Fox of France

Strictly speaking, in the face of fortifications full of anti-gun holes, barbed wire, and trenches, cannons alone cannot completely solve the problem. Moreover, in the era when there was no synthetic ammonia, both propellants and explosives were derived from saltpeter or nitrate. Production of these items is quite limited. Even after the opening of the Panama Railway, the French were able to import a large amount of saltpeter from Chile. But the consumption of these saltpetres is also very large, and it is not mainly consumed in military affairs, but in agriculture.

Yes, the main use of these saltpeter mines is as a fertilizer to increase agricultural production. For a long time, in France, Napoleon's staunchest and most stable supporters are the farmers in the French countryside. It is very interesting to say that in today's France, the enthusiasm of farmers to participate in politics is significantly higher than that of urban residents.

In the era of the Great Revolution, French urban residents were significantly more politically active. But in the Napoleonic period, due to the granting of land by veterans and the organization of the Veterans Association, farmers became more and more organized. Today's Veterans Association has completely become a monopoly syndicate economically (a kind of enterprise alliance, each enterprise cannot independently sell goods and purchase raw materials, but must be handled by the head office in a unified way, thus competing for product sales and fierce competition in the distribution of raw materials. They retain their production and legal independence, but lose their commercial independence.).

Nowadays, the procurement of various raw materials and the export of commodities in rural France are almost all carried out through the Veterans Association. This gives this organization great economic and political influence. At the order of the association, the entire French countryside will stand up to support Napoleon.

Of course, any support will not be invaluable. All the gifts bestowed by fate have their prices marked in secret. The reason why the Veterans Association supported Napoleon was not only because many of their members were Napoleon's old subordinates-this was a factor, but not a decisive factor. The most decisive factor is that Napoleon's various policies are all representing their interests and safeguarding their interests.

Napoleon did not collect agricultural tax. In theory, agricultural tax still exists, but because of the existence of a series of relief conditions, in fact, it is almost not collected. (Of course, if the individual is changed, it will be difficult to say whether the agricultural tax will still be collected.) Moreover, Napoleon's way of unifying electricity for irrigation and opening up foreign markets has brought them a lot of benefits. Therefore, the entire countryside has always supported Napoleon.

In cities, however, the situation is different. The population mobility in today's cities is relatively high, and many people in cities are still so-called honorary French or preparatory French. Just as Mentheus said, a person must have a reliable industry before he can have a reliable political attitude. Therefore, the support for Napoleon among those in the city is actually weaker than that in the countryside.

One of the tricks in politics is not to betray the fundamentals. In many cases, the wavering part of the power is so critical that politicians are prone to have an illusion, or for the so-called election interests, feel that the basic market will always be on my side, as the so-called I abuse The basic disk has been played thousands of times, and the basic disk treats me like first love. Then sacrifice the basic plate to please the so-called centrist. This is completely a brain problem, the idea is too beautiful, really thinking about eating at the east house and sleeping at the west house? Even the king knew he couldn't do that.

But there are always many such fools in history. For example, the baked (K), steamed (M) and tou (T) of later generations have all gone to Ghost Island, and they still make this kind of mistake all the time, always wanting to be the president of the whole people. Then the centrists found out that they must not be the basic plate for baking steamed buns, otherwise they would be baked by them; and the basic plate also found that they were regarded as steamed buns by the baked buns. So not only did the centrists fail to hold back, but the basic market also ran away, and finally it became the way it is now dying.

Napoleon was no fool, and neither were Joseph and Lucien. That's why Napoleon often said publicly: No matter how poor you are, you can't be poor in agriculture, and no matter how miserable you are, you can't be poor farmers.

And he not only said so, but also did so. For example, most of the saltpeter that was dragged back from South America thousands of miles away was turned into ammonium nitrate explosives, ah, no, it was ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which was sprinkled into the wheat fields by farmers. . Therefore, France's wheat yield is high, the cost is low, and it is popular in the market, which makes Ukraine, which has the most fertile black soil in Europe, suffer another famine. Of course, this is a matter of the free market, and it is also a matter of the Russian government. In short, it is by no means the responsibility of France.

As for the signs of famine in Ukraine, the main reason is that some Russians are too eager for quick success. After the relationship between France and the British became tense, the British naturally followed the tradition and sent diplomats to try to form an alliance with Russia against France. However, the Russians believed that relying on Russia and Britain alone was not enough to fight against France and his large number of slave countries in Europe. Russia would not join such a union unless the British could bring in Austria, Prussia, and Spain.

The Russians did not have the idea of ​​forming an alliance with the British and taking chestnuts for the British, but this does not mean that the Russians have no other ideas. If it is said that the actions of the French towards the United Kingdom triggered a frenzy to carve up the United Kingdom, then it seems difficult for the Russians, who are farther away, to get a share of this matter. However, if the attention of the French and other European countries is attracted by the United Kingdom, then it seems to be a very good choice to take the opportunity to bully and bully Turkey in the south.

However, although the Turks are not as strong as they used to be, it still takes a lot of effort to defeat them. As the saying goes, a lean camel is bigger than a horse. This is a huge empire after all.

And over the years, the Turks have trained new troops and bought various weapons, especially those retired by the French, many of which have been picked up by the Turks.

