Chapter 39: The Porter

Common folk are all people, and as long as they are people, they have all sorts of thoughts. As the saying goes, the same rice raises a hundred kinds of people, so it is no exaggeration to say that a hundred people have a hundred different minds.

Yet on the question of joining the "Ming army," most of the able-bodied young men of Luoding had collectively reached the same conclusion: this soldiering was not to be done.

Why not?

The answer was simple — they were afraid!

Since the first year of Yongli, no fewer than ten different forces had been garrisoned in Luoding at one time or another.

Among them were Li Dingguo's troops, the troops of other Southern Ming generals, and even forces that had first been Ming and later turned Qing, such as the former Southern Ming Regional Commander of Luoding, Xu Anguo's command.

Of course, there was no shortage of Qing troops from the north either — Kong Guoliang's force, which Zhou Shixiang had slain, had come from Jiangxi to the north.

Once troops were garrisoned in the city, the press-ganging of laborers naturally followed. No matter whose army it was, you did not simply walk in and become a proper soldier with blade and spear in hand. First you had to start as a porter.

The army gave porters a fine-sounding name, calling them auxiliary troops, but the common folk knew perfectly well that auxiliary troops were just conscripted laborers.

Only after you had followed the army long enough, after the comrades who had joined with you were mostly dead, or if you were lucky enough to cut off a head and bring it back, or when the regular ranks were so badly depleted that you, the auxiliary, finally got the chance to become a proper soldier — only then could you truly be said to be a soldier drawing pay.

Until then, you were nothing but cannon fodder and coolie labor, the sort who, if you died, had no place to be buried.

There was a folk saying: ten porters, one soldier. It spoke of the bitterness of serving as an auxiliary — of ten auxiliaries, only one could become a proper soldier.

As for whether you would live to return to your hometown, or whether you could make something of yourself in the army, that all depended on your own fate.

All told, the able-bodied young men of Luoding who had been seized by the armies to serve as porters numbered in the thousands at the very least.

When those troops took men, they spoke sweetly, saying they were expanding their strength to protect the region and keep the people safe.

But in the end, those officers who constantly mouthed the words "protect the region and keep the people safe" abandoned Luoding and fled, every last one of them, the moment the enemy attacked!

And when they fled, they left the city's people in misery. One had to understand: every able-bodied young man was the pillar of his household.

Which of them did not have elders above and children below? If the army dragged a man away just like that, what were the old, the young, and the women left at home to do?

Some, a bit more decent, would give a sum of silver to settle the family before leaving. The indecent ones simply used the whip and drove men off at sword- and spear-point.

And if a man would not go even under the lash, they dragged him out and cut his head off on the spot. Beneath the breach in the eastern wall lay buried over a hundred able-bodied young men who had been beheaded!

These past few years, with Ming and Qing fighting back and forth across Guangdong, the men of the household had vanished without a trace, no one knowing whether they were dead or alive.

The old, weak, women, and children left without their pillar either endured bitterly at home or fled abroad, supporting the old and leading the young. Yet even so, they could not hold out for many more days.

In the end, their fate was to sell their sons and daughters, or to stick a straw marker in their own hair and sell themselves. Otherwise, how were they to live?

In times of chaos, a person is worth less than a dog!

In any place, once the men — especially the able-bodied young males who formed the main labor force — drained away in great numbers, the impact on the local economy and people's livelihood was absolutely fatal.

Sometimes ten years, twenty years, even forty or fifty years would not be enough to restore the place to its former prosperity.

Luoding Prefecture had only been established as an independent prefecture during the Wanli reign. Its territory was mountainous, its economy more backward than other parts of Guangdong, and its population small. How could it withstand such a massive drain of able-bodied young men?

To take a nearby example: the Zhao family, which owned the most land, had once had over a hundred tenant households farming its fields, yet now only a dozen or so remained. From this one could see how great the impact of the loss of able-bodied young men was on local livelihood.

Add to this that the Qing army had a custom of massacring and sacking newly conquered Ming territory. On the one hand, they hoped to obtain money and grain by such means; on the other, they sought through such inhuman cruelty to terrify the remaining regions into not daring to resist.

Calamity after calamity, all man-made, and Luoding's total population had plummeted from over one hundred seventy thousand in the first year of Yongli to just over three thousand today.

Even counting those who had fled to other places or hidden in the mountains and forests, the total would not exceed ten thousand.

The city of Luoding Prefecture, which had once governed two counties and directly administered one prefecture, was now no more than a somewhat large town.

With all these bloody lessons of recent years, how could the able-bodied young men of the city still be willing to serve as "cannon fodder" for Assistant Regional Commander Hu of the Ming army?

Even a young man from a disaster-stricken household who gritted his teeth and wanted to take those two taels of silver would be held fast by his wife and children.

Two taels of silver might relieve the immediate crisis, but in the end it would not last long. As long as there was still a man in the household, they could tighten their belts, eat chaff and wild greens, flee famine and beg for food, and somehow survive.

But if the man was gone, the sky itself would collapse!

Looking at his white-haired old father and mother, at his wife's sallow, undernourished face, and then stroking his skinny child — how could that able-bodied young man dare to take those two taels of silver?

While a man lives, there is always hope. Once he is dead, what is there left to speak of?

This soldiering must not be done, and this silver even less must be taken!

The ones truly willing to throw everything aside and take those two taels of silver were mostly those who ate alone and had no family to feed. The thirty-odd able-bodied young men Zhao Sihai had recruited were of this sort.

Apart from a few who had blood feuds with the Qing, the rest were bachelors with no wife, children, or elders to tie them down.

They saw things clearly enough: since life could not go on either way, better to take a gamble in the army. Perhaps they could rise from porter to proper soldier, and if they fought well, who knew — they might even be promoted by their commander to personal guard.

Then, in time, they could at least become an officer, far better than their present circumstances.

In short, the reason Zhao Sihai could not recruit men was that the able-bodied young men were unwilling to abandon their families and go to their deaths in the army. This was, in essence, the same as the attachment to one's native soil that Zhou Shixiang worried about.

Of course, the Ming army's repeated defeats in recent years and the grim outlook for the Southern Ming also dampened the people's enthusiasm for joining the army to some degree.

To resolve the young men's misgivings, there was only one way: make every citizen a soldier.

Only by bringing the able-bodied young men and their families all into the army, adopting the kind of coercive mass-mobilization used by Li Zicheng and even by the later Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, could people be absorbed into the system in the shortest time, uniting high and low in purpose and thereby gaining greater strength.

Zhou Shixiang did not deliberate long. He immediately sent men to gather all the disaster-stricken commoners — he would do the recruiting himself.

After the great fire the night before, Song Xianggong had designated the area by the eastern wall as temporary shelter for the disaster victims, and had arranged for the city's wealthy households to provide some grain. At present, most of the victims were still there, having nowhere else to go.

At the sound of the clanging brass gong, the refugees — some willing, some not — were assembled before the city gate.

Zhou Shixiang had Peng Dazhu bring over a square table, then stood upon it and began his recruitment speech to the bewildered crowd.

His opening was very simple, just one short sentence: "Do you want every person to have food to eat, every person to have clothes to wear, every person to have meat to eat!"