Chapter 858

In the eighth year of Shaoming, 954 CE, in the fourth month, Zhang Zhao needed only a single month to complete the mobilization of troops and appointment of commanders.

After Murong Xinzhang departed, Qu Yanqing, also known as Qu Qilang, Commander of the Left Yulin Guard, led three thousand elite troops of the Left Yulin Guard and more than ten thousand auxiliary soldiers from the divine capital Luoyang to Guilin Prefecture.

Under the Left Yulin Guard, talent now abounded; the Wind-Fire Raider Cavalry Battalion originally commanded by Qu Yanqing had already been handed over to Pan Mei.

At the same time, the rising stars of the next generation from Hexi—Zhao Jingangnu, Fan Changgong, Li Zun, and others—were all serving in the Left Yulin Guard.

The other two personal armies that reached Guilin Prefecture, the Right Jinwu Guard and the Right Shenwei Guard, were commanded respectively by Wang Quanbin and Wang Shenqi; counting auxiliary troops, each numbered around ten thousand.

At the same time, a thousand elite heavy-armored infantry of the Hanshan Capital's rear division also arrived at Guilin Prefecture, led by Cao Bin, the Left Capital Marquis of the Inner Division and currently a favorite of the Emperor.

With their arrival, the troops available to Zhang Zhaojun (Ma Shacai) suddenly swelled to around thirty thousand.

Of these, at least twenty thousand were elite troops of extremely strong fighting capacity, enough to exert overwhelming pressure on the Southern Han army.

Furthermore, besides Zhang Zhaojun's army as the main force for destroying the state, the Defense Commissioner of Jiangxi, Fan Shun, personally led the imperial Anhua and Baisheng garrisons plus about ten thousand garrison troops, crossing the Dayu Range from Qianzhou (Ganzhou) and advancing on the Southern Han's Xiongzhou (Nanxiong) and Shaozhou (Shaoguan).

On the other side, Liu Zaisheng, Duke of Tian, who guarded Fujian, dispatched Lin Renzhao with fifteen thousand naval and land troops—five thousand sailors setting sail from Dongshan Island and ten thousand infantry departing from Zhangzhou—advancing by water and land together straight toward the Southern Han's Chaozhou.

Of course, before this combined force of fifty to sixty thousand troops set out, Zhang Zhao still gave Liu Sheng one more chance.

On the first day of the third month, the second batch of court envoys arrived at Xingwang Prefecture, decreeing that Liu Sheng release Wang Jiu and personally go to the divine capital Luoyang to beg forgiveness.

It was stated plainly that as long as Liu Sheng came to the divine capital, the court could still let bygones be bygones; he would only be demoted and enfeoffed as Prince of Pengcheng Commandery.

After a brief silence, Liu Sheng rejected the decree.

The option of merely being a rich man had always been, in his heart, a fallback he would choose only when truly out of options, and clearly that time had not yet come.

Moreover, after the Jinyi personal guards' ambush of the envoys and Wang Jiu's cursing at his door, Liu Sheng felt he had seen through the other side beneath Zhang Zhao's benevolent face, and he no longer dared trust Zhang Zhao.

In that case, there was nothing more to say—just start fighting.

In the eighth year of Shaoming, on the tenth day of the fourth month, Zhang Zhaojun divided his forces into two routes. He personally led the twenty-five thousand main force down the Li River to attack Wuzhou, a key Southern Han stronghold for both water and land.

The other route was led by Qu Yanqing, who selected five thousand cavalry and struck from the west straight at Liuzhou, the major stronghold on the western side of Lingnan Circuit.

Almost simultaneously, Fan Shun in Qianzhou personally took the field, selecting six hundred brave men who wore no armor and carried only strong bows, heavy crossbows, and short weapons suited for close combat. Taking advantage of the bright moonlight, they risked scaling the sheer cliffs on the eastern side of the mountain range, circled behind Mei Pass—known as the first pass of Southern Yue—on the Dayu Range, and launched a sudden attack.

The Southern Han army's attention was almost entirely on the front; they never imagined anyone could scale the sheer cliffs of the Dayu Range.

Caught completely off guard, they were shattered by Fan Shun's troops descending like divine soldiers. The garrison commander and his several hundred soldiers resisted for only two quarters of an hour before scattering like birds and beasts.

Fan Shun captured most of the soldiers, opened the pass gates to let the main army through, then forced these Southern Han soldiers to serve as guides, leading the Zhou army toward the next Southern Han pass, Xiongzhou (Nanxiong).

For this operation, Fan Shun selected two thousand men from ten thousand elite troops and ordered them to abandon all baggage, including armor, carrying only a small amount of water, dry rations, and essential weapons.

