Master Yuan, start!

Want to join my staff? It's not that easy! Yuan Xiangcheng had other plans for Song Qing.

Seeing Song Qing bow his head, the four armies of Jiashen who were kneeling on the ground around him also kowtowed and asked for surrender.

Yuan Xiangcheng did not ask them to stand up, but instead accepted their kneeling with an open mind.

The National Defense Army is his base, and he has no intention of changing the thinking of these feudal armies in a short period of time.

After all, apart from the puppet army set up by the Japanese, the Chinese have always been more brutal against their own people since ancient times!

"Ming Ye, Sheng Fei, Wang Shizhen, Duan Zhigui, Jin Weidong, Wang Zhanyuan, gather the captives and break them up and reorganize them.

The wounded soldiers of the National Defense Army were to remain at Shanhaiguan to recuperate. Yuan Xiangcheng gave instructions on all the important matters.

After making the arrangements, he approached the remains of the hot air balloon lying on the ground.

He stared blankly at the captain of the balloon team whose body was already somewhat broken.

“Everyone has it”

"salute!"

Yuan Shikai took off his military cap and led tens of thousands of national defense troops to pay the most sincere respects to the martyrs.

Chapter 145: To resist foreign aggression, we must first stabilize the country. This is a mistake.

Two hundred miles away in Yongping Prefecture, the commander of the First Regiment of the Hunan Army, Chen, had a wandering look in his eyes as he looked gloomily at the defeated soldiers kneeling on the ground and running from Shanhaiguan.

"Shanhai Pass was breached, and nearly 4 soldiers were captured?"

Chen asked hoarsely.

The defeated Bannerman kowtowed again and said in a tearful voice, "Yes, Marshal Chen, Song Qing led the rebellion, and all 4 troops surrendered!"

"Useless! The new troops in the north are all useless!" Chen Bao shouted, standing up. "Even if we had 4 pigs, we wouldn't be able to catch them all in two days.

It's a shame you're still as famous as the other four armies of Jiashen Right Army, but you've completely lost all your face!"

As a fellow villager of Zeng Guoquan, Chen naturally had no good impression of the Manchus, and even despised the Four Armies of Jiashen who formed an army together with the Manchus.

The Hunan troops from the two towns had already arrived in the northeast of Tangshan, Yongping Prefecture. Why did the Fourth Army of Jiashen not allow the Hunan troops to enter?

On the surface, they said that the city wall was blocked and there were no extra houses to provide for the guest troops, but in fact, weren't they still afraid that the Hunan Army would disobey orders and seize power after entering?

Next to Chen, Zhu Hongzhang, who was bandaged and had blood on his forehead, also felt a little depressed after hearing the news.

Yuan Shikai's army was so brave that for some reason they could fire cannonballs from the sky. The Hunan Army defending the city had no idea where the cannons were fired from and could only passively take the beating. When he went up to the city to supervise the battle, he was even scratched by fragments from the cannonballs.

However, even if he personally supervised the battle, he could not find a good way.

Xifengkou is easy to defend but difficult to attack, but on the other hand, it also means that it is difficult for the defenders to take the initiative to attack.

In the end, Zhu Hongzhang had no choice but to abandon the pass and flee under the continuous bombardment of artillery shells falling from the sky, taking more than 2000 people back to Yongping Prefecture.

However, as soon as he returned, he encountered the defeated soldiers fleeing from Shanhaiguan and learned that Shanhaiguan had also fallen.

Seeing the bannerman in front of him opening his mouth to return to defend the capital and then closing his mouth to join Lord Rong, Zhu Hongzhang couldn't help feeling sad.

Before, there were 2 Zhili trained troops and 1 Zhili Green Camp troops near the capital, plus 2 Hunan troops and 4 Jiashen Four Armies.

They clearly had an army of 9, but why was it turned into a loose sand by the imperial court and was on the verge of being defeated one by one by the enemy?

If Yuan Shikai were around, he would definitely tell Zhu Hongzhang that this was a problem that the Qing Dynasty had been carrying around since its inception.

When the Manchus were in Liaodong, everyone was a soldier. But after they took control of the Central Plains, the Manchus, who used to have everyone as a soldier, became a country where everyone was a master.

From then on, the feudal Qing Dynasty never had a real "national army"

First, hundreds of thousands of Eight Banners entered the pass and fought from the northeast to the south of the Yangtze River. Later, due to frequent rebellions in various places, they had to form Green Camps in various prefectures to suppress the rebellions.

This resulted in the Green Camp being extremely fragmented from the moment it was born. In order to deal with possible rebellions caused by the Green Camp, the Qing Dynasty concentrated the Eight Banners in key cities across the country.

By establishing one or more Manchu cities in a province, the Green Camp scattered in the state capitals could be monitored to prevent the Han people from becoming too powerful.

