Chapter 542: Western Route Relief Army

Leaden clouds pressed down over the sky. Inside Yingzhou territory in Datong Garrison, a village was burning.

A huge wooden rack had been piled beside the well. Corpse after corpse, stripped stark naked and wrapped in reed mats, were laid out in neat rows inside the rack, to be cremated on the spot.

On the southern mountain stood a Cihang Temple, its gate bristling with the banners of the Eight Banners. The weather had turned cold. Huang Taiji, draped in a capacious fur robe offered in tribute by the Haracin tribe, looked down at the burning village below. His broad face was full of helplessness, a gloom he could not shake congealing between his brows — what was burning down the mountain were not the corpses of villagers, but the war dead of the Two Yellow Banners and the Two White Banners.

When the army had set out from Shenyang, he could never have imagined the campaign would turn out this wretched, or that this war would be so utterly different from what he had envisioned.

In truth, this incursion through the border wall from beyond Xuanfu had gone extremely smoothly for the Later Jin army, militarily speaking.

The Eight Banners were a mighty force forged through countless battles amid the white mountains and black waters; their combat strength was beyond question. More importantly, their string of victories and the submission of the Mongols had given the army an overbearing mentality — whatever opponent appeared before them, with whatever equipment and whatever martial power, they would dare to draw their blades and have a go.

The campaign situation was indeed so smooth it was almost absurd. Since the rivers swelled in summer, Huang Taiji had led his troops toward Xuan–Da, once again asserting Later Jin suzerainty over the Haracin tribe beyond the border. In the seventh month they breached the wall and entered Datong through Desheng Fort, while Ajige and Dorgon entered Xuanfu through Longmen.

Afterwards, Huang Taiji, along with Abatai, Hooge, Kong Youde, and Geng Zhongming, also led troops from Xuanfu to Shuozhou. The three columns ultimately converged at Yingzhou and laid siege to Yingzhou city.

In under two months — very smooth.

Yet the problem that vexed Huang Taiji, that even made him feel wretched, lay precisely here. When he had set out from Shenyang this time, he had only two strategic objectives.

He had not come to Xuanfu to seize cities and territory. It was because his home base, Shenyang, had suffered a flood — this was armed famine migration, aimed at devouring the Southern Desert Mongols to let Manchuria catch its breath.

As for the second, it was to use that breathing room to cement Jin's dominion over the Southern Desert, turning all those former allies into vassals.

In Huang Taiji's conception when he marched, he was going west to fight a major war, to wipe out every last Southern Desert Mongol tribal noble who refused to submit in one breath. And obviously, dealing with Mongols on the Southern Desert steppe did not require Hongyi cannons.

So, of the fifty newly cast Hongyi cannons in Shenyang, Huang Taiji had only brought two along for show, and not much cannon shot either. After all, these two gentlemen were only meant to intimidate those Mongol nobles, skittish as startled birds — odds were they would never need to fire.

The entire army had only the Tianyou and Tianzhu Han troops under Geng the Second and Shang the Fourth, who carried some light cannon specifically for hitting Mongol soldiers.

But this world — it always finds a way to surprise you. The Mongol tribes of the Southern Desert steppe did not merely surrender at the mere rumor of his approach; they damn near came racing to him with provisions in tow.

No — sorry — no provisions, just racing to him.

Huang Taiji was practically on the verge of tears. He had trekked a thousand li to the Southern Desert, only to find the Mongols there even poorer and more wretched than the flood-stricken Later Jin.

The Khorchin grasslands were suffering drought, cattle, sheep, and horses all dropping dead. The rivers of the Xilin Gol grasslands had run dry. The Ulanqab grasslands were baked into salt-alkali flats — you could boil salt from the little lakes. Only the Fengzhou flats of the Tumed tribe, hugging the Yellow River, had halfway decent soil moisture.

But that area had just been hit by a locust plague — the Great Wall, after all, was not built to stop locusts; it could not keep that thing out.

Huang Taiji, Geng the Second, and Shang the Fourth had led thirty to forty thousand Manchu and Han vagabonds on a grueling trek all the way from Shenyang to Zhangbei, bearing down fiercely on the Mongol tribes that refused to submit — the Haracin, who kept flip-flopping, the Tumed, who submitted in name but not in spirit. They were going to fight a great battle and wipe them out!

