Chapter 888: The Shun Northern Expedition Army (Please Subscribe)

By the shore of Green Jade Lake in Kunming City, a complex of buildings had now appeared that was half school and half military camp. They shared a single name — the Yunnan Military Academy!

That name sounded impressive as hell!

And in fact this military academy was anything but simple — one only had to look at who its commandant was. The commandant of this Yunnan Military Academy was none other than the Shun Emperor Li Guo himself!

Li Guo's idea for founding this military academy had of course come from Zhu Cilang's Nanjing Military Academy, and he had the same need as Zhu Cilang — the Shun army was even more motley than the Ming army. It had originally been cobbled together from many bands of roving bandits, and at the start even their internal orders and commands had not been uniform, so they had to be unified. After entering Sichuan and Yunnan, in order to adapt to the change in terrain and to the transformation of their own role, they had to carry out military reform.

The original Shun and Xi armies had both been roving bandits; to "rove," they naturally had to emphasize mobility. So both sides had equipped themselves with large numbers of mules and horses, and the main force of the old camps had been primarily cavalry. Their abilities in infantry combat, siege warfare, and city defense were all relatively poor.

Historically, the main reason they had collapsed so quickly when they met the Qing army that had entered the pass was that once their best skill, mounted warfare, was checked by the Qing cavalry, they had no other tactics worth using — they could not even defend a city.

But in this timeline, because of the long war between Ming and Qing, they had been given ten years to evolve slowly, and as a result they had actually made progress. Not only had they completed their transformation into a fubing system (the Shun dynasty's institutions had originally been modeled on the Tang, so developing equal-field land distribution and fubing was only natural), they had also developed a combination of saber-and-shield troops and matchlock troops suited to the rugged terrain of the southwest, and had even imported Western matchlocks and cannon through the Burma trade route.

Moreover, Li Guo, Li Laiheng, Li Dingguo, and the others had drawn inspiration from the Nanjing Military Academy and had founded the Yunnan Military Academy in Kunming three years earlier.

However, the Yunnan Military Academy still differed somewhat from the Nanjing Military Academy. The Nanjing Military Academy had largely copied European pike-and-shot square tactics — tactics that were in fact not entirely suited to China, because European square tactics required strong cavalry support, and the Ming army precisely lacked strong cavalry.

At the same time, the Ming army's opponents also lacked powerful shock cavalry. Even the old Manchu of the Eight Banners did not use mounted charges as their primary means of combat. They were more like dismounted knights — riding to battle, dismounting to fight, and their most formidable ability was close combat!

If on the battlefield of Deshengdian, Dodo had been willing to stake his old Manchu, using the tactic of approaching on horseback and dismounting to fight hand-to-hand against the Ming army's Maurice-style squares, there would still have been a chance of victory! Of course, the precondition was that the Eight Banners warriors could withstand a volley of Ming gunfire and the dense scattered fire that followed, and perhaps also had to charge upward against the Ming army's 3-pounder cannon firing grapeshot, trampling over the corpses of their own men in a hard charge. Fight three such victorious battles, and the old Manchu Eight Banners would have gone extinct. Shi Kefa had pacified Liao while failing all the way — that could be counted a miracle too!

But who asked these old Manchu of the Eight Banners to be rarer than giant pandas? These days there were more wild giant pandas than old Manchu warriors.

So Dodo basically knew the weaknesses of the Ming army's Maurice-style squares, but he did not dare fill them with the lives of the old Manchu.

But the Shun army had plenty of men!

They called themselves a peasant uprising, and China was full of peasants!

So Li Dingguo, a homegrown Shun (Xi) tactical expert, had invented the musket saber-and-shield formation on the basis of summing up the lessons learned from the campaign to pacify Yunnan.

On the tenth day of the tenth month of the sixth year of Shun Joint Rule, the Joint-Rule Emperor Li Guo, who governed with folded hands, could not be bothered to hold court. Early in the morning he descended Wuhua Mountain, crossed Green Jade Lake by boat, and went to the military academy to watch Li Dingguo drill the troops.

Li Dingguo's musket saber-and-shield formation was not a battalion-level formation but a hundred-man formation — that is, a company-level formation. Nor did it do away entirely with long spears. Each formation was composed of thirty matchlock men, sixty saber-and-shield men, and ten long-spearmen.

In addition, the musket saber-and-shield formation came in a fairly wide variety of shapes — not only squares, but also circular formations and wedge formations. The square formation had the muskets in front and was used for delivering firepower. The circular formation used shields to form a circle, with long spears thrust out from between the shields and muskets also braced on the shields; it was used against cavalry. The wedge formation had the long spears in front and the saber-and-shield men behind, and was used when launching a charge.

