choke element

Chapter 983 Torrent (Part )

Genghis Khan stood in the big tent and looked at his subordinates who had not been seen for a long time slowly coming in. He noticed that several familiar Qianhu Nayans walked with a staggering posture and looked very old.

The Mongolians, especially the Mongolian nobles, grew up eating beef and mutton, so they were generally strong. Even when they were a little older, their physical fitness was not worse than that of the average young people in the Central Plains. They were vigorous when riding horses and walking. But their aging came very suddenly, as if at a certain point in time, their energy and spirit suddenly drained out of their bodies.

Genghis Khan noticed the old faces of several of the thousand households and thought about his own age. He remembered that a western expedition took several years, while Guo Ning, the leader of the Han Kingdom in the south, was still young.

He chuckled twice, ignored the old companions who were walking up tremblingly, and turned around to ask:

“How many people can be mobilized now?”

The other tents near the Golden Tent were now crowded with messengers and scribes. The messengers whispered and handed arrows of various colors to the scribes. The scribes waved their brushes or feather pens, quickly recording the total numbers, and then bent over from time to time, with their foreheads almost touching the ground, and walked closer to the big tent to report the numbers to the sticky mountain in the corner of the big tent.

It had been nearly a year since Genghis Khan transferred Chongshan from Tolui's side. During this year, he organized the Bijachis in the Qiexue well, replaced the original Mongols with Hui people and a small number of Han people, and greatly improved work efficiency.

Because of this achievement, he secured his position as Yekdarughachi and gradually became an indispensable subordinate of the Khan.

Hearing Genghis Khan's question, the two Bijachi knelt down tremblingly, not daring to make a sound. Henhe Chongshan calmly flipped through the book and took a look, then said, "The Khan ordered me to count the troops that arrived at the grassland five days ago. Only half of the Bijachi have returned, so half of the number is accurate, and the other half was counted in Huolanbashi before. Now that it has been several months, there may be some changes."

"You tell me."

Nianhe Chongshan said: "Excluding the troops left in Bukhara, Samarkand, Yulongchijie and other places, and the many thousand households left in the grasslands and scattered in various places, the remaining warriors of the main force are 67,355. There are 4,193 soldiers in the left and right wings. There are 153,842 Kangli, Sarat and Kipchak people in the left and right wings. Among them, there are more than 23,000 armored soldiers and more than 49,000 war horses. After the army passed Kholanbashi, the Uighurs and Dangxiangs who came to surrender one after another were less than 10,000 who could fight. The rest were directly listed as Boole according to the Khan's wishes and sold their labor along the way."

Genghis Khan never had such an accurate grasp of the strength of his subordinates. Even when the tribes were divided and each thousand households were established, some thousand households were descendants of Genghis Khan's enemies and deliberately concealed their strength. In fact, including their own troops, slaves and prisoners, they could only gather two to three thousand troops; some thousand households followed Genghis Khan in the wars for many years, and only had one cavalryman after four or five tents.

After Genghis Khan conquered Transoxiana and Khorasan, due to Tolui's repeated proposals, he began to send many powerful Nayans to various places as Darughachi, thus separating them from their subordinate Qianhu and bringing Qianhu under the direct control of the Khan.

The more than one year since the army returned to the grassland was the time that Jihe Chongshan and others were busy with. This was also because Genghis Khan gave her enough power and she also got the help of Tolui, otherwise the Mongols of each thousand households would not pay any attention to a Jurchen surrender who spoke Chinese.

Compared with the difficulty of counting the Mongolian army, it is even more difficult to count the left and right wings that are rapidly expanding outside the Mongolian headquarters.

The left and right wings of the Mongolian army were originally set up for battlefield command. Mu Huali and Borshu did not actually directly manage dozens of thousand households under them. If the expansion of the Mongolian army went smoothly, this model would not change for another hundred years. In any case, wherever the Mongolian iron hoofs went, they would kill all the local people and destroy everything in the local area, leaving nothing behind except ruins and pastures enjoyed by the Mongolians.

However, because the Mongolian army suffered successive setbacks in the Central Plains, it did not carry out excessive massacres during its westward expedition. Instead, it spent a lot of energy to continuously integrate the forces of the conquered.

That number is terrifyingly large. Khwarezm alone was said to have 400,000 soldiers at its peak. If they were not counted and selected and fully incorporated into the army, the number of Kangli soldiers alone would be close to the total population of the entire Yek Mongol Ulus.

To truly incorporate it into the Mongolian military war machine and enable the army to play its due role, a repeated process of disruption, dispersion and reorganization is required.

For example, after the death of Tutuha, the first leader of the Boyawu tribe who was sent to the grassland, his position was inherited by his seventh son, Yultimur, instead of his eldest son who held power. Yultimur was soon transferred from the thousand households of the Boyawu tribe to the newly formed right-wing Kipchak cavalry thousand households.

Even so, there were still many twists and turns during the period. Not to mention the surrender of these foreigners, even Jochi, who had participated in the Western Expedition and made great military achievements, showed signs of being coerced by foreigners. He tried to consolidate his control over the Kipchak steppe and vaguely opposed the Khan, which almost led to a rift between father and son. The Mongolian army was delayed in Kholanbashi for half a year.

Fortunately, among Genghis Khan's sons, only Jochi had a weird personality. The others were all reliable.

Chagatai acted decisively, Ogedei was good at winning over people, and Tolui had a large number of people recruited from the Han area, who were particularly smart and capable. With their assistance, Genghis Khan finally reorganized the army and achieved a thorough reorganization during the long march.

