Chapter 310: The Guide Battalion Commander

Little Hetao — Huoluochi's Little Hetao — was the haven Choktu Taiji yearned for day and night.

From the very first day he led his army across the river, Choktu Taiji observed this land with boundless delight: the long-abandoned high terraces on the hills delighted him; the desert gobi encircled by rivers delighted him too.

Lhazang's flight without a fight enormously boosted Choktu Taiji's confidence — the enemy scattering at the mere rumor of his approach, what awe-inspiring prestige did that signify?

He had even dispatched two sets of messengers: one to follow Lhazang's southward trail, telling him to stop fleeing and come back to surrender — so long as he converted to the Red Sect and pledged loyalty to Ligdan Khan, he could still preserve his transcendent status as a Living Buddha.

Who wouldn't like a lucky mascot that bolts the moment trouble brews?

The other set of messengers went to deliver orders to his son garrisoned at Ulan Mountain: a detachment was to be sent beyond the Xuanfu frontier to invite Ligdan Khan into Qinghai — with the wealth of Qinghai, they could establish a new dynasty ruling all of Mongolia on the plateau!

But Choktu Taiji's exhilaration did not last long, for never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that the first battle his army would fight upon entering Little Hetao would be against Ming troops.

He had thought the enemy might be Huoluochi's young Lhazang, but young Lhazang ran; he had thought the enemy might be the Qinghai Marshal's Office, but he saw no sign of the Marshal's Office in Little Hetao — instead, Ming troops, utterly inconspicuous here, blocked his path.

The man blocking him was the Vice Battalion Commander of Guide Defense Battalion, Bao Hu.

Guide is a very common place name: in Henan there is a Guide Prefecture, in Shaanxi's Yulin there is a Guide Fort, and on the southern bank of the Yellow River south of Xining, there is also a Guide Defense Battalion.

This battalion lies south of Xining, on the southern bank of the Yellow River, with two rivers running eighty li north to south between the mountain ranges; the long narrow strip along the river valleys, if counted as part of Qinghai, might well be the most fertile land in all of Qinghai.

But this battalion belonged to Shaanxi's Hezhou Guard, under mixed native and circulating-official administration; it had one guard town and thirty-three native stockaded villages, an exceedingly low profile, with only one hundred forty-eight officers and soldiers on the roster — even counting unlisted native troops, its strength fell short of a thousand men.

Bao Hu had not had a sound sleep in a long time. Liu Chengzong's entry into Xining had coincided with a season of troubles for Guide Battalion — the Battalion Commander had fallen ill and died at his post, and the heavy responsibility had fallen onto his shoulders.

Hezhou Guard ordered him to sever all contact between the Liu bandits who had slipped into the sea of grasslands and the sea bandits.

Bao Hu was also a native officer. The officers here were all descended from Yuan-dynasty turncoat generals, and due to geographical constraints — Guide was separated from Xining by the Yellow River and mountain ranges, and cut off from Hezhou Guard by mountains — they had never had deep ties with the court.

Relying solely on geographic isolation and interconnected forts to block the sea bandits, whenever the sea bandits grew strong, they would still have to pay some "added barley" under the name of the Guide tribes.

He could not understand: since these were official posts granted by the Emperor, why was there still such wariness?

Still, an order was an order and had to be carried out. In any case, Liu the Lion had no intention of crossing the river from Guide, and young Lhazang likewise seemed to have no plan to join forces with Liu the Lion — so although they could not rest easy day or night, at least everyone was still alive.

Even when Choktu Taiji launched his massive assault on Qinghai, Bao Hu was not overly worried — after all, that was a war between Choktu Taiji and Huoluochi.

What he never expected was that young Lhazang would flee — and moreover send men to escort his tribesmen and their families through his territory into Xining. Turning his head to look back, Bao Hu found himself being roasted over a fire.

Lhazang could leave, but the one hundred forty-eight banner troops of Guide Defense Battalion had no road of escape.

Their place did not live off court salaries; they relied entirely on the vast tracts of tenanted farmland around them to become a blessed land.

