Neither would they stand for the jeers and insults of the Kai warriors. Inevitably, the Oda men cast caution aside in the midst of all the blood, and thought only of their own province and reputations.

While this was going on, Katsuyori and his generals must have thought that the time was right, for the center battalions of Kai's fifteen-thousand-man army began to advance like a giant cloud. Their orderly formations broke up like a gigantic flock of birds taking flight, and as they finally approached the palisade, each corps simultaneously screamed its war cries.

To the eyes of the Takeda, the wooden palisade clearly appeared to be nothing much at all. They thought they would force their way through, breaking through with a single charge, boring right into the central Oda army like a drill.

Raising a battle cry, the Kai forces charged the palisade. They were determined— some tried to clamber over, some to beat the fence down with huge mallets and iron staffs, some to cut through it with saws, and some to douse it with oil and burn it down.

Nobunaga had left the fighting to the Sakuma and Okubo corps outside the palisade until then, and the ranks on Mount Chausu were silent. But suddenly…

"Now!"

Nobunaga's golden war fan cut through the air, and the commanders of the firearms regiments competed with each other in yelling out the order:

"Fire!"

"Fire!"

The earth shook at the volleys of gunfire. The mountain split open and the clouds were shredded. Powder smoke shrouded the palisade, and the horses and men of the Kai army fell like mosquitoes into piles of corpses.

"Don't retreat!" their commanders urged. "Follow me!"

Recklessly charging the palisade, the soldiers leaped over the dead bodies of their comrades, but they were unable to avoid the oncoming rain of bullets. Screaming pathetically, they ended up as corpses themselves.

In the end, the Kai army could no longer stand its ground.

'Retreat!" screamed four or five mounted commanders, pulling back their horses, the command somehow wrung from their throats even in their panic. One fell, covered with blood, while another was thrown from his whinnying horse as it went down under a hail of bullets.

No matter how badly they had been beaten, however, their spirit was not broken.

They had lost almost one-third of their men in the first charge, but the instant they retreated, a fresh force once again hastened toward the palisade. The blood that had spattered the thirty thousand stakes had not yet dried.

The gunfire coming from the palisade answered their charge directly, as if to say, We've been waiting.

Glaring at the palisade dyed red with the blood of their comrades, the fierce soldiers of Kai screamed as they charged, encouraging one another, vowing that they would never retreat a single yard.

"It's time to die!"

"On to our deaths!"

"Make a death shield so the others can leap over us!"

The "death shield" was a last-ditch tactic in which soldiers in the front rank sacrificed themselves to protect the advance of the next rank. Then that rank in turn acted as a shield for the troops following, and in this way the troops pressed on step by step. It was a terrible way to advance.

These were, indeed, brave men; but surely this charge was nothing more than a futile display of brute strength. And yet there were able tacticians among the generals leading the assault.

Katsuyori, of course, was at the rear, urging his men to go forward, but had his commanders known that victory was an absolute impossibility, there would have been no reason to ask for such an immense sacrifice and repeatedly to push the troops too far.

"That wall must be broken down!"

They must have believed that it could be done. Once the guns of that period were fired, reloading the ball and repacking the gunpowder took time. Thus, once a volley had been fired, the sound of gunfire would stop for a while. It was that interval that the Kai generals considered a window to be taken advantage of; thus the "death shield" was not begrudged.

Nobunaga, however, had considered that particular weak point, and for the new weapons he had devised new tactics. In this case, he divided his three thousand gunners to three groups. When the first thousand men had fired their weapons, each man would quickly step to the side and the second group would advance through their ranks, immediately firing their own volley. They, too, would then open their ranks and be quickly replaced by the third group. In this way, the interval the enemy so hoped for was never given to them throughout the entire battle.

Again, there were openings here and there in the palisade. Measuring the intervals between the tides of charges, the Oda and Tokugawa spear corps would dash out from inside the palisade and quickly strike at both wings of the Kai army.

Obstructed by the protective palisade and the gunfire, the Kai soldiers were unable to advance. When they attempted to retreat, they were harassed by the enemy's pursuit and the pincer attack. Now the Kai warriors, who took such pride in their discipline and training, did not have even a moment to exhibit their courage.

The Yamagata corps had retreated altogether, leaving behind a large number of men who had sacrificed their lives. Only Baba Nobufusa had not fallen into the trap.

Baba had clashed with the troops of Sakuma Nobumori, but as Nobumori had only been there originally as a decoy, the Oda troops feinted a retreat. The Baba corps chased after them and took possession of the encampment at Maruyama, but Baba's orders were to go no deeper, and he did not send a single soldier beyond Maruyama.

"Why don't you advance!" Baba was repeatedly asked by both Katsuyori's headquarters and his own officers.

Baba, however, would not move. "I have my own reasons to ponder over for a moment, and I'd better stop here to observe what is occurring. The rest of you should go ahead and advance. Win some glory for yourselves."

Every commander who got near enough to attack the palisade met with the same overwhelming defeat. And then Katsuie and Hideyoshi led their battalions far around the villages to the north and began to cut off the headquarters of the Kai army from the front lines.

It was almost noon, and the sun was high in a sky that promised the end of the rainy season. It now burned down on the earth with an abrupt heat and with a color that announced an intense summer.

Hostilities had begun at dawn, at the second half of the Hour of the Tiger. With the continual change of new troops, the men of the Kai army were by this time bathed in sweat and breathing hard. The blood that had been shed in the morning had dried like glue on the leather of their armor and on their hair and skin. And now there was fresh blood wherever one looked.

Behind the central army, Katsuyori was howling like a demon. Finally he had sent every battalion, including the reserve corps usually held back for emergencies. If Katsuyori had understood the situation more quickly, he might have finished the matter with only fraction of the damage his army incurred. But instead, moment by moment, he himself turned a small mistake into a monstrous one. In short, this was not simply a matter martial spirit and courage. It was the same as if the forces of Nobunaga and Ieyasu had set snares at the hunting grounds and waited for wild ducks or boars to come. The Kai regiments that attacked so fiercely did nothing more than lose their valuable soldiers in a pointless "death shield."

Alas, it was said that even Yamagata Masakage, who had fought so well with the left wing since morning, had been struck down in battle. Other famous generals, men of great courage, went down one after another, until the dead and wounded numbered over half of the entire army.

"It's obvious that the enemy is going to be defeated. Isn't this the right moment?"