Chapter 484: The Cuckoo in the Nest

Zhou Riqiang left, and he left thoroughly satisfied.

Liu Chengzong's blade of war swept straight east, reaching the Gaotai oasis, and a tedious siege against the wagon fort began.

Gansu Deputy Regional Commander Li Hongsi's tactics were not complicated. He was an old veteran — aside from never having fought in Gansu, his military experience was impeccable. The moment he saw Tang Mingshi's plea for help, he knew he had made a mistake: he should never have permitted Tang Mingshi to go out and fight.

But the mistake was already made. All Li Hongsi could do was remedy it. With Tang Tong impossible to defeat quickly and Gao Yingdeng still on the flank, he had to find a way to pull Tang Mingshi out.

Yet that would make the whole affair seem too much of a loss. It happened that Gansu Regional Commander Yang Jiamo was leading troops over from Ganzhou, so Li Hongsi decided to go for something big. Regardless of whether Gao Yingdeng had reinforcements behind him, he would prepare as if there were. He would use one wagon fort to block them, while Gaotai threw its entire force south to swallow Gao Yingdeng swiftly.

The wagon fort commander he dispatched was Ganzhou Route Mobile Corps Commander Lin Chengdong, a military juren from Xi'an Prefecture. He was likewise richly experienced, having led a wagon fort in the campaigns against the Chahar.

In Li Hongsi's design, Lin Chengdong's mission was the absolute key to whether the plan could succeed. Lin Chengdong himself understood this perfectly well: his wagon fort was being sent out to bear the brunt of the battle line.

The core military thinking behind a wagon fort was to defend first and fight later — first place oneself in an invincible position, then watch for the right moment to act.

Even though Gansu's wagon forts could not match those of Liaodong in materiel — a full-strength Liaodong wagon fort had close to seven thousand men, while Lin Chengdong's had only four thousand — the ratio of provisions was the same. Both were prepared for forty days cut off from supply lines.

A wagon fort, after all, was merely a type of equipment. The foundation of the army was still infantry and cavalry, and its mobility was relatively poor. It was very expensive in cost, but that was because the large number of wagons brought extraordinary transport capacity, allowing them, at equal troop strength, to carry large quantities of cannon, rockets, and provisions.

Lin Chengdong could not say he was brimming with confidence about this operation, but neither was he afraid.

After the initial defeat, their understanding of the Marshal's Army had been updated. A shortage of heavy cannon remained a weakness, but they were very strong in constructing field fortifications and in light firearms.

Lin Chengdong's operational objective was to tie down the Marshal's Army and create the opportunity for the main force to annihilate Gao Yingdeng's division.

Thus there was little worth describing about how the two armies met. Both sides' responses were entirely conventional, formulaic maneuvers.

Lin Chengdong's wagon fort, while on the march, received reports from its scout cavalry that two horse battalions of the Marshal's Army were sweeping in from the west. He halted immediately, sent the camp's cavalry forward to buy time, and had the wagon fort deploy on the spot, digging trenches and laying out artillery positions.

Four battalions under Liu Chengzong's command were advancing. The first to engage the wagon fort was Zhang Tianlin's cavalry, and the two sides clashed briefly.

Zhang Tianlin had run the fastest because his mission was to relieve Gao Yingdeng. Two li from the wagon fort, he reined in his horse to look, realized this wagon fort was not his objective, and immediately led his troops away, switching out for Feng Rang's and Wei Qian'er's battalions behind him to take over the engagement.

Once Lin Chengdong's wagon fort had set its formation, it immediately opened fire with cannon on the Marshal's Army troops entering within one li of the fort, covering the cavalry's return to camp. Wei Qian'er and Feng Rang decided to return fire with their own cannon and attempted to close in and break the formation. When that failed, they switched tactics and began digging trenches and building walls on the spot to besiege it.

Lin Chengdong was perfectly happy to see this. With the enemy building walls, his wagon fort would be safe in the short term, and he could also achieve the strategic objective of tying down the enemy's main force. All he had to do was wait for the main army behind him to assemble.

