Chapter 124: Murderous Light

When they divided the troops at Xinxing, Zhou Shixiang deliberately set a marching route for the rear camp, a route that completely avoided the cities garrisoned by Qing troops and kept as close to the mountainous areas as possible.

To cover the rear camp's withdrawal, Zhou Shixiang personally led the front camp in a thrust toward Zhaoqing to pin down the Zhaoqing Green Standard.

Zhaoqing Prefecture governed eight counties and one subprefecture.

The subprefectural seat of Deqing, along with the troops of Regional Commander Xu Erxian and the Xinxing Green Standard, all shut their gates and defended themselves because they did not know the Taiping Army's true strength.

The Green Standard forces of Sihui and Gaoyao counties had been completely wiped out by the Taiping Army. Guangning to the southeast and Yangjiang and Yangchun to the northwest were too far away for their local Green Standard troops to possibly come.

The remaining two counties, Enping and Gaoming, had been slaughtered clean by the Qing army years before; within their borders, to say nothing of garrisoning troops, it was hard to find even a single living person.

The rear camp's marching route ran eighty li west from Xinxing, then turned south and headed straight for Xinhui. The total distance was over two hundred li, and the way was basically all mountains and depopulated land that the Qing army had massacred.

Therefore, so long as Song Xianggong did not alter the route and go looking for Qing troops to attack, in theory the rear camp could not possibly be in any danger before reaching Xinhui.

It was precisely because the rear camp's route was so safe that Zhou Shixiang had dared to divide his forces at Xinxing and lead the front camp in a thrust at Zhaoqing Prefecture's seat, thereby drawing and confusing Regional Commander Xu Erxian of Zhaoqing and covering the rear camp's withdrawal from Zhaoqing territory.

But what Zhou Shixiang never imagined was that the most impossible thing happened — four days ago, after more than twenty straight days of slow marching, Song Xianggong had led the rear camp's ten thousand old, weak, women, and children at last into the borders of Xinhui County.

Before the whole camp had even caught its breath, a Qing force of over a thousand men suddenly appeared in the Guifeng Mountains and launched an attack on them.

The Qing troops seemed to have known all along that a force of over ten thousand would appear here. Their commander had laid an ambush in the Guifeng Mountains beforehand, and they struck suddenly just as the rear camp arrived and before it had steadied itself.

One side had rested and was fully prepared; the other was panicked and scrambling to fight. The result was predictable.

Zhao Sihai led his three hundred soldiers in a desperate resistance, and Song Xianggong brought the newly formed security corps into the fight as well. But most of these soldiers and security corpsmen had never been in battle and lacked weapons.

Facing a Qing force twice their number, they fought to the death on sheer courage alone.

By the end, they had failed to hold back the Qing onslaught and more than half were dead or wounded, but they had succeeded in covering the withdrawal of most of the camp's old and young to the area around Yutai Temple in the Guifeng Mountains.

Facing a situation where annihilation could come at any moment, Song Xianggong quickly steadied himself after his initial panic.

Seeing that the terrain around Yutai Temple was easy to defend and hard to attack, he quickly transferred the storehouse troops to Zhao Sihai and conscripted every able-bodied male in the camp who could still walk or run.

Together with Zhao Sihai's survivors, he formed a force of over two thousand men and used the terrain to resist the Qing troops to the death.

In addition, he ordered each camp to conscript the sturdy women, telling them to take up wooden clubs and stones and fight alongside the men.

At this moment there was no way out. Everyone in the rear camp knew that if the Qing troops broke through the line, all of them would die.

So even those who still harbored hostility toward the Taiping Army — the former Luoding gentry and wealthy households who had been forced into the camp — all moved now as well.

Those who could fight went to the line, those who could lend a hand lent a hand, and those who could not fight carried stone after stone up from behind, all for the sake of holding back the Qing attack and waiting for the front camp's rescue.

