Chapter 190: Desperate Ground

Since the Taiping Army rose up from Luoding, it had no base territory, and Zhou Shixiang had insisted on expanding the army by the roving-bandit method of sweeping up people as it went, so everything in the army — troops, grain, fodder — came from plunder and from what it seized from the Qing army.

After the battles at Deqing, Gaoyao, and Xinhui, the Taiping Army had captured enough grain and fodder to sustain the whole army for half a year, but the amount of salt seized was not large.

There were two reasons for the scarcity of salt: first, the prefectures and counties along the Taiping Army's route were not salt-producing regions; second, the Qing forces in those areas had long since imposed strict control and a blockade on salt.

The Qing army's blockade of salt meant that no large quantities of salt flowed into the places the Taiping Army passed through, and the common people could only buy it in fixed rations.

In this way, the Qing army effectively prevented large amounts of salt from pouring into these regions, which Ming and Qing forces repeatedly contested, lest salt — a war material — fall into the hands of the Ming army, which was just as short of salt.

If the Taiping Army could have continued following the policy Zhou Shixiang had earlier laid down, sweeping up people and plundering as it marched, then given its current manpower alone, it would naturally have had no need to fear a salt shortage.

But after occupying Xinhui, Zhou Shixiang, to avoid having the Taiping Army move on Xiangshan and be blocked by superior Qing forces, decided instead to use Xinhui to lure the main Qing force from Guangzhou into attacking the city, and thereby, through this strong fortress that even Li Dingguo's tens of thousands of troops had failed to take, wear down the effective strength of the Guangzhou Qing army in large numbers, making the southward advance relatively easier.

Judged purely from the Taiping Army's own conditions, this strategic conception was clearly in the Taiping Army's interest.

After all, the Taiping Army was only an army made up of many people, some willing and some not, and it was only through the earlier small-scale battles that the whole army had coalesced into a certain degree of fighting strength.

That bit of fighting strength was enough to take on a small force of Green Standard troops, but once it met the main Guangzhou Qing army with its cavalry, it was plainly not enough.

Moreover, the Taiping Army was not merely an army on the march and in battle; it also carried along a great number of old, weak, women, and children.

With no means of transport, to bring so many civilians along with the army was something only two kinds of men had ever done since ancient times: roving bandits and mountain brigands.

The fates of the two were more or less the same — no one had ever heard of either accomplishing anything great.

Even Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong had done it when they first raised troops, but once their forces grew large, they too abandoned this method of sweeping people along and turned toward the path of building elite, crack troops.

The remnants of Li Zicheng's Dashun Army and the Daxi Army, which had by then become the main force of the Southern Ming, were the surviving offshoots of those elite, crack troops.

The drawbacks of expansion by sweeping people along — Zhou Shixiang, who had lived two lives, knew them well. But he had no time, and no opportunity, to make the Taiping Army larger, to set it on the path toward elite, crack troops.

Trapped in Xinhui, the Taiping Army's front camp, with its five great battalions, had a combined fighting strength of only a little over two thousand.

So small a force, whether placed in the whole country or even just in Guangdong, was utterly insignificant and could not influence the course of the Ming-Qing struggle in the slightest.

Had Xinhui not been built so extraordinarily strong by the Qing themselves, a force this size would have been devoured by the Qing army several times over already.

In the battle at Guifeng Mountain, the deaths of several thousand old, weak, women, and children had sounded an alarm throughout the Taiping Army, high and low. Zhou Shixiang was riding a tiger and could not dismount.

The policy of sweeping people along was one he had set, and one he had personally pushed forward. He could not now simply cast off the rear camp as a burden and lead the front camp, traveling light, straight to Xiangshan.

If he did that, the first to defy him would be his own officers — for many of them had wives and children in the rear camp!

How many men in this world could harden their hearts enough to do as Liu Zongmin, the great general at the Chuang King's side, did — kill his wife, destroy his children, and stake his very life on making "revolution"?!

The people certainly could not be cast aside at will. In the future, even when they marched on Xiangshan, they would still need to seek development, and to develop they would need manpower. Without manpower, what development could there be?

Therefore, so long as he could not thoroughly remove the threat the Guangzhou Qing army posed to the Taiping Army's southward advance, Zhou Shixiang did not dare abandon Xinhui and move the whole army to Xiangshan.

The course of the fighting largely matched what Zhou Shixiang had envisioned. The difference was that after launching two major offensives, the Qing army fell silent and switched to besieging the city to deal with the Taiping Army.

This greatly disappointed Zhou Shixiang, who had been intent on using the strong fortress to kill Qing troops in large numbers.

After the disappointment, he could only face reality — the Qing army's prolonged siege was creating more and more problems for the Taiping Army, and salt was one of them.

The besieged city of Xinhui had no way whatsoever to obtain salt from outside. The Qing commander besieging the city was Shang Kexi's son Shang Zhixin, the Prince of Pingnan's heir.

Though this fellow would one day rebel against Kangxi, Zhou Shixiang was not so wildly optimistic as to think that he already harbored rebellious thoughts against the "Great Qing" now, or that, out of regard for their shared anti-Qing cause, he might send salt into the city.

The Qing troops besieging the city were also the elite of the Guangdong Qing army.

Not only were there Han Banner troops from the two princes, but the Governor-General of Guangdong's own provincial standard troops were also taking part, and half of the crack troops the Guangdong Green Standard could spare were camped outside the city.

The generals commanding these forces were all diehard "fans" of the Great Qing — there was absolutely no one among them who might secretly deal with the Taiping Army.

