Chapter 182: Army Morale

Shortly after Lu Xiangsheng and the assembled generals settled on their bandit-suppression strategy and dispatched several scouting parties toward Zhuxi and Zhushan to reconnoiter the enemy, good news came one after another.

First, the court's military dispatch arrived, and its contents put Lu Xiangsheng at ease: Gao Yingxiang had been defeated and captured by Sun Chuanting at Heishuiyu south of Xi'an, then escorted to the capital and executed by lingchi.

In the hearts of Zu Kuan and the other generals, there was more disappointment and resentment. Gao Yingxiang's elite troops had been virtually wiped out in the Battle of Shouzhou; the remaining scattered remnants were too feeble to withstand a single blow—and now that surnamed Sun had picked up a ripe persimmon. The Qin army was sure to receive no small reward this time; those bastards earned merit just lying down, while they themselves were still fighting tooth and nail against the roving bandits in the mountains. Damn it all! Comparing yourself to others only makes you furious!

Hot on its heels came another piece of good news by fast horse from the Ministry of War: twenty thousand Capital Camp troops were already en route, and the minister was asked to plan in advance the bandit-suppression strategy to be carried out once the several armies combined into one force of tens of thousands. The court was also drawing up the roster of all officers and soldiers who had taken part in the campaign to exterminate the Dashing bandit, along with their rewards, and the merit list would be distributed to the entire army shortly; the minister was asked to proclaim it to the generals to steady the army's morale.

Lu Xiangsheng spoke with a smile on his face and a booming voice: "The Dashing rebel has been captured—the Shaanxi Governor-General has rendered a great service! I congratulate His Majesty! I congratulate the court! I congratulate the Great Ming! The downfall of such a colossal bandit proclaims that none of the roving bandits can escape the same fate!"

Zu Kuan, Li Chongjin, and the others remained silent, while Huang Degong, Yang Maogong, Qin Yiming, and others wore looks of excitement on their faces.

Lu Xiangsheng swept his gaze across the assembled men, reading each one's thoughts with perfect clarity.

He continued with a smile: "I have already received instructions from the Ministry of War. Following His Majesty's edict, the court is drawing up the merit register and has included the Battle of Shouzhou in the campaign to exterminate the Dashing rebel—its merits shall be counted the same as the Qin army's!"

Zu Kuan's face lit up with joy at these words, and he grinned as he said: "Does the Governor-General mean what he says? I said it all along—if we fight with our lives on the line, how could His Majesty and the court fail to see it? Hahaha! This time the lads will have even more fire in their bellies!"

Li Chongjin said happily: "Governor-General, no matter how the court rewards merit, so long as they haven't forgotten us, that's enough! We men of the Liaodong army are willing to die for His Majesty!"

Zu Kuan, standing beside him, shot him a glance but said nothing.

Huang Degong laughed: "Governor-General, with the Dashing bandit's head taken, the largest remaining gang of bandits before us is the Xi'an bandit—the rest are not worth worrying about! If we can wipe out the Xi'an bandit too, then who among all the imperial armies of the Great Ming could stand shoulder to shoulder with us? That lad Zhou Yuji did earn great merit by going to the Qin army, but once Shaanxi is pacified, the Qin army will have no more great deeds to accomplish! This old Huang finally has his chance to shine—I'll make old Zhou green with envy!"

Huang Degong's words immediately stirred the hearts of everyone in the tent.

The greatest bandit scourge of the Great Ming had now been eliminated; what remained were the chief culprits who had burned the imperial mausoleum in the eighth year of Chongzhen—Zhang Xianzhong, Old Huihui, and others.

Zhang Xianzhong in particular had been listed by the Emperor as a bandit beyond pardon. To capture and behead him would be a merit no less than the extermination of Gao Yingxiang.

In the Battle of Shouzhou, the five hundred men of the standard battalion Huang Degong had brought from the Yongwei Camp had charged against the bandits' cavalry, and in the end barely a hundred riders remained; the infantry casualties also approached a thousand. Seeing the troops he had personally trained suffer such grievous losses, Huang Degong was despondent for a long time. In the subsequent bandit-suppression battles across several prefectures of Henan, Huang Degong and Wu Qun, after careful selection, had only just filled out the five-thousand-man establishment from surrendered bandits and local able-bodied youths who wanted to enlist—though the cavalry could not yet be replenished.