The Qing troops had not expected that a mob of old, weak, women, and children driven to a dead end could still have fight in them. They charged several times and each time were beaten back by the rear camp, which held the advantageous ground, leaving over a hundred corpses behind.

Seeing this, the Qing commander could not help regretting that he had not cut off the road to Yutai Temple beforehand.

He cursed himself for carelessness and underestimating the enemy, thinking that a band of roving bandits herding old, weak, women, and children could not have much fighting strength.

He had not expected these people to be so fearless of death, and so he had failed to annihilate the enemy in one blow and instead lost two or three hundred men.

After his regret, however, he quickened the pace of the assault. He could see that this force no longer had much fighting strength left. Once he broke through the line in front of him and killed all the men, the remaining old people and children would be lambs to the slaughter.

After another full day of fierce attacks, the Qing troops were still left glaring helplessly at Yutai Temple. The steps in front were covered with corpses. True, the enemy's dead far outnumbered their own, but the enemy still held firm control of the only passage in and out of Yutai Temple.

If a frontal assault won't work, then surround them and starve them to death!

The Qing troops quickly changed tactics. They stopped their fierce attacks and instead split their forces to encircle the enemy.

The Qing commander saw clearly that these old, weak, women, and children had brought hardly any grain with them, and how much grain could a bunch of poor monks inside Yutai Temple have?

Within a few days the temple would run out of food, and then it would fall without even being attacked.

The Qing commander was completely confident in starving the enemy out. He had long since sent men to investigate: this force of nearly ten thousand had come from the Xinxing area, led by a bandit named Zhao Sihai.

The old, weak, women, and children in the force had all been herded along by Zhao Sihai and his bandits, and there were no other reinforcements whatsoever. So there was no need to worry about relief troops coming for these people.

Once those people were too starved to walk or lift a blade, he would lead his men in to finish them off. All the men would be killed.

The women would all be taken away and sold — the pretty, good-looking ones presented to the provincial capital, the slightly plainer ones given to his soldiers for their pleasure and then sold to brothels, and the still plainer ones simply killed to save trouble.

The one flaw was that some people had escaped from the mountains, but that did not matter. Let them run — in this world, how could there be no fish that slip the net? With these ten thousand people in the mountains, the credit was already firmly in hand, and the money was right before his eyes.

Zhu Er's party had made contact after the rear camp withdrew to the area behind Yutai Temple. In breaking through the Qing encirclement, six cavalry troopers had died, but they had not died in vain.

The remaining troopers, under Zhu Er's leadership, charged through the Qing lines, found the horses they had hidden beforehand, and rode day and night without rest.

After riding several horses to death, they finally delivered the rear camp's desperate intelligence to Zhou Shixiang.

"Chief Administrator Song sent me back at full speed to report.

He begs the Battalion Commander to lead the front camp to Guifeng Mountain at once, or the rear camp will be completely wiped out!" When he saw Zhou Shixiang, Zhu Er was still badly shaken, his heart pounding wildly.

Thinking of the rear camp's old and young at Yutai Temple made him all the more frantic.

Tie Yi, Qin Zhisheng, Ge Zheng, and the others, who had rushed over on hearing the news, were also beside themselves when they learned the rear camp was surrounded by Qing troops.

Ge Zheng and his men were worried about the hard-won wealth stored in the public treasury, while Tie Yi was worried about the miners' families in the rear camp.

"Battalion Commander, let's set out at once to rescue the rear camp!"

Everyone begged Zhou Shixiang to give the order to relieve them immediately.

Zhou Shixiang, however, raised a hand to quiet his subordinates, then asked Zhu Er in a low voice, "How many people does the rear camp still have?"

Zhu Er hurriedly replied, "I fear only half remain. Chief Administrator Song and Company Commander Zhao have organized all the men.

Right now they're holding out against the Qing troops using the terrain around Yutai Temple. When I left, the Qing troops had stopped attacking — it looks like they mean to starve our people out."

Hearing this, Tie Yi and the others' eyes lit up. They had been worried they would not arrive in time, but now it seemed there was no need to worry.

