Chapter 543: The Front Lines Are Tight, the Rear Lines Are Feasting

The war that erupted along the Xuan–Da defense line in the seventh year of the Chongzhen reign caught everyone off guard.

It turned out nothing like what Hong Taiji had imagined. The reason he did not bring artillery was, first, that when he set out from Shenyang he had pulled together just over thirty thousand men from the Manchu Eight Banners and Han troops — a force clearly insufficient to attack an entire Ming garrison town.

Artillery posed no threat to rammed-earth forts and city walls; its role in siege warfare was suppression. If the attacker's guns could suppress the defender's guns, they could effectively reduce assault casualties, even knock away entire battlements so the defenders dared not man the walls, pushing the fight straight into street combat.

On the other hand, Hong Taiji genuinely lacked the transport capacity. The war environment the Later Jin faced was different from Liu Chengzong's, and the cannon-casting techniques they used were different too. The Hongyi cannons he cast himself were all made by the lost-wax process — genuine, massive cannons, six thousand jin apiece.

And when hauling supplies, there is a critical weight threshold. Beyond a certain weight, you must commit many times the draft animals to achieve the output of one. Two oxen pulling a cart can easily move twelve hundred jin, but to drag something weighing six thousand jin, you need to throw in twenty oxen.

The two great cannons he used to overawe the Mongols took forty oxen just to haul over. Simply moving fifty great cannons would require rounding up a thousand oxen. Those thousand oxen on heavy labor duty consume twenty-five thousand jin of fodder every day. Over the five months from setting out to now, that would mean eating through three million seven hundred fifty thousand jin.

If he had the ability to organize logistics on that scale, would he still need to abandon his home and flee to the southern Gobi to fight a war?

He had not anticipated the conditions on the Mongol steppe, still less the situation after entering the Xuan–Da defense line — the campaign went smoothly, the battles were well fought, but the Later Jin could not afford this kind of war, especially not against the Great Ming.

Small-scale skirmishes could not annihilate Ming troops; siege assaults could not breach Ming cities. Everywhere, with near one-to-one loss ratios, they were locked in pointless, endless field battles with the Xuan–Da border army inside the second line of border walls. Trading lives like that made Hong Taiji's heart pound with dread.

If this trading of lives went on, once the Ming's various relief columns arrived, wouldn't the Later Jin simply be traded out of existence?

The Chongzhen Emperor thought the same way. Although the Ming army's opening in this campaign was not particularly good, and from start to finish they never fought a single thoroughly satisfying major victory, just as Hong Taiji was dissatisfied with the war situation, the valiant Later Jin troops had failed to devour any Ming unit, and the valiant Xuan–Da border troops had likewise failed to devour any Later Jin unit.

This was because the Xuan–Da defense line had relatively few troops. Once the various relief columns arrived, they would surely give the Later Jin army one big blow.

But in reality, by the time this muddled campaign reached this point in time, both sides were already giving the best performance they could with every ounce of strength they had.

The rulers of both Ming and Jin were deeply dissatisfied with how the campaign had gone so far. The only difference was that Hong Taiji felt anxiety over the approaching crisis and was doing everything in his power to find a moment for his side to withdraw, while the Chongzhen Emperor was full of anticipation for the war to come.

And then… the relief troops never came.

Fu Zonglong, on his end, was responsible for organizing thirty thousand relief troops drawn from Ji Garrison, Miyun, Shanhai Pass, and Ningyuan — and the troops simply could not be assembled.

He himself had only three thousand personal guard troops. Shanhai Pass first sent five thousand men, led by Vice General Wang Yinghui — a man who, in the first year of Chongzhen, had been thrown into the imperial prison for embezzling and withholding soldiers' pay, and had only recently been released. Over in Ningyuan, Wu Xiang said he would scrape together six thousand men to march, but he only had five thousand. When the court censors started cursing him out in the streets, he threw a tantrum and wanted to leave on his own first, and Fu Zonglong had to talk him back with great effort.

The troops were barely half assembled when trouble broke out.

Hong Taiji felt deeply that having his vast host sitting around Yingzhou City was no solution. A great force of tens of thousands of Later Jin troops had entered the passes and focused solely on assault, yet had accomplished nothing. The Xuan–Da Supreme Commander Zhang Zongheng inside Datong City was not afraid of him either. Manchu soldiers were human too — thwarted at every turn, what morale could they possibly have left? If this dragged on, he was finished.

Calculating back and forth, at this moment, taking a city at any cost was in his interest.

First, it would replenish military supplies; second, it would boost the army's morale; third, it would overawe the Ming forces.