If they left this land, they could not sustain themselves anywhere else.

Early on the twenty-fourth day of the sixth month, from the northern bank of the Yellow River came an order from Liu Chengzu, Commander of Xining Guard: he was to withdraw the checkpoint at the crossing and allow seven hundred soldiers of Zhenhai Camp to cross the river as reinforcements against Choktu Taiji.

Bao Hu, mindful of Hezhou Guard's instructions, did not withdraw the checkpoint and righteously refused the Zhenhai Camp soldiers entry.

But this was a refusal in words only, for that same evening, the southern Hukou Fort came under attack — over a hundred Khalkha mounted troops slipped into the river valley and advanced northward. So Bao Hu transferred away the two cannons at the northern crossing, buried a large number of landmines at the crossing, and reduced its garrison to two men.

In this moment of crisis, he could no longer tell whether Liu Chengzu, Commander of Xining Guard, was offering genuine support or seizing the chance to take the land his ancestors had depended on for generations.

Fortunately, the Zhenhai Camp soldiers on the opposite bank were indeed Ming imperial troops — it was just that they ate from the Marshal's Office and used the Marshal's Office's supplies, so they listened to the Marshal's Office.

On the matter of crossing the border, however, they remained very obedient: when the friendly troops denied them entry, they truly did not cross, merely constructing simple defensive works at the crossing on the opposite bank and once again sending word to Bao Hu that they were coming to provide support.

Bao Hu did not only lay landmines at the northern crossing — he also laid a great many landmines in the narrow stretch of Mawu Gorge to the south.

As a place contested by every strategist during the Wanli reign, Guide Defense Battalion still retained the most advanced Ming military equipment of those years, as well as large quantities of gunpowder ingredients stockpiled over the years.

Bao Hu had his men remove the no-longer-reliable steel wheels from the landmines; he had no time to make new steel wheels and could only use the ancient fuse construction, leaving soldiers behind to ignite the landmines.

At dawn on the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month, the Khalkha cavalry, having slept soundly through the night in the southern stretch of the river valley, came galloping forth — horsemen clad in leather coats or leather armor reinforced with iron strips, brandishing ten-foot lances, with maces and sabers at their waists, charging through Mawu Gorge in formation.

Not all of them wore armor, nor did all have helmets.

Some of the cavalry wore iron helmets — bowl-shaped helmets and Mongolian-style round iron caps.

Others had no helmets and wore only leather caps; these men carried a wicker shield thirty inches wide, covered at the center with a round iron plate large or small, and reinforced around the edges with iron strips hammered into various decorative shapes.

Their chieftain wore heavy armor of separate iron plates and carried a furled banner that would only be unfurled when overseeing battle.

As the horse column passed, every inch of the river valley trembled.

The native banner troops of the battalion, long unaccustomed to battle, crouched in their foxholes, only half their heads exposed, watching the very ground around them quake as a great mass of enemy cavalry thundered past barely a dozen paces away — it made him tremble uncontrollably; no matter how he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, he could not stop the shaking.

He blew on his fire striker three times in a row and failed to ignite it each time; the more he blew, the more frantic he grew, and the more frantic he grew, the less it would light.

So much so that Bao Hu, lying in ambush on the flank with his troops, seeing that the enemy had already passed through the ambush zone, simply ignited the cannons on the hillside. In an instant, from the hillside above and both banks of the gorge, four cannons, dozens of firelocks, and two Hundred-Tiger Volley Carts fired in unison — war cries rose, gunpowder smoke billowed, and the Khalkha cavalry's advance was forcibly halted.

Since the building of its town in the early Ming, Guide Battalion had always had many cannons, but as the years wore on, many could no longer be used and needed replacing — yet Hezhou Guard never had the time to transfer new ones to this tiny battalion.

Hezhou Guard was one of the top guards in the entire Ming dynasty: where other guards had a full complement of five thousand six hundred banner troops, Hezhou Guard had a full complement of nine thousand eight hundred eighty-eight banner troops; at its peak it commanded eight battalions and nine native battalions — it simply could not spare attention for Guide Battalion.

