No. 057 Training the New Army (Final)

Of course, as the Son of Heaven, everything cannot rely on the loyalty of his subordinates, and if he wants to completely control the new army, there must still be the necessary checks and balances of power, so the post of deputy commander, Zhu Youlang intends to let Wu Jihei take over, and he will set up a team to supervise the troops alone, train together with the war auxiliaries on weekdays, assist the commander in making combat drills, and be solely responsible for maintaining military law, supervising the battle before the war, and recording military merits; As a civil servant, he does not have to fight against the enemy, but only needs to be responsible for some logistical work such as money, food, propaganda and education, and the major matters of combat drills and training are under the control of the chief and deputy capitals. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

As for the remaining officers above the sentry commander, Zhu Youlang also arranged them one by one according to the inspection results. After the list of appointments and dismissals came down, everyone was convinced, and they all knelt on the ground and shouted happily: "Long live the emperor!" Banzai! Banzai! ”

Seeing the vitality exuded by the small military group he founded single-handedly, Zhu Youlang was very satisfied, after all the setbacks, and now he is finally in charge of the military power of a town, and the first step to trap the dragon into the sea is to have water.

After announcing that the recruited sergeant would become a regular guard pro-army, Zhu Youlang was worried about the equipment of the new army, and in his plan, each guard pro-army should be equipped with at least four sets of military uniforms, military boots, sergeant fur hats, etc., including two sets in spring and winter. In this way, it is easy for the sergeant to change and wash, but it is really expensive. A set of mandarin duck jackets cost one or two and a half yuan, and the inner bags of the three guards in Guilin, Guangxi, the elephant guard, and the Pingle Shouyu Thousand Households were emptied, and a total of only more than 18,000 sets were collected, and there was a gap of 30,000 sets, which could only be ordered from the market, which was 45,000 taels based on a set of 125 yuan.

The problem of military uniforms has been solved, and there are other problems, such as every sergeant, regardless of the soldiers, auxiliaries must be equipped with a sharp waist knife, which is a protective weapon for close combat and hand-to-hand combat.

Although there are not many military uniforms, lacquer, glue, and beef tendons, there are still some of them, and there are very few heavy weapons of the military state, such as leather armor, iron armor, bird guns, and horizontal knives, and even if there is a little, most of them are rusted and unusable.

Before the establishment of the new army, there were only more than 3,000 qualified waist knives and more than 4,000 damaged and corroded waist knives in the whole army.

At present, wars are frequent, and the price of weapons is also rising, a good knife can be sold for more than a dozen taels, and if you order 10,000 waist knives, it will cost at least 100,000 taels, and there are not so many military workshops that can forge so many waist knives in a short time.

Zhu Youlang had to sigh that raising soldiers is really expensive! It's more expensive to raise elite soldiers! Recently, the money has been spent like water, and the original more than 700,000 taels of silver in the treasury are less than 600,000 taels left in just one month.

Therefore, a month ago, he ordered Zhai Shiyun to bring all the official-run craftsmen of a guard house in Guilin Zuowei (craftsmen and guards not military guards) to Wuzhou, together with iron-smelting furnaces, blows and other iron-making equipment, intending to re-polish and re-grind the damaged, rusted weapons captured on the battlefield, and reuse them as waste.

Three days later, there were more than 500 old craftsmen in ragged buildings.

They are all hereditary craftsmen, more than 200 years later, the status has fallen to the extent that even the military households are inferior, the military households at least have some food and salary to get, but they can't get a single copper, do a good job is right, do not do well and have to be punished, life is more and more difficult day by day.

When there was no project in the imperial court, they often couldn't eat a dry meal for a few days, and many young craftsmen fled because they couldn't stand such exploitation, and only some old craftsmen were in poor health because of their age, so they could only stay in the guard house for a day.

In the heyday of Guilin Zuowei, there were more than 5,000 craftsmen, and now there are more than 500 old craftsmen who can't escape.

As long as you are in the craftsman register, you can only be a national craftsman for generations, and you are more like a state slave than the same military household.

This impersonal institutional design is, of course, the work of Emperor Taizu Gao, who simplified all issues, but these disadvantaged groups have not had their own speakers, so no one has been interested in paying attention to this issue for 300 years.

After the craftsmen arrived in Wuzhou, Zhu Youlang asked the Ministry of Industry to choose a good address for them and build a simple military workshop. The wives and concubines of the artisan households were also provided with housing, so that their wives and children could live in peace of mind.

Each old craftsman was given a generous treatment, Zhu Youlang according to their level of craftsmanship, initially divided into three small grades, according to the corresponding level of each person per month to give a monthly grain of two to four stones, plus silver eight coins to two taels of salary. These are all technical talents, others don't pay attention to these lowly craftsmen, Zhu Youlang can be regarded as the top baby, and when the time is ripe in the future, the unreasonable craftsman system will also be abolished.

Seeing that the royal family was so generous, these craftsmen bowed their heads again and again, and wept in gratitude. They have been officials and craftsmen for generations, have little freedom, and are hungry and cold on weekdays. I didn't expect that once I was sent by the emperor, there would be blue brick houses, silver money, and other treatment that I couldn't think of, compared to the original cold and starvation, it was simply a paradise on earth that I couldn't yearn for in my life.

So they cherished everything in front of them, and worked very hard, not enough manpower, so Zhu Youlang recruited thousands of apprentices from the market, worked overtime, and after a month, the repair workshop not only returned to the furnace to forge 8,000 brand-new sharp waist knives, but also produced an additional 20,000 arrowheads, 4,000 iron spear heads, more than 250 crossbows and crossbows, three thousand catties of Francorang machine artillery, eight tiger squat cannons, and made five barrels of gunpowder, each barrel of 100 catties.

It is a pity that most of the firearms such as bird guns and three-eyed guns are rusted and difficult to use, and they cannot be repaired, so they can only be rebuilt. Most of the more than 1,000 bird guns and three-eyed guns in the army are made of cutting corners, with little power, and they are easy to blow up, and they hurt the enemy less and hurt themselves more, which is simply more chicken ribs than chicken ribs, so Zhu Youlang packed them all and sent them to the iron workshop for the old craftsman to return to the furnace to rebuild, and it is okay to make the gun slowly, but it must be qualified, which is Zhu Youlang's requirements for those craftsmen.

For this reason, the proportion of firearms in the new army is very low, almost exclusively cold weapons.