Chapter 486: Strengthen the Walls and Clear the Wilds

On the banks of the Black River, Gaotai Battalion Fortress.

Yang Jiamo was resolved to defend Gaotai City to the death. His resolve was immense — he would abandon the three hundred thousand mu of irrigated fields and dry farmland along the Black River. His order was to strengthen the walls and clear the wilds: not a single person was to be left for the foolish bandits.

He had the confidence to issue such an order.

Gansu was a military garrison; in wartime, the Regional Commander held immense authority. The troops he led were all Ganzhou native regulars, sharing a common hatred with the residents, which reduced the chance of plunder and mutiny. The Gaotai Battalion Fortress housed a large number of military dependents, who were more organized and obedient than those in the interior. And the Ganzhou army's troop strength outnumbered the civilian population around Gaotai.

All of this made a swift "strengthen the walls and clear the wilds" operation possible.

Yang Jiamo wanted to carry out a proper "strengthen the walls and clear the wilds." His plan was meticulous and comprehensive — notification, persuasion, mobilization, evacuation, demolition, resettlement — but in actual execution, the Marshal's Army did not give him that much time.

From the moment the Gansu high command discussed the plan to the moment orders were issued and troops dispatched in all directions, the vanguard of the Marshal's Army, the Khoshut cavalry, had already thrust into the city outskirts, only thirty li from Gaotai City.

The forward commanders were Brigade Commander Mo Yujing, Assistant Commander Dorji, Assistant Commander Chaotu, and Assistant Commander Wei Qian'er. None of them had initially expected Yang Jiamo to choose to strengthen the walls and clear the wilds in such a short time.

They had therefore planned for a meeting engagement. The entire force was arranged with Dorji's Khoshut cavalry as the vanguard, Taiji Chaotu's seven hundred Chahar cavalry in the center, and Wei Qian'er's unit, which had the most orderly formation, in the rear.

But as soon as the two sides clashed, the dispersed cavalry fought several meeting engagements in the paddy fields and dry farmland against Ming troops carrying out the clearing operation. Every Khoshut squad suffered more defeats than victories.

It made sense. Whether common folk, military dependents, or great families with fortified manors — not only did no one want to abandon their homes and move to Ganzhou in the first place, but the notification alone just told them to leave without the slightest care for method. No one could stomach that.

Besides, the troops who came were local soldiers. They weren't afraid of them. This wasn't their first chaos — the people who had fled from Suzhou all said that the Marshal's Army was also Han troops, that their discipline was quite good, no looting or killing. They were already regretting listening to the officials and fleeing as refugees.

"You want me to become a refugee now? Absolutely not!"

The government troops couldn't even get mobilization started; it was nothing but endless bickering.

Common folk are remarkably bold when it comes to watching excitement; they have no fear of armies that have food. During the Rebellion of the Three Regents, when Yang Jian sent troops to suppress Yuchi Jiong, the civilians watching the battle formed a human wall. The Sui army fired arrows at the watching civilians and used the scattering crowd to break Yuchi Jiong's battle formation.

But the situation at Gaotai was a bit different. The commoners were already quarreling fiercely with the soldiers carrying out the clearing operation, and the local militia were even shoving and pushing, ready to fight the government troops.

Then everyone suddenly saw, in the distance, braided Mongol cavalry raising long sabers and stiff bows, their horses' hooves plunging deep and shallow as they ran across the field ridges.

The Khoshut cavalrymen were already miserable with their horses' hooves sinking into the paddy fields and ridges, but the sight of the commoners and government troops in open discord delighted them.

They were neither Chahar nor Tumed. Since their grandfathers' generation, they had lacked experience raiding the Great Ming. They naively believed those men in padded jackets, with their wives and children, posed no threat — the enemy was only that small number of Ming troops in cloth-faced armor.

But the problem was, in the minds of Gansu men, there was absolutely no concept of "Chahar" or "Khoshut." Seeing their attire, they had only one shared name: "The Tatars are coming!"