Who could have imagined that the nobles of these tribes, upon seeing him, would act like drowning men clutching at straws, clinging to him with a death grip and refusing to let go? One after another they cried out and shouted their loyalty: Who the hell among us isn't a Manchu already — Great Khan, we're starving!

And just like that, Huang Taiji now nominally had a hundred and twenty thousand vagabonds with no food or clothing on his hands.

So what was he supposed to do?

Forced by circumstances, Huang Taiji had to change his pre-departure strategic objective. Of the hundred and twenty thousand vagabonds around him, fewer than forty thousand were reliable hands, and all of them were howling with hunger. He had to plunder the Great Ming to strengthen Jin's dominion over the Southern Desert, and to ensure that this Manchu–Han allied army could make it safely back to Shenyang surrounded by starving Mongols.

In a certain sense, the Han soldiers were more reliable than the Manchu soldiers, because at this very moment, only the Two Yellow Banners and the Bordered Blue Banner counted as Huang Taiji's own trusted troops. The Han soldiers were different — every last one of those Han soldiers had a wife, all issued by Huang Taiji.

Yet his army seemed invincible wherever it went. By all rights the campaign should have been going smoothly, but in reality it was the exact opposite — they could barely move.

Not a single one of the forts and castles behind them had surrendered cleanly at the mere rumor of their approach. Many of those forts, in fact, were visibly crumbling, their walls low and long unrepaired, no grain inside and no troops on the walls — yet they stubbornly could not be taken.

Ildei of the Plain Yellow Banner was a fierce man, a clan nephew of Yangguri. He had ridden as vanguard for Huang Taiji many times and earned considerable merit. In the fourth year of Chongzhen, besieging Dalinghe, the garrison sallied out and Ildei led a charge that drove the sortie force right back into the moat. A general under Zu Dashou came galloping with drawn bow to strike Huang Taiji's camp, and Ildei charged out and cut him down from his horse.

This time in Xuanfu, Ildei again served as vanguard. Together with Xingne, he had taken one armored man from each niru — fewer than three hundred armored soldiers in all — plus over six hundred banner slaves. After breaching the border wall, they drove forward as the vanguard, extremely fierce.

As it turned out, the Xuanfu Ming troops were fierce as well. At the sight of the beacon fires, Kong Dengke, the Central-Column Brigade Colonel who had been drilling troops near Longmen Station, threw his soldiers straight at them, buying time for the tens of thousands of commoners in the countryside to flee into Longmen Station.

The Central-Column Brigade had another name: the Standard Brigade. This name came from the Zuo Commentary, Twelfth Year of Duke Xuan, referring to how Chu divided its army into five corps when marching: right chariots, left foragers, vanguard, central column, and rearguard.

The grass-cutting supply troops were the left corps; the war chariots were the right corps; the vanguard corps carried yak-tail banners to open the road; the central corps weighed strategy; the rearguard corps used elite troops to cover the retreat.

Kong Dengke's Central-Column Brigade had been established from the start to forge a blade for defending against enemies who breached the wall. His entire brigade was made up of Xuanfu's sharpest soldiers. They moved at the signal of the beacon fires, and the moment they spotted Ildei's troops they charged straight in and attacked.

He was the central column; Ildei was only the vanguard. Kong Dengke knew this. Beacon fires and beacon cannons — an enemy force exceeding ten thousand meant five fires and five cannon shots.

But what Kong Dengke did not know was that behind Ildei came the main force of the Two White Banners, led by Ajige, Dorgon, and Dodo. Twenty thousand troops arrived on the battlefield in succession and joined the assault on Xuanfu's Central-Column Brigade.

The outcome of this battle could hardly be called satisfactory for either side. Ajige, with his numerical advantage, did not win. Kong Dengke fought a field battle, and seeing he was hopelessly outnumbered, withdrew into Longmen Station. The main army then attacked the city and still failed to take it.

Though Kong Dengke did not lose, he had endured a bloody battle and suffered enormous losses. His Standard Brigade had three thousand men in total. In a single battle, two Squad Commanders were killed in action, over eight hundred soldiers died, more than four hundred were gravely wounded, and over four hundred mules and horses were lost.

Xuanfu's most powerful brigade, the Central-Column Brigade, was nearly cut in half, in exchange for a result of just over a thousand Later Jin dead. Most critically — the heads. Because he could not control the battlefield, the Later Jin banner slaves and camp servants cremated every last corpse on the spot.

After an entire battle, all they had to show for it were three heads taken by household retainers in the skirmishing before the battle began.

