Lin Zhe is special in this era, he is different from those officials and ordinary people who are frightened by foreigners, he has no fear of foreigners, but he is different from those pedantic people who think that contemporary China is still the same as the Han and Tang dynasties, and is full of contempt for foreigners, he has a full understanding of the strength of foreigners, especially Britain and France.

He was not arrogant enough to think that the Chinese army, which had only been trained for a few years, could easily defeat the British and French coalition forces, but he also did not think that the British and French coalition forces could defeat their own troops like the Qing army.

In his opinion, as long as a certain price is paid, it is possible to block the attack of the British and French forces, so as to obtain the benefits he wants at the negotiating table.

In this regard, Lin Zhe is mentally prepared to pay a certain price!

Now the 10,000 casualties in the Battle of Wusong are within Lin Zhe's cost budget, and the casualties of 10,000 people can kill and wound 5,000 or 6,000 British and French troops, and at the same time capture more than 2,000 prisoners, which is completely acceptable for Lin Zheli.

And after this battle, it also gave him more confidence, as long as he persevered, it was not impossible to win this war.

As for saying that the casualties of 10,000 people will make people feel heart-wrenching, this is indeed a bit regrettable, but it is normal for the two armies to have casualties in battle, and the casualties of 10,000 people are also within the tolerance range of the Chinese army.

As early as the beginning of the year, Lin Zhe instructed the military to recruit soldiers on a large scale, and so far more than 60,000 new recruits have been recruited, in addition to the existing troops and the four new units of the 8th, 9th, 11th, and 12th divisions. The remaining recruits are still in the boot camp, waiting to replenish the battle losses.

Other words. Before the outbreak of the war, Lin Zhe had already considered more than 10,000 casualties or even 20,000 or 30,000 casualties, and made preparations for this in advance.

"Let the Military Training Department, the Ordnance Department, and the Quartermaster Department do their best to replenish the combat losses on the Wusong side. Soldiers, weapons, ammunition and other consumables must be replenished in the shortest possible time, and I don't want the enemy to launch a second round of attacks, and Wu Song's side still hasn't recovered! ”

In war, casualties are normal, and for an empire's war machine, as long as it can replenish soldiers, weapons and various materials in time, then it can continue the war and finally achieve victory.

Several senior military generals who followed Lin Zhe hurriedly nodded yes, even though it was an urgent meeting. But Lin Zhe didn't last too long, but sent the generals of the headquarters away in a few words, now is not the time to sit and have a meeting, there are still a lot of things that need to be busy with these senior generals of the military.

After leaving Pingrentang, even if the sky was gloomy overhead, Lin Zhe still felt that the sky was good today, with a slight spring breeze and a thin drizzle, which was a typical rainy season scene in the south of the Yangtze River.

Lin Zhe, who was satisfied with the battle of Wusong, already had the confidence to win the war. After he returned to the harem with brisk steps, he rarely took time out to cooperate with the little princess Shuchun, who was still unsteady in walking, and shouted with a milky voice to play with his father's little princess.

Chen Jing, who had a big belly on the side, watched Lin Zhe and her daughter play with a smile on her face, and her daughter's giggles from time to time made her quite happy. Although Lin Zhe is a very standard career-oriented man most of the time, he has little time to spend with his family, and he rarely loses his temper on weekdays. But he treats this eldest daughter very fondly, and he smiles at his daughter more than he smiles at Chen Jing.

Look at the scene of this father and daughter playing. Chen Jing couldn't help but think that after the birth of her second child in a few months, if she gave birth to a prince. Then everything is perfect.

It's just that Fang Deconcubine or Li Huifei's due date is earlier than her, and if one of the two of them can give birth to a son, the position of the eldest son will be a little vacant.

Lin Zhe's son is related to the important responsibility of the country, and a large group of people from the government and the opposition are staring at the stomachs of these three women, just waiting for when these people will be able to give birth to an heir for the empire, and if there are two sons born at that time, it is estimated that it will cause a storm, after all, there is only one prince of the empire, and it will be troublesome to choose who to choose at that time.

But these are all things for the future, although Chen Jing sometimes worries about these things, but most of the time he is still at ease.

Although Chen Jing is a traditional woman who has been in the back house all her life, it does not mean that she is an ignorant woman, she can manage the harem properly of the big one, and she does not let Lin Zhe worry about this is something that ordinary women can do at all.

And Chen Jing also knows that in the past dynasties, the vast majority of the Han dynasty pursued the policy of establishing a prince who is a long-term ruler but not a virtuous person, which is an ancient tradition for thousands of years, except for a few barbarian dynasties and a very small number of special eras, China's prince policy has been basically the same for thousands of years.

So as long as she, Chen Jing, can give birth to a son, then the son is expensive by the mother, and she Chen Jing is the queen, so her son is a proper son-in-law.

It's just that now Lin Zhe has not clarified the relevant regulations for the establishment of the reserve, and although those ministers are shouting one by one about how important the national capital is, they still don't have the courage to raise the question of how to establish the reserve and who to appoint, because Lin Zhe is still young now, and more importantly, he doesn't have a son now, and now you dare to shout about the issue of establishing the reserve, it is estimated that Lin Zhe will cut off your head the next day.

Therefore, what kind of policy will be used in the follow-up, no one knows except Lin Zhe himself.

In fact, even Lin Zhe himself doesn't know now, and he hasn't considered this aspect of the matter yet.

