204: Chapter 114 The Emperor's Personal Expedition

On the morning of January 23, 1908, a special train painted in dark gray camouflage stopped at a small station in western Liaoning called "Majadian".

Snow half a foot thick accumulated on both sides of the tracks, and a thin layer of ice formed on the wooden boards of the platform, creaking when stepped on, as if someone was continuously stepping on something.

Several railway workers were shoveling snow with iron shovels, the sound of shovels scraping across the concrete ground and wooden boards echoing alternately in the silent morning, one after another, mixed with the white breath exhaled by the snow shovelers and occasional coughs, like some monotonous, continuous timer.

On the distant horizon, several slender wisps of black smoke were slowly rising into the gray-white sky, first as a straight column, then blown apart by high-altitude winds into a blur of dark clouds, the edges of which were translucent gray, and the center a deeper opaque black, like diluted ink.

The burnt smell was faintly perceptible from over a dozen kilometers away, slipping into the nasal cavity mixed with the cold wind, making one involuntarily frown; that smell was mixed with the scent of burning wood, hay, and the carbonized residue after cloth was thoroughly burned.

When Li Ling got off the train, the cold wind wrapped in snowflakes rushed over his face, piercing it like fine needles.

He instinctively squinted his eyes, then wrapped the collar of his military overcoat tightly, his boots crunching as they stepped into the accumulated snow, which swallowed the edges of his shoe uppers.

He stood on the platform for a moment, exhaled a puff of white air, watched it condense into a fog in front of him, and then slowly tore apart by the wind.

At the end of the platform parked a few jeeps, their roofs covered with a thin layer of snow, tires wrapped in snow chains whose metal pieces slightly gleamed with white frost in the low temperature, while the hood of one of the cars gave off a faint heat, the steam forming a small, continuous white mist in the cold air, like something breathing.

Chief of Staff Zhang Wanshan stood beside the jeep at the very front, his military overcoat collar turned up to cover half his face, a drop of water about to fall hanging from his frozen red nose tip.

He walked over briskly and saluted, his boots making a dull sound on the snow, his voice tired but clear: "Your Majesty, you have come."

"How is the situation?" Without pleasantries, Li Ling directly took the military map from Chief of Staff Zhang Wanshan, unfolded it on the hood, pressed one hand on the corner of the map and the other hand on the corner blown up by the wind.

The corners of the map had frayed edges from repeated browsing, marked densely with red and blue pencils showing the enemy and friendly postures, with arrows, circles, dashed lines with arrows, and some numbers and abbreviations written in pencil, the handwriting somewhat sloppy, but every stroke was clearly distinguishable.

"After landing, the Japan Second Division advanced in two routes.

The northern route pushed along the railway line toward Yingkou, numbering about 8,000 men, equipped with light and Heavy Machine Gun and infantry guns, covered by a small number of armored cars; the armored cars were light wheeled ones with limited off-road capability.

The southern route detoured along the coastal highway toward Anshan, numbering about 6,000 men, with relatively lighter equipment but stronger mobility.

The two routes were about forty kilometers apart, with a hilly area in between, and no solid connection had been established yet, but reconnaissance showed they were trying to set up observation posts from several commanding heights in the hilly area."

Li Ling looked down at the map, his fingertips moving slowly along the enemy's attack line, extending from the landing point all the way to the first marked circle along the direction of the red line.

A few flakes of snow were brushed off the hood by his cuffs, falling onto the paper surface and quickly melting into tiny water stains, bleeding into a few small dark spots between the contour lines.

"What about our troops?"

"Two divisions of the Second Army Group have entered the western Liaoning positions.

One division is deploying defenses relying on the railway line north of Yingkou, and another division is occupying the hilly commanding heights north of Anshan, constructing circular fortifications.

But time is too tight, less than one division has completed a complete trench system—the trench depth is insufficient, many sections are only dug about 1.2 meters, digging trenches on frozen soil is much slower than expected, and pickaxes can only bite out a thin layer when smashed down.

