A few days later.
After spending five days and traveling hundreds of miles back and forth, at the border of Jiaodong and Yangxia counties, and thoroughly inspecting the Chu army's outlying camps, Yan Yunqing returned to the camp filled with worry and disappointment.
The most worrying thing happened.
Just as he had suspected before, the entire Chu army's camp for more than 300 miles was tightly defended and heavily guarded, and no flaws could be seen in the military management.
The millions of Chu troops were actually managed as one body, forming a unified force.
Faced with this kind of enemy, Yan Yunqing was helpless and couldn't think of a way to deal with it.
And when he returned to the camp, there were even more troubles.
Because compared to the Chu army's strict control of the army, it was as if they were one body. On Liang Jun's side, there were so many mistakes and omissions that it was unsightly.
must admit.
As the overlord of Zhongzhou, the Liang Kingdom is located in the center of Kyushu, surrounded by powerful enemies. It has fought countless tough battles for decades. During this period, countless generals have emerged from the Liang Army. It can be said that the generals in this army are shining like stars.
From this aspect, Liang Guo has no shortage of generals who can lead the army in battle.
But here's the problem.
Because the war was so intense, Liang would lose a large number of soldiers after every major battle.
After the loss of these people, at the beginning, the noble families in Liang State, relying on their strong foundation, were able to quickly send their own children and send them into the army to serve as middle- and high-level generals, while the lower-level generals promoted veterans. take office.
Relying on this method, although Liang Guo suffered heavy losses in troops and horses every time, he could always quickly regain his strength after half a year as the new soldiers were trained and the generals at all levels were trained.
Therefore, in the early stage, Liang Guo was able to maintain its advantage when facing the attacks of Wei, Zhao and Xu, and could launch counterattacks from time to time.
But no matter how large the talent reserve is, it cannot withstand losses every month and year, and hundreds or even thousands of people are lost every time.
No matter how prosperous the descendants of the noble clans of Liang Kingdom are, there is always a limit.
A clan of tens of thousands of people would already hold up to the sky.
Excluding the old, weak, and those who have not practiced martial arts, there are only a few hundred disciples who can actually join the army.
Wei Zhaoxu is not a weak country. Even if there is a gap in national power between them and Liang, the basic quality of their soldiers and horses is still almost the same.
After Liang Guo fought a great battle with them, even if he won, he would have lost tens or hundreds of thousands of troops, including hundreds or thousands of fallen generals.
A single war can wipe out all the male members of a family who have joined the army.
And how many aristocratic families are there in the Liang Kingdom?
There are only dozens or hundreds of them.
After fighting a hundred wars, all the young men of these aristocratic families were gone, and the family was completely ruined.
Therefore, after more than ten years of fighting and the death of tens of thousands of descendants of the Liang army, the Liang Kingdom quickly realized this serious problem.
Therefore, later on, in order to preserve their strength and reduce losses, the noble families in Liang State began to consciously reduce the number of their children joining the army.
Without these carefully trained, well-educated, and well-educated descendants of aristocratic families joining the army, the middle and high-level generals in the Liang Army soon began to fall short as the war continued to intensify.
In this way, we have to let go of the original opening and promote generals from poor families from the bottom.
Although these generals from humble backgrounds are not lacking in bravery, they even have enough battlefield acumen and their own intuition for leading troops in battle.
After all, he also emerged from the mountain of corpses and sea of blood on the battlefield.
But no matter how brave and intuitive these people are, they cannot change the fact that they are monks halfway, have not received systematic training, and may even be illiterate.
An army of tens of thousands of people, relying on the bravery of the generals and enough luck, may be able to ignore the difference in the quality of each other's generals and draw a tie or even win a battle.
But in this kind of war with millions of people, even if you are an innate master, the role of personal bravery you can play has become extremely limited.
An innate master, after a war, would kill thousands of people until they were exhausted.
And a few thousand people is just a drop in the bucket compared to an army of one million.
Not to mention one innate grandmaster, even if there were ten innate grandmasters, if they were asked to kill a million people, they would probably not be able to finish them all until they died of exhaustion.
