Chapter 481: Two Fronts

At the foot of the Qilian Mountains southwest of the high platform, thousands of warhorses galloped wildly. Over ten cavalrymen, wearing only Marshal's Mansion woolen surcoats over unarmored bodies and carrying long poles, roved back and forth, herding the vast mass of Mongol horses toward the central army encampment.

This was the second day of rest for Liu Chengzong's Tiger Guard Battalion. Under the protection of the scout cavalry defense line and the battalions of Feng Rang and Zhang Tianlin, the soldiers of the Tiger Guard Battalion seemed at ease in the secure atmosphere.

As April approached, the weather was gradually warming. Outside the camp, cavalrymen could be seen chasing and frolicking from time to time. Usually, one rider would be in front, dragging a haystack with a rope to kick up weeds and dust, or perhaps continuously tossing a cloth ball into the air, while the dozen or so riders behind raced each other, using their mounted archery skills to send arrow after arrow at the target.

Although the march of over two thousand li had left the soldiers in ragged and filthy clothes, disheveled and dirty-faced like beggars, in these rare moments of leisure, people still took tireless delight in showing off their skills at a gallop — perhaps shooting from both sides, perhaps hiding beneath the horse's belly in the stirrups.

Actually, just yesterday, people had been using arrows wrapped with cloth bundles to simulate mounted archery combat against each other, but after someone was injured, Liu Shizi put a stop to it.

In adversarial mounted archery training, the distance between the two sides was within ten paces, even five paces. Even if the arrow shafts were wrapped with cloth bundles, without armor, a hit to the body would still break bones when it should.

After all, they were out here marching to war. The soldiers of the Tiger Guard Battalion were all grassroots officers who had earned battle merits, and in the entire battalion, you could not find a single war bow with a draw weight lighter than ninety jin. With that draw weight and distance, even a pellet bow could kill a man if it hit his head.

The pellet bows used in the army were not Y-shaped but bow-shaped, specifically designed to shoot stone pellets or iron pellets — first, for hunting without damaging the fur; second, for stuffing secret messages inside iron pellets and shooting them out to relay information.

With a major enemy ahead, Liu Chengzong's army was camped at the foot of the Qilian Mountains not solely for rest, but because at the westernmost end of the desertified Hexi Corridor, the pastures of Suzhou were far fewer than Liu Shizi had imagined.

The usable land here all cycled between irrigation and abandonment. There were not many pastures available for feeding horses, which created a difficult grazing problem.

The pressure on supplies had not been obvious outside the pass, but once inside Jiayu Pass, the sudden shortage of horse fodder became the top priority demanding Liu Chengzong's attention.

Bean cakes and wheat bran for horses were not rare in Hehuang; they had even brought quite a lot of dried alfalfa blocks. But if these supplies ran out, their more than twenty thousand warhorses would be grounded — not to mention the immense pressure on logistics transport.

After all, the Oirat troops who had earlier served as supply soldiers for the main force had already headed toward Hami, and they could not conscript civilian laborers locally. Suzhou had so few people, there were not even enough to transport supplies.

Warhorses on heavy duty need concentrated feed, but they need more than just concentrated feed. No one can afford to raise warhorses on concentrated feed alone... This problem is like how people need to eat meat, but they cannot eat only meat; they need a balance of meat and vegetables, and they also need to eat grain.

On one hand, it is about comprehensive nutrition; on the other, the cost is also right there.

So Liu Chengzong's countermeasure was to requisition additional local horses, using as many Mongol horses and Tibetan horses in battle as possible.

The Marshal's Army had actually never had enough proper warhorses.

Take this expeditionary force with over twenty thousand warhorses and more than thirty thousand pack mules — the breeds of just the twenty thousand riding warhorses alone were a motley assortment of every kind.

The relatively pure ones included Qinghai Hequ horses, Mobei Mongol horses, Shaanxi Guanzhong horses, Tianshan Yili horses, and Kangning Prefecture Tibetan horses; the impure ones were mixed-breed horses of various unknown origins.

Beyond these, many soldiers' mounts were not horses at all — for example, the leftover troop type from the Lion Battalion days, mule infantry; and the Bactrian camels from Batur Hongtaiji.

