Chapter 734: The Liaodong Border Wall

Liu Chengzong led his army eastward, but his steps were far from resolute.

Half believing, half doubting.

This was highly unusual.

Lion Liu excelled at putting himself in the enemy's shoes during war — advance or retreat, fight or negotiate, he could always read the opposing commander's mind.

Only this time, everything had seemed fine earlier, but from the moment the Eight Banners suddenly withdrew, Liu Chengzong realized he could no longer fathom Hong Taiji's thinking.

He just couldn't figure it out.

Even if Hong Taiji truly believed Ajige had been defeated and captured, and feared the Great Ming would free up a hand to strike on the Liaoxi front, that still wouldn't justify completely ignoring the north.

In fact, in Liu Chengzong's view, if Hong Taiji really believed it, the Eight Banners army should have deployed in force on the Khorchin grasslands — even if they were secretly shifting troops behind the scenes, they should have put on a massive show of strength in the open.

At the very least, they should have fought him one more time at the Khingan Range.

Not like this, retreating in great strides toward Shenyang with no regard for anything, without even a rearguard unit in sight.

Because even though the Daicing Gurun was organizationally leaner and more efficient than the Ming army, and the Eight Banners were relatively better at shock combat and often fought brilliant pitched battles —

that still had a prerequisite: the moment of opportunity, and that moment came from the Ming court's rigid organization, which would cause its armies to expose weaknesses automatically.

Liu Chengzong knew this better than anyone. When he fought Ming forces, whether a few thousand or over ten thousand —

when the moment came, victory or defeat often hung in the space of a turned hand. From general assault to total triumph, a single two-hour period could send ten thousand enemy troops collapsing like a mountain.

But a campaign was not just that single fatal instant, especially in battles between regular armies; it was certainly not the kind of all-out steamroll — meet, charge, kill in one blow — that government troops used to suppress peasant armies.

If the Eight Banners could truly steamroll the Ming army, then why had they been holed up in Shenyang all this time — were they fond of the ice and snow amusement park?

The Ming army's weakness might be its supply lines, its troop movements, discord among its officers, or insufficient pay and provisions. In short, exposing a weakness required external pressure and time.

Even at the very worst, if twenty thousand troops pushed to the front and dug in behind fortified carts and stockades, Hong Taiji as ruler would have to consider what to do if the fight dragged on — he'd have to plan for at least three months, wouldn't he?

When the Eight Banners suddenly withdrew from the north, Liu Chengzong was bound to be stunned for a moment, but no matter how stunned, he wouldn't stay stunned for three months.

With the Ming army locked in a standoff against the Eight Banners, and Liu Chengzong descending from the north, what was Hong Taiji supposed to do?

So Lion Liu was certain: Hong Taiji had never believed the rumor of Ajige's capture. It was even very likely that the withdrawal had occurred before the captives were deliberately released by the Marshal's Army.

And it was definitely not because the Ming army was threatening Shenyang.

Yet that was precisely why Lion Liu was utterly baffled — what the hell are you running for?

He even suspected that the Joseon Kingdom had mobilized its troops and marched north.

This suspicion was utterly absurd.

Although the Great Ming and Joseon, ever since the Wanli Emperor's intervention in the Imjin War, had for decades both tried their best to play the roles of benevolent father and filial son —

the Joseon Kingdom's military capability didn't even rank. At best, it was slightly stronger than the independent tusi before Liu Chengzong entered Kangning Prefecture.

Joseon could rely on mountain fortresses to defend, and holding out against the Daicing Gurun's pressure without surrendering already counted as a display of filial devotion. Expecting them to launch an offensive against the Eight Banners was simply demanding the impossible.

Yet aside from this, Lion Liu truly could not think of any other reason.

This feeling of groping in the dark left him deeply uneasy.

So he advanced with trepidation. On one hand, he supervised his commanders and deployed troops with ever-increasing caution, consolidating every step. On the other, he had the Southern Desert Army, under He Huchen and the Chedu Taiji, garrison the Khingan Range to secure his line of retreat.

The Marshal's Manor's mixed corps, over forty thousand strong, thus surged into the Kulen grasslands in a mighty tide.

The sand kicked up by the horse columns crossing the dune and gobi belt cut off the Livestock River, and even the Liu River was churned turbid and turbulent.

Despite such a massive movement, the Daicing Gurun's forces remained eerily composed — there wasn't even a token blocking action.