The innate masters are like this, and the role of bravery that ordinary generals can play is even more limited.
Since bravery does not work, then when the two armies confront each other, the competition will be based on each other's quality.
This quality refers to the gap between soldiers, the gap between generals and their command, and the gap between troops and horses in various departments.
Desperately, in the above three competitions, Liang Jun could not gain an advantage, or even be at a disadvantage.
Let's talk about the difference between ordinary soldiers. Although Liang Jun has been on the battlefield for a long time, he is an elite who has fought in battles one after another.
But Chu State is not bad either.
In the past thirty years, Chu State has been in peace and prosperity in the hinterland. But in the border areas, it cannot be called peaceful.
In the southwest, there are rain forest barbarians who are constantly migrating north; in the tens of thousands of miles of sea, there are pirates who are constantly landing; in the northwest, they come out of the fortress every year and fight fiercely with the barbarians of Yongxi.
With three major battlefields, Chu's military strength remains at 500,000 all year round. When the war is fierce, it can even reach millions.
In order to maintain the combat effectiveness of Chu soldiers, Lu Yuan adopted a rotation system, dividing domestic soldiers into three batches and letting them take turns to go to the front line for training.
Therefore, although they enjoyed thirty years of peace, the Chu army did not degenerate. Instead, it was always in the flames of war and suffered no less temper than other countries.
Even because the Chu army rotates all the time, it is not limited to multiple fronts and strong border pressure like other countries. Often when a large army is caught, it is used to death without getting any effective rest at all.
As a result, a large number of elite veterans were wasted on the battlefield, and a large number of new soldiers had to be recruited to replenish the size of the army.
The army is in a situation where veterans and new recruits are mixed, and the quality of the soldiers varies.
The Chu army benefited from the rotation system, and the elite veterans who had been on the battlefield were well preserved. The army was basically composed of veterans.
Even the two million new recruits that Lu Yuan recruited domestically this time were actually former veterans who were re-recruited after they were discharged.
As early as twenty years ago, feeling the increasingly fierce wars between various countries, Lu Yuan forcefully implemented reforms in the military in order to reserve more high-quality troops for the country.
It is stipulated that a soldier can stay in the army for a maximum of ten years after joining the army.
After ten years, no matter how old you are, you must be forced to retire and be included in the junior high school reserve force.
A soldier may join the army at the age of fifteen or sixteen and be discharged at the age of twenty-five or six.
From this point on, the Chu State was different from other countries in the lifelong military system. The army no longer had gray and black hair, and the status quo of joining the army at fifteen and returning at eighty was completely eliminated.
As a result, the Chu State also received a large number of young and middle-aged soldiers in their twenties and thirties who had received good military training.
These reservists who have been retired over the years are all registered with the local government. With the order of the local military commander, they can be assembled in an instant, and then weave into small-scale armies according to their previous ranks in the military.
In this case, not to mention two million new recruits, Chu could easily assemble three million or even five million and ensure a certain combat effectiveness.
Even if the Chu soldiers trained under this system are re-enlisted as reserve soldiers, they are much better than recruiting new soldiers from the private sector.
Therefore, at the soldier level, the Chu army is naturally far superior to the Liang army, which is a mixture of young and old, old and new.
As for the quality of generals, let alone that.
The wars fought by the Chu army in recent years have all been consciously controlled in scale and intensity, and were only wars to defend the border and train the army.
It is fundamentally different from the life-and-death struggle for hegemony between countries.
In this case, the losses of the soldiers were much less, not to mention that the generals were protected by so many soldiers.
Over the past few decades, the Chu Army has trained countless outstanding generals of the middle, upper and lower levels.
The noble families and local wealthy families in Chu State have trained tens of millions of outstanding children like stars.
Under Lu Yuan's initiative, these people have received good military education, and there is absolutely no problem in serving as qualified officers at all levels.
These two sources of generals not only ensured the command of Chu's existing standing troops, but even the civilian men who were recruited were arranged to be managed by a large number of generals at all levels and treated as an army for training and command.
