical work. "When our battalion went to fight at Chengmai, everyone got two. Really effective! Throw one and down goes a crowd—real 'palm thunder'!"
"Have you disposed of the extra materials?"
"We're just a half-platoon; we have no documents or such." The sergeant spoke calmly. "As for military IDs, I've already collected and burned them all. Just these—" He pointed to two badges on his chest.
These were the recently issued "Chengmai Campaign Victory Commemorative Medal" and "First Counter-Encirclement Victory Commemorative Medal."
"Bandits definitely won't want these, so I kept them."
"Bury them and leave them for your family. Something to remember you by."
"I don't have family." The sergeant said with a bitter smile. "Never got around to marrying—also lucky I didn't."
As they spoke, the whistle sounded from the watchtower: "Enemy forming up!"
Battle erupted again.
That afternoon, the bandits went to the village and stripped all the thatched roofs from villagers' huts. They also gathered large quantities of dry brush and weeds, bound them into bundles, and piled them upwind to set alight. The damp straw produced thick, acrid smoke that drifted inexorably toward the camp.
At first the smoke wasn't too threatening—from a distance, it dispersed before reaching the camp. But it did obstruct visibility. Batch after batch of bandits used the smoke for cover, advancing section by section, steadily piling burning straw closer to the berm. Eventually they lit brush piles right at the trench's edge.
Wang Wu and the others could only blindly fire as fast as possible into the crowds glimpsed through the thick smoke, but couldn't halt the smoke operation. Finally the entire camp was engulfed in choking haze. Team members and soldiers all donned water-soaked gauze masks, barely managing to hold on.
The bandits finally concentrated all their forces for an all-out charge. They advanced through the smoke, themselves half-choked, but with their numbers, they finally filled in a section of trench under the smoke's cover and clambered up the berm.
The bandits' faces were wrapped in wet cloth. Blinking eyes stung to near-blindness by smoke, they swung swords and spears blindly, coughing violently as they charged upward.
Arrows flew wildly into the camp from all directions. Everyone who could still move had retreated to the trench on the west side of the berm. Wang Wu looked around—only three people remained beside him.
The sergeant had already had his head cut off on the berm. A bandit was waving his rifle in triumph.
Over a dozen rifles remained in the trench. These rifles couldn't fall into bandit hands.
"Everyone smash all the rifles we can't use." Wang Wu said, and slammed his short-barreled rifle against a rock. The barrel and stock separated; parts flew everywhere.
The others smashed their extra rifles too. Then everyone piled all the ammunition at the base of the berm and tossed a torch onto the heap.
The copper percussion caps exploded like firecrackers, crackling violently. The gunpowder immediately detonated. Over a thousand Minié rounds, propelled by the powder, erupted like a massive firework. The bandits screamed in agony.
Wang Wu picked up a soldier's long-barreled Minié rifle and fixed the bayonet. The others did the same. In the instant he leaped from the trench to fight to the death, he saw Liu Bing crouching and trembling on the ground, lift her bayonet and thrust it violently into her own throat.
Wang Wu let out a great roar: "Kill!" These were his last words.
Liu Yixiao was run off his feet these days. The five or six work teams he had dispatched had all begun operations. The highway extending from Lingao also needed to enter the materials-and-labor preparation stage. Most urgently, grain requisition and land surveying had to be prepared.
The Danzhou Garrison refused to surrender, so Yu Zhiqian had to launch an expedition against them. He quickly forced the various garrison posts to capitulate and accept reorganization.
According to policy, they arrested a batch of qianhu, baihu, and xiaoqi who had been lording it over the military households—these would serve as free labor. Ordinary military households were reorganized. Military-household farmland was relatively concentrated, making it ideal for large-scale commercial cultivation. The military households had been the Ming's official tenants; now becoming agricultural workers at the empire's state farms made perfect sense.
Ye Yuming had already dispatched a Tiandihui work team from Lingao, preparing to take charge of the Danzhou Garrison's farmland.
"The buildings in and around the garrison city and various camps, though somewhat old and dilapidated, are structurally sound. Repairs won't cost much. They can all be used going forward—far better than those broken huts with bamboo-lath-and-mud walls and thatched roofs." Yu Zhiqian boasted grandly about his expedition's "glorious achievements."
He had also stationed forces ranging from a platoon to a company at the garrison city and various camps, responsible for reorganizing and training the military households. Danzhou remained an important stronghold for "pacifying the Li." Until the transmigrator regime had fully unified the Li regions, they still needed to maintain necessary deterrence. So the military households couldn't simply be disbanded—they had to continue maintaining some armed capability.
Liu Yixiao expressed concern. "Without political reform, directly organizing them into armed militia is too unreliable."
"No problem—reform can happen gradually. Right now we need to 'pacify the Li' first." Yu Zhiqian told Liu Yixiao that from a surrendered military-household xiaoqi, he had learned that since their victory over the imperial army at Chengmai, the Li regions had shown signs of instability. Some Li chieftains were coordinating, apparently with designs of their own.
"From late summer to early autumn here, the Li typically make small-scale raids on Han villages. So every year at this time, everyone has to 'guard against the Li.'"
News of the imperial army's rout had stirred undercurrents in the Li regions, which had been calm for decades since the great Li uprising at the end of the Wanli era. The Li weren't gentle souls. For Qiongzhou, with its long-standing sharp Han-Li tensions, the imperial army's crushing defeat represented an excellent opportunity.
"The bulletin said Lingao's Li people haven't made any moves, and the trade-post negotiations in the Li regions have been settled—"