Chapter 457: Advancing the Army

In the second month of the seventh year of the Chongzhen reign, Liu Chengzong had already personally led the five-battalion grand army out from Xining.

Compared to the offensive route along the southern foothills of the Qilian Mountains, the march route for his main central army was far more distant: they would first head south from Xining to the Heka Grasslands, then pass through the Chaka Salt Flats and Mount Wulan to advance west to Delingha, before turning north and advancing to Guazhou — a total distance of two thousand two hundred li.

This route was chosen by Liu Shizi; it was nearly eight hundred li longer than the route marching along the southern foothills of the Qilian Mountains through Hala Lake to Yumen, and it had even fewer water sources along the way.

But this route's advantage lay in its greater population capacity: at Heka, Wulan, Dulan, Delingha, Golmud, and Greater and Lesser Chuandan, all were garrison ranches and chieftain outposts of the Marshal's Manor; though the water sources were somewhat fewer, they were all under his control.

Although the extreme terrain and environmental conditions required a projected marching time of fifty days, it offered a stronger guarantee.

At first, Liu Chengzong's advance was very slow, because the court's counterattack from the Lanzhou direction to the east was also very slow, making it hard for him to feel at ease, but when a letter arrived from Ren Quan'er, his mind was set at ease.

In his heart, Liu Chengzong had never regarded the leaders and clansmen who remained in Yan'an Garrison as his subordinates.

They had once been friends who fought the storms together in hard times; sometimes people were close, sometimes they were far — those close, like Shangtian Hou, shared his aspirations and pulled together in the same boat; those far, like the Dashing King Gao Yingxiang, could tolerate him but he was unwilling to serve under another, so they formed a joint camp.

In any case, back then, whether it was General Liu or the Dashing King Gao, no one had any hope of overthrowing the Great Ming and succeeding, so everyone was very tolerant.

But there were also some special times when people's aspirations were not the same.

Even if they all shared the surname Liu, not everyone was still willing to be dead set on rebellion after having enough to eat; in fact, precisely because they were of the same clan — this one an uncle, that one a brother — and had not wanted to rebel in the first place, they were actually harder to manage.

To put it bluntly, if you forced them to ruin their families and abandon their livelihoods, it was all your fault — you've become the big chief, shouldn't you be supporting me?

To prevent conflicts from escalating, the Yan'an Garrison was created, where many people bore the surname Liu.

In essence, the Yan'an Garrison was a reservoir where Liu Chengzong discarded conflicts; in earlier years, his father Liu Xiangyu's Yu-Character Battalion had served the same purpose.

There had always been three types of people: Liu Chengzong's Lion Battalion were his subordinates, whom he could command as he pleased; the Yu-Character Battalion were people whose hearts were in the right place but who were rather troublesome to command; and the Yan'an Garrison were a batch of people who might not be troublesome to command, but who had joined the rebellion only because circumstances forced them.

The only person back in the old home who could be called a subordinate was Ren Quan'er, but Liu Chengzong likewise did not dare to treat him as a subordinate in his heart — after all, times had changed, and the former poor lad had become a commander holding real power in the court's eyes; could he still obey his orders?

Whether he was a subordinate or not was not for him to say; it only counted if Ren Quan'er regarded him as his superior.

Ren Quan'er's letter had three pages. The first page informed him that the court had dispatched at least three battalions to attack Lanzhou from the Lintao direction, and it laid out the circumstances of the three battalions' commanders with perfect clarity.

This left Liu Chengzong very puzzled, because the Marshal Manor's defensive strength on both banks of the Yellow River at Lanzhou was extremely ample, and moreover, because the momentum of recruiting surrendered former Ming troops was so huge it was practically an open hand — the court ought to know exactly how many troops they had.

At Lanzhou, the senior general and brigade commander Wang Wenxiu personally led one battalion in garrison, and there were also three nearly full-strength battalions under Luo Rucai, Li Wanqing, and Yang Chengzu — that alone was over ten thousand of the Marshal Manor's own direct-line troops.

