Chapter 68: Military Organization

Hu Quan's funeral was conducted with great solemnity. The people of Luoding who had not joined the Taiping Camp were all compelled by the camp to take part in the funeral procession.

Buried together with Hu Quan were the 86 Luoding soldiers who had fallen in battle, along with 3 squad leaders who had come from Dajiao Mountain.

The funeral procession stretched for several li and looked quite grand, but Zhou Shixiang worried that if the Taiping Camp ever left Luoding, the Qing army would desecrate the graves after such a lavish burial of Hu Quan and the soldiers.

Song Xianggong, however, said there was no need to worry.

He told Zhou Shixiang that the Ming and Qing had been fighting for over ten years, and each year both sides lost large numbers of officers and soldiers, so the two sides had an unwritten rule: neither side would damage the graves of the other's fallen.

Otherwise, if you dug up my dead and I smashed your tombs, when would it ever end? Moreover, by the customs the Han had followed for thousands of years, no matter what a man had done in life, once dead he must be laid to rest in the earth.

Therefore even the most vicious Manchu soldiers would not destroy the graves of a Han army, lest they provoke fierce resistance from the Han and gain more trouble than it was worth.

Hearing what Song Xianggong said, Zhou Shixiang felt somewhat reassured. In the two days since his return, through the large quantities of supplies seized from Deqing and several military councils, he had already established himself as the leader of the Taiping Camp.

The old brothers from Dajiao Mountain, Shao Jiugong's Jiangxi soldiers, the new recruits from Luoding, and the prisoners and refugees all held great admiration and respect for him as the new Assistant Regional Commander.

One could say that the Taiping Camp had now changed from the old "Hu enterprise" to the "Zhou enterprise." What Zhou Shixiang had to do next was bring this "Zhou enterprise" Taiping Camp onto the right track and gradually build it into a backbone force for resisting the Qing.

The compensation Zhou Shixiang set for the fallen was 50 taels per man. For this, Song Xianggong, who managed the public treasury, paid out a total of 4,300 taels of silver to the families of the fallen — a sum that accounted for nearly one-third of the silver seized from Deqing.

Fifty taels of compensation was a large sum in the present day. Even allowing for the damage years of war had done to the economy and people's livelihoods, the actual purchasing power of 50 taels of silver was enough to buy a small house.

Converted into grain, it could feed a family of three for several years. It could not be denied that this was a great deal of money.

Setting the compensation for fallen soldiers so high did not go without opposition within the Taiping Camp. Even before the Manchus entered the pass, the Great Ming had never given this much compensation to fallen soldiers — sometimes it gave none at all.

And now the Ming had fallen until only a few southwestern provinces remained. Although the Taiping Camp flew the banner of the Southern Ming's Yongli Son of Heaven, there was no reason to set such high compensation for fallen soldiers.

The Qing, far wealthier than the Southern Ming, had never paid this much either. Why should the Taiping Camp, only just established, give so much?

To pay out like this was simply throwing silver away. How much of a family fortune could withstand such squandering?

Including Shao Jiugong, all ten company commanders without exception opposed it. For this, Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong did a great deal of work.

They spoke many words of empathy, explained the benefits that high compensation would bring to the families of the dead and to the living soldiers, expended no small amount of breath, and laid out a whole string of "reasoning."

In the end, they managed to persuade the dissatisfied company commanders.

After the compensation was distributed according to the roster, it turned out just as Zhou Shixiang had expected.

When the families of the fallen learned they would receive 50 taels, the resentment they had felt toward the Taiping Camp over the deaths of their men immediately subsided, and their discontent was diluted along with it.

Song Xianggong also deliberately had people spread word of the Taiping Camp's benevolence: if your man had been seized by some other army as a conscript laborer, never mind compensation — you would not even see his corpse.

But now they had not only brought your man's body back, they had also given you such a large sum of silver. If you still felt dissatisfied after that, then you simply did not know good from bad.

With both measures working at once, soon no one in the camp could be heard speaking ill of the Taiping Camp among the families of the fallen. In its place, the grief remained grief, but alongside the grief came endless praise for the Taiping Camp's righteous conduct.

If the families of the fallen were like this, the families of the living soldiers had even less to say. Their men had likewise received rewards issued by the Taiping Camp — not gold or silver, but cloth and white flour, along with some meat, and even wine.

These were all extra rewards and did not affect their continuing to draw their allotted food from the public storehouse.

They could take what they did not need or could not eat and exchange it with others for things they required, or even sell it to common folk who had not joined the Taiping Camp and thereby obtain some silver — and the Taiping Camp would not confiscate that silver.

