Chapter 375: Mental Fortitude

General Zhong Hu's pleasant holiday came to an end.

At Liu Chengyun's call, Zhong Hu, the garrison commander of Nanshan Fort, had taken part in the battle to help Wang Wenxiu crush the Lintao border army. After that, he led his troops back to Nanshan and threw himself into the grand enterprise of wide sowing and meager reaping.

Because Nanshan Fort was the key position protecting Qinghai Lake, the garrison troops here lived exactly like frontier guards — in fact, worse off than the Ming dynasty's frontier garrison troops.

Ever since the Great Ming opened its markets, frontier garrison troops could always see other people, but Nanshan Fort was different — its permanent population was small to begin with.

Normally, once a month a salt transport convoy would leave Nanshan and go out through the pass; a few days later, camel caravans loaded with green salt would come back through the pass into Haixi Crossing, where they boarded the paddle-wheel warships of the Naval Command and were shipped north.

Apart from that, only in winter would a Mongol nomadic tribe appear, and as soon as spring began they would wander off again.

Guarding the frontier in a place with no people was a lonely business to begin with.

Zhong Hu's soldiers were also drilled every day by their squad leaders — a company-commander-level minor drill every five days, a battalion-commander-level major drill every ten days — grueling work.

But whether they wanted it or not, garrison troops holding a pass will always end up somewhat different from field armies; no one wants to be penned up inside a mountain fort every day.

So in their spare time from training, these Shaanxi veterans pooled their money and grain, hired craftsmen from Haixi County to come build a brick kiln, and then hired laborers to build houses for them at the foot of the mountain.

Ultimately, it came down to these men being well-off — they could easily hire craftsmen and laborers from Haixi County to help with the work.

Although the Marshal's Manor paid them no military wages, between the fourth and fifth years of the Chongzhen reign, with Liu Chengyun coordinating from the center, the soldiers' grain, horses' grain, and material provisions they were given would have made government troops die of envy. One of their men could basically support an entire ten-man squad of government troops.

The monthly grain issued to an ordinary soldier at Nanshan Fort was divided into three portions: soldier's grain, march grain, and family grain.

The soldier's grain was eight jin of white flour, eighteen jin of yellow flour, twenty jin of millet, eight jin of pickled vegetables, five jin of dried sauced meat, two salted fish, three jin of butter, three liang of tea leaves, and three liang of tobacco.

The march grain was six jin of roasted flour, one chi of vinegar cloth, and one jar of pickled vegetables and dried meat, kept in reserve for when troops were cut off during a sortie; if no sortie was made, they ate it when the new grain arrived.

As for the family grain, it was far simpler and more straightforward: one hundred jin of highland barley flour and one salt brick worth seven qian of silver. Whether a soldier had a family or not, every man received the family grain, as an expenditure by the Marshal's Manor to encourage marriage and childbearing.

In addition, there were horse grain that never passed through the soldiers' hands and highland barley wine for special purposes, both delivered directly to the fort. The horse grain was distributed to each squad, and the wine was used to reward soldiers or for everyday wound treatment and driving out cold, distributed by Zhong Hu.

Most of these non-staple foods were under Zhou Riqiang's management, prepared each month and delivered by the salt transport convoy.

In truth, the Naval Command was the Marshal's Manor's largest aquatic produce base.

Zhou Riqiang had once served as a county magistrate in Shandong and had always placed great importance on fishing. When he arrived in Qinghai, he took up his old trade again. Here, there was salt when you needed salt and fish when you needed fish, and moreover the advantage of cart-boats for transport. He turned the Naval Command by the shores of Qinghai Lake into the Marshal's Manor's largest salted fish factory.

The Marshal's Manor did its utmost to let the frontier garrison troops eat their fill, but the natural environment being what it was, eating well was doubly difficult.

The soldiers at the training camp over in Hehuang could occasionally eat some fresh meat and vegetables, which was all right, but out on the lake, eating anything fresh was rather difficult. And here at their Nanshan Fort, if they wanted something fresh, they could only go up the mountain in summer and dig up a few caterpillar fungus, come back and steam a potful, and barely count that as having meat and vegetables — just to satisfy a craving.

