Chapter 52: Expanding the Vine Armor Army

Last time, Buqiu sent ten small teams to escape from the city, including his two sons. Liu Hou sent a team to pursue these Soochow squads, and as a result, six were eliminated and four were escaped.

This is the fourth day of the rainstorm, and the rain is gradually getting lighter. The first three days of the typhoon were continuous heavy rain, and from the fourth day, the rain became lighter and intermittent, and the day was already sunny for some time.

Liu Hou also took advantage of this rare opportunity to go out for a walk and inspect the camps to see what problems needed to be solved.

He saw that the morale of many soldiers was relatively low, the musketeers were better, well-trained, and did not suffer many losses, and the morale was as usual, followed by the rattan armor soldiers.

However, the morale of the fish belly troops originally subordinate to Zhu Bao was very low, and in this siege, they took the lead, and under the desperate resistance of the Eastern Wu army, they suffered heavy losses. In just half a day, more than 3,000 people of the first echelon of 5,000 people were lost, and the first echelon was basically disabled.

If it weren't for the sudden arrival of the storm, the remaining more than 1,000 people would soon be reimbursed, and when the time came, Liu Hou would have had to catch up with the second echelon to the city wall.

In the face of such a brutal battle, in the face of such a large battle loss rate, the entire fish belly army was in a panic. They were afraid that as soon as the sky cleared, it would be their turn to go to the front line and die.

No one wants to die, especially this poorly trained fish belly unit, their discipline and obedience are still very poor, and in this case, the troops are faintly showing signs of instability.

After Liu Hou learned about these situations, he returned to the big tent and asked someone to invite Fei Yi and Zhu Bao to come over and discuss how to solve these problems.

However, before the two of them could come, the soldiers came to report that the adjutant general of the military police, who was responsible for interrogating the fugitives from Soochow, asked to see him. Liu Hou had no choice but to let the adjutant general of the gendarme, who asked to see him, come in first.

The adjutant general of the gendarmerie who came in was Huang Xu, who had won the first place in the archery competition before, and Liu Hou admired his amazing archery skills and transferred him to serve as an adjutant general in the gendarmerie battalion.

The gendarmerie is actually a supervising team and military judges, who usually do not participate in the battle against the enemy, but only picket the military law and atmosphere in the troops, which is equivalent to the police in the army, and supervise the battle during the battle, cut and kill deserters, etc.

After Huang Xu finished saluting, he told Liu Hou the purpose of his arrival: it turned out that when pursuing the escape squad of Eastern Wu before, the Shu army captured some people, and these people were all handed over to the gendarmerie for interrogation. Huang Xu happened to be the chief officer in charge of the interrogation, and now that the interrogation results came out, he felt that the situation was serious, so he hurriedly ran to report to Liu Hou.

During their interrogation, they found out that a person was Buqi's youngest son Bu Xie, according to the accompanying Dongwu soldiers, Bu Qi's eldest son Bu Xie also escaped from the city, but he was not captured by the Shu army in another fugitive team.

Originally, the escape of Bu Qi's two sons was not a big deal, but what made Huang Xu feel that the big thing was that he found a letter from Bu Xian. This letter is naturally Bu Qi's last letter to Sun Quan.

The letter expressed Buqi's loyalty to Sun Quan, and expressed his determination to sacrifice his body to drag down the Lingnan Shu army at the expense of this remnant. What shocked Liu Hou the most was that Bu Qi actually mentioned in the letter the weakness of the Shu army's firearms unit and hot air balloons.

It turned out that when the storm began a few days ago, the hot air balloon was blown away and blown crooked, and it was inferred that these monsters floating in the sky of the Shu army were afraid of the wind. From the fact that the Shu army retreated as soon as it rained, it was inferred that the firearms troops of the Shu army were also afraid of wind and rain.

He suggested that Sun Quan proceed from this point and study ways to restrain the Shu army's firearms and air forces.

There is not a single sentence in the letter about finding a way out for the two sons and asking Sun Quan to take care of his sons. In addition to listing the weaknesses of the Shu army that he speculated, there was also an analysis of the general situation in the world, and some suggestions on Wu-Shu relations and Wu-Wei relations.

In addition, there are suggestions on the strategic direction of Soochow in the future, and some suggestions on people's livelihood and so on.

It can be seen that this step is indeed a talented person. Not only because, although he only saw some unremarkable performances of the Shu army in the wind and rain, he speculated on the weaknesses of hot air balloons and firearms, but also because many of the opinions and suggestions mentioned in his letter were very insightful.

Seeing Liu Hou's surprise, he was very curious about this step, and he couldn't wait to recruit him immediately.

But from this letter, Liu Hou also saw that Bu Qi was a very loyal person, and it was estimated that it would be difficult to recruit such a person.

From Huang Xu's narration, Liu Hou learned that there were two such letters, which were placed on Buqi's two sons, and now the younger son was arrested, but the eldest son escaped.

Liu Hou was also secretly anxious in his heart, everything else was easy to say, but the analysis of the weaknesses of the firearms unit and the hot air balloon unit in this letter must not be ignored, because this is almost the truth.

Once Sun Quan gets this letter and comes up with a targeted way to deal with it, it is estimated that the combat difficulty of his own troops will increase a lot in the future. And Liu Hou is a person who is most afraid of trouble, and if he can avoid unnecessary trouble, Liu Hou will try his best to avoid it.

However, the infantry association had already escaped from the field of vision of the Shu army's tracking team, and the traces along the way were eliminated and covered by the wind and rain, so they could not be found for a while. Liu Hou couldn't, so he had to send three messengers to the three checkpoints on the Nanling Ancient Road to tell them the situation, so that they could pay attention to arresting these small detachments, and they must not be allowed to escape from Lingnan.