The railway corps are rushing to transport ammunition and supplies with all their might, but the weather is too cold, and some tracks have frozen and cracked, making the transport speed 40% slower than expected; some road sections need to first stop and use blowtorches to heat the rail joints before continuing."

Li Ling straightened up, his gaze moving away from the map, casting it toward the snow-covered hilly area in the north.

The morning light was spreading from the eastern horizon, dyeing the accumulated snow into a pale golden color; that gold was very pale, as if mixed with a large amount of water, just barely covering the white underlying layer.

Those smoking places in the distance looked like freshly baked scars in the morning light, their edges radiating faint heat, forming a thin mist in the cold air.

The wind blew from that direction, carrying a dry smell of fireworks, mixed with the unique chilling taste in the snow, making one unconsciously want to cough, and a slight dryness would rise in the throat.

"Pass the order." He spoke, his voice not loud, but every word was very clear,

"First, the First Fleet dispatches two Cruiser into the Liaohe Estuary to implement artillery interception on the enemy supply line in the direction of Yingkou, focusing on hitting the onshore assembly areas and ammunition dumps—first calibrate the coordinates, use airburst shells for calibration, and after confirmation, cover with high-explosive shells, five rounds per round, at intervals of ten minutes, lasting until the southern retreat route of the enemy completely loses nighttime passage capability.

Second, the two divisions of the Second Army Group stop constructing fortifications, and the entire army advances this afternoon to contact the enemy twenty kilometers north of Yingkou, not rushing to engage, but first pinning them in place—use Mortar to continuously harass their front line, firing a round every twenty minutes, so they cannot rest or redeploy with peace of mind.

Third, notify Commander Zhao Tieshan that Special Forces will strike the enemy's southern route command post tonight, with the target tentatively set at this location south of Anshan."

His finger tapped on the map, where a small circle was drawn with a pencil next to the abandoned minefield, the font inside the circle looking a bit blurry because the ink was frozen, but the coordinates were still readable,

"They set up a temporary ammunition depot there; knock it out, and the southern route will slow down, slow enough for us to readjust our battle line."

Chief of Staff Zhang Wanshan was silent for a moment, his tone cautious when he spoke: "Your Majesty, taking the initiative to attack? Our people have not arrived yet, and their people have not arrived yet either. Won't acting now be a bit too early? We only have two divisions in place, and although they are few in number, they are gaining a foothold; rashly advancing may stretch the battle line too long."

"If we wait until they all arrive to fight, we will pay a greater price."

Li Ling said as he had already turned around and walked toward the jeep, his boots leaving a string of hurried footprints in the snow, the distance between the footprints being even and stable,

"Have your people prepare, I am going to the front line. No need to send anyone to follow me, just manage the dispatching. The situation I see over there will have three times more content than what is written on the telegram."

Chief of Staff Zhang Wanshan's expression changed, and he took two quick steps to catch up, his voice carrying an irrepressible urgency: "Your Majesty, you just arrived, the front line is not yet fully stable—"

"I won't sit in the back and read telegrams." Li Ling pulled open the car door and sat into the front passenger seat, casually fastening the seat belt, the metal buckle making a crisp click.

"The front line being unstable is precisely why someone needs to be on-site. My presence at the headquarters versus at the front line has two completely different effects on morale. You stay here to coordinate the various units, and I will take just one guard company. Let guides familiar with the terrain lead the way, those who have walked this road and know where the ditches and slopes are. Before the sky falls, you just keep filling ammunition and soldiers into this line like feeding a stove, and as for the rest, I will assess the situation when I get there, right on the spot."

When the jeep started, the soldier in the back row mounted a light machine gun on the roof, the muzzle facing the open wilderness ahead of the front of the car, the sound of the bolt pulling being exceptionally crisp in the cold air, like a metal spring being stretched and then springing back.