Why could they not take Longmen Station? Precisely because when Huang Taiji set out, he had never intended to knock down forts on the Xuan–Da defense line. He had brought no cannon. The only siege equipment he had were iron hook poles for pulling down wooden palisades and the light field cannon of the Tianyou and Tianzhu Han troops. How was he supposed to assault a city?

Of course, using cold weapons to assault a city was not impossible — it just meant heavier casualties and a bit of time needed to throw together siege equipment. But with time, would the Ming troops not close in and encircle them? Even if their numbers were so great they did not fear Ming encirclement, there was another critical problem: Huang Taiji was in a desperate hurry.

The Later Jin army had formidable organizational ability. What was more, once they crossed from the white mountains and black waters into the interior, everywhere they looked they saw stretch after stretch of fine farmland. Seeing that stuff was like staking out land on horseback — it made them want to build fortunes, want to get rich, want to plunder the hell out of everything. This further boosted their combat strength.

Most crucially, the Manchus were afraid of dying. To avoid death, they would fight to the death. Fight this battle and die on the battlefield — that was dying today. Refuse to fight this battle, and the whole clan would not live through this winter.

Huang Taiji was the same. He assaulted cities for grain and livestock. Once the beacon fires were lit, the nearby commoners all fled into the cities. Only by taking a city could he get grain.

But as time went on, every commoner in the entire Xuan–Da region knew the Later Jin had invaded. They all took their property and hid inside the big cities. What was left for him to plunder? So he was stuck. If he wanted to seize grain nearby, he had to assault cities. If he assaulted cities, the commoners farther away would take their grain and hide in the cities.

And to make matters worse, the Xuan–Da border troops had an extremely fierce will to resist.

Kong Dengke's case was just Longmen Station. In reality, Huang Taiji had divided his forces into four columns — who would have guessed he would meet setbacks everywhere?

The Two Yellow Banners and the Han troops had marched thirty thousand strong to attack Shenjing Fort. After two days they could not take it and had to lift the siege. The Manchu and Han losses and deaths became utterly meaningless. Attacking places like Shacheng Fort and Tumu Fort was harder than taking Shenyang or Liaoyang. All they could do was burn the houses outside the four gates, cremate over four hundred corpses, and lift the siege.

One column commander, Degelei, led three banners in a joint assault on Chicheng Fort — again they failed to take it. Worse, because they burned houses and slaughtered and abducted commoners, an eighty-year-old woman, carried off, threw herself straight off a cliff. This roused both soldiers and civilians to righteous fury; everywhere there was a will to kill the bandits, so that the Later Jin troops, deep in enemy territory, could not even sleep soundly in their camps.

Then there was the attack on Ximalin Fort. A Squad Commander inside the fort had guts that reached the heavens — he actually wanted to launch a night raid. And he actually found a hundred and seventy men willing to be his ghost soldiers.

You have to wonder — at four qian of silver a month, six months in arrears, what are you risking your life for?

That bunch ran out of the city at night and raised a huge ruckus in the middle of an army camp of ten thousand. Though they only brought back seven heads, they scared the Later Jin troops camped outside the city into trampling each other in the dark, and they lifted the siege and fled overnight.

And then there was Wanquan Left Garrison. That city was crumbling and squat, with no grain inside either. But squatting in this broken-down place was the Zu family's second madman, Zu Dabi. He led two hundred and fifty horsemen leaping out of the city, silent as a mud-cart, and without a word crashed into and killed Turusi, the Bordered Yellow Banner's Vanguard Camp commander and a third-rank baron.

The most interesting thing, though, was not this, but that the Great Wall in northern Shanxi — like the one in Shaanxi — had two lines, commonly called the Second Border Wall. Inside the Second Border Wall lay Xuanfu and Datong.

What was the situation at this point?

Huang Taiji's great army was hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall. Inside that ring, not a single city or fort had been breached. All four columns were blocked at every turn. Yet this situation was nothing for the Later Jin army to complain about. In fact, that they could maintain such a state at all precisely demonstrated that the Later Jin army was well-trained, high in combat strength, and possessed extremely resilient morale.

They had already performed beyond their normal level. All four columns, without controlling a single city in Xuan–Da territory, without breaching a single fortress, still had three columns able to maintain cohesion and mass at Yingzhou in southern Datong. There was also an isolated force under Daišan encamped outside Shuozhou city in southwestern Datong, guarding against Ming reinforcements from Shanxi.

What does this mean?