In just over one and a half but less than two double-hours, the two thousand elite troops raced more than sixty li.

Although still far short of the Qingfengdian death run during the War of Liberation, it basically matched the forced-march standards of the later ordinary People's Liberation Army.

This was truly remarkable, considering that in later times, whether the roads, the soldiers' food, or their initiative, none of it could be compared to the conditions of this cold-weapon era.

But Fan Shun did it. When he personally led the two thousand elite troops to Xiongzhou (Nanxiong), the city gates were not even closed, there were hardly any soldiers on the walls keeping watch, and merchants and commoners came and went at their leisure.

Even after Fan Shun's elite troops had entered the city, farmers carrying vegetables to sell in the city on either side of the gate were still standing there gaping at the spectacle, completely unaware that the court's army had already arrived.

Two days later, Fan Shun once again displayed his trait as the master of the mad dash. After leaving a thousand men to hold Xiongzhou, he requisitioned all the mules and horses in the city, first having his soldiers ride them at full speed, and when the animals were exhausted, they dismounted and marched on foot.

From Xiongzhou to Shaoguan was a full one hundred sixty li, and Fan Shun's two thousand elite troops covered the entire distance in less than two days.

Just as with the capture of Xiongzhou, Fan Shun's main force had already seized the city gates before the defeated troops sent to report from Xiongzhou were even summoned to the main hall for questioning by the Prefect of Shaozhou.

Before the questioning was finished, the city gates had already fallen.

The Southern Han Prefect of Shaozhou was terrified, because Shaozhou now had only a few hundred militia troops, utterly incapable of driving back Fan Shun's two thousand men who had entered the city.

Under the Southern Han military system, the standing army was divided into the imperial guards—six armies and twelve guards—and the garrison troops under the Military Governors; these two were the main combat forces of the Southern Han court.

The rest consisted of large numbers of militia troops, Left and Right Street armies, local troops, and the like.

Of these three types, the militia troops were the relatively trained local forces, inferior to the Great Zhou's garrison troops and the long-service braves serving as constables and archers in the patrol offices, roughly equivalent only to the rotating sworn followers of the patrol offices.

The Left and Right Street armies were formed from city residents given a certain amount of training. The local troops were made up of peasants from the countryside.

The fighting capacity of these two forces could be said to be practically nil; even for catching bandits, they could only nab petty thieves.

Even more fatal was that Southern Han, from its founding emperor Liu onward, had emphasized the imperial examinations to select presented scholars, using civil officials as the heads of the various prefectures and counties.

In all of Southern Han, the only remaining Military Governors were those of the Jingjiang Army in Liuzhou and the Jianwu Army in Yongzhou (Nanning); all the rest had been abolished.

This was the fatal weakness of using civil officials to guard the frontiers. In terms of military organization, after civil officials took over and the border military provinces were dismantled, military strength and defensive capability were greatly weakened.

For example, at this moment, after the original Military Governor of Shaozhou had been removed and the garrison troops disbanded or absorbed into the imperial guards, the entire vast region north of and including Shaozhou had only three hundred garrison troops at Mei Pass.

The rest were all militia troops and worthless Left and Right Street armies, local troops, and the like, utterly incapable of organizing a new defense after the fall of Mei Pass.

At the same time, civil officials were far less vigilant about military affairs than proper military officers.

For instance, Liu Sheng had demanded as early as last year that the Prefect of Shaozhou strengthen defenses, but the Prefect believed that the Great Zhou's main attack would clearly be in the Guilin Prefecture area; with the Li River water transport available, only someone with nothing better to do would come attack natural barriers like Mei Pass and Shaoguan.

Moreover, once defenses were strengthened, it would mean conscripting able-bodied men from the civilian population and supplying the needs of the imperial guard troops coming from Xingwang Prefecture.

The money and grain required would quickly exhaust Shaozhou's accumulated reserves from recent years, and would also raise the status of military officers.

So he had been somewhat duplicitous, making excuses about the defense of Xiongzhou that he was responsible for, and paying little attention to the supply of provisions for Mei Pass.

This resulted in Mei Pass, reputed as the first pass of Southern Yue, having only three or four hundred soldiers; Xiongzhou, counting constables, was only three to five hundred strong; and Shaozhou, the northern gateway, had only one militia Commander with seven or eight hundred militia troops holding it.

To be sure, among civil officials there are those accomplished in both civil and military affairs or sufficiently vigilant about enemy movements, but such people are always rare talents, found by chance and not by seeking; you cannot expect every civil official under you to have such quality.