However, this fragmentation is good for internal control, but once faced with foreign invasion, it is difficult to assemble a large-scale army.

Not to mention that it takes a very long time to mobilize troops. When mobilizing troops, in order to ensure the strength of internal suppression, only a part of the troops can be mobilized.

This problem has existed since the early Qing Dynasty and has been a difficult problem throughout the Qing Dynasty for more than 4 years.

When Emperor Qianlong was fighting against Myanmar, he successively mobilized troops from dozens of places, including the Jianrui Battalion, the Firearm Battalion, the Guard Batulu, the Fujian Navy, the Guizhou Green Camp, the Eight Banners in Beijing, the Solon Soldiers, the Jilin Soldiers, the Eight Banners in Jingzhou, the Eight Banners in Chengdu, the Taiwan Sailors, the Xibe Soldiers, and the Eleuth Soldiers.

It looked very intimidating, as armies were mobilized from all over the country, from Jilin in the north to Mongolia in the west and Taiwan in the south.

But the total number of people was actually less than 2. For example, only 100 guards were recruited.

Even if we mobilize troops from a county, no, from a town, there will probably be more than a few hundred people.

It is hard to imagine that this is something that the leader of a country with a population of 2 million can do.

Chongzhen, who was ridiculed by Qianlong more than a dozen times in his life, was able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops to fight against bandits, quell civil unrest, and defend against the Jurchens' invasion before he hanged himself.

Of course, Chongzhen had beautiful ideas, but unfortunately he failed to do any of the three things.

However, Chongzhen's failure did not mean the failure of the Ming system.

Or, in other words, this is the value of orthodoxy. If the ruling class and the ruled class are of the same nationality, then the ruled class will naturally have a higher degree of tolerance.

The militia in the late Qing Dynasty was also organized according to this principle. The Hunan Army and the Huai Army had a unified name on the surface, but in fact they did not have a complete command organization.

At its peak, the Hunan Army had nearly 12 soldiers, but they had different "camp numbers". In addition to Zeng Guoquan's "Ji Camp" and Bao Chao's "Ting Camp",

There are also the "Shun Camp" which is mainly composed of cavalry, the "Jingyi Camp" which is mainly composed of vanguards, as well as the Kui Camp, Hu Camp, Wu Camp, Zheng Camp and other large and small camps.

All in all, the Hunan Army had more than 20 battalions of various sizes, and they were arranged in a nesting structure, with large battalions inside small battalions.

1 Li Chendian's "Xin Camp", which was famous for digging tunnels and blowing up the Nanjing city wall, belonged to Zeng Guoquan's Ji Camp.

During the siege of Tianjing, the underground siege method was cracked many times. The Xin Camp dug more than a dozen tunnels, but most of them were discovered by the Taiping Army.

In the early days, the Taiping Army wiped out thousands of officers and soldiers of the Xin Camp by setting fire, throwing feces, and throwing explosives. They were suffocated to death, burned to death, and blown to death in the narrow tunnels. For a time, everyone in the Xin Camp was afraid of the method of digging underground and did not want to dig anymore.

Later, when Zeng Guofan wanted to mobilize the Xin Camp to dig tunnels, he often had to give orders through Zeng Guoquan, who would then notify Li Chendian, who would then go to the Xin Camp to stir up the atmosphere before he could mobilize enough people to dig tunnels.

6. This is why the Qing government immediately withered as soon as the foreigners reached Tianjin. It was not because they did not want to fight, but because they really had no soldiers available and no soldiers they dared to use.

The strength of the Nine Manchus' rhetoric is inversely proportional to the distance between the enemy and the capital.

1Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing government was finally forced to loosen the shackles and ordered the governors and governors-general across the country to form a new army with unified numbering.

This also accelerated the demise of the Qing Dynasty. Training a new army was like poison. If you didn't drink it, you would die of thirst immediately, and if you drank it, you would die of poison slowly.

3. The new recruits formed in the local areas were not loyal to the Qing Dynasty at all. Under the infiltration of the revolutionary party's ideology, they often disobeyed discipline.

There was even a phenomenon of "rebellion if wages were not paid".

The salary is about to be paid, so just wait for two more days and talk about it after you get your salary.

"What? You're saying you won't pay me anymore? Let's go join the revolutionaries!"

At this time, the Qing Dynasty was still struggling with whether to delegate power or not, so it made such an awkward arrangement when guarding the capital.

4 elite Jiashen troops were stationed at Shanhaiguan and monitored by the bannermen of the Jiashen Central Army. After the 2 Hunan troops moved north, they were not allowed to station near the capital and were sent to Yongping Prefecture to block Yuan Shikai's city, which also served as a deterrent to the Jiashen Fourth Army.

As for Ronglu, he led the Zhili Training Army and the Zhili Green Camp to the north of Tianjin, suppressing the bandits in the capital while monitoring the Hunan Army stationed nearby.