It means that in the autumn of the seventh year of Chongzhen, the most powerful bandit chieftain on the Chinese soil had changed hands. Aisin Gioro Huang Taiji — he was now the mightiest bandit chieftain of them all.

The Xuan–Da region had always been a key northern stronghold of the Ming court — it would be no exaggeration to call it impregnable. But by the Chongzhen reign, that was no longer the case at all.

As the threat from the Mongols, the northern archfoe, gradually waned, the court shifted its defensive focus to Liaodong. Under the pressure of military defeats, it kept draining troops from the Nine Border Garrisons to feed Liaodong, leaving the Xuan–Da defense line extremely hollow in reality.

Moreover, the Ming army truly did not dare to leave the cities for open-field battle. In the sixth month, while Hong Taiji was still on the Khorchin steppe, the Chongzhen Emperor issued an order to the border forts and cities: if any were breached by the Later Jin, the defending officer would be summarily executed under the harshest law.

This order made Ming garrison commanders passive about sallying out to engage the enemy, yet each fought with desperate, life-staking resolve when defending the walls — so much so that the two sides ended up in this stalemate.

Hong Taiji wanted to assault the cities. To say he didn't would be bullshit — everyone knew the greatest wealth lay inside the cities. But the problem was he couldn't take them. So he had to change strategy and settle for the next best thing: first use the Later Jin soldiers' battle-hardened prowess and the Ming army's weakness in large-scale pitched battles to destroy the Ming's heavy troop concentrations through field combat, and then seize the cities.

Hong Taiji was agonizingly frustrated by this situation. The longer he dragged it out, the harder his journey home would become. Yet he couldn't order a withdrawal now either — he had only captured a little over a thousand people in total. He'd seized plenty of cattle, sheep, and livestock, but that was nowhere near enough to sustain his return march.

Not to mention the tens of thousands of newly submitted Mongols outside the passes. He had already received word that the Three Khans of the Northern Desert had also led troops to the Ordos region and elsewhere, eyeing him like tigers. Add to that the heavy Ming troops garrisoned in Xuan–Da — all these players were waiting for him to withdraw and head home.

The moment he gave the order to pull back, his army could no longer perform as well as it did now on the return route, and he would face a beating from all sides.

At this very moment, he had stationed his troops at Yingzhou precisely to lure the two heavy Ming troop concentrations from Datong and Yanghe into a field battle with him. But the Xuan–Da Grand Coordinator, Zhang Zongheng, simply ignored him.

So Hong Taiji made two preparations. The first was to write to Zhang Zongheng inside Datong City proposing peace talks, buying himself time.

The other was to urgently dispatch mounted troops out of the passes to deliver news to Shenyang of the unfavorable campaign and considerable troop and horse losses. He ordered the Jin state to relocate the entire farming populations from Gaizhou, Haizhou, Jinzhou, Fuzhou, and other areas to Shenyang, leaving only cavalry patrols at each location to guard against raids from Pi Island. Every niru was to pan-roast and stir-fry flour for field rations, to support the main army's return.

At that same moment, Zhang Zongheng inside Datong City had the exact same idea as Hong Taiji — he too made two preparations.

On one hand, he wrote to the Emperor, explaining that the campaign was difficult to fight. The garrison commanders and officers in the forts and camps inside the second border wall had managed to hold the cities passably, but that was bought with their lives, and they fought bitterly. Field forces could not be concentrated in one place, so sallying out meant fighting outnumbered. Therefore, he needed to stall, wait for reinforcements to arrive. Since Hong Taiji wanted peace talks, he suggested using that to delay him.

The Emperor's reply was swift and unruffled: "Don't panic. Reinforcements are on the way."

To be honest, when Zhang Zongheng saw that list of reinforcements, his heart nearly collapsed. A mix of emotions churned inside him.

The beginning of the list was fairly normal: Shanxi Regional Commander Zhang Quanchang was rushing over at top speed with Pingyang Assistant Regional Commander Fu Renxi.

Besides the Shanxi troops, the court also planned for Ji–Liao Supreme Commander Fu Zonglong to assemble a relief force of thirty thousand men — ten thousand from Ji Garrison and Miyun, ten thousand Guan troops, and ten thousand Ning troops. On paper, the situation looked excellent.

But the absurd part was that reinforcements weren't only coming from the east; the west had its share too. The list contained many names both familiar and strange to Zhang Zongheng.

For example — Liu Chengzong.

Good morning!