Li Hongsi's concept was excellent. His army would screen off the battlefields to the west and south, and Gaotai, with its extensive fortifications, could safely wait for Yang Jiamo to move in.

He overlooked only one small problem: Liu Chengzong's decoy force was not just Gao Yingdeng's single division — it was two divisions, Gao Yingdeng's and Mo Yujing's.

At that moment on the battlefield, Mo Yujing was leading his army in a southward movement.

Mo Yujing had originally been the Mobile Corps Commander of Lutang Battalion. Because of the pacification campaigns in Shaanxi, he had been promoted to Gansu's Xining Deputy Regional Commander. His soldiers were deeply war-weary. Transferred into Hehuang just as a peasant uprising erupted there, and then with the Marshal's headquarters launching its offensive, he had no soldiers and no officers under him — just a bunch of tusi whose power the Great Ming had already weakened. He did not hold out until the great Hehuang battle began before surrendering.

After surrendering, Mo Yujing did the bare minimum at the Marshal's headquarters. He neither went to lecture the academy's officers, nor did he meddle in the military affairs of the Tiger Guard Battalion. But beyond that, he had no other options either, because Mo Yujing's situation was rather similar to Wang Cheng'en's — they were both Xining men.

Once the dust settled after the great Hehuang battle, the whole of Hehuang became the Marshal's headquarters' territory. They were both from generations of meritorious official families, and they could not bring themselves to work cleanly and efficiently for Liu Chengzong. Yet to rise in revolt — the Marshal's headquarters' policies in Hehuang were too popular. So they could only ease their own awkwardness through passive cooperation.

Later, Mo Yujing landed the post of Garrison Herding Brigade Commander, and from then on he truly let himself go. He simply squatted in Delingha, leading the Chahar and Khoshut battalions in herding horses and grazing sheep, and stayed completely out of the Marshal's headquarters' central affairs.

However, although Mo Yujing stayed out of the Marshal's headquarters' central affairs, he handled both military and civil administration in the Gobi single-handedly, and did it rather well.

He built a brigade commander's yamen in Delingha, and from that yamen as the center, he administered the grazing lands and farmlands of the two battalions. Cooperating with several tusi, he recruited tribes and pacified the barbarians, built roads and bridges, opened fields and dug canals, and mined and set up salt works across the region between Delingha, Golmud, Dulan Mountain, and Ulan Mountain. He did it all with impressive energy and success.

This suited Liu the Lion's intentions perfectly anyway. He had put Mo Yujing in charge of the Central Garrison Farming Brigade as its brigade commander without ever expecting him to do much. The main point was mutual restraint.

Mo Yujing controlled the Mongols — if the Mongols wanted to rebel, Mo Yujing was there. If Mo Yujing wanted to rebel, the Mongols were there. The two sides' fundamental interests in rebellion were completely different, so neither could ever rebel.

Mo Yujing had not even been supposed to take part in this expedition. It was Chahar Battalion Mobile Corps Commander Shaktu Taiji and Khoshut Battalion Mobile Corps Commander Dorji Taiji who, having completed their studies at the New City Academy, wanted to send troops, and so they brought their brigade commander Mo Yujing along.

It was called a brigade, but in reality it had just over four thousand men, ninety percent of whom were Khoshut and Chahar. It was basically a reinforced Mongol battalion.

By this point, Mo Yujing was the person who most wanted the Marshal's headquarters to win, because this expedition had severely depleted the Mongol battalions from Golmud to Ulan Mountain. If they could not win, everything he had done before would be nearly reduced to zero.

The Marshal's headquarters' Khoshut Battalion was an elite force selected from the Oirat army that had invaded south, but its very composition meant it was not a tribe — it was the herding soldiers and combat soldiers of the Tianshan Khoshut tribe.

All six Mongol battalions under the Marshal's headquarters were like this. Even though every man rode a horse, the lack of a logistical population meant that a portion of these cavalrymen had to spend part of each day walking horses, brushing horses, watering horses, and tending to horses.

Put nicely, they were a nation in arms, but in reality the price of sending everyone to war was that production ground to a halt. No one herded sheep, no one grazed horses, and certainly no one farmed the land.