In essence, the Han soldiers in Liu Chengzong's army were not born for war. They were all born in the Wanli years, when prices were low and all goods were cheap. In a short ten years, everything around them had been turned upside down, and in the end they could only choose to fight for survival.

Therefore, once they had carved out a path to survival, people longed for a better life, and that meant they had to build houses. The house itself wasn't the key; the key was that the barracks wouldn't let them raise pigs. With their own house, they could raise pigs at home.

What is a home? A roof radical and a pig — shelter from wind and rain and a place to raise pigs, that is a home.

The year before last, they finished building their houses and discovered there were quite a few rivers around, and a good deal of land that could be opened up. But farming required a lot of hands.

No matter how great the soldiers' craving for fresh vegetables was, Zhong Hu did not dare let them go farm.

What kind of man was Zhong Hu? He was probably the most daring troublemaker among the Marshal's Manor's officers at the battalion commander level. He had taken a lead ball for the Grand Marshal.

For the Marshal's Manor, he was even an epoch-making figure. Ever since he stepped in front of Liu Chengzong and took that musket shot, the bloody lesson had driven the Lion Army's firearm equipment rate steadily upward.

With a record like that, it meant that as long as he didn't stir up trouble recklessly, a lifetime of glory and wealth was guaranteed. Even if he did stir up trouble recklessly, something that would kill another man would still spare his life.

There was only one exception: he could not mess around with the army.

The Grand Marshal, the Grand Marshal — he was the Grand Marshal only because he had an army. If the army collapsed, then the Grand Marshal would no longer be the Grand Marshal. So even if the soldiers desperately wanted to farm, Zhong Hu absolutely dared not let them.

There were plenty of things the soldiers wanted to do: they wanted fresh vegetables and to farm, they wanted girls and to strike it rich, they wanted to race horses by the river and fish on the lake. They wanted to do everything — except train.

If he let them have their way, then when the Grand Marshal returned from the southern campaign, Zhong Hu would end up hanging from a tree.

Zhong Hu's initial idea was to hire some people from Haixi County north of the mountain and from Guru Taiji's tribe south of the mountain to open up a vegetable plot.

As it happened, Liu Chengzong solved the labor problem for opening up wasteland for him.

As the southern campaign progressed, every so often the Grand Marshal would send a batch of aristocratic laborers, stubborn captives, or monks and the like up from the south.

Zhong Hu couldn't tell what these people were supposed to be, nor could he understand their speech, but their destination was very clear: they would all be taken to the quarry at the foot of the Qilian Mountains north of the lake.

He figured, since it was all labor, what difference did it make where they did it?

So every batch of quarry laborers and overseers, before reaching north of the lake, first had to spend two months opening up farmland for him at Nanshan Fort.

This solved the labor problem, but a new problem followed right on its heels: people had to eat. Since these people were captives, the soldiers couldn't be expected to support them — what were they, ancestors?

Zhong Hu brought his intelligence and ingenuity to bear and solved this problem.

As an elite soldier produced by the Great Ming military system, Zhong Hu knew the workings of the guard-battalion system inside and out… If you had people, you had everything.

Wasn't squeezing military households a traditional skill? Was there any difference between military households and these laborers?

There seemed to be a slight difference in name, but was there really a difference? Zhong Hu felt there was no difference at all.

Each batch of laborers, upon arrival, would first receive a large iron ladle and go to the Chaka Salt Lake to collect salt. After collecting the salt, they would make it into salt bricks according to regulation by the small river south of Nanshan Fort, and only then go open up farmland.

The salt bricks were bought by Guru Taiji of the Tumed with highland barley flour and tsampa, taken home for the livestock to lick, and the grain received in exchange became the laborers' rations.

Liu Chengzong fought in the south, and Zhong Hu opened up fields in the north. By the time Liu Chengzong finished fighting, Nanshan Fort had lost the laborers who used to arrive every so often, but Zhong Hu's primitive accumulation was already complete.

