The spring of the fourteenth year of the Great Zhou Jianxing has arrived.

According to the popular saying on the Internet: the wheel of history is still rolling forward.

During the Chinese New Year, officials at all levels in Qingzhou were required to visit the areas under their jurisdiction: Xu Muhe personally visited the prefectures and cities, the prefecture officials asked to visit the counties, the county-level officials visited the villages or Wubao, and the village-level officials visited the households.

All households that have been organized into households should send a few liters of grain as a New Year gift from the Marshal's Mansion to the people.

This has several advantages: first, it can further unite the people and win the hearts and minds of the people before the war; Second, through such visits, the prestige of the grassroots and the image of being close to the people can be established. Section 3: Newly appointed grassroots officials in the marshal government can have a general impression of the population and land under their rule through visits, and can also make a census of the population directly under the jurisdiction of the whole Qingzhou.

The low-level officials currently appointed by the Jieshuai Mansion are mainly from those families in Juzhou, Rizhao and other places who joined the alliance earlier and abolished their independence.

It is usually the sons and nephews of these families, the young people of these families, plus some veterans of the new army who have been wounded and discharged, and militia captains who have performed well in previous years.

Before, most of these people have not really been officials, they have just been appointed as grassroots officials, and they have not learned the messy things in the officialdom, so they seem to be more vigorous, and the Marshal's Mansion ordered them to go deep into the grassroots, and these petty officials who originally came out of the grassroots were not ambiguous, and they completed the task before the first month.

According to statistics, there are 180,000 households and 820,000 people registered in Qingzhou, of which 170,000 are Ding Zhuang and Ban Ding aged 16 to 45.

Xu Muhe and his staff estimated that there should still be about 8 to 100,000 hidden households in the hands of those outer dock forts, and there were also about this number of displaced people and bandits in the mountains everywhere.

If these people can be used, the total population of Qingzhou can exceed 1 million, and there is no problem with 200,000 Dingkou.

Of course, this work could not be done in a hurry, and it was impossible to complete it before the Tartars attacked.

The local authorities in Qi Province can only rely on the current 170,000 Ding to resist the onslaught of the Tartars.

Preparation is still the most important task in the future!

For this reason, during the Chinese New Year, Xu Shiyang, the military commander of Qingzhou, only gave himself two days off to reunite with Zhao Shan, Zhao Lin's sisters, and his son, who had just learned to staggering around, and then devoted himself to intense preparations for war.

According to the plan of the General Staff of the New Army, the Qingzhou Jiedu envoy mobilized 100,000 men and women to start building large-scale defensive positions along the Yellow River and the canal.

The position started from the mouth of the Yellow River in Quancheng Prefecture, and was repaired along the Yellow River to the vicinity of Anping Town, Yanzhou Prefecture, and then turned a corner and followed the canal to Weishan Lake.

The entire defense line is more than 1,000 miles long, and the defensive distance is so long that it is almost impossible to expect to form a key defense.

This is also the big trouble brought by the beginning of Qi Province - in the land of the four wars, there are almost no geographical boundaries that can be used for defense, the enemy can choose any position to attack, and each position has a high probability of forming a breakthrough.

For this reason, Xu Shiyang could not accept the construction of permanent fortifications such as long walls that were too high and too thick - he did not have so much money and manpower to build such fortifications, and if he repaired them, he would not have so many soldiers to fill the defensive line, and there was no guarantee that the enemy would not break through.

Therefore, Xu Shiyang's choice was a large-depth defense with a combination of low breastwork and a trench.

Xu Shiyang planned to dig five trenches half a meter wide and half a meter deep on the west bank of the Yellow River \ Canal, and the excavated soil was piled directly on the edge of the trenches, which was the five breast walls.

The thickness of the breastwork was only a few tens of centimeters, but it was enough to withstand the direct fire of the heavy arrows of the Tartars.

There are also dense longitudinal communication trenches between the five planned chest wall trenches and fortifications, and a large number of small pits large enough to sink into half a horse's legs, so that even if the first few lines of defense are breached, the troops can retreat to the next line of defense in an orderly manner through the communication trenches, without being pursued by enemy cavalry, causing the collapse of the whole army.

Of course, in Xu Shiyang's view, the biggest advantage of building this kind of fortification is actually that the cost of the fortification is very low, and the construction method is really suitable for the Han militia - anyway, it is to plow the ground, and there is no nation on this planet that is more capable of plowing the land than the Han people.

There are also planned fortifications east of the Yellow River \ Canal, most of which are still similar trench chest wall fortifications, but due to the depth of the control area, the fortifications on the east bank have many canals or Yellow River dock forts as support points.

These support points can store large quantities of food, grass and other military supplies, as well as new troops as mobile troops.

Xu Shiyang and his staff believed that if the Tatars were really iron enough not to destroy Qingzhou and would not give up, then after they broke through the five lines of defense on the west bank and crossed the Yellow River/canal, the staff still could not accurately judge the location of the opponent's main breakthrough point, so everyone might as well wipe their necks.

It's not a question of the unqualified commander-in-chief and the general staff, such a chain of command is made up of pure fools.

Xu Shiyang felt that his staff team was very immature, but not so stupid.

The trouble is that the beginning of spring is the time when agriculture is busy, and large-scale mobilization of manpower will inevitably affect agricultural production.

After all, it is an agrarian society now, and there is no food in hand, so it is bound to panic in my heart.

Moreover, Qingzhou had just unified most of Qi Province, and if there was a famine in the first year, it would inevitably seriously weaken the cornerstone of the regime, so Xu Muhe and Xu Shiyang held a meeting of all the high-level cadres under their jurisdiction, demanding that efforts be made to maintain agricultural production while ensuring the combat effectiveness of the troops.

At present, among the 170,000 men in Qingzhou, there are about 7,000 recruits who are completely out of work, including 5,000 field troops and 2,000 recruits in the new barracks.

After the basic unification of Qi Province, the subordinate fleets of the coastal dock forts of the former Qing, Lai, and Deng provinces basically fell into the hands of Qingzhou, and the Xu family assembled a fleet composed of more than 50 large and small sea ships, and the number of sailors was about 1,000.

There are slightly less than 3,000 men in local officials, civil servants, and education and health care systems, and more than 5,000 men in military factories, iron and steel plants, salt companies, banks, and other enterprises (textile factories are mainly young female workers, not counting).

In this way, a total of 16,000 men under the jurisdiction of Qingzhou have been separated from agricultural production.

This proportion is not high, or even relatively low, and according to common sense, it should not affect agricultural production.

But the total population of Qimin is too small, and Xu Shiyang estimates that the territory currently under Qingzhou's control is about 120,000 square kilometers.

With such a large area and a population of only 820,000, it can definitely be regarded as a vast and sparsely populated area.

This created a problem: with the exception of the part of the land controlled by the agricultural company, most of the rest of the cultivated land was scattered around the former dock forts, and the farmers had to spend a lot of time every day going back and forth between several plots of land they cultivated, which was frighteningly inefficient.

In addition, the construction of the Yellow Canal defense line has mobilized a large number of young and middle-aged men and women, including more than 70,000 men alone, which makes it impossible for about half of the men to participate in spring ploughing at least this year, which will inevitably have a major impact on agriculture.