The establishment of the Fourth Infantry Battalion is part of the Six Battalions and Two Outposts plan and is also the focus of the second batch of military expansion within the plan.
When leaving Lushan County in the east, Luo Zhixue finalized the army expansion plan of six battalions and two posts, and first launched the army expansion plan of three infantry battalions.
Now the reorganization of the three infantry battalions has been completed. Although currently, except for the first infantry battalion, which is fully equipped with musketeers, the second infantry battalion and the third infantry battalion are not fully equipped with musketeers. Instead, they use one Archers were sent to fill the vacancies.
But this did not prevent Luo Zhixue from launching the reorganization plan of the Fourth Infantry Battalion after arriving in Li Qingdian.
Because most of the soldiers required by the Fourth Infantry Battalion have been prepared, even if there are not many muskets yet, they can still train with confidence and wait for the muskets to be in place while training.
The backbone of the soldiers of the 4th Infantry Battalion were drawn from the 1st Infantry Battalion.
This kind of transfer of people is also simple and straightforward. The deputies of officers at all levels are directly transferred from the first infantry battalion, and then matched with some key soldiers.
With the deputy officers of the 1st Infantry Battalion as the framework and the backbone veterans as the branches, it is enough to fill it with a large number of new recruits.
This is also the reason why Luo Zhixue assigned each battalion with far more deputy officers than needed in the first place, just to facilitate the expansion of the army.
On the first day after arriving in Li Qingdian, Luo Zhixue issued a plan for follow-up operations and officially announced the establishment of the Fourth Infantry Battalion.
Starting from the next day, troops followed the orders and successively swept through the surrounding villages and areas, first taking control of the areas around Li Qingdian.
It doesn't take much time to control the local area. Basically, it's almost done in one day. The main reason is that there are no fortresses and estates of big landowners in the surrounding area. They are all ordinary villages, and these ordinary villages basically have no ability to resist the rural protection army.
At the same time, the villagers in these areas were also afraid and resisted the rural protection army.
Even some local small and medium-sized landowners saw the arrival of the rural protection army, and they directly took out the money and grain they had prepared in advance to pay the land tax, so that the rural protection army came to kill them.
After paying the land tax, some bold landowners are still thinking about getting the title of village chief. Even if they don't take the title themselves, it would be good to let the collateral clan members take the title.
The villagers and landowners in these places have such an attitude towards the rural protection army because they have a certain understanding of the rural protection army.
Know that these bald thieves are different from ordinary thieves.
Because Longtou Township northwest of Li Qingdian has long been controlled by the Township Protection Army, many villagers in the Li Qingdian area have heard of a bald bandit army in the northwest.
And I also know that these bald bandits look fierce, but unlike other bandits, these bald bandits don't like to play the game of burning, killing, looting and kidnapping. The things these bald bandits do are weird.
When I came here, I liked to set up village chiefs, then recruit troops and grain, and even organize villagers to carry out reclamation, dig and build canals. At first glance, it was no different from what the government did, or even better than what the government did.
When faced with such bald thieves arriving in their own village, the local villagers could only look at them in horror, but it was unlikely that they would just give up everything and flee.
Even the small and medium-sized landowners have no intention of resisting. Anyway, these bald thieves just want some food and grass after dying, but they will not just destroy their families like ordinary thieves.
Although it was uncomfortable, they were not unable to accept it.
Especially this time when Luo Zhixue went south, he took relatively mild measures against the landlord class in the villages under his control.
The first is to abandon the previous practice of directly taking the direct descendants of landlords as hostages and solving the talent gap by the way.
What we did before was simply because there was a huge talent gap, and the control area was already small. We took hostages in order to prevent the landlords from causing trouble.
Now, there are quite a few talents under the General's Mansion of the Baoxiang Army. Even if the gap is still not small, it can barely support the operations of the General's Mansion and its subordinate townships.
In addition, the Hometown Protection Army continued to recruit half-hearted scholars as thieves, and was able to acquire some talents one after another. Therefore, there was no need to forcibly capture hostages and force these landlords' children to work for themselves.
After all, if you keep arresting people's direct children, people will be unhappy.
In addition to not taking the direct descendants of landlords as hostages, Luo Zhixue also completely abandoned the practice of dividing land from landlords.
He had tried this method before, and to be honest, the effect was not very good, and it also caused some internal backlash.
When he controlled some villages on the outskirts of Funiu Mountain, Luo Zhixue distributed land that resisted landlords free of charge to the tenants who originally rented the land.
However, the Baoxiang Army did not gain the gratitude of these people, let alone arouse their enthusiasm to join the army. Many people even pretended not to know about this and continued to farm their fields, but never mentioned that these lands belonged to them. of.
Even though they are all villagers with little knowledge, they also know that these bald thieves are just a group of rebels. According to ordinary people's eyes, they will not be able to survive for long...
In the future, officers and soldiers will come to kill them sooner or later, and the families of these landlords will definitely come back with them. By then, these lands will still not belong to them.
In addition to the distrust and concerns of the villagers, the internal soldiers of the Baoxiang Army also have certain opinions on this.
how to say.
People follow you Luo Zhixue to fight life and death, and you Luo Zhixue just give them a bite of food, but those ordinary villagers did nothing and got free land.
