While the Huaxia Seventh Army and Wanyan Zonghan set the plains west of Hanzhong ablaze, the beacon-fires of Jiange had likewise been burning fiercely for several days.
Qu Zhengyan had not managed to take Jiange within the planned three days.
Facing Balishu, who had by now resolved himself to die and was defending his position with extraordinary determination, Qu Zhengyan, without a numerical advantage, made only slow progress up the mountain—historically speaking, breaking through the pass ahead and gradually advancing was already an unparalleled achievement in itself, and given the current balance of forces and firearms at Jiange, this too was already something close to a miracle.
With the miniaturization of iron cannons still not decisively achieved, the force Qu Zhengyan led found it very difficult to haul large numbers of cannons out through the narrow mountain roads of the southwest for a sustained assault. The few dozen rockets he had specially brought along—the “Dijiang”—could certainly give him a certain edge in long-range exchanges, but their numbers were far too limited to determine the course of the entire battle.
And Balishu had scattered his cannons across every position on the mountainside; the moment any looked likely to fall, he would ignite the powder barrels and destroy the iron cannons himself. Such determined resistance made it very difficult for the Huaxia Army to seize the cannons and then use them to press further up the mountain.
Beyond the already scarce rocket batteries called “Dijiang,” Qu Zhengyan’s only advantage was that the troops under his command were the elite of the elite—once battle turned into a general melee, they could press the enemy hard. But even so, the Jin soldiers, having already realized there was no way home and that surrender would bring them no good end, were not about to lay down their weapons easily.
Qu Zhengyan, who had always excelled at walking the tightrope and springing surprise attacks, chose, upon seeing the resolve in Balishu’s defense, to abandon any plan for a reckless surprise assault in this battle. Against a veteran of Balishu’s caliber, playing games of cunning ran a real risk of tripping himself up on the battlefield instead.
Taking all these factors together, the fighting at Jiange settled thereafter into a brutal yet methodical campaign. The Huaxia Army would identify one point in each attack, then eliminate it, advancing step by step toward the summit; whenever Balishu organized a counterattack, the Huaxia side would likewise calmly organize its defense, each move answered in kind. Qu Zhengyan gained no great tactical advantage overall, but the several sudden counterattacks Balishu organized—even large-scale artillery barrages—were all calmly turned aside and resolved by Qu Zhengyan one by one.
Many years later, this campaign—each side commanding several thousand men in attack and defense—would appear again and again in military histories. Both sides poured everything they had into this fierce and unrelenting exchange.
This was the final battle of Balishu’s life as a veteran general of the Jin state. On one hand, he faced everything with the resolve of one who had burned his boats, calmly enduring retreat after retreat as his men died and his defensive lines were compressed; on the other hand, even as the reality of the reversed balance of fighting power bore down on him like a mountain collapsing, he still, at several critical junctures, organized fierce resistance and laid clever traps and ambushes.
Like so many Jurchen generals who had followed Aguda into rebellion decades earlier—men who, in their days of smooth sailing after conquering Liao and Wu, had at times indulged in idleness and pleasure—when facing the collapse of their fortunes, they still summoned that same spirit of defiance against this world as they had shown back then, resisting calmly even in the face of overwhelming disadvantage, trying to tear open, with sheer will, a sliver of a chance to survive within this world.
But this time, Qu Zhengyan calmly extinguished every last flicker of his hope.
At the same time, Qu Zhengyan and the Huaxia Fifth Army within Jiange were themselves facing an extremely anxious psychological state.
Outside Jiange, the Huaxia Seventh Army had already relayed word of Wanyan Zonghan’s restless movements and intentions, and the Seventh Army’s staff office had made preparations to meet him head-on. On one hand, this was the Seventh Army’s last chance to face Zonghan’s forces directly; on the other, it was also meant to counter the local setbacks caused by Dai Mengwei’s betrayal around Xiangfan and elsewhere—if this battle were not fought, both Qi Xinhan and that stretch of Han resistance forces would find themselves in serious trouble.
Ning Yi could understand the necessity of all this, but at the same time, although the earlier sparring matches and tactical assessments had given some sense of the Seventh Army’s fighting strength, planning and discussion were one thing, and being thrown onto an actual, fast-changing battlefield was quite another. Twenty thousand against ninety thousand—if anything went wrong and they fell into an enemy trap, the possibility of total annihilation was real, and not a small one.
As Qu Zhengyan pressed his assault on Jiange, the Fifth Army’s internal forces in the southwest had already begun, bit by bit, to be redeployed. Ning Yi, like a miser, further tightened the already overstretched military structure—on one hand pushing to organize more militia to the front, on the other, scraping together another thousand-odd men from an already threadbare force, preparing to send them toward Jiange.