Therefore, in the pairing of civil and military officials, one should not overcorrect; professional matters should be left to professionals.

In Shaozhou, in a panic, Prefect Huang claimed he was going to muster troops and hold firm, but in reality, once he retreated to the rear hall, he simply took two trusted aides and fled on foot.

The administrative assistant and the militia Commander outside the office waited a while before realizing something was wrong. They rushed in to look, and Prefect Huang was long gone.

But they did not lose out either. Prefect Huang had to flee because he was an outsider, but the administrative assistant and the Commander were locals.

Now that Prefect Huang had fled alone, he effectively bore all the responsibility; free of blame and light of heart, they surrendered very smoothly to the Zhou troops who had entered the city.

Almost at the same time, the situation in Liuzhou was similar. Although it was the foremost stronghold of northwestern Lingnan, the Ma Chu state north of Liuzhou had itself only six to seven hundred thousand people, and its mobilization capacity was not very strong.

Moreover, the contested areas between Ma Chu and Southern Han were mostly around Guilin Prefecture; Liuzhou existed merely as a rear base, so its military preparedness was not rigorous.

Liu Sheng was no brilliant ruler; at best he could be considered a man of middling ability.

Nor was the Southern Han court a classical military empire like Zhang Zhou, with a Bureau of Military Affairs, a Ministry of War under the Department of State Affairs, and a Phoenix Terrace under the Secretariat, capable of rapidly completing mobilization, training, and logistics.

Whether it was Liu Sheng himself or the Southern Han court, their administrative efficiency was extremely slow.

Even though Ma Chu had been gone for four or five years, the Southern Han's defensive strategy for the north was still the same set of back-and-forth tactics developed over decades against Ma Chu.

But Ma Chu was merely a small separatist state that could field at most twenty or thirty thousand troops, and in the training, equipment, and morale of its soldiers it was no match for Zhang Zhou. Using a system designed to deal with Ma Chu against the Great Zhou was naturally courting disaster.

Thus, by the time Qu Yanqing personally led five thousand elite cavalry to the area, the Southern Han was still moving reinforcements into Liuzhou.

The Southern Han army's military system was in fact extremely similar to that of the Northern Song, both employing the strategy of strengthening the trunk and weakening the branches.

Liu and his son Liu Sheng incorporated the finest troops into the Six Armies and Twelve Guards of the imperial guard. Apart from those, only the Jingjiang Army at Liuzhou and the Jianwu Army at Yongzhou had any real fighting strength; everywhere else relied entirely on militia troops to muddle through.

After refusing Zhang Zhao's edict ordering him to go to the divine capital Luoyang to beg forgiveness, Liu Sheng transferred the Left and Right Longxiang Armies of the six imperial guard armies to Wuzhou for defense.

Then, considering that Liuzhou's position was important and it was guarded only by the Jingjiang Army, a single garrison force, he transferred the vanguard of the Left Longxiang Army to Liuzhou to strengthen its defense.

As a result, before the vanguard of the Southern Han Left Longxiang Army could even enter Liuzhou, it was discovered by Qu Yanqing, who came charging at full speed.

Qu Yanqing immediately ordered Li Zun to lead two thousand cavalry in a fierce charge at Liuzhou's east gate, which had not yet been closed in time, while he himself led three thousand riders to intercept the Left Longxiang Army vanguard still advancing north.

One Southern Han imperial guard army numbered around seven thousand men, so the entire vanguard of the Left Longxiang Army was around thirty-five hundred, and with civilian laborers it would not exceed five thousand.

Although their fighting strength was relatively strong, compared to a super-elite unit like the Wind-Fire Assault Cavalry Battalion of Zhang Zhou's Left Yulin Guard, they were far inferior.

More importantly, they were suddenly attacked while on the march. Cavalry in Lingnan was pitifully scarce, and the scouts had only just sounded the alarm when Qu Yanqing, with Zhao Jingangnu, Fan Changgong, and others, suddenly charged into the Southern Han army's flank.

They had not even had time to deploy from their single-file long-snake formation before the iron cavalry smashed into them. The battle lasted less than two quarters of an hour: the commander of the Southern Han Left Longxiang Army vanguard died in battle, more than sixty officers of the rank of Deputy Commandant of the Accompanying Guard and above were killed, over a thousand soldiers were killed or wounded, and the entire army collapsed outright.

Without bothering to sweep the battlefield, Qu Yanqing immediately turned his troops around. They had three horses per man and had long since left fifty men halfway to tend the warhorses, so as long as the men could hold out, the horses were not a problem.

An hour later, Qu Yanqing returned with three thousand riders to the outskirts of Liuzhou. By then, the two thousand men under Li Zun who had stayed behind to seize the west gate had already achieved complete success.

