Chapter 475: The Junior General of Bandit Suppression

The first order Liu Chengzong issued for the Ganzhou campaign was to march troops north.

Mo Yujing, brigade commander of the Garrison Farm Brigade, led over four thousand Mongol soldiers from the Khoshut and Chahar battalions northward. They set camp at Yanchi Post Station, a mere fifty li from the Zhenyi Battalion fortress, then successively stormed Balidun and Sanshilidun in the Gobi, wiping out every Ming outpost northwest of the Black River.

After that, the Khoshut Battalion cavalry dismounted, took out the tools they had brought, and began tearing down the border wall.

This scene was witnessed firsthand by Zhenyi banner troops who had risked crossing the Black River to gather intelligence. Word quickly reached the Zhenyi Battalion fortress, then drifted southeast along the Black River, entering the defensive positions Li Hongsi had so carefully constructed.

Why would they demolish the border wall?

A terrifying thought coiled in Li Hongsi's mind: could the Marshal's army be planning to plunge back into the desolate Gobi, making a long-distance raid to bypass him?

Liu Chengzong excelled at thousand-li raids — that was no secret to anyone.

Raiding was, after all, a common skill among the roving bandits of the late Ming. Those with real ability called it raiding; those without called it fleeing. Either way, no one without a pair of iron legs survived to see the seventh year of Chongzhen.

But Li Hongsi felt something was off. They were all outsiders here — why was it that he couldn't find his way, yet Liu Chengzong dared to charge blindly all over the Gobi wasteland?

Li Hongsi himself did not know the terrain, but some of the officers under him and among the allied forces did. Tang Mingshi, the Zhenyi Mobile Corps Commander, was one who knew the terrain, and he scoffed at the Zhenyi banner troops' report: "Even if their legs are strong, in the deep desert they'd cover thirty li a day at most. To circle five hundred li north of Ganzhou — Suzhou would have fallen long before half a month was up."

Tang Mingshi shook his head decisively. "Rest easy, Vice Marshal. The rebel bandits will never detour through the deep desert. What we should watch for is them damming the Black River upstream."

Li Hongsi nodded, half believing and half doubting, inwardly unconvinced by Tang Mingshi's assessment.

It was not that he had any personal issue with Tang Mingshi. In fact, he knew perfectly well that this General Tang possessed exceptional natural gifts in loyalty and courage. It was simply that Tang had risen from the ranks of hereditary officers in the Liangzhou Guard, and his merits — like Li Hongsi's own — had all been earned in Shaanxi.

Since taking up his post as Zhenyi Mobile Corps Commander, Tang Mingshi, like many generals in Gansu, had extensive combat experience in places like Ningxia and Yansui, but had simply never fought a battle in Gansu.

He raised a hand and ordered his household retainers: "Summon Battalion Commander Lin."

Lin Chengdong, Battalion Commander of the Ganzhou Circuit, was the most experienced man at Li Hongsi's side. For one, he was a military examination graduate from Xi'an Prefecture; for another, he had taken part in the campaign to intercept the Chahar tribe and had indeed fought battles in Gansu.

Different regions had different environments, and there were always local advantages a commander only learned after the fighting was done. For this reason, Li Hongsi placed greater weight on Lin Chengdong's military counsel.

These past few days, Lin Chengdong had been eating and sleeping at the very front line, in a camp ringed by main canals and trenches, busy inspecting the army corps' firearms and equipment. The situation could hardly be called good.

Rockets were old and duds; heavy cannon carriages were decrepit; light cannons were crudely and shoddily made; gunpowder was unevenly mixed; cannonballs varied wildly in size... the armaments were nearly in total collapse.

Lin Chengdong beheaded eighteen ordnance officers from three battalions. Their headless corpses were dragged outside the camp, their heads all hung blood-dripping from the main gate.

An ordnance officer was a squad-level soldier-official, like those in charge of banners, drums, and horns. Every squad had one, responsible for overseeing weapons and equipment.

Lin Chengdong knew that the collapse of armaments was a malaise afflicting the entire Ming army — the broader climate was to blame. Those ordnance officers, though they bore the responsibility, were helpless to do anything about it. By law they deserved execution, but there were mitigating circumstances; their crimes did not warrant death.

But this army corps, cobbled together from three different regions, had lax discipline. Soldiers and officers alike were rife with the arrogance of elite troops and fierce generals. Since the commanding officers could not be executed, Lin Chengdong used the ordnance officers as the opening to tighten military discipline.

What did "arrogance of elite troops and fierce generals" mean? It meant a craving for quick victory. Men were eager to charge the front lines and kill the enemy, but that eagerness stemmed not from confidence in victory, but from the fact that these men had never fought a battle and could not endure the hardships of waiting for war.