The snow crunched under the wheels, and the snow chains crushed over the ice layer emitting a fine metallic cracking sound.

The jeep drove north along a dirt road barely crushed out, the snowy fields on both sides unfolding in the morning light, occasionally seeing sparse farmhouse roofs and bare tree tops in the distance, the snow on the roofs reflecting dazzling white light in the sunlight, and icicles hanging from the tree tops slowly turning in the wind.

There were a few fresh ruts on the road surface, still leaving tread impressions, indicating that vehicles had passed here not long ago; the edges of the ruts had already formed a thin ice shell in the low temperature, with a grayish-white cross-section, like frozen pottery clay.

Li Ling leaned against the seat, his gaze falling on the snow road ahead being compacted by the wheels; that snow turned into a grayish-white after being crushed, like the grayish-white of old bedsheets that had faded after being washed too many times, faintly glowing with a dim light under the gray sky, and deep in the ruts there were still some unmelted ice particles, making a fine crunching sound when crushed by the wheels.

The system sounded in his mind, its voice carrying a rarely seen cautiousness: "Host, are you really going to the front line? Your position holds the command node of the entire operational chain; if an accident happens to you, the subsequent deployment will fall into at least three hours of chaos.

Three hours are enough for the enemy to complete a division-level infiltration; by the time our people react, a gap may have already formed, and once formed, it will be very hard to seal before nightfall."

"I know." Li Ling looked at the road ahead, his gaze passing through the water mist condensed on the windshield and falling on the distant horizon that was becoming clear,

"But precisely because of this, I must go. A commander sitting in the rear and a commander standing in the snow at the front holding binoculars—what the soldiers see are two different things. At the frontline distance, they can see my face, what color boots I am wearing, the abrasion marks left on my shoulders rubbing against the earth wall when bending over to pass through a trench, and the shape of the white breath I exhale condensing into fog in the cold air. They need to see these to believe that this battle is not being fought for them by others, but that someone is standing in the same trench with them, seeing every moving outline on the opposite snowfield, and hearing the sound of the same wind blowing from the same wilderness."

At noon, the convoy stopped at a small village called "Gaojialing" about fifteen kilometers north of Yingkou.

The village had only twenty-some households, with grayish-blue brick houses scattered sparsely across the slope, their roofs piled with accumulated snow, and some tiles blown off by the wind, exposing the grayish-black purlins underneath, whose wood grain had already blurred in the wind and snow.

A few temporary trenches had been dug around the village, the snow shoveled to the edge of the trenches to form low walls, and a few sentries lay behind the low walls, watching the north vigilantly.

The soil inside the trenches had become solid and compacted from repeated trampling, giving a hard echo when stepped on, but at the edges, freshly turned frozen soil clumps and frozen mud could still be seen, the sharp edges of the clumps still crisp and not yet rounded by footsteps.

A modified truck was parked on the threshing floor at the entrance of the village, the truck bed filled with ammunition crates, and several soldiers were unloading goods, the white breath exhaled turning to frost in front of them and then dispersing.

Because of excessive force, one soldier let an ammunition crate slip from his hands, the corner of the crate hitting the snow with a dull thud, and he hurriedly bent down to check if the crate had cracked, his fingers searching around the edge of the crate body, breathing a sigh of relief only after confirming that the tiny crack was merely a scratch on the paint surface, a thin layer of sweat already oozing on his forehead when he straightened up.

When Li Ling jumped off the jeep, several resting soldiers recognized him, and the dry rations in their hands almost dropped to the ground.

A young soldier subconsciously stood up to salute, but Li Ling pressed down on his shoulder: "Don't stand up, lie down and keep warm."

When that hand pressed on the soldier's shoulder, the warmth transmitted through the military coat made the soldier stunned for a moment, and then he slowly sat back down on the ammunition crate, the steamed bun in his hand squeezed into a dent.