It turned out that after Li Zun seized the gate, Gong Chengshu, the Military Governor of the Southern Han Jingjiang Army at Liuzhou, mustered five thousand Jingjiang troops plus several thousand militia to attack.

Li Zun first had the army's sharpshooters occupy the high ground, and from above they shot the Southern Han troops into chaos, men and horses toppling, with heavy casualties.

Gong Chengshu then ordered the infantry to don heavy armor and attack, but they were shot down in large numbers by the divine-arm crossbows.

Finally, Li Zun took advantage of their confusion and suddenly ordered three hundred elite cavalry to don armor and charge. The Southern Han army was still changing formation, and caught off guard, it collapsed in a great rout, the various units trampling one another with countless dead and wounded.

Had Li Zun not feared that Liuzhou was too sprawling and that pursuing might lead him into an ambush, the city would likely have been taken by then. Now that Qu Yanqing had returned, they immediately began seizing the whole city.

Qu Yanqing ordered his men to scatter the banners and armor of the Southern Han imperial guard's Left Longxiang Army all over the city, and to shout that tens of thousands of Southern Han reinforcements had been utterly annihilated. In terror, Gong Chengshu fled through the east gate toward Yongzhou, and all the rest surrendered.

On the nineteenth day of the fourth month, the Fujian Provincial Fleet, near the island later known as Nan'ao, dealt a crushing defeat to the Southern Han Chaozhou fleet, capturing dozens of warships, destroying the Chaozhou naval base, and then withdrawing swiftly.

As a result, although the Southern Han navy was still stronger than the Fujian Provincial Fleet, the loss of Chaozhou as a supply base meant that, given the navigational conditions of the time, it was no longer really possible for them to sail north and harass Quanzhou and Fuzhou.

At the same time, the total destruction of the Chaozhou fleet, which knew the waterways around Chaozhou well, greatly weakened the Southern Han navy's ability to support Chaozhou city from the various water routes.

On the twenty-fifth day of the fourth month, Lin Renzhao personally led an army of ten thousand, plus more than twenty thousand long-march stalwarts and rotating sworn followers temporarily conscripted from the various counties, to besiege Chaozhou.

Li Tinggui, the Southern Han Prefect of Chaozhou, was originally a civil official. Both he and his father Li Chuyan were renowned for their literary accomplishments, and as administrators the father and son could be said to have achieved results. But when you made him the prefect of a border region like Chaozhou, the moment military matters were involved he was completely at a loss.

Moreover, the Chaozhou naval commander who understood military affairs had already died in battle, which meant Li Tinggui not only did not understand military matters himself, but no longer even had anyone to consult.

The great clans of Chaozhou—the Chen, Li, Lin, and others—knew that Li Tinggui was ignorant of military affairs. Fearing that stubborn resistance would bring the Zhou army into the city to take revenge with a massacre, they simply stirred up a clamor within the city.

The local militia and native troops in the city were all sons of these great clans, and once they refused to resist, Chaozhou simply could not be defended.

Li Tinggui, forced into a corner and held hostage by these local great clans, had no choice but to open the city gates and surrender to the Zhou army outside.

But the Zhou army's extraordinarily smooth progress stopped right there.

Zhang Zhaojun led the main force south along the Li River, smashing more than ten Southern Han military stockades on the river in succession.

But when they reached Wuzhou, the Li River merged there into the Yu River (the West River). Not only did the water volume surge, but Wuzhou was also a strong fortress city.

At this time Wuzhou consisted of two cities, one on water and one on land, connected by drawbridges and boats. Wooden stakes stood in the river, and there were iron chains for interception. The Wuzhou fleet darted back and forth on the river like shuttles, under the cover of archers and crossbowmen on the walls.

Because of the wooden stakes blocking the river, the Zhou army's larger, deeper-draft ships could not get through. If they sent small boats, the enemy had the archers and crossbowmen on the water city to fall back on, making the fighting extremely difficult.

Most importantly, the defender of Wuzhou was the Southern Han's great general Ji Yan-Yun.

This man had originally been Liu Sheng's black-gloved hand, specializing in disguising himself and his men as pirates to plunder merchant ships at sea. Most of the gold and silver they seized was presented to Liu Sheng to fund his extravagance.

It could be said that most of the several dozen palaces Liu Sheng built in Xingwang Prefecture were earned for him by Ji Yan-Yun.

Yet although he behaved like a pirate, Ji Yan-Yun ran his army with strict discipline and never withheld his soldiers' pay. On the contrary, whenever a soldier had any difficulty, he found a way to help resolve it, and so he was deeply cherished by his troops.