After dealing with this matter, Liu Hou instructed Huang Xuhou to wait for explanation. He hoped that he could use this step to lower his steps in the future. Waiting for Huang Xu to leave as promised, Fei Yi and Zhu Bao came to Liu Hou's big tent one after another.

General Liu Hou told these two about the demoralization of the lieutenant general, and asked them to come up with ideas to see if there was a good way to improve morale and eliminate the instability of the troops.

Zhu Bao proposed to increase their salaries. At present, these fish belly troops only have 500 yuan per month, while the rattan armor soldiers have the same money, and the musketeers are the best, with two yuan of silver per month. This is also one reason why the musketeers are always in high spirits.

Fei Yi proposed to promote these fish belly troops to official combat troops, after all, these people have done a good job during this period of time, and although they did not make any contributions, they did not defect, which shows that their loyalty is not a big problem.

The last time they stormed Panyu City, the first echelon suffered heavy casualties, and their loyalty and courage were confirmed.

Hearing this, Liu Hou disagreed, these people were just forced by the butcher's knife of the gendarmerie behind them, if they fled backwards, they would die, and there was still a chance of life if they rushed forward, they had no choice but to rush forward.

Liu Hou summarized the opinions of the two and found that they were very similar to those in a best-selling book he had read before.

In that best-selling book, it was said that when a new official takes office, there are three fires, and when a new official takes office, if he wants to win the hearts of employees, he can generally do three things: the first fire, increase their salaries. You've just taken office, and there's a lot where you need their support. Raising salaries in exchange for support is one of the common means used by new officials to take office;

Second, improve the company's working environment. For example, decoration, so that everyone has a good office environment, the mood is naturally comfortable, and the work will naturally be harder;

Third, if some people are promoted, these people will naturally be grateful to you and see you as a benefactor.

Zhu Bao's opinion is the first fire mentioned here, to raise everyone's salary.

And Fei Yi's proposal is the third fire - promotion, but he means to promote everyone, not just a few people.

Although this promotion is very small, only from the fish belly unit to the official soldier, he believes that this can also make all the soldiers grateful to Dade, although it may not necessarily be loyal to himself, but it is still possible to improve morale and increase everyone's sense of belonging.

Thinking that there was a theoretical basis for this, Liu Hou agreed to the proposal of Zhu Bao and Fei Yi, and promoted this unit to a formal combat unit under his command, which was essentially a rattan armor soldier, and the treatment was the same as that of the vine armor soldier, with a consistent monthly payment.

It just so happened that Liu Hou brought over the rattan armor of the 15,000 rattan armor army stationed on the Nanling Ancient Road, and used it just right for this newly formed army.

This army originally had 20,000 people, and Zhu Bao sacrificed some of them in the trebuchet battle with Panyu City in the early stage, plus more than 3,000 sacrifices in the storming of Panyu City a few days ago, and now there are only about 15,000 left.

In this way, the vine armor army quickly recovered to 30,000 troops, of course, the combat effectiveness is far inferior to the original vine armor army, this is not urgent, it needs to go through a long period of training and real combat tempering, in order to make them become an invincible iron army again.

Sure enough, as soon as this order was announced, the entire fish belly army camp was boiling, and the previous gloomy mood was swept away. All the soldiers were screaming with excitement, and many were raising their hands in cheers.

Liu Hou was also very happy, it seemed that although these people were originally his enemies and prisoners he had captured, they did not have much loyalty to the original lord. Before, the reason why they were unhappy was not because they missed their old master and didn't want to be loyal to Liu Hou, but because their treatment was too poor, their status was too low, and they were afraid of being used as cannon fodder to die on the battlefield.

Now that their treatment and status have been raised, and they can wear invulnerable rattan armor, the threat of death has been greatly reduced, and their morale has been increased countless times at once.

Moreover, Liu Hou has already obtained their allegiance, although the foundation of this allegiance is still very weak, but I believe that in time, they will be able to return to their hearts and become loyal warriors under Liu Hou.

Since he had paid a big price, Liu Hou was not polite to them, he ordered to go down, pay a month's full salary in advance, boost their morale, and then start harsh training for them.

Liu Hou transferred all the veterans of the Fujian Army and adopted the method of one belt and one belt to conduct surprise special training for the recruits, so as to raise the training level of the recruits in the shortest possible time.

The results of one-on-one training are of course good, and the combat effectiveness and discipline of the entire vine armor army are gradually rising, and I believe that the vine armor army will soon be able to recover to the level it had in its heyday.

Seeing the gratifying changes in the army, Liu Hou was in a good mood, his anxiety was alleviated, and he also had the heart to find a woman. No, after a few days of intermittent rain, on the seventh day, the weather finally cleared completely, and he finally remembered Zhou Xue, who was left out in the barracks, and personally went to her military tent to invite her out to play.

"Don't go!" After hearing Liu Hou's request to play, Zhou Xue simply and clearly refused.

"Uh......" Liu Hou was very helpless, this guy also said that he was here to serve the pillow seat, this has the appearance of serving the pillow seat, and he didn't even want to go out to play together, Niu 13 baked like this, is he here to be a concubine or a master?

Zhou Xue has not had a good time these days, since Liu Hou told her that last time, her heart is also very anxious, she is really suspicious of the orthodoxy of Dongwu and Xishu, and she has doubts about Sun Quan and Liu Hou's righteousness, so by extension, she has doubts about what she has done before.

In professional terms, she now has problems in her perception of the world, her outlook on life and the world is deviant, she begins to doubt life, feels confused about the future, and her thinking is confused......

It's not psychosis, but the symptoms are comparable to psychosis, and if you let it go, you won't be able to get out of the quagmire, and in severe cases, you may become suicidal.