Chapter 370: Even Going to War Means Competing with Fathers First

Zhang Dalang of the Zhang family set out for Liangzhou that very day with his eldest son and the garrison soldiers and village militia from the same village, right after the morning meal.

His eldest son was still young, only seventeen, and ordinarily would not have qualified for the garrison army.

But Zhang Dalang had a brother who had died in battle outside Mapaoquan Village in Guanzhong, and because of that, one of his descendants could be granted a place in the garrison army.

Originally, his brother's child was only five, and once he was a few years older he could have been sent to Minqin County to study at the academy the Great King had established specifically for the children of those who died in battle, to learn some letters and some martial skills.

But misfortunes never come singly. By the time Zhang Dalang returned home, his brother's only son had already fallen ill and died four or five months before.

So after an application by the squad leader and review by the Bureau of Military Affairs, Zhang Dalang's eldest son received a reward of a three-layer suit of armor, a hengdao saber, and a bow with arrows, and was then assigned to the Wuwei garrison as a soldier.

All of it had been bought with his brother's life. Zhang Dalang had already made up his mind: if his eldest son survived past the year after next, he would not let him go to battle again, and would have him adopted into his brother's line to continue the family incense.

"Father! Look — the men from Upper Baima Village are here, and Brother Wang is here too."

On his first campaign, his eldest son, brimming with excitement, pointed at a troop of men in the distance and shouted to him.

Zhang Dalang looked up and saw that among the men coming out of Upper Baima Village there was a burly fellow with arms as long as an ape's.

The burly man was leading three horses: one for charging into battle, one carrying his armor and rations, and on the back of the third sat a dainty, pretty little lady.

The word "brother" generally cannot be used carelessly, because it can be a respectful term for an elder brother, or it can mean father.

But as for this burly man with the ape-long arms, the young men of Upper and Lower Baima Village all liked to call him Brother Wang behind his back.

The reason was the girl on the horse behind Brother Wang. She was the burly Wang man's daughter, the finest in face and figure in both villages, and she could also cook a fine pot of soup and raise big fat pigs of over a hundred catties a year.

A girl with a healthy body, who could cook, and was quick at farm work — if she also happened to be good-looking, then she was a perfect all-around girl in the village marriage market of the time.

Zhang Dalang's eldest son was no exception. The reason he had insisted on going to war was precisely to win rewards so he could come back and marry this young lady of the Wang family.

"You turtle-spawn, don't you want your eyeballs anymore? If you don't, I'll gouge them out and pop them like blisters!"

Zhang Dalang's eldest son had been staring so raptly that he did not even notice when the burly Wang man walked right up to him.

A burst of laughter rose around them, though in the laughter of the younger ones there was a sour note, the kind that made a man want to hit someone.

The young lady of the Wang family was not shy at all. She looked the Zhang boy up and down, then suddenly pressed her lips together and smiled.

"How come you're so skinny? Once you're on the battlefield, won't you be gasping for breath after a single charge?"

The Zhang boy's face instantly flushed red. He turned and made to grab the leather armor off the horse's back, still sputtering.

"I'm not skinny! My archery is excellent, I have armor too — let anyone come charge at me, and one arrow will finish him!"

Zhang Dalang reached out and twisted his eldest son's ear, making him yelp in pain, then gave him a light shove, pushing him in front of the burly Wang man.

"The armor and bow were both granted by the Great King, carried on the merit of my second brother. He's a bit young, but his archery is not bad. On the battlefield, brother, keep an eye on him for me — beat him or scold him as you like!"

The burly Wang man nodded. He knew why Zhang Dalang was doing this.

Because Zhang Dalang was a leaping assault soldier — a heavy-armored man whose job was to charge the line when the long spears were thrusting at each other.

The burly Wang man, by contrast, leaned more toward the crossbow and archery side. Zhang Dalang's son was a good shot and a fellow villager, so he would certainly be assigned under his command.

"Easy, easy!" the burly Wang man said, then turned and hauled out a tall young man from behind him.

"This is my elder brother's second son. He's got some strength, and can handle spear, staff, saber, and axe. Zhang family lad, keep an eye on him for me too."

Zhang Dalang nodded. The burly Wang man's nephew was about the same build as himself.

"On this campaign, the platoon leader said I'll likely be issued cotton armor. When that happens, I'll let young Wang wear this lamellar armor of mine."

That was a great kindness indeed!

A fine suit of lamellar armor could greatly increase a soldier's chances of survival, and even more so his chances of winning battle merit. The burly Wang man solemnly cupped his hands in salute.

"I'll go find the platoon leader too, and no matter what, I'll get a suit of Persian mail for the young lad."

The two battle-hardened veterans immediately formed an alliance of mutual aid, leaving the young men around them who had no elders in the army green with envy.

In every trade and profession — even when going into battle to cut men down — it all comes down to who your father is!

Take young men like the Zhang family's eldest son and the Wang family's nephew. Not to mention that armor improves their chances of survival, even in terms of battlefield adaptability, they very much need someone to help them.

Many recruits on their first battlefield, no matter how well they trained in peacetime, will panic the moment they see the blood and flesh flying in the slaughter.

Many will even, at certain moments, lose all awareness of their surroundings.

But on the battlefield, military law is extremely harsh. Sometimes a man does not actually intend to desert — he just instinctively walks one step too slowly, or fails to hear the drum and horn and goes the wrong way — and he is very likely to be cut down in one stroke by a silver-saber officer keeping the line.

Only with veterans helping to control and warn them can recruits avoid all kinds of accidents on the battlefield.

Compared with the other young men, these two greenhorns from the Zhang and Wang families undoubtedly had a far greater chance of survival.

