Qian Song

Chapter 39 Little Lady Liang (please read more!)
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After completely cutting off from Fang La, Li Cun discovered Fang La's benefits.

When I was in Qingxi, the people Li Cun sent out to recruit people into the gang could easily attract a large number of people to join the Huben Army every day. In just forty or fifty days, Li Cun pulled up a team It has a huge team of more than 3 combatable soldiers and nearly [-] military dependents.

It can be said that the development of the Huben Army at that time was definitely changing with each passing day.

Later, Li Cun concluded that the main reason why people were so friendly at that time was that almost all those who poured into Qingxi were righteous men who knew that Fang La had raised the banner of uprising and rushed to Qingxi to follow Fang La's uprising. The people who went down, in this case, Li Cun, who was also carrying the banner of the uprising, sent someone over to make a move, and they naturally came to vote.

Today, Li Cun still has the original conditions, but very few are willing to join the Huben Army.

——Two days have passed, and only a few hundred people have come to enlist in the army. Moreover, these hundreds of people are mostly rogues. They came to join the Huben Army, mostly for speculative purposes.

Li Cun was greatly influenced by Qi Jiguang's military books such as "Ji Xiao Xin Shu", "Records of Military Training", "A Brief Introduction to Soldiers" and "Wu Bei Xin Shu".

Therefore, Li Cun particularly dislikes people with fair skin, quick actions, and no scruples when they see themselves, because these people are slippery, unreliable at critical moments, will slip away, and will drag others along with them.In case they are caught by Shangguan, they have enough eloquence to blame others.The so-called mouse droppings spoil a pot of soup.In the army, this kind of person will not only be unable to fight, but will also play a role in disintegrating the morale of the army.

What Li Cun likes is the kind of rural peasants who are black, big and thick, with solid skin and flesh, just like the five idiots of the Queen.

Such a person, although it is a bit strenuous to train, but once trained, they are very easy to command and can fight hard.

Based on his own preference, Li Cun sent the most severe instructors to this group of recruits, and secretly told these instructors that if any of these recruits escapes, don't look for them.

Li Cun wanted to see how much gold would be left after the big waves wash away the sand?

in fact--

Li Cun failed to recruit many people in Jiande City, mainly because this is a city, a city where people's lives are relatively better, rather than a rural area, where many people cannot survive.

After this failed recruitment, Li Cun also decided on his future development policy, which is to take the route of encircling the cities from the countryside.

Early in the morning of the third day, Li Cun asked Zhang Shi to lead the team and went to the nearby villages to recruit people.

The effect was immediate.

——That night, Zhang Shi and the others brought back nearly two thousand good soldiers and six or seven thousand military members to Li Cun.

Zhang Shi discussed with Li Cun that he wanted to stay here for a few more days and recruit more good soldiers.

But it was rejected by Li Cun.

History has proved that the top priority now is to block the Song army to the north of the Yangtze River, and they must not be allowed to cross the river, otherwise the uprising will fail.

You know, this is not just a matter of the 15 Zhao Song Dynasty's most capable Western Army.

Rather, as soon as the 15 Western troops arrive, many landlords in the southeast region will surely pull up their troops and follow the 15 Western troops to suppress the uprising.

There is no need to take any chances in this matter, because this is not a struggle between two people, and you can find some reasons to turn it into a jade. This is a struggle between two classes that have accumulated contradictions for nearly 200 years. It is the peasant class who wants to overthrow the landlord class How can there be room for relaxation in the struggle?

Therefore, the landlord class will definitely support the Song army to suppress the uprising unreservedly.

Also, never underestimate the potential of a dynasty that has existed for almost 200 years.

It is no exaggeration to say that at the current stage, the Zhao and Song Dynasties have devoted all their efforts to at least one million active troops.

If the uprising is really strong enough to overthrow the Zhao Song Dynasty, the Zhao Song Dynasty will definitely put all the more than 100 million Song troops into the southeast battlefield.

What Liao Kingdom, what Xixia Kingdom, what Jin Kingdom, Zhao Song Dynasty must all have to let go.

Because to fight against the outside world, the inside must be settled first!

Moreover, the southeast here is an indispensable economic lifeline of the Zhao and Song Dynasties.

In addition, the Zhao Song Dynasty can also continuously recruit new troops.

