"Kill them!"

"Kill these bastards!"

The sun was very poisonous, Cao Yifeng lowered his head, and the roars of hundreds of people became distant in his ears. The public trial meeting was held on flat ground, and hundreds of people from the whole village attended the meeting. First, the prisoners of the Beiyang Army and the tax collectors in the county wept bitterly and explained what they had done, and heard that Cao Cuishan had colluded with the government to "suppress the people" in order to try to keep his family's land. Everyone roared.

The people are afraid of the government, and they are even more afraid of the Beiyang Army. After the Beiyang Army entered the village, those real "Diao people" were scared away. With the support of the People's Party, which annihilated the Beiyang Army, this fear rebounded even more violently, and if it were not for the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army to stop the people rushing up, these people, driven by fear, would have killed the Cao family with their own hands. In fact, even when they were blocked, the masses began to look for all kinds of clods of earth and throw them at the Cao family.

Cao Yifeng didn't care about these anymore, when Beiyang and the tax collector put all the responsibility on the Cao family, Cao Yifeng knew that the Cao family was finished. The conduct of the Beiyang Army will definitely slaughter the people, and the killing of the "Diao people" in Hebei in the Yuan Shikai era is already famous. The nickname "Mintu" is not in vain. Both the tax collectors and the captured Beiyang Army openly admitted that the government had ordered the "Diao Min" to be killed. For these people, it was not easy to "escape death", and there was a strong urge to kill boiling in their chests. Whether it was the Beiyang Army in front of them, the tax collectors, or the people from Cao Cuishan's family, they were all once a group of people who were on top. Now they are tied up strongly, and there is no longer the same scenery as before. Even if the action is blocked, the masses can't do it themselves, but "kill them!" "Kill them!" The shouts rose higher and higher.

In this whole operation, Cao Yifeng suffered the most and experienced the most ups and downs. Betrayed by the government, betrayed by Beiyang, and now spurned by the whole village, Cao Yifeng no longer feels anything, since death is directly connected to eternal sleep, he already feels that this result is good in his empty mind. There were no distracting thoughts in his heart, and Cao Yifeng did not listen to the pleas and explanations of his father, the Beiyang Army, and the tax collectors. Closing his eyes under the scorching sun, Cao Yifeng felt a gust of wind blowing in his face, and his skin felt cool. This sense of comfort made Cao Yifeng feel calm, and even had a feeling of happiness. He couldn't help but smile.

"What are you laughing at?" A deep and powerful voice came from the side.

It didn't matter who asked this question, Cao Yifeng didn't even think to answer this question. Anyway, it's all at this time, why not enjoy the last coolness brought by the summer breeze before death.

Seeing that Cao Yifeng was so calm, the person who asked the question was also interested, and he smiled: "It seems that you have confessed your guilt?" Are you not afraid of death? ”

"If you are afraid, you will die, and if you are not afraid, you will die, what's the difference?" Cao Yifeng still closed his eyes and said, "Beiyang said that our Cao family is the culprit, and the People's Party also said that we are unforgivable, and I will die if I fall into the hands of the villagers." The handle of the knife is in someone's hand, what else can I say? ”

The person who spoke couldn't help but laugh after hearing this, and after laughing a few times, "Hehe, I remember your name is Cao Yifeng, right?" ”

The other party was neither domineering nor cynical, Cao Yifeng opened his eyes and looked over, but the person in front of him was a senior official in the headquarters of the People's Party that he had seen, at least the soldiers of the People's Party were very obedient to him.

"It's Cao Yifeng below." Cao Yifeng doesn't talk nonsense.

"Is it the Beiyang Army you invited to the county seat?" The man continued.

"Yes." Cao Yifeng's answer was concise and clear.

This kind of answer, which does not beg for mercy or shirk, is very interesting to the questioner. He returned to his original question, "So what are you laughing at?" ”

"It's cool when the wind blows." Cao Yifeng replied calmly.

"Haha, interesting." After the man said this, he turned his head and stopped paying attention to Cao Yifeng.

Cao Yifeng originally thought that the man was going to say something, but he didn't expect that the man would stop talking at all, but continued to watch the public trial meeting intently. Being interrupted like this, the mood that I had just enjoyed couldn't continue. Cao Yifeng was so sad that he refused to cry in public, and held back his crying, but tears poured out of his eyes.

At the end of the public trial, the People's Party announced that Caojiapu would be placed under the rule of the People's Party, and that land reform would be carried out in Caojiapu. As an active counter-revolutionary, Cao Cuishan was sentenced to death, divided by the punishment of confiscation of the Cao family's property. As for the decision of the rest of the Cao family, the people of the People's Party did not mention it. When the masses learned that this year's taxes would be waived and that every household would be divided into land, and that Cao Cuishan had already lost his life for his counterrevolutionary acts, they were already thunderous with joy. Everyone doesn't care about the fate of the rest of the Cao family.

The People's Party followed the instructions of the Party Central Committee that all executions in the land reform must be carried out by the People's Party. This is also something that Chen Ke has particularly emphasized. While mobilizing the masses, it is necessary to organize the masses, and the boiling revenge of the masses is understandable, but the administrative and judicial power must be firmly in the hands of the People's Party. This is the most basic power of a government, and it is also a power that must not be pretended to others. It may seem very happy and reasonable to throw criminals into the middle of the people and let the people cut them with a thousand knives, but from a management point of view, this is completely irresponsible.

This explicit rule began during the People's Party's earliest Anhui Revolution, when Xiong Mingyang, who is now the political commissar of the Henan Military Region, once killed a young lady of a landlord's family with his own hands during the attack on Weizi. Some comrades felt that Xiong Mingyang was a little too ruthless in doing this, and in addition to some internal contradictions within the party, some people raised the question of whether the people should decide the life and death of these guys in the old era.

