Chapter 296: The bleak autumn wind and the sound of war drums
In order for the Tang Dynasty to have an heir, and to prevent the Li family from being extinct, Li Xuan was prepared to be a monk for a few months. He was not prepared to touch anyone, whether it was Dong Yunyun, Ye or Zhuer.
And in order to avoid letting these three delicate women dangle in front of him and shake his determination, he returned to Lanjiang Ferry with his guards early the next morning.
Today's Lanjiang Ferry has completely turned into a huge military camp. The New Army of the Tang Dynasty has stationed 3,000 people here. Because they are preparing to stay here for a long time, they are building many river beach fortifications. At the same time, they are also building
There are many relatively simple barracks, and they look like they are going to take root here.
In addition to fortifications and barracks, the new army of the Tang Dynasty also took some time off to build many rafts and even ships.
Naturally, these ships cannot be used now, but not using them now does not mean that they will not be used in the future. According to Li Xuan's plan, within three months after the Battle of Lanjiang Ferry, the Tang Dynasty will work hard to cultivate their internal strength.
Lord, the Ming army will probably arrive in three months. At that time, we should defend instead of attack, and try to keep the Ming army at the bottom of the Lanjiang River again.
By then, it will be time for his new army of the Tang Dynasty to send troops to Xingquan Fucheng!
At that time, it was not only because of the defeat of the Ming army, but also because Zhengtai County, a remote and remote area, could no longer meet the development needs of the Tang Dynasty. They needed a wider territory to obtain troops and various strategic resources.
The ships and rafts being built in advance are for crossing the river when the time comes to attack Fucheng.
The Tang Dynasty cannot stay in the small Zhengtai County forever!
There are only two endings for it, either it will be wiped out by more and more Ming troops, or it will develop and grow all the way upstream. How to develop and grow against the current, this is what Li Xuan needs to consider.
And occupying the entire Xingquan Mansion is Li Xuan's next strategic plan!
Of course, before launching the next strategy to capture Xingquan Mansion, the entire Zhengtai County must be controlled first. In addition, the Ming army that will attack in the next few months must first be annihilated. Otherwise,
It was easy to lose Xingquan Mansion, and the new army of Tang Dynasty was swallowed up by the huge Ming army.
Annihilating the Ming army is a matter of the future, and Li Xuan has nothing to do with it now. In recent months, he has been preparing to further strengthen his control over Zhengtai County.
To this end, he established multiple towns and more than 60 villages, and these villages and towns all had police officers. In addition, he also set up a bandit-catching camp. Two of the three teams of the bandit-catching camp were stationed in the creek.
Kou Village, and one is stationed in Yangjia Village in the northwest of Zhengtai County.
The bandit camps and the police officers in each town and village, these semi-military armed forces were barely able to help the Tang Dynasty control each town.
However, Longhua Town and Zhengtai County are a bit special. Longhua Town is fine. Su Jiakang obviously abandoned Longhua Town and transferred all the regular troops stationed in Longhua Town to Zhengtai County, leaving only a few dozen young men.
But even so, the new army of the Tang Dynasty did not occupy Longhua Town, but only left dozens of soldiers outside the town to guard it.
After such a long time, the young people and ordinary people in Longhua Town have become accustomed to the existence of dozens of soldiers of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty outside the town. The soldiers of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty outside the town run around every morning to train.
The shouting and yelling at the time was no longer surprising, and even some children who lived nearby occasionally ran to watch the training of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty.
On the other hand, over in Zhengtai County, there were seven to eight hundred Ming troops and young men in the city, plus Su Jiakang was in charge, so they never let down their guard.
The New Army of the Tang Dynasty did not dare to relax its surveillance of Zhengtai County. Personnel were deployed at the four gates of Zhengtai County for surveillance. In addition, a team of soldiers was stationed a little further away as backup.
With the expansion of the strength of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty, the New Army of the Tang Dynasty that monitors or surrounds Zhengtai County has increased from more than 100 people before to more than 200 people today. These two hundred people are the first members of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty.
Two mixed camps.
The mission of this second mixed battalion is to monitor the Ming army in Zhengtai County and capture and occupy Longhua Town and Zhengtai County as soon as possible if necessary.
Naturally, it was impossible for the nearly 4,000 troops of the New Army of the Tang Dynasty to be deployed at the Lanjiang Ferry. Instead, the main force of more than 3,000 troops was deployed at the Lanjiang Ferry, in Zhengtai County, and at the Longhua Town side of the second mixed battalion.
The First Mixed Battalion was used as a mobile force and was deployed about fifteen miles northwest of the Lanjiang Ferry. There was another section of the river at this place that was more suitable for large armies to cross the river. If the Ming army crossed the river from here,
, the first mixed battalion had to shoulder the heavy responsibility of blocking the Ming army from crossing the river and delaying time to wait for the main reinforcements.
In addition, Li Xuan also deployed some troops as appropriate at several other places where the Ming army might cross the river.
As for the Lanjiang Ferry, the main force consisted of three thousand people.
If the Ming army attacks on a large scale and prepares to cross the river at Lanjiang Ferry again, Li Xuan will definitely transfer the first mixed battalion and the troops deployed at several other ferry crossings to Lanjiang Ferry to fight the Ming army to the death.
.
When the situation is critical, the second mixed battalion and the pirate battalion at the rear will also be deployed to reinforce the main force.