By this point, Liu Chengzong had begun to give up thinking. The unfamiliarity born of lacking intelligence and knowing nothing of the terrain made him irritable, and the irritability made him bull-headed. Since he couldn't figure it out anyway, he simply concluded that he had already walked into a trap.

He just wanted to see exactly how sturdy this trap of Hong Taiji's was, whether it could hold his forty-thousand-strong army.

Even the Northern Desert cavalry brought by Subadi were transferred into the scout cavalry division, fanning out over a hundred li in all directions to gain complete knowledge of the surroundings.

Still, nothing was found.

Liu Chengzong was like a hunter with a fully drawn bow walking through the jungle, probing step by step, slowly, toward Shenyang.

In three days, they advanced only eighty li and saw not a single enemy soldier.

Just when Liu Chengzong was about to go mad from the pent-up tension, the scout cavalry finally waved their flags.

The flag signal said: Enemy. Many enemies.

More precise battlefield intelligence, relayed back li by li as the forward scouts withdrew in stages, reached Liu Chengzong's ears.

A trap... hard to say whether this counted as one, but sturdy it certainly was.

Because the verbal message the forward scouts sent back consisted of just two words: "Border Wall."

The Liaodong Border Wall.

Liu Chengzong, caught between tears and laughter, cursed a filthy oath.

Having pinpointed the enemy and the border wall, Lion Liu and his commanders actually felt their nerves relax. Troop movements returned to normal as they pressed on toward the Liao River.

Drawing near the Liao River, Liu Chengzong could see the border wall for himself.

On the north bank of the Liao, blockhouses built on flat ground squatted with Tatar garrison soldiers inside. Surrounded and hemmed in by the Northern Desert cavalry, they pulled up their rope ladders and, with a show of earnestness, lit beacon fires and fired signal cannons.

On the south bank stretched an unbroken, winding length of the Great Wall, planted with solid-colored and bordered army banners. The Daicing Gurun's defenders stood atop the wall, arrayed in strict formation and ready for battle.

Watching this scene through his telescope, Lion Liu felt like applauding.

So... I've become the northern barbarian!

He summoned Feng Rang, who commanded the wagon fort brigade, and raised his whip to point at the wall on the horizon: "Elder brother fought at Sarhu — why didn't you tell me there was a border wall ahead?"

Feng Rang shook his head, looking equally baffled.

How was he supposed to know?

In the entire Marshal's Manor, there was not a single proper Liaodong soldier.

Even veterans with a Guanning background were pitifully few, and those outsiders who had come in as captives could hardly be expected to sit in the central command of a Marshal's Manor whose main body was made up of mutineers from the five garrisons of Shaanxi and rioters from seven prefectures.

The Guanning Army, or what was now called the Liao troops, were only familiar with the Guanning Corridor west of the Liao River.

As for the proper Liaodong Army, it had ceased to exist back when Liu Chengzong was still a child.

Feng Rang hadn't known there were border walls here either, because Sarhū was to the east — too far east.

Back when he followed Cao Yao out past the border with Du Song's army, he was still just a young man. They left Shanhai Pass and advanced east along the Liaoxi Corridor without ever seeing a border wall. It wasn't until Niuzhuang at the mouth of the Liao River that he caught a distant glimpse of a small stretch, and then as they moved along the Hun River it vanished from sight again.

Not until Fushun Pass — which was already east of Shenyang, about to leave the border — did he see the border wall again.

The Great Wall over by Fushun Pass ran north to south.

So in Feng Rang's subconscious, it never occurred to him that there would be border walls in this direction northwest of Shenyang.

It was only at this moment that Liu Chengzong truly realized: Shenyang, Liaoyang — these places he had subconsciously thought of as the Later Jin or Eight Banners' stronghold — had all been seized by Nurhaci.

What stood before him now was the ring of border walls the Great Ming had once built around the Liaodong Regional Military Commission.

Precisely because the Liao Marshes existed, the border wall's junction along the Liao River formed a 'V' shape at the coast, then wrapped around Liaoyang, Shenyang, Kaiyuan, Fushun, and other places, shutting the Jianzhou and Hada tribes outside, and finally winding its way to the banks of the Yalu River.

From what he had seen and heard so far, along with what Feng Rang and the others knew of Fushun, Sarhū, Jianzhou, and the like, Liu Chengzong, halted outside the border in his central army command tent, quickly pieced together a rough map of the Daiching Gurun.

The map was truly bizarre.

Viewed alongside the border walls, the core territory of Daiching Gurun looked even more like an independent kingdom than Joseon did.

