Chapter 76

Getting rich was the shared dream of Ge Zheng, Ge Yi, and the other officers who had come out of Big Woodcutter Mountain.

They had no faith, and no sense of right and wrong when it came to the great cause of the nation; all they had were fine notions of how to get rich, how to eat meat and fish every day, and how to count money until their hands went soft.

And indeed, in the Taiping Camp today, apart from Zhou Shixiang, there were probably few men who thought about the camp's future, or the future of China, from the level of the nation.

The moment Ge Yi proposed attacking Deqing, he won the support of Jiang He and the others, who all said that although Deqing's walls were stronger than Luoding's, if they really used this gunpowder to blast them, they would probably turn out to be made of paper.

Blast the wall, break the city, and the brothers would get rich and live it up.

The big fellow Chen Mo was even more eager, saying that if they attacked Deqing again he would volunteer to lead the death-soldier battalion in the first assault, and would surely drag Lu Gongming before the Battalion Commander.

He spoke so well that Zhou Shixiang was almost moved, and truly felt like gathering all the gunpowder in his hands and going to blast Deqing.

Fortunately, he came to his senses in time. There was wealth in Deqing that could be looted, but what would they do after looting it — occupy Deqing and fight the Qing army to the death, or withdraw again to this godforsaken place, Luoding?

There was only so much gunpowder; if they really blasted the wall, it would probably all be used up in one go. Without gunpowder, what would they do the next time they ran into a "nail house"?

Besides, Deqing was still, for the moment, a "friendly state" of the Taiping Camp. They had just obtained a large batch of money, grain, and supplies from them, and now to turn around and smash down their door — that seemed a little ungenerous.

Until he could obtain a source of gunpowder, Zhou Shixiang would not rashly use his only supply for blasting. These less than two hundred jin of granulated powder were the one sharp weapon he held that outmatched the Qing army.

Good things had to be used in good places, and Deqing was plainly not a "good place" in his mind. So he ignored Ge Yi and simply had Tie Yi and the others sum up the effects of this blast and make improvements on its shortcomings.

This left Ge Yi thoroughly deflated, blinking in embarrassment. When Jiang He and the others saw that Zhou Shixiang had no intention of attacking Deqing again, they tactfully dropped the subject.

After witnessing the power of the Taiping Camp's gunpowder, the camp elders were ordered to return and publicize the camp's strength to the camp folk, while Song Xianggong, at Zhou Shixiang's request, set about establishing the Taiping Camp's Quartermaster Office.

At present the Taiping Camp had only a little over four hundred sets of uniforms; most of the rest of the men were dressed as civilians, so ragged they hardly looked like an army. As their numbers grew, weapons too had become scarce.

Zhou Shixiang had no pig iron on hand, so he could not forge weapons himself.

He could only gather up all the iron farm tools and implements in the city and hand them to Guo Dachui, the man who had branded the Jiangxi soldiers, and have him do his utmost to forge a batch of long sabers.

Guo Dachui, having boarded this "pirate ship," grumbled bitterly about the task, but did not dare refuse. He could only lead his two apprentices, plus a dozen or so youths the Taiping Camp assigned him, in working day and night.

Hurrying and scurrying, he finally supplied the Taiping Camp with another sixty-odd long sabers — but no more than that, because there was no iron left for him to melt down into blades.

Even a clever wife cannot cook without rice; if you give a man no raw materials, how can you expect him to supply you with weapons? Zhou Shixiang was strict in rewards and punishments.

He had Song Xianggong pay Guo Dachui thirty taels of silver, then appointed him Director of the Taiping Camp's Armory Office, with treatment equal to that of a squad leader in the front battalion.

Of course, this Armory Director was for now only a nominal title; Guo Dachui was in substance still a blacksmith. When he was not forging blades, he led his apprentices and helpers in doing repair and patch-up work for the Taiping Camp.

Another two days passed. During these two days the various units were still getting used to one another, and some training for the new recruits was put on the schedule.

Though it had not yet been carried out systematically, at least every day squads of soldiers could be seen before the city gate, shouting slogans as they marched in and out, in what was called running drill.

There were also a few squads doing some sort of barefoot-with-shoes exercise, which gave the common folk, who had never seen such training methods, a real spectacle.

The Quartermaster Office was also set up.

Yang Shanyuan of the Taida Cloth Shop was forcibly conscripted and forcibly made Director of the Quartermaster Office, and now spent his days dealing with cloth, along with all the clerks of his Yang family and three hundred women selected from the various battalions.

The camp was short even of weapons, so Zhou Shixiang naturally could not demand that the Quartermaster Office provide armor for the whole camp. Given the Taiping Camp's current supplies, they could not even produce padded cotton armor on their own.

So Zhou Shixiang made no demands of the Quartermaster Office, only ordering them to dye the cloth black and make jackets and trousers.