Trying to find among them another Tang Sanshui, the Garrison Commander of Deqing, would be harder than climbing to heaven.

With no way to get salt from outside, the nearly ten thousand people in the city needed salt every day. Even if they could not guarantee the rear camp and the people of Xinhui salt every day, the front camp, the men who carried swords and guns, had to have salt.

And the captives forced into hard labor had to be given a token bit of salt too — otherwise a man could barely stand, let alone have the strength to work.

In early July, Song Xianggong made a count of the salt currently in the public storehouse, and then Zhou Shixiang summoned the various generals and the camp elders of each battalion to discuss and fix a salt-rationing system.

This rationing system was not much different from the water-well allocation method: first guarantee the army's needs, and only then the rear camp.

The generals and camp elders all understood the present situation clearly. Grain, water, salt — all had to go to the front camp first.

Otherwise, without these men with swords to defend the city, the old, weak, women, and children would in the blink of an eye become meat on the Qing army's chopping board, to be ravaged and tormented at will.

Even so, the salt in the public storehouse would not last half a month. For this reason, Zhou Shixiang, still adhering to the principle of pooling everyone's wisdom, had everyone think of solutions.

Someone proposed scraping nitrous salt from around the latrine pits and boiling it down to eat.

This proposal reminded Zhou Shixiang of how, in later times, the Red Army on Jinggang Mountain, also short of salt, had apparently gathered that nitrous salt clinging to the walls around latrines and eaten it.

Whether this nitrous salt was edible or not, having a salty taste in the mouth was always good! Zhou Shixiang rewarded the man who made the proposal with ten taels of silver and had Liao Ruixiang organize the county yamen staff to go collect some and see.

As a result, Magistrate Liao became the first county magistrate in a thousand years of Chinese history to spend his days leading men in circles around latrine pits — which thoroughly humiliated the old scholar.

Practice proved that this nitrous salt was indeed edible, but the quantity was still limited and could not help much at all. Zhou Shixiang had everyone think of more solutions.

He was going all out, offering a heavy reward: whether a cat is white or black, if it can catch mice, it is a good cat!

Whoever could solve the salt problem — if he wanted office, a commoner would be promoted directly to Banner Chief; if he wanted silver, a hundred taels as reward!

It is often said that under a heavy reward there will surely be brave men, but seven or eight days passed in succession without a single bit of news. Not one person came to tear down the yamen notices posted in the rear camp and the residential areas of the Xinhui people.

With no new salt coming in, how could they just sit and eat through their stores! If it truly came to running out of salt, they might as well each take a knife and cut their own throats!

After Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong conferred, they decided to select death volunteers again, led by Chen Mo, to slip out of the city at night and seize salt from the Qing camp.

This was a venture destined to cost many lives, because since the last time Chen Mo led death volunteers to destroy the Qing army's eastern and western gun platforms under cover of night, the Qing army had clearly grown more wary.

Not only had they completely sealed off the tunnels they themselves had dug, they had also dug two trenches in front of the camp, the trenches filled with sharpened bamboo spikes — if a man fell in, he would be crippled if not killed.

Not only that, the Qing army had also set up several rows of palisades beyond those trenches, each row built rock-solid.

Qing sentry platforms stood every three or four zhang, each manned by either gunners or archers, and Qing patrols made a round every half a stick of incense, leaving no gap to exploit at all.

To say nothing of breaking through the palisades, even crossing those two trenches was a thousand difficulties and ten thousand hardships — who knew how many lives would have to be piled up just to get over a single trench!

Chen Mo, the condemned prisoner who had once ordered his men to loot a burning house, had already been promoted to Banner Chief of the Guard Battalion for his merit in destroying the Qing army's eastern and western gun platforms.

When he received Zhou Shixiang's order to leave the city again to seize salt, he was silent for a moment, then nodded without a word. At that moment, his face bore an indescribable deathly stillness; clearly he knew this mission was nine deaths and one life.

Song Xianggong, seeing this, sighed and said nothing.

Zhou Shixiang felt no better in his heart and wanted only to encourage Chen Mo with a few words, when Bald Jiang He came in excitedly to request an audience, saying that outside the west wall, anti-Qing patriots had come under cover of night to join them.

The west wall was garrisoned by the Xiongwei Battalion. Compared with the other three directions, the Qing force stationed outside the west wall was noticeably weaker — judging from the banners alone, it was held only by Green Standard troops.

But weak defense did not mean the Taiping Army could open a breach at the west wall and make contact with the outside, because the west wall faced the Tan River directly.

Less than three li beyond the city lay the broad river waters; trying to cross the river from here — no way at all!

Precisely because Xinhui's west wall faced the Tan River directly, and the Taiping Army in the city had no naval force on the river to coordinate, the besieging Qing army's defense of the west side was weaker than in the other three directions.

Neither Shang Zhixin nor Zhou Shixiang had ever entertained the idea that the Taiping Army might break out from the west wall.

If the Taiping Army truly did break out from the west wall, they would have the Tan River ahead and pursuers behind — no gate to heaven above, no road through the earth below!

Before the Qing army surrounded the city, Zhou Shixiang had sent out several batches of envoys, intending to contact the remnants of the Ming army scattered in the mountains near Xinhui after Li Dingguo's withdrawal.

But because the Qing army came too quickly, not only did no scattered Ming troops come to join them, not one of the men sent out ever returned. At first Zhou Shixiang had still held onto hope, but after a month or two, he no longer counted on the outside.

Now, suddenly hearing Jiang He say that people had come to join them, he was at once astonished and could no longer sit still. He personally led men to the west wall to see what was going on.