Chapter 73: On Track

Luoding was now one great military camp. Every house that could hold people was packed full, and even so, more than three thousand people still had no place to stay.

Left with no choice, Song Xianggong worked through the night organizing men to clear a stretch of rubble on the west side of the city.

It was fortunate that Zhou Shixiang had bought a batch of tents from the Green Standard back in Deqing; only with those were they barely able to settle the people in.

The public storehouse had grown several dozen times larger than before the Deqing campaign. Money, grain, and supplies were piled across a full several mu of ground.

The fifty soldiers formerly under Zhao Sihai could no longer handle the storehouse's supervision alone, so Zhou Shixiang drew one hundred men from the Laofeng Village miners and formed them into two squads, placing them under Zhao Sihai's unified command.

Zhao Sihai's rank of squad leader was also temporarily promoted to probationary centurion to cope with the increase in troops under him.

The public storehouse was the Taiping Camp's vital center for money and grain — one could say it was the very lifeline of the entire camp. If anything went wrong with the storehouse, the Taiping Camp could not keep functioning.

For that reason, Zhao Sihai's appointment as probationary centurion drew no opposition from the other squad leaders. Tie Yi, the miners' representative and a man of Luojiao background, likewise raised no objection to Zhou Shixiang's taking men from the miners.

After expanding the storehouse guard force, Song Xianggong also drew two hundred men from the twenty small camps to handle the storehouse's daily operations. Most of these were old men around fifty, with only a dozen or so boys of thirteen or fourteen.

These men were called the Storehouse Corps, and their main task was transporting, requisitioning, and distributing the storehouse's supplies.

Of course, because they bore mainly heavy physical labor, they received half again as much food each day as the originally fixed ration, and at month's end they could also draw some wine and meat.

Besides the Storehouse Corps, Song Xianggong also modeled on the Ming army's storehouse organization and created the post of Storehouse Commissioner, filled by Lin Wanfu, whose duty was to keep count of all money, grain, and supplies entering and leaving the storehouse.

Below the Storehouse Commissioner were twenty storehouse clerks, most of them employees from the Lin family rice shop. This was Lin Wanfu's own suggestion.

He said his own employees had been with him a long time and had mostly done this kind of work before; familiar hands were easy to use, whereas bringing in people who knew nothing would inevitably cause delays, and if a mistake occurred it would be even harder to answer for.

After weighing it over, Song Xianggong decided it was no great matter and went along with Lin Wanfu.

Because Zhou Shixiang had already hinted to Song Xianggong that he would not remain in Luoding for long, Song Xianggong assigned most of the camp's carts to the storehouse, along with all the men who could drive them, so that when the Taiping Camp struck camp and left Luoding, the storehouse's money, grain, and supplies could move out smoothly with the army.

In private, Zhou Shixiang also gave Song Xianggong a word of warning: if the situation turned unfavorable, protect the storehouse first and the camp's civilians second.

That is, if the Taiping Camp were defeated in battle against the Qing army, Song Xianggong's task would be to ensure the storehouse's money and grain could be moved out quickly.

Only after the storehouse was secure could he consider evacuating the old, the weak, the women, and the children.

Song Xianggong naturally understood the implication behind Zhou Shixiang's warning. He was no longer the bookish fool of years past, deaf to all outside his window and devoted solely to the classics.

More than ten years of experience had taught him to tell the urgent from the trivial, and to cast aside that bit of womanish softness in his heart. If the day ever came when he was forced to choose, he would carry out Zhou Shixiang's orders without hesitation.

With a Storehouse Commissioner, storehouse clerks, and the Storehouse Corps all in place, the storehouse's management and operations began to take shape.

The commissioner led the clerks in keeping the registers of money and grain in and out; the Storehouse Corps handled transport and distribution; and Probationary Centurion Zhao Sihai led his 150 soldiers in guarding the storehouse's security.

Of all the camp's institutions, the storehouse was the first to settle into order and the first to begin functioning once its full manpower was in place.

When Lin Wanfu learned that he had been appointed Storehouse Commissioner of the Taiping Camp's public storehouse, he could not contain his delight. Zhou Shixiang saw him several times trailing behind Song Xianggong, bobbing and bowing.