And Guide Battalion had no armory of its own. Over time, some cannons that could no longer be fired were taken home by native officers and soldiers, to be used as iron stock for forging swords or making armor plates — until now, only these four venerable ancestors remained among the cannons.

The youngest of these four old masters was cast in the thirteenth year of Wanli, a four-hundred-catty breech-loading swivel gun — a junior among the four, the same age as Bao Hu's grandfather. The most senior was cast in the thirteenth year of Hongwu, a two-hundred-catty bronze general cannon.

People held a superstitious reverence for things from the Hongwu Emperor's era, firmly believing this ancestor could still serve — and indeed, so long as you loaded less powder and shot, it still could.

There had originally been another bronze ancestor of the same age, but in the forty-fourth year of Wanli, when a drought struck Xining, the brothers of the battalion had melted that ancestor down, cast some copper coins, and traded them for flour to eat.

As the saying goes, old ginger bites hotter — a Han-dynasty ring-pommel saber, well-maintained, can still kill, let alone a cannon from the Hongwu years.

With a half-load of powder, at forty or fifty paces, it still blasted a faceful of grapeshot into the Khalkha cavalry. The heavy-armored centurion, caught in the sudden attack, was thrown from his warhorse; he scrambled up and fled backward, arrows clanging and ringing off his armor.

The cannons in Bao Hu's hands might be old veterans, but the heavy armor on that Khalkha centurion was no lightweight either.

This thing was clearly another old family heirloom, certainly older than Dayan Khan, for one of the reasons the Ming army shifted from heavy cavalry to medium or even light cavalry was precisely that they could no longer catch up with Mongol horsemen.

And there were many reasons the Mongol cavalry shifted from heavy to light armor — one of them being the great increase in the enemy's field firearms, which meant heavy armor no longer completely dominated the battlefield.

At the same time, advances in bellows technology allowed Mongol smiths to forge lighter armor plates that still offered decent protection.

The dwindling of available resources was indeed another factor.

Still, heavy armor had its undeniable superiority. Seeing their centurion thrown from his horse, his tribesmen surged forward, each brandishing a hook-spear — in the blink of an eye, three hooks were latched onto the centurion's armor.

No one cared whether the centurion actually wanted to run; once the hooks were on, they dragged him back at a run, refusing to listen even when he shouted.

To a Mongol man, the hook-spear was a weapon with entrepreneurial qualities.

What had the Khalkha Mongols charged into Qinghai for? Wasn't it a thousand-li raid purely for wealth?

Setting aside for the moment Choktu Taiji's grand ambition to build an eternal enterprise, for the common herder-soldier, so long as he could hook this hefty thing and drag it back, it didn't matter whether the battle was won or lost — he himself had certainly won big.

Bao Hu, firing his cannon from the hilltop, was stunned. The cannon smoke had just cleared, and he was still urging his men to reload quickly, fearing the enemy would attack — but when he looked closely, no one was fighting them at all.

They saw a group of Mongol soldiers, each using hooked sickle lances to drag their own comrades and lead their comrades' warhorses as they ran back — regardless of whether they were dead or alive, and regardless of whether the hooked ones wanted to go back; once hooked, there was no escape.

But the Mongols were not the only entrepreneurs in this battle.

Bao Hu watched those Mongol cavalrymen, his eyes splitting with rage, shouting himself hoarse as he exposed half his body atop the hill: "Don't let them take the corpses away!"

In an instant, over twenty banner troops burst forth from the front, brandishing blades and axes as they gave chase for several dozen paces, until they finally saw firelight amidst the massive tremors at Mawu Gorge.

A chain of landmines laid along the roadside was ignited by the native banner troops; from front to back, the mines erupted one by one with colossal firelight, blasting out of the earth with a roar, shattered stones bursting and spraying in all directions.

