The mountains and rivers on both sides of the Grand Canal are now covered with a layer of late autumn colors. The sky is high and the clouds are pale, and there is a chill.
The autumn harvest is over, the sky and the earth are open, and the autumn day in the northern plains is the time for military expeditions and heroes.
On the road from Liaocheng, the capital of Dongchang Prefecture, to Anping Town, where the Daqing River and the Grand Canal meet, hundreds of knights guarding the pro-army army were surrounding Emperor Hongxing of the Ming Dynasty and several others, rushing back from the front of Liaocheng to where the emperor was stationed. Anping Town. Prepare to gather all the generals there to discuss the plan for a decisive battle with Donglu in Liaocheng.
At this moment, Emperor Hongxing felt really unhappy.
After more than a month of steady efforts, by the end of September in the 20th year of Chongzhen, both sides of the canal from the north of Weishan Lake to Dongchang Fucheng and Liaocheng were already the world of the Ming Dynasty. As they came all the way south, they saw Ming fleets rushing to Liaocheng in an endless stream. In addition to replenishing supplies for the Ming army outside Liaocheng, there were also soldiers, horses and chariots from Shandong armies, one after another or Take a boat or walk to the front line of Liaocheng.
The Shandong armies are all "heavily equipped troops", equipped with a large number of sidecars, and at the same time there are not enough mules and horses - it is not that the mules and horses are used to pull the troops, but that there are not several groups of mules and horses to replace them, so mules must be saved. The strength of the horse. Therefore, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Shi Kefa all preferred to use river vessels to transport troops and baggage.
In the past two years, the Shandong armies have spent a lot of effort building ships, and now they finally have sufficient water transportation capabilities.
On the canal, the fleets coming from the south or along the Daqing River from Jinan Prefecture slowly headed north. The ship was fully loaded with military supplies, food, equipment, vehicles, and the draft was very deep. Because the canal has lacked maintenance in the past two years, and now is the time when the water is shallow in autumn, there is a boatman on each canal boat on the bow to carefully measure the water depth. There is no south wind to borrow now, so in addition to poles, these canal boats have to be pulled by human and animal power. The soldiers who walked on both sides of the bank acted as trackers, taking turns dragging these flat-bottomed and pointed sand river boats forward slowly.
In addition to the lively scenes of boats running thousands of miles along the canal, there is a busy and noisy construction site every twenty miles or so on the west bank of the canal. Civil servants recruited from all over Shandong worked like worker ants, digging soil into trenches, ramming soil into walls, and then using sandbags to pile up a slope to protect against cannons. Finally, sandbags were piled up on the top of the city wall, which was less than one foot high. Protective breastworks.
This is to work steadily and step by step!
The army marched along the waterway, and the hard-fortress earth city was built along the river.
Although I can’t say that this style of play is guaranteed to win, it can still be invincible, right?
Zhu Cixiang rode his horse on the road, feeling a little proud.
Looking back on the past, standing out from the crisis in Beijing, taking on heavy responsibilities, risking one's life to break out, fighting in Tianjin, walking to Taku, and traveling south all the way, it seems a bit like a dream... How many years has it been? We have gathered more than 100,000 troops for the Northern Expedition, and our troops are pointing north, making them invincible.
He, the emperor, went on tour incognito today. He did not display the emperor's banner, nor did he wear a dragon robe. He was just wearing a red arrow jacket and a collar of plate armor made in Anping.
Under the joint promotion of Zhu Cihong, Zheng Zhilong, Shen Tingyang and others, Ming's military industry has made rapid progress in recent years. In Shanghai, Nanjing, Anping (Fujian), Foshan and other places, iron workshops using hydraulic hammers appeared, so it was possible to create plate armor using large pieces of iron.
However, the number of hydraulic hammers is still very small, and the output of plate armor is also very small, not necessarily thousands a year.
But we have made progress from scratch, which is not easy!
At the same time, the production capacity of artillery and muskets is also gradually taking shape. Not only ironworks in Foshan and Anping are increasing production. Clusters of iron workshops also appeared in Shanghai, Nanjing, Dengzhou and other places, most of which served the military industry. Although the quantity of fire guns, plate armor, and lath armor produced by these iron workshops is still insufficient to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding new army to overcome difficulties, so "import substitution" cannot be fully realized, but as long as time is given, there will always be One day to achieve complete localization.