In the several counties around Lintao Prefecture, there was also the Lintao Brigade formed from former Ming troops under the three surrendered commanders Shi Xiang, Li Zude, and Zhang Yunqi; when Liu Chengzong granted them the offices of deputy general and colonel, he had laid his cards on the table — he wanted their pledges of allegiance.

Thus, when the three men recruited the surrendered garrison troops and banner soldiers, they struck the surrounding counties very fiercely; moreover, opening the city gates and offering surrender was the three men's own responsibility, and the troops they led were also paid by the Marshal Manor, so they possessed a certain degree of loyalty.

Facing this army, for the court's Supreme Commander of the Five Provinces to put forth a mere three battalions of just over ten thousand men seemed excessively shabby — in a siege battle, they still wanted to fight one against two; were they all heavenly soldiers and divine generals?

However, on the second page, Ren Quan'er detailed the great melee in the Central Plains, Huguang, and Sichuan — the court's inescapable net, the government troops' string of victories, the peasant army's deep thrusts — and then everything made sense.

Liu Chengzong believed the court's battle reports, because he had experience in combined-camp operations and knew the difficulty of coordinating commands across a vast battlefield stretching several hundred li.

The appearance of such a situation in the Ming army's battle reports was not because Ming commanders were falsely reporting exploits, but because over a hundred thousand peasant troops were breaking through an encirclement.

Among these hundred-thousand-odd peasant troops, the personal veteran camps of some leaders had the ability to fight government troops head-on, but they were still not a regular army, and the leaders who possessed such formidable veteran camps were often relatively independent leaders.

After four years of war, Liu Chengzong had established the Marshal Manor and built his own political framework; the peasant army that remained in the Central Plains, though lacking such a structure, had also shed its naivety in the war and learned ruthlessness.

They were breaking through; no one with a strong army at hand would stay behind to cover the rear for others, leaving their own direct-line troops to be surrounded by government forces.

Ren Quan'er's letter summed up this situation with a single piercing remark: the strong run rampant, the weak fill the ditches.

Those capable of forced marches broke through enemy lines, killed generals, destroyed cities, and plundered lands at the front; the old and weak who lacked that ability were intercepted and hunted down by government troops along the road, leaving the ground strewn with headless corpses that became the government troops' battle merits.

Liu Chengzong felt somewhat dejected.

He had thought that the Marshal Manor's capture of Lanzhou would make him the number one great enemy of Shaanxi and ease the threat to the peasant army, but he never imagined that now, in Chen Qiyu's eyes, he had instead become a secondary target of the court's punitive campaigns because of it.

As for the third page of Ren Quan'er's letter, it contained his deployment for the Yan'an Battalion's defection on the battlefield; Liu Chengzong did not trouble himself with these matters, and had it forwarded to Wang Wenxiu — decisions on the front-line battlefield still had to be made by the front-line commander.

Liu Chengzong merely circulated the situation of the Central Plains peasant army to the entire army, telling the officers and men to hurry their march — only by fighting a quick battle to swiftly seize Gansu could fewer of the peasant army die.

The five battalions of troops he commanded had already become nine battalions by the time they reached Delingha.

However, these four extra battalions were merely traveling the same road as him; one battalion consisted of nobles and their escorts from the various Oirat tribes — the Mongol nobles like Baatur Khuntaiji marched in high spirits, but many of their tribesmen had wept upon leaving Xining.

Their vast and mighty army had departed the Tianshan Mountains, and now returned with just over three thousand men, still accompanied by two ferocious and menacing Han army battalions — needless to say how miserable they felt inside.

Baatur Khuntaiji and the others were happy, firstly because they could go home, and secondly because Liu Chengzong had given them many gifts and also agreed upon a comprehensive trade agreement covering furs, arms, daily necessities, and all other goods.

Although they had fought a battle and lost many men, the nobles had all become wealthier, and in the foreseeable future, they would grow even wealthier along with the trade routes.

