Chapter 876: The Arabs, Defeated! I (1/2)
Chapter 876: The Arabs, Defeated! (I)
Translated by: Hypersheep325
Edited by: Michyrr
The seventh, ninth, and tenth infantry units… these were elite infantry units personally trained by Umar, his personal guards. They also had another duty: assaulting hardened points of resistance on the battlefield. The Arabs had conquered the world through cavalry, but they had also researched methods to deal with cavalry.
After all, the Arabs were far from the only power to possess and train cavalry!
These were Umar's handpicked men who had helped him kill the elite troops of numerous enemy states on the battlefield, both infantry and cavalry.
As the army moved and shifted, an invisible net of death was drawing in around the five thousand Wushang Cavalry. But things were far from over. Umar was a renowned general, and his expertise was not restricted to mere defense.
”The thirtieth cavalry unit, thirty-third cavalry unit, fortieth, fiftieth, and eightieth cavalry units… charge and smash their left and right flanks! Crush them!”
Umar's eyes were cold and emotionless as they locked onto the flanks of the Qixi army.
'Avoid the solid and strike the weak' was not a principle that only the Great Tang understood. The Arabs might not have had many strategy texts, but through countless bloody battles, Umar had grasped this obvious principle through real combat. This force of Tang cavalry truly was very powerful, but this did not mean that all the Tang soldiers were like that.
As long as he could bypass the Tang cavalry and strike at their weakness, defeating the main force in the rear, then in the end, no matter how powerful this group of Tang cavalry was, the victory would still go to the Abbasid Caliphate.
And not only that, even though the Tang forces seemed to cover the earth, Umar understood that all he needed to do with his tactics was buy some time. The Arabs had gathered more than three hundred thousand elite soldiers at Talas, and once those three hundred thousand soldiers were fully mobilized, the only thing awaiting the Tang would be death.
Boom!
The earth swayed and trembled. Umar had barely spoken when a force of fifteen thousand Arab cavalry rode out from the rear, dividing into two halves that rode to the left and right, galloping past the shield wall like black whirlwinds. Black halos clanged and clattered under their feet as they rapidly accelerated to their maximum speeds.
Three hundred zhang went by in a flash!
The fifteen thousand cavalry had smoothly bypassed the Wushang Cavalry, as well as the forces led by Sun Zhiming, Chen Burang, and the others. They now had a clear path to the rear of the Qixi army.
Infantry!
In the face of charging cavalry, they had always been sheep waiting for the slaughter. In the history of infantry versus cavalry, the numbers of times that infantry had won was extremely small. A fully-armored cavalry force could charge down an infantry force five, six, even ten times its number, and the ferocious Arab cavalry had annihilated infantry forces beyond number.
”Kill them!”
”Crush their formation! Pulverize them!”
”For the Abbasid Caliphate! Kill these infidels!”
Hooves thundered along the ground as the fifteen thousand Arab cavalry and their black halos approached the Tang rear like a majestic hurricane. One hundred and fifty zhang, one hundred zhang, fifty zhang… the distance was rapidly decreasing, and they could now see the soldiers on the transport carriages getting off and taking up formation.
But this was already too late. Before these veteran and lighting-fast Arab cavalry, such efforts were pointless.
”Kill them!”
Vicious bellows filled the air as the fifteen thousand cavalry pushed themselves to cross that final stretch.
”Readyyy!”
At almost the same time, a loud order came from the Tang side. Silvery-white carts were suddenly pushed forward, five Tang infantry standing next to each one. And in front of these infantry, Chen Bin had unsheathed his Wootz Steel sword and pointed it forward.
His gaze was aloof, his back straight, his sword hand unmoving as if fixed in place.
Forty zhang!
Thirty zhang!
”Fire!”
At the final moment, Chen Bin swung down his sword. The hundreds of small carts instantly began to move. Boooom! For a moment, the world seemed silent, all other noise drowned out by a deafening explosion, the music of death itself.
Countless ballista bolts, each of them more than one zhang long and covered in inscriptions, were fired out of the small carts in a torrential rain.
”Careful!”
”Ballista bolts!”
The eyes of the Arab cavalry at the very front instantly widened at the sight of these bolts, and the breath in their lungs seemed to freeze as terror seized their bodies. They strenuously pulled on the reins of their horses to turn and flee, but it was already too late.
Bang! A horse shrieked as a thick ballista bolt blew through it, and then a second, a third… The renowned Arab warhorses, each of them wrapped in thick armor that was impervious to ordinary arrows, might as well have been made of paper in the face of the Great Tang's mighty ballista bolts.