In many ancient war-themed film and television dramas, we can often see scenes of soldiers attacking the city. In the era of cold weapons war, siege is not an easy task. The ancients armed the city, with tall walls and heavy walls. The attack on the city wall, the moat under the city wall, a series of designs make the whole city easy to defend and difficult to attack fortress. As long as siege warfare is involved, no matter how disparity in the number of troops is, it is always the defensive side that is dominant. This is also why during the Three Kingdoms period, Zhuge Liang only relied on two book boys and an empty city plan of the guqin to scare off Sima Yi, who was suspicious of the attack.
In various historical materials and various costume dramas, it is not difficult for us to find that the easiest to break in the siege war is the city gate, in order to attack a city wall, often sacrifice countless soldiers, which also makes the war cruel. In many cases, the method of strong attack is adopted, and the strong attack generally adopts the forced climbing of the city wall with a ladder. Although this method is quite passive, the military orders are like mountains, and behind them are deserters who shoot and kill the supervising troops, and the horizontal and vertical are all dead, and they can only fight to the death. And this kind of robbery siege warfare is not very common in cold weapons warfare.
In ancient times, due to the limitations of technology, the city gate was mostly wooden, which made people wonder, since it was a wooden city gate, why not choose fire attack? Fire attacks can be easily broken, so why risk your life to climb the city walls?
In fact, here everyone fell into a misunderstanding. Although the ancient city gates were made of wood, it was not so easy to break through. There are 3 reasons for this.
First of all, although the ancient city gate is a wooden gate, this wooden gate is not as easy to light as imagined. Since the attacker can think of fire attack, the defender will naturally also take into account. The ancient city gate is basically a giant wood that is more than 100 years old, and it is also a very non-flammable iron birch or jujube wood, elm wood, etc. as the main material of the city gate, this wood wants to be lit, and it is impossible to do without half a day's effort. And just as you forcibly burned the door, the knife of the defending soldier had already been cut. In addition, these wooden gates are usually wrapped in a layer of iron and marked with large copper nails. Its purpose is also to prevent fire, and the originally non-flammable wood, together with these accessories, is basically foolproof.
Secondly, we see the ancient city gates, which were covered with several door nails. The original role of door nails is to strengthen the wood of the city gate, because the wood for building the city gate is relatively large, and the general nails cannot directly fix the wood, so there is the appearance of door nails. However, door nails have other wonderful uses. Because the door nails are made of huge metal blocks, with strong toughness and heat dissipation ability, so in the face of fire attack, door nails can not only prevent the flames from climbing, but also through the spontaneous heat dissipation ability, the city gate can be cooled. Under this kind of heat dissipation measure, the city gate is not easy to catch fire, and the plan to attack with fire will also fail.
Finally, and most importantly. Although the city gate seems easy to break, it is also the most dangerous breakthrough. It is like a pass, no matter how many soldiers are besieging the city, the city gate is so large that it can only pour in a fixed number at a time.
Moreover, the besieging soldiers were unaware of the false reality and the situation in the city gates. As long as the defenders of the city ambush at will, they can catch turtles in an urn and strangle the siege soldiers who poured into the city gates at the city gates. In this way, using fire to break through the door is the fastest way for the siege soldiers to die. Historians also assert that even if soldiers wanted to use this method, it would never be used.
Based on these 3 reasons, the ancient siege soldiers would rather spend more effort digging tunnels to secretly cross Chen Cang, rather than choose to go to the city gate and the defenders to confront each other. The attack and defense of an ancient city gate involves so much attention, which shows that the cold weapon war is not as simple as modern people imagine. And the wisdom of the ancients can also be glimpsed from one or two.