Baatur Khuntaiji was the most earnest person on the march; this was not only because the Oirat were responsible for guiding the Marshal Manor's army, but even more because he was learning marching from the Marshal Manor — primarily how to tow heavy cannons on sand and across the Gobi.

Ever since his defeat and surrender, he had been thrown into the Marshal Manor's school to learn the Han language; in a place as militaristic as the Marshal Manor, even learning Han speech could inadvertently lead to picking up some military knowledge, and he had indeed learned quite a few things.

Right at this moment, over thirty thousand people were advancing along the Gobi desert at the foot of snow-capped high mountains, stretching out in three parallel columns into a winding long-snake formation; Baatur Khuntaiji was up on a small hilltop with the scout cavalry posted on the high ground, notebook in hand, recording the army's marching-camp scale.

In his half-year and more at the Marshal Manor, Baatur Khuntaiji's gains were not limited to familiarizing himself with the Marshal Manor's various firearms; more importantly, he had learned a good deal of history and armed his own mind.

His teacher was an old pedant who revered antiquity, forever invoking Confucius and even the Five Emperors, and what he taught was the Spring and Autumn Annals; this history had little practical significance for guiding the Marshal Manor's various students, so it was unwelcome at the New City Academy, which was why he had been shuffled off to a branch campus to teach a bunch of Mongol nobles the language.

But for Baatur Khuntaiji, these things were different; in his view, the foundation for the Central Plains — that fertile land under heaven — becoming the Central Plains of the Han people had been laid precisely in that period.

People built sturdy walled cities, enfeoffed feudal lords across the land, linked them with roads to partition vast stretches of territory, used bloodlines to divide the state from the wilds, established ritual protocols of honoring the king and repelling the barbarians, waged unending wars against the barbarian tribes, and made the Central Plains an eternally impregnable realm for ten thousand generations.

This held powerful guiding significance for the Dzungars' tribal form of organization; it fully illustrated the meaning of development — a seed planted in Haojing three thousand years ago, carefully watered by the Han people as it branched out and spread its leaves, had become the present-day Great Ming.

If he returned to the Tianshan Mountains today and built a walled city, enfeoffed nobles at strategic passes, constructed official roads following rivers and mountain ranges, locked all the barbarians he saw inside, and dispatched elite cavalry to raid back and forth, then three thousand years later a Mongol great power would emerge across the vast expanse of Siberia; by then, Genghis Khan would become a figure like the Yellow Emperor, and he himself would be honored with the title of Zhou Wen... no, the Mongol King Wen.

He was already prepared to return to the Tianshan Mountains and launch a grand undertaking: two Mongol standing-army battalions — as long as the furs and wool were transported over this year, he could buy weapons and equipment for two battalions.

Next year, he would haul out thirty-three light and heavy cannons and have a talk with the Russians about the issue of free trade in Siberia.

In truth, for Baatur Khuntaiji, the normal march of over thirty thousand people held nothing special apart from the need to learn how to transport heavy cannons — until Liu Chengzong passed down the order for the entire army to accelerate, and all the Oirat nobles were frightened.

It was not that they had never seen a forced march — the Mongol cavalry themselves were experts at forced marches — but a forced march toward Jiayu Pass, that impregnable stronghold where "barbarians dismount here," a pass that had never been breached, with the soldiers utterly exultant... no one had ever seen that.

The Marshal Manor's five direct-line battalions, nearly twenty thousand troops, had been eating and drinking well the whole way along this road; over the course of the march, the livestock of the several garrison ranches along the route, save for those kept for breeding, had almost all been eaten up by them; were it not for the alpine snowmelt, even the river water would have been drunk dry by them.

Baatur Khuntaiji could not understand why these troops, living such a life of immortals, were instead burning with impatience to rush to their deaths at Jiayu Pass; if the Marshal Manor's army possessed such high fighting spirit, why had they come all the way to Qinghai?

