Chapter 62: A Promise

Seeing that there were now many people, Zhou Shixiang ordered them organized at once, lest they cause disorder. He personally selected sixty able-bodied men from the 118 prisoners to serve as death soldiers for the Taiping Camp.

The commander of the death-soldier squad was Chen Mo, the burly man who had just spoken with Shao Jiugong and whose face was still mottled with bruises.

The first thing Chen Mo did after taking office was to establish his authority. Imitating the jailers and prison bosses, he drew in the stronger prisoners to help him oppress the weaker ones, set down all manner of rules, and made the death-soldier squad as dark a place as the prison itself.

Zhou Shixiang turned a blind eye to all this. He wanted only obedient death soldiers.

As for what inhuman treatment these death soldiers—prisoners only a few hours earlier—suffered, he did not care.

To be frank, even if Chen Mo beat some disobedient, defiant prisoner to death in order to set the rules, Zhou Shixiang would treat it as though it had never happened, and might even send troops to help Chen Mo suppress prisoners unwilling to submit.

A great man of later ages once said that theory must be combined with practice, and that without investigation one has no right to speak. In his previous life, Zhou Shixiang had served in the people's army, but an army, in the final analysis, is an instrument of violence.

It does not need soldiers with independent minds, still less can it allow a situation where a hundred men have a hundred different hearts. Obedience is the first principle of an army.

Troublemakers and rebels can never be tolerated within it.

Therefore, when a new recruit steps into the army and, beset by all kinds of discomfort, grows rebellious, and when theoretical persuasion and education fail to work, physical punishment is perhaps the most effective means.

Zhou Shixiang had no intention of transplanting the theories of later ages to seventeenth-century China. In his view, anything produced by transcending the character of its age was impractical.

Therefore, in a seventeenth-century army, physically punishing soldiers, or even killing disobedient ones, was beyond reproach—there was nothing to criticize.

Compared with the miserable fate of a single soldier, the existence and strength of the Taiping Camp outweighed everything. If the Taiping Camp were destroyed, it would not be one soldier who suffered misfortune, but countless soldiers and their families.

Rebellion is a technical craft, and making soldiers obedient is one of its techniques. Zhou Shixiang's choice was simple—violence.

One must act according to the conditions of the age one lives in. Some time-travel novels of later ages like to set up parliaments or separation of powers in ancient times; to Zhou Shixiang, this was pure fantasy—a joke thought up on a whim.

Ask yourself: when most common people cannot read and have no education at all, how can they think independently, and how can they exercise their political rights?

Forcefully implementing certain "lofty" policies regardless of national conditions results in separation of powers becoming a legal system by which the powerful and the rich sit down and divide the spoils, and parliament becoming a club for local thugs, hooligans, and colluding officials and merchants—the dark and evil forces.

Ordinary people simply cannot take part in this game, because they cannot read, they have no money, they have no power, and they have no time, because they are busy feeding their families.

Democracy is a game for the rich.

Zhou Shixiang never believed in any democracy. He always held that the political system best suited to China was centralized power—all the more so in seventeenth-century China, and all the more necessarily so in the army.

Of course, worrying about such things now was truly meddling in matters that were none of his concern. As for the problem before him, Zhou Shixiang saw it simply: death soldiers exist to throw their lives away.

If these death soldiers would not obey, what use were they? So as long as Chen Mo could make these prisoners obedient, no matter what methods he used, Zhou Shixiang's attitude was tacit approval.

He had no energy to play the upright official. Whether these prisoners had been wronged, and whether they should not be made to throw away their lives as death soldiers, were not matters he cared about.

At least, not matters he should care about now. What he should care about now was how to keep the Taiping Camp alive, make it grow and strengthen, until it utterly wiped out the Manchu Qing and restored China.

The able-bodied men among the more than six hundred refugees who had fled famine to Deqing were also drawn out and organized, 230 in all. Part of them were used to replenish the various squads that had suffered heavy losses, and the remainder were formed into two new squads.

Thus, apart from Zhao Sihai's squad in Luoding, the Taiping Camp's strength at the Xihe ferry crossing amounted to eight squads, 400 men in total, of whom sixty were in the death-soldier squad.

The captured weapons of the Deqing Green Standard were quickly distributed. Forty sets of padded armor were given to the Jiangxi soldiers and the Luoding soldiers who had distinguished themselves, and most of those men were also swiftly promoted to squad leaders.

This gave the Taiping Camp a wholly new appearance. The dejection caused by heavy casualties was swept away, replaced by soaring morale.

The death-soldier squad was not issued weapons—not because weapons were lacking, but because there was no need. Shao Jiugong told Zhou Shixiang that these men should be fed and housed in ordinary times, with no training.

When a hard battle came, each man would be handed a blade, and if conditions allowed, given an extra layer of armor, and sent charging in. If they died, so be it.

As for the future development of the death-soldier squad, Zhou Shixiang naturally had his own ideas, but for the moment Shao Jiugong was not wrong, so he made no further arrangements.

The hundred-odd able-bodied men Peng Dazhu had seized from the surrounding villages were not incorporated into the army, but were used for the time being as laborers. Zhou Shixiang planned that after returning to Luoding, he would keep those willing to join the army and release those who were not.

These Deqing men were different from the Luoding soldiers and different from the famine refugees. Their homes were in Deqing, and their families were all in Deqing—how could they be at ease in the Taiping Camp?

Forcing them to stay would mean they were in Cao Cao's camp with their hearts in Han. Rather than have them desert en masse out of homesickness and thereby reveal the Taiping Camp's true situation, it was better to simply release them.

When the day came that the camp had the strength to take Deqing, it would not be too late to sweep them up then. Conscripting them by force now would only be a waste of grain.

Zhou Shixiang had Secretary Liao, who had not yet adjusted from his identity as a prisoner, go and reassure those able-bodied men, promising that once they had delivered the Taiping Camp's wounded and supplies to Luoding, they could go home, and each man would receive twenty jin of rice and one tael of silver as payment.

The livestock plundered from their homes would also be compensated to some degree.

In short, the Taiping Camp was the royal army of the Great Ming, a righteous force under Li Dingguo, the Prince of Xining of the Great Ming, and would absolutely never do anything to wrong the common people.

This promise had a great effect. At the very least, the hostility of these hundred-odd Deqing men toward the Taiping Camp lessened considerably. They no longer worked only under the curses and whips of the soldiers, but showed much more initiative.

Having a promise is always better than having none, and having hope is always better than having none. Compared with the armies of the past that seized laborers, the Taiping Camp's promise to send them home was already an act of the utmost benevolence.

There were no army physicians with the troops, and no physicians in the surrounding villages, so the wounded soldiers received no medical treatment, and their wailing filled the ferry crossing.

Zhou Shixiang had no choice but to have people boil water and use boiled cloth strips to bandage the wounded as best they could. He also had Luoding soldiers who knew them comfort them, encouraging them to stay alive and return to see their families.

This measure gave some of the wounded the will to survive, but it worked only on those whose wounds were not severe. Late at night, word came from the ferry crossing that eight badly wounded men with severed hands or legs had died from loss of blood.

Hearing this, Zhou Shixiang sighed and resolved that after returning, while strengthening the training of new recruits, he would also establish a military medical system.

Every soldier who had faced death was a seed of an elite fighter; saving one more was adding one more measure of strength to the Taiping Camp.

Around the hour of zi, Tang Sanshui sent men with silver and grain, and proposed a fine piece of business that Zhou Shixiang could not refuse.