Chapter 857: The Great Qing's Good Uncle

Crushing Dodo will be far more difficult than crushing Shunzhi!

Because Zhu Cilang still doesn't know where Dodo is, nor where he will strike. For now there are only two rough conjectures — directions arrived at by guesswork.

One direction is, of course, the area around the Tianjin garrison. Shi Kefa is besieging the city, and Dodo coming to rescue the Emperor is, from a purely military standpoint, the more likely possibility. So the Zhu Emperor sent Prince Condé to help Shi Kefa with troop dispositions. Although Shi Kefa has improved greatly and is more than capable of thrashing Fulin, Dodo is no Fulin — the "tutor" Condé had to go in person.

And the other direction is the Qing army's great camps north and south of the Yellow River!

This time, the target of Zhu Cilang's northern expedition was not Shunzhi — Shunzhi delivered himself to his door asking for a beating! The Zhu Emperor's objective was the Central Plain: Henan province and the western part of Shandong province.

And the key to the Central Plain campaign was the north and south great camps the Qing army had built on the banks of the Yellow River near the prefectural seat of Kaifeng.

The so-called north and south great camps were, in fact, two earthen fortresses built facing the river. The two strongholds stood opposite each other at a distance, connected by a pontoon bridge between them.

Both earthen fortresses were built as bastion forts. On Dodo's advice, Shunzhi placed ten thousand picked troops in each of the two forts — soldiers of the Qing infantry battalions. They were commanded respectively by Niohuru Chentai and Magiya Tuhai, the deputy and full commanders of the infantry battalions. Chentai garrisoned the Henan great camp, and Tuhai garrisoned the Hebei great camp.

Their task was simply to hold the camps to the death when the Ming army came to attack, so as to wear down the Ming army's strength.

Once the Ming army had exhausted itself before the Henan and Hebei camps, Dodo would come charging over with fresh Manchu troops!

If Dodo won, the Central Plain would be saved, and the standoff between the Northern Qing and Southern Ming would continue. If he could not win, then they would breach the great dike and flood Henan — heh heh, no one would get off easy!

The task was simple enough, but after the New Year, Chentai and Tuhai, those two lords, no longer knew what to do. Because bad news from the Shandong and Northern Zhili directions came one after another! By the eighth and ninth of the first month, there was no news at all!

The saying "no news is good news" did not apply now, because the Shunzhi Emperor and the Henan and Hebei camps had always maintained contact.

Even after the Shunzhi Emperor had been frightened back to the Tianjin garrison by Shi Kefa, he had not forgotten to send envoys to the Henan and Hebei camps, ordering Chentai and Tuhai to obey the Empress Dowager Bumbutai's commands, and also informing them that Fuquan was to be the successor as master of the Two Yellow Banners.

That had rather the air of settling one's final affairs!

And after that, no more news came from the Tianjin garrison! No news came from Beijing either — no matter how one looked at it, something was off!

Early this morning, Chentai, who was holding the Henan great camp, had put on a show of everything being in excellent shape as he made his rounds of the camp, and casually fabricated a few victory reports to tell the men below. The Henan and Hebei camps' channels of communication with the outside world had always been controlled by Chentai and Tuhai, so the men below had no idea that the Great Qing already showed signs of being finished.

But Chentai himself knew perfectly well in his heart: if the Emperor really was gone, the Imperial Uncle most likely would run, and then he and Tuhai and the twenty thousand men here would be as good as dead.

Burdened with worry, Chentai returned to his headquarters. He was just about to summon his aides to ask whether there was any news from Beijing or Tianjin when hurried footsteps and Tuhai's loud voice came from outside the door.

"Gūsa ejen, is the Gūsa ejen back?"

"Linzhou, come in quickly!" Chentai called out.

Then he saw Tuhai — a man of imposing bearing, every inch the loyal minister and good general — push open the door and walk in. Magiya Tuhai had started out as a bithesi clerk, one of the Shunzhi Emperor's "cultured and frail faction." He had accompanied Shunzhi in his studies and calligraphy practice, and had even learned French with him. But unlike those young dandies Songgotu, Mingju, and Gaosai, who liked to show off their learning, he was an honest man: if he did not understand something, he asked — and he asked no one else but the Shunzhi Emperor. Asking and asking, he made Shunzhi feel he was a gentleman who was not ashamed to seek instruction from his inferiors.