More importantly, the Later Jin army's earlier tactic of surrounding forts everywhere to intercept relief troops had paid off. A surrendered-man guide reported that to the east there was a place called Lingqiu County. A few years back, a chieftain named Yiliubai had risen up there, and his influence around Lingqiu and Guangling was huge. He had torn down the western city wall. Later, although Yiliubai was suppressed by government troops, the court had no funds to allocate, and the western wall still had not been repaired to this day.

Hong Taiji first had men set up straw dummy soldiers in camp, pretending the main army was still encamped outside Yingzhou. Then he sent a letter to Datong mocking the Xuan–Da Supreme Commander Zhang Zongheng for not daring to come out and fight him in the field. Finally, he ordered Abatai, Ajige, and Yangguri to take the most direct-line and most elite troops — the Two Yellow Banners and Two White Banners — to raise troops under cover of night and head east, rushing toward Lingqiu.

And of all this, the Xuan–Da Supreme Commander Zhang Zongheng basically had intelligence.

On one hand, there were some Han people in Hong Taiji's army who, even if you gave them wives, you could not tie down their hearts. Seizing the moment when Later Jin army morale was unsteady, they looked for any chance to flee to the Ming camp. Those who made it to Datong all survived, and naturally told Zhang Zongheng this intelligence.

On the other hand, although Zhang Zongheng did not send a large army out of the city, small squads of cavalry scouts approaching the Later Jin main camp at Yingzhou to directly probe for intelligence had never ceased.

But intelligence is something that requires analysis, and most importantly, it must be analyzed in light of the situation of both the enemy and oneself.

Zhang Zongheng was a supreme commander of great talent and courage — this was universally acknowledged in the Great Ming. He had served two terms as Prefect, one term as Surveillance Vice Commissioner, and one term as Military Defense Circuit Intendant. In Shanxi, he had thrashed Ligdan Khan and suppressed peasant armies, all with excellent results.

He had even personally led troops against Hong Taiji in a battle earlier at Yanghe.

But the army Hong Taiji commanded exceeded the army Zhang Zongheng was capable of controlling — and this was a rather interesting matter in the Great Ming of the Chongzhen era.

A squad commander leading fifty men, fighting fifty Later Jin men, could very likely fight them to a one-to-one ratio. A Regional Commander, with equal troop strength, could also hold his own against the Later Jin without being at a disadvantage. In a skirmish, even a very inept general might manage to roll over a Later Jin unit.

But if several Regional Commanders combined forces, or several Chief Generals combined forces, as long as the Later Jin army exceeded the number of troops the Ming supreme commander could effectively control, any battle fought would be a loss.

Zhang Zongheng actually held little hope for the eastern route relief army. Even if the eastern route, as the Emperor said, could send thirty thousand relief troops, the Ji–Liao troops would answer to Fu Zonglong, he had no authority over You Shiwei at Shanhai Pass, and the Ningyuan troops went without saying — the army supervisor for the Liao troops was Gao Qiqian. Who among this bunch outranked whom? They couldn't even sort out who was the big king and who was the little king with the final say, and they were supposed to fight a joint campaign?

Commanding a large army corps requires not only the structure of command and troops to be commanded, but also the authority to command.

A large army has supervisors above and divided authority below — constraints everywhere. This bunch, whether military men like You Shiwei and Wu Xiang, or civil officials like Zhang Zongheng and Fu Zonglong, or eunuch-born men like Gao Qiqian, were all figures who had reached the pinnacle of official rank in their respective careers.

If Xuan–Da fell, it was the responsibility of Xuan–Da Supreme Commander Zhang Zongheng. If the relief army was defeated in field battle, that was the relief army's responsibility. Any fool could write that script — it was nothing more than Zhang Zongheng taking the lead while the various relief armies put in a token appearance.

He could only consider the problem from his own perspective, and from his own perspective, the outcomes were dismissal from office, imprisonment, exile, or having his head delivered around the nine border garrisons — corresponding respectively to Hong Taiji withdrawing his army, winning a field battle, breaching a city, or capturing Datong.

The answer, then, was obvious: the most important thing was that Hong Taiji must not be allowed to capture Datong.

First of all, Datong's garrison city was a colossal city with a circumference of twelve li and two hundred sixteen paces, and with a "single-spread phoenix wing" layout, it had three additional small cities and barbicans connected on the north, south, and east sides.

For a colossal city like this, even just manning the walls, his Xuan–Da Supreme Commander's guard battalion and the Datong garrison were short on troops. Only by mobilizing every able-bodied man in Datong and dividing up defense sectors could they barely hold it as impregnable as metal and stone.