At that time, there will be a large and continuous Song army outside, and countless landlords armed inside. How will this battle be fought?
According to the "Historical Collection of Peasant Wars in the Song and Song Dynasties", during the reign of the Zhao and Song Dynasties, a total of 430 and three peasant uprisings broke out in its territory, which is equivalent to an average of about [-] per year.

But none of these peasant uprisings overthrew the Zhao and Song Dynasty together, and they didn't even hit a big wave.

why?
The main reason is that, despite the external weakness of the Zhao and Song Dynasties, they are definitely professional in suppressing peasant uprisings internally.

If Li Cun didn't want to be suppressed, he had to find ways to block the Song army in the north of the river, north of the Qinling-Huaihe River, and then concentrate his efforts to eliminate all the landlords in the south of the Yangtze River, occupy the entire south of the Yangtze River, and then compete with Zhao Song in the Central Plains.

In order to accomplish this strategic goal, Li Cun must not waste too much time on the road, and he cannot even care about the gains and losses of a city or a place.

In fact, Li Cun would not have wasted three days here if the location of Jiande City was not too important to be missed.

After three days, Li Cun immediately ordered the army to march eastward along the Fuchun River, and went straight to Hangzhou, the political, economic and cultural center of the Zhao and Song Dynasties in the southeast.

The Huben army left, and Li Cun also took away a lot of regrets.

I don't know if it's because Li Cunzhi hasn't achieved success yet, or because Li Cun, who chose a low-key development route, didn't establish a political power like Fang La and couldn't give the literati the false name they want, or because the Zhao Song Dynasty really won the hearts of the literati clan so much. , even though Li Cun offered extremely high treatment, but still no literati took the initiative to vote for Li Cun.

In the end, Li Cun personally paid homage to the corporal, and he just invited a student named "Hu Sheng" and a private school teacher named "Kang Jian".

Li Cun saw that Hu Sheng was very clever, so he left him in Jiande City as a staff officer for Zhang Datie and Shen Yi, and asked him to take care of Zhang Huiyan and other Song officials while helping Zhang Datie and Shen Yi as staff officers.

And Kang Jian was brought by Li Cun's side, temporarily acting as Guan Gou's text.

Because the power of literati was really weak, Li Cun took away Tong Shu's family who seemed to be quite organized, and forced Tong Shu to be his deputy envoy to help him manage the growing number of people with Fang Wuji and Xie Shi. Military and various supplies.

But craftsmen, especially military craftsmen, Li Cun recruited quite a few.

Military craftsmen of this period, in the Zhao and Song Dynasties, were between soldiers and official servants. Like soldiers and criminals, their faces had to be tattooed, so they were also excluded from the ranks of ordinary citizens.

The Zhao and Song courts implemented militarized management of military craftsmen, which left them no freedom at all.

That's all, the key point is that Zhao Ji's military ministers like to do large-scale construction, so the labor burden of military craftsmen is very heavy.

In addition, when there is nothing to do, military craftsmen have to do private work for the powerful, and they don't get paid.

The most typical example is that Gao Li turned the supposedly most elite Central Forbidden Army of the Zhao Song Dynasty into military craftsmen. While repairing official buildings such as palaces and Longevity Mountain for Zhao Ji, he also used these military craftsmen to undertake various private projects , Earn nothing, earn a fortune.

More importantly, because military craftsmen are under military status, they cannot engage in other business activities like other civilian craftsmen to earn money and food.

In addition, officials often withhold money and food from military craftsmen.

This behavior undoubtedly made the situation of military craftsmen in this period more difficult.

In short, in the Song Dynasty, the treatment of military craftsmen was very meager, not even enough to meet their own food and clothing, which caused a large number of military craftsmen to choose to flee.

Previously, Li Cun's recruits were filled with a large number of military craftsmen who had escaped from various places. The reason why Li Cun was able to make so many siege equipment so easily and build a ten-foot-high arrow Although Li Cun personally taught the secrets to the tower, it cannot be denied that the military craftsmen under Li Cun also played a key role.

To sum up, it can be seen that military craftsmen in this period were enslaved by the government and served the ruling class, but at the same time they had extremely low social status, and their status was even lower than that of farmers.

It's no wonder that a large number of military craftsmen chose to join the Huben Army after hearing that Li Cun gave such high treatment to craftsmen.

