Chapter 615: This Is Mobile Warfare!

The bitter winter of the Little Ice Age had finally arrived. After several heavy snowstorms, the great plains of western and northern Shandong were blanketed in a vast expanse of white. The Grand Canal, the Daqing River, the Tu River, and the old Yellow River — all the rivers great and small that crossed the lands of western and northern Shandong — froze over completely, and could no longer hold back the iron hooves of the Qing army.

Just as Kong Youde was laying down his life for righteousness, gladly drinking the poisoned wine, some hundred and several tens of li from Liaocheng, within the borders of Yucheng County and Jiyang County under Jinan Prefecture, a long marching dragon made up of eight-colored cavalry and green-clad mounted (mule-mounted) infantry, along with horse-drawn Hongyi small cannons and one-catty great general cannons, was rolling forward, sweeping toward the Ming dynasty's provincial capital of Shandong, Jinan, with unstoppable momentum!

This force was the great army striking at Jinan led by the Qing dynasty's Duanzhong Commandery Prince, Bolo — uniformly "four-legged," perhaps unable to cover seventy or eighty li a day, but in this world of ice and snow, fifty li a day was no problem at all.

Zhu Cilang's ad-hoc New Army could of course manage this marching speed too, but the precondition for rapid marching was not being frequently harassed and blocked by the enemy, along with good roads and an unobstructed path. Setting aside the matter of road conditions for now, not being frequently harassed and blocked by enemy forces while marching at the front was no easy goal to achieve. On the North China Plain, achieving that goal required powerful cavalry capable of suppressing the enemy!

And cavalry was precisely the Ming army's weak point, and the Qing army's strength!

In the Daqing River and Tu River basins within Jinan Prefecture, the territories of the two sides interlocked like dog's teeth, churned into a tangle!

What the Qing had placed in this area were twenty or thirty niru of the Plain Green Banner, while on the Ming side were the armed landlords under Gao Hongtu — both sides had blades in hand, and deep hatred besides! This land had originally belonged to the landlords and rich men of Shandong, and now the Qing's Green Banner had enclosed so much of it. How deep the hatred ran — one could figure that out just by thinking with one's heel.

So over the past year or two, the Daqing River and Tu River area had seen a small fight every three days and a big fight every five days, and the fighters on both sides had been tempered by experience.

Now that the Qing side's Green Standard troops had pulled back, wouldn't the Ming's landlord forces be swaggering with their tails up?

Without strong cavalry to sweep the route clear, merely dealing with harassment and ambushes from small units along the way would greatly slow the marching speed of Bolo's Qing force.

But how could small bands of landlord militia be a match for the veteran Eight Banners cavalry under Bolo?

As shock cavalry, the Eight Banners cavalry might not count as particularly outstanding in this era of the world, but as reconnaissance cavalry and light cavalry, they were absolutely among the very best.

Moreover, the veteran Eight Banners were configured entirely as mounted units — every man could do acrobatics on horseback — fully capable of undertaking the very important "odd jobs" of reconnaissance, searching, and pursuit. The main body of the Plain Green Banner cavalry following the veteran Eight Banners was also drawn from the Ming dynasty's northeastern and northwestern frontier armies, among whom there was no shortage of excellent cavalrymen; basically every man could ride, and every man had a horse to ride.

So the roving cavalry Bolo could send out were numerous — several thousand even — to say nothing of small bands of landlord militia; even large formations of the ad-hoc New Army's cavalry would not dare contest them for control of the battlefield!

How much cavalry did Zhu Cilang have? Merely two regiments of heavy cavalry, plus seven battalions (each battalion just over three hundred men) of light cavalry (attached to the divisions) — altogether just over five thousand.

Of these, half were not quite up to standard in horsemanship, utterly unable to defeat the elite of the veteran Eight Banners, and even inferior to the mounted troops of the Plain Green Banner — this was because large numbers of elite soldiers with better horsemanship (mostly from household retainers and the old camps of the roving bandits) had been promoted over the past few years and become officers leading troops.

And the Zhu Emperor's side did not have many good horses to use either. Of these five thousand cavalrymen in active service, more than half had no decent warhorses available.

The Ming cavalry's horsemanship was lacking, and the warhorses beneath them were lacking too, so naturally they had no capital with which to wage fierce skirmishing battles against the Qing cavalry across the broad battlefield.

Even proper Ming cavalry was no match, so the landlord forces of the Daqing River and Tu River area were even less so.

