In December, the city of Nanjing has been covered in white by heavy snow, and as the sun rises, the triple gate of the Nancheng Jubao Gate slowly opens, representing the official start of a new day.

Outside the city, a large number of homeless people who went to the city to work part-time gathered together, these people huddled together to keep warm, and then heard the sound of war drums from three miles away, and a guy in his forties scolded: "These Qiu Ba are really idle, why don't you stay and toss blindly on this snowy day?" ”

A thirty-year-old guy on the side whispered: "That's Ma Junmen training, those Qiu Ba eat really well, one of my fellow villagers is a soldier in the left battalion, I heard that there are three dry meals a day, and there is a big fat meat to eat at night!" ”

The forty-year-old guy scolded: "Your kid is pure nonsense, and he still eats three dry meals a day, and the landlord in my hometown can't eat like this, how rich is this Ma Junmen, can he raise tens of thousands of troops?" ”

"Big brother, what the younger brother said is true, just yesterday, that fellow of mine came back and sent his wife a military salary, one or two lines of silver with white flowers, which I saw with my own eyes."

"You kid said it so well, why didn't you go to be Qiu Ba at that time?"

"Hey, I also went at that time, but people want to be under the age of twenty, I am thirty-six this year, and I was not selected!"

The two homeless people were chatting in front of the treasure gate, and at this time, the gate of the city gate opened, and a team of gatekeepers came out of the gate, driving the homeless people at the door with guns, and scolded: "You corpses are lined up, if you want to enter the city, give Lao Tzu some rules!" ”

The forty-year-old guy looked fierce, but he didn't dare to offend these doormen, he couldn't enter the city to work, and he was going hungry today, so he had no choice but to line up while scolding in his heart.

In the Admiral's tent, which was three miles away from Jubaomen, there were already generals in armor, there was no fire in the tent, and the temperature was still below zero. The hot breath exhaled by these generals made the big tent a fog, like a fairyland.

At this time, after the three drums were finished, the Chinese officer Zhu Tong saw that the generals had already arrived, came to Ma Cheng's side and arched his hand and said: "My lord, the generals have arrived after the drums, please order the troops and drill!" ”

Ma Cheng nodded after listening to Zhu Tong, got up and took the generals in the battalion out of the camp, at this time the soldiers of the five battalions under Ma Cheng had already assembled, and they were neatly lined up in five square formations and stood in the middle of the school field.

There are a total of 25,000 soldiers under Ma Cheng, in addition to the 5,000 musketeers directly under the management of Ma Cheng, Ma Cheng divided the remaining 20,000 soldiers into four battalions, front and back, left and right, and handed them over to the four general soldiers for management.

These 25,000 soldiers are all elites selected by Ma Cheng, with an average age of about twenty, after more than half a year of training and ultra-high-scale food supply, these people are all full of muscles, according to the standards of the Ming army, these people are enough to be elite soldiers.

When these people saw Ma Cheng coming out, they quickly knelt down on one knee and shouted: "Mark down and meet the military gate!" "25,000 people with the same voice, it's really sonic and powerful.

Ma Cheng nodded with satisfaction when he saw this, these people now have the rudiments of elites, and they can become real elite soldiers after a few battles.

But when Ma Cheng saw what these soldiers were wearing, he was full of frustration, except for the five thousand people in the Shenji Battalion directly under Ma Cheng, the others had no armor to wear, so they had no choice but to wear cotton clothes for training.

Of course, this is not Ma Cheng's Weapons Bureau not working, in fact, after Song Yingxing joined, the Weapons Bureau has burst out of its maximum production capacity, and the monthly slatted armor can produce 500 pairs. These armors seem to be quite numerous, but Ma Cheng's soldiers are even more, so far only more than 2,000 pairs of slatted armor have been produced, and even a battalion of soldiers is not fully equipped.

It's not that the Ordnance Bureau doesn't work, after Song Yingxing's improvement, the Ordnance Bureau has reached a monthly output of 2,000 pairs of armor, but what Ma Cheng didn't expect was not a problem with production capacity, but a problem with the supply of raw materials.

Although Ma Cheng's arsenal boasted of industrialization, it was actually on the same scale as a nineteenth-century handicraft workshop, and at the same level as the arsenal during the American Civil War. Reed bamboo forest

But for this half-mechanical and half-manual arsenal, the raw materials needed were not available in the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. Not to mention anything else, steelmaking alone requires more than 100 tons of refined coal every day, not counting the thermal coal needed for steam engines. Most of the coal needed by Nanjing comes from the Fengyang area in Jiangbei, and the poor transportation conditions, coupled with the pure manual coal miners, the Fengyang Coal Mine can only produce more than 50 tons of coal per day, which is the quantity to supply the entire Nanzhili, so now Ma Cheng's arsenal cannot produce at all capacity.

The lack of supply of raw materials has prevented the arsenal from producing at full capacity, and Ma Cheng has no choice but to reduce the production capacity of the arsenal by half, so up to now, Ma Cheng's soldiers have not all been equipped with new armor.

There was no way for Ma Cheng to do everything possible to scrape the armor and weapons, and even scrape the warehouses far away in the Suzhou Mansion Guardhouse, and finally scraped together five or six thousand sets of various types of armor, chain mail, cotton armor, etc., which allowed the four battalions under his command to avoid the embarrassment of wearing cotton clothes on the battlefield.

