Chapter 474: Better to Have Friends Come from Afar

"The Great Ming's Exalted Emperor, the Great Ancestor, reborn — invincible in battle!"

When Zhu Cilang's heroic figure on horseback appeared outside the Longjiang Pass docks, the New Army officers and men who had disembarked early and formed ranks on the broad streets outside Nanjing's outer wall suddenly burst into the loudest cheers.

Their cheers, in turn, drove the commoners crowding along the long street to welcome the victorious soldiers into a frenzy. Beside the Longjiang Pass docks, every warehouse, shop, and government office was packed with people; the walls were covered with people clinging to them, and in some places even the rooftops were full of people standing. Everyone was shouting at the top of their lungs, yelling slogans about "the Exalted Emperor, the Great Ancestor, living among us," and some were so moved that their eyes brimmed with tears.

Of course, most of these commoners welcoming Zhu Cilang were not natives who had long lived in Jinling, but "northerners" who had come from the north or from the Huai region. Some were family members of the Hard-Working New Army's officers and men, while others were refugees who had lost their homes and had been relieved and taken in by officials dispatched by Zhu Cilang to Nanjing.

These people almost all ate the Zhu family's rice and wore the Zhu family's clothes, and they counted on Zhu Cilang, the Grand Crown Prince Who Soothes the Army, to lead them back to their old homes. Thus they had become the most resolute supporters of Zhu Cilang's "northerners' regime" in Nanjing!

Zhu Cilang, who was about to turn eighteen, rode a tall warhorse, wearing the plate armor forged by water-powered hammers that Zheng Zhilong had presented as tribute, and looked full of heroic spirit. Compared with before this campaign, however, he had gained an added composure and an air of looking about with proud self-assurance. Li Yan, Wu Xiang, Hao Yaoqi, Wang Qi, Shi Rui'en, Ferreira — these Chinese and Western generals — also wore plate armor or splint armor and rode clustered around Zhu Cilang. Each of them bore the bearing of a victor, radiating confidence in certain victory from head to toe.

By now, no one worried any longer that Zhu Cilang's regime could not endure. Even the most pessimistic forecast was no more than that it would hold a corner of Jiangnan in peace for a hundred and some decades — the Great Ming already had a national fortune of more than 270 years, and if it could gain another hundred and some decades, that would be a four-hundred-year foundation for two Mings, enough to rival the Han dynasty.

Here in Jiangnan, some scholar-officials were already privately calling the present Great Ming the "Southern Ming," and comparing the Southern Ming with the Southern Song.

Compared with the Southern Song, the present Southern Ming seemed somewhat stronger, and it looked as though it could preserve a hundred and some decades of peace in Jiangnan.

Of course, there were also some people who opened their eyes and looked at the world, and who already knew that the greatest difference between the Southern Ming and the Southern Song lay in the eastward spread of Western learning. These people were all full of confidence in the Southern Ming's prospects for a northern expedition. For example, Duke of Quan Zheng Zhilong had Chen Ding, who was escorting the Van Diemen mission, deliver another batch of firearms and gunpowder to Zhu Cilang along the way. The firearms among them were all turtle-dove-foot muskets made in Foshan and Anping — 1,000 of them, all fine pieces!

In Zheng Zhilong's view, Tartars who could be dealt with using firearms and gunpowder were no threat. As long as the southeast's supply of silk and porcelain did not cease, Western firearms and gunpowder could be bought in whatever quantity. Even manufacturing them oneself was not a problem.

As a burst of drumming with a very distinct rhythm sounded, the officers and men of the Hard-Working New Army's Vanguard Division and First Division, who had long since finished forming ranks, began to march with orderly steps along the broad street toward Yifeng Gate.

The eight thousand tiger-guard troops of four infantry regiments had all changed into brand-new armor. Half of the pikemen, about 2,000 men, had changed into splint iron armor, the surfaces polished to a bright shine, a dazzling blaze of light under the sun. Pikes a full zhang long rested on their shoulders, the spear tips polished just as bright, reflecting a chilling gleam; seen from afar, they looked like a moving forest of steel. Even more chilling were the wind-dried human heads hanging beneath the spear tips of these pikemen! All were heads of Tartar captives with money-rat tails; each pike bore three heads, a total of 6,000 hideous heads, proclaiming the awe-inspiring military might of the Great Ming's Grand Crown Prince Who Soothes the Army.

