Recruiting 20,000 troops is just within the financial capacity of Huainan at present, and at the same time, it can alleviate the situation of insufficient mobile troops that may be encountered, which is the most suitable choice at present. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

However, it was easy to make the decision to expand the army, but Yang Wu had a headache when he selected the corresponding governor.

When Tai Meng died of illness, he was replaced by the veteran Zhang Xun; When Li Shenfu was promoted to privy envoy, his position was replaced by Liu Cun; The position of governor resigned by Yang Wu was held by Qin Pei.

However, it is difficult to determine the new governor, because although there are many generals in Huainan who are qualified to serve as the governor, each one seems to be a little worse when taken out individually.

For example, Chai Zaiyong and Lu Shizhou, Yang Wu knows the abilities of these two people, and they are both generals with more significant contributions in history, but their current qualifications and merits in the Huainan Army are still a little insufficient, plus Yang Wu has not met them in reality, and he is not sure whether they are loyal and reliable, so naturally he cannot promote these two people at will.

And Liu Xin and Wang Juan's qualifications are sufficient, but their merits seem to be a little insufficient, at least they have not yet taken significant credit.

As for Zhu Siqing, not to mention, he is still far behind in all aspects, and his official position has been promoted fast enough, if he continues like this, it is difficult to guarantee that other generals will not complain.

Therefore, after thinking about several generals who were qualified to serve as governors, Yang Wu still couldn't make a decision.

"General Li, you are the privy envoy, and your privy council must also make suggestions on the personnel arrangements of my Huainan army. What do you think of the candidate for the governor? Yang Wu simply asked Li Shenfu for advice.

In the past year, with the resignation of Yang Wu as privy envoy and the appointment of Li Shenfu to Li Shenfu, the various systems and powers of the Privy Council have gradually moved on the right track.

According to the rules formulated by Yang Wu, in the future, there will be permanent privy envoys and left and right privy deputy envoys in the Privy Council, and the privy envoys must be military generals, while the two privy deputy envoys will be civilian officials and military generals respectively.

The purpose of this is to make the civil and military check and balance each other, and avoid the Privy Council being completely controlled by the military generals, and the situation of military generals dominating the situation; The reason for using only one civilian official as a privy deputy is to avoid chaos among civilian officials who do not understand military affairs.

Today's privy deputy envoy Yan Keqiu still understands military affairs after all, and there will be no problem with him serving as deputy envoy; However, Yang Wu could not guarantee that the civilian officials in the future would not gradually override the military generals, and even the Privy Council, the highest military body, would be controlled by civilian officials.

Although Yang Wu advocated "using civilian officials to control military affairs", this military system with civilian officials is to use civilian officials to check and balance military generals, rather than using civilian officials to command military generals. If there are civil officials like the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty who completely overrode the generals, and even the army that went out to fight was led by civilian officials who did not understand military affairs, it would be strange if such an army did not defeat the battle.

In addition, in order to avoid excessive power of the privy envoys, Yang Wu also stipulated that neither the privy envoys nor the privy deputy envoys were allowed to personally lead the troops; In compensation, the Privy Council's powers have been greatly enhanced, and now it has become the real supreme military institution in Huainan.

All kinds of military deployments, troop movements, and arrangements for generals must be confirmed by the Privy Council before they can be implemented, and if there is no time to report to the Privy Council in case of emergency, they must also be reported afterwards. In this way, the Privy Council's control over the military was greatly enhanced.

"Your Highness, according to the regulations formulated by Your Highness, although the Privy Council should advise on the personnel arrangements of the generals, it is only for the middle-level generals; And the selection of the governor of the first army is very important, and the last general does not dare to make suggestions, and asks His Highness to make a decision! Li Shenfu stood up and bowed, but he didn't want to express his position.

Yang Wu shook his head secretly, this Li Shenfu was too cautious, he didn't even want to make a suggestion, and he only wanted to avoid suspicion.

Of course, Yang Wu can also understand him, after all, Huainan is now the time of the replacement of the old and the new, as a meritorious veteran of Huainan, he is now in the position of a privy envoy, and his son is one of the five commanders of Yang Wu's army, he will naturally worry about attracting Yang Wu's suspicion, so it is normal to be cautious.

Li Shenfu refused to answer directly, and Yang Wu asked the other generals: "Mr. Yan, General Zhu, you are both privy deputy envoys, do you have any suggestions for the selection of generals?" ”

"Please ask Your Highness to make your own decision on this matter, please forgive your subordinates for not daring to say anything." Yan Keqiu and Zhu Jin glanced at each other and hurriedly replied.

There is no way, even Li Shenfu said that Yang Wu will decide for himself, and they are naturally not good at making suggestions; What's more, no matter who they propose to serve as the governor at this time, they may offend several other generals who are expected to serve as the governor, and they naturally don't want to do this kind of thing that offends people.

Yang Wu frowned, and looked at Zhou Ben, Qin Pei and the others again, but saw that these generals, who were still very active just now, looked like they were looking at their noses and noses at this time, and obviously they didn't intend to speak.

In desperation, Yang Wu finally decided to promote Li Jian to serve as the new governor, as for the reason, because he is not outstanding in terms of ability, qualifications or merit, but it is very balanced, and letting him serve as the governor is relatively the best at present.