They were unwilling to dig trenches and build ramparts day after day, unwilling to make all the exhausting, repetitive preparations that victory required. They just wanted to charge up and fight, plain and simple.

Lin Chengdong knew what that meant: if he actually let them charge up and fight, they'd be served up on a platter. The slightest setback would trigger a massive rout... and what was more, this patchwork army corps had no chain of command uniting its field officers.

Li Hongsi was the defending general of the Suzhou Circuit; Tang Mingshi, the Zhenyi Mobile Corps Commander, was the mobile corps commander of the Suzhou Circuit. The two shared a defense district but had never met before this. Lin Chengdong, meanwhile, was the battalion commander of the Ganzhou Circuit; his superior, Yang Jiamo, was back in Zhangye coordinating all manner of military supplies and planning reserve forces for the front.

With a setup like that, even if these were crack troops, ten-tenths of their capability would probably yield only eight-tenths in coordination — to say nothing of the fact that the vast majority of the soldiers had no combat experience whatsoever.

When word came that Li Hongsi was looking for him, Lin Chengdong was in the middle of receiving a batch of cannons shipped from the various guards of Ganzhou. Two unusable large breech-loading falconets and twelve "rolling-bead" cannons were being replaced with three newly cast "Grand General" cannons and twenty-two small "Barbarian-Slayer" cannons.

Once the old and new cannons had been exchanged, he dispatched trusted aides to escort the civilian labor teams from Ganzhou back with the old pieces. Only then did Lin Chengdong swing into the saddle and ride to the main army camp to find Li Hongsi and the others.

When he reached the main camp and heard the report from the Zhenyi Battalion banner troops, Lin Chengdong did not even pause to consider. He clasped his fists toward Li Hongsi and Tang Mingshi and said, "Grand Commander, General Tang, forgive my bluntness. Though the two armies have not yet clashed head-on, our three-division reconnaissance cavalry have been skirmishing with the enemy's reconnaissance cavalry in the desert for days now. You, Grand Commander, and the General must surely know the specifics of how those engagements have gone."

Lin Chengdong clapped his hands together, then spread them open toward the two men. "Our reconnaissance horses are weak; the enemy's reconnaissance horses are fat and strong. Our reconnaissance troopers eat two meals a day, half a wheat flatbread each time. The enemy reconnaissance troopers carry both parched flour and dried meat on their horses. When tired, they eat sugar; when weary, they drink tea. Even with the three-eyed guns — ours have one-chi barrels, theirs have one-chi-three-cun barrels."

Speaking of this, Lin Chengdong was utterly infuriated. Government horses were inferior to bandit horses, government armor inferior to bandit armor, government rations inferior to bandit rations, and even government soldiers were inferior to bandit soldiers. In a fight, they were at a sure disadvantage. When his reconnaissance trooper shot an enemy rider with an arrow, the enemy rider kept right on going, lively as ever, and even dared to laugh. When an enemy rider galloped in and loosed an arrow, his reconnaissance trooper would be knocked from the saddle.

On average, they had to suffer three times the casualties to kill a single enemy reconnaissance rider. As for capturing one alive, there was no ratio at all anymore. Since the skirmishes began, seventy-six of their riders had been wounded, killed, or captured — and they had taken only a single prisoner alive.

And this one enemy rider — they could not even extract any useful information from him under torture. He had been on the verge of breaking under the beating, said he used to be a government soldier too, and surrendered as soon as they gave him a meal, answering whatever was asked.

Then, for some unfathomable reason, just when he was eating his soaked flatbread quite contentedly and had already let slip a few pieces of intelligence, he suddenly smashed his bowl and slit his own throat when no one was looking.

This had happened two days ago. At first, Lin Chengdong could not make sense of it no matter how hard he puzzled, until yesterday, when he saw a reconnaissance trooper who had distinguished himself burning something outside his tent — a simple little iron stove Lin Chengdong had never seen before, with a small, rolled-rim iron pot heating tea on top.

The little stove was quite simply made: three iron rods, thin at the top and thick at the bottom, and a hollow round iron plate with three holes. You just set it on top and it locked into place. Lin Chengdong found it novel and thought it would be quite handy on the battlefield — just dig a hole and you could set it up. So he asked an extra question.

When he asked where it came from, the answer was: from an enemy reconnaissance squad leader, spoils of war that had not been reported.

Inside the leather horse-rump pouch were dozens of small straw-paper packets, each holding a portion of tea leaves, lumps of brown or white sugar, and salt blocks. Lin Chengdong stared at these for a moment, thought nothing of it, and figured this enemy squad leader had been rather fond of his creature comforts.