This greatly increased the sense of closeness the soldiers and the old, weak, women, and children felt toward the Taiping Camp, forming the cohesion Zhou Shixiang had hoped for.

After the wounded returned to Luoding, they received medical treatment. Although the methods were very backward and some were inevitably left disabled, the greater part of the wounded were still able to recover.

Those left disabled were not abandoned by the Taiping Camp as they had feared on the road.

Instead, they were promised that once their wounds healed, they could take up non-physical posts in the rear camp and receive a certain reward for these duties, with treatment equal to that of a squad leader.

Of the three squad leaders who had fallen, one had been a bandit by origin, and the other two, like Hu Quan, had been soldiers under Li Chengdong. None of the three had family nearby, so their compensation was for the time being recorded in the accounts.

If their families could be found in the future, the money would be handed over to them.

When the compensation was being settled, a problem presented itself to Zhou Shixiang: how the treatment of soldiers and officers within the camp was to be put into practice.

A hierarchy is the root of all evil, yet it is also indispensable. Without a hierarchy, there would be no way to define the various regulations, nor any way to give the lowest-ranking soldiers a path upward. Compensation was one very real and urgent issue within this hierarchy.

After Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong reached a preliminary consensus on the matter, he summoned the ten company commanders for a military council.

At the council, the ten company commanders unanimously agreed that the camp needed a clear system of rank and deference, with different treatment for people at different levels.

Shao Jiugong even said they could simply copy the Green Standard's system wholesale and set up the same markers, camps, and posts, so that officers at every level would be clear at a glance — saving both trouble and time.

Zhou Shixiang naturally would not adopt the Green Standard's military system.

After mulling it over, he decided to apply the Ming army's guard-and-battalion system to the Taiping Camp, using it to define the camp's hierarchy so that future problems of command, reward and punishment, treatment, and compensation could all be resolved.

The Ming guard-and-battalion system was organized into small banners, general banners, hundred-households, thousand-households, and commandants.

In light of the Taiping Camp's current state, Zhou Shixiang made each squad leader a small-banner officer and each company commander a general-banner officer.

Then, taking into account problems that had arisen in actual command, he provisionally created the post of hundred-household.

This hundred-household post was not a standing one but was established only in wartime, similar in nature to the former forward-camp command officer.

That is to say, once the Taiping Camp went into battle against the Qing army, a hundred-household could be appointed besides Zhou Shixiang to command five general banners in combat.

The choice of hundred-household was not fixed; it was decided only at the military council before battle.

For the sake of maintaining military discipline in the Taiping Camp, Zhou Shixiang decided to establish a disciplinary officer. For the time being, Song Xianggong would hold this post concurrently, to be changed when a suitable candidate appeared later.

Although the Taiping Camp's combat soldiers numbered less than a thousand, the camp's total strength was close to three thousand.

Song Xianggong therefore proposed that Zhou Shixiang take the post of thousand-household himself, saying that if the camp grew larger in the future, everyone's positions could be raised accordingly. Naturally, no one had any objection to this.

The guard-and-battalion system was the regular military system of the Ming dynasty. If Zhou Shixiang wanted his thousand-household post to be legitimate, he had to obtain recognition from the Yongli court.

Otherwise, his action would amount to privately conferring office. The problem was that he did not know how to obtain the Yongli court's recognition.

Song Xianggong told him the matter was not difficult: had they not already sent men to Gaozhou to report the victory? Once Gaozhou sent someone over, they could simply raise the matter.

After all, the Luoding Assistant Regional Commander post had already been given to the Taiping Camp — could an Assistant Regional Commander not confer a thousand-household?

Zhou Shixiang thought this made perfect sense.

Small banner, general banner, hundred-household — these were, frankly, much like the second lieutenant, lieutenant, and captain of later armies, while Assistant Regional Commander, Garrison Commander, and Route Commander were the actual posts, like division commander, Mobile Corps Commander, and regiment commander.

Hu Quan was dead, so the Luoding Assistant Regional Commander post would certainly fall to him. With the standing of an Assistant Regional Commander, asking the Yongli court for a substantive thousand-household appointment should not be a problem.

Zhou Shixiang had originally thought of directly adopting the division-brigade-regiment organizational system of later armies, but on reflection it seemed somewhat incongruous. After all, this was the 17th century, not the 20th.

It was better to keep some period flavor, and it would also spare him the trouble of explaining one by one what a division commander was and what a regiment commander was.