Although warhorse breeding on Dragon Colt Island had long since begun, establishing a horse stud was a task requiring long-term investment and extremely high costs.

Starting from building the stud farm, mares gestate for eleven months, foals take three years to mature — if everything proceeds step by step smoothly, it takes at least four years for the first batch of foals to be organized into the army.

The Marshal's Mansion's Dragon Colt Temple was only established in the fifth year of Chongzhen. Now Dragon Colt Island was full of young foals, nowhere near ready to be organized into the army.

In terms of military requirements, according to reports from Dragon Colt Temple and the horse camps, the best all-around warhorse for the Marshal's Army was the Hequ horse, because of its large frame, strong carrying capacity, and good endurance.

The selective breeding direction for gelded warhorses at Dragon Colt Temple was also oriented toward these traits, with no attention paid to speed... On the battlefield, aside from fleeing, there is almost no need to let a horse run flat out.

The situation with Mongol horses and Tianshan horses was different from the Hequ horse. Although Mongol horses are generally small, poor at carrying loads, and their endurance is, comparatively speaking, just so-so, their advantages and disadvantages alike come not from selective breeding, but from their growth environment.

The Mongol grasslands are larger than all of Western Europe. The so-called "Mongol horse" is more like a broad umbrella term, like "village dog." Under that umbrella, the difference between a sighthound and a Pekingese is no smaller than the difference between a sighthound and a corgi.

In other words, the difference between one Mongol horse and another Mongol horse might be greater than the difference between a Mongol horse and a Hequ horse.

The Mongol foals raised at Dragon Colt Temple generally had a shoulder height one to two inches taller than free-ranging Mongol foals of the same age, but by the same token, they had also largely lost the advantage of eating little.

Liu Chengzong was more than familiar with warhorses. He knew perfectly well how much a horse eats. Regardless of breed, regardless of sex, a horse's appetite generally follows one metric: a normal mix of hay and concentrated feed is two to three percent of its body weight; if let out to eat only grass, it needs three to five times that amount.

The Mongol horses raised free-range by steppe nomads generally weigh four to five hundred jin. They can spend two shichen a day with their heads buried in the grass, eating fifty jin of grass. If supplemented with two to three jin of concentrated feed, ten to fifteen jin of grass a day is enough. If it really comes down to it, eating a bit less and losing some weight is not a big problem.

Although their abilities in every area are not particularly great, they can indeed undertake nearly all combat missions.

The Hequ horses selected as warhorses, on the other hand, weigh seven hundred fifty to eight hundred fifty jin. They can also do everything, and they do it very well in terms of carrying capacity and endurance — but with that body weight, a daily ration with five to six jin of concentrated feed means they can polish off twenty jin and still not have enough. On the march or on heavy duty, they shed weight like crazy.

In Hehuang, Heka, Guide, Bajiao City, even Kangning Prefecture, tens of thousands of warhorses could be casually let out to graze and all would eat until their bellies were perfectly round. After they had their fun and came back, supplementing with concentrated feed and some salt bricks would keep them in excellent condition. The soldiers of the Marshal's Mansion could ride the most magnificent warhorses and charge with abandon.

But in places like Suzhou and Gaotai, where desertification was extremely severe, especially since their direction of advance was eastward, it was a different story entirely.

If they were advancing westward, crossing a desert a hundred li across would not matter — if they could not resupply here, they would just resupply somewhere else.

But to the east lay the irrigated fields and crisscrossing canals of the Hei River basin.

At a time like this, the grass-saving advantage of the Mongol horses raised free-range by herders became enormously significant.

Liu Chengzong was outside the camp, following the cavalry in their mounted archery chase. Just as he shot an arrow that nailed a soldier's tossed cloth ball and sent it flying, he heard the guard cavalryman beside him immediately shout: "Grand Marshal, the horses are back!"

Seeing the Mongol horses being driven by the herding soldiers with their long poles at the foot of the mountain, Liu Chengzong, wiping sweat from his forehead, could not help but smile.

Suzhou had not disappointed him. At least requisitioning these warhorses meant that even if the front lines were delayed for a few days in battle, they could still ensure the soldiers pushed the battle line past Shandan.

