Chapter 31 Starry Night

Yanhuang calendar 4603, A.S. 1905. On March 20, looking at the distant snowfields and the Linhai snowfields on the mountains, compared with Guannei, the winter in the northeast has the color of the north, like most places in the northeast. At this time, the northeast has entered spring. The early spring in the northeast is not necessarily the same as Guannei. The bright sunshine and tender branches flow in cold and heating. Under the intersection and impact, there may be snow and freezing rain in the originally clear sky.

Under the influence of sunlight, the thick ice in the river began to melt. When the huge ice hit each other, the roar echoed between the rivers. At this time, in the northeast, there was no golden warm and comfortable sunshine in the customs, and there was only relatively changeable weather in early spring.

In the morning, the weather is shrouded in a layer of mist like soft gauze. Against the mist and golden woods, everything between heaven and earth looks quiet and serene. Several soldiers release hydrogen balloons behind the front, and at the same time use the ribbon to measure the wind speed and direction of the wind. Everything is the same as usual.

The silent front line, as before, failed to ignite the flames of war in the muddy trenches. When the two [***] people arrived in the morning, while enjoying the warm sunshine, they were carrying out an activity.

Some are eating, some are walking out of the fortifications and taking a few mouthfuls of fresh air outside. For those Japanese soldiers, they don't pay attention to the Chinese army at all. In their eyes, the Chinese army seems to be the Qing army 11 years ago. Even in their opinion, if it weren't for the requirements from Tokyo, they might have conquered the Chinese army's defense line now.

When the mist dissipated, the soldiers who suffered in the muddy trenches talked and laughed. Occasionally, the painful shouts of the soldiers whose feet were soaked reminded them that this is a battlefield, so they would take this opportunity to sit by the trench, take off their boots, and bask in the sun on their feet and trenches. Foot! The trench foot has always been the most lethal weapon. They can't even imagine that those Chinese people can stay in the trench for a long time, because they have never seen Chinese people dry their feet.

At this moment, the "buzz" of the plane sounded in the air, and several planes came from the northwest. A Japanese soldier who took off his boots and was drying his feet there pointed to the air and shouted, "Chinese plane!"

Then, the other Japanese soldiers who were laughing looked into the air one after another. When the plane was overhead them, they did not shoot in the air, but looked at the planes curiously and enviously.

"When did you have your own plane!"

In this war, I said that I learned too much, just like in Lushun, facing the continuous sound of Russian machine guns. They didn't even know what it was, but within a few months, they had more machine guns than the Russians, as many as many as 100 machine guns, French and British. As long as they can buy machine guns, they have bought them.

But when the Chinese plane passed over their heads, they tried to buy it from China. After failing to buy two from the United States, no one could fly it. Fortunately, the plane was not a machine gun, and the plane could not kill people. At least they all thought so, and as they thought, they flew over their heads. The plane passed by, which circled an arc far away, flew away again.

"Oops! I really don't know what Chinese people do with this kind of waste!"

"A lot of money! Stupid!"

Looking at the distant plane, the soldiers on the edge of the trench couldn't help laughing at the Chinese people. In their eyes, this is just a common nerve war of the Chinese army. They want to use the plane to tell others, look, you can run on the ground and swim in the sea, we can fly in the sky, but what's the use of flying in the sky?

So, the position returned to a relaxed atmosphere. And these planes are reconnaissance aircraft sent by the First Army of the Guards.

After the flight, the scouts on the plane went to Xiao Yan, the commander of the army, to make a report.

"The Japanese military position is very long, with only two trenches. Most of the artillery is in front, mainly between the first and second trenches. Most of them are in the bottom depression area. The trenches are very weak, and the depth is estimated to be no more than one meter..."

Another reconnaissance report proved that the Japanese army's position was nothing new. After receiving this report, Xiao Jianren, after putting down the report, he read another weather report, then went to the map, looked carefully for a while, and then said:

"All is ready, only the east wind!"

After saying that, Xiao Yuren sneered. What does this mean? This will be the first time a new weapon to enter the battlefield.

In the afternoon, it rained heavily with cold snow. The snow was melted by the water. After a night, the snow melted and turned into ice.

In the low trenches of the Japanese army, there is cold mud everywhere. The soldiers sitting in the trench with guns in their arms flashed with the wet guns in their hands. There are sparse starlight in the sky.

A short and strong officer stood for a while at the door of a bunker where an officer lived. His fingers slipped on the buttons, hurriedly untied his military coat, shook off the drops of water on his collar, and quickly wiped his boots on the hay, and then pushed the door open and bent down into the bunker.