The instant the first man let out that cry, something strange buried in the bloodline of the Gansu border folk must have been activated.

The shoving and quarreling stopped. The two groups now shared a common hatred. While shielding their wives and children as they retreated, they grabbed bows, crossbows, waist sabers, flails, and clubs and surged forward, shouting as they went: "Kill the Tatars! Kill the Tatars!"

The spiritual world of Dorji Taiji, the sixth son of the Khoshut Güshi Khan, suffered a tremendous shock. Watching squad after squad of herding cavalry abandon their warhorses and stumble in flight through the paddy fields, he was terrified.

He couldn't understand. He racked his brains — no past grievance, no recent feud. Why had these people suddenly erupted with such immense fighting fervor? Damn it, even Liu Chengzong had never hit me this hard!

He had no idea what his own head meant in the eyes of these people. To the government troops, it was silver in the shape of a head. To the commoners, it was worth a ninth-rank official cap and sash, a mark of honor — and the leverage to keep quarreling with the government troops later.

The frontline clashes were more defeats than victories. Taiji Dorji might have been dazed, but Chahar's Taiji Chaotu was not dazed in the slightest. He understood perfectly. Riding up to Mo Yujing, he said, "Brigade Commander, send General Wei. We Chahars have learned this lesson — Gansu Han men cannot bear the sight of Tatar soldiers."

Mo Yujing followed good advice readily. What was "true knowledge comes from practice"? It meant that on the military issues of the Great Ming's Three Borders of Shaanxi, not only did Shaanxi military officers like them have no final say, but no one south of the Great Wall had any final say. Only Taiji Chaotu had the final say.

He was a genuine survivor who had been hammered in turn by the border troops of three garrisons. Whatever he said, went.

The Mongol brigade quickly pulled back, and Wei Qian'er's Han battalion took over as the vanguard. In the brief interval of this switch, the now-alerted Ganzhou troops, charged with the mission of strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds, immediately turned brutal.

There was no more time for notification, persuasion, or mobilization. The soldiers rounded up the commoners, formed squads, and ran in all directions with torches, seizing everything outside the city — door planks, haystacks, grain, timber, bedding, clothing, livestock — and then set fire to whatever could not be taken, burning it all to ashes.

Soon, dozens of columns of black smoke shot into the sky. Beneath the black smoke were burning fortresses, villages, battalion posts, and vast stretches of orchards.

The black smoke was like beacon fire. It not only informed Ganzhou of Gaotai's defensive measures but was also immediately recognized by Liu Chengzong, who was bringing troops up from the rear.

Liu Chengzong's first thought was not "strengthen the walls and clear the wilds," but that his own Mongol camp was looting... It wasn't his fault for thinking habitually — Mongol cavalry and village black smoke, those two things were naturally complementary!

He called for paper and brush on the spot and, writing furiously on horseback, began a scathing letter berating Mo Yujing for failing to restrain his troops.

Fortunately, the two armies were extremely close. The speed of the first and second relay scouts was nearly the same. Before the letter was even finished, a frontline scout cavalryman arrived to report: "Grand Marshal, the Gaotai defender is strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds. The frontline Khoshut camp's offensive has been repelled."

The sky over the Gaotai Battalion Fortress was filled with black smoke; nearly the entire land seemed to be burning. The scene cast a shadow over the hearts of the central army camp's commanders.

Strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds had been an extremely effective means of defensive warfare since ancient times, because in war, the army controls the land. An army protected by city walls can stand in an invincible position, and for a besieging army, the key to capturing the city lies outside its walls.

To put it plainly, a siege requires three necessities: people, materials, and grain.

People are the foundation — not just the army, but also the civilian laborers transporting supplies, and the agents for internal collaboration. Materials are timber, stone, craftsmen, copper, and iron — everything needed to build siege equipment. Grain is simpler: food and wealth.