Then he saw the twelve tiny, thin iron cups stacked together, and nearly had a stroke.

Damn it all — was this standard-issue Marshal's Headquarters equipment?

A picture had already formed unbidden in his mind: the enemy reconnaissance troopers, after a day of standoffs, each side with something to show for it, happily riding back from their rotation to a spot behind a small sand dune near the front lines. They'd set up their little pot, sit around the fire drinking tea, and stuff parched flour and dried meat into their mouths.

With the supply situation so utterly lopsided, and both sides counting as frontier troops, who was strong and who was weak was already glaringly obvious.

What he did not know was that the captured Marshal's Headquarters reconnaissance trooper had started out as a post-station runner from Yan'an. He had followed Liu Chengzong through six years of campaigning across the northwest without earning any particular merit. This time, captured and tortured first, unable to endure it, he had resolved to surrender.

Yet when mealtime came, what they gave him was a dry flatbread so hard it could brain a man, and the side dish was water — cold water.

Thinking back over the years, even when Grand Commander Liu had been at his most desperate, he had never been fed anything like this. For a moment, a tumult of emotions surged in his heart. He simply could not fathom why they could not give a man a hot drink. Unable to get past it, he had done himself in.

As for Lin Chengdong, he clung to one ironclad conviction: without superiority in reconnaissance cavalry, there was no real intelligence. Therefore, he treated every piece of news coming in from outside as false intelligence. "Everything we detect," he said, "is what that crafty bandit wants us to see."

"In my humble opinion, rather than listening to one-sided reports and seeing omens in every shadow, we'd do better to believe nothing at all, focus solely on holding Gaotai, and do our defensive duty well."

Lin Chengdong spread his hands. "If he comes, he comes; if he goes, he goes. As long as we do not move, they have too few cannons to win in a pitched, open-field battle. At worst, let him circle around to Ganzhou. If he moves, his main reconnaissance cavalry force will have to move with him. Once our reconnaissance cavalry gains the upper hand, it won't be too late to talk about taking the field."

He had said a great deal, but Li Hongsi latched onto a single phrase: "Too few cannons?"

Grand Commander Li thought to himself, you're feeding me nonsense. There were plenty of things about Liu Chengzong he knew nothing about, but cannons — on that subject, Li Hongsi was an expert.

Damn it, those Shaanbei bandit gangs would casually haul out a three-hundred-catty little Western-style cannon at the drop of a hat. What was that cannon called? The Lion Cannon — and Liu Chengzong made them! You're telling me the supreme chief of the northwest's greenwood, a man who started out building cannons, has too few cannons?

Li Hongsi could, right this moment, have his household retainers roll out ten Lion Cannons and shove them in Lin Chengdong's face. Two years ago in Shaanxi, he had captured one. Later, after using it himself and finding it quite satisfactory, he had successively copied it and built twenty more. Over years of campaigning, ten had burst, leaving ten remaining.

Of course, in his hands, it was not called the Lion Cannon. He had given it an imposing name: the Three-Hundred-Catty Junior General of Bandit Suppression.

The earliest Lion Cannon in his possession was a local-made piece from after Shen Yikui had seized Bao'an Camp. At present in Shaanxi, these imitation early-model Lion Cannons were the most common type.

This type of cannon had first been built in Shanxi by Gao Yingxiang and Shi Chengwo. Later, when it came time for delivery, Liu Chengzong was not satisfied. He wanted two-hundred-catty ones, and he told Gao Yingxiang to use two-hundred-catty ones as well.

Gao Yingxiang was someone who could take advice, so he too adopted the two-hundred-catty standard. The three-hundred-catty cannons were later all given away. Many chieftains with less close ties all believed that bigger was better and heavier meant harder-hitting, so the local-made red-barbarian cannons in Shaanxi basically came in just two standards: bronze cannons at three hundred catties, iron cannons at four hundred catties.

With the carriage, that was six or seven hundred catties.

Strangely enough, Liu Chengzong's design primarily considered transport capacity. A two-hundred-catty cannon on its carriage weighed four hundred catties. For draft horses or mules, that counted as heavy labor — on a good road, one mule could pull it; on bad ground, two mules could haul it away.

But at six or seven hundred jin, two mules would already be struggling — and yet, to other roving bandits, this problem simply didn't matter.

Because no one else was like him, daring to lead troops scurrying everywhere in broad daylight. Other roving bandits all hid by day and moved by night, so they used oxen to pull their cannons — just one ox would do.

Oxen are especially afraid of heat and won't walk during the hottest part of the day. The vast majority of roving bandits also feared the light of day, so using oxen to pull cannons suited them perfectly — they just moved a bit slower, that was all.