Chen Ke was originally non-rective about Xiong Mingyang's approach, but when he heard that someone took this opportunity to propose that the people decide the life and death of the landlords, he immediately expressed his opposition clearly, "Our revolution is not just a carnival, and it is not that everyone can kill whoever they want when they are happy at this moment!" A revolution is an act to establish a completely new social system, which must be built at the same time as it is destroyed. All judicial powers, including executions, must be in the hands of our BJP. Since Chen Ke has set the tone, the judicial article is clearly stipulated in the implementation measures of land reform.

Of course, Cao Yifeng didn't know these things, he found that he was not dead for the time being, but he was not fortunate to be immortal. Now that the Cao family has been abandoned by all the former backers and villagers, what will happen to the People's Party after falling into the hands of the People's Party, Cao Yifeng is no longer optimistic at all.

Caojiapu is very close to Henan, so the old saying is almost the same, there is a saying that "it is easy to die first and it is difficult to die later!" "Cao Yifeng's father, Cao Cuishan, died for his own choice, which is also clean. The storyteller said that when the big officials dealt with people in the past, they liked to say that "the death crime can be avoided, and the living crime cannot be escaped", and in the story of this sentence, a considerable part of the characters in the book are "not able to survive but not to die". If it is such a "post-death" method, it is better to let people kill it with a clean and neat knife.

The People's Party did not leave the Cao family's people, the Beiyang Army, and the tax collectors in Caojiapu, and the brigade led them south. It took a day to enter Henan in the scorching heat. All the women in the Cao family's dozen or so members are riding the train for the first time. Escorted by heavily armed soldiers, the train traveled for most of the day and transported these people to Anyang. A concentration camp was built on a large area of land outside Anyang, with wooden fences, barbed wire, high watchtowers, searchlights, and guards patrolling with large dogs. The grandeur and austerity of the German architecture, which was imitated from later generations, made these people dare not resist in the slightest. The Cao family and the Beiyang Army were screened and sent to concentration camps for men and women.

The Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army didn't care much about the Cao family, a group of rich people, and even less about the captured former bandits. For the current war of unprecedented scale, there is also a sense of embarrassment within the Party Central Committee for prisoners. For Chen Ke, the current Beiyang Army is not the Kuomintang army during the Liberation War. At that time, the Kuomintang army was full of terrible and cruel oppression, and so many "liberation fighters" were able to be captured in the morning, reformed at noon, and become revolutionary soldiers in the afternoon.

In those days, the Kuomintang was a strong man and treated soldiers like slaves. The profound class oppression brought great resistance from the Kuomintang soldiers. For those liberation fighters, the worst enemy is not to regard their superiors at all. There was also oppression in the Beiyang Army in 1915, but the Beiyang Army was still a mercenary army. Yuan Shikai paid this army, and there were theoretically tax exemptions in the families of soldiers who served in the army in Hebei. Compared with Chiang's bald army, the Beiyang Army faced by the People's Party was enough to be called happy.

In history, when the Beiyang Army was greatly expanded, it frantically recruited bandits from all over the country, and the same was true for the Beiyang Army that Chen Ke faced. Because the casualty rate of the bald army was too high in the war against Japan, the soldiers were basically ordinary people from Lazhuang Ding by the time of the Liberation War. Ordinary people wanted to live in peace after the war, and complaining about their grievances would be useful to them. But what do these bandits have to complain about? In particular, the habitual bandits who have accumulated for many years have not been used without these people in the Red Army era in history, and the Red Army generals did not have a high opinion of these people. Later, they would rather spend several times more time training, and the people of the good family who had never touched the barrel of a gun refused to absorb these people easily.

Chen Ke didn't quite understand the reason for these things before, but after he personally did the revolution he realized that the bandits were not peasant rebels, but belonged to the "lumpenproletarian" class. They proved that they were unwilling to work by participating in the actions of the bandits, and that when they became bandits, they were separated from productive labor, and it was not easy for them to get used to labor after they had eaten and drunk spicy food by plundering. It is even more difficult to reform the mind by complaining about grievances, and the pain of the bandits in their bandit career is basically that they don't grab enough and don't grab enough hard. The bandit leaders are on fire and serious, and you will sing and I will appear. Their co-oppression of the bandits below is also hardly linked to class oppression. Back then, He Zudao suppressed bandits in Jiangxi, and there were many bandit members in the army. At the time of rectification, Jiangxi was the most ruthless in rectification, and it was not until almost all the cadres and fighters who came from bandits were restored that the atmosphere of the Jiangxi troops could be regarded as completely reversed.

Now there is no possibility of release in the war, the Beiyang Army is destined to be captured on a large scale, and after the release of the captives, even if the captives do not return to Beiyang, they will be exiled to the civilian scourge everywhere. After discussions, the Central Committee of the People's Party finally decided to deal with the issue of prisoners of war by establishing large-scale concentration camps and labor camps. The prisoner of war camp in Anyang is a transit point for containment, screening, and even relocation.

The current stalemate also ended with the end of the summer harvest in Henan, and the Beiyang Army's will to fight was too weak. The Henan Provincial Committee of the People's Party did not expect that the Beiyang Army would not dare to enter the patrol, and it insisted that Henan successfully completed the summer harvest in the area north of the Yellow River. Since Beiyang has given the People's Party a chance, the People's Party will not waste it. Now that the food supply was fully guaranteed, the offensive of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army began.

Chai Qingguo, commander of the Henan Military Region, officially signed his name on the "Handan Campaign Offensive Order" on June 18, 1915. The first target is Linzhang County, which is close to Anyang, Henan.