Dawn.

Jieli came to Beishan Pass.

After a fierce battle all night, Zhi lost his mind and succeeded in attacking the mountain a thousand steps further.

Now they are still one thousand two hundred steps away from the top of the mountain,

But these twelve hundred steps are still out of reach. Looking at the road paved with corpses on the mountain, Jieli's face is as gloomy as water.

The narrow and steep mountain road is densely covered with countless corpses. There are many corpses piled on the road every step forward. After being blown by the north wind all night, they have been frozen into ice sculptures.

It was still difficult to see clearly at night, but in the early morning, I could see the face of the ice sculpture so lifelike, so painful and desperate.

Even many wounded soldiers were frozen to death without treatment after dark.

Six stops have been climbed on the ten-stop road,

But Zhi lost his mind and was already kneeling in the ice and snow, asking Jieli Khan for instructions not to attack again.

"This is a death trap. Every time I feel that the Tang army will collapse in the next moment, and we will win, but there is always one step missing, and we are led step by step towards the abyss.

Khan, we can’t attack anymore, the casualties are too high.”

Fires were set up on various mountain passes in Yehu Ridge at night, and smoke was burned during the day. There was still a pillar of smoke, which meant that Jieli's strategy of raiding various places and making more flowers last night failed to succeed.

Not only Badger's Mouth suffered heavy casualties, but the same was basically true for other places.

Jie Li thought that Wu Huaiyu was spreading the pie by dividing his defenses in various places, but his troops were divided into multiple directions to attack, which was also a taboo for military strategists.

If you can't focus on attacking the badger's mouth, how can you attack the rest of the area?

It just adds casualties.

What makes Zhi lose his mind and heart the most is the main battlefield of Badgerzui last night. Not only were the casualties such as Xi Qizgdian and other miscreants and Tuli surrendered, but also many elites including Zhi lost his troops were lost.

Day and night, after dozens of battles, we still stopped halfway up the mountain.

It seems so easy to reach, but it's so far out of reach.

The sky is overcast.

It seems that a bigger snowstorm is brewing.

In this kind of weather, it was difficult to continue to camp, let alone continue the all-out attack, especially since many wounded soldiers could not receive treatment. Fortunately, they did not die on the mountain, but also died in the wounded barracks at the foot of the mountain.

"Zhao Deyan, all the troops attacked the mountain last night. Please report the casualties."

Jieli tried his best to suppress his anger.

Zhao Deyan carefully reported numbers one by one in a low voice. Everywhere reported progress in the night attack, but no one was captured. The so-called progress was just like the one before him. He had to pay more than 10,000 casualties, but it was just an upward climb.

A thousand steps.

But as long as the mountain pass is not taken, what's the point of 1,800 steps or 800 steps?

"Great Khan, regarding today's events, I am thinking of the siege of Bai Deng, the great ancestor of the Han Dynasty, and the siege of Yanmen in the past by Great Khan Shibi. That Wu Huaiyu is extremely cunning. Our intelligence was wrong and we were fooled by him."

Zhi lost Si Li also said bluntly, "Great Khan, the Tang army still has some strength left and is not exhausted, especially since they have enough arrows. They took advantage of this dangerous situation to block attacks with shields, spears, bows and arrows. We lack attack equipment and the weather is bad. It is really difficult."

No more attacks can be made."

If you continue to attack, it will be an egg against a stone. No matter how many eggs you have, you will not be able to defeat the stone.

They don’t know that the historical battle between the Tang Dynasty and Tubo was a small stone castle with only a few hundred Tubo defenders. However, the city was dangerous on three sides and only accessible by a small goat intestine trail. The sky was extremely dangerous.

The fortress occupies the military artery on the front line of Tangtu,

The Tibetans occupied the fort, and the Tang army was at a chokehold. Although Wang Zhongsi strongly opposed the attack, Tang Xuanzong finally ordered Ge Shuhan to gather more than 60,000 men to attack the fort.

In the end, the Tang army attacked and fought hard at all costs, and finally captured the fort and captured more than 400 people. However, the Tang army paid tens of thousands of casualties. The entire battle for the stone fort did not last more than ten days, with thousands of casualties every day.

Even Ge Shuhan, who is known as the God of War in the Northwest, cannot understand this kind of battle. After all, although Shibao City was originally built by Tubo, it was later captured by the Tang army and reinforced, and Gai Jiayun fell to Tubo again.

, Tubo tried its best to reinforce it, but who would have thought that a small stone fortress could hang tens of thousands of people in a few days.

But there are countless such battles in military history.

Just like later in history, the Jin army gathered more than 400,000 people to stop more than 100,000 Mongolian horses at Yehuling. The result was that the Jin army of more than 400,000 people was defeated.

Another example is the Battle of Taigu in the 8th year of Wude. The Tang army sent troops from five directions. In the end, after ten days of bloody fighting, the entire army of more than 70,000 people was wiped out in Taigu.

There are usually not many casualties in field battles, and even if it is a large-scale battle, only the prisoners will be captured after being defeated. However, offensive battles and city siege battles are often real meat grinders.

In the Battle of Huaiyang, the defenders were able to eat everyone in the city.

Huang Chao was even more ruthless. During the siege of Chenzhou, while attacking the city, he sent people to collect grain and grass. There was a great famine in the world and there was no food to collect, so he arrested people everywhere. The Qi army established a grinding mill village and pounded the captured people directly.

Minced meat.

Another fierce man in the late Tang Dynasty, Feihuzi Li Keyong, conquered Tianchang, killed tens of thousands of enemy troops, and directly made the enemy's corpses into preserved meat, which he carried with the army as military rations.