So after Shunzhi took personal rule, among that "cultured and frail faction," his official career prospered the most. He was now deputy commander of the infantry battalions, second in status only to the six Grand Ministers of the Imperial Household.

This is what they mean by humility bringing progress!

Chentai also thought highly of this deputy who could get things done, spoke pleasantly, and had such an imposing appearance. Seeing him come in and about to make the Manchu greeting, he waved a hand and said, "Skip the formalities. If you have something to say, say it quickly."

"Gūsa ejen, urgent military intelligence!" Tuhai's tone was grave. "The mounted patrol I sent east to scout for the enemy has returned. They went out more than three hundred riders strong, and fewer than a hundred came back. Heavy losses!"

Chentai was taken aback. "A mounted force of over three hundred — how could... surely they didn't blunder into an ambush?"

Tuhai shook his head and said with a frown, "It wasn't an ambush. It's worse than an ambush!

I was worried that a small mounted patrol would be ambushed, so I sent out a large force of over three hundred riders, and I specifically instructed them not to pursue the southern army's mounted archers, and to be careful when passing villages and woods. But who would have thought they would run into over a thousand armored lancers, every man riding an extraordinarily powerful warhorse, and when they charged our mounted force it was like a gale sweeping away scattered clouds. I truly don't know where they got so many fine horses."

They had run into the Zhu Emperor's guard lancers! Those were elite troops raised at a cost of heaven knows how much silver and seven or eight years of time — all of them on Tianzhu fold-eared horses. When they charged, of course the Green Standard mounted troops, who made do with Mongol ponies, could not withstand them.

So Tuhai's three hundred riders had over two hundred swept away in a single charge. But it was precisely because of that large three-hundred-rider force that the "black-gun mule soldiers," who operated in units of a few dozen riders, had found it hard to strike — and had forced the main Ming army advancing along the north bank of the Yellow River to send out its trump card, the guard lancers!

"What they're riding must be great ocean horses bought from the West!" Chentai's face was ashen. "Over a thousand such ocean horses shipped from the West must have cost a fortune. No matter how rich the southern barbarians are, they can't have many of them. Their main force has come!"

"The commander is brilliant!" Tuhai smoothly flattered him.

In fact, he had long known that the mounted force he sent out had run into the Ming main army!

"A large force, ocean-horse cavalry, over a thousand of them..." Chentai drew a sharp breath. "They are not coming with good intentions! Linzhou, send men at once to report this news to Beijing — especially the news that the southern barbarians have over a thousand ocean-horse cavalry!"

"Ja!" Tuhai said. "The moment I return I will arrange for men to carry the message to Beijing."

In fact, the message party had already set out! Tuhai did not dare delay in the slightest. He feared the Ming cavalry would seal off the roads near the Hebei great camp. Now the Ming army had not only the "black-gun mule soldiers" but also "long-lance ocean-horse soldiers." The Great Qing's cavalry could no longer compete. And the cavalry attached to the Henan and Hebei camps were no good troops either — all former Green Standard or old Eight Banners Han cavalry, with neither good men nor good horses.

If the Ming army's black-gun soldiers and ocean-horse soldiers really did seal the roads, then the two great camps north and south of the Yellow River would truly have no way to contact their superiors!

At the time Tuhai was reporting to Chentai his men's encounter with the Ming ocean-horse soldiers, the man who had sent out those ocean-horse soldiers — Yan Yingyuan, the Ming Grand Commandant of Henan — was leading the Northern Expedition's Western Route Army, composed of eight infantry divisions, one artillery regiment, one cavalry regiment, and a large body of supply and militia units, marching along the ice- and snow-covered bank of the Yellow River.

The Yellow River itself could not be seen, because the Grand Commandant's army was marching below the riverbank levee. The Yellow River's surface "hung" above the Grand Commandant's head — not too high, just one or two zhang above the ground. This was the situation in winter, when the water was shallow. If one waited until the summer floods, it would be much higher still. At that time, if the south-bank dike burst, the floodwaters would sweep all the way to Huaibei, and drowning a dozen or more counties along the way would be the least of it. If rain on both banks of the Huai River was too heavy and the water level too high, even the Hongze Lake flood-detention basin could not hold, and the losses would be catastrophic!

So Zhu Cilang had given Yan Yingyuan a death order: under no circumstances could the Yellow River's floodwaters be allowed to drown the prefectures and counties of Henan.