Of course, these iron workshops that have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain are all commercial! Including the Nanjing Artillery Factory invested and established by Zhu Cixiang himself (products include 12-pound Hongyi cannon, 3-pound regiment cannon, 24-pound mortar cannon, turtle-dove foot fire blunderbuss, Spanish light fire blunderbuss, black powder, blooming bullets, chain bombs, shotguns, etc. etc.), it is not a so-called government-run enterprise, but a commercial workshop jointly held by employees and His Majesty the Emperor. Zhu Cixiang himself is only the major shareholder, and his shareholding is not large, only 30%.
The reason for this is actually related to Zhu Cihong, Zheng Zhilong, and Shen Tingyang's vigorous promotion of the development of the military industry-skilled blacksmiths cannot be created out of thin air by throwing money at them! With more blacksmith workshops open, blacksmiths are of course rare. Not only do they get paid more, but many of them also use their bodies to own shares.
And Zhu Cixiang's thinking is more capitalist, and he will not use the method of sending corvee labor to the blacksmiths to recruit people to open the ironworks - the blacksmiths who are captured by force will not work hard without severe punishment, and they cannot mess around with blunderbuss and artillery. , that’s going to explode! Therefore, we must use Helian Bobo's method of making the Daxia Dragon Bird Sword, and use the method of chopping off the skull to improve the quality!
But in addition to quality, the factory also has costs, output, and technological inheritance... Just chopping off the brains cannot solve such a large number of problems! Just a technical inheritance is useless. Who dares to learn this craft when he can chop off heads at every turn? If you hit your head with an iron, who will come? If no one comes, will we still have to follow the path of a hereditary craftsman family?
Then what kind of treatment did Emperor Zhu give to the hereditary craftsmen? If the old blacksmith is not given a high salary and loses his head at any time, the old blacksmith can't even get a wife, so how can he have a hereditary inheritance?
So after going around for a long time, I still have to give money... Since we also use economic interests to stimulate, let's use capitalism!
Government-run factories are raising sons, and all of them are treasures. We cannot let them lose money!
Capitalist handicraft factories are like cultivating insects, the survival of the fittest, the weak and the strong, and if you don't do well, you will lose...
And now that there is no large-scale machine industry, guns and cannons have to be made by small workshops (compared to large industries) and by hand. There are a lot of small workshops. The quality, cost, and output are difficult to control. If there is no mechanism for "raising gu" and the quality cannot be controlled by chopping off the brains, is there any natural reason not to blow up the chamber?
Under the "Gu Raising" mechanism, not only the equipment of Zhu Cihong's new army to overcome difficulties is getting better and better, but also the vassal army in Beiliu Town has obtained a lot of good things.
The armies of these six towns and vassals are all made up of soldiers. Naturally, the leaders of the three armies are more attentive and willing to invest!
Seeing that the large group of vassal infantry approaching from the canal were all well-armed, Emperor Zhu became even more confident. He turned to Li Yan beside him and said: "One hundred thousand elite soldiers... Dole How much can Gun have on hand? Fifty or sixty thousand would be good, right?"
Li Yan smiled and said: "It's almost the same number. Luoyang also has some people left, and Shanxi also has to keep people. Liaocheng, Linqing, Wucheng, Dezhou, and Suizhou and Shangqiu to the south of us all have a lot of troops stationed. It’s not easy for Dorgon to gather 50,000 elite soldiers!”
Zhu Cixiang smiled: "Where can 50,000 people fight? Will they fight with us under Liaocheng?"
"We are bound to lose!" Li Yan said, "Now is not the time for a battle between Song and Jin... We have many soldiers and powerful weapons, and we can afford it."
Zhu Cixiang nodded. He did not seek victory in this battle. He would be satisfied with a draw... He did not seek a one-to-one exchange ratio. How many people did Manchuria have? How many Han people are there? There is no need to train your soldiers to the point where they can trade lives one by one with others.
If you want to fight like that, are more than 100 million people just for fun?
Li Yan thought for a while and said: "It is more likely to surround Wei and rescue Zhao... but it doesn't matter. As long as we are not ambushed by them and rely on our military advantage, we are still 100% sure. Even if the war is unfavorable, as long as we can It would not be a loss to kill ten or twenty thousand Manchus."