In this way, the mobile strength of the Huainan Army will also be officially increased to 140,000 people in the seven armies.

In terms of the distribution of the seven armies, the two armies of Li Chengsi and Zhang Xun were stationed in the northern defense line to prevent Zhu Quanzhong from moving south; One of Wang Maozhang's troops was stationed in Xuanzhou in the south to guard against the two major feudal towns of Zhong Chuan and Wang Shenzhi; One of Liu Cun's corps was stationed in Ezhou as the western defense line of Huainan; The remaining three armies remained in Guangling.

Such internal and external checks and balances can not only ensure that the garrison of the three defense lines is sufficient, but also ensure that Guangling has enough mobile troops to deal with emergencies at any time.

After determining the new First Army, Yang Wu took this opportunity to order the seven armies to be given military titles.

When the whole army was just reorganized into six armies, although the imperial court was already very down, after all, there was still some authority, and it was Yang Xingmi who was in power at that time, so Yang Wu did not give the official military titles to the armies.

And if you use names similar to "Yellow Head Army" and "Silver Spear Capital", it is not loud enough, and it feels a little chaotic, so it was simply shelved at that time.

But in the past year or so, Li Ye, the Son of Heaven, was first killed by Zhu Quanzhong; Then many of Li Ye's princes were also killed by Zhu Quanzhong in April this year; Then there was the disaster of the White Horse Post in June, and those important ministers of the court were almost killed by Zhu Quanzhong.

By this time, the authority of the imperial court had been completely lost, and with Zhu Quanzhong, the "No. 1 rebel in the world", in front, it would not be a big deal for Yang Wu to do something arrogant even if he followed behind.

So this time, Yang Wu ordered the names of the Seventh Army, of which the two armies in the north were named the Left and Right Wuxiang Army; The two armies of Ezhou and Xuanzhou were named the left and right Tengxiang armies respectively; The three armies stationed in Guangling were named Zhenwu Army, Zhenguo Army and Tianwu Army respectively.

Of course, when taking these military titles, Yang Wu still avoided titles like "Yulin Army", "Tiger Ben Army", "Shence Army" and other titles that were obviously the pro-army of the Son of Heaven, after all, Yang Wu had not yet established the country, and it was still too early to use those names, and it was too conspicuous, I was afraid that even Yang Xingmi might jump out to oppose it.

And Yang Wu's pro-army was also given the name, called "Controlling the Crane Army", but this name is the pro-army of the Son of Heaven in this dynasty, and it is also one of the pro-army names of the Later Zhou and Northern Song Dynasty in history.

In addition, Yang Wu set up a separate cavalry army, called the Xiao Cavalry Army, with Shi Yan as the governor and Hou Zan as the deputy governor.

The power of the cavalry has been revealed in many wars in recent years, even if there are many rivers in the south of the Yangtze River, which greatly limits the power of the cavalry, but the Huainan cavalry has still achieved great results in recent years.

When the rebellion of Tian Hao and An Renyi was quelled, Yang Wu relied on the strong mobility and attack power of the cavalry to defeat and eliminate the enemy army many times, and made great contributions to the victory of the counterinsurgency.

In the war to eliminate Qian Biao, the cavalry led by Shi Yan and Hou Zan played a key role.

In the night battle in the north of Deqing City, if it weren't for the sudden arrival of the cavalry led by the two, they defeated the main force of Qian Biao's army in one fell swoop, and then continued to attack and chase and kill, maybe Yang Wu's main force would have fled back to Hangzhou safely before Qian Biao arrived. In that case, the war against Qian Biao would definitely not be the end it is now, and maybe until now the Huainan Army is still fighting with Qian Biao for the states south of the Yangtze River.

Therefore, after so many battles, the Huainan generals naturally attached great importance to the construction of cavalry.

Unfortunately, although Yang Wu collected horses through various means, Huainan still has a serious shortage of horses.

The newly formed Xiao cavalry army currently has only 3,000 cavalry, and the cavalry of the entire Huainan is only 5,000. More importantly, among the 5,000 cavalry, the cavalry of the Huainan Army mainly came from the 3,000 Shatuo elite cavalry that went south with Li Chengsi and Shi Yan.

After so many years and so many battles, many horses are now too old or injured, which is why Huainan has a serious shortage of horses to keep these problematic horses to make do.

Fortunately, although Huainan lacks horses, the terrain in the south is more suitable for infantry and naval battles, and Huainan is among the enemies in the south, such as Qian Biao, Zhong Chuan, Ma Yin and other forces are more short of horses than Huainan, so the Huainan army can easily dominate in the south.

However, the terrain in the north is more suitable for cavalry, whether it is Li Keyong, Zhu Quanzhong, Liu Rengong and other forces, they all have a considerable scale of cavalry.

Especially Li Keyong, the king of Jin, he was originally the leader of the Shatuo tribe, and he was located in the northernmost part, and the quantity and quality of cavalry were much higher than Zhu Quanzhong's. In history, Li Cunqiao fought with Houliang, and in each major battle, tens of thousands of elite cavalry under his command played a key role.

In the future, if the Huainan army went on a northern expedition and needed to go north to fight the Liang army or even the Jin army, the lack of cavalry could become a fatal problem.

Therefore, at the same time as the establishment of the Xiao Cavalry Army, how to obtain sufficient horses became a problem that Yang Wu urgently needed to solve.