The border walls the Great Ming had built to defend against the Jurchens and the Uriankhai — and then Nurhaci fought his way in and perfectly took over the position of the Liaodong Regional Military Commission.

No wonder the Great Ming, ever since Sarhū, had never been able to fight its way back east. There were border walls and garrison towns and guard cities.

Field battles alone were a struggle, let alone with fortifications on top of that.

Liu Chengzong crouched beside the map, studying it for a long while, then suddenly spoke: "Brother, have your wagon battalion switch equipment. Half a month. Pick the old skills of infantry and cavalry combat back up."

This was no problem for Feng Rang. His battalion had originally been infantry and cavalry; it was only after they happened to acquire Lin Chengdong's equipment that it became a wagon battalion on paper. In reality, it was still primarily infantry and cavalry, just with added proficiency in heavy wagons and artillery.

It was Liu Chengzong's order itself that struck Feng Rang as unusual. After acknowledging the command, he asked, "Is the Grand Marshal planning to assault the walls?"

"Since we're here, if we can get inside, we ought to go in and take a look."

Liu Chengzong kept his eyes on the map, tracing the area around Shenyang with his sheathed knife. "I've always heard the Eight Banners have plenty of silver but few goods, that everything within their borders is terribly expensive, and the marshal's headquarters is perpetually short of gold and silver. If we can break through the border and take it, then this trip won't have been in vain."

"Yes!"

Feng Rang had long wanted to earn a great merit, to get himself a second-prefecture territory and become a brigade commander with his own headquarters and banner. The opportunity was right in front of him — how could he let it slip away?

He immediately clasped his fists. "Rest assured, Grand Marshal, my battalion can be the vanguard!"

The central army command tent was crowded with personnel, but the most agitated person there was not any marshal's headquarters general, nor even a newly surrendered officer like Zuo Liangyu, but Grand Secretary Qian Shisheng, who stood at the edge of the tent under the watch of the Feathered Forest Guards.

Cao Huachun came and went from Liu Chengzong's main camp as if it were his own home. Qian Shisheng was different.

He had been kept in the central army; even when Cao Huachun left, no one notified him.

Ever since Cao Huachun departed, Qian Shisheng, recognizing his own situation, had immediately become obedient.

After all, he was a Principal Graduate — his mind was first-rate. In a low and base position, let your sharpness show; dwelling in the high halls, blend your light with the dust.

The Great Ming's central government was, to him, a low and base place; Liu Chengzong's central army command tent, on the other hand, was the high halls.

Low and base, or the high halls — these did not describe the man himself, but rather his own position within a shared value system.

Whether it was the Great Ming's court officials or its Grand Secretaries, when it came to learning and seniority, he, Qian Shisheng, was the Principal Graduate of the forty-fourth year of Wanli. What did he have to fear in dealing with others? Just let his sharpness show; there was no need to overthink it.

But in Liu Chengzong's central army command tent, every single man there was a fiend who had wreaked havoc upon the world. The soldiers outside the tent measured seniority by which year they had risen in revolt or rebellion — a completely different development track from his own.

Listen more, speak less — that was safer.

To be honest, Qian Shisheng still felt that before he set out, he had thought far too well of the Grand Marshal's headquarters.

He had originally imagined that the Grand Marshal's headquarters, going on campaign with its Minister of the Rites Academy in tow, sounded like a regime with a very militarily and politically classical and well-developed structure.

After seeing Liu Chengzong's way of doing things, he had still been fooling himself, thinking, well, this is wartime, they're out on campaign, personnel matters are bound to be a bit chaotic.

Like, there ought to be at least some semblance of an administrative framework. Even if you're dividing gold by the scale, you should at least have a scale.

Until he laid eyes on the Minister of the Rites Academy, Zhang Xianzhong. Well then. His suspended heart finally died for good.

Qian Shisheng didn't want to offer any advice. He looked down on Liu Chengzong's Grand Marshal's headquarters, thought it was pretty hopeless — just a bunch of strongmen running rampant on brute force.

People like that, cruel and murderous, cultivating no benevolent governance — sooner or later, heaven would deal with them.

But when Liu Chengzong stared at the map of Daiching Gurun and gave his officers the order to break through the Daiching border wall and charge in to seize gold and silver — hmm — Qian Shisheng's heart suddenly felt a rush of satisfaction.

So, the Eight Banners' day has come too, he thought?

He couldn't even control his feelings. Overcome with emotion, he opened his mouth.

