Shells screamed across the sky and crashed into the earth, exploding with a thunderous boom that sent rocks, smoke, and dust flying everywhere.
"Damn you, Mi Long. You were the one who egged Master Wang into opening fire." Bu La crouched in a bomb shelter, grumbling irritably.
"So what?" Mi Long replied righteously. "If we don't fight the little Japanese, will they stop fighting us?"
After two rounds of shelling, before they even had time to count the casualties, Wang Yan called out, "The little Japanese are attacking! Kill them!"
The routed soldiers moved swiftly, all rising to their feet and taking up their weapons to return fire.
Mi Long handled the machine gun and swept it across them with a burst of rat-a-tat-tat.
Wang Yan walked over and smacked him on the head. "Why are you spraying bullets when they're still two li away? Short bursts! Short bursts! Ammunition isn't unlimited! Don't you know how to run a household frugally?"
So Mi Long obediently began firing in short bursts. Brief rat-a-tat-tats, rat-a-tat-tats, stood out sharply amid the dense gunfire of the battlefield.
Wang Yan constantly shifted positions through the trenches, even heading to other positions. After all, more than three hundred men could not all be stationed on one hilltop. They had to be properly deployed to create overlapping fields of fire.
He was not afraid of revealing himself. He ran around behind the lines to inspect how the routed soldiers were responding, occasionally pointing out their mistakes while also trying to save soldiers who had been wounded in the bombardment.
Positional warfare was actually comparatively simpler. It was a matter of distributing firepower properly, then adjusting that distribution in time according to the enemy's attack, arranging ammunition resupply, rotating replacements, and so on.
In this battle, their position