Li Ling squatted down and glanced at the markings on the ammunition crates being reloaded — 7.92mm machine gun rounds, two boxes, neatly stacked, pinning down a section of tripwire stepped into the snow, the end of the tripwire also connected to a gray directional mine safety pin, the pull ring of the safety pin turning slightly white due to the low temperature, covered with a very thin layer of frost.

"Who is the highest commander here?" he asked.

A major in his early thirties ran and slid over from the direction of the trench, his uniform stained with mud and frozen snow chunks, his boots pasted with a layer of grayish-white mud, holding the handset of a field telephone in his hand, the canvas cover on the handset frozen hard like a stiff piece of gray cloth: "Reporting to Your Majesty, Commander Zhou Dayong of the Second Battalion, Third Regiment, is organizing the defense."

"A Japan reconnaissance squad, about a platoon, has been spotted two kilometers ahead, observing our positions."

"They have stayed by the river ditch for nearly half an hour, changing three observation positions, with an interval of about a quarter of an hour for each shift, taking no further action, as if waiting for something, or perhaps mapping the distribution of our positions."

Li Ling walked with Commander Zhou Dayong to a low slope north of the village, from where most of the terrain within about two kilometers ahead could be overlooked.

He took out the binoculars from his waist and adjusted the focus, the fog on the lenses slowly dispersing.

On the snowfield, several blurred footprints were extending towards the southeast, and some tiny figures were moving slowly a few hundred meters away, bending over with short steps, stopping to observe for a while after advancing a certain distance.

The wind blew from that direction, smoothing out part of the snow on the edges of their footprints, as if being slowly erased, leaving only some shallow depressions.

"They will launch a probing attack this afternoon." Li Ling lowered the binoculars, "What you need to do is not to stop them, but to make them feel that there is a regiment's strength here, which cannot be broken through."

"The firepower points in the position must take turns firing, don't concentrate on a few locations — the machine gun stops after a long burst, moves to another position and fires again, with unfixed intervals, so that they cannot judge the firepower density and true number of people."

"Wait until they approach within fifty meters to use the Hand grenade, firing early will expose the location of the minefield and also let them judge that our defense depth is insufficient."

Commander Zhou Dayong remembered silently, looked around the terrain again, his gaze sweeping from the dry ditch in the east to the sparse woods in the west: "Your Majesty, if they outflank from both wings, our flank forces are not enough to cope with three directions at the same time — the Third Company's position is in the west, and there is only half a platoon there..."

"The flanks have reserves to respond."

"You just worry about the front."

"Leave a squad in the dry ditch to the east, don't let them sneak over along the ditch."

Li Ling pointed to the dried-up canal east of the village, the bottom of the canal accumulated with thin snow, and the frozen soil on both banks cracked into several slender gaps due to contraction.

"Bury a few directional mines along the canal bank, hide the tripwires below the snow surface, use thin branches to raise the wires to a fist's distance from the ground, and don't expose the reflective wire ends."

"Press down the mine bodies with soil clumps, don't use sandbags, as sandbags are too conspicuous in the snow."

At dusk, the probing attack finally came.

About two platoons of Japan soldiers approached from two directions simultaneously, advancing in skirmish lines with alternate cover, the gunshots sparse and rhythmic, with an interval of about seven or eight seconds between each round of shooting.

Following Li Ling's deployment, Commander Zhou Dayong had the machine gunners take turns firing in bursts, sometimes tight and sometimes loose, creating the illusion of a large tactical depth in the position, sometimes firing a short burst from the east, sometimes a long burst from the west, and sometimes opening fire and ceasing fire simultaneously from both directions.

After a few rounds, those advancing figures stopped on the snow, lying behind a low earthen ridge, not moving for about twenty minutes, like dark spots suddenly frozen on a grayish-white background.

When dusk began to press down from the east, they began to withdraw in an orderly manner, someone bending down to drag the arm of a companion, that person being dragged backward along the snow, leaving a drag mark on the snow behind him, the edges of the drag mark quickly forming thin ice in the low temperature.

