When the autumn harvest season of Chongzhen's sixth year really came, not only the main force launched a rapid assault operation, but also many follow-up echelons in Western Europe gathered to send reports on the occupation and clearance operations. Originally, the arrangement for the expedition was to launch rapid and continuous strikes with a main group of about 100,000 men, while the follow-up troops followed by a team focused on controlling the local resistance forces in Central and Western Europe. At this point, not only the large-scale military operations of expeditionary operations have come to an end, but also some of the clean-up operations carried out to occupy and control the local area are gradually coming to an end. After all, the "law and order strengthening campaign" against the hinterland of Europe was probably launched from the autumn and winter of Chongzhen's fifth year, when the army had just arrived in the hinterland of the European continent. At this time, in addition to the large-scale organized resistance that still existed in many places such as Russia, Poland, and southern Europe, the resistance forces from Central Europe to Western Europe had gradually subsided under the repeated severe suppression of the resistance forces and the combined pressure of political and distributional bribery and military action on the broad grass-roots level.

In the entire expeditionary operation, the regular troops annihilated more than 1.2 million regular armed forces of various opponents from the river to England with a total of about 50,000 casualties, of which nearly one million were killed on the battlefield and executed after the war. In the successive purge of the echelons, the number of reservists and irregular forces of the other side was purged, and at least a million people were killed in combat operations, and more than a million young and middle-aged people were executed in retaliatory liquidation.

Although the entire army did not carry out exterminating massacres in most places, more than 3 million or more than one-tenth of the young and strong people died in a region of about 100 million people in just two years, coupled with a series of political policies such as "equal wealth and poverty" and "no grain levy", which finally collapsed and calmed down all kinds of resistance of opponents in this era when nationalism was not widely prevalent in Europe and beyond.

During the clean-up operation, the contingent that continued to be reinforced in the second year also suffered more than 35,000 casualties and losses. Xiao Xuan was also able to roughly guess that the 90,000 casualties lost since the entire expedition were likely to have shrunk, and ruled out some minor injuries.

However, compared to the casualties, the greater gains of the entire army are not only those heads that do not have much significance. Since the classical era, the production of hard currency, which has been far more prominent than the East, has increased the continuous accumulation since the Age of Discovery, which still makes Europe in this era have wealth far beyond Xiao Xuan's imagination, especially when the plunder collection reports from France, the Netherlands, Spain, Southern Europe and other places have been greatly sent. According to the scale of 90 million taels of gold that has been seized and clarified, it is equivalent to about 3,000 tons in later generations, and the amount of silver is nearly 1 billion taels. Moreover, this does not include the various gold and silver riches in the hands of the common people below the middle affluent group, and even the gold and silver riches that are likely to be hidden by the local nobles who fled during the war. These gains will undoubtedly solve the problem of money shortage in the East for a long time to come. According to the estimation that the money stock is at most half the size of the economy under normal circumstances, the money stock equivalent to two billion taels of silver alone can support an economy with an economic output of four billion taels. Without a large-scale increase in prices, there is no doubt that it will be able to meet the needs of an economy of about 200 million people, which will eventually reach the level of development of Britain during the First Industrial Revolution. This also began to make Xiao Xuan understand how big the monetary advantage that Europe had accumulated in modern times, just through the price difference brought about by the money stock, I am afraid that the benefits obtained from various places in the hundreds of years of modern times may not be much less than the benefits of direct colonization.

Of course, what Xiao Xuan values most is not these metal hard currencies that can be used as a means of short-term mobilization, but also the cultural and educational resources and even related technologies that have begun to significantly surpass the East in the fields of culture and publishing.

Until the middle of the fifteenth century, the total collection of books in the West was always around 10,000, far inferior to that of the East. However, within 50 years of the advent of Gutenberg's movable metal type printing, more than 30,000 kinds of books were published, and more than 10 million books were distributed, greatly narrowing the gap with the East. Throughout the sixteenth century, 1.2 million titles were published in Europe. It is almost ten times more than ten times the bibliography banned and affected by the Siku Quanshu plus the Siku Quanshu. So far, Europe has also had a clear advantage in the fields of culture, education and publishing, which were originally leading in the East. Obviously, in Xiao Xuan's eyes at this time, the huge cultural and educational resources of tens of thousands of books and tens of millions of books and periodicals in the whole of Europe every year are the greatest wealth obtained in this expedition.

Therefore, in the immediate aftermath of large-scale military operations, the work of further expanding, developing, and even improving European papermaking, printing, and publishing began to begin rapidly. Of course, in the short term, the most important thing is to popularize the Chinese language based on Hanyu Pinyin. In this era, even if the Chinese language has been greatly transformed by oneself and the people around them, it is still too difficult for people who have no foundation at all. In the field of publishing, there are serious problems. However, if you only master another pinyin script, it will be much less difficult to promote it in terms of cultural resistance or time.

The large-scale iron tools and related military production industries that existed in various parts of Europe also began to turn to the production of agricultural tools and horse harness after they were completely controlled.

In the late autumn, the climate in the hinterland of Western Europe was still Iraqi, and the main force of the volunteer army also followed more than 100,000 people after making relevant adjustments and arrangements for the occupation forces, and the baggage team was loaded with gold, and at the same time, there were more than 50,000 various skilled workers and talents on the road back to victory.

"It's been more than two years, and when the team returned to the Central Plains, the expedition of the main force had been away from the mainland for almost three or four years, although there was no big thing coming, I always had a feeling. During the period when the army left, the potential contradictions and hidden dangers in the inland provinces were not small, would they really be so calm? ”

In fact, there is no need for too detailed arguments, just a glimpse or two from some simple and verifiable clues.

For strategic or geographical reasons, the weight of the status of the navy is not the same in all countries of the world, but the weight of the status of the air force is mostly not far behind. Even some small countries in Southeast Asia or Africa attach importance to the role of air power.

(End of chapter)