The Ming army and the Later Jin had fought for so many years on the Liaodong battlefield. Many frontline military forts had been breached, but cities fell in only three ways: first, internal betrayal; second, siege starvation; third, the defending commander's surrender.

Because although gunpowder weapons had made great advances in this era and changed the shape of warfare to some extent, reducing the casualty ratio for both attackers and defenders during the siege phase, siege methods still had not undergone a qualitative change.

When both sides were regular armies, the attacker could not rely on simple field cannons and long ladders to achieve victory. Building siege equipment was still a necessary preparation for a siege.

No one could march while carrying massive siege engines.

Therefore, a well-executed, orderly "strengthen the walls and clear the wilds" operation focused on removal, not destruction. The goal was to transport away the grain, materials, and people within the area, minimizing the defender's losses to the greatest extent while increasing the besieging army's difficulties — stalling them, forcing a retreat, or even causing them to lose morale in helplessness, until they were ultimately defeated in a counterattack.

Liu Chengzong said nothing. He crumpled the nearly finished letter into a ball in his hand and tore it to shreds. Looking around at the frustrated expressions of the central army camp commanders, his own brow furrowed.

The atmosphere in the marching column was oppressive. He knew very well that this was a heavy blow to many commanders, not because of the consequences of the clearing operation itself, but because of the origins of the central army camp's officers.

The Tiger Guard Camp was all officers, and the Marshal's Office's war experience determined that these men had very simple origins. There were not many border soldiers from the three garrisons of Guyuan, Lintao, and Gansu; they were all northern Shaanxi peasant rebels and border troops from Yulin and Ningxia.

In the marching column, the officers closer to Liu Chengzong more or less shared a common experience... They had once led commoners in Yanchang, Yanchuan, and other places in Yan'an Prefecture to resist taxes and evade government troops. That, too, had been strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds.

Now, they had become the very people that commoners would burn their own houses to flee from. It was a bitter feeling.

A blow to morale was naturally a bad thing, but Liu Chengzong felt it need not be so.

He summoned Yang Yao, Han Shipan, Han Shiyou, and other officers still in the central army and discussed with them: "Gentlemen, there is no need to be disheartened by this. We have done the 'strengthen the walls and clear the wilds' thing ourselves before. Gaotai cannot possibly relocate its civilians by gentle means in a short time. Since Yang Jiamo is using this method to hold out, the disadvantage for us already exists. Now we can only step beyond the Gaotai battlefield, set our sights on the whole of Gansu, and minimize our losses."

"Therefore, I intend to issue orders. Mo Yujing is to immediately lead his troops to advance on Gaotai, to prevent the government troops from moving civilians and supplies into the city. Wei Qian'er's unit is to immediately sweep the outskirts. For civilians already mobilized for relocation by the government troops, we must contend for them, promising that once the siege of Gaotai begins, we will grant them land and establish their homes. For civilians not yet mobilized, we will issue proclamations to reassure the people, forbidding killing, looting, plunder, and theft, and order them to continue farming as usual."

"Even for the civilians already relocated to Ganzhou by the government troops, we must let them know that the Marshal's Army's arrival brings them no harm."

After saying this, Liu Chengzong shook his head and added, "Gaotai has only three or four thousand people. Strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds here just means we'll build our siege equipment a bit slower. But if the Ganzhou guards, with their tens of thousands of people, do the same, we can forget about marching east."

The assembled commanders had no objections. Under the waving signal flags, the orders were quickly relayed to the front line. Mo Yujing and Wei Qian'er split their forces into two routes. For a moment, troops and horses surged forth across Gaotai's paddy fields and dry farmland, and arrows flew everywhere among the crisscrossing water networks and irrigation ditches.

In every village and every field, squads flying the same military banners clashed back and forth. Fleeing civilians scattered in all directions. In an instant, the entire Gaotai Battalion Fortress was plunged into unprecedented chaos.

From Gaotai Battalion City, everything was visible. Watching the Mongol horse troops in the distance ignore the outskirts and head straight for Gaotai City, Yang Jiamo slammed his fist heavily onto the battlements in fury.