At first, Mo Yujing's orders were to seize the upper reaches of the Heihe River and build a dam. Later, he received Liu Chengzong's order to lead his army south and attack Gaotai.

Leading an army like this to carry out an assault on Ming fortifications was a rather nerve-wracking affair.

But Mo Yujing, who had expected a bitter fight, arrived at Gaotai travel-worn and dusty, only to find a scene that made his eyebrows lift with delight — hey, no one was there!

Never mind that Liu Chengzong's main force had not arrived; there was hardly anyone in the Gaotai Battalion fortress either, and the Camel City defensive works were even more deserted. All that remained were the crisscrossing trenches of camps and bastions. The Khoshut Battalion's cavalry charged around wildly but never encountered a proper enemy.

Of course, Mo Yujing did see small groups of Ming troops — they were on the Great Wall's border forts and beacon towers along the Heihe River line, from Baba Fort to Siba Fort. Inside each fort were scattered handfuls of garrison troops, a few dozen at most, endlessly firing beacon cannons.

But Mo Yujing did not care. Once the beacon cannons had sounded, he had already been discovered; a few more booms made no difference.

He paid no attention whatsoever to those beacon forts whose garrisons had been withdrawn. He plunged straight into the Gaotai Battalion fortress and did three things that very day. First, he informed Liu Chengzong that Gaotai had been captured. Then he immediately withdrew from Gaotai and led his troops straight to the defensive positions Li Hongsi had built at Camel City. Finally, he ordered those defensive positions to be remodeled.

Mo Yujing was perfectly aware that with his reinforced Mongol battalion, which did not even have a few cannon to its name, they could manage hit-and-run raids on horseback, but trying to hold the Gaotai Battalion fortress in a positional battle was sheer wishful thinking.

So he merely had Shaktu Taiji plant a flag at Gaotai, then turned around and had his men clear out the junk the Ming army had left behind and came out. Gunpowder, winter clothing, horse fodder, tools, even iron pots inside the town — they swept it all away and planted themselves squarely inside the carefully constructed defensive positions Li Hongsi had built outside Camel City.

Li Hongsi's positions were fine, but they did not suit Mo Yujing.

The Ming army position had the camp on the inside, a low wall in the middle, and two lines of trenches on the outside, along with a row of chevaux-de-frise and caltrops. For the Ming army, it was suitable and solid.

Both trench lines were lined with large barbs, leaving only a few gaps for men to stand. These gaps were not for soldiers to hold the trench as a defensive position, but to serve as observation posts for the artillery.

There was a reason the Ming army often called cannon "guns" — it was because they used cannon exactly like guns. Sometimes they even fielded more cannon than guns. Load powder, ram a ball, aim in rows, fire — they were guns indeed.

The only difference was that cannon could not be fired from inside a trench, so this kind of trench position would appear: a few men in a trench shelter observing the enemy and directing the cannon batteries' aim.

Mo Yujing had no cannon. He was himself a Ming army officer and was very familiar with Ming tactics.

Throughout the Marshal's headquarters, there was an attitude that Mongol troops were weak and Han troops were strong, but in his eyes, that was not how it was. When it came down to it, how much real difference was there between one man and another? Men could not be separated from their environment, just as tactics could not be separated from weapons and equipment.

This trench defense method was meaningless for his Mongol soldiers. Even if they hid in the camp, once the Ming army attacked, they would be pinned down and slaughtered by cannonballs — because they had no cannon.

So he had his men pull out all the wooden spikes in the inner trench and plant them directly in the flat ground between the two trench lines. He picked nearly half of his unarmored soldiers and had them get down into the trenches to serve as shelters and shoot arrows.

In truth, the most bewildered man on the battlefield had to be Gansu Regional Commander Yang Jiamo, leading the newly recruited Ganzhou army to the east. He kept wondering: why were those beacon cannons still firing?

Actually, by this stage of the battle, beacon cannons and signal fires as a method of transmitting military intelligence had already become meaningless.