Li Xuan actively prepared for the war and spent all his time on handling government affairs and training the army, but Song Zhiwen on the other side of the river was obviously not idle either.
Although he was able to deceive the failure of the Battle of Lanjiang Ferry with his clever writing, he could not just sit back and watch the puppet Tang rebel army develop and grow in Zhengtai County.
By then, let alone annihilating these pseudo-Tang traitor armies, Xingquan Prefecture may not even be able to defend it.
In order to wipe out the puppet Tang rebels, and even more to prevent these puppet Tang rebels from crossing the Lanjiang River, Song Zhiwen has recently been recruiting young people to rebuild his army. At the same time, he also used his personal connections to persuade the governor to send troops to the nearby
Guard troops from several state capitals came over to help suppress the bandits.
As soon as the governor took action, four Qianhu offices located around Xingquan Prefecture received orders to prepare to send troops to Xingquan Prefecture.
Now these reinforcements are already on the way. The total number is about 2,000. In addition to the 1,000 soldiers newly recruited from several thousand households in Xingquan Mansion itself, there are a total of 3,000 guards.
It's not a problem.
And Song Zhiwen also understood that it was unreliable to rely on these three thousand guardsmen. These guardsmen could not even defeat the bandits. To fight the war, they had to rely on the recruited soldiers!
So he recruited two thousand soldiers in one go, and is now training day and night.
In addition, there were more than a thousand Ming troops at Lanjiang Ferry. After the defeat at Lanjiang Ferry, he collected nearly a thousand troops from various places to urgently reinforce Lanjiang Ferry. These troops have been stationed at Lanjiang ever since.
There are about 1,500 people in total at the ferry.
Three thousand plus two thousand plus one thousand five hundred, that is to say, the strength of Song Zhiwen's troops will reach 6500 in the next one or two months.
These 6,500 people do not include civilians, but pure combat troops!
Even if the combat effectiveness of the soldiers at the guard station is very weak, and even if the soldiers he recruited were all recruited in the past month, these soldiers are regular troops anyway, and they are still fundamentally different from civilians.
When the war breaks out, Song Zhiwen will continue to recruit several thousand civilians to be responsible for logistics, transportation and auxiliary tasks. It will be possible to have a population of tens of thousands by then.
As for how his Xingquan Prefecture can feed tens of thousands of people, he doesn't need to worry about this kind of thing. The two thousand reinforcements from the guard station brought their own dry food. At most, he just gave them a little bit of food and left it to them.
solve.
And how to deal with the food and grass for the more than 1,000 guards in Xingquan Mansion itself? It is better to bring your own dry food!
What is a garrison soldier? They usually work in the fields to accumulate military rations, and when fighting, they go out to fight with the rations they have grown.
This is why some people explain that the imperial guard system made it impossible for the imperial court to spend money on raising troops.
Of course, if these guardsmen want to fight hard, they still need to spend extra real money to reward them. At the same time, those border troops who often experience wars need to allocate military funds for subsidies from the court because of their huge expenses. This is the so-called
'Annual silver'.
Song Zhiwen now needs to find a way to borrow this money. This is just to suppress bandits. In addition, Song Zhiwen deliberately concealed the information for the sake of his official title. Therefore, the imperial court will naturally not spend any money on military expenses.
, Song Zhiwen can only borrow it himself.
The soldiers in the guard station need to pay a small amount of military expenses, so those recruiting soldiers will cost even more money. These recruited soldiers are paid military salaries. If they have no money and no food, don't expect them to work for you Song Zhiwen.
Even for those civilian men who were temporarily recruited, although they were not paid and were even asked to bring their own dry food, necessary expenses were still required.
Adding this up, the expenses of tens of thousands of people are not a small amount, and the local officials of the Ming Dynasty have always been poor, and the finances of Xingquan Mansion cannot afford such a large amount of money.
But Song Zhiwen never cared about this problem?
There is no military expenditure to support the army? Is this simple? He is the head of the government, so he can just give orders to allocate silver and grain to the big households.
Is it possible that a dignified magistrate can still be stumped by such a small amount of money?
Of course, it's okay to apportion things once or twice, but if it happens more often, the big players will have objections.
But this kind of apportionment cannot continue many times. In the next three months, these tens of thousands of troops will either wipe out the puppet Tang rebel army or be defeated by the puppet Tang rebel army.
It is impossible for Song Zhiwen to support tens of thousands of people doing nothing for a year and a half.
But Li Xuan still doesn't know that Song Zhiwen is already preparing to mobilize and train a total of 6,500 regular troops, plus thousands of civilians, preparing to gather an army of tens of thousands to give him a big kill.
trick!
But it doesn't matter whether you know or not. Even if Li Xuan expected the Ming army to be thousands or tens of thousands sent from the provincial capital, the fact is that these Ming troops were brought by Song Zhiwen himself, but there is a gap in strength between the two.
Not big.
Anyway, there are so many Ming troops, no matter who they hit, they will be the same!
As the Mid-Autumn Festival, frost and other solar terms pass by, the weather gradually becomes cooler.
There were more and more Ming troops on the other side of the river. Finally one day, spies from the New Army of the Tang Dynasty discovered that there were 5,000 Ming troops coming from the direction of Fucheng towards the Lanjiang Ferry. When they arrived, they added the original 5,000 troops.
Ming army, then the total strength of the Ming army across the river will exceed 10,000 people.
After Li Xuan got the news, he took a deep breath, and then said to a group of generals: "After waiting for so long, they are finally here!"