As the saying goes, good fortune and bad luck do not go alone, but this time the situation in Bavaria seems to break this saying, because just when Bavaria's financial situation is unprecedentedly explosive, and the prince is thinking about how to spend money, and is ready to try 100 armored vehicles of various kinds, the Russians came to send money again! Because just a month ago, the Russians had just received intelligence about the Japanese army that surprised them!

It turns out that Japan's adventurous action against the Philippines in 1898 was very correct, and if you don't consider the diplomatic debuff of permanent hostility with the United States, Japan can be described as making a lot of money! Because after occupying the Philippines, it didn't take long for the Japanese to earn back all their original expenditures, and there was a large surplus! By 1901, Japan's economy was even better off than it was in history!

Surprised? In fact, it is easy to understand that this profit, like the water in the sea, will always be squeezed, especially since this is a mature colony run by the Spaniards for hundreds of years, and not a dime like Africa! Tropical cash crops such as palms, rubber, and sugar cane in the Philippines were originally sought-after goods in the market, but after the arrival of the Japanese, they immediately developed another product that was very popular with the British Empire - Finu!

The British are now very short of manpower, and this is caused by the prince, the Boer War in this plane is larger than in history, and the consumption is even more, not to mention anything else, after the Boers successfully occupied the Eastern Cape, the mobilized population directly more than doubled! With the support of Germany and the United States, the firepower of the Boers increased more than three times! The number of troops has also increased significantly. Historically, the www.biquge.info could not deal with 80,000 Boer troops, and the British had more than 200,000 troops stationed in South Africa at the peak, but now? According to the prince's conservative estimates, you can't get the Boers without concentrating an army of 300,000!

It seems a bit difficult for you to ask the British to deploy 300,000 troops in South Africa....... You must know that after the outbreak of World War 1 in history, after Britain completed its strategic mobilization, the total army gathered was only 658,000 people! And these people are not all thrown into the battlefield at once. And now the situation is that the British have to deploy at least 300,000 to 400,000 troops in the less fertile South African region.

That's just the number of troops, and if you count the number of people supporting them, it's even more terrifying! There are only 4 million blacks in the whole of South Africa, and a considerable number of them also launched an uprising when the British and the Boers were at war, and these African laborers are definitely not enough, so well, where do the British now draw auxiliary logistics personnel? There are many Indians, but unfortunately there is a large amount of land in India that cultivates cash crops such as cotton, and because the British over-promoted cash crop cultivation, India's food production is too low, and even leads to widespread famine. In order to ensure the cultivation of cash crops and to make up for the shortfall in personnel caused by the famine, the British naturally could not draw much labor from India.

As for Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I'm sorry, these places can provide industry, provide financial support, provide some military support, but they just can't provide a lot of labor, after all, if you look at the 21st century, these countries are only a few people .......

Now the British, who need a lot of labor, are looking for people all over the world, and the British need the kind of labor that can be imported in large quantities, can be consumed, and is not very expensive, and who can provide this labor? Oh Japan! The Philippines also has a population of tens of millions, and the Japanese did not treat the Filipinos as citizens, and stuffed those rebels directly into ships and shipped them to South Africa, that is money! And it reduces the pressure on the Japanese to rule the locality, killing two birds with one stone, anyway, there is no shortage of people in Japan, and there are fewer Filipinos, so it is enough to immigrate directly from Japan......

And these Finu not only alleviated the manpower gap of the British, but also brought a lot of income to the Japanese, reduced colonial resistance, and obtained the origin of raw materials and markets The development speed of Japan has skyrocketed, otherwise, it would not have ordered 4 new battleships from the British in one go, and there is a tendency to continue to increase orders! In fact, the military expenditure of the Japanese Army is the bulk of Japan's military expenditure, standing at about 7% of the total military expenditure! And the current development of the Japanese Army is indeed terrifying!

At the beginning of this year, General Kulopatkin, who was in charge of the military affairs of the Far Eastern Army, received the information on the military strength of the Japanese army in 1901, and by February 1901, the Japanese Army had 156 infantry brigades, 54 cavalry squadrons, and 106 field artillery and mountain artillery squadrons, with 8,791 officers, a total of 17,581 officers and soldiers, and 636 field and mountain artillery pieces! This is only the number of troops that we have now, and after mobilization, the number will increase, and the number of troops in July 1903, before the start of the war in Japan, is no more than this (in fact, this is the situation of the Japanese army at the same time in history......). ）

At the same time, the Russians were preparing for war in the Far East, with a total strength of only 90 infantry battalions and 45 other battalions (including cavalry and artillery). Moreover, there are a large number of garrisons among these troops that cannot be mobilized, such as 25 battalions and other units deployed at the mouth of Arthur, about 30,000 garrisons of fortresses, and garrisons stationed in Vladivostok and South Ussuri.

Such an imbalance in military power worries Kuropatkin very much. He even admitted frankly that if it weren't for the Navy's four just-completed Rurik 2 super warships with sufficient deterrent power, Japan would now launch an attack, and the Russian Army would not be able to resist it at all!

If the Germans need to complete the expansion of the Far East, they need two points, the first is to establish a logistics support system that can support the actions of the large army, and the second is to add a large amount of equipment. The reason is simple, the Russians even lagged behind Austria-Hungary in the military industry in the 1st World War, and in the stage of rapid expansion, the Russians could not come up with enough money to develop the military industry, so now it is good, the only way is to buy ideas and order arms in large quantities!

The Russians now have difficulty in completing the established expansion plan, and at this time, on the battlefield in South Africa, after the news that the Boers used cavalry to inflict heavy damage on the British army, the Russian General Staff suddenly discovered that in the same vast northeast region, the Russians could also use the mobility of the Cossack cavalry to attack the Japanese! This cavalry has a lot to do, and it can even quickly decide the outcome of the battle! (To be continued.) )