The entire process raced against time, and within three days the redeployment and new arrangements were complete. In the midst of this, certain unspeakable arrangements would, in later years, draw a fair amount of criticism—Ning Yi concentrated the reduction of troop strength around several of the prisoner camps, while at the same time deliberately reinforcing the armed presence nearby. When the staff office reported upward that this risked giving the prisoners an opening to mutiny, Ning Yi’s reply was: “If there’s a mutiny, then deal with the mutiny.”
Faced with the tense and uncontrollable situation outside Jianmen Pass, this response suggested that Ning Yi had, to some degree, already prepared himself for the possibility of a large-scale execution of prisoners—especially given that, around those very prisoner camps where troop strength had been reduced, he had reinforced epidemic-prevention measures and distributed prevention handbooks, which only lent further weight to this suspicion. This was to deal with the situation that would arise once large numbers of corpses appeared in the damp mountain air. The Huaxia soldiers who noticed this development spent the following days with their sense of tension raised yet another level.
Alongside the troop redeployments, men like Hou Wu and Hou Yuanyong, responsible for guarding the prisoners, deliberately let word of the broader picture leak to the “leader” figures among the prisoners. In particular, Ning Yi’s offhand order to “deal with the mutiny” was embellished and spread by various means among the people.
The Huaxia Army’s manpower was indeed stretched thin—but that demon had already set mercy aside, and was preparing to adopt crueler countermeasures… Word of this kind spread among the mid- and high-ranking Jurchen prisoners who still held some standing among their fellow captives, and the mood among the prisoners grew correspondingly tenser and grimmer. Death, or resistance—this was, for some of the Jin prisoners, the last… freely made choice of their lives.
On the twentieth of April, Qu Zhengyan had still not taken Jiange as scheduled. Ning Yi lost his temper at one point, and sent word to the front line: “Ask him whether he wants me to come do it myself.”
The Battle of Jiange came to its end on the afternoon of the twenty-second of April. Balishu, already pushed to his last stand, allowed the remaining Jin soldiers to surrender to the Huaxia Army, then led eight of his personal guard in one final charge.
This was his last charge. The nearby Huaxia soldiers met him head-on; his guards were cut down one by one, and a Huaxia platoon leader named Wang Dai engaged Balishu in single combat. Both men had already been wounded in the earlier fighting, but in the end, Balishu was cut down by Wang Dai in a pool of blood.
Ning Yi, leading over twelve hundred men, also arrived at Jiange that same afternoon. Jiange lay some three hundred-odd li from Hanzhong in a straight line, but accounting for the winding roads, reaching the battlefield would likely require a march of some five hundred li. He ordered his twelve hundred-strong fresh reinforcement force to set out first, moving with all possible speed to strike Zhaohua. “Tell Wanyan Zonghan I’m coming for him.”
That same night, still at Jiange, he received the initial battle reports from the Hanzhong plain. Ning Yi and Qu Zhengyan read them, dumbfounded. “You’re kidding me—Nianhan, micromanaging like this? How does he even keep it together!”
Qu Zhengyan didn’t quite understand what “micromanaging” meant, and only sighed: “These Jurchens’ resolve is something else.” Facing a losing position, the usual choices were either to cut one’s losses decisively or to collapse into total defeat—but Zonghan had done neither. He kept throwing his troops out wave after wave, trying to wear the Huaxia Seventh Army down to death. Had the people of the old Wu dynasty possessed this kind of resolve back in the day, there would never have been a second Jin invasion at all.
“…Zonghan doesn’t want a large-scale decisive battle, so he’s throwing his troops out like this instead, hoping that each unit will have some fighting power the first time it engages. Once broken, all he can rely on is how strong these Jurchens’ desire to go home really is. So many years now, who knows how many have died—we keep paying that debt, and we’re still paying it, even now… I suspect Zonghan may have set some mid-term rally points, telling these men where to regroup if defeated, then using mid-level officers to gather up the routed troops—but routed troops have limited fighting power… I think at first he might make it look like he has an endless supply of reinforcements, but once things reach a certain point, the whole framework will collapse… General Qin over there must have seen this possibility too, which is why he simply chose to meet the ever-changing situation without changing his own approach, grinding it out one battle at a time…”
Qu Zhengyan traced out the likely course of the war on the map. With the distance between them so great, such speculation might not amount to much—but on the whole, the fact that the Seventh Army had not fallen into a trap and collapsed outright, and could still, broadly speaking, fight with composure, did at least ease Ning Yi’s anxiety somewhat.
“These spendthrifts…” When he cursed them like that, every so often, his tone actually sounded rather fond.