Once they had fought two or three battles and gained experience, they would become hardened veterans of the field.

While the people of Upper and Lower Baima Village were chatting, the garrison soldiers and militia from the other villages of Minqin County had also arrived and assembled outside the county seat.

After the farewells from their families, the garrison soldiers formed up according to their units and marched off to their respective camps to muster.

The militia archers and the sworn follower cavalry were also gathered by the county sheriff, and then garrison army officers would come to select them as auxiliary troops.

The rest would be chosen from among the hundred-odd county sheriffs of Hexi and Longyou to accompany the army on campaign, and also to manage them and do the dirty and exhausting work.

Meanwhile, in the mines of Jingtie Mountain in southern Ganzhou, more than seven thousand miners did not report for work today, for the first time in memory.

Because today, garrison army officers were coming here to select "ram-order lads."

This term originally came from the Western Xia of history, used for Han Chinese cannon-fodder troops. Zhang Zhao thought the name was quite good, so he used it in Hexi and Longyou.

Except that his "ram-order lads" were not Han captives, but death squads selected from the Jingtie Mountain mines.

Yet even the chance to go off as cannon-fodder death-squad soldiers was treasured beyond measure by the mine slaves.

Only those who had truly spent time in the mines knew what hell on earth was.

At this time, there were no blasting methods available for mining. The gunpowder developed by Cao Yanming barely approached the level of black powder and could not be called an explosive at all.

Moreover, because it was extremely precious, even the army itself did not have enough for its own use, and generally could not bear to use it for mining.

For a mine as large as Jingtie Mountain, the Right Chief Clerk of the princely establishment approved only forty catties of gunpowder a year, and even using that required layer upon layer of approval.

So all mining at Jingtie Mountain was done by the manual labor of the miners. Not to mention the difficulty of the digging, even the tunnels they dug were barely larger than a man's body.

As a result, accidents were frequent — mine slaves suffocating after going down the shafts, or being crushed when tunnels collapsed. As for those worked to death, they were beyond counting.

And these men were originally rebels who had resisted Zhang Zhao, or blood enemies like the Ganzhou Uyghurs. If anything happened to them, few people cared whether they lived or died. Their status was lower than livestock.

For such men, staying in the mines meant death sooner or later. Being worked to death was already the best possible outcome.

But on the battlefield, although they would most likely be killed, there was also a small chance they could earn merit and then escape the fate of mine slaves.

The former meant an early death and an early rebirth; the latter meant changing their fate. Either way, it was worth a try.

The manager of the mine was Zhang Zhao's maternal cousin, Yin Yuanzhu, Superintendent of the Jingtieshan Mine and concurrently County Magistrate of Jingtieshan County.

When Ma Yaozi hurried over, he saw iron ore at Jingtieshan piled up like mountains, yet only a very few of the steel furnaces for smelting the ore were in operation.

Yin Yuanzhu gave a bitter smile at the questioning look in Ma Yaozi's eyes.

"There's no coke left! The coal is too difficult to extract — the mine shaft has only gone in a dozen or so meters. Distant water cannot quench present thirst. This year's hundred thousand jin of refined iron certainly cannot be completed."

The hundred thousand jin of refined iron was a task Zhang Zhao had jointly assigned to Cao Yanming and Yin Yuanzhu.

Zhang Zhao had originally planned that after producing a hundred thousand jin of refined iron this year, he would then spend his last reserves to forge two thousand sets of cloth-faced iron armor and a number of weapons.

But before even twenty thousand jin had been smelted, the coke ran out, and coal mining was also going extremely poorly.

Ma Yaozi nodded heavily. This hundred thousand jin of refined iron was no small figure.

Take the Great Tang period, for example. In the third year of Yuanhe (809), the highest year of iron production, the entire realm produced only two million jin of iron.

That looks high, doesn't it? But that was iron, not raw iron or refined iron. When it came specifically to refined iron, the estimate was only around two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand jin.

And even for the Great Tang, such high output lasted only a few years before it could not be sustained. By the years when the Great Tang was nearing its end, the entire realm produced only four hundred thousand jin.

This also shows, from another angle, how precious iron armor was. Shi Jingtang did not know the details. If he knew that the Guiyi Army, though only twenty or thirty thousand strong, possessed several thousand sets of iron armor and several thousand sets of mail and ring-linked armor, he would certainly have made the Guiyi Army his number one enemy.

But Yin Yuanzhu's problem was not something Ma Yaozi could solve, and he had not come to solve it.

Instead, the recruitment of the mine-slave cannon fodder needed to be sped up, because the bodies of these mine slaves had all suffered a certain degree of damage in the mines. After recruitment, they would still need to be fed and rested for ten-some days before they could be sent out as cannon fodder.

At the end of the eighth month, Zhang Zhao held a grand banquet in Liangzhou, entertaining the assembled officers and soldiers from all routes.

Each soldier was to receive two chi of red silk and one bolt of fine white cotton cloth as a reward — though this was only verbal. It would be honored only after they returned from the war, and only if they had not violated military law.

Afterward, he levied nine thousand garrison troops from five garrisons, plus six thousand men of the Hanshan Capital's horse-and-foot troops — fifteen thousand in all.

Adding two thousand united archers, three thousand elite cavalry of the sworn followers, two thousand mine slaves from Jingtieshan, and over ten thousand laborers, the total came to more than thirty thousand men, proclaimed as fifty thousand.

Setting out from Liangzhou, they first went to Lanzhou, then followed the Yellow River eastward down past Huizhou, crossed Shapotou and the Weining Plain, and headed straight for Yanzhou (Dingbian, Shaanxi).

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