But civilian levies were not enough to go outside the city and fight Hong Taiji's soldiers. His troops, split into small squads, were locked in a constant back-and-forth tug-of-war with Later Jin sentries and scouts — skirmishes were manageable, but a major pitched battle would mean losing so badly they'd be stripped bare.

On this basis, Zhang Zongheng could also sense that Hong Taiji was growing anxious because he had accomplished nothing since entering the passes. Right now, he must be desperate to breach a city before Ming relief troops arrived. So, of all these cities, which one did Hong Taiji want to breach? Datong.

Only if Datong was breached would this incursion not count as a loss for Hong Taiji.

Then the answer was practically shouting itself out: all this business Hong Taiji was now pulling outside Yingzhou City — the straw dummies, the peace talks, the splitting of forces — were all decoy strategies.

Zhang Zongheng: I'm not listening, I'm not listening, the tortoise is chanting sutras!

And then Lingqiu was gone.

That city's western wall had collapsed. The county troops fought to the death, but the watchtowers, cannons, and stone munitions — all military preparations — had been utterly neglected. They simply could not stop the Later Jin army's assault. The attackers killed off the defenders and climbed over the wall into the city. The county magistrate, Jiang Bingcai, at the moment of defeat, threw his official seal into a well inside the city, then hanged himself. His entire family, old and young, perished with him.

The fall of Lingqiu shook the entire Xuan–Da defense line. Zhang Zongheng urgently ordered Shanxi Chief General Zhang Quanchang to cross the Great Wall and rush to Hunyuan Subprefecture, attempting to coordinate with the eastern route relief army and the northern route Xuan–Yun border troops to form an encirclement, with the aim of launching a war of annihilation against the Later Jin corps positioned at Lingqiu.

The massive troop movements on all routes could not be hidden from the Later Jin. Abatai and Ajige had just plundered over ten thousand captives and several hundred cartloads of wealth, goods, fodder, and provisions. Their troops turned and launched a feint attack toward Zijing Pass and Daoma Pass.

In reality, whether it was a feint or not mattered little to the Ming forces, because east of these two passes lay Baoding Prefecture, which had no defensible terrain. Fu Zonglong could only dispatch the relief column under Wang Yinghui to reinforce Zijing Pass.

At the same time, the Later Jin force under Daišan, which had been deployed at Shuozhou, also broke through a section of border wall after Zhang Quanchang led his troops east, bypassing Ningwu Pass and thrusting into Dai Prefecture. Their vanguard passed through Guo County, where the acting county magistrate, Li Zhuangtu, braided his hair and surrendered. Guo County was declared fallen.

Two counties fell in succession, and the eastern route relief army also entered Xuan–Yun territory. Zhang Quanchang immediately dispatched Fu Renxi to rush to Guo County. No sooner had he left than the eastern route relief army halted its advance — Wu Xiang's troops had mutinied.

The mutiny was very small in scale, just a few hundred Yi auxiliaries. A later investigation found that Later Jin spies had infiltrated the army and spread rumors that after they entered the passes, their wives and children back home had all been imprisoned by the authorities. They shouted that even if they died, they must not die inside the passes; they wanted to return to Ningyuan and Jinzhou to die together with their wives and children.

The mutiny had barely been pacified when the encirclement the Ming forces had formed against the Two White Banner and Two Yellow Banner troops that had taken Lingqiu County became useless. At the same time, to the southwest in northern Shanxi, Fu Renxi's troops had also engaged Daišan's Two Red Banners.

Fu Renxi's unit was no different from any other Ming border army, except for one thing: his veteran firearms troops shot with extreme accuracy.

They had trained for it. This fellow was in league with bandits — back in the day, he had made a fortune selling gunpowder to Liu the Lion. Later promoted to Regional Commander at Pingyang Prefecture, he was even closer to Shanxi's saltpeter-producing regions. Although by then Liu Chengzong had already moved west, he never forgot this means of getting rich. What if Lion Liu couldn't hold his ground in the northwest and came back?

Later on, well, that naturally counted as a failed investment. Liu Chengzong did not come back, and his gunpowder had nowhere to be sold. After all, he had no basis of mutual trust with other chieftains. If he sold gunpowder to you, Li Zicheng, today, and tomorrow you set up your cannons and went bang-bang at him, who could he go to for justice?

So he used all the gunpowder himself and trained the finest firearms troops in Shanxi.

Daišan knew the news that Fu Renxi was returning to relieve the siege, but he did not take the Pingyang Garrison troops seriously at all. Pingyang Prefecture counted as the interior. Aside from the border troops who could still fight the Eight Banners on even terms, interior troops were useless. So he did not care in the slightest and led his troops to meet Fu Renxi, heading northeast, attempting to cut across Dai Prefecture and link up with the Yellow and White Banners at Lingqiu.