Watching several hundred-man units composed of Shun army officers trained at the academy shift rapidly — now square, now circular, now wedge — as smooth as flowing clouds and water, Li Guo loudly called out his approval.

At his side, Li Dingguo was also quite pleased with himself. Thumping his chest, he said to Li Guo, "Imperial Lord, as long as the Northern Expedition Army can drill this musket saber-and-shield formation until it is second nature, it will be invincible!"

Li Guo nodded. "Still, we must not underestimate the enemy. This time we are going deep into enemy territory. The slightest misstep, and I fear there will be no return!"

"Rest assured, Imperial Lord," Li Dingguo said. "As long as our fifty-thousand-strong Northern Expedition Army completes its training, even if the enemy has two hundred thousand men, they will collapse at a single blow!"

"When can the Northern Expedition Army finish organizing and training?" Li Guo asked. "Are there enough matchlocks?"

Li Dingguo said, "According to plan, our Northern Expedition Army is to be organized into four hundred hundred-man companies, plus some artillery, cavalry, baggage troops, and so on, forming one hundred battalions and twenty-five regiments. In total we need twelve thousand turtle-dove-foot matchlocks. Our ironworks in Chongqing and Kunming have limited output — they can only produce four or five hundred turtle-dove-foot matchlocks a month, so gathering twelve thousand matchlocks will take two years. Current stock is nearly six thousand, so in another year or so we should be about there."

Li Guo nodded. "That will do. By then, even if we don't have ten thousand, we'll still have eight thousand."

"Imperial Lord, so soon?" Li Dingguo was clearly somewhat surprised.

Li Guo lowered his voice. "Huang Shu has already reached Syriam and sent a memorial back. By next autumn at the latest, the Ming army will launch a massive assault on Beijing, and the Great Ming Emperor will personally lead the campaign. That will be our opportunity! Prince of Jin, you must seize it!"

"Rest assured, Imperial Lord. This subject will not fail your expectations!"

"Your Majesty, according to reliable intelligence, the roving bandits have recently imported large quantities of cannon and muskets, and have also opened a military academy in Kunming, Yunnan, to train officers and organize the so-called Northern Expedition Army! The military garrisons of the two Sichuan provinces and the forces under Guizhou's jurisdiction are all in great alarm, and they hope Your Majesty can dispatch the Hard-New Army to their aid."

The one reporting southwestern military affairs to Zhu Cilang in the Hall of Imperial Supremacy in Laoshan Palace was Ma Shiying. He had supervised the army in the southwest for many years, with troops worn out and no achievements, and had even lost quite a bit of territory. Had this been in the Chongzhen Emperor's day, the censors would long since have denounced him to death.

But now the censors had no standing to interfere in military affairs, and civil officials could not say much either. The only ones truly qualified to pass judgment were the Military Staff Office.

And the Military Staff Office's assessment of Ma Shiying and the various southwestern armies was fairly favorable — although they had not won any victories, they had still worked hard to hold the situation together. So Ma Shiying had sat in the post of Governor-General of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan for many years, and only recently had received a new assignment — Governor of Jiangnan!

That was a post dripping with profit. Even without any graft or greed, one could take in over ten thousand taels a year!

That Ma Shiying could obtain such an assignment was clearly a reward for his hard service in the southwest.

The man replacing Ma Shiying as Governor-General of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan was a military officer of local Sichuan origin named Zeng Ying. Zeng Ying was only thirty-four this year, yet he had been famous for many years! As early as the last years of Chongzhen, he had defeated Zhang Xianzhong and recovered Chongqing Prefecture.

In the many years of war since, he and another Sichuan-born general, Yang Zhan, had grown together into the twin jewels of the Sichuan Ming army. Later, they had left Sichuan one after another to attend the Condé cram school, but the tactics they had learned from Prince Condé had not worked well once they went to Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan.

So the southwestern theater remained unfavorable to the Ming army.

Recently, the Ming Governor-General's office for Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan had again picked up word that the roving bandits were organizing a Northern Expedition Army, and was extremely nervous. So the newly appointed Governor-General Zeng Ying and the outgoing Governor-General Ma Shiying had used the occasion of entering the capital for an audience with the sovereign to report the emergency and request aid from Emperor Zhu.

After Ma Shiying finished, Zeng Ying continued from where he had left off: "Your Majesty, the roving bandits are growing more entrenched in the southwest by the day and have already assumed the posture of a rival power. If the court does not send a large army into Sichuan to suppress the bandits, I fear the troubles in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan will drag on indefinitely, with no end in sight!"

(End of Chapter)