The three armies formed a pincer attack, which could both support and restrain each other.

However, what was unexpected was that Yuan Shikai quickly left Shanhaiguan in two days, making all the arrangements of the Qing court go to waste.

"Brother Chen, what should we do now?" Zhu Hongzhang asked, wearing a blood-stained headscarf. "Should we defend or retreat?"

Chen was a little undecided for a moment. It was already a stretch for 2 people to face Yuan Shikai's 4 troops. If the four armies of Jiashen were also incorporated by Yuan Shikai, then they would have no choice but to run away.

Before leaving, the Ninth Marshal specifically instructed him to act according to circumstances. The first priority was to guard the capital, and the second priority was to preserve the strength of the Hunan Army.

8: Zero; 73804 Luo Han

But if he were to retreat in such a sad way, he would feel a little unwilling.

If we fight, we are probably no match for their opponent. If we flee, it would be too embarrassing. If we defend, we will definitely not be able to hold on with the 20,000 people we have now.

Besides, Yongping Prefecture City is not a strong city. Yuan Shikai was able to capture Shanhaiguan, so why would he be afraid of a small prefecture city?

"Let's go find Ronglu," Chen made up his mind. "Join forces with Ronglu, and the Ninth Marshal will be able to explain himself to the court."

Even if Chen agreed, Zeng Guoquan would not agree to run back without firing a shot.

The only way now is to find Ronglu to join forces, and combine the Zhili Training Army, the Zhili Green Camp, and the New Hunan Army into one, so as to stop Yuan Shikai's southward advance.

But this also means that the Hunan Army will lose part of its command. However, with the enemy at the door, Chen has no better solution.

"Send the cavalry battalion to gather intelligence," Chen ordered his deputy general after leaving Yongping Prefecture, "have them clear the retreat route and harass Yuan Xiangcheng's progress southward along the way."

After that, Chen and Zhu Hongzhang led the Hunan Army from two towns and marched towards Wuqing where Ronglu was stationed.

...

Before Yuan Shikai launched his rebellion, the civil unrest in Zhili was quite troublesome, with various forces in chaos.

Under the names of the White Lotus Society, the Big Sword Society, the Red Lantern Society, and the Divine Fist, they killed officials and seized cities one after another. At one point, they had to rely on new armies such as the Jiashen Fourth Army to suppress them.

However, the bandits came and went without a trace. When they saw the army approaching, they fled in all directions and disappeared, so the effect of suppressing the bandits was very poor.

However, after Yuan Shikai launched the uprising, the momentum of the civil uprising weakened. In addition, Ronglu divided his troops to encircle and suppress the uprising, and soon wiped out some bandit groups such as the White Lotus Sect and the Red Lantern Society.

The reason was that Ronglu relied on the advantage of having a large number of people under his command and divided the 3 troops under his command into six parts, lining them up along both sides of the Yongding River, with three parts on each of the north and south banks.

Each section was separated by a distance of a hundred miles, stretching from Beijing to Tianjin, one heading south and the other north, to eliminate the rioters who came and went without a trace near the capital.

The rioters were armed with swords and spears, and could only run away when faced with the government troops. They only managed to survive because the army found it difficult to encircle and suppress them.

Now that Ronglu had divided his troops, he immediately achieved considerable results. Relying on the tactics of "marching straight ahead and attacking in groups", he successfully wiped out many bandits under the banners of the White Lotus Sect and the Yellow Lantern Sect.

However, another group of bandits called the White Tiger Group gradually emerged. This group of bandits never killed officials in the city, but only attacked camps and strongholds in the countryside, and would avoid officials and soldiers if they saw them from a distance.

When the county magistrates of the capital saw that the White Tiger Regiment was attacking, they would often close the city gates and throw out gold, silver, jewelry and food, and the White Tiger Regiment would retreat elsewhere.

The regiment kept searching the countryside for landlord camps and forts to attack. They had some cannons that came from nowhere, but they could break through the countryside camps and forts in just a few hits.

After entering the fortress, the White Tigers would choose to open the warehouses to release grain, and distribute some gold, silver and jewelry to the accompanying civilians. With this move, the White Tigers gradually became the largest group of bandits in the capital.

The number of people is said to be over ten thousand, and there are often more people following behind them waiting to share the silver.

Moreover, the name was praised by the people of Gyeonggi Province, and the bandit leader was honored as "White Beard" and "White King".

But the landlords in the countryside are not easy to deal with. Although they are not current officials, there are always relatives and friends in their families who are officials in the capital. Even they themselves have mostly donated money to become deputy prefects or magistrates, but they have not taken up the positions yet.

Therefore, as the remaining civil uprising armed forces were gradually eliminated or dispersed, the White Tiger Regiment became a thorn in Ronglu's side.