Chapter 113: The Harvest

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The Han Banners' firelocks could certainly kill a man. Even if Zhou Shixiang had no eye for such things, once Qin Zhisheng fired a shot with one, he understood just how deadly these firelocks were.

Fired at close range, this thing was nothing like the later rumor that it could only pepper a man's face or burn him — it would genuinely take a life.

As for the development of the firelock, although Zhou Shixiang had been a soldier in his previous life, he did not know much about it either.

But he reasoned that since the Ming dynasty's Divine Machine Battalion had once ridden across the northern deserts relying on firelocks, and since for more than two hundred years of the Ming the firelock had remained standard equipment of the Ming army and had never been phased out, there was no reason to say the Ming firelock was a useless fire poker.

If it truly were, the firelock would have been discarded two hundred years earlier. What kind of hero was the Yongle Emperor?

Would he have let his soldiers carry a weapon that could not kill? This was a man who campaigned his entire life and was still on the march when he died — such a man's judgment was not something later generations could match.

The root reason the Ming army now turned pale at the mention of firelocks lay in the debasement of the military and exaltation of the civil, and in the matter of pay and provisions.

The former suppressed the political rights of military officers, leaving the army with no voice at court; military officers were subordinated to civil officials, and the civil officials mostly knew nothing of military affairs, so naturally they would not value the production and improvement of arms.

The latter cut off the very root of arms production.

Like the guard-battalion system, the hereditary artisan-household model likewise made the craftsmen skilled at making weapons decline generation after generation, and the things they produced naturally declined generation after generation as well.

No matter how good a thing was, without enough silver it could never be made well. History had already proven that the Ming army's firelocks in the late Ming were entirely the product of skimping on materials and shoddy workmanship.

One side superior, one side inferior; one side weighted, one side slight — the final result was the most direct expression of the wars of these past decades, and in Guangdong province it was expressed directly in the strength of the Han Banners.

Li Dingguo had twice attacked Guangdong and had suffered no small losses at the hands of the Han Banners. In those days inside Xinhui city, Zhou Shixiang had heard the roar of firelocks on the walls day and night.

The firelock could not be useless. On the contrary, it was a fine weapon. Even without Qin Zhisheng's demonstration, the hundred-odd soldiers of the Taiping Camp killed or wounded by firelocks had already told Zhou Shixiang in bloody fact — the firelock was useful.

His experience with guns and his previous life as a soldier made Zhou Shixiang very fond of the captured firelocks.

He turned the Han Banners' firelocks over and over in his hands before finally setting them down, then ordered Qin Zhisheng to gather all the captured firelocks together for safekeeping, and to collect every powder pouch from the bannermen's bodies, absolutely none to be missed.

The construction of the firelock was too complex, and firing one was a skill in itself.

Although Qin Zhisheng, Jiang He, and the others repeatedly stressed in their words that firelocks were useless, Zhou Shixiang still decided to establish a firearms unit in the Taiping Camp, and in the future he would certainly improve these firelocks that still relied on matchcord ignition.

The best way to improve the firelock was none other than to borrow from the Europeans, whose firearms manufacture in this age was already slightly ahead of the Great Ming's. And the nearest white settlement to the Great Ming was not far from Xiangshan County — Macau.

This future gambling city at present gathered many missionaries and men of science and technology from Europe, and it was also a city of arms.

The Great Ming could buy cannon and firelocks in large quantities from Macau, and Zhou Shixiang could too, as long as he had enough silver. Before real gold and silver, those white-skinned pigs who had come east to seek fortune and adventure had no reason not to sell.

After the matter of the firelocks was arranged, Zhou Shixiang ordered the whole camp into the city to rest and regroup.

Since the Bordered Blue Banner Han troops had come to Gaoyao not to target the Taiping Camp, and there were no other banner units near Gaoyao, he had no need to keep his nerves strung tight.

Days of forced marching had already pushed the whole camp, from top to bottom, to the limits of their bodies. Men were not made of iron; if they did not rest soon, they might truly collapse without a battle.

According to the prior assignments, Tie Yi and Song Erniu each led men to take over and inventory the county office and the storehouses.

With the terrified "help" of the county office's petty clerks, the money and grain were quickly tallied: three thousand two hundred taels of silver, over fourteen thousand copper coins, and a hundred bolts of cloth and silk.

In addition, County Magistrate Qin Ming, who had already hanged himself, had personally "sponsored" the Taiping Camp with seven hundred taels of fine silver and thirty taels of gold, and his wife and two concubines had likewise "sponsored" gold and silver jewelry worth nearly a thousand taels.

On the grain side, the haul was not small either. Gaoyao had suffered no disaster the previous year — the weather had been favorable — so the autumn grain harvest had been fairly large.

After what had been shipped to the prefectural seat and the provincial capital, and what the county office had privately sold off, there were still more than three hundred shi left in the storehouse.

Guangdong lies in the south, where the common people mostly plant rice, so the grain was chiefly rice. When the gleaming white rice was carried out of the storehouse, the Taiping Camp soldiers' eyes lit up, and most of them breathed a sigh of relief.

With this rice, they would not have to worry about the wives, children, and elders they had left in the rear camp going hungry.

For the Taiping Camp, which had no faith to sustain it, the safety of their loved ones was the greatest force sustaining every man. The Han people prized family above all, especially married men.

Their greatest worry was not for their own safety but for their wives, children, and elders. As long as their wives and children and parents had a mouthful to eat, they would fight with everything they had.

The Taiping Camp so far was just such a force, made up of a band of men worried about whether their loved ones were hungry, whether they had eaten their fill, whether they had clothes to wear, whether they had ground to sleep on.

The purpose for which they fought was not some great national cause or the defense against barbarians, but simple family feeling. To be sure, such an army was not, strictly speaking, a good force, because it had too many attachments.

But at present, this army could carry Zhou Shixiang step by step toward his goal. He needed these men to fight with their lives — or rather, he was using these men to fight with their lives.

In Zhou Shixiang's view, the great national cause and whether one's wife and children could eat their fill were equal; there was no contradiction between the two. Whether the former was achieved or the latter, the goal of opposing the Qing would be reached.

Shao Jiugong's unit had, since Xinxing, essentially taken on the task of maintaining military discipline after entering a city.

Those officers of Jiangxi Green Standard origin, however unwilling, now conscientiously took up the task of maintaining discipline as well, and had come to realize the importance of it.

The Taiping Camp's bandit-style method of expansion did not prevent Zhou Shixiang from stressing the importance of military discipline everywhere he went.

Bandit-style tactics, bandit-style methods of swelling strength by sweeping people along, and the maintenance of military discipline sounded contradictory, but in practice they were not. The way to make the two coexist was very simple: it lay in whether or not one swept people along.

The residents of Gaoyao city were not on Zhou Shixiang's list of people to sweep along, because this place was too close to the prefectural seat of Zhaoqing, and the purpose of the vanguard's thrust into Zhaoqing was to confuse, harass, and pin down the Zhaoqing Green Standard, so that the Zhaoqing Green Standard could not threaten the rear camp, which was even now moving toward Xinhui.

Therefore Zhou Shixiang had to preserve the vanguard's fighting strength and mobility. That being so, sweeping up the common people along the way was not the vanguard's operational objective, and he was not so foolish as to do it.

After sending men to pass the order for the Ge Zheng brothers to pull back their troops, Zhou Shixiang had someone call Chen Mo in from outside the city, and at nightfall the Taiping Camp closed the gates of Gaoyao. (A pie falling from the sky — a great event!

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