Wuzhou already had a strong navy, and now it had also received reinforcements from the main force of the Southern Han imperial guard, so its defensive strength was very great.

Moreover, the palace envoy and army supervisor Liu Sheng sent to Wuzhou, Shao Tingxuan, was also a man who understood military affairs. He and Ji Yan-Yun cooperated with each other, no one among the officers and men obstructed them, and rewards were not skimmed off, so morale was high and fighting strength was very strong.

Against such a strong fortress city, with officers and men united in purpose and a military-wise great general defending it, even Zhang Zhaojun had no particularly good solution.

He could only have the main army encamp outside Wuzhou, cut timber to build siege equipment, and use the clumsy method to take the city.

At the end of the fourth month, Zhang Zhaojun had built more than ten large trebuchet platforms on the north bank of Wuzhou.

Although Ji Yan-Yun knew he could not allow the Zhou army to build siege equipment at leisure, after the Zhou army made camp their discipline was strict and they never slackened, never giving Ji Yan-Yun a chance to catch a weakness.

Thus, although Ji Yan-Yun several times sent elite troops on night raids, they were all surrounded and annihilated with heavy casualties, and he could only watch as Zhang Zhaojun's trebuchets were steadily completed.

With this batch of trebuchets, Zhang Zhaojun could now use them directly to bombard Wuzhou's water city.

Because the water city spanned the water, its load-bearing capacity was insufficient, and it could not be fitted with defensive trebuchets or far-shooting crossbows, so it had no way to deal with Zhang Zhaojun's trebuchets.

Ji Yan-Yun was well aware that if the water city fell, Wuzhou would lose this crucial flank support and could not possibly withstand a fierce Zhou assault.

Therefore, he had no choice but to risk leading twenty thousand men of the various Southern Han armies out to form battle lines with their backs to Wuzhou, adopting an offensive posture.

Because these trebuchets capable of bombarding city walls were extremely cumbersome at this time, once they were set in place they could not easily be moved. Ji Yan-Yun's leading a large army out of the city was thus a huge threat to the trebuchets.

In truth, Zhang Zhaojun was also impatient with waiting for the trebuchets to slowly batter down Wuzhou's water city. Seeing Ji Yan-Yun come out to attack, he immediately led his own troops straight for the walls of Wuzhou.

And to prevent Ji Yan-Yun from shrinking back inside, Zhang Zhaojun ordered the two generals Wang Quanbin and Wang Shenqi to select only six thousand elite troops.

He himself took his trusted personal troops, five hundred strong, plus the one thousand heavy-armored soldiers of the Hanshan Unit that Cao Bin had brought, as the central army.

Ji Yan-Yun had originally worried that the entire Zhou army was coming and had indeed considered withdrawing into the city. But now he saw that there were only seven or eight thousand men before him, and that the main army had not arrived in full, and he was overjoyed.

On the twenty-eighth day of the fourth month, Ji Yan-Yun commanded the main force of twenty thousand men of the Southern Han Wuzhou Army and was the first to launch an attack on the seven thousand five hundred Zhou soldiers drawn up in formation.

And then—and then there was no "then."

As soon as the battle began, the feint troops on the Southern Han army's left and right wings were utterly routed in a little over two quarters of an hour, while the main force of ten thousand in the center ran head-on straight into an iron wall.

Those fifteen hundred men were Zhang Zhaojun's personal retinue and the heavy-armored soldiers of the Hanshan Unit!

Even the Later Tang's elite yabing guards of old would not have dared to fight the Hanshan Battalion head-on without three or four times their numbers, let alone a state like the Southern Han, whose army was never strong.

Ji Yan-Yun attacked full of hope, only to smash his head against a wall of blood.

The Hanshan Battalion advanced in formation, showing no mercy against an enemy eight times their number. Within half an hour they had badly mauled the Southern Han army, killing more than two thousand men.

With casualties mounting so fast and so heavily, Ji Yan-Yun could no longer hold his troops together. The Southern Han central army collapsed even faster than the feint troops on the wings.

In the chaos, Ji Yan-Yun raised his great banner, trying to rally the routed troops back into the city to resist, but Wang Shenqi spotted him, circled around from the left, and put a divine-arm crossbow bolt straight through his skull.

Ji Yan-Yun fell at the sound of the shot, and the Southern Han army finally broke. Zhang Zhaojun seized the moment to storm the city.

On the wall, the army supervisor Shao Tingjuan saw how ferociously the Zhou troops fought. In despair, he took his own life on the battlements, dying for his country, and Wuzhou fell.

(End of Chapter)

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