Bai Qianfan has thought about how his life will end many times, and each time, the ending he envisioned is different.

In the beginning, when he first followed his father on the battlefield, he was still a seventeen or eighteen-year-old boy, and Lu Chuan and Ava were not as arrogant and chaotic as they are now, and they were still obedient to the power of the Ming Dynasty.

For him at that time, as well as the vast majority of the soldiers of the Yunnan Guard, their battlefield was in Jiaozhi, where they made meritorious contributions, following General Zhang Fu, they were invincible, and the braver the person, the more meritorious he could get.

At that time, in his imagination, he almost never thought that he would die in battle one day, on the contrary, he thought that one day he would make a great feat, and from then on he would become a marquis, shelter his descendants, and be able to guard one side like the Mu family, even if he died, he would die after enjoying all the glory and wealth surrounded by his descendants and his family.

And when he dies, not only will his wives and concubines grieve for him, but also countless of his enemies will celebrate the death of a strong enemy.

This kind of thinking could not be more accurate to say that he is young and vigorous. Now Bai Qianfan, thinking of himself at that time, can't help but feel dumbfounded, and he doesn't know what to say.

According to his rationality, he wanted to sarcastically criticize himself at that time, but think about it, if he was still fighting under the leadership of General Gong Zhangfu in the Yongle period, he would probably still retain a little bit of the youthful spirit of that time.

It is better to say that he has changed, but it is better to say that the world has changed. Only bitterness.

And in later middle age, things slowly became wrong.

Although he took over the official position of his father Qianhu, and because of the accumulation of military merits, he was promoted to the position of commander, and for a time he was considered to have reached the apex of a middle-level officer, and he was also successful in life.

But he lost the happiness of the year, on the one hand, there is the negativity of losing his son in middle age and having no family business, and on the other hand, it is also career.

For Bai Qianfan, who has been on the battlefield for decades, war is a big part of his life, and he takes his military exploits and the elite of his soldiers as the greatest belief and pride in his life, and losing the war is also a heavy blow to him.

First of all, in the absence of the British Gong Zhang Fu, he followed General Mu Sheng with the army to suffer a defeat in the battle of Jiaozhi, although he did not make any big mistakes, but the blow of the war defeat was real, for him at that time, in fact, he did not experience much defeat in the real sense, but after Zhang Fu left, on the battlefield of Jiaozhi, Bai Qianfan suffered a real blow for the first time.

The enemy, who was once vulnerable in front of the Ming army, became more and more tenacious and powerful, and gradually, the Ming army was not only unable to obtain a devastating victory, but it was also difficult to even gain a tactical advantage.

Later, the army of the Ming Dynasty actually became the disadvantaged side, constantly losing its own interests and the territory under its control, and in order to regain the lost interests and engaged in a protracted and long war with the enemy, and in the end, in this war of attrition, the Ming also became the losing side.

With the continuous defeat of the war, the army began to become weaker, the elite troops fought less and less, and the recruits died quickly on the battlefield, and many people gradually sank in the process, completely becoming defeated soldiers who could not be supported, and it was difficult to grow into elite soldiers through tempering.

Elite troops began to show a tendency to constantly concentrate around the main senior generals, except for the leading troops, deputy commanders, and the cronies led by the following senior generals, the casualties of other troops without background relations became more and more large, and gradually they could not support the maintenance of the team, and the ranks of some guards began to collapse and began to be unable to continue to maintain sufficient combat effectiveness.

In addition, ordinary troops also began to gradually withdraw from the battlefield, withdrawing from the first-line battlefield, withdrawing from the second-line battlefield of support and support, withdrawing from the battlefield of the last line of defense, until they withdrew to their original guards, and a large number of casualties also affected the guards themselves, and the organization of the guards began to collapse.

First of all, the main force of the guard gradually disappeared, and then the backbone of the guard gradually collapsed to disappear, leaving only a small number of old, weak, sick and disabled guards have continued to maintain themselves, let alone continue to participate in the war, and even their own turnover can not continue to maintain, the result is that a large number of guards deserted, not only can not absorb fresh blood, but your guards have also begun to flee constantly.

This kind of collapse is like a rout that blooms from the center, when the real collapse happens, first the core of the guard begins to collapse, the guard near the central area of the Ming Dynasty first reaches the limit of maintenance, unable to continue to supply more manpower, and then the edge guard begins to gradually decline under great pressure because of the lack of internal support.

When the declining periphery guards began to collapse due to tremendous pressure, the defeat of the external war became the last straw that broke the camel's back, and the periphery guards began to completely lose any support from the inside, and faced tremendous pressure from the outside, and the external forces were unable to give the guards sufficient support because of the defeat in the war.