In the past six months, Genghis Khan's control over many ethnic groups has become increasingly tight, and his command of marches has become increasingly handy.

According to the original estimate, it would take at least half a year for the army to reach Khorum from Khorumbashi. However, because the command became smoother and smoother, the army moved twice as fast as expected and arrived in advance in the autumn of this year, avoiding the pain of wintering.

At this moment, the army mobilized from the Western Regions poured into the grasslands near Khorin like a surging tide. The first to arrive were the Kangli people, the Boyawu people and the Kipchaks, followed by the native people of Khwarezm, who were called Sarat people by the Mongols. They were huge in number, wearing simple leather armor, and walked for more than a year before reaching their destination.

After the Sarats, there were all kinds of foreign tribes, including mountain people wearing Sassanian-style helmets and long-sleeved chain mail; highland nomadic riders who used split animal horns and hooves to make breastplates and held poles to guide their companions; and Mulay assassins who were covered in robes and used hoods to cover their faces and weapons and armor, and so on.

They brought their own herds or carried food prepared in advance, and after an unprecedented long march, they dispersed on the grassland. According to Genghis Khan's instructions, they settled down in the territories of different Mongolian thousand households and set up camps.

The armies of different tribes and different nationalities were not close to each other, had no exchanges, and had no subordinate relationship. When they were on the march, they were only responsible to the temporarily stationed Qiexue; the leader of each tribe or the warrior with appeal had the right to be summoned directly by Genghis Khan, just like the strongest stallion in each herd must be equipped with the best saddle.

In the past few months, Genghis Khan had been on the road every day, busy instructing the leaders of different tribes and issuing various orders to them. It was not until this time that he summoned his old friends because all the new subordinates were settled.
The tribes that arrived the earliest had been stationed on the grasslands allocated to them for more than two months, and the latest group arrived only yesterday. They had all been ordered repeatedly, waiting patiently for Genghis Khan to issue an order to conquer the source of countless rare treasures on the grassland trade route.

Such a large-scale mobilization was completely different from the Mongolian habit of dispersing tribes and people over hundreds or thousands of miles, migrating while nomadic. In order to ensure that the organization of the army would not collapse during the long journey, Genghis Khan and his subordinates took great pains.

Even so, the consumption was innumerable. Every day, thousands of cattle and sheep were slaughtered to supply the army, and every day, more than ten thousand acres of lush grassland were chewed into wasteland by the army's horses. Every day, people died of illness somewhere on the grassland due to acclimatization.

Even recently, conflicts of varying scales broke out between different tribes, causing casualties, but Genghis Khan didn't care.

He and the Nayans around him had seen this kind of scene many times and were already used to it. When the Mongolian army went out to fight, the camps of the various thousand households were also in such a mess, and they were constantly being consumed. This consumption and the frenzy caused by consumption were, to some extent, one of the reasons why the Mongolian army slaughtered and plundered wantonly wherever it went.

Because of the long-distance migration, the centurions and thousand-man commanders who saw their people and wealth shrinking had no patience to wait for distribution from the superiors. They were like a pack of hungry wolves, with only the instinct of filling their stomachs in their minds, and they had to realize the benefits of conquest as soon as possible after the battle. Genghis Khan had almost no way to stop them.

Even though his position gradually increased, he had more talented advisers around him, and he knew many more effective ways of exploiting people, which were much better than brutal massacre and looting, it was still useless.

Even before and after Genghis Khan unified Mongolia, when his prestige among ordinary Mongolians was the highest, he caused tribal backlash several times because of his interference in the distribution of spoils.

Now, Genghis Khan has returned from a foreign land thousands of miles away with his newly reorganized army. The members of this army may not be the most fierce fighters like the Mongols, but their original regimes and homes have been destroyed by the Mongols. The remaining supplies are only enough for them to maintain their march, and the vast grasslands cannot support them. They are just like the Mongols during the Western Expedition, and are gradually falling into a manic and bloodthirsty mood.

This is exactly what Genghis Khan wanted to see.

Even the most docile dogs will bar their teeth at people when they are extremely hungry. After a long journey, these homeless and helpless conquered people have only one way to survive. If they don't want to starve to death on the grassland, they have to bite, conquer, and plunder. No matter where they come from or what kind of blood they have, under Genghis Khan's command, they will become the most terrifying army.

It's ridiculous that Guo Ning dared to withdraw the troops stationed in the north? Maybe it was true, or maybe it was some kind of strategy to lure the enemy. Genghis Khan didn't care.

Because Guo Ning had no idea how much the Mongolian army's strength had increased after the Western Expedition, and he could not imagine how well the Mongolian army understood the Han country in the south!

Genghis Khan turned around and sat down, and said to Nianhe Chongshan: "Write it down, start now, and record the great war that is about to begin. Use this sentence as the beginning..."

Nianhe Chongshan immediately switched to a feather pen and used the Uighur alphabet to record Mongolian. This writing system, called "Tobuchiyan" by the Mongols, was widely used in the ruling institutions of the Mongol Empire, which was beginning to take shape.

Genghis Khan thought for a moment and said in a deep voice: "A great conqueror must have the determination to never give up until he achieves his goal. A conqueror must also be mysterious and must wrap himself and his army in mystery. A conqueror may seem attracted by the enemy's simple schemes, but in fact, he must use unimaginable means to destroy the enemy!"

After waiting for a while, he found that Genghis Khan had no intention of continuing to speak, so he couldn't help asking, "What is the unimaginable method that the Khan mentioned?"

Genghis Khan laughed out loud.

(End of this chapter)