Before dawn on the twenty-third, twelve hundred Huaxia soldiers took advantage of the cover of darkness to launch a surprise attack, breaking through the ancient city of Zhaohua, then held by Han troops.
After the Jurchens had departed, the Han army garrisoning the city numbered roughly twenty thousand-odd, but the assault met with almost no resistance at all. It was as if they had already known the Huaxia Army was coming; the moment the Huaxia vanguard scaled the walls by rope, there was hardly any fighting at all before the garrison inside the city had already knelt before the Black Banner.
According to the subsequent interrogations, some of the Han commanders had already fled the city the night before, taking with them what remained of the gold and silver stores.
The force that had taken Jiange rested briefly, and then Ning Yi and Qu Zhengyan gathered eight hundred men still fit to fight, marching north to link up with the vanguard at Zhaohua.
That same day, around noon, Fan Hong’an, battalion commander of the Second Battalion, Third Regiment, of the Huaxia Seventh Army’s Second Division, led his men in tricking open the southern gate of Hanzhong. From a broader perspective, at this point, the several tens of thousands of troops led by Zonghan were, as a whole, already being smashed to pieces bit by bit under the hammer blows of the Huaxia Army; some of the defeated and scattered Jin soldiers were fleeing toward Hanzhong, and having already anticipated the possibility of defeat, the Jurchens could hardly turn away these defeated men.
The system Zonghan had woven together over these short few days had, in some of its workings, inevitably run into trouble—and Fan Hong’an found and exploited that very gap. Having taken the gate, he immediately began fortifying his position; that same afternoon, Chen Hai, leading over seven hundred men, came racing toward the same spot—he too had had his eye on Hanzhong, only to find Fan Hong’an had beaten him to it by a step.
After this, Gao Qingyi led his forces in through the western gate, while Zonghan, Shaba, Sheyema, and the others were also converging toward this area. That same afternoon, Qin Shaoqian arrived at Hanzhong as well; men were gathering in growing numbers, and street fighting broke out within the city of Hanzhong, while outside the walls, preparations began for a positional battle.
That evening, Wanyan Xiyin appeared on the Han River east of Hanzhong, leading a great fleet of ships. He committed the army under his command to battle—this was the last usable reserve force of the Jurchen Western Route Army. The moment he learned that fighting had broken out here, he abandoned his plan to besiege Qi Xinhan near Xiangfan and instead turned his fleet west up the Han River. His arrival, at this moment, brought enormous pressure to bear on the Seventh Army at the Hanzhong front.
From last year through this one, Wanyan Xiyin’s presence had truly been the single most troublesome thing for the Seventh Army. Formidable as the Seventh Army’s own fighting strength was, Xiyin’s responses had consistently proven to be the most correct, and the most difficult to counter. Earlier, when the Seventh Army had forced an assault on Zhaohua and fought a round against the Tushan Guard, Xiyin had mobilized tens of thousands of Han cannon fodder, causing the Seventh Army’s advance to come to nothing. This year, he had manipulated the situation around Xiangfan, causing tens of thousands of Han troops, after switching sides, to be broken and scattered instead; even Qi Xinhan’s perilous thousand-li march ultimately fell into a trap, and the resistance forces of the greenwood around Xiangfan were wiped out entirely.
Facing an enemy like this was much like facing Ning Yi himself—though there was no fear on the level of raw combat power, no one ever knew when they might fall into some pit he had dug, and that alone was enough to weigh on anyone psychologically.
But fortunately, another piece of news had already reached them as well.
The Huaxia Fifth Army had broken Jiange, killed Balishu, and afterward taken Zhaohua. Ning Yi and Qu Zhengyan were leading their troops racing toward Hanzhong—should this demon manage to seize hold of their tail, the defeat at Wangyuan Bridge might well repeat itself here on the banks of the Han River.
On the twenty-fourth of March—hmm—by the twenty-fourth, east and south of the Han River, the Han armies around Xiangfan still had no way of judging from the intelligence which side, the Huaxia Seventh Army or Zonghan’s main force, held the upper hand. But word that Ning Yi had broken through Jianmen Pass was already spreading across a thousand li and more.
At this time, Dai Mengwei and the others had not yet finished absorbing the great stores of Jurchen supplies and personnel around southern Xiangfan; the tale of his having “saved” a million common people remained only in the earliest stages of its propagation. On this day, the various Han army commanders who had recently pledged loyalty to Dai Mengwei, gathered near Xicheng County, were quietly exchanging news among themselves.
“The demon’s broken out of Jiange… marching on Hanzhong…”
As people spoke of this, their faces, and their voices, had all turned pale and grave…