Just by seeing the Marshal's Army's deployment, he knew he had ultimately been a step too slow. The plan to strengthen the walls and clear the wilds had been ruined by Liu Chengzong.

Beyond fury, he felt more frustration with himself. He had only seen the shared hatred of the two Ganzhou battalions during recruitment and assembly, but had not anticipated their nervousness when the plan was suddenly disrupted... This army, composed almost entirely of new recruits, was insufficient to handle the heavy task of strengthening the walls and clearing the wilds in close-quarters combat.

This tactic itself was a double-edged sword in execution; it simply depended on whose hand held the sword. Whoever handled it well, the sword would cut the other side.

Therefore, there was absolutely no room for haste. Long before issuing the order, he had warned Wang Xingshan and the officers: since they had decided on a scorched-earth policy, expecting the common people to suffer no loss whatsoever was wishful thinking. But the common people were all loyal and brave subjects of the Great Ming. As long as they persuaded the military households, made proper arrangements for relocation and resettlement, and expressed gratitude for the sacrifices people made to resist the Foolish Bandits, no man loyal to the throne and devoted to the nation could bear to see his homeland fall.

Yet now, with the Marshal's Mansion army charging and intimidating them, the troops sent out to carry out the mission panicked. Once they panicked, they grew hasty; once hasty, they started burning — and that was how the whole thing went wrong.

More critically, those Mongol cavalrymen racing toward Gaotai City immediately brought immense pressure upon Yang Jiamo. Scorched earth meant moving supplies and people into the city — but if the city was blocked off, where were those people supposed to run?

And it was in that very instant that Yang Jiamo realized a massive cognitive blind spot shared by all of them — though he was a Regional Commander, in terms of war experience, he might not actually surpass Liu Chengzong.

For five whole years, a commander like Liu Chengzong, who time and again served as the chief general planning campaigns, marching east and striking west with not a single month free of battle — the Great Ming simply had none. On the contrary, the roving bandits had a few ringleaders in similar circumstances, but even they lacked Liu Chengzong's seniority.

Not only did the Great Ming have none, the Mongols had none, and even the Later Jin had none. Right now, the Later Jin's seesaw struggle with the Ming army in Liaodong saw intervals between campaigns measured in years.

Looking back fifty years, only one man had such experience — Nurhaci, who spent five years conquering the five tribes of Jianzhou.

The columns of black smoke charging toward the sky made Yang Jiamo suddenly see impeachment charges swirling in droves toward Beijing; the Mongol cavalry charging at the city walls made him see the tragic sight of a scorched-earth policy turned against its own side.

If these were the shocks dealt to Yang Jiamo by the Marshal's army attacking Gaotai, then for Vice Regional Commander Wang Xingshan, still out in the field, it was sheer terror.

Wang Xingshan could not ascertain the exact purpose of the Mongol cavalry charging toward Gaotai, but he could grasp that if he delayed any longer, Gaotai might not necessarily fall, but the battalion he led would certainly be divided, encircled, and annihilated.

Horn calls rose and fell across the Gaotai countryside. The scattered Ganzhou Army units, at this point in no position to worry about scorched earth, all converged on Wang Xingshan's location. Wei Qian'er was perfectly happy to let them — he simply focused on gathering the common people and collecting supplies, paying them no mind at all.

By the time Liu Chengzong led his army to the outskirts of Gaotai, Wang Xingshan had already withdrawn with nearly four thousand infantry and cavalry to three li south of the Battalion Commander's city, arraying a dense, imposing camp formation with fluttering banners at the edge of the boundless farmland.

The two sides were five li apart. Liu Chengzong, holding a telescope, rode his horse along the field ridges, circling until he had seen through their formation completely. Raising his whip, he laughed: "Forming ranks with their backs to the city — interesting!"

Good morning! My wife and kid both tested positive; I'll probably be next soon.

(End of chapter)