At present, there are too many affairs to worry Lin Zhe, there is the mind to think about what will happen in more than ten years or even decades, and now he is thinking about how to unify China and defeat the British and French forces, but he has no energy and time to deal with these messy affairs.

Just when Lin Zhe rarely played the role of a loving father in the harem, various departments of the military also acted quickly, and those recruits who had undergone an initial three-month training in many recruit camps set up in northern Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu were transferred to Shanghai in batches. Then it was replenished into the Second Army and the units of the Seventh Army, and the Battle of Wusong lasted for many days before and after. The total number of casualties is more than 10,000, which means that the troops are only to be restored to the previous situation. In addition, the 11th Infantry Division was already understaffed, and if it was to be replenished to full strength, it would have to need several thousand more recruits.

The replenishment of more than 10,000 recruits is a great challenge for the work of the military training department of the Chinese army.

Not only is it the trouble of replenishing new recruits, but in fact, nearly 100 officers were killed and many officers were injured in this battle, which also made Wu Song's troops seriously short of officers, after all, if this unit wants to recover, it is not enough to replenish new recruits, but also to replenish a considerable number of officers, otherwise there are only soldiers and no officers. This army is not fighting at all.

To this end, on the one hand, the Military Training Department has drawn students from other units, and at the same time, it has advanced the graduation time of the third batch of students from the Military Academy. It has also made bold reforms and promoted some outstanding soldiers directly to the rank of second lieutenant in order to make up for the serious shortage of junior officers.

Compared with the difficulty of replenishing officers and soldiers, there is not much problem in terms of weapons, because although the Chinese army suffered heavy losses in this battle, the loss of weapons was not large, and the follow-up battlefield cleaning was also carried out by the Chinese army.

It's not just the weapons of your own dead and wounded soldiers that have been recovered. At the same time, more than 4,000 Mini rifles of the British and French forces were also captured, as well as a small number of artillery pieces.

However, a large number of rifles are also worn out during the battle, such as rifling is wiped out or other problems simply arise.

This one in and one out, there can be more than a thousand more rifles on this rifle.

Words on the artillery side. The artillery losses on the army side were not large, but the heavy artillery losses on the navy side were not small, and more than a dozen heavy artillery pieces had been destroyed so far. These lost guns had to be replenished by the Linde Machine Factory working overtime to produce them.

The gap in ammunition, especially artillery shells, was relatively large, during the battle between the British and French forces and the Chinese army. In fact, only the artillery units fought from beginning to end, and the decisive phase of the infantry on both sides lasted very shortly. This means that the consumption of shells is the largest relative to the consumption of rifles and bullets.

Hundreds of artillery pieces continued to fight, and the shells consumed were not hundreds or thousands, but tens of thousands, which needed to be produced and supplemented by the Linde Machine Factory.

Many weapons and ammunition need to rely on the Linde Machinery Factory, which is also fortunate that the Battle of Wusong blocked the British and French forces, so that the military can swear to the head of the royal industry that Shanghai will never fall, and your Shanghai shipyard, Linde Machinery Factory and other enterprises can produce Yunyun with peace of mind.

The British and French forces could not enter Shanghai, so there was no need to mention the relocation, so that the Linde Machinery Factory and other enterprises could continue to maintain high-intensity production and continue to provide various ordnance and ammunition to the Chinese army.

When the Chinese army replenished ammunition and weapons, the Anglo-French army led by Count Ergin was also hiding under the cover of naval guns, building fortresses while waiting for the arrival of supplies, their losses were not small, and they were fighting in a foreign land, and the supplies in all aspects were very troublesome, food and living materials were good to say, and the ones brought were relatively sufficient, but it was difficult to replenish the war materials such as shells after they were consumed, and they needed to use the fleet to transport them from Hong Kong or even from South Asia, which would take about ten days to make a trip.

Both sides were busy licking their wounds, and for a moment the war seemed to have stopped.

On the third day after the Battle of Wusong, Bao Ling also returned to the trade zone with a few diplomats to conduct a second round of negotiations with Song Guanqian and other officials of the Imperial Foreign Ministry.

The core content of this negotiation is not the content of the previous dispute between the two sides, but the more than 2,000 prisoners of the British and French forces!

"Please ask your country to provide full security for the lives of the captured officers and men of our army, and give the captured officers the treatment that is compatible with them!" When Bao Ling said this, he did not have the consciousness of the defeated at all, and what he said was not a request, but a request.

"Oh, the matter of prisoners, our army has captured countless prisoners of war for many years, and there is already a mature system for how to deal with prisoners, don't worry!" Song Guanqian said, he was actually talking nonsense, although the Chinese army had captured hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but those were Qing or Taiping troops, and this time they were captured by foreigners, and the difference between the two could not be dealt with in the same way.

This is not to say that there is a difference between China and foreign countries, or that foreigners are more noble than Chinese, but because in the past, after the Chinese army captured prisoners, they were generally directly reorganized into auxiliary defense forces, but they did not have the habit of repairing prisoner of war camps to raise prisoners of war in vain.

Obviously, the British and French prisoners could not be co-opted, so what to do with them became a problem. In this regard, the military was too lazy to bother itself, and directly transferred the handling of these prisoners of war to the cabinet, and only acted as a prisoner.

However, no matter how these prisoners of war are dealt with at this stage, it is obvious that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to use these prisoners as bargaining chips to gain more benefits for subsequent negotiations.

It's just that these foreigners care about the life and death of their captives? (To be continued......)