The situation in Shandong in September and October 1647 was a nightmare for the Qing court.

First of all, the famous yellow-clothed drama Kou Mo Ming led 20,000 horse infantry artillery troops throughout North China, and countless huge ships and boat divisions, attacked the city in Denglai Erfu, and even broke Dengzhou and Jiaozhou two towns and towns with 30,000 strange troops. Then, after capturing a large number of heavy baggage, the yellow-clothed thieves captured Anqiu for the second time after spending a day crossing Weishui, and then the whole army went north to conquer Linqu County, which was only one step away from Qingzhou.

Led the four thousand Eight Banner soldiers stationed in Qingzhou City, Leke Dehun played a sit-in war, his 4,000 cavalry infantry to fight the Ming army is a dozen and one accurate, but the damage to the yellow-clothed thief is relatively large, if he loses a thousand children and 800 people because of preventing the yellow-clothed thief from attacking the city and conquering the land, then he Lekedehun's life is not easy. Shandong has already lost more than a thousand men of the national race, if the remaining thousands of people have another difference, then he simply don't mix. Therefore, Luck Dehun simply pretended to be dead at this time, but sent troops from afar to keep an eye on the movements of the yellow-clothed thieves, and then continued to urge the prefectures and counties to step up the purchase of grain and grass equipment, and reinforcements from all over the country to speed up the gathering of Qingzhou, and then slowly marched forward to force the yellow-clothed thieves to fight a decisive battle.

However, thinking of this, Luck Dehun was a little depressed, because according to his experience, the yellow-clothed thief would definitely retreat in this situation, and then take advantage of the fact that the main force of the Qing Dynasty was gathered somewhere to go away by boat, and then go ashore to plunder, which was really a headache. But what can be done about this, is it difficult for the thief in yellow to come, and when he can't see it, let it gallop? That's even more inappropriate.

No matter how distressed Luck Dehun was, the situation in Shandong at this time could be described as turbulent. After the yellow-clothed thieves made such a fuss, it was originally because the Qing army was heavily stationed in Shandong (a total of 90,000 people. Historically, there were not so many Qing troops in Shandong), and the suppressed anti-Qing sentiment came to a big outbreak at this time.

Originally, Xie Qian, the "Gaoyuan thief" who had just been exterminated by the Qing army at this time in history, was still alive and kicking at the moment. This person was originally the domestic slave of Han Yuan, a high-ranking official in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Han Yuan was reduced to a minion. But his slave Xie Qian was unwilling to be a slave to a foreign race, so he took advantage of the opportunity of the Qing army being repeatedly hit by the yellow-clothed thieves, and pulled up the pole with a group of old brothers, and soon conquered Gaoyuan County, and beheaded Wu Zhenhua, the magistrate appointed by the Qing court; Later, it connected the empty Xincheng and Changshan counties, and swept away a large amount of treasury silver in Changshan County.

Last month, he led his army to conquer Zichuan County, which is located between Jinan and Qingzhou, and captured the traitor Sun Zhiqi, who was raising and transporting grain and grass for the Qing army. Sun Zhiqi died a tragic death. This shameless man who shaved his hair and made it easy to obey Dolgon was stuck in his scalp with an awl by Xie Qian, saying that "grow your hair for you!" ”。 Later, he himself was sewn up and died later, and the men of the whole family, including his great-grandson, were killed one by one, and the female dependents were humiliated to death, which is lamentable.

Hearing that thousands of people from Xie Qian's department had conquered Zichuan County and had been confronting the Qing army in Linqu for many days, Mo Ming was overjoyed, and immediately sent people to take the mountain road with a letter to contact him, and at the same time sent 30 armor and 100 sabers as gifts, and advised him not to resist the Qing army head-on, and to withdraw immediately if there was anything wrong. It is important to preserve the vitality - in history, Xie Qian failed because he was forced to defend Zichuan County for two months before the Qing army dug a tunnel to bury gunpowder and blew up the city wall.

At the same time, he led the whole army to cross the Shigou River and approach the city of Qingzhou and set up a wall. Invite the Qing army to fight, so as to make the Qing army unable to draw troops to exterminate Xie Qian's department. At this time, Luck Dehun had just gathered more than 15,000 people brought by Li Shutai, and the number of troops was only in the early 20,000s, and the number was not even as good as the yellow-clothed thieves after receiving reinforcements from the servant army, so he did not respond positively to Mo Ming's invitation to fight.

The Qing army was a turtle with a shrunken head, and of course Mo Ming would not stare at him outside. I saw that he sent some of the officers and scouts at hand to contact the anti-Qing forces in various places. In particular, he played the title of general of the Great Shun system and the envoy of Shandong Jiedu, and prepared to attract some of the remnants of the Shun army among the "Yuyuan thieves" at the junction of the vertical and horizontal, Shandong, and Henan to fight together.

The Yuyuan Thieves were a loose peasant armed alliance based in Yuyuan Laozhai in Fan County, Puzhou, Dongchang Prefecture at this time. The land in Fan County has been lost for a long time, and a large amount of elm money has fallen into the land to take root and sprout, turning into an elm forest, and more than a dozen armed forces under the command of Zhang Qi, Ren Qi (Ren Fuxing), Liang Min and others have taken this as a base, first to resist the Ming Dynasty, then to resist the Qing Dynasty, in short, to oppose the government. They took advantage of the complex terrain here to carry out tunnel warfare and guerrilla warfare, and had been fighting with the Qing army for several years. And because the primary enemy of the Qing army in Shandong has always been the yellow-clothed thieves, their life is more nourishing than in history, often sending a large group of horses to plunder the Qing court and county, and at the same time cultivating the "thief field" in the dangerous terrain between the Yuyuan and mountains in the Puzhou area to persist for a long time, so that the thin green battalion of the Qing army in Dongchang Mansion is powerless.

