Since it is already possible to recruit rural scholars, there is no reason why peasant soldiers cannot be recruited.

Zhou Lang's army has not been expanded for a long time, and now the army structure has been basically perfected, the organization has been unified, and the training has reached the standard, and it has a certain amount of combat experience, which can be regarded as a mature army.

The expansion of the army is on the agenda.

There is no shortage of money for the time being, Zhou Lang does not like to hold too much cash, burning money to occupy the market is the choice in the past, and now he chooses to burn money to enhance his strength.

I thought that there would not be many soldiers recruited, because because the Heaven and Earth Society would take away a large number of idle young people, and the landlord regimental training took away a group of rural young people, there should not be many remaining young people in Fengshan County. Unexpectedly, as soon as the recruitment list came out, there were quite a lot of young people who went to various recruitment points to apply, and hundreds of people applied every day and were sent to Dagu Port, and the news from the recruitment offices in various places said that the young people who lined up to apply for recruitment every day were crowded with recruiting offices.

Zhou Lang's recruiting offices are distributed all over Fengshan County, which is the flood land of the Qing army, those barracks were taken over by Zhou Lang, basically according to the number of garrisons of the Qing army, Zhou Lang's purpose is not to prevent banditry, mainly to deter landlords around the country, as for the bandits, bandits did not rebound, that is mainly because of the deterrence of the landlords' armed forces.

These recruiting offices are located on major transportation routes, but most of them are actually rural areas, making it easy to recruit soldiers. The soldiers came here to sign up, there was no requirement at the beginning, the results were mixed, some were too young, some were too old, originally worried that they would not be able to recruit people, and they picked up the vegetables in the basket, and after seeing the gratifying results, Zhou Lang began to set strict standards, and sent a bamboo pole to various places, about one meter and five lengths, and everything that was lower than the bamboo pole was not wanted. The old and weak soldiers who had already been sent to Tagu Harbor were sent back with a silver dollar each.

In terms of age, don't be over thirty, but if you're young, you can be lenient, almost no age limit, as long as it's a boy, you want it, Zhou Lang plans to play the cultivation plan.

As a result, a large number of children under the age of 10 were sent to the recruitment site by their families, and the boy was fine, and then someone simply stuffed the girl as a boy.

In this case, Zhou Lang can only sigh, it is all the scars brought by the war to the society. The Heaven and Earth Society Uprising, the Qing Army suppressed, repeated tug-of-war, was a huge damage to the social order, many people died for no reason, most of these boys and girls became orphans because of the war, and many of them were the descendants of the soldiers of the Heaven and Earth Society Uprising.

Their parents, or died, or fled, in short, lost a trace, these children have no one to support, the unlucky can only wander, the lucky ones, there are relatives to raise on their behalf, but some relatives have limited ability, and the extra pressure to raise other people's children is very high, when Zhou Lang began to recruit soldiers, he found that even no matter how small the boy is, so some people were ruthless and sent the children of their relatives in.

Zhou Lang thought about it, his original intention was to recruit boys, and then teach them to read and write, and cultivate them seriously, so that they would be his closest cronies in the future, but the girl, after thinking about it, he also acquiesced in this situation. After all, boys are more valuable in this era, and the sale of young children is very common, and even if boys are sold, they are mostly bought by families who can't have children in order to pass on their ancestry, but girls have a high chance of being sold into Qinglou.

So he simply recruited these girls and handed them over to Chen Sanmei to take care of, and also taught them to read and write, as for what they could do in the future, Zhou Lang didn't think about it for a while.

Zhou Lang didn't expect this opening to be too big, and it was a little out of control.

The number of boys is relatively normal, one or two hundred people are sent every day, but the number of girls continues to increase, so that he is aware of some problems, many poor families with too many daughters simply regard Zhou Lang here as a workhouse, and even send their daughters over. This is what Zhou Lang couldn't have imagined, but the times are like this, poverty is the greatest test of human nature, in this era, the poorest Fujian Province is popular with baby drowning, can you accept it? If you don't accept it, you may drown!

