July, Liang City.
As the sun set in the west, dusk fell.
"Kill!"
The remains of the bonfires spewed black smoke, and countless soldiers, shrieking, desperately fought beneath the afterglow.
Blood splattered, tal clanged, war drums thundered, and banners were furled in defeat.
The most grueso spectacle of human beings was incessantly enacted on this battlefield.
Countless lives disappeared quickly in the slaughter.
Clang clang clang!
A rapid gong sounded.
The warriors, who were locked in combat on the battlefield, upon hearing this sound, suddenly relaxed their tense spirits.
Then, they exchanged glances, and regardless of whether the person opposite had been an enemy just a mont before, they all felt as if pardoned.
Cautiously, they retreated and waited.
After distancing themselves, they hastily joined a few comrades and ran toward the main camp in the rear.
Today, they had already fought for an entire day.
From the first light of dawn, as the morning glow began, the Chu and Zhao armies laid out their formations and continuously brought out troops to fight on the field between their camps.
This battle raged from morning to evening.
Both sides were littered with corpses, blood flowed like rivers, and everyone was utterly exhausted.
At this mont, whether it was the Chu people, the Zhao people, or even the Wei people, none wanted to keep killing.
Had it not been for the stringent military orders, who would have willingly ventured into that battlefield?
Atop the high watchtower, Huang Lin watched his soldiers retreating back. Observing the weary expressions, the thinned ranks, and the units no longer at full strength, he maintained a calm deanor.
He simply watched as the soldiers were counted and then, under the lead of their officers, they returned to the city or headed to the main camp nearby to begin their al.
The fragrant sll of food wafted both inside and outside the city at that ti.
The generals, having fought for a day, were severely drained physically and ntally; the best redy was to let them have a full al, with sufficient nutrition and fats.
Being well-fed, that sense of fullness, is one of the most primal instincts of human beings.
Once this desire is satisfied, it can overshadow most negative emotions and provide new energy and good morale.
So even though providing a large amount of at to the soldiers placed imnse pressure on the logistics, both the Chu and Zhao sides still did so.
After all, these soldiers, having been fed, would be consud by this brutal battlefield in a few days; being able to eat well for just ten days to half a month was the limit.
The n had sold their lives to you, so it was only right to let them eat well before their deaths.
With this in mind, the pressure on logistics wasn’t as great as it seed.
"Report to the director, today’s casualties have been calculated,"
Lost in thought, the deputy commander ca over, saluted Huang Lin, and reported, "Today, a total of fifty-eight battalions engaged in combat, including defector battalions and our main units. Losses per battalion were between two hundred and three hundred soldiers, nearly half of them killed or wounded.
In total, approximately eight thousand defectors and around three thousand of our Chu soldiers were lost, totaling about eleven thousand casualties.
As for the Zhao army on the other side, while there’s no precise number, the dead and wounded are estimated to be over eight thousand."
Hearing this figure, Huang Lin nodded slightly and then dismissed him with a wave, "Understood, you may go."
"Understood."
The deputy left.
After he was gone, Huang Lin muttered to himself, "Eight thousand people, we have been killing for a month now, and the Zhao army’s troop deploynt remains undiminished each day.
It seems they really did, as they claid, mobilize an army of two million."
Ever since he took Liang City and seized the Zhao people’s lifeline,
suddenly, the western army was like a hornet’s nest that had been poked, provoking an all-out retaliation from the Zhao people.
The Chu army seized Liang City at the end of May.
However, by early June, just as Huang Lin had barely repelled the Zhao army from Baima County, the main force of the Zhao army from Diqiu ca roaring forward a few days later.
The Zhao people declared they had two million troops, the full strength of the nation, vowing to retake Liang City.
Initially, Huang Lin didn’t take the Zhao nation’s claim to heart.
After all, with the intensity of current warfare, the size of the armies each country mobilized was increasingly vast.
When embarking on an expedition, they’d often exaggerate the numbers to intimidate the enemy.
For instance, the Chu army’s first Northern Expedition flew the banner of thirty million soldiers, intended to scare the warlords north of the river.
This inflated the actual number of Chu soldiers by almost sixty percent.
However, whether the intimidation was successful is debatable.
If you insist it was, indeed, the states of the Nine Provinces north of the river were terrified of the Chu army and were in a state of panic.
But if you say it wasn’t, although these states were frightened, in the end, they still mustered all their resources to oppose the Chu army.
Even Xu State and Jin Country, which had little to do with Chu, joined in the fray, siding against Chu.
So it’s hard to assess whether this sort of propaganda was good or bad from Lu Yuan’s perspective.
Assuming others did as Chu had done, surely the Zhao army must have also exaggerated to so extent.
Two million people? It probably capped at one million at most.
After all, whether it’s one million or two million, such an imnse army would present a formidable sight that could stretch for hundreds of miles. With such vast numbers, even if scouts were dispatched for reconnaissance, the numbers they returned would be vague.
Endless human masses, forests of banners, and so on.
Ten miles of land occupied by Zhao soldiers, surrounding prefectures and counties all under Zhao encampnts, etc.
If you ask for a specific number?
I’m sorry.
But with tens to hundreds of millions of people, no matter how capable the scouts are, they would be counting till they dropped dead and still not finish.
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