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Chapter 367: Public Sacrifice (Part 1)

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    Wuhan moved very quickly. On the afternoon of the 16th, it received a good news from the 7th Division. On the morning of the 17th, the relevant rewards for the 7th Division were distributed to the headquarters of the Third Theater District Commander.

    The commander of the Third War Zone did not dare to neglect and immediately called the headquarters of the 7th Division to inform them of the matter. However, they were told that all the senior officers in the division had gone to attend the funerals of the fallen officers and soldiers today, and only a few combat staff officers were staying behind.

    The Huangni Mountain outside Bengbu City is crowded with people, filled with mourning and joy.  Today, the Seventh Division held a collective funeral for all the fallen officers and soldiers. Not only the surviving officers and soldiers of the Seventh Division participated, but also the common people who had returned to the city spontaneously came to Huangni Mountain to bid farewell to the heroes.

    At this time, rows of stretchers were placed at the foot of Huangni Mountain. The stretchers were covered with white cloth, only pairs of intact or incomplete feet were exposed.

    Because there were too many dead, there were not so many coffins at all, so simple stretchers could only be used as coffins for the soldiers.

    At this time, pits have been dug on Huangni Mountain. They are two meters long, one meter wide and two meters deep. They are very standard. These pits are densely packed along the foot of Huangni Mountain and extending up the hillside.  There are tens of thousands of them.

    Li Guoyao knows the specific number. There are 11,624 in total. This does not mean that the 7th Division lost more than 11,000 people in total during this battle. It is just that after some soldiers were killed,  The bodies have been buried on the spot, and some have simply lost their bones. After the war, the headquarters of the Seventh Division only collected so many remains of martyrs.

    At ten o'clock in the morning, a cavalry team suddenly appeared at the foot of the mountain. There were more than 500 people in this cavalry team, all of them tall horses. Except for the tattered clothes on their bodies, the knights were very strong in spirit and momentum.

    The cavalry team came to the foot of Huangni Mountain, and then all dismounted and lined up. Then five or six generals wearing woolen coats appeared in front of the team, and the leader was Li Guoyao, the temporary commander of the seventh division.

    ¡°Then I saw Li Guoyao taking the Blue Sky and White Sun Flag from a soldier, holding it firmly in his hand, and leading the team towards the front.

    When the team came to the front of the crowd, Li Guoyao handed the national flag to the guard behind him, then he and deputy division commander Xu Hu lifted a stretcher and walked toward the mountain.

    Immediately afterwards, the soldiers following him also carried stretchers up the mountain in pairs.

    Soon, other soldiers and even the people who came with them joined the crowd. They carried the bodies of all the fallen soldiers to the dug pits, then sold the soil and erected tombstones.

    Since there were so many soldiers who died in battle, there were not that many stone tombstones at all. Therefore, with the approval of Li Guoyao, all the fallen soldiers, whether officers or soldiers, chose fine cypress wood as tombstones.

    The entire funeral was solemn and solemn, during which many people shed tears. Although they did not know these fallen soldiers, they all knew that these soldiers died in the battle to protect Bengbu City.

    At eleven o'clock, all the fallen soldiers were buried, and then Li Guoyao and others held a public memorial for all the fallen soldiers at the foot of the mountain.

    Standing at the foot of Huangni Mountain, Li Guoyao felt very heavy as he looked at the tens of thousands of ordinary people and soldiers who came spontaneously.

    Although he had expected before the war that the battle would be heavy in casualties, he did not expect that more than 17,000 soldiers would be killed directly. This was only determined. In fact, the casualties were calculated after the war.  In the past few days, the field hospital has reported another 1,300 dead casualties, which means that the number of casualties of the 7th Division in this battle has actually reached 19,000.

    And it can be expected that this number is not the final number of casualties. As time goes by, there will still be many seriously wounded people who cannot hold on and die.

    The loss of nearly 20,000 people in the first battle was something Li Guoyao had never thought of before. Even during the battle to defend Nanjing, they did not suffer such heavy losses.

    With a simple loudspeaker in his hand, Li Guoyao was speechless for a long time, even though he really had a lot to say!

    There was a whimper in the crowd. The first thing the Seventh Division did after entering Bengbu was to recruit ordinary people to strengthen the city defense, and then asked all the ordinary people in the city to evacuate Bengbu City. This was resisted by many ordinary people, and even  abuse.

    However, the Seventh Division still withstood all kinds of pressure and evacuated 98% of the people in the city, leaving only some old people who could not move.

    People didn¡¯t understand it before, but when they returned to Bengbu City and saw the city that was almost in ruins and corpses on the ground, they knew how tragic this battle was.

      They even heard from the survivors that the Japs fired poison gas bombs into the city at the most critical moment of the battle, and used large-caliber cannons and aircraft to shell and bomb them. Fortunately, the soldiers defending the city evacuated them.  If we don't get out, we don't know how many people will die.

    At that moment, the people in Bengbu understood the defenders¡¯ painstaking efforts!

    Standing in front of the crowd, Li Guoyao was silent for a long time, and then he said: "Folks and soldiers: My heart is very heavy today, because today I saw off more than 11,000 of my brothers, and this is just the loss of my life."  Some of the brothers, and there are more brothers who don¡¯t even have such a simple grave, they are scattered in the world like ordinary dust.¡±

    "In this battle, we sacrificed more than 19,000 people, and more than 20,000 people were injured. The number of killed plus injured exceeded 42,000. More than 19,000 lives were lost like this.  They are not cold names, nor are they emotionless plants and trees. They are also other people's fathers, husbands and sons, and they carry the dreams and hopes of their families, but all of this came to an abrupt end because of this damn war."

    "Originally they had a happy life and a bright future. Some of them had just gotten married and their newlywed wives were waiting for them at home. Some of them had just become fathers and had not even waited for their children to wake up.  His father died as soon as he heard it, and some people¡¯s old father and mother are already old and sick. I hope he can go back and visit, butbut all of this"

    Following Li Guoyao's voice, there was a cry below. Before this war, the Seventh Division recruited a large number of young and middle-aged people from Bengbu. At this time, among the people who died in the battle, Bengbu locals accounted for at least one-third, and even among these people  Their relatives and friends were killed in action, and they felt the same.

    To be honest, many people in this era do not have much favorable impressions of soldiers, because in many cases there is not much difference between soldiers and bandits. One is secretly harming people, while the other is openly oppressing under the guise of legality.  Being so kind, soldiers are often even more hateful than bandits.

    The Central Military Commission also wants to point out that there is really no bottom line in which local warlords cause harm to the people, so there is no such thing as a fishy relationship between the military and civilians.

    But today, in this small town in northern Anhui that was mostly destroyed by the war, in front of the tombs of more than 10,000 fallen soldiers, all the people felt a strong sense of family and country.

    Although many of them are illiterate and don't have that much sense, most of them are dog-slaughters for their righteousness. The lower class people are often moved by such emotions.

    Therefore, the entire Huangni Mountain was whimpering, and almost everyone was wiping tears!  (Remember the website address: www.hlnovel.com
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