Compared with Liang Jun's current situation of lack of generals, I don't know how much better it is.
Not to mention the final cooperation of the army.
With Lu Yuan's avatar deployed among the troops and commanding a hundred thousand men, even if Liang Ren was able to show off his tricks in the face of cheating with immortal magic, it would still be incomparable.
Therefore, the sum of various advantages resulted in the Chu army crushing the Liang army in all aspects.
So, it was the first day of winter, before it completely entered winter.
After hundreds of small-scale trials, the Chu and Liang sides finally started a big battle, each sending 100,000 troops to fight in the wilderness between the two armies.
The result was a disastrous defeat for Liang Jun.
Yan Yunqing immediately realized the gap between the two sides.
Later, they began to close the camp and defend themselves, no longer paying attention to the provocations of the Chu army. They defended for several days, enduring heavy snow and freezing everything.
Taking advantage of this respite, he summarized the many problems he had discovered, and quickly reported them back to Liang, promoted them, and asked the emperor to send enough qualified generals to fill the current shortcomings within the Liang Army.
Now there is a winter as a buffer, surrounded by heavy snow, the Chu army cannot go out to fight.
Liang Jun can also take advantage of the three to four months of winter to reorganize his troops and replace unqualified generals, so as to reduce the gap with the Chu army.
If you wait until after winter, the heavy snow melts, and the Chu army can move freely.
Liang Jun's side is still the same as the status quo. If there is no change at all, a disastrous defeat is not far away.
Yan Yunqing wrote down his worries in letters to alert the emperor and ministers in Daliang City.
After thirty years of cultivation and accumulation, the Chu army was by no means as impetuous and weak as it appeared on the outside, and the gap between them and Liang Guo had widened.
In this battle, the Chu State had spent thirty years of strength, while the Liang State had exhausted its strength after a hundred battles. It was really extremely critical.
…
Just when the Huang Xuan and Yan Yunqing armies were fighting fiercely on the border of Jiaodong and Yangxia counties.
At home, Lu Yuan also began the final round of mobilization before the Northern Expedition.
After half a year of preparation, except for the Yangxia camp, which has already rushed to the front line.
In Chu State, the Hanzhong Expedition Camp and the Xiangyang Expedition Camp, which were responsible for the expedition against Wei State, had been completely prepared a month ago.
The three camps of the West, Central and East routes under the direct leadership of Lu Yuan were also assembled in Yuzhang, Linhai and Guangling respectively in the name of relocating people and supporting the Yongxi and Yangxia front lines, and most of them were completed.
In order to advance this matter as quickly as possible, Lu Yuan even temporarily traveled to Jinling to control people's hearts.
Judging from the current preparations, preparations for the three-way camp will be completed by the end of February next year, that is, after the snow melts and spring begins.
In addition to preparing to build camps, those people who migrated north from the southwest of Lingnan also gradually arrived along the river in the north of Chu after half a year of migration.
The number of these relocated people was more than 18 million, which was almost the same number of soldiers and horses recruited by the Chu army for the Northern Expedition. It was an extremely large number.
And so many people gathered along the river in large numbers, which naturally brought about many complicated management problems.
And the daily food consumption of these immigrants is like an astronomical figure, which is simply incalculable.
If it weren't for the fact that Lu Yuan, in order to prepare for the Northern Expedition, had many Changping warehouses set up in the south bank of the river in advance to supply grain and grass to the front line, it would really not be able to support it.
But even so, the consumption of nearly 20 million people is too much.
Especially if Chu State has to support an army of the same size, it is even more terrifying.
Therefore, Lu Yuan has decided.
During the Northern Expedition next year, as soon as the army crosses the river and takes control of the Liangguo counties in the north of the Yangtze River, they will immediately start arranging immigration work.
Supporting almost 40 million non-productive workers puts too much pressure on Chu State.
Even if Lu Yuan tried his best, he could only last for more than a year at most.
In order to solve the problem of food consumption and to allow those immigrants to settle down and resume production as soon as possible, we can only take some risks and let those people go with the army.