In fact, according to the scale of the entire Nanzhili to supply Ma Cheng an arsenal of pig iron is nothing, the Ming Dynasty because of the use of charcoal in ironmaking, the demand for coal is very small, and Lishui County outside Nanjing is the production base for the supply of the entire Nanzhili pig iron, the production of cycads is very famous in the country. The annual pig iron production of Lishui is about 100,000 catties, and the annual output of pig iron in Nanzhili can reach more than 10 million catties, while the pig iron output of the whole Daming is about 160,000 tons, which is the same as the output of the whole Europe in the same period.

This kind of pig iron production supply to Ma Cheng is naturally not a problem, but the Ming Dynasty in this period is playing with a market economy, whether you are the emperor or the minister, if you want iron to be simple, take the money!

This is not a joke, in the 28th year of Hongwu, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the abolition of official smelting everywhere, allowing private individuals to mine and smelt freely, and paying taxes by two-thirds of the output. This is also the main reason why in the late Ming Dynasty there was the world's largest national strength, but it could not defeat the 200,000 Manchurians. The whole country is a market economy, and your emperor needs to take cash for whatever he wants to buy, but in the Ming Dynasty, because of the poor financial situation, there was money to buy steel. The Manchu Qing outside the Guan, because they could loot the Guan, had a lot of silver in their hands, one had money and one had pig iron, so a large number of pig iron produced by the Ming Dynasty was smuggled by merchants outside the Guan, and then made into armor and weapons by the Manchu Qing Dynasty to attack the Ming Dynasty in turn.

Ma Cheng has now deeply experienced the side effects of this market economy, and it is clear that there are hundreds of thousands of catties of pig iron in Lishui County outside Nanjing, but Ma Cheng does not dare to use it. Ma Cheng had no choice but to go home and find a way for his own son, but in this environment, there was no good way for Zhang Juzheng to come back to life.

Ma Cheng looked at his subordinates equipped with a variety of armor, and secretly sighed and scolded: It is best for the Manchu Qing Dynasty to come to the city at this time, and then Lao Tzu will have the right to confiscate the property of you profiteers.

Although Ma Cheng thinks so, there is no way at present, and now the Manchu Qing Dynasty is fighting Li Zicheng to the death in Shaanxi and Shanxi, and Nanzhili is singing and dancing here, and Ma Cheng has no way to implement military law to nationalize the industries of these profiteers.

Ma Cheng wore a full set of good Mingguang armor, an eight-break copper helmet, and a steel knife made of high-carbon steel hanging from his waist, paced up the high platform, stood on it and said loudly: "Brothers, you have made this governor very satisfied!" Remember Bento's words, sweat more in peacetime, and bleed less in wartime! ”

As soon as Ma Cheng's words fell, the 25,000 soldiers below shouted in unison: "Sweat more in peacetime, and shed less blood in wartime!" ”

Seeing that the morale was like a rainbow, Ma Cheng nodded, and then said: "Chinese officer Zhu Tong, pass on the order of the general, on the first day of December in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the conference exercise officially began!" ”

With Ma Cheng's order, all the soldiers began to practice attack and defense in groups according to the formation that had already been trained.

The tactics of the Shenji battalion are very simple, that is, Ma Cheng copied the formation of the later generations to shoot in line, with four to six rows of soldiers firing in accordance with the principle of layered shooting, and the artillery troops covering behind.

The tactics of the other four battalions of cold weapon troops were a little complicated, and what Ma Cheng chose for them was the Mandarin Duck Array invented by Qi Jiguang. In the Ming Dynasty, firearms were widely used in warfare, and the lethality and destructive power of weapons increased significantly, and the large and dense battle formations were difficult to meet the needs of combat. Qi Jiguang, a famous general in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, applied this array for the first time according to the hilly and ravine, vertical and horizontal rivers, narrow roads and the characteristics of Japanese warfare in the southeast coastal area, and was named after the mandarin duck in the shape of a mandarin duck.

The mandarin duck formation is a team of eleven people, and the captain is responsible for the command in the middle. The long player holds a long shield to block the arrows and spears of the Japanese robbers, and the rattan player holds a light rattan shield with a javelin and waist knife, and the long player and the rattan player mainly cover the rear team to advance, and the rattan player can also fight the enemy in close combat in addition to covering.

Then the two of them are wolf whisks holding wolf whisks, wolf whisks are the use of the southern growth of bamboo, choose its old and solid ones, cut the end of the bamboo obliquely into a pointed shape, and leave sharp branches around it, each wolf whisk is about three meters long, the wolf whisk hand uses the sharp blade at the front end of the wolf whisk to assassinate the enemy to cover the advance of the shield hand and the attack of the spearman behind.

Then there were four spearmen with spears, two on the left and two on the right, and the shieldmen and wolf-bearers on the left and right in front of them. Followed by two soldiers armed with "boring palladium" to serve as guards, supporters, and other work. If the enemy attacks in a roundabout way, the short soldier will rush forward with a short knife to slash the enemy.

The division of labor of various weapons is clear, and as long as each person is proficient in his own kind of operation, the key to effective killing of the enemy lies in overall cooperation and prohibition. The Mandarin Duck Array not only closely combines the spear and the shield, the long and the short, giving full play to the effectiveness of various weapons, but also the formation changes flexibly. According to the situation and operational needs, the column can be changed into a horizontal formation, and a formation can be changed into two small formations on the left and right, or three small formations on the left, center, and right. When it becomes two small formations, it is called the two talent formations, and the left and right shield players are accompanied by the left and right wolf fighters, pikemen and short soldiers respectively to guard their attacks. When it becomes a three-small formation, it is called the three-talent array, at which time the wolf hand, the pikeman and the short soldier are in the center. The shield bearer guards on the left and right sides, and this changed formation is also known as the Mandarin Duck Formation.