The design of this uniform was much like the later Zhongshan suit, and clashed utterly with the uniforms of the Ming and Qing armies of the present day.

After seeing the first sample, Song Xianggong was greatly displeased, saying this sort of clothing did not accord with the rites of Chinese dress, and that wearing all black was simply ugly. Zhou Shixiang fobbed him off with talk of a good fit and insufficient supplies.

While the black uniforms were being produced, Zhou Shixiang also sent men to Deqing to find Tang Sanshui — this time not to do business, but to deliver gifts.

The gifts were genuine gold and silver: one hundred silver ingots of ten taels each, plus a landscape painting by some unknown Song dynasty artist. The former was given directly to Tang Sanshui; the latter was for Lu Gongming.

No one strikes a gift-bearer.

Under the assault of genuine gold and silver and that calligraphy-and-painting scroll of unguessable value, Tang Sanshui and Lu Gongming disclosed the plans of Zhaoqing Prefecture and the provincial capital for dealing with the "Ming army's" large-scale attack on Deqing.

Plans, they were called, but in truth there were no plans.

Xu Erxian, the Regional Commander of Zhaoqing, had done his utmost to petition Guangzhou to send troops to suppress the Ming army in Gaozhou and recover Luoding, but Guangzhou would not approve his proposal to march, because the two princes in Guangzhou were at that moment being driven to distraction by the situation in Chaozhou and Shantou.

After Hao Shangjiu's defeat, the Qing army, which had thought it could control Chaozhou and Shantou, had not expected that Zheng Chenggong of Jinmen and Xiamen was also eyeing Chaozhou and Shantou hungrily.

When the Qing army besieged Chaozhou, Zheng Chenggong ordered his general Chen Liu, the Great General of the Northern Garrison, to lead troops to its relief.

After Hao Shangjiu's defeat, Zheng Chenggong again sent Regional Commanders Li De, Zhou Jiwu, and other generals to lead troops into Jieyang, which bordered the Chaozhou prefectural seat, and they repeatedly invaded Chaozhou to seize grain.

Twice their vanguard pressed straight toward Chaozhou itself.

This made the two false princes in Guangzhou — Ping and Jing — who had just seen the Manchu troops return north to escape the summer heat, afraid to use their forces on a large scale in the southwest, for fear that if they moved against Li Dingguo in the southwest, the northeast would be exploited by the Zheng clan.

The shortage of troops was naturally not a reason the Guangzhou authorities would admit openly.

On the surface, the Ping and Jing feudatories and the Qing Governor-General of Guangdong, Li Shuaitai, all sternly ordered Zhaoqing Prefecture to strengthen its military preparations, and commanded the Regional Commander of Zhaoqing, Xu Erxian, to send troops when the moment was right to recover lost territory and strike at the arrogance of the "old-bandit rebels."

Beyond that, however, not a single grain of rice or tael of silver was issued. After receiving the reply, Xu Erxian said not a word, took his personal guards, and went up the mountain to hunt, never again troubling himself with any talk of suppressing or recovering.

Tang Sanshui got his wish and leaped from Battalion Commander to Garrison Commander — a promotion and a fortune all at once.

Lu Gongming, too, was reported by Zhaoqing Prefecture to the Governor-General's office for "merit in defending the territory," and if nothing went wrong, a commendation would come down before long.

With such happy events at their doors, the two men naturally greeted Zhou Shixiang's envoy with smiling faces, all the more so since the man had come bearing heavy gifts.

The news the envoy brought back let Zhou Shixiang breathe easier. He feared nothing else, only that the Qing army in Guangdong would attack Luoding in force, which would put the Taiping Camp in extreme danger.

Fortunately, the Qing army in Guangdong could not yet fully control Guangdong: in the northeast the Zheng clan watched hungrily, in the southwest there was Li Dingguo's force, and along the coast there were the volunteer armies raised by the Southern Ming Governor-General of Guangdong, Lian Chengbi, and the Grand Secretary Guo Zhiqi.

In the short term, the Taiping Camp, this sudden new force wedged among several powers, could borrow considerable advantage from the situation.

Without the restraining presence of these Ming forces, the Taiping Camp's handful of men would probably not even be worth the Qing army's notice.

Day after day, Zhou Shixiang threw himself wholly into building up the Taiping Camp, wishing he could forge it into a crack force in a single day. But one cannot grow fat on a single mouthful; no matter how anxious he was, it was useless — haste makes waste.

Fortunately, someone from Gaozhou finally arrived. Although more than half a month had passed since the occupation of Luoding, and they had come a little late, better late than never.

Strangely, the man Gaozhou sent this time was not Cheng Bangjun, the Director of the Bureau of Operations in the Ministry of War of the Yongli court, who had previously been in contact with them, but Lei Xianchu, a Mobile Corps Commander under the Four-Prefecture Governor Zhang Xiaochi.