Once they took the Zhangye oasis, the battle line could be pushed effortlessly past Shandan Guard, straight to the walls of Yongchang Guard at the narrowest point of the Hexi Corridor, facing the Wuwei oasis of Liangzhou Guard from afar.

By then, they would no longer need to worry about horse fodder. The Shandan Army Horse Farm established by Huo Qubing was a true long-established Chinese brand. That place raised seventy thousand horses in the Tang Dynasty, and even now, it remained the most suitable place in all of Gansu for raising army horses.

After all, Gansu's geographical environment, in terms of large-scale horse breeding, had deteriorated to an unprecedented degree during the Chongzhen years... Desert to the west, drought to the east — only this middle stretch could still support large-scale warhorse breeding.

Of course, the main reason Liu Chengzong smiled was that seeing the herds of big heads tossing their bangs as they ran free reminded him of Red Flag.

He had just sent men to take receipt of the warhorses when he saw a trail of dust racing in from the distant west. It was a scout cavalryman from the Suzhou direction coming to report: an envoy had arrived from beyond the pass.

After a few more relays of the message, the small cavalry squad from the west finally arrived, travel-worn and dusty. Liu Chengzong frowned at the man on the lead horse.

Because this man was dressed all in crimson, with a rank badge on his chest and a black gauze hat on his head — he looked very familiar.

Although these were all the hallmarks of a court official of the fourth rank or above, this was not the appearance of a Great Ming court official, because the crimson official robe was cinched with a belly wrap in the military dress style, and the rank badge on the chest was not square but round, like the coiled dragon pattern on cotton armor.

And what he wore on his head was not a black gauze hat, but a trendy item from the Great Tang — the putou.

The iron soft-foot putou this man wore had been personally designed by Liu Chengzong and issued by the Marshal's Mansion as a helmet for high-ranking civil officials, serving as their protection on the battlefield.

It was not entirely original either. Liu Shizi had copied Zhao Gongming from Daoist paintings, except that Zhao Gongming's iron putou had crossed feet, while Liu Chengzong had prepared iron soft-foot putou for his civil officials.

The Tianshan Expeditionary Force had no one but soldiers and generals — how many high-ranking civil officials could there be? Only one man wore this helmet: the Chief of the Qinghai Marshal's Mansion Navy Office, the Master of the Salted Fish Workshop, the Huaiyuan Colonel — Zhou Riqiang.

But Zhou Riqiang should have been heading toward the Tianshan Mountains with the elder brother right now.

Seeing him come running over, Liu Chengzong was completely baffled... Judging by his composed demeanor, it did not look like something had gone wrong with the army in the west.

They had no idea of the surging emotions in Zhou Riqiang's heart. Gazing at Liu Chengzong, who had reined in his horse not far away, Zhou Riqiang quickened his steps one after another. When he was about a dozen paces away, he cupped his hands and bowed early, then stepped forward, clasped his fists, and said loudly: "Grand Marshal, Hami — lost and regained three times by the court, fallen for a hundred years — has returned!"

"So fast?"

Liu Chengzong blurted out without thinking. The recovery of Hami held nowhere near the deep obsession in his heart that it did for Zhou Riqiang. Or rather, to him, the Marshal's Mansion taking control of Hami was a matter of course, nothing to get excited about.

But he truly had not expected his elder brother's advance to be this swift.

Because Liu Chengzong was not entirely ignorant about the Yarkent Khanate.

The year of the southern campaign against Kangning, the Turpan chieftain in eastern Yarkand had already dispatched a tribute mission into Juer Bay. As soon as the Political Advisor Shili arrived, he was detained, and to this day they still haven't let the man go home.

Yarkand is a khanate that is fragmented across oases, feudalized, and tribal.

In that single sentence, there are four terms, and every one of them means lowered political stability.

Fragmented across desert oases means poor communication between cities; feudalized means powerful local strongmen; tribal means low resilience against crises; a khanate means weak centralization of power.

Political Advisor Shili's introduction to Liu Chengzong was that Yarkand has one khan in the west and one khan in the east. Even if their relations haven't reached the point of drawn swords and taut bows, at their most intimate, they are at best like Liu Chengzong and Liu Chengzu.