In fact, it was not only Baatur Khuntaiji who did not understand — even Liu Chengzong did not quite understand. He had ordered the accelerated advance so as not to lose time: a standoff was underway along the Zhuanglang River, and the battle at Lintao Prefecture was about to unfold; the sooner he reached Jiayu Pass, the sooner Zhang Tianlin's division could act, diverting the enemy's attention on both battlefields.

The Marshal Manor's army did not always possess such high fighting spirit.

Just when the army was setting out from Xining and New City, Liu Chengzong had specially assembled the army's discipline officers and told them to pay attention to the soldiers' state of mind, and to explain to them the justness of this campaign.

When they were moving slowly at the start, the army's morale was neither low nor high; it was only when the forced march was ordered that everyone instead grew stirred up.

It was only after Liu Chengzong summoned his subordinates and asked them that he learned what was going on; actually, the reason was rather laughable when you got down to it — it was simply because the soldiers had finally left the Hehuang region.

It wasn't about fighting their way back home; rather, as they left Hehuang behind, that feeling of being superior — of being soldiers of the Marshal's headquarters — returned to them.

Hehuang was fine, but in the months after Hehuang's land equalization and bumper harvest, the Marshal's headquarters soldiers — except those native to Hehuang — all lived very stifled lives.

Before land equalization, the common folk of Hehuang suffered from both scarcity and inequality. Though the Marshal's headquarters soldiers had hardly any pay, each man held enough grain to keep several mouths alive. Even without battles to fight, they could support their entire families on rations and still help others.

The soldiers of the Grand Marshal's headquarters were the proudest fighting men under heaven — even surrendered troops walked with chests out and heads high.

But after the land equalization and bumper harvest, the psychological letdown hit. Everyone was living well now. Every household had grain they could barely finish. They sold their surplus to the Marshal's headquarters and had more silver than they could spend.

The Marshal's headquarters soldiers suddenly realized the grain in their own hands didn't seem so plentiful anymore, and their silver was even scarcer. Shedding blood and risking their lives wasn't as good as farming a few acres at home.

People vaguely sensed something was off, yet couldn't quite put their finger on what. They had risen in revolt because they couldn't survive. Now, seeing the common folk living happily under the Marshal's rule, they were happy too, from the bottom of their hearts — but they still felt somehow shortchanged.

They didn't blame the Grand Marshal. The Grand Marshal had never shortchanged them. No matter the time, the soldiers' grain and pay had never once stopped. Still, quite a few men truly began thinking of taking off their armor and returning to the fields.

Fortunately, the time wasn't long enough for them to harden their resolve to take off their armor and return to the fields — after all, these rough fighting men from foreign parts really weren't much good at farming.

This sense of letdown didn't vanish until they entered the territory of the garrison herder camps and the tusi. Though the people here lived decently enough, animal husbandry was the mainstay. Grain here was still a scarce hard currency, and their fixed worth multiplied once again.

Only then did it suddenly dawn on people: not every place under heaven was like Hehuang under the Grand Marshal's rule. They were heading to Gansu. Gansu had not yet seen land equalization. The common folk there still lived bitterly under the rule of wicked officials. They would once again overturn heaven and earth and change everything, basking in the people's love and esteem.

Once they breached Jiayu Pass, they would still be respected and proud warriors.

Bearing such convictions and private hopes, the five battalions of the Marshal's headquarters marching toward Jiayu Pass were immensely stirred. As they advanced through the dust-choked Gobi, their drive was boundless.

When they reached Subei, Liu Chengzong finally gave the order. Thousands of relay riders began crisscrossing through the Gobi valleys.

The simple verbal order, carried by the relay riders' yellow command flags and red cotton armor galloping on horseback — it swept up the dust of the Gobi dunes, echoed through the melting snow-capped gorges, crossed the boundless salt lakes and the banks of surging snowmelt rivers, and finally reached Zhang Tianlin's ears with perfect clarity.

The verbal order was just four words: "Advance on Gansu!"