While the Ninth Army in the north was fighting the Tatars to the death, the Jinling City was still singing and dancing, as if it could not see the slightest impact of the war.

Actually, too!

Although the Hetao campaign formulated by the Tang Empire was very important, it was at best a strategic battle, far from the extent that it could completely wipe out the Tatars all at once.

The troops used by the Tang Empire are only 40,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry, even if you count more than 10,000 young and strong people, the total number is only 60,000 or 70,000.

This number of troops seems to be not small, but they are not as many as the troops that marched into Liaodong back then.

And for today's Tang Empire, this bit of strength is only a small force!

Today, the Tang Imperial Army has 20 main infantry divisions, 5 cavalry divisions, more than 10 cavalry regiments, and more than a dozen other independent artillery, infantry and other troops, and the main force alone has reached more than 300,000.

This refers to the fact that there is still no mobilization, because in order to save military spending, even the main force on the front line is divided into two kinds of formations, one is the wartime establishment, and the wartime establishment is fully staffed, or even overstaffed.

The other is the peace establishment, in which the combatants are retained, but the auxiliary forces are only retained, and at the same time, the establishment of some units is incomplete, and on the whole, the peace establishment is only about 80 percent of the full strength.

However, even if it is a peaceful establishment, the number of its combatants and weapons and equipment is complete, and what it lacks is only some capabilities such as long-distance mobility, but it does not affect the main combat mission.

If all the above-mentioned troops are mobilized and reach a full strength, the total strength will exceed 400,000!

In addition, we have to add reserve divisions, the reserve divisions in various places under the Tang Army, the number has been arranged to more than 50, although these reserve divisions are strong and weak, the strong ones can have seven or eight thousand or even tens of thousands of troops, and the few may only have four or five thousand troops.

The shortage of reserve divisions is even more serious than that of regular troops!

The reserve division and the main force combined, the strength of the Tang Army alone has reached five or six hundred thousand.

Fifty or sixty thousand troops, this is only a tenth.

At the same time, this is not counting the Navy and the Guards.

The navy has a lot of troops, and the navy, which has many combat warships, has a total strength of about 60,000 people, of which more than 10,000 are marines, and the rest are sailors and artillerymen.

The strength of the Guards is smaller, currently maintained at 40,000 men, and although the Guards only have two divisions, these two divisions are super-large and fully equipped divisions that have maintained combat readiness all year round.

The total active strength of the above-mentioned three armies has reached nearly 700,000!

That's a pretty scary number, at least for any of the neighboring countries in East Asia.

It's a pity that most of this huge army is actually used internally!

That's right, you read that right!

The million-strong army of the Tang Empire, their real enemies are not foreigners, but internal rebels.

Compared to the threat of the Tatars, internal rebellion was more deadly.

Therefore, no matter how lively the fighting in the north is, the imperial army in the Zhili region has never been mobilized, at most it is just to send troops to participate in the war in a rotational way.

These tens of thousands of people in the Ninth Army, placed inside the empire, are actually nothing.

Otherwise, why did Liu Mengyang, the commander of the 13th Baggage Regiment, have the idea of fighting a war of attrition?

It was because he knew very well how strong the empire was, and the loss of a few thousand people was a fart, and it would be replenished in minutes, but he heard that the scale of recruitment at the War Department this year was much larger than in previous years, and the number reached 150,000.

From the number of recruits in the War Department, it can basically be judged that the Datang Army either wants to expand its army or is preparing for war.

The ordinary soldiers of the Tang Army, the early service period was three years, and later increased to four years, this additional year, the reason for the increase in time, is because the military wants to supplement the training time of recruits and the time for replenishing soldiers, and this period has to spend at least half a year.

If they don't add it back, then when the Datang Army has worked hard to train the recruits and send them to the army, their remaining service life will only be two and a half years, and the army feels that it is a little disadvantaged, so it later extended the service period by one year.

In this case, it also means that the army needs to recruit more than 100,000 recruits every year to supplement the units and reserve units to fill the vacancies of veterans in each unit after they are discharged.

But as of this fall, the number of recruits recruited by the War Department has exceeded 200,000!

This is more than the personnel gap caused by the normal retirement of the troops.

What are the extra troops going to do?

Expansion?

Without the number of new troops coming out, the expansion of the army is unlikely.

Then the only explanation is only mobilization to fight, these extra soldiers are replenished to the participating troops, so that the participating troops are fully manned, and they are also used to serve as supplementary soldiers, and after the casualties of the troops fighting in the front, these trained recruits can be on top.