Seeing the somewhat gloomy atmosphere instantly turn lively and the generals' spirits rise dramatically, Lu Xiangsheng felt immensely relieved as well.

He raised a hand to silence the generals' mutual chatter, then continued: "There is one more piece of good news to tell you all: His Majesty, mindful that our forces have campaigned for years and the soldiers are utterly exhausted, has specially dispatched twenty thousand Capital Camp troops to come reinforce us! The Capital Camp forces have already reached Ruyang Prefecture and will arrive at Yunyang within days! The Ministry of War requires me and all of you to scout the bandit situation and formulate a strategy, so that once the armies join, we can take the Xi'an bandit in one stroke!"

Hearing that the court had sent a large army to reinforce them, the generals felt both joy and worry.

Zu Kuan clasped his hands and said: "Governor-General, we were transferred from Liaodong to the interior over a year ago. We've crossed swords with the roving bandits countless times, and the lads have taken no small losses. But the court has never shorted us on military pay and provisions or compensation, and the lads have no complaints. A soldier takes his pay and gives his life—that's only right and proper. His Majesty's good intentions fill us with gratitude, but we can still fight. Dashing bandit or Xi'an bandit, they're all just local ruffians! Give the word, Governor-General, and our Liaodong army will charge at the forefront and trample the bandits before us flat!"

Huang Degong and the others also voiced their positions one after another, saying there was no need to wait for the Capital Camp's main force to arrive—the current troops were more than enough to wipe out the Xi'an bandit, and they asked the Governor-General to give the order to attack immediately.

How could Lu Xiangsheng fail to understand what was on everyone's minds? Huang Degong's earlier speech had swayed the crowd—they feared the Capital Camp would come and steal their glory, and so were urging him to order an immediate attack, hoping to exterminate Zhang Xianzhong before the Capital Camp arrived.

He saw very clearly the purpose behind the Emperor's dispatch of the Capital Camp to Huguang: the Capital Camp's new soldiers had to undergo the tempering of the battlefield to become strong troops. His Majesty did not fully trust the military families of Liaodong, and so intended in the future to use new armies to counter or replace the Guanning army.

At this thought, Lu Xiangsheng laughed and scolded: "Stop playing your little tricks before me! The Xi'an bandit has been designated a bandit beyond pardon, so the primary task of this campaign is to ascertain the true state and disposition of his forces, then formulate a meticulous strategy and wipe him out completely! The scouts have not yet sent back their intelligence, the situation between friend and foe is unclear, and the terrain south of Yun is complex. Given the Xi'an bandit's cunning, what if he slips away in advance as he did at Shouzhou? Moreover, according to the words of the Yunyang governor, there are still other bands of roving bandits active in the surrounding area. In my view, this time we must catch all the bandits of Huguang in one net—not a single gang may escape! In your greed for glory, have you ever once considered the overall situation?"

Lu Xiangsheng's words immediately sobered the generals. All of them were veterans of countless battles and knew that their earlier thinking had been somewhat presumptuous.

Zhushan was nearly two hundred li from Yun County, where the main army was stationed, and Zhuxi was another two hundred li beyond that; Fang County and Baokang were even farther. The several scouting parties had to cross mountains and rivers before reaching their destinations, then conceal themselves and approach to investigate, record the terrain and the bandits' troop dispositions, and return to report—only then could strategy and tactics be formulated based on the intelligence brought back. All of this was an indispensable part of warfare. How could one attack without knowing the terrain or the enemy's situation? That would be the purest armchair-strategist nonsense of a useless scholar.

Seeing the embarrassed expressions on everyone's faces, Lu Xiangsheng smiled and reassured them: "Do you think I don't know how eager you are to earn merit? Rest assured—since the court has counted even the Battle of Shouzhou into the merit rewards, how could it overlook this Yunyang campaign? You won't be shorted any merit! But all of you must remember this clearly! Once battle begins, you must strictly obey orders and coordinate with friendly forces—the Xi'an bandit must not be allowed to escape! Otherwise, I will show no leniency!"