However, with Chu State's preparation and strength, as long as they cross the river, they will basically push it all the way, and there is almost no risk of losing the territory they have gained.
Therefore, even if those immigrants follow the army, they will only have to face some resistance from the Liang people at most, and it is basically impossible to face the established Liang army.
And they had the help of the garrison troops left by the Chu army, so the risk was even smaller.
Therefore, after making this decision, Lu Yuan called up his good friend Sun Siwen, who had lost a lot of hair due to fatigue in order to supply supplies for the Northern Expedition.
Let him allocate officials to deal with this matter.
The entire three-way crossing of the river was under preparation in an orderly manner.
The Wei State in Yongzhou, also urged by the Chu State, assembled a large army for the Western Expedition in Guannei County.
As long as the next spring comes and the heavy snow melts, we can send out troops together with the Chu army camped in Hanzhong to attack the barbarians.
As for Liang Guo.
After receiving Yan Yunqing's letter, Daliang Junchen also showed great importance to it.
It's just that the Liang Kingdom is really weak now, and when people are in need of employment everywhere, the scarcity of talents is visible to the naked eye.
Even if they wanted to support, they didn't have much spare power.
Finally, a group of elite police officers were mobilized from each army, and they also ordered the ministers of the noble families in the country to contribute a group of their own children. They gritted their teeth and gathered more than a thousand people, and sent them to the Jiaodong front line.
However, these thousand numbered men can only manage hundreds of thousands of soldiers and horses at most, and their impact on the frontline army is also limited.
Yan Yunqing's idea of giving the entire army a major overhaul and reshaping it was in vain.
In the end, Liang Guo still lost on his foundation.
In desperation, this famous Liang general could only use the limited resources at hand to train the army as much as possible.
He didn't have much confidence in how effective this would be.
However, in addition to the elite generals, Liang Guo gathered another 100,000 elites and sent them to Jiaodong County to supplement the losses of the Liang Army in the previous battle.
The number of soldiers and horses in the Jiaodong camp was restored to one million.
However, the recovery of troops and horses did not improve Yan Yunqing's confidence at all, nor did it improve the morale of the previously defeated Liang army.
After fighting against the Chu army, both sides realized the gap between them.
At the same time, many psychological changes have occurred because of these gaps.
Many soldiers in the Liang Army began to show fear of war. The legend about Emperor Chu Lu Yuan was also circulated privately in the camp, making people's hearts fluctuate.
The future of Liang State was covered with a layer of gloom under this severe cold.
The Yangxia camp had sufficient food after receiving the last batch of grain and grass subsidies from Zheng Guo before winter.
So Huang Xuan also simply ordered to select a group of adjutants, generals and capable veterans from the army, and disperse them among the recruited Zheng Guominfu to train these people.
He planned to take advantage of this winter to increase the combat strength of the 500,000 Zheng Guomin men to make up for his lack of troops in a foreign country.
Otherwise, in this unfamiliar environment, thousands of miles away from the homeland, supplies would be inconvenient.
With only a million people in his hands, it would be a dilemma of one dead and one missing.
Just like the many battles with the Liang people some time ago, although the Liang army lost nearly 100,000 people, the Chu army also suffered many casualties, with more than 60,000 people.
These missing soldiers and horses, as well as the vacancies in various ministries, were eventually replenished by Zheng Guomin's men, thus ensuring the integrity of the army.
At this time, training these Zheng Guomin men more is to add more high-quality soldiers to his army, which is a matter of foundation.
And among these parties, time is slowly flowing in the intensive preparations for the war.
The 40th year of Shenwu passed through a heavy snow, and amid the clouds of war, Kyushu ushered in the 41st year of Shenwu, and spent this new year that was not very happy.
At the end of spring in February, General Meng Chenglin of Wei State led a million troops into the grassland to wipe out the barbarians.
In the same month, after receiving the news, the Chu State camped in Hanzhong. The general manager Huang Xin led the troops out of Longshan to conquer the foreign tribes in Helong.
The first battle of the new year in Kyushu was started by Chu and Wei.