It was an early warning system. If it kept sounding endlessly, the rear could not distinguish any intelligence either. Yang Jiamo only knew that some enemy force must be stationed somewhere, but exactly where it was stationed, no one knew. His marching speed therefore became extremely slow, terrified that someone might ambush his army.

In truth, the soldiers of these two newly recruited Ganzhou battalions all came from the five guards of Ganzhou. Although besides the banner troops there were also able-bodied young men from all trades, it was very hard to find idle hands in Gansu who had nothing to do with the military.

After all, this was not a province — it was a military district.

But for Yang Jiamo, this was both a good thing and a bad thing. The good part, naturally, was that recruiting in Gansu was very simple. Every able-bodied young man without physical defects, to a man, possessed a certain level of basic military knowledge and was fine soldier material.

The downside was that Yang Jiamo had to ensure as many of them survived as possible.

As the saying goes, "poor scholars, rich warriors" — martial training costs money, but the expense isn't in the obvious things like food and drink. During the Wanli reign, a hired laborer's income was already enough to support a martial youth eating a chicken every three days, or half a jin of beef every day — barely four qian of silver a month.

The real expense of "poor scholars, rich warriors" lies in the fact that the youth must leave productive work behind, training in the dog days of summer and the bitter cold of winter, practicing a skill he might use only a handful of times in his entire life.

In peaceful years like the Wanli era, with only one or two border skirmishes annually, training such a skill placed far too much pressure on a commoner household... mainly because it was useless.

In normal times, plenty of men spent their whole lives as soldiers without ever seeing a battle.

Ultimately, the path of advancement through martial arts was extremely narrow in ordinary times. The civil path was different — even if you couldn't become an official, you could still pursue other professions, earn a decent income and social standing, making it a fine tool for making a living, whereas martial skill was more like a hobby.

For ordinary people, making a living is practical; a hobby is a luxury.

These young soldiers, no matter how close they had been to the battlefield before, were not yet true soldiers. They would ultimately need to fight one or two battles before they could become more like warriors.

What Yang Jiamo feared most right now was an enemy force ambushing them midway, trampling their faces under hoof and scaring the men out of their wits on the spot, sending them fleeing into the desert to become bandits.

Yang Jiamo had no veterans at hand — the Supreme Commander's Guard Battalion was at the Zhuanglang River. He hadn't planned to use these two battalions as his main force anyway, only as reserves, yet trouble struck at precisely this critical moment — Gaotai Thousand-Household Post, how did a Tatar lance end up planted there?

His confusion did not last long. Soon soldiers ascended the deserted Gaotai Thousand-Household Post and took down the Chahar black banner that Shaktu Taiji had planted on the wall. Afterward, reports from the various scout riders reached Yang Jiamo's ears.

The entire battlefield was like a footrace.

Tang Mingshi had linked up with Li Hongsi, and the two of them were chasing Gao Yingdeng in a headlong dash eastward. Behind them, Zhang Tianlin pursued relentlessly like a madman. At Camel City, four thousand Tatars had seized the defensive fortifications, and a wagon battalion full of big, burly men was surrounded in the middle of the battlefield.

Yang Jiamo quickly recognized the danger — and not simply because his plan to keep the Marshal's Manor rebel army west of Zhangye had suffered a colossal failure and completely collapsed.

The crux was that Gansu's government troops had already been pulled completely out of shape in the initial clash, with east and west disconnected, while the enemy's main force had yet to appear on the battlefield.

Standing atop the wall of Gaotai Thousand-Household Post, Yang Jiamo heard Vice Supreme Commander Wang Xingshan, temporarily commanding the Ganzhou Newly-Recruited Left Battalion, ask: "Commander, do we rescue General Lin or not?"

Rescue Lin Chengdong or not?

Truth be told, Yang Jiamo wanted to rescue him — even setting aside the matter of a subordinate, even setting aside four thousand troops, a single wagon battalion could serve as a battlefield anchor in the coming decisive battle.

But he still slowly shook his head. "The wagon battalion can hold out. Watch him first."

The "him" Yang Jiamo meant was Liu Chengzong. "See whether he rescues those two battalions to the east."