He said, "Grand Marshal, this old man has a word..."

Liu Chengzong was deep in thought, staring at the map, pondering that entering the border wall would surely require a feint to the east and a strike to the west, when he suddenly heard an unfamiliar voice in the tent.

His train of thought interrupted, he was somewhat annoyed at first, but turned his head to see that it was actually Qian Shisheng speaking.

"Grand Secretary Qian?" This made him click his tongue in wonder. He simply rose and gestured with his hand. "What guidance does the Grand Secretary have?"

"If the Grand Marshal intends to break through the border and attack Shenyang, you must make speed your paramount asset and brook no delay."

What Qian Shisheng said was a platitude. The tent was full of officers who campaigned for a living; everyone knew the principle that speed is the soldier's asset.

But without sufficient intelligence, a bunch of northwestern veterans running off to the northeast to make speed their asset — the more they sought a quick victory, the faster they'd get themselves killed.

But Qian Shisheng wasn't speaking nonsense. He had his reasons: "When this old man set out on his mission, the eastern slaves had broken through Changping, shaking the capital. The troops on the passes could not be moved lightly, nor had I heard any court intention to dispatch the Guanning forces on an eastern campaign."

"However, before that, Yang Sichang had already advised His Majesty to order Chen Hongfan, as Naval Commander-in-Chief, to lead naval forces into Joseon. But because they intercepted Hong Taiji's correspondence with him, the matter of the navy crossing the sea was subsequently shelved."

These words of his, in fact, were listened to with great interest by the marshal's headquarters officers in the command tent. The first half, about stationing troops in Joseon, even drew nods from several generals.

Liu Chengzong and Zhang Xianzhong exchanged a glance as well. The two shared an unspoken understanding: both thought that Yang Sichang, who could propose such a suggestion, did have some ability, and that the court seemed to be getting its act together again.

But the second half made everyone burst out cursing.

Gao Yingdeng nearly jumped to his feet, pointing at Qian Shisheng. "You old... In central army deliberations, what useless talk is this?"

"Though Chen Hongfan did not set out, the Dongjiang Garrison still exists. On Pi Island there is Garrison Commander Shen Shikui. This man's reputation is poor, but the island has over ten thousand troops."

Qian Shisheng was, by nature, a man who showed his sharpness. Earlier, he had felt he and Liu Chengzong's people did not share a value system, and had not dared to speak.

But now he realized that these western army veterans were basically all illiterate and knew nothing of eastern affairs. That made them no longer frightening.

Because he, in the central government, knew a great deal.

Knowledge was power!

"Hong Tai's southward withdrawal most likely means island troops have landed and are raiding the civilian stockades in his rear. The island soldiers are barely clothed, their armor and weapons are broken, and they lack horses, so they come ashore to loot fast and flee just as fast."

Qian Shisheng was not the least bit afraid of the threats from the gathered officers. He unhurriedly finished speaking, then said to Liu Chengzong, "Therefore, Marshal, if you intend to advance on Shenyang, you must prize speed above all else. The island troops cannot hold out for long; they may have already withdrawn by now."

"Useful!"

Liu Chengzong nodded heavily and immediately said to Yulin, "Reward Elder Qian with three fine horses. Shen Shikui... this is even more likely than Korea or the Guanning forces sending troops."

Qian Shisheng was just feeling pleased when he saw Liu the Lion turn his head and say to Zhang Xianzhong and the others, "If Pi Island has sent troops, then we should be even less eager to advance rashly. Once we break through the border wall, the Eight Banners army will come through as well. Fighting them inside the border would actually be disadvantageous."

The Great Wall, after all, only has those few passes. You can just come out through the pass yourself, but if I break through, it's like chiseling a new opening for you.

"The plan remains unchanged. I will circle and watch from outside the border. If an opportunity presents itself, I will break through the border and strike. Brother, your wagon camp will still switch to light cavalry. In addition, I will assign General Zuo's Baturu Camp to you... You will pursue the Dalahan army from outside the border and proceed together to the area outside Fushun."

As Liu Chengzong spoke, his small knife traced along the edge of the map, all the way to outside Fushun Pass, east of Shenyang.

He believed that direction was the weak point in Daicing Gurun's defenses, because it was the only direction with no enemies.

"That's where Du Song lost that battle before, isn't it? Sarhū. Go there, take a look at the old home of Jianzhou. Tear down any stockades you can, and bring back the silver and the maps."

?? Good afternoon!

? (End of chapter)