After that, the Huben army came to Tonglu and Xincheng successively.

The officials and gentry in these two cities were neither willing to surrender to Li Cun nor dared to defend the city, so they fled in droves, leaving only a few dedicated officials who were like lambs waiting to be slaughtered. discipline.

After Li Cunbing took Tonglu and Xincheng without bloodshed, except for confiscating the homes and official treasuries of those officials and gentry who had fled, he did not commit any crimes against the others in Tonglu and Xincheng.

Li Cun also bought the food and other things needed at high prices.

It can be said that Li Cun's actions in Tonglu and Xincheng are almost a replica of Li Cun's actions in Jiande.

The only difference is that this time Li Cun only left a team of Huben soldiers in each city to cooperate with the officials who stayed behind to maintain order in the two cities, and told them that if the people in the city did not like them staying in the two cities In the middle, they left the city immediately, and then went to Hangzhou to find a large army to join them. They must not disturb the people, otherwise they will be killed without mercy.

In other words, in these two small cities, Li Cun did not place literati in charge of Zhao Song's officials.

What needs to be explained here is that it is not that Li Cun thinks that these two cities are small and the location is not so critical, so he doesn't have this heart, it is that he does not have such a person.

After leaving Xincheng, the Huben army continued to set out towards Fuyang along the Fuchun River.

Fuyang was the last city before Hangzhou. As long as they passed Fuyang, the Huben army could go straight to Hangzhou, Li Cun's first inevitable goal in this battle.

Who would have thought that Sun He, who was sent by Li Cun to capture Lin'an and cut off the possible reinforcements from the Huhua Army in Hangzhou before the Huben army came to the city of Fuyang, would report in person, saying that his front battalion surrounded the city. There was a group of remnants of the Song Army, and the other party asked to see Li Cun by name, and said that he could help Li Cun take down Hangzhou City.

As soon as Li Cun heard that there was still such a good thing, he immediately asked Sun He to bring him.

Li Cun couldn't help being a little surprised when this group of remnants of the Song Army arrived in mighty form!
This group of remnants unexpectedly numbered nearly a hundred people, and that's not counting the people in the carriage.

But this is not enough to make Li Cun curious.

What really made Li Cun curious was that the remnants of the Song Army actually had 200 or [-] war horses, and this was not counting the dozens of pack horses pulling the carts. If these dozens of pack horses were counted, They actually had more than [-] horses.

Needless to say, this is definitely a remnant of a real horse army.

How could this not make Li Cun curious, which Song army did this remnant horse army belong to before, and there are so many war horses?

You know, this is not in the northwest region, but in the south of the Yangtze River. The real horse army is definitely a very scarce unit here!

Li Cun scanned the remnants of the army one by one, and finally landed on an old man in his fifties who was the leader, and asked bluntly, "How can you open the gate of Hangzhou for me?"

The old man immediately bowed and said: "The last general is Liang Jin, the deputy commander of the Hue horse army. He originally went to Qingxi to suppress Fangla with Mr. Yan Tan. Later, because the general was careless and defeated, the last general and others covered Mr. Yan Tan and broke out of the encirclement. I don’t want Mrs. Yan Tan to commit suicide by the side of the field..."

After listening to Liang Jin's story, Li Cun knew that after Cai Zun and Yan Tan defeated Fang La, Liang Jin and the others fled all the way to Xixing Town with Zeng Sheng.

In Xixing Town, Zeng Sheng said that Fang La's group is powerful, and Hangzhou will definitely be captured. He is not planning to go to Hangzhou, but to go directly to Zhenjiang to play Tianting, and let Liang Jin and others protect him to go to Zhenjiang.

But the family members of Liang Jin and the others were still in the Hue Army. If Hangzhou fell, their family members would not be spared, so they discussed with Zeng Sheng to pick up the family members first, and then go to Zhenjiang to find Zeng Sheng.

Zeng Sheng knew that Liang Jin and the others cared about the safety of his family, and it was impossible to escort him to Zhenjiang without taking his family on the road, so he left with a few people who were willing to go to Zhenjiang with him.

And Liang Jin and the others immediately went to Shunjunhua to pick up their family members, and took all the family property of the Shunhua army with them, planning to go to Zhenjiang to find Zeng Sheng.

I don't want to, Liang Jin and his group just hit the main road when they bumped into the selection camp of the Huben Youjun.