Opening up wasteland in this place was easy. The soil itself wasn't very suited to farming, and there were hardly any trees around. The most grueling task wasn't clearing the land, but hauling silt up from the river.

South of the fortress, on the riverbank between the two mountains, there were now two manors, one brick kiln, two irrigation canals, two windmills, seven wells, two hundred and forty cave dwellings, four hundred small courtyards, and thirty-four thousand mu of farmland.

The only thing missing was people.

At first it was because the fighting in the south was more or less over and no more laborers were being sent north. Later it was because Choktu Taiji invaded.

The land Zhong Hu had opened up had never been intensively cultivated to begin with — it was virgin soil, after all, and even intensive cultivation wouldn't yield much grain. Wide sowing and meager reaping was just like that: they scattered over a thousand dan of seed and got a little over two thousand dan of grain out.

And even then, half of it was looted. In the end they just broke even.

Truth be told, the Nanshan garrison troops were crack soldiers. No one could take grain from them at knifepoint, but the looters were all Mongol refugees — the old, the weak, women and children, famine victims. Zhong Hu's soldiers went out carrying their heavy muskets, but in the end they couldn't harden their hearts.

They were very well-off — well-off enough to possess the capital for kindness.

Right after that, these Mongols submitted and were taken in. Then the Great Ming sealed the border and forbade grain from being sold into Hehuang. The Marshal's Manor's military grain supplies suddenly tightened, and they launched another eastern campaign.

It wasn't until after they had defeated Wang Cheng'en that Old Master Liu of Xining Prefecture, who was fretting over how to settle the captives, had Zhong Hu volunteer himself. He asked Old Master Liu to place the two thousand Lintao captives under his command for military farming. Not only could he handle the ideological work, but the Marshal's Manor wouldn't even need to provide rations.

Old Master Liu asked him about his plan and was greatly astonished — so General Zhong was actually a little farming prodigy. He gladly approved his plan to take the captives back to Nanshan Fort and even allocated an extra two hundred dan of seed grain and one agriculture erudite.

Agriculture erudites were master farmers recommended from various regions, a type of village official. Because of the war on the front lines, twenty percent of the land in Hehuang could not wait for the Marshal's Manor to register the households and unify cultivation, or else the farming season would be missed. So Liu Xiangyu had prepared an ample supply of both agriculture erudites and seed grain.

Zhong Hu asked about the prisoners' treatment. These prisoners came from three sources: first, Wang Cheng'en's Lintao Supreme Commander's Guard Battalion; second, the garrison troops from Lintao's various camps, forts, and passes; third, the banner troops of Lintao Garrison.

The Guard Battalion's treatment was very good — monthly grain and monthly pay both supplied in full. For them, going on campaign was a hardship assignment, their attitude the same as the soldiers of the Marshal's Headquarters' three great battalions, because marching rations were not as good as what they ate while garrisoned.

The garrison troops' treatment was passable. After supporting themselves each month they could still afford a little drink, but it was only passable — that small surplus was nowhere near enough to support a family. Apart from a little drink, they didn't know what else it could do. Whether they were sent on campaign or not made no difference to them; either way, the food was bad.

The banner troops had it much worse. When the garrison farm collected grain, one dan should have been calculated at one tael and two mace of silver, but it was calculated at eight mace. When it came time to issue grain and pay, it was again converted at one dan to eight mace of silver — and issued by docking four mace for every four mace paid out.

For the banner troops, being mustered for campaign was a good assignment. The longer the fighting dragged on, the better — going on campaign meant they didn't have to go hungry at home.

Zhong Hu used the most direct method to pacify the prisoners: he showed them the monthly grain ration of the Nanshan garrison and told them to go reclaim farmland in the past. Once the war was over, if they followed the Grand Marshal, in just a year or two they too would receive such treatment.

And the prisoners did not disappoint Zhong Hu's expectations. Apart from a handful of stubbornly unrepentant Supreme Commander's Guard Battalion soldiers, Zhong Hu felt that most of the prisoners were even more obedient than the soldiers of Nanshan Fort.