This kind of relationship cannot last beyond three generations. Under normal circumstances, by the second generation they would already be fighting.

Jiayu Pass is fifteen hundred li from Hami. He calculated the schedule — by all reasoning, his elder brother should not even have reached Hami Garrison yet. How could news of Hami's recovery have already been delivered?

Zhou Riqiang's face was brimming with joy, nearly beyond words.

He nodded repeatedly and said, "Grand Marshal, your subject also did not expect that recovering the Hami Garrison, lost for a hundred years, would be as easy as turning over one's palm."

The moment Zhou Riqiang said this, the expressions of the generals and guards standing beside Liu Chengzong varied. Liu Chengzong had not yet declared himself king, and among his subordinates, none had ever addressed him as a subject. Moreover, this sort of thing was usually done by military men — no one had expected Zhou Riqiang to call himself a subject so naturally.

They were all military men; none of them could understand what Hami meant to Zhou Riqiang, a scholar of the Ming dynasty.

In Zhou Riqiang's life, from as far back as he could remember, the nation's strength had already begun its decline. But in the era when he studied and grew up... the Great Ming was still invincible under heaven. The previous generation had fought and won every war to be fought in all four directions.

Zhou Riqiang was born at the tail end of that mighty era. In the ideology of the scholars of that time, the Great Ming lacked only one proof that it had surpassed the Han and Tang — that proof was the recovery of the ancestral homeland of Yin Prefecture, and that homeland was Hami.

Without it, the Great Unification was not achieved.

Occupying Hami stirred Zhou Riqiang's heart far more than occupying the Tianshan Mountains. This had nothing whatsoever to do with strategy, resources, wealth, or population — it was entirely the sentiment of achieving the Great Unification.

To put it bluntly, if he could accomplish this one thing in his lifetime, even if he only knew on his deathbed that it would be accomplished, Zhou Riqiang would feel it was worth dying on the road.

With such a monumental deed, worthy of shining in the annals of history, accomplished, Zhou Riqiang found it very perplexing that Liu Chengzong was not the least bit stirred.

Liu Chengzong was different. He was born later than Zhou Riqiang. Let alone Hami, he didn't even have much sentiment for the Great Tang's "nine thousand nine hundred li to Anxi." His sentiment lay in Beijing, in Shenyang.

Moreover, in Liu the Lion's view, the fact that Zhou Riqiang was stirred by this only proved that it was indeed mere sentiment, and that he had never considered the matter from a strategic perspective at all.

The Great Ming could not recover Hami, not because Hami was unwilling to submit, nor because the Great Ming did not want Hami, and still less because Hami's separatist forces were particularly strong.

It was because the ones who truly decided the situation in the outer northwest had always been the Mongols, roaming and herding. In the era when Hami broke away, Hami's north was occupied by the Oirats, its south by the Kokonor Mongols, and its west by the Turpan Khanate.

These three brothers were all regional powers. Any one of them could easily pull out over ten thousand riders and beat Hami to a pulp. And Hami was fifteen hundred li from Suzhou. Gansu itself was merely a few oasis outposts along a narrow corridor, relying entirely on a string of forts built along the Heihe River just to hold Gansu. As for Hami, it was completely beyond their reach.

Hami lies on open flatland, with great mountains to the north and flat, open terrain on three sides. Its local forces are few and weak, and it lacks the capacity to supply a large army. It is entirely a case of the monk can run, but the temple cannot.

It would submit for a few years, then take a beating and be occupied. The Ming army would fight back and retake it. A few years later, it would take another beating. The Great Ming's abandonment of Hami — there was simply no better solution.

But for Liu Chengzong, times had changed, and the situation was no longer the same.

Liu Chengzong smiled faintly and gave a soft snort. "Think back — Hami had the Oirats to the north, the Mongols to the south, and Turpan to the west. You could say it was ringed by powerful foes. The court hoped the King of Hami could defend himself, but it was beyond their reach."

"And now, the Oirats are me, the Mongols are me, and Suzhou is also me." Liu Chengzong shook his head. "General Zhou need not be stirred by this. Recovering lost territory is nothing more than what ought to be done. Better to tell me — Hami has fallen, what is Turpan's reaction? Are we about to fight a war on two fronts?"