With that final sentence, Lu Xiangsheng's tone suddenly turned severe.

The generals all clasped their fists in acknowledgment, then returned to their own camps to proclaim the court's merit rewards to the soldiers.

Ever since gaining the allegiance of Pan Du'ao and Xu Yixian, Zhang Xianzhong's ambition had swelled sharply. The submission of these two meant something extraordinary to him—it was a symbol.

Someone as powerful as Gao Yingxiang, at his peak, had commanded twenty thousand elite cavalry and tens of thousands of infantry, and with the other bandit factions that came to join him, his forces had at their greatest numbered in the hundreds of thousands—he had quietly become the foremost rebel under heaven.

But even with such immense strength, no scholar had ever come to join him.

This meant that the literati did not hold high hopes for the rebels' prospects.

Although Pan Du'ao and Xu Yixian were not the elite of the scholarly class, in the eyes of a rough-and-tumble man like Zhang Xianzhong, anyone who had read the books of the sages was a top-tier figure in both vision and knowledge.

Looked at from another angle, the two men's defection indirectly signaled that the literati no longer held out hope for the Great Ming's rule.

Ever since the two men had brought their families to the Xi'an bandit camp at Huangmao Pass, Zhang Xianzhong had shown them the utmost respect.

He assigned each of them twenty personal guards, all carefully selected veteran soldiers of many battles, each with an old army hand serving as the squad leader of his guard.

Following Zhang Xianzhong's instructions, these twenty men were divided into several shifts, guarding the two men's sides all twelve double-hours of every day, and standing watch outside their doors while they slept.

Zhang Xianzhong specially found several servants and maids from the local area of Zhushan and sent them to the two men's homes for their families to use.

Understanding what men liked, Zhang Xianzhong also presented each of the two with two beautiful maidservants. Such thoughtful arrangements filled Pan Du'ao and Xu Yixian with extraordinary gratitude.

Neither man came from a wealthy household. Though their families had a little spare money, that did not mean they could spend it freely. Pan Du'ao, the elder of the two, had at home only a wife, two sons, and a father nearing seventy. His daily income came from the output of his own thirty mu of farmland, plus the produce of fifty mu registered under his name, along with the occasional brush-fee for writing letters for others—altogether twenty or thirty taels of silver a year, which put him only slightly better off than the common folk.

Xu Yixian's family circumstances were much the same as Pan Du'ao's—an ordinary household, better off than some, worse off than others.

Had the two men never envied those wealthy men who kept beautiful wives and lovely maids at home? Unfortunately, all they could do was polish their eyeballs, then drink a little wine and curse the decline of public morals to vent their frustration.

What had once been a beautiful thing they could only dream of but never obtain now suddenly appeared before their eyes—real, true, and theirs to enjoy to the fullest. It was all like a dream.

While Pan Du'ao and Xu Yixian felt boundless gratitude toward Zhang Xianzhong, they also brought out all their abilities to help him with his affairs.

Although Zhang Xianzhong had spent several years in the official army and was fairly familiar with camp matters, he knew nothing whatsoever of military doctrine. He fought entirely on experience and battlefield instinct, and his soldiers were drilled according to the meager scraps he had learned in the official army—hardly a profound method.

Pan and Xu brought out hand-copied copies of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and explained them to Zhang Xianzhong in careful detail, and also taught him the methods of drilling battalion square formations that they had read about in books.

Zhang Xianzhong summoned Sun Kewang and Li Dingguo from Zhuxi to listen to Pan and Xu's instruction together, and then drilled a portion of the old camp soldiers according to their methods.

After nearly a month of drilling, the several thousand soldiers of the old camp moved with proper bearing and form—no longer the chaotic mess they had been in battle before. They advanced and withdrew with discipline, their formations quite orderly, and they looked considerably more fierce and capable than before.

During this period, Old Huihui Ma Shouying, Geliyan He Yilong, and Cao Cao Luo Rucai, who were entrenched in the Fang County area over a hundred li away, heard that Zhang Xianzhong had led his forces there and broken into Zhushan county town. They sent men to establish contact with Zhang Xianzhong's forces, and also had word sent to Chuang Tatan Liu Guoneng, who was farther off in the Baokang area.