Fu Renxi gave Daišan a small shock.

Starting from probing attacks at the pond outpost to multiple small-scale encounters, Fu Renxi, at the cost of one hundred and seventy-seven cavalrymen killed in action, routed and annihilated four Later Jin supply columns, recovering over two thousand seven hundred civilians and one hundred and eighty-three supply carts laden with goods and wealth.

By the time Daišan reacted and organized his forces to meet him in an open-field battle, he could not find even a trace of Fu Renxi, seeing only over a hundred burned and abandoned carts on the mountain paths of Mount Wutai.

Fu Renxi had already settled the civilians inside Daizhou City, then fled with six hundred and sixty heads, racing swiftly along the Mount Wutai mountain roads and entering Taiyuan City.

In the battle report submitted to the imperial court, Fu Renxi claimed he had been routed on the Mount Wutai road, that after a bloody battle most of the recaptured carts were seized back by the Later Jin army, and that his only achievements were rescuing over two thousand seven hundred civilians and taking six hundred and sixty heads of the eastern caitiffs.

In truth, he simply did not want to fight anymore. On one hand, he had tested them and indeed could not win.

The reason he obtained so many heads was mainly because he relied on numerical superiority to raid supply columns, allowing him to sweep the battlefield after a quick rout; otherwise, with the battlefield controlled by the Later Jin, the corpses would all have been burned.

Despite lacking Liu Chengzong's gunpowder trade, because the invisible great bandit One-Chest-of-Gold had also pulled off two big jobs in Shanxi, the Pingyang Battalion was very wealthy, and its three thousand soldiers were all fully equipped with arms.

The Two Red Banners he fought against were not in the same situation. In Later Jin operations, the bayara served as the commanders' guards and would not appear on the small battlefields of such skirmishes. The main combat troops were armored cavalry or armored infantry, also called uksin or armored men, along with cotton-armored soldiers, who made up only one-third, at most less than half, of the force in a campaign.

The majority were banner slaves, also called yaluhai — these men had no armor.

When battle began, at the front of the Later Jin formation were the banner slaves serving as death-defying shock troops, the dead soldiers; behind them were the cotton-armored archers; in the middle were the commanders and the bayara overseeing the armored foot and mounted combat troops; and further back were vast swathes of banner slaves.

This was in fact exactly the same as the Ming army: shock troops at the front, the commanders' household retainers and battalion soldiers in the middle, and guard-post banner troops at the rear — identical in every way.

Therefore, over the course of several battles, the Later Jin armored combat troops who actually died at Fu Renxi's hands were not many — it was basically one-for-one. But Daišan had over ten thousand troops under his command, while Fu Renxi had only three thousand battalion soldiers. With that rate of exchange, Fu Renxi was unwilling and did not dare to fight.

On the other hand, it was because on the larger battlefield, Fu Renxi had no hope that the Ming army's motley allied forces could pull off a large-scale annihilation battle along the Xuan–Da defense line.

So he decided: time to split the spoils!

The relief troops were just as he had imagined. While they fought life-and-death struggles on the front lines, the relief troops arriving from Liaodong halted their advance and garrisoned locally. Many barbarian soldiers slipped out of camp to steal horses and cattle, violate women, and wound their husbands, and they also killed a batch of people — the very surrendered men who had escaped through hardship and danger from Hong Taiji's army.

Those who fled to Datong were all properly settled by Zhang Zongheng, who also reported a good deal of intelligence about the Later Jin.

Those who fled east were all killed by the eastern-route relief troops as eastern caitiffs.

Of course, the killing was not thorough enough. There was a licentiate who was a master escape artist — he first escaped from Hong Taiji's army, then escaped from under Wu Xiang's soldiers. All seven of his companions died; he was the sole survivor. Only then was a complaint lodged, letting the court know that the eastern-route relief troops not only refused to advance but were also running amok doing evil everywhere.

This was devastating to morale.

At the same time, the Later Jin army's morale was also low.

Hong Taiji received intelligence from the rear. While he was leading the army in battle at the front, the Mongol tribes beyond the passes had grown so famished they had started fighting among themselves. For reasons unknown, the three Khalkha tribes, who had been quietly raising horses in the Ordos, suddenly crossed the Yellow River and launched a raid on Fengzhou Beach, where the Tümed tribe was entrenched.

This intelligence in itself was nothing special — infighting was the normal state of affairs among the Mongols in this era — but within this intelligence report, Hong Taiji spotted a Han Chinese name, and that was highly problematic.

"Yang Qi — who is he?"

Good evening!