Originally, the composition of the guard house was divided into two parts, the guard center in the internal area was in a stable state, and the number of military households was in a stable state, and this state was actually close to no increase or decrease, or it was accompanied by a steady increase in the population from generation to generation, and was generally stable.

Their task was to provide soldiers to the frontier guards in wartime, assemble them into a large-scale army, and fight under the command of the high-ranking commanding generals in wartime. The war on the frontier is not going well, so that the ability of these internal regional guards to project troops has gradually reached a limit, and in order to ensure their basic stability, this kind of troop projection from the internal regional guards has begun to gradually shrink.

But if there is still a choice for the guards in the internal area, there is no choice for the guards in the border areas, the enemy army is in front of them, they have to fight, when the enemy army is weak, they need to fight, when the enemy army is strong, they must also fight, even if they are so strong that they are no longer opponents, but in order to protect the interests of the Ming Dynasty, as the soldiers of the Ming Dynasty, they also have to fight.

From this point of view, Ming Xuanzong saved these people to a certain extent, but even these people were willing to do it, or they were unwilling, but they were dominated by fate and mission, and chose to fight for the distant future of the Ming Dynasty and this land, Ming Xuanzong gave up these and saved the lives of some people who were still alive, but sold the souls of those who had died and those who survived.

Bai Qianfan naturally couldn't understand these things, in the final analysis, he was just a veteran of the Ming Frontier, an ordinary middle-level officer who had experienced a hundred battles, what he knew was that the frontier support that originally relied on the military support provided by the internal guard was unable to get enough support from the internal guard because of the unsmooth war and the consumption of a large number of wars.

At the same time, due to the unsmooth external war, the way in which the external guard station built new guards or recruited new soldiers by relying on the expansion of its sphere of influence began to become difficult to function, and it took effect in time.

When there was a shortage of personnel both inside and outside, and the pressure of the war was increasing, they began to rely on a certain degree of recruitment, and the strength of these recruits was uneven, and some of them were carefully selected to serve as the personal soldiers of high-ranking generals, but in fact they participated in fewer battles, which increased the burden of resources for the war.

And many of the remaining people are used as people to supply the army, to put it nicely, it is called the reserve military service system, but these reserve soldiers who are supernumerary in the guard station have not been able to get good equipment and training in the Ming Yingzong period, so that these soldiers can have enough combat effectiveness, and the result of this situation is that the cost of war is getting bigger and bigger, and the results that can be achieved are becoming more and more limited.

And if this kind of final result is used to evaluate Ming Xuanzong's strategy at that time, it may be extremely correct, and it is the only choice that can be made.

This is also the opinion of countless people in later generations, who believe that Ming Xuanzong is recuperating and creating a ruling world. But the problem is that this is not the case, and it is not going to be in a bitter battle all over the frontier, in a dead cycle of resource consumption, an endless vortex.

It was Ming Xuanzong Zhu Zhanji's own strategy that created this situation in which he had to give up his interests and had no choice, and he was the creator of the tragedy.

When he took over this huge empire, this empire could have become the most powerful country in the history of human civilization, but for unknown reasons or reasons, he let this empire embark on a long dark road without seeing the light, and the end of this road is death, slavery, and the despair of civilization.

Returning to Bai Qianfan, as an officer on a frontier battlefield, he can't see the battlefield on such a broad scale, let alone understand the historical trajectory of later generations, but he can see the most real situation.

On the one hand, the war is not going well, and the arrangement of the troops must be cautious, and the main force must not be allowed to take too much risk, on the other hand, the main force will have to bear the responsibility for the defeat of the war, and if the elite force can be kept, then the responsibility will not be too heavy. Everything is still turning around.

If you analyze it from the emotional aspect, then there is no such thing as letting the cronies of the senior general's troops take risks, the general still has to rely on his troops on the battlefield, if his own troops are exhausted, on the one hand, no one on the battlefield can protect the life of the commander, on the other hand, after the war is over, what awaits him will not be a good end.

But both rational and emotional analysis have overlooked one of the most important points, that is, if they are all responsible for themselves, then who is responsible for the war? From a big point of view, everyone is responsible for themselves and the entire war, but in fact, countless troops like Bai Qianfan and his subordinates who have no background and rely on the war that have been gradually cultivated and developed over the past years are taking responsibility for the war with their own lives.

In the final analysis, this kind of war is actually overdrawing the lives of the army, not only the soldiers are killed, but also the traditions of an army, and it is not only a small guard post that collapses, but also a whole set of military systems that follow, and what is ultimately destroyed is the soul of the army, which is the military system that maintains the stability of the country.

At that time, when he withdrew from Jiaozhi, Bai Qianfan was twenty-six years old, and he thought for the first time that maybe one day, he would die on the battlefield after exhausting his last bit of strength, just like his colleagues.