Liang Jin and the others had more than 150 horses in their hands, so they would definitely be able to escape the pursuit of the forward battalion. They could even take advantage of the horse army's advantage to fight a battle with the forward battalion, which only had a thousand infantry.

But Liang Jin, who has been a soldier all his life, can tell at a glance that this thousand-man unit bearing the banner of the Huben Army is the advance unit of the Huben Army, which is as famous as Fang Layi's army, and there must be a large force of the Huben Army behind it. It must be impossible to defeat the large army of the Huben Army.

As for running, their family members couldn't outrun the Huben army no matter what.

When Liang Jinhe was with Zeng Sheng, he once heard from the dignitaries and nobles in Qingxi County that one of Li Cun's favorite things to do was to reward the captured women to his soldiers.

The point is, Liang Jin knew that this time they fought such a big defeat and ruined the only combatable soldier near Hangzhou. In all likelihood, they would be dealt with the most serious military law, even if Zeng Sheng helped them mediate.

What's more, Liang Jin also defied Zeng Sheng's wishes and did not directly escort Zeng Sheng to Zhenjiang. Therefore, it is hard to say whether Zeng Sheng would try his best to help them mediate.

Therefore, Liang Jin, who was already hesitating whether to go to Zhenjiang or not, gritted his teeth, led the others to surrender, and planned to use their identities to help Li Cun fraud open the gate of Hangzhou.

After hearing Liang Jin's plan, Li Cun felt that Liang Jin and the others might really help him open the gate of Hangzhou by fraud.

In this way, the Huben Army will definitely save a lot of people from dying.

The point is that in history, Fang Layi's army had to withdraw from Hangzhou City because of lack of food.

Li Cun boldly guessed that, as the political, economic and cultural center of the Zhao and Song Dynasties in the southeast, it is impossible for the city of Hangzhou to be without food.

You must know that Jiangnan has always been the largest grain production base of the Zhao Song Dynasty. A large part of the grain in the north of the Zhao Song Dynasty was transported from Jiangnan.

As a transit center, Hangzhou should not only have food, but also a lot of food.

Li Cun vaguely remembered that the history books said that after Fang La captured Hangzhou, he set fire to Hangzhou City for six days.

Li Cun reckoned that Fang La could not say whether the fire was caused by Fang La, but this fire was probably the main reason why there was no food in Hangzhou.

Therefore, if Liang Jin allowed Li Cun to take down Hangzhou City easily without giving anyone a chance to burn the food in Hangzhou City, then Liang Jin can definitely be said to take the first place.

Furthermore, after all, Liang Jin was born as a serious military commander. Moreover, he is over 50 years old, and he can still fight out of the pit. He must be stronger than Li Cun's group of mud legs.

Therefore, Li Cun immediately promised: "If you can do this for me, I will promote you as the acting commander, let you command 5000 troops, and the others will also be rewarded, how about it?"

Liang Jin also knew that the leader of the rebel army was worthless, let alone a general of the rebel army who commanded 5000 people.

But who told Liang Jin and the others to be desperate now?
Therefore, Liang Jin bowed to the ground and said, "No!"

Liang Jin, who was half buried in the loess, knew that Li Cun would never easily trust these surrendered generals.

Moreover, Liang Jin and the others are now surrounded by the Huben army, and it is impossible to repeat it again.

As a result, Liang Jin simply said to his son Liang Zhen generously: "Tell your mother and the others to come out and meet the general."

In fact, the so-called meeting meant that Liang Jin and the others mortgaged their family members to Li Cun as hostages, so that Li Cun might let them go to the Hangzhou gate.

This is a must.

If Liang Jin didn't take the initiative to do this, Li Cun would definitely bring it up.

So Li Cun didn't stop Liang Jin and the others from calling out their family members.

Not long after, nearly two hundred old and weak women and children got down from dozens of carriages.

And Li Cun saw a tall girl with star eyebrows and sword eyes, dressed in a Song Army uniform, with a short knife in her waist and a strong bow on her back.

The girl, about sixteen or seventeen years old, has a cool temperament, but also has a pure and sweet appearance, a slender and well-proportioned figure, plus her outfit going to the battlefield, four words best describe her - heroic and valiant !
"Huh~ This girl looks like Zhang Xinyu."

……

(End of this chapter)