Meanwhile, the shield troops had continued advancing.
They began attacking the enemy manor's gate.
Soon, they reached the gate.
At that moment, several elderly Jurchen bannermen began firing.
But every shot was blocked by the shields.
The musketeers promptly fired back through the firing ports in the shields.
After a volley, the elderly Jurchen soldiers who had been trying to shoot fell dead.
This tactic was actually similar to a wagon fort.
Historically, however, this type of unit had never appeared on a large scale.
Clearly, it had significant drawbacks.
The first was its poor mobility.
The second was its high cost.
They needed shields as well as armor.
For the westerners, however, manpower was cheap at this time.
Those mercenaries were all men who could barely afford to eat.
The mortality rate among sailors was as high as seventy-five percent.
How did ordinary sailors end up on ships?
At the harbor, someone would buy them drinks. Once a batch got drunk, they would be tied up and hauled aboard.
That was why mutinies and deaths aboard ships were commonplace.
Mercenaries were much the same. The reason musketeers had appeared in such large numbers and replaced archers was that, with whips and clubs, they could be trained into shape in three months.
On the battlefield, they only needed to do whatever the officer told them.
They were beaten into conditioned reflexes with clubs.
Feudal archers could not be trained that way. They needed at least three years, and a single bow took three years to make.
Once the Veteran Jurchen Soldiers had been shot dead,
the remaining aged, weak, sick, and crippled Jurchen began to flee as well.
Naturally, Jurchen feared death too.
In this situation, they had already put up resistance, so they would not be beheaded for fleeing.