Yet when Lin Wanfu saw Zhou Shixiang, perhaps because of his daughter, he seemed slightly awkward.

Lin Wanfu had once tried to ask Song Xianggong what exactly his daughter was doing at Zhou Shixiang's side, but Song Xianggong scolded him a few times, and he was too frightened to ask again.

Only, every time he saw Zhou Shixiang, his eyes took on the look of a father-in-law sizing up a son-in-law, and he did not seem to mind in the least that his daughter was no longer untouched. In his thinking, one might call him an enlightened man.

Although twenty small camps had been set up, each with its appointed camp elder and camp steward, for a while every camp was still in an uproar.

Those who had come from the same place were comparatively quiet; everyone knew one another, and seeing familiar faces from home all around, their hearts could settle somewhat — no suspicions here, no fears there.

But some camps were thrown together from people of different origins, such as the common folk coerced into coming by Jiang He.

Looking at the strangers around them, thinking again of those "utterly vicious" Taiping soldiers, thinking again of their homes plundered clean, and looking at their trembling, frightened wives, children, and elders beside them — their hearts could not be still.

Once a person's heart cannot settle, it will always stir.

Once hearts stir, trouble follows. Rumors and slander were inevitable, and even more people secretly thought of running away.

Faced with this, apart from tightening the watch, Zhou Shixiang had no other recourse. Song Xianggong, for his part, kept pressing the camp elders and stewards to patrol among their people and do what they could to soothe them.

For those who had joined the Taiping Camp willingly, such measures were unnecessary; but for those who had been "swept along," no amount of talk was of any use.

Fortunately, food did what people could not. When the first meal was set out on time before the old, weak, women, and children of each camp, the sight of something to eat at last calmed everyone somewhat. At the very worst, anyone who gave you food to eat could not be all that bad.

Arranging the meals had cost Song Xianggong enormous effort. He went camp by camp, checking whether the camp elders had chosen cooks, whether each camp's stoves and pots were complete, and whether the rice was cooked through.

There was no help for it — this was the Taiping Camp's first large-scale meal service, and even if it was only for show, Song Xianggong had to do it properly.

By the end of the rounds, his legs were cramping from exhaustion, and he could only sigh that the post of quartermaster-general was no lighter than that of County Magistrate.

Eating was a great matter, but excretion was greater still. Luoding had originally held only a little over three thousand people; now the number had more than tripled, and with more people came more filth.

The ancients had little refinement in such matters; when few people were about, one could find a corner and be done with it. But Luoding lay in Guangdong, and the weather was warming day by day.

If ten thousand people were allowed to piss and shit all over the city, what would become of the sanitation?

Zhou Shixiang had no wish for the newly formed Taiping Camp to be struck by plague, so he instructed Song Xianggong to issue strict orders for the camp elders to organize men to dig latrine pits in each camp, for men and women to relieve themselves separately, and for all excretion near water sources to be forbidden.

Beyond that, drinking boiled water also became an explicit regulation of the Taiping Camp.

The first day, things were chaotic. The second day, things were still somewhat chaotic. The third day, the chaos was gone.

Once everything in the rear camp was on track as Zhou Shixiang had envisioned, he was finally able to free his hands to deal with the question of forming the miners into troops.

The miners of Laofeng Village numbered more than four hundred in all. After one hundred had been drawn off for Zhao Sihai, Zhou Shixiang had something of a headache over how to organize the remaining three hundred or so.

The young man Tie Yi held great influence among the miners. Zhou Shixiang had seen with his own eyes the respect the miners showed Tie Yi.

Considering that these miners had always lived within a fixed pattern of work, they could become an elite force without any training — just as Qi Jiguang's army had been drawn largely from the miners of Yiwu in Zhejiang, and just as the crack troops of the later Taiping Army were all Guangxi miners — Zhou Shixiang naturally wanted to forge an elite force from miners as well.

But whether this force should be dispersed or concentrated, he could not decide. While he was mulling the matter over, Tie Yi came to invite him over, saying he wanted him to see the powder they had brought from the copper mine.

The household affairs are mostly settled; formal updates resume tomorrow.