Zhou Lang couldn't help but accept it, and the girls who were a few months old continued to gather from all over the country to Dagu Port, and the conscription was final, and Zhou Lang really decided to open a workhouse.

In the end, 2,000 boys under the age of 10 and 20,000 girls were sent, and the extra ones were probably sent by the mothers with tears in their eyes.

There are so many of them, so Zhou Lang has to think about the future of these children, if it is only a few hundred, just raise it, raise the men to do things, and the women to marry. But there are so many of them, raising and marrying people is too laissez-faire, and Zhou Lang thinks of setting up a factory.

Now these girls can't work, Zhou Lang doesn't want them to do hard labor, it is imperative to promote the industrial revolution, there are no conditions now, there will always be a time, so start cultivating now, these girls are the seeds of the first batch of industrial revolution.

These are, of course, trivial, and the conscription has not been delayed.

A large number of young men and women gathered in Dagu Port from all over the country, and after further screening, 10,000 people were left, and then the recruitment was stopped.

These soldiers will be trained first, and will not directly become an army, and Zhou Lang plans to establish a training camp dedicated to military training.

Fischer did not participate in the Northern Expedition, he stayed in Fengshan County as a military adviser hired by Zhou Lang, and he was not alone, but established a team with twenty mercenaries, all branches of the army, artillery, cavalry, and chasseurs, only the lack of engineering troops.

When this group of soldiers is trained, Zhou Lang will not expand the army structure, but expand the strength of each formation. The regiment would be expanded to three hundred, the battalion to a thousand, and the brigade to three thousand.

At the same time, various formalizations were initiated.

The specifications of the military uniform have been determined, and Zhou Lang is very concerned about it, and the military appearance is related to the soldier's sense of honor. Under the influence of the Chinese social concept that good men should not be soldiers, Chinese soldiers are often the soldiers with the least sense of honor, so it is more necessary to improve their sense of honor.

The improvement of this sense of honor is not overnight, but because of the high military salary policy adopted by Zhou Lang, although no one can afford the profession of a soldier now, he is a little envious of the soldier's income, which is a good entry point. In fact, one of the main reasons for recruiting so many soldiers this time was the high salaries, and another important reason was that some small landlords with weak financial resources disbanded their regimental training on their own after seeing that the bandits were over.

Based on his own experience, Zhou Lang knows that as long as he perseveres, the culture of discrimination against soldiers will end. He still remembers that in the early days of reform and opening up, those wage earners who held the iron rice bowls of state-owned factories looked down on those who did business, and at that time they were called "stall holders", "people who pounded things", and "so-and-so dealers"; ten years later, those who opened shops and did business had a relatively neutral title of "self-employed" and "businessmen"; 20 years later, the title of "big boss" of businessmen from Guangdong, where the atmosphere of openness was the strongest, began to carry praise, and 30 years later, businessmen were promoted to "entrepreneurs". It's just beginning to glorify.

Now the common people are beginning to envy the income of being a soldier, and in ten years they may begin to accept the soldier as a normal profession, and in twenty years the soldier will have a taste of praise, and in thirty years the soldier will be full of glory.

Of course, a certain amount of propaganda will promote this process, but Zhou Lang is not yet able to publicize it, and lofty concepts with universal significance, such as "protecting the family and defending the country", are not suitable for him now, and he can at most use the slogans of "fighting for the sky and seizing the country" with the taste of personal power of the Heaven and Earth Society, but this kind of slogan cannot enhance the honor of soldiers, but is easy to attract the attention of all parties, which is not conducive to his Taoguang and obscurity.

However, Zhou Lang thought of some obscure methods, combined with the situation of recruiting a large number of orphaned children in this recruitment, Zhou Lang simply set up this charity hall in the name of a soldier and named it the Sergeant Charity Hall.

Sergeant means soldier, but the word "soldier" has a considerable positive meaning, and orders are issued to require soldiers to call themselves sergeants in the future, and the words "small soldier" and "pawn" are used carefully in official documents.