Shen Yikui was an exception. He didn't fear daylight, but he also didn't fear government troops. He was in no hurry on the march, so using oxen to pull cannons wasn't a problem for him either.

So much so that the three-hundred-jin Lion Cannon was considered especially good by the roving bandits. This remained the case until Lion Cannons were captured by government troops, and only then did veteran commanders realize the cannon's design was somewhat brainless and its role extremely awkward.

A cannon of this size was theoretically meant to do the work of small battle guns like the Spouting Pearl, Crouching Tiger, old Mighty Distant, and old Foe-Slayer — covering ranges of one to two hundred paces against unarmored or armored men. The killing power gained from the extra weight and caliber was completely excessive and meaningless.

Yet large battle guns like the General, Frankish, new Mighty Distant, and new Foe-Slayer all surpassed it in sheer power.

And when it came to bombarding fortifications or mounting city defenses — that was the work of assault guns and defense guns, tasks it couldn't handle either.

Still, despite discovering these flaws, in Li Hongsi's eyes the Bandit-Suppressing Junior General remained an outstanding firearm, thanks to its fine workmanship, solid materials, and sensible design.

As for its drawbacks — for him, they simply didn't exist.

Because his way of using this cannon was different from Liu Chengzong's. The standard method was to fire a three-jin ball, level out to one hundred ninety paces, very durable, with rapid reloading seven or eight times for volley fire.

Li Hongsi used a double charge — loading a solid shot first, then loose lead pellets. Cavalry outflanked, infantry advanced in front. The small battle gun's role was the same as the three-eye gun and bird gun: it was purely an assault cannon.

Across the frontage, a dozen or so cannons in several waves provided cover to support the infantry's advance. Only at close range would they fire once — the pellets sweeping a swath, the solid shot grinding a path. The infantry pushed forward to twenty or thirty paces, where two firing lines of three-eye guns and bird guns would execute volley fire. Basically, one volley and the formation would break into melee.

Cannon duels? They didn't exist. In bandit-suppression campaigns, government troops had no baggage train either — there was simply no way to carry that many cannonballs.

Such experience led Li Hongsi to declare to Lin Chengdong and the others with great pride, "The rebels have few cannons, but their cannons are very good."

Lin Chengdong replied, "Grand Commander, the intelligence I've gathered is that enemy chiliarchs have thousand-jin cannons, and centurions have two-hundred-jin small cannons. Our chiliarchs also have thousand-jin cannons, and squad leaders have hundred-jin cannons. As long as we let them get close, one cannon can't suppress two."

Each of the two had their own intelligence sources and made deductions based on the information they had. Only the Zhenyi Mobile Corps Commander Tang Mingshi had no intelligence sources whatsoever and couldn't get a word in at all, forced to stand to the side and listen.

Tang Mingshi had, however, gotten a rather good grasp of the Marshal's headquarters armaments situation. He finally found one area where their side held the advantage: a rebel centurion squad had only one cannon, while a government centurion squad had two. Although those two cannons were slightly weaker in power, if they let them get close, they could suppress the enemy's cannons.

He committed this to memory.

Just then, a patrol scout came running over in a fluster and reported to Li Hongsi, "Grand Commander, the frontline patrol scouts have signaled — over a thousand enemy cavalry, about fifty li out. They haven't built a camp, but they're digging latrine pits, lots of latrine pits!"

The three commanders understood at once: this intelligence seemed to mean the enemy was preparing a surprise attack.

Large-scale digging of latrine pits, like eating a meal ahead of schedule, was a necessary preparation for launching a surprise attack. The soldiers settled their personal matters first, so they wouldn't be delayed in the coming battle.

Lin Chengdong said, "A feint, a feint. Pay it no mind."

Li Hongsi, however, was not so certain. He frowned and said, "Even if it's a feint, we can't afford not to guard against it. What if they circle around the southern foothills to our rear and cut our supply line? We can leave the north alone for now, but the south we cannot ignore."

Tang Mingshi thought briefly, then said, "Grand Commander, then let me go block them. I'll engage them in that terrain crisscrossed with ditches and draw their cannons in close before striking."

Lin Chengdong immediately felt this was ill-advised, but he had neither command authority over Tang Mingshi nor shared a defense sector with him — and Li Hongsi was, after all, worried about the south. So he could only urge, "General Tang, everything we see is what they want us to see. If you... if you must go, take extra troops. The enemy cavalry may not be merely a thousand-odd."

Li Hongsi also admonished, "General Lin is right. You must take extra troops. If the enemy outnumbers you, withdraw quickly and we'll think of another way."

Tang Mingshi clasped his fists heavily. "Rest assured, Generals — your subordinate knows what he's doing!"