And this was not even the worst of it. The worst was that not only could they not delay the Qing troops' movements, they could not even hold their own forts and walled strongholds — Bolo's column had one niru of Hongyi small cannons, equipped with six three-pounder guns and six one-catty guns. Against a strong city like Jinan that was hardly enough to matter, but how could an ordinary landlord fort withstand it?

Fortunately, Bolo's purpose in coming was not to demolish the landlords' houses, and he had no time to batter down fort after fort. So as long as those strongholds he took a fancy to handed over a certain amount of grain, they could escape disaster.

After escaping disaster, of course, they would do everything possible to send urgent word to Jinan!

The Qing main force seemed to have struck into Jinan Prefecture!

Suffering a situation similar to Jinan Prefecture were Huang Degong's Huaibei Garrison and Gao Jie's Xuhai Garrison.

The more than ten thousand elite troops of the Nine Banners led by Mandahai had also taken advantage of the time when Zhu Cilang's main force was besieging Liaocheng to march south from Guide Prefecture, striking into Suzhou territory within the Huaibei Garrison — equally unstoppable!

Within Suzhou territory of the Huaibei Garrison, all were manors of land-grant soldiers, who also dwelt in fortified settlements. The military households of one battalion lived together in one place, but the forts they dwelt in were far sturdier than the strongholds of the Shandong landlords — bastion forts built with timber as the bones, rammed earth as the flesh, and sandbags as the skin. There were moats outside, and great general cannons mounted atop the bastions.

Moreover, Huang Degong had guarded against his own nest being ravaged by the Tartars, so when mustering troops he had held back a hand — each fort had at least one hundred regular soldiers left behind. Add the women and youths among the military dependents who could mount the walls, plus the tenant farmers of each household, and a single fort could always scrape together three to five hundred people to man the walls.

Not many in number, but for the Qing troops to break them would still be troublesome — quite possibly with heavy casualties!

However, Mandahai was also a famed general of the age, and saw at a glance the weakness of Huang Degong's deployment — there were too few forts! And the gaps between the forts were too large, so they could not serve at all to block the invading Qing troops.

So Mandahai simply passed through these simple bastion forts, advancing eastward along the Sui River, and marched straight into Suining County, the disputed territory between the Huaibei Garrison and the Xuhai Garrison. Here there were no bastion forts of the landlord troops, and because Suining County town was relatively far from the front lines and not considered particularly important, it had not undergone bastion-fort conversion. As a result, it was taken in a single assault by this Qing column under Mandahai!

Now the problem became serious! Suining County lay southeast of Xuzhou, separated from Suqian and Pizhou, the two key points on the Grand Canal, by only one river — the Yellow River — and a Yellow River that was already frozen over at that!

Lady Xing (Gao Jie's wife), who remained behind in Pizhou, on one hand summoned troops and organized the defense, and on the other dispatched six-hundred-li express riders to send urgent word to Zhu Cilang far away in Liaocheng.

And when Zhu Cilang received the emergency military reports from Jinan and Pizhou at the same time, he too was somewhat dumbfounded!

He had thought he was advancing step by step, consolidating as he went; he had not expected the gap left behind him to be so large.

"Your Majesty, Jinan Prefecture is not urgent, but Xuzhou and Haizhou must not be lost!" At the temporary court in Liaocheng, military advisor Li Yan immediately advised the great Zhu Emperor, "I beg Your Majesty to move the court to Xuzhou at once!"

Zhu Cilang was moving together with two infantry divisions, two cavalry regiments, two artillery regiments, and one guards battalion. If he moved the court to Xuzhou, that would mean the great army currently gathered at Liaocheng would be split in two.

Zhu Cilang asked hesitantly, "Do we know how many men the eastern barbarians who broke into Suining have? Is it Dorgon's main force?"

Li Yan shook his head: "Impossible to know! Even the beacon fires of Huaibei were not lit in time, so the enemy's strength is even less knowable. But the fact that they could take Suining County town in one assault shows they have some real strength. According to reports, this eastern barbarian force used quite a few cannons when attacking the city. The eastern barbarians now have only eight niru of Hongyi small cannons in all — a force that can move with cannons cannot be a small detachment, and must not be taken lightly!"

Zhu Cilang stood before the map, looking at the seventeen or eighteen bastion forts along the more than four hundred li of the Grand Canal between Liaocheng and Pei County, and merely sighed softly: "I truly did not expect that the four-hundred-li bastion line would all be bypassed by Dorgon."

(End of Chapter)