Pan Long watched the Slavian soldiers slowly closing in and could not help sighing.
He knew Doctor had done well—better, in fact, than Pan Long could have imagined.
Facing an army of over a hundred thousand with only three or four thousand people, Doctor had held out for nearly two hours while keeping his operatives' losses remarkably low. Aside from one or two who had been especially unlucky and taken fatal hits in the earlier exchange of fire, the rest had suffered injuries at worst.
The Slavian army, meanwhile, had lost at least two or three thousand men.
Anyone would have called that a battle well fought.
If the Slavian army had numbered only ten or twenty thousand, this battle could practically have been considered won. After losing more than a tenth of their troops, anyone would have needed time to regroup before fighting again.
Zion's people could then have withdrawn in peace, without worrying about pursuit.
Even if the Slavian army had numbered fifty or sixty thousand, the battle would have reached a point where Zion had some chance of victory.
They were still five or six li from Zion. With defenses laid out in layers, they could hold each position in turn and wear down even an army of fifty or sixty thousand by the time it fought its way through.
Armies everywhere relied on fighting spirit. With it, every soldier fought bravely; one man could take on ten, and an army could fight to its last soldier.
Fighting spirit, put simply, meant that soldiers understood why they were fighting and were willing to fight to the death for that reason.
That was why, throughout history, defenders had often become iron armies, while attackers willing to face death had been few and far between. When an army marched