Chapter 2100 - The New Army
In the west wing of the Wuzhou Prefecture Yamen, an Australian oil lamp burned through the night. Yi Haoran had not slept, his mind churning with tactical concerns.
All day he had stood tensely on the city walls, observing the Australian troop movements below. The Hair-Bandits' actions were unhurried and methodical—their advances and withdrawals choreographed with professional precision. They truly deserved their fearsome reputation as the "Giant Canal" that made imperial troops blanch and flee. Such an army, even without superior ships and devastating artillery, could defeat demoralized imperial forces through sheer discipline and morale alone.
Yi Haoran had developed a gnawing sense that Xiong Wenchan's pursuit of "superior weapons" was strategically misguided. Even if every soldier in Wulzhou's garrison were equipped with Nanyang rifles, he doubted they would have much chance against such a professional force. And at present, he commanded only five hundred men—a drop in the ocean.
On the surface, this arrangement was Xiong Wenchan's way of balancing the rivalry between advisors Chang Qingyun and Yi Haoran. But Yi Haoran recognized the Governor-General's strategic foresight.
The regular Ming army was beyond reform, its corruption and incompetence too deep for half-measures. Even Xiong Wenchan dared not touch the entrenched interests. A "surrendered bandit" like Jiang Suo had no personal troops or political connections; placing him within the rigid military structure would make survival uncertain. By dispatching Yi Haoran and Jiang Suo together to Guizhou to recruit household guards and build a force from scratch, Xiong Wenchan had done them a considerable favor. The legendary Qi Jiguang himself had started the same way, raising an entirely new force from nothing.
Training an effective army required serious money. Fortunately, Guizhou was poor; a settling fee of four taels per man attracted volunteers. But three taels monthly pay for each soldier was no trivial sum. Xiong Wenchan allocated ten thousand taels: four thousand five hundred for three months' wages in advance, two thousand for settling fees and equipment, the remainder for "miscellaneous expenses."
The miscellaneous fund required no accounting—any surplus belonged to the manager. A seasoned bureaucrat might even skim from wages as profit. When Yi Haoran received this assignment, he became recognized as a "man in favor." Colleagues and strangers alike came to congratulate him and slip in names of relatives they hoped he might appoint.
Yi Haoran had served in staff positions for years and understood the political games. He couldn't refuse outright—even if a petitioner couldn't help him, at least they wouldn't sabotage him. When he and Jiang Suo finally departed for Guizhou, their recruiting party had swelled from a dozen to over a hundred.
The recruitment site was Xiong Wenchan's home region: Yongning Guard in Guizhou. Since Guizhou lay outside his jurisdiction, Yi Haoran's pretext was recruiting "household guards" for protection rather than formal soldiers. The court didn't forbid this, but Xiong Wenchan had enemies who might seize it as a political weapon. After filling the ranks to five hundred, Yi Haoran marched them back to Guangxi for drilling. The training camp was established at Teng County, not far from Wuzhou.
Days after arriving, Yi Haoran summoned Jiang Suo privately and handed him five hundred taels of silver.
"What's this for, sir?" In his hard life, Jiang Suo had never seen so much silver. He was visibly shocked.
"You accompanied me to Guizhou and will train this force. This is your rightful share."
"But... the monthly pay was just issued..."
Yi Haoran had never delayed wages—that was true. Yet the distributed pay wasn't the promised three taels but only two. The excuse was that three taels applied to active combat; during peacetime training, two sufficed. That adjustment yielded five hundred extra taels monthly. Jiang Suo received his full stipend, but it sat uneasily with him. Among the Australians, the agreed sum was always paid, never skimmed.
"This payment is from the miscellaneous fund," Yi Haoran explained calmly. "It's your rightful share. Take it and don't worry."
Yi Haoran possessed genuine public loyalty—that was sincere. But lofty sentiment didn't preclude enriching himself from opportunity. He was past fifty; whether he'd hold another lucrative position was uncertain. If he didn't squeeze silver from this assignment, he wouldn't have money for a proper burial. Besides, entertaining superiors and smoothing relationships cost heavily. If he didn't take from allocated funds, the miscellaneous fund wouldn't cover overhead.
"But wasn't the expense fund already disbursed before Guizhou?" Jiang Suo knew this practice—"drinking soldiers' blood," as the Australians called it.
"What could you possibly know!" Yi Haoran read his disapproval and felt surprised at such naivete. "You're a court official now, not an Australian soldier. In the Ming system, there are appearances to maintain, expenses to cover, people to entertain constantly. How could official pay suffice? Right now, we train in isolation, answering to no one. But once posted amid regular forces, you'll have demanding superiors and jealous colleagues to appease—who will you not bribe?" Seeing Jiang Suo about to protest, he waved impatiently. "Hear me out. This is entrenched Ming corruption—it cannot be changed. Even Governor Xiong daren't touch it. Even Qi Jiguang and Yuan Chonghuan had to curry favor with factions just to survive. Otherwise you won't keep your post or your life."