With the successive victories of the army on the east bank in Denglai and other places, the Qing army in the west and north of Shandong began to assemble in the Qingzhou area, which undoubtedly created great convenience for the Yuyuan army's operation. Although these peasant armies, totaling more than 100,000 and 200,000, were vulnerable in terms of combat effectiveness, they were still able to seize places and disrupt the logistics of the Qing army when the Qing army had no time to take care of anything else at this time.

For example, in the fourth year of Shunzhi, Zhang Ruxiu, the governor of Shandong, played: "Stealing pictures of the Erdong Tukou, known as cunning, haunts the mountains and forests, and is uncertain...... Check the post and raise the pacesetters and horses, the original amount is 3,000, half of it is now, and there is not much left outside the city guard sheath. The towns are far away, and when they hear that the prefectures and counties have changed, they will be exhausted, and the provincial capital will be empty. The dispatch of troops from all walks of life echoed in an emergency, and the thieves broke the city and plundered the city, and every recklessly. ”

It's a pity that this group of Yuyuan troops has a complex composition, loose organizational structure, and many people are still in the style of local bandits, so only Ding Mingwu, who had been incorporated by Dashun, led 10,000 people to enter Jinan Mansion eastward through Gaotang Prefecture after thinking about it again, preparing to take advantage of the Qing army's troops to march to Qingzhou to plunder in the empty Jinan Mansion to enrich his strength. As for the others, although most of them were absorbed by Dashun when Guo Sheng entered Shandong, but at this time and at that time, Dashun was hanging half-dead like that this year, and the name of the Shandong Jiedu envoy hanging by Mo Dashuai was a fart to them, and Ding Mingwu, that fool, would go to deal with the yellow-clothed thief.

In addition, the old qualifications in the Yuyuan army were also quite moved by the mention of the people on the east coast, because the people on the east coast had already bluntly explained to him that it was not interesting to keep fighting in the area of Dongchang Mansion, and it was better to come out and earn a big vote. And as Shandong became more and more critical, the Qing court would inevitably mobilize troops from neighboring Beizhili and Henan to suppress them, although there were not many soldiers in these provinces. At that time, 100,000 Qing troops will gather, and it will only take a little effort to eliminate the Yuyuan army.

It's just that Ren Fuxing's opinion has not been taken seriously by others, so in desperation, he can only send Du Chong, the small leader of the Yuyuan Army who is attached to him, to lead a horse team of 1,000 people and a foot team of more than 4,000 people to the east line of Caozhou, preparing to find an opportunity to get in touch with the people on the east coast, and by the way, plunder the relatively wealthy Yanzhou Prefecture.

In addition to the Yuyuan Army, there were also "more than 50 battalions" of local peasant armed forces on the ground in Shandong, which Zhu Langrong, the imperial governor of Shandong Province of the Qing Dynasty, called "a famous dramatist in the eastern province and a thief with a trumpet". It can be said that Shandong in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties was definitely the province with the most local bandits and peasants armed and the most fierce resistance to the government among the thirteen provinces in China. These local anti-Qing forces are all potential collaborators for the people on the east coast, and even if they cannot be allowed to come to take refuge, then they must try to maintain a good relationship so that they can fight together in the future.

On October 1, after confronting the Qing army for more than ten days, not long after the military team sent by Mo Ming returned from sweeping grain in the surrounding countryside, the Qing army in Qingzhou City finally moved. However, instead of going out to fight the people on the east coast, they sent a force of about a few thousand people west to Zichuan, preparing to overcome this nail stuck in the grain route of the Qing army.

It was not for nothing that they did this, because these days more than 4,000 people from the Xie Qian Division, which occupied Zichuan County, began to frequently attack the Qing army's grain transport team from Jinan Prefecture to Qingzhou, and the Qing army was unable to send a large army to escort it because of the shortage of troops (Jinan only had more than 3,000 people), so a large amount of baggage grain was taken away, and the losses were not small. In addition, Mo Ming secretly sent 2,500 people and 1,500 troops from Zhai Cong's army to the west a week ago, and went to Zichuan by mountain road.

The dispatch of this Qing army seemed to be a signal, and tens of thousands of horses on both sides of the sit-down war immediately started running at high speed. On October 1, Mo Dashuai ordered the whole army to attack Yidu County, the capital of Qingzhou. At this time, there were 4,000 soldiers from the Eight Banners, 12,000 soldiers from Binzhou Town (3,000 people from Dong Xueli's Department had moved west to Zichuan), and 4,500 local miscellaneous troops from Jinan and Qingzhou (Xiangyong, Yanding, Shui Ding, and Catcher), totaling only more than 20,000.

As their opponent, the Yellow Cloth Thief had 17,000 main forces (including soldiers) at this time, such as the regular army of the army, the New Army of the Eight Banners, the Standing Team, and the mercenaries; In addition, there are more than 3,000 servant troops in the Qin Shangxing Department (including the recently incorporated surrendered army) and more than 5,000 Chen Zhilong's troops, with a total strength of more than 26,000 people, and complete infantry, cavalry, artillery, and baggage troops. Although the grain is slightly insufficient, it will not be a problem to hold on for more than half a month, and if it is really not possible, livestock can still be slaughtered, and maybe the Qing army that has been harassed in the grain route will not be able to consume the people on the east coast first.

On 3 October, after repelling a tentative attack by the Qing cavalry, the East Bank Army finally set up camp after two days, and then the 12-pounder artillery unit immediately launched a heavy artillery attack on the county town of Yidu, which had changed hands several times in the past few years. (To be continued......)