The yellow light of the small kerosene lamp shone on the visitor's face. An officer with his coat open, he lifted up from the board, touched his hair with one hand and began to turn white, and yawned.

"Has the rain stopped?"

"Stop,"

song xia Qingci replied, then took off his clothes and hung his military coat and rain-soaked military hat on the nail by the door.

"It's very warm here. There are a lot of people.

"We just caught fire not long ago. The bad thing is that water goes straight out of the ground. If we don't take the initiative to attack, we can't wait for the Chinese to come, but the rain can drive us away from the trenches..."

Matsushita Qingci rubbed his hands, bent down, and squatted next to the small stove.

"The local power of people repairing trenches is higher than here. We haven't learned to repair trenches yet. Look here, we actually chose to repair trenches in depressions. If we can't dig less than one meter, groundwater comes out, while Chinese trenches can dig two meters deep!"

"The Chinese are good at defense, and we are good at attacking."

"But now the base camp has tied our hands to death!"

Matsushita Qingci's order not to attack for the time being was annoyed.

"Didn't the Chinese also stop attacking in Fengtian?"

"They want to control the scale of the war because of their strength! But what about us?"

"At that time, because we didn't have shells, you don't know the current battlefield situation. We, the Chinese and the Russians are mixed together in Manchuria. They surrounded the Third Army in Fengtian, and we surrounded their troops in Dalian, that is, in Fengtian, I They also formed a semi-encirclement of them.

song xia Qingci did not look up and said softly.

"Do you mean that we will continue to consume like this? The Chinese have killed a lot of us!"

"Wait," Seiji Koizumi, whose hair was slightly bald, sighed.

"Tokyo hopes for a diplomatic solution!"

"Bak! A bunch of shameless politicians!"

Matsushita Qingci raised his body with his elbow.

"Diplomatic solution, is our blood in vain?"

He gasped and stared out of the bunker.

"Ser or later, the empire must be destroyed in the hands of these politicians, Mr. Koizumi, maybe we should take the initiative to attack the Chinese army! What do you think?

"There are not enough shells. Our wing now only has 2,000 shells, which can't tear apart the Chinese defense line at all. As you have seen, their barbed wire is denser than Lushun. The 5th Division lost a wing in Dalian and failed to capture their barbed wire!"

"But we have someone!"

"We have been fighting for a year, and the manpower has been exhausted. The Chinese army has a steady stream of soldiers. They have 450 million people, and we are only tens of millions of people!"

The two of them spoke to each other depressedly, accompanied by a trace of powerlessness in their anger. When they were talking, among the barbed wire that the Japanese army regarded as dead ground, hundreds of close trenches were constantly extending to the left and right. In the trench, the soldiers pushing the cart pushed the heavy gas cylinders into the close trench more than 300 meters away from the front of the Japanese army, and the one-person-high cylinders pointed to the position of the Japanese army at 45 degrees. .

There is no war on the whole line. For the two countries, after the Japanese revealed their hope for a diplomatic solution, the Guards stopped the attack under Fengtian City, and both sides maintained a certain degree of restraint. On the one hand, the main force of more than 200,000 troops north of Fengtian were facing the dilemma of insufficient ammunition and were unable to attack, and the other side The Guards were looking for the right direction of attack in order to catch the other party off guard, which was also heartbreaking.

This subtle stability makes the two armies confrontational, but there is no fierce battle outside Fengtian and Dalian. At most, it is a small-scale tentative attack. However, today is different from usual. It seems that the last silence will end today in the silent battlefield. "Come on, come on!"

In the urging of the officers, the soldiers speeded up.

"Wock!"

With a cylinder collision in the trench, both officers and soldiers were shocked, and the sergeant next to him immediately rushed up and slapped the careless soldier in the face.

"You fucking want to die, don't you? Move gently!"

A small accident failed to stop the continuation of the whole operation. Thousands of engineers worked hard for nearly 10,000 cylinders. In the past week, these cylinders were loaded on trains from Huainan, transported to Wuhan by river, then transported to Wuhan by ship, and then transported to the bottom of the customs by train, and then transported to the front line by carriages, trucks and even wooden ships. All the outer packaging of the cylinders are marked "artillery bullets". In the eyes of the Japanese intelligence personnel, these shells are only part of the materials mobilized by the Guards to the front, and there is no difference.

Even if they are now responsible for arranging these "cannonballs", they don't know what they are installing. They only follow the order to send the cylinders to a place 200 meters away from the front line of the army and press the electric detonation fuse.

When dawn is coming, it seems that today will be the same as yesterday, and it will be the beginning of a calm day.

(to be continued)