Being close did not necessarily mean death, and being far did not necessarily mean life — it basically came down to one's Eight Characters. If your fate was tough enough, you wouldn't die even in a lost battle; if your fate was soft, you couldn't keep your life even in a won battle.

Several hundred jin of gunpowder buried underground made a terrifying sound when it exploded, but the killing power was not so fearsome — more Mongol soldiers were stunned unconscious than blown to death, and more were completely unharmed than stunned.

The hooked-sickle cavalry, who had risked their lives to start their venture, passed through layers of obstacles and fled the battlefield with their spoils; the Guide Garrison native banner troops who leaped out of the fortifications also got the heads they wanted, as they had wished.

At least in this battle, some of the soldiers on both sides found their own happiness.

But Bao Hu was not happy. After inspecting the equipment of the captives and corpses, the Guide Garrison's Assistant Battalion Commander's brow was tightly furrowed — the equipment level of these Khalkha cavalrymen was over a thousand years ahead of Little Lhazang's troops.

A landmine ambush could only be used once. Although the Guide Garrison's territory was long, narrow, and easy to defend but hard to attack, and the river valley was dotted with forts and stockades everywhere, he did not have enough troops to hold every strategic point. Once a single defensive line was breached, there would be no need for further fighting.

Precisely at this moment, the banner soldier sent to Hezhou Guard to request reinforcements returned travel-worn and dusty, bringing word for him to hold the fortresses.

Bao Hu was so angry his teeth itched. Wasn't that just worthless nonsense? Guide was his homeland — if he didn't hold it, who would? "Where are the reinforcements I asked for?"

The native banner soldier shook his head, his eyes carrying fear of his superior: "The Commander said, said that Guyuan has drawn away Hezhou Guard's banner troops, and because Lhazang has gone south, Hezhou Guard must guard against the tribal chiefs beyond Tumen Pass and Jishi Pass causing trouble, so they can only send two Company Commanders to come to our aid."

Bao Hu's heart suddenly lightened. He clapped his hands and said: "Two Company Commanders is fine too — that doubles my troop strength. Where are they, how far have they come?"

The native banner soldier lowered his head, not daring to speak, and turned to point at two riders behind him: "Commander, those are the two Company Commanders."

Bao Hu froze for a moment, looked at the native banner soldier, then looked at those two men in the distance who had just dismounted and dared not approach — they wore armor, and judging by the flags on their helmet-spears, they were indeed Company Commanders.

He stretched out his hand, pointing at those two men, and asked the native banner soldier: "Just those two fucking sheep-carriers?"

Receiving his subordinate's affirmative reply, Bao Hu looked at those two Company Commanders, his face flushing crimson, his blood pressure surpassing his height in the blink of an eye. In a daze, he seemed to hear suona horns blaring by his ears, and before his eyes appeared a hallucination of a professional troupe singing and dancing as they carried him away.

A moment later, General Bao finally caught his breath. Furious beyond restraint, he suddenly flung up his arm and cursed: "Get lost! I fucking asked for two hundred banner troops, not two fucking sheep-carrying Company Commanders! Where are the soldiers?!"

"General, the soldiers — when we set out, there really were two hundred banner troops, but after passing Changning Horse Relay Station, they heard there were tens of thousands of Tartars here, so they crossed the Yellow River and fled toward Xining Guard." The native banner soldier hung his head: "The Qinghai Marshal's Office is recruiting people to open up wasteland... everyone in Lintao and Gongchang knows."

The instant the native banner soldier finished speaking, a string of northwest curses with an extremely high sheep-content reached his ears, and only then did he hear Bao Hu tilt his head to look at the sky and let out a long, faint sigh: "This isn't isolating me from the Liu bandits and the sea bandits — this is clearly having the Liu bandits and the sea bandits isolate me... Open the crossing!"

"Huh?"

"I said open the crossing. Let Xining Guard's reinforcements come over. If they want to cross and fight, let them fight — I'm done with this. I'm going home." Bao Hu waved his arms wildly, as if trying to exhaust all his strength on an enemy that did not exist in the air: "Home. We'll hold our Guide City."