He sighed heavily. "When you enter the maze of officialdom, you must go along to get along. Sometimes you must deliberately sully your reputation for pragmatic reasons. Don't take it to heart."
Jiang Suo said nothing more, silently accepted the silver, and made to leave.
"Jiang Suo, you still haven't selected personal guards?" Yi Haoran had been pressing him to choose bodyguards.
"I have one attendant. That's sufficient."
"You're far too naive!" Yi Haoran sighed, then remembered the man wasn't literate. "On the battlefield, even a legendary general needs trusted guards who'd stake their lives for him. Otherwise, in a crisis, you're alone and vulnerable."
"Yes, sir. I understand." Jiang Suo bowed respectfully, tucked away the silver, and departed.
Yi Haoran shook his head inwardly. These men the Hair-Bandits trained were hopeless sticklers for principle.
The five hundred new soldiers had been selected according to the Effective Discipline Manual's rigorous standards—robust mountain folk with good physiques, every one. Yi Haoran handed them to Jiang Suo for training.
Unfortunately, though Jiang Suo was well-versed in "Hair-Bandit drill methods" and could speak impressively about training techniques, he was just a former private—not even a corporal—with no experience commanding large bodies of men. Tasked with teaching five hundred alone, he was overwhelmed. For days, everything was disorder.
Yi Haoran recalled his military classics and changed tactics. First, he selected ten capable men for Jiang Suo to mentor intensively in marching, formations, and arms. Then those ten drilled a hundred men, with Jiang Suo correcting them. Finally, those hundred drilled the remainder. In three months, the unit became visibly "orderly and presentable." Yi Haoran was pleased.
By Jiang Suo's standards, the training was unremarkable. It didn't match the elite Fubo Army or even the competent National Army. At best, it was solid militia-grade. What he could teach was limited to basic formation drills; the few battles formations he knew—deploying on the march, double-rank volleys, defensive squares—were elementary. How to apply them flexibly in combat, he wasn't confident.
Shooting practice followed Jiang Suo's own regimen: fifty dry-fire drills for muscle memory, thirty live rounds for accuracy.
This ammunition expenditure agonized the budget-conscious Yi Haoran. Each rifle came with only a hundred rounds. Ammunition was an Australian monopoly, exorbitantly priced. Even setting aside gunpowder and lead, the copper percussion caps remained a mystery—no one knew their manufacture.
Though he wasn't spending personal savings, too much expense meant trouble with Governor Xiong.
Still, watching the Nanyang rifles perform impressively, Yi Haoran felt it was money well spent.
The real trouble was numbers. Only a hundred rifles for the entire force—far too few. Yi Haoran had planned to arm the rest with Portuguese matchlocks from Macau. But Jiang Suo argued the weapons differed too drastically in performance to coordinate effectively. Instead, he proposed equipping them with long pikes, following a combined arms method from his Australian militia training.
Standard pikes were far easier to obtain than Nanyang rifles. Soon, Yi Haoran's agents returned from Macau with several hundred Lingao-manufactured pikes of good quality. Jiang Suo systematically drilled spearmen and musketeers together in combined formations.
On paper, this drill looked straightforward. In practice, it was anything but easy. Shifting formations fluidly—mixing pike and firearms units—required a professional army with extensive experience. An amateur like Jiang Suo and an autodidact like Yi Haoran couldn't manage alone. Recognizing this, Xiong Wenchan assigned an experienced bazong named Song Ming to assist.
Song Ming was a capable young officer who had survived the disaster at Chengmai. Since that defeat, his career had languished unfairly. But he remained ambitious. On arriving at Teng County and meeting Yi Haoran, the two hit it off, and Song Ming took charge of field exercises.
Jiang Suo sketched combined arms tactics on paper from memory, and Song Ming implemented them systematically in field drills. His methods were sound, and soon the drills took shape. Yet a fresh problem arose: Jiang Suo's knowledge was skin-deep. The largest unit movements he'd seen were company-level. How to coordinate five hundred men across a battlefield, he had no idea. The three experimented continuously, groping by trial and error toward something workable.
But time had run out. The shocking Australian amphibious landings, the rapid fall of Guangzhou and Zhaoqing, the uncertain fate of the Chaoshan Vice Commander's desperate defense—Xiong Wenchan's fledgling new army, barely formed and untested, was about to be thrown into a last-ditch fight against the vastly superior Australians at Wuzhou.
"Alas—the new army is not yet tempered by battle, and I have only five hundred men!" Yi Haoran's heart ached with regret and frustration.
(End of Chapter)