This differential treatment makes many soldiers uncomfortable.
Finally, there are many landowners, no matter whether they are big landowners or small landowners, even the homesteaders are very panicked about the so-called free land allocation policy of the Baoxiang Army...
They were afraid that Luo Zhixue would give all his land to the tenants for free!
This also led to the fact that some landowners in the peripheral areas of Funiu Mountain resisted very tenaciously in the face of the raids by the rural protection army. They even called on nearby small and medium-sized landowners and farmers to organize a coalition to resist the rural protection army.
At the same time, some landowners who did not resist and paid for their crops honestly were also frightened, fearing that the rural protection army would come to divide their fields tomorrow.
Various factors forced Luo Zhixue to re-examine his free land allocation strategy. In the end, Luo Zhixue decisively made a change overnight...
Completely abolish the free land allocation policy.
After the land protection army confiscated the land from the recalcitrant landlords, they all turned it into official land and leased it to the original tenants at a fair price.
That is to say, the original tenancy relationship will not be changed, but the tenancy rent will be reduced.
At the same time, Luo Zhixue also informed the military that meritorious soldiers will be allocated military fields for free in the future.
It is not the distribution of land to military households, but the distribution of land to ordinary people.
The Baoxiang Army does not behave like military households.
You can't say how much the changed policy has promoted the rural protection army, but at least it has not caused panic among the small and medium-sized landowners and farmers under the rule.
On this basis, Luo Zhixue also carried out unified innovations in the grain collection system.
The grain collection of the Baoxiang Army is actually a tax collection, and the taxes collected are very simple. Currently, there are only three types of land tax, customs tax and business tax.
Checkpoint tax is a tax levied on goods passing through checkpoints based on a certain percentage.
Business tax is a fixed tax levied on businesses with fixed business production areas based on their scale.
The above two kinds of taxes, which are regarded as commercial taxes, are actually not much, because the largest business firm in the Funiu Mountain area is themselves, and there is no point in paying taxes by themselves.
The largest source of tax revenue for the Baoxiang Army was the land tax.
Land tax is a fixed tax levied directly on land and collected in kind such as grain.
It is precisely because of the existence of the land tax that the grain collection office will go to the major landowners to collect taxes after arriving in the newly occupied areas.
Because these landlords are the ones who own a lot of land, the Baoxiang Army collects taxes based on the land and not the people. Whoever owns the land will collect taxes.
Therefore, under the rule of the Baoxiang Army, if you are a tenant and do not do some small business, the Baoxiang Army will not bother to pay attention to you, and it is impossible to find you to collect taxes.
On the whole, the rural protection army's move south this time does not pose much of a threat to the local villagers. For the landowners, as long as they pay the land tax honestly, nothing will happen.
Therefore, many people have a bystander attitude towards the Baoxiang Army, a bald rebel army.
Even if they don't like it, some landowners who reject the rural protection army will not foolishly jump out and insist on armed resistance to tax and cause the disaster of annihilation.
This is also the reason why the Baoxiang Army moved relatively smoothly after moving south to Nanzhao County. Except for a small battle in Li Qingdian, there was basically no subsequent fighting, not even many small-scale battles.
After taking only two days to basically control the area around Li Qingdian, the 3rd Infantry Battalion officially moved eastward. They will gradually control villages all the way east.
However, it would not be too close to Nanzhao County to avoid excessive irritation to the Ming Dynasty officers and soldiers.
At the same time, the 1st Infantry Battalion, 1st Cavalry Post, and 1st Artillery Post crossed the Baihe River and continued to sweep the villages along the south bank of the Baihe River.
As for Luo Zhixue himself, he was stationed in Li Qingdian with his personal sentries, baggage sentries and the newly established fourth infantry battalion.
At the same time, people from the Industrial Department began to arrange for people from the Industrial Department to select a location to build the arsenal's factory building on the bank of the Baihe River in Li Qingdian, in preparation for the subsequent move of the arsenal to the south.
When the Baoxiang Army captured Li Qingdian and swept through the surrounding countryside, officials of the Ming Dynasty in Nanzhao County, more than 20 kilometers away to the east, learned of the news within a few days.
When they learned that a group of two to three thousand bandits were coming south from Funiu Mountain and were wreaking havoc on the countryside, the Ming court officials in Nanzhao County consciously acted like a coward.
Anyway, it’s not just once or twice that rogue thieves tortured the countryside. Last autumn, there was still a stream of rogue thieves traveling from south to north, passing through their Nanzhao County and heading north to Funiu Mountain. At that time, they also pretended that I couldn’t see them...
This time there are bandits coming south from Funiu Mountain. As long as they don't attack Nanzhao County, they will also pretend to be invisible.
This is not because they want to be cowardly, but because there are not many defensive troops in Nanzhao County, and they are too few to defend the county.
If we still send a large number of troops to the countryside to suppress the bandits, what if the bandits take advantage of the situation and capture Nanzhao County?
Nanzhao County is a strategic artery connecting Nanyang and Luoyang. It is Yunyang Pass in the middle of the three passes of Yalu, and Luyang Pass is to the north.
If Yunyang Pass, the capital of Nanzhao County, is captured by bandits, Luyang Pass will not be far away from being destroyed!
No one among the officials in Nanzhao County can bear this responsibility!