Therefore, the Russians also need to strengthen their armaments and purchase weapons and supplies. And they even have more expenses, for example, they want to develop their own industry, so they need to buy machines; they need to maintain their bought machines, so they need to hire French engineers; they want to train their own engineers, so they spend money To study in France; they want to build their own university, so... In short, all these things need money, but where does the money come from? Russia's industry has made considerable progress over the years, but compared to France, it is completely insignificant. Civilian goods and the like are completely uncompetitive, and they are military supplies. In fact, if you calculate the cost, and look at the price of second-hand goods in France, it is really not as good as buying them.

Since industry cannot make money, it can only rely on agriculture. That is, by exporting food. But the problem is that French food is everywhere in today's international market.

Over the years, there has been a strange phenomenon in the international market, that is, whatever the French buy, the price goes up; whatever the French sell, the price drops. Now the French themselves are preparing for war, which has the consequence that the prices of war-related things are increasing. In order to buy these vital things, the Russians had to export more grain, but fortunately, the weather was good this year, and Ukraine had a bumper harvest. However, the French also had a good harvest this year... and then the Ukrainians starved to get enough money...

However, although the Ukrainians were starving, the Russians finally completed the corresponding preparations. So after France declared war on Britain, the Russians immediately started military exercises on the border between Russia and Turkey. After a day of exercise, the Russians found the Turks and said to them: We have a soldier missing during the exercise. We suspect that he was kidnapped by your people. So we asked to search and search in your barracks!

Such an unreasonable and completely shameless request was of course rejected by the Turks without hesitation, and then the Russians bombarded the Turkish barracks, and then... the war between the Russians and the Turks broke out again.

In this regard, France expressed the hope that the two sides will exercise restraint and not destroy the rare stability and unity in Europe. But now the French are also busy fighting with the British, and they don't have time to take care of them for the time being. Of course, if there is no air traffic control, there will be no air traffic control, and business still needs to be traded. Because the price of weapons and ammunition is high now.

Therefore, although the land battleships of the French army have a lot of cannons, they are equipped with quite limited shells. There is no way, anyway, the Irish are cheaper than shells.

However, a hard attack is still not the first choice of the French. First of all, the morale of the British in the city must be hit.

Generally speaking, the morale of the enemy army under siege is not easy to maintain. But if there is a back road, it will be different.

Therefore, to lower the morale of the defenders in the city, the best way is to threaten their retreat first.

The 280mm gun uses 40 times the caliber, uses gunpowder propellant, and has an exaggerated maximum elevation angle of 45 degrees, so the range is quite far. From the predetermined artillery position, it can directly hit the port of Dublin. Therefore, the French plan is to first attack the port berth with a few shells. Although it is impossible to block the port with only one gun. However, any attack on the port can greatly demoralize the defenders, and if it happens to sink a ship or two, that's even better.

So this morning, the sky was bright, and the French army became busy on the ground.

The first is to observe the weather, especially the wind direction. The weather was good that day, the sky was clear, cloudless, and the wind was not strong. There were only one to two winds near the surface. The wind might be stronger at higher places, but it was still a good weather for launching observation balloons.

A huge hot air balloon rose from the French position. Then the barrel of the 280mm gun was slowly lifted up, pointing to the sky.

First shot, test fire! Commander Colonel Hill gave an order, and a 280 shell flew out of the long barrel. The shell drew a parabola, and then fell towards the port.

With a rumbling whistling sound, the shells passed over Dublin like a train with its siren sounding, and then plunged into Dublin's port.

For fear of accidentally hitting the urban area and causing Irish casualties, the artillery was fired a little farther away. To be honest, the French don't really cherish the lives of the Irish. Otherwise, they would not have sold the shells to the Russians and Turks in order to make money, so that the shells were not enough.

However, it is one thing not to care how much the Irish were killed by the British. The French themselves would not have killed the Irish without killing the Irish.

The shell landed in the sea, about four or five hundred meters away from the pier. The person on the balloon uses the semaphore to transmit the landing point information back to the ground. At this time, the artillery on the ground had lowered the barrel, ready to reload the shells.

The loading of the 280mm gun is at a fixed angle, so every time a shot is fired, the barrel must be swung back to the fixed loading angle. This of course makes the reload speed greatly reduced. But Joseph and the others made this cannon to pretend to be a wolf with a big tail, so in order to save money, they even adopted the mode of retreating. In this way, the rate of fire of this cannon is naturally very low. Fingers crossed.

It took a full ten minutes before the cannon fired a second shell at the port area of ​​Dublin. This time the shell fell directly into the harbor, and landed between the two moored cargo ships.

The shell exploded in the water, and the huge water pressure immediately tore a big hole on both sides of the two weak merchant ships. Since there were no damage control personnel on the merchant ships to deal with this situation, the two ships were It sank quite quickly. A single shell sank two ships, neither of which was particularly large, but it certainly put a lot of pressure on the defenders.

But the subsequent shelling, luck is not so good. After that, the 280 mm gun fired ten more shells, but these shells never achieved such great results. Only one shell hit the trestle bridge, breaking it in two. Other shells basically failed to hit any important targets.

However, just as the French expected, the port was shelled. Although the loss was not particularly large, it still had a considerable impact on the psychology of the British soldiers. Many people, especially the wealthy who remained in Dublin, feared for their safety. So these people left Dublin one after another and returned to England. The governor of Norfolk knew that if these people left, it would make the soldiers wonder whether the British really intended to hold here. As a result, their morale naturally dropped a lot.