Those Guard Battalion soldiers did not think the treatment was bad — they simply wanted to go home. Zhong Hu likewise made a promise, telling them of the Lion Army's tradition: once the war was over, the Grand Marshal might just let them go back, and might even issue them a few mace of silver as travel expenses.

When they learned this news from Zhong Hu, they were not happy but rather more bewildered, because they only wanted to go home, not that they had to go home.

Even their Grand Marshal Wang Cheng'en had been invited into Xining City — if they went back, where would they go back to? Yet if they stayed, who would they themselves be?

At the very least, it seemed the Marshal's Headquarters had no intention of killing them all. For the prisoners, this already counted as good news.

With a muddle-along mentality, under Zhong Hu's direction they threw themselves into Nanshan Fort's sowing enterprise.

Zhong Hu had long been impatient. He was the general in the Marshal's Headquarters least willing to fight. When the enemy struck his face he had to go into battle, but once the fighting was done, his desire to farm was even more urgent.

After two years of silt irrigation, Nanshan Fort's land ought to yield a decent harvest this year. If all went smoothly, starting this autumn, perhaps the Nanshan Fort soldiers' eight hundred dan of highland barley flour per month could be self-supplied.

He had also earned merit in this battle. With the Marshal's Headquarters gaining so many prisoners, Zhong Hu thought he might be transferred elsewhere. These fields would be his parting gift to Nanshan Fort.

Before being transferred away, whether this land yielded one thousand dan or twenty thousand dan made an enormous difference in meaning to him.

But just when Zhong Hu thought he could finally farm in peace, the Mongols came.

Early morning on the third day of the fourth month, Zhong Hu was strolling through the boundless fields, watching the prisoners farm, when soldiers who had gone west to exercise the horses came running back in frantic haste, telling him that an endless, silent Mongol army had appeared below Wulan Mountain.

Not long after, a small squad of heavy-armored cavalry arrived to report: they were envoys of the Khudun Taiji Khagan, seeking to enter the pass and meet with Grand Marshal Liu Chengzong, and also searching for the earlier envoy, the Candu Taiji.

Zhong Hu did not let them enter the pass, agreeing to relay the message on their behalf, but the Khudun Taiji Khagan could not wait that long.

On the afternoon of the third day of the fourth month, another group came, wanting to do business with Nanshan Fort — demanding to buy grain, yet unable to produce silver or Lion Notes. In the end, they decided on barter.

Zhong Hu thought barter was fine too, but he never imagined that the Khudun Taiji Khagan would send over a thousand people, wanting to trade captives seized from raiding Turpan for grain with Nanshan Fort. He refused flatly.

He thought to himself, you could trade anything and the Marshal's Headquarters could swallow it all — anything except people. If this had been back when Liu Chengzong first entered Qinghai, hearing such news would probably have made his eyes gleam.

But by now, Zhong Hu did not even want to pass this request on to Liu Chengzong. They were so poor that all they had left was people. What Khudun Taiji had hauled over was not over a thousand people — it was over a thousand mouths, and ancestors at that, who could not speak the language but could eat prodigiously.

By the morning of the fourth day, the Chahar tribe's envoy came again, this time more urgent, demanding grain from the Marshal's Headquarters and also demanding the return of the envoys sent on the two previous occasions.

Fortunately, the envoy they had sent earlier had just disembarked from the Haixi ferry, bearing Liu Laoye's handwritten order to pass through the checkpoint. Only then did Zhong Hu learn that an earlier envoy party had already entered Xining from Haibei County.

Along with this envoy party came Liu Laoye's instructions for the Nanshan Fort garrison: there were two Mongol armies outside, combined possibly close to a hundred thousand — he was to consolidate the troops and prepare for battle.

Once battle broke out, Nanshan Fort must hold firm for fifteen days at all costs, buying time for the Haixi-Haibei Naval Office to withdraw into Hehuang and for the Grand Marshal's main force to return in reinforcement.

Zhong Hu on Nanshan Fort turned his gaze to the fields below the mountain, then looked toward the rolling dust clouds beyond the mountain, pondering in his mind the concept of a hundred-thousand-strong Mongol army.

He knew — the time had come to temper his mental fortitude.