If you want to know how many Ming troops in Guangdong have been reorganized into green battalion soldiers, you must have the help of someone who is familiar with the inside of the Qing army, and the person who can know this kind of information must have a high status in the Qing army, at least an official above the rank of a staff general, or a close staff member of the two feudal clans who can directly contact this kind of secret. This kind of character is not yet in the Taiping Army, but this information is very important to the Taiping Army, so Zhou Shixiang activated Zhang An's card.

On that day, in view of the needs of intelligence work, Zhou Shixiang hastily set up a military intelligence department in Luoding, and let the eloquent Zhang An serve as the ambassador of the military intelligence department. However, when the Military Intelligence Department was established, the Taiping Army was about to leave Luoding and enter Xiangshan in the south, so Zhou Shixiang had no energy or enough resources to invest in Zhang An. Fortunately, Zhang An took the silver ticket given to him by Zhou Shixiang and arrived in Zhaoqing, and after his development in Zhaoqing, Song Ying risked his life to pass on the information of Gaoyao City, and directly helped Zhou Shixiang make a decision to seize Gaoyao City.

Later, because of the trapping of Xinhui, the Taiping army's communication channels with the outside world were cut off by the Qing army, and Zhang An could not get in touch with Zhou Shixiang, so this line was broken. After the first battle of Yinbeizui Mountain, Zhou Shixiang found Song Ying, who is now a small banner of the Taiping Army, and handed him the wooden plaque engraved with the word "Li", and asked him to go to Zhaoqing immediately to find Zhang An.

Persimmon has to pick up the soft pinch, compared with the main force of the Qing army in Guangzhou, the Taiping army is undoubtedly the soft one, but compared with the Zengcheng green camp, the Taiping army is the hard one.

Earlier, Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong had analyzed the strength of the Qing army in Guangdong, and the two came to the unanimous conclusion that the overall strength of the Qing army in Guangdong should be between 30,000 and 40,000, and the strength of the Han army, which was still gratifying, should be between 5,000 and 8,000, and the remaining soldiers of the green battalion ranged. and the strongest of the superintendents who were promoted by the Yamen, the governor of Guangdong.

After the first battle of Xinhui, after interrogating the prisoners, it was learned that the total strength of the besieging army commanded by Shang Zhixin reached more than 18,000 people at its peak, and then some were withdrawn one after another, and by the time of the decisive battle of Xinhui, the Qing army outside the city had a total of more than 14,000 troops. Among them, there are 2,600 Han army banners and family soldiers of Shang Domain, 600 Han army banner soldiers of Geng Domain, more than 500 green battalion superintendent and pacesetters, and the rest are green battalion soldiers transferred from all over the country, and the most of these green battalion soldiers are battalions under the jurisdiction of Guangzhou Prefecture. Xiangshan is under the jurisdiction of Guangzhou Prefecture. It was also close to Xinhui, and the garrison battalion was drawn the most, which led to the fact that when the Taiping army crossed the river to attack Xiangshan, the Qing army stationed in Xiangshan had no strength to resist.

With the current strength of the Taiping Army, it is impossible to directly confront the Han army banner of Shang Kexi and Geng Jimao, but the Taiping Army is operating under the nose of Guangzhou, and a head-to-head confrontation with the two feudatories in the future will definitely be inevitable. If you want not to be defeated by the Han army flag, the Taiping army must become strong enough, and if an army wants to become strong, it is not simply a paper expansion of troops. Equipping weapons with simple mobilization can be achieved, and it must improve its combat effectiveness through constant fighting.

There is no way to fight with the Han army's banner soldiers, and it is necessary to improve combat effectiveness through battle. Zhou Shixiang's eyes could only be on those green battalion soldiers. Of course, the Green Battalion also has hard bones, and the Taiping Army can't pinch the hard stubble from the beginning, so the losses will be too great. The gains outweigh the losses, so you have to pick up the soft ones and fight first, but which green battalion is the soft bones. Zhou Shixiang didn't know, so he urgently needed the garrison deployment and strength of the Guangdong Green Battalion.

Before setting off for Qianshanzhai, Song Ying disguised herself as the son of a landlord in Yongle Township who had escaped the massacre and blended into a fleeing process, which was composed of people who had "fled" the landlord gentry and their families because their hometown was occupied by the Ming army, and their target was Guangzhou.

The military discipline of the Taiping Army is not to kill people, but it kills the landlords and gentry who dare to resist, and for some inferior gentry who have helped the Qing army, they are slaughtered regardless of whether they are obedient or not.

The trapped camps that occupied Yongle were all poor miners, and they hated these landlords and gentry who lived by drinking the blood of the people, so there were several massacres in Yongledu. Those who were killed were either country bullies or had children from the Qing Dynasty. The process of exterminating the door was naturally very bloody, many underage children were killed, and the matter reached the ears of Zhou Shixiang, although he was a little dissatisfied, but he did not explicitly reprimand Tie Yi for this inhumane massacre, only to say that Tie Yi should be different from the local gentry in the future, and he could not kill in vain, nor indiscriminately. It is necessary to pay attention to uniting local people rather than killing them outright. As a result, when the words came to Tie Yi's side, it was regarded as Zhou Shixiang acquiescing to him, but there were several cases of extermination, among which several families did not help the Qing army, but the land rent was higher on weekdays, and the usury was more.

"This is the instinctive reaction of my soldiers to the squires who used to ride on their heads, and it is also the result of the natural antipathy of the poor to the rich. Before, they were not able to resist these people, but now they have a knife in their hands and can do whatever they want. I am very afraid that this kind of thing will become the norm in the future, and that it will not be good and will not be good for the development of our army. ”

"The elimination of these landlords and gentry who are entrenched in the countryside will make our army disrepute in some places and will be resisted, but at the moment I have no better way to deal with these things. At present, our biggest enemy is the Manchu Qing and his lackeys, to a certain extent, the landlords and gentry in the occupied areas are the lackeys of the Manchu Qing, as long as they do not stand up to support our army and support the Ming Dynasty, then there is nothing wrong with destroying them. ”

Song Xianggong, who received Zhou Shixiang's letter, was very confused about Zhou Shixiang's different attitudes towards Tie Yi in the letter, and did not know what Zhou Shixiang's attitude was towards the gentry. In his busy schedule, he wrote down some of his views and sent them to Zhou Shixiang to see, but the latter did not express his views on this matter after seeing the letter, and only hurriedly asked him how the land consolidation in Longyan Capital was going, what the local people thought of the arrival of the Taiping Army, whether the Taiping Army had infringed on the interests of the local people, and whether the local people were not very enthusiastic about participating in the Taiping Army, etc

Song Ying successfully concealed the investigation of the Qing army in Guangzhou, and after staying in Guangzhou for two days, he went to Zhaoqing under the pretext of defecting to his relatives and found Zhang An. (To be continued.) )