As an officer of the Imperial Army, Liu Mengyang was only a lieutenant colonel, but he was also very aware of the operation mode of the army, and he knew even more that the General Staff Department under the Operations Department of the Privy Council had prepared tens of thousands of recruits in Taiyuan and Datong.

What are these recruits used for, you can think of it as if it were to prepare for the war damage.

Dead people, the Tang Empire has never been afraid!

Liu Mengyang is even more afraid!

If this transport force can be wiped out, and then this Tatar cavalry can be successfully damaged, then Liu Mengyang will be very happy.

It's a pity that these Tatars in front of them seem to have noticed that this is actually a retreat!

Looking at the Tatars running wildly, Liu Mengyang felt quite a pity, but it was a pity that his army was not a cavalry unit, but a transport force, and it did not have enough mobility to pursue the enemy army.

Otherwise, every minute will be a great victory to chase down the fleeing enemy!

It's a pity that his troops are not cavalry, so he can only watch Xin Ai Huang Taiji roar away with the remaining more than 3,000 cavalry.

After the battle, this transport force did not advance immediately, but was stationed in this chaotic stone formation, and if it continued to advance, with the remaining more than 1,000 troops, it would be difficult to cover such a large convoy, and it was very likely that it would be attacked by the Tatars at that time.

At the same time, it is also for the sake of the wounded.

Although Liu Mengyang didn't care about the life and death of the soldiers and regarded them as cold numbers, this did not affect him to pay attention to the injuries of the wounded soldiers.

Because his troops are now seriously reduced, some of the lightly injured soldiers in these wounded soldiers, if they can be treated, can completely fight with injuries, which can greatly supplement his current strength gap.

Well, in the end, he thinks about it from a purely military point of view!

In this battle, the main force of the transport unit, the 13th Baggage Regiment, was reduced to 1,000 men, and about 14 people were killed on the spot, more than 400 were seriously wounded, and hundreds were slightly wounded.

Needless to say, there is a high probability that the seriously injured will not survive, and the part of the minor injury, after some of the injuries have been treated simply, they can still barely return to the battle sequence, what Liu Mengyang needs is these people.

As for the rest, it is their duty and honor to die for the empire and for the Son of Heaven.

Not to mention ordinary soldiers, even if they are officers, even if they are middle and high-ranking officers, they must have the consciousness of dying on the battlefield when they go to the battlefield.

However, even if there is a certain replenishment of the wounded, there are still too few troops available for battle, and in desperation, Liu Mengyang can only let those people undertake certain combat tasks.

Although these civilians were all temporarily conscripted, they had gone through several days of military training before they set off, at least they knew how to load, how to pull the trigger and shoot.

Brutal hand-to-hand combat, naturally, can't count on them, but if you just let them pick up their muskets and shoot at the enemy, it's still okay.

When they relied on the car formation to fight before, these people played a certain role, they had thousands of people, thousands of muskets, even if the marksmanship was bad, the bullets shot out were full of damage.

In this case, it is not surprising that Liu Mengyang used these people as combatants.

However, Liu Mengyang also knows very well that these people can only be used under specific circumstances, and if they are ignored and really used as ordinary soldiers, the ending will be very wonderful.

After all, these civilians have not undergone complete military training, and their physical fitness, their combat skills and professional soldiers are completely incomparable, these are actually secondary, and the most important thing is military discipline!

The soldiers of the Datang Army, during the three-month recruit period, have three most important trainings, one is physical training, which is simple, eat and drink enough and then toss desperately, and train a body of muscles.

The second type of training is discipline training, which is brainwashed in various ways every day, so that they know the importance of obeying orders and let them form the instinct to obey orders.

The rest is naturally the training of combat skills, loading, aiming, shooting, fighting with bayonets, these are the most basic combat skills that need to be trained.

Generally speaking, the above three items are combined training!

The recruits who have undergone three months of training are completely different from ordinary people in terms of mental outlook and personal quality, and these soldiers have also laid the foundation of the Tang Army.

These civilians have not undergone military training, and their quality in all aspects is naturally not up to standard, and they can only be used in specific situations and occasions, but they must not be used as ordinary soldiers.

It took them a lot of time to treat the wounded and clean up the battlefield, and it is worth noting that they also harvested hundreds of intact horses when they cleaned the battlefield, all of which were left behind by the Tatars.

As for the wounded and dead horses that can be used as military rations, there are even more.

The Tatars left thousands of cavalry in this area, and the horses they rode were either dead or wounded, left on the battlefield or simply ran away.

It's just a pity that the soldiers under Liu Mengyang's command, except for the officers, few ordinary soldiers can ride horses, otherwise, he would have let the soldiers ride those horses to fight in a mobile battle.

Don't think that a military horse is not a horse, it really rode on a four-legged cavalry!