Marching together with the pikemen were musketeers wearing cloth-faced iron armor. One third of them carried huge turtle-dove-foot muskets on their shoulders, while the remaining two thirds carried various types of light matchlocks with bayonets fixed.

The heavy matchlocks now used by the Hard-Working New Army, that is, the turtle-dove-foot muskets, were by and large of a unified model. Although not standardized, they were generally much the same. Their light matchlocks, however, were somewhat motley. The most commonly used among them was the Japanese three-monme gun, a very light firearm that could only ensure killing or wounding heavily armored Manchu soldiers at a distance beyond 30 paces when loaded with a double charge of powder. Its power was truly unsatisfactory and could only be counted as a make-do weapon.

Therefore, once the situation had stabilized somewhat, Zhu Cilang decided to phase out the three-monme gun and chose the Folangji light musket, likewise transmitted from the West, as the standard light musket — this firearm was the Spanish light matchlock. Though called light, it was actually about the same as the Japanese six-monme gun: a ball weight of six qian, a powder charge of five qian, and an extremely high muzzle energy, sufficient to shoot through Qing shield carts at a distance beyond 50 paces.

In addition, this firearm was nearly five chi long, and with a socket bayonet fixed, its length could reach seven chi — a full head taller than a man, quite usable as a pike.

But from choosing the Spanish light matchlock as the standard light musket to completing the replacement of equipment, there was still a long road to travel!

After all, the military-industrial clusters in Nanjing and Shanghai had only just started, and were far from reaching a scale capable of mass-producing firearms.

The military industries in Foshan and Anping did have some foundation and had long been able to produce turtle-dove-foot muskets and Lumi muskets, but their output was also far from sufficient to meet the demand for equipping the Hard-Working New Army with firearms — firearms were consumables, easily worn out in the course of high-intensity training and combat. So a fairly large output was needed to support a huge firearm-equipped army.

Therefore, purchasing firearms from abroad was still very necessary at present. This was no comprador mentality; today's firearms were all handicraft products, so production capacity grew very slowly. It all depended on masters teaching apprentices hand to hand; an apprentice needed three years of teaching before he could graduate, and without eight or ten years, production capacity simply could not rise. If one forcibly demanded a surge in output from below, the craftsmanship would not be up to standard, and what was produced would be barrel-bursting junk.

So what needed to be bought still had to be bought!

But the underpowered Japanese guns could no longer be bought; those were just emergency stopgaps. European muskets with greater power, better quality, and ample supply were what Grand Crown Prince Zhu truly needed.

But this bottom card could not be revealed to the red-haired barbarian envoy Van Diemen.

What Van Diemen could be allowed to know now was that the Ming Crown Prince was invincible in battle, and that the Tartars of the north had already been defeated!

"Bruce, you are an army officer. What do you think of the Chinese Crown Prince's army? Does it measure up to the standard of an elite European force?"

Antony van Diemen had little interest in those thousands of dead men's heads that were sickening to look at, but he had to ascertain the true level of this Eastern army before his eyes — this would determine whether he, Van Diemen, was a friend from afar, or a wicked and ferocious European colonizer!

His brother Bruce was an army officer in his forties who had fought in the Thirty Years' War and served as an officer in many German Protestant princely armies.

When Zhu Cilang's army appeared on the main street outside Yifeng Gate, Bruce raised his telescope and observed carefully.

He soon discovered that this Eastern army employed typical Maurice-style tactics — using a battalion of about 500 men as the basic combat unit, with pikemen and musketeers each making up half, and 3-pounder cannons attached at the regimental level. In addition, they had fixed bayonets to the muzzles of some light matchlocks, which looked good, though he could not tell how they were attached.

What left the deepest impression on Bruce, however, was the strict and orderly formation of this Eastern army!

He had never seen such a strictly ordered army in the East. Even in the West, such an army could count as elite!

"They are strong. Military threat will not work!" Bruce lowered his telescope, pondered for a moment, and said in a low voice, "Antony, it seems we must reconsider the contents of the treaty."

(End of Chapter)