Towards the end of the war, it could no longer be described as tragic.

Historically, at the beginning of the founding of the Tang Dynasty, although the army was elite, by the time of Emperor Gaozong, they were often defeated. For example, the defeat of Dafeichuan, which was known as the first truly disastrous defeat since the founding of the Tang Dynasty, involved 100,000 soldiers.

The whole army of soldiers was wiped out. Later, Wu Zetian attacked the Khitans and conquered the Khitan three times, but all returned with great defeats. Each of them was a huge defeat with more than 100,000 troops.

In the history of the Tang Dynasty, it is said that the emperor fled nine times and the capital fell six times. Although Li Shimin initiated the rule of Zhenguan and the Khan of Heaven came to the dynasty, foreign wars were often defeated in history. Not to mention the Turks who bullied invaders in the early days of the founding of the country, and later Goguryeo.

Khitan, Silla, Baekje, as well as Tubo, Western Turks, Tuyuhun, Xueyantuo, Later Turks, and even Nanzhao, Bohai Kingdom, etc. Even the island countries dared to cross the sea to clamor against the Tang army in their small days.

The surrounding countries were all annihilated by the Tang army when they were young, and they did not dare to make any noise in the future. The rest had already been defeated by the Tang army.

The Tang Dynasty was once very powerful in history, but it was also beaten badly. It belonged to a very special era. Its strength was unparalleled, but its decline was also a cliff-like decline.

In the battle of Xiangji Temple, two to three hundred thousand people from the two armies attacked each other, and hundreds of thousands of them were killed in a few hours. It was simply a miracle in the history of war.

But today, a small mountain pass blocked the 100,000-strong Turkic army here. Moreover, they fought head-on here for a day and a night, killing more than 30,000 people.

I didn't feel anything during the fight, but now when the casualties were tallied, everyone was shocked.

There are more than 30,000 people. If you include the disabled, it means that many tribes on the grassland have disappeared. A small khan or a bastard who controls one area alone can only manage an account of tens of thousands.

And these more than 30,000 people are all young and strong.

In the eighth year of Wude, at the Battle of Taigu, Jieli used more than 100,000 troops to attack the Tang army of more than 70,000 troops, and finally wiped out all 70,000 troops, even though he himself suffered less casualties.

It can be said that since the founding of the Tang Dynasty, or since the Qimin Khan Rangan defected to the Sui Dynasty and usurped his brother's position as the Great Khan, the Khan's position in their family has been passed down for four generations, and there has not been a single incident.

There were so many casualties in the battle.

In the ninth year of Wude's reign, they reached the Weishui River. Although they were tricked by Li Shimin and suffered many defeats, the total casualties were not so heavy.

Jie Li and others thought at first that the statisticians had made a mistake, but after repeated calculations, they found that there were indeed so many casualties.

There were over 30,000 casualties and nothing gained.

Now not only is Zhi losing his thinking power, people like Ashina Simo and Zhao Deyan no longer want to attack, but none of the other leaders want to continue fighting like this.

What's the difference between this and attacking Chang'an City directly? If you besiege Chang'an, you can also plunder the Guanzhong Plain. But outside the ice-covered fortress, besides the fierce northwest wind and the vast expanse of ice and snow, what else is there? Oh,

There are also tens of thousands of war dead corpses frozen into ice sculptures.

Jieli looked up at the mountain.

Next to the flag of the Qingyi Army, in addition to the flag of the Guangning Army, there were several more flags.

Some of his subordinates recognized that the newly added flag was the flag of Wu Huaiyu, the governor of Youzhou. There were also flags of Youzhou Yabing, Jinglue, Lulong, Jingsai, Huaihuang, and Yuyi troops.

If an army has several thousand people, then the number of new troops added at once will amount to at least 20,000 to 30,000 reinforcements.

Jie Li didn't believe it.

He pointed to the mountain, "Planting a few flags just to show off your bluff? I dare to say that the Tang army is at the end of its rope."

But now all the Turkic nobles don't want to fight anymore,

Not to mention those who could be saved by King Xi, the Khitan Khan Da Hemohui, and the Sogdian Dagans, no one wanted to send his troops up in vain to be strangled and left to freeze on the hillside as frozen corpses.

The morale of the army has been exhausted.

No matter what Ren Jieli said, no one was willing to respond.

"Khan, we failed to capture Badger's Mouth or other mountain passes last night. We have missed the opportunity. If we want to capture it now, it will be as difficult as climbing to the sky."

"Khan, there is an old saying in the Central Plains, if you keep the green hills, you will not be afraid of running out of firewood. There is no need for us to fight here. We will make a comeback next time!"

Jie Li's face became darker and darker.

He suddenly picked up the riding crop and whipped Zhao Deyan, who had always been his favorite, hard, "You are a Han Chinese, so you have to crawl inside and out. Could it be that you have accepted the benefits of the King of Tang, and you have betrayed me?"

Zhao Deyan was stunned by the sudden whip, and quickly defended, "Khan, my loyalty to you can be learned from the world."

Jieli whipped Zhao Deyan so hard that his clothes were in tatters and his face was bruised.

He pointed his whip at Zhao Deyan, who was on the ground, and looked around at the noble leaders, "Who still objects?"

No one said anything.

"Bring the sudden profit."

Tuli Khan was brought up, still bearing scars from being whipped previously and even frostbite.

"Shi Bobi, how long do you think the Tang army can hold on?"
To be continued...