A few dark corpses were left on the snow, and dusk was gradually swallowing their outlines, leaving only a few blurred dark shadows, like a few unhealed wounds on the snow, slowly shrinking and blurring in the darkening light, and finally merging into the entire grayish darkness.

Li Ling stayed at the observation post of the front-line position until dark.

His hand leaned against the earthen wall at the edge of the trench, touching a section of dead grass stem cut off by shrapnel, the cross-section of the grass tip still bearing scorch marks burned by gunpowder, which was evidence of the brief high temperature left when the shrapnel grazed by, like a silent annotation written only for those who noticed it.

On the distant skyline, the last ray of the evening glow was extinguishing, dyeing the snow into a dark purple, and then rapidly turning into ink color, the process of color change very fast, as if someone slowly dimmed a lamp on the horizon.

Deep within that ink color, a dull roar like thunder faintly came — that was the First Fleet beginning a fire blockade in the direction of the Liaohe Estuary, the impact point of the heavy artillery about twenty kilometers away from them, the sound refracted through the cold air, dull and distant, like the heartbeat deep in the earth, slow and regular.

The 380mm shells were tearing apart the supplies and fuel reserves that were too late to be transferred, the firelight lighting up along the coastline in the night, like a string of fuses being ignited, the orange-red light flashing and extinguishing in the dark, like some kind of rapidly blinking eyes.

As the night deepened, Li Ling turned around and said to Commander Zhou Dayong beside him: "Before dawn tomorrow, have everyone clean the snow in the trenches, and the muzzles must be kept dry, otherwise at least twenty percent of the first round of salvo tomorrow morning will jam — wrap the bolt with a cloth strip and untie it when using, don't let iron directly touch the frozen ground, that layer of frost will jam the firing pin."

"The ammunition crates must be elevated, at least two palms off the ground, supported by logs, otherwise the ammunition at the bottom of the crates will get damp."

He paused, his gaze sweeping across the distant contours of the hills being swallowed by the night, his voice lowering: "After Commander Zhao Tieshan succeeds on that side tonight, they will adjust the flank troop deployments."

"If you have any unusual movements here, you don't need to ask for instructions, just adjust the deployment directly."

"Sometimes, by the time you receive an order and act, it is already too late — too late means that when you see the enemy pressing over from the flank, the telephone line in your hand hasn't even had time to be connected."

In the distance, a dull explosion came from the south, shorter and crisper than artillery fire, like a taut string suddenly breaking under heavy pressure, with a sharp sound at the moment of breaking, and then quickly covered by the subsequent low-frequency reverberation.

The sound traveled very far on the snow, and was blown by the wind into scattered reverberations, like the last syllable of some signal being slowly dragged out and then disappearing.

Li Ling did not look back, but that direction was precisely the target area where the Special Forces were preparing to infiltrate — the location of that abandoned mine.

He stood at the edge of the trench, gazing toward the wilderness in the south swallowed by the night and snow fog, the cold wind blowing fine snow into his collar and cuffs, the icy touch spreading along his skin all the way to his shoulders.

He didn't know what he was thinking at the moment, he only knew that something he couldn't see but could feel was happening in that direction at the moment — like a hand slowly clenching, the fingers closing one by one, and the last one would make that decisive sound.

The wind stopped for a moment, and then blew again, sending new snow particles into his turned-up collar.

It began to snow again, fine and even, covering the footprints just stepped out layer by layer.

Those footprints slowly became shallow under the accumulated snow, their edges rounded by newly fallen snowflakes, as if being smoothed over again by time, but beneath those footprints was frozen hard soil, leaving micro-invisible indentation marks where they had been stepped on, even if covered by snow, people walking up could distinguish where someone had walked — the snow there would be slightly thinner, and the touch when stepping on it would be slightly harder, like a mark that only the soles of the feet could read.