Zhou Shixiang also breathed a sigh of relief, then immediately asked Zhu Er, "Have you found out where this Qing force is from?"

"That..." Zhu Er hesitated. "Chief Administrator Song said some of the Qing troops speak with a local accent and some with out-of-province accents. We don't know exactly where they're from, but when I broke through, I saw Qing troops flying a banner with the character Wu on it."

"A Wu banner?" Zhou Shixiang turned toward Li Fuguo, who had just entered the tent. "Do you know of any Green Standard officer surnamed Wu in the Xinxing area?"

Li Fuguo was taken aback. He racked his brains, then said, "Reporting to the Battalion Commander, in the Green Standard, apart from the regional commanders and assistant regional commanders, there are only a handful of officers who can actually fight.

I saw most of them back when I served in the Green Standard, but I never heard of anyone surnamed Wu."

Li Fuguo did not know. Zhou Shixiang frowned and was about to send someone to find Shao Jiugong, who had served in the Green Standard, to ask him.

The Qing force surrounding the rear camp numbered over a thousand, so its commander had to be at least a garrison commander or higher. The background of such a man ought to be investigated thoroughly.

Just as he was about to order his personal guards to fetch Shao Jiugong, Li Fuguo said hesitantly, "Battalion Commander, Brother Zhu said that Qing force has men speaking out-of-province accents. Could they be banner troops?"

"Banner troops?"

Zhou Shixiang pondered briefly.

Qing troops in Guangdong who spoke out-of-province accents could only be one of two things: either Han Banners from Liaodong, or guest troops transferred from Jiangxi or Fujian — Shao Jiugong, for instance, had been a subordinate of Kong Guozhi of the Jiangxi Green Standard.

If they were banner troops, he would have to be cautious; if they were Green Standard troops, the matter would be simple. It was not that Zhou Shixiang feared the Han Banners.

What worried him was that if the force surrounding the rear camp really was Han Banners, then it had to be troops from Guangzhou. That would mean the Taiping Army had already been discovered by Guangzhou, which would be extremely disadvantageous for the Taiping Army's next moves.

If the two princes of Pingnan and Jingnan in Guangzhou mustered their own banner forces in strength to suppress the Taiping Army, Zhou Shixiang would face the greatest test since the uprising began.

One misstep, and not only would the southward march to Xiangshan die in the womb, but the Taiping Army itself might be wiped out.

"If they are banner troops, then we cannot rush to the rescue recklessly. We must make thorough preparations..."

Zhou Shixiang had just begun to make contingency plans in case the force surrounding the rear camp was banner troops when he suddenly stopped short. His ordinarily calm gaze filled with murderous light.

Banner troops, surnamed Wu, Xinxing.

These three points together could not help but make Zhou Shixiang think of one man — a man he dreamed of flaying alive with his own hands: the other defending general of the Qing army at the Battle of Xinhui, the Right Wing Regional Commander under the Prince of Pingnan, Shang Kexi — Wu Jinzhong!

"Battalion Commander?"

Everyone was startled by Zhou Shixiang's sudden change. Seeing the murderous glare in the Battalion Commander's eyes frightened them even more.

After a long while, Zhou Shixiang slowly spoke: "The families of most of the camp's officers and men are in the rear camp. We absolutely cannot sit by and watch the rear camp be destroyed.

Rescuing people is like fighting a fire. Pass the order: the whole camp is to set out immediately for Guifeng Mountain!

Tell the brothers that this Battalion Commander wants that Qing officer surnamed Wu taken alive!"

"Orders received!"

All the company commanders and probationary company commanders stiffened. They were all puzzled by the Battalion Commander's sudden reaction, but none dared ask.

They answered in a thunderous chorus and withdrew. After they had gone, Zhou Shixiang slammed the fist he had long since clenched tight hard against a wooden pillar beside him.

Wu Jinzhong, I will make you wish you were dead!