Wearing British clothes as a second-generation aristocrat

Chapter 105 The Battle of Cooks 12

Chapter 105 The Battle of Cooks 12

Time quickly came to 9 o'clock, the sun rose, and the thick fog in the swamp gradually dissipated.

Constrained by the deep peat bogs on both sides, the wide and orderly line formations are of no use here.

Two full-strength elite companies, totaling 360 French soldiers, were forced to break into a long, narrow single-column line, end to end, like a long, dark blue serpent, slowly inching forward toward the pass of the Blexen outpost.

Meanwhile, a 30-man field engineering detachment, carrying basic engineering tools such as picks, shovels, and short axes, followed closely behind the vanguard.

"Merde! — Diable! — Bougre! — Putain!" The French engineering platoon leader burst into a string of profanities upon seeing the barbed wire fence of varying heights on the narrow road.

The engineer platoon leader said to the scout lieutenant, "God knows how the British came up with this disgusting thing. We don't have the tools to break through this kind of barbed wire."

In 1804, the European military industrial system did not have any special cutting pliers specifically designed for cutting barbed wire.

The engineering equipment of this era was designed only for breaking down wooden barricades, digging trenches, blowing up city walls, and cutting down trees.

Short axes were used to chop logs, and pickaxes were used to break ground and dig trenches. French engineers did not have any tools that could efficiently cut barbed wire, let alone the densely wrapped, barbed wire.

Touching it with bare hands will instantly cut your skin; if you pull the wire slightly, the copper bell hanging on the net will sound a clear alarm, and the next second will be a precise sniper shot from the enemy.

"We can't cut the wire, we can only dig up the stake." The sapper squad leader stared at the thick oak stake buried deep in the ground, his face grim, and gave the order, "Everyone spread out, use pickaxes to dig through the soil at the bottom of the stake, and dig the entire stake up by the roots!"

This is the only option right now.

But Dugan had foreseen this; all the stakes securing the barbed wire were driven nearly two feet into the ground at an angle by the soldiers, and reinforced with rubble around them, making them far more stable than ordinary fences. Digging through the soil and pulling out the stakes by hand would take an extremely long time.

Even more fatally, all groundbreaking work would be exposed to the guns of the defending troops.

"Sir, you need to buy us some time," the engineering platoon leader said with a helpless expression.

"Alright!" The lieutenant gritted his teeth. In order to buy the engineers precious time for breaching the defenses, the entire first lieutenant company pressed forward, squeezing themselves into the narrow, hard passage. On one hand, they fired at the enemy on the other, and on the other hand, they built a barrier with their flesh and blood to attract all the firepower of the German light infantry.

"Have the French gone mad?" Behind the outpost wall, von Altyn was quite surprised. He looked at the densely packed blue figures in the narrow passage. "They actually want to use a human wall to cover their engineers?"

But von Arten still gave the order without any mercy.

"Free fire".

With a whoosh, nearly a hundred German light infantrymen, relying on the rammed earth walls, dilapidated watchtowers, and makeshift foxholes of the outpost, used the Beck rifles' ultra-long effective range of 200 yards to calmly select targets and carry out precise point-to-point sniping beyond the range of the French smoothbore muskets.

The narrow passage blocked all the French troops' escape routes.

On the left and right sides were swampy mud that could swallow living people, and in front and behind were comrades advancing in the same direction. The soldiers could neither disperse to avoid bullets nor retreat in large numbers. They could only passively endure the one-sided bloody massacre.

Then you see the blue wall of men bursting with blood, and wounded French soldiers falling into the swamp, their blood staining the swamp red.

"Counterattack! Raise your guns and counterattack immediately!" roared the French lieutenant.

The French soldiers hastily raised their rifles, and the sound of gunfire echoed through the swamp.

The 1777 improved Charville smoothbore gun, the mainstay of the French army, had an effective range of only eighty yards. Beyond that distance, the trajectory became scattered and unpredictable, and the hit rate depended entirely on luck.

The 1801 Versailles rifle, issued to a small number of officers, had a range that was barely on par with the Beck rifle, but its loading process was cumbersome and complicated, and its rate of fire was less than half that of the Beck rifle.

Even worse, the passage on the French side was very narrow, allowing only three soldiers to line up at a time. Even if the soldiers in the front row fired while the soldiers in the back row fired while standing, only six or seven soldiers could fire at a time.

On the other hand, the light infantry of von Alten's troops on the opposite side had at least a hundred men capable of firing at a time, and their firepower output was on a completely different level.

Ahead, the engineers lay prone on the muddy ground, frantically digging through the dirt under a hail of bullets.

Bullets would occasionally whiz past their ears or pierce the soil around them; every inch of soil they dug away cost the lives of several soldiers.

Just as a combat engineer was prying away the rubble at the base of a wooden stake, a precise lead bullet pierced the side of his helmet. Blood mixed with brain matter splattered onto the barbed wire and black mud, and the body slid straight down, falling into the desolate swamp beside him.

Along the road, screams and wails never ceased.

Rows of French soldiers fell one after another under the relentless long-range sniping. Wounded soldiers who were shot but not killed struggled in agony, blocking the already narrow passage. The soldiers following behind could only step over the corpses and blood of their comrades to continue pushing forward.

In the panic, some people lost their footing and fell into the swampy mud. Their desperate cries for help were quickly swallowed by the swamp.

This battle-hardened French elite company had never fought such a frustrating and bizarre battle.

They couldn't see the enemy's exact location, and they didn't even have the chance to fight the enemy head-on. They could only stand passively as live targets, gradually being worn down.

Von Altin, hiding behind the fortifications, silently watched the horrific scene of the French being torn apart, and said in a flat tone, "Poor Frenchmen!"

Time ticked by, and blood stained the entire highland passageway.

After a full forty minutes of bloody struggle, with the last oak stake being pulled out by the engineers, the barbed wire barrier that had been blocking the front of the pass was finally completely dismantled.

Of the thirty-man engineering detachment, only eleven survived with injuries.

As the smoke cleared slightly, everyone gasped when they looked at the narrow passage.

Corpses lay strewn across the ground, and dark red blood, soaked in black mud, covered the entire hardened high ground.

The French First Vanguard Company, originally a fully-organized unit of 180 men, was completely wiped out.

Von Aalten was deeply moved, saying, "Even as enemies, I admire your bravery."

After forty minutes of one-sided slaughter, von Alten's troops were almost out of ammunition. Von Alten immediately sent a messenger to have Halkert's troops in the rear relieve him.

Upon receiving the report, Lakul nearly stumbled and fell off his horse.

Lacour envisioned that at most two hundred casualties would be enough to breach the British defenses.

But reality dealt him the heaviest blow; he lost an entire elite platoon just to dismantle a simple barbed wire fence.

"General—" the adjutant beside him asked cautiously, "Should we consider changing our attack strategy?"

Lakul's jaw was clenched, maintaining the composure of a senior officer, but after a few seconds, he abruptly released his grip on the riding crop and, through gritted teeth, ordered: "Order the Second Vanguard Company to take up position and not retreat: Notify the Artillery Company to bring up two six-pound field guns."

Since flesh and blood cannot break through the British defenses, let the French cannons talk to the British!