Gwangju, Henan, this area located in the southeast of Henan is not only located at the junction of Henan, Hubei and Anhui provinces, but also borders the Dabie Mountains in the south.

Because it is located at the junction of the three provinces, and the terrain is relatively complex, after the civil war between the north and the south last year, there have been many armed forces such as defeated armies and bandits.

The Southern Federation and the Anhui Army were defeated successively, and after withdrawing from Henan and Anhui, many of the routs and deserters of the Southern Federation and the Anhui Army fell here, and then they took a fancy to the fact that this place belonged to the junction of the three provinces and the terrain was complicated, so they were entrenched, or became bandits, or pulled up the name of some militia group.

And whether it is bandits or some militia group, these civilian armed forces have always been the target of the Feng army's vigorous purge!

A few years ago, when Zhao Dongyun was in charge of Fengtian, he almost wiped out the large-scale bandits in the northeast, and even Zhang Zuolin, the famous bandit leader in later generations, was hanged, and Feng Delin, a bandit with the same reputation, simply threw himself into the Feng army, and with the growth of the Feng army, his status also rose, and now he is the brigade commander of the 25th Brigade.

and the commander of the First Cavalry Brigade, Lu Chengtong, who was also born as a bandit, can be said to be an outlier in the Feng army!

After the Soviet Union entered the customs and Zhili, it also vigorously suppressed the bandits, militia groups and other civilian armed forces in Zhili and Mongolia, and then successively captured Shandong, Henan, and Jiangbei. Fortunately in the direction of Shandong, this province is not too chaotic, and when the Feng army went south, heavy troops were deployed in this area, and during the Jiangbei Campaign, the canal in Shandong was an important supply channel for the Feng army to go south, so the Feng army made great efforts to clean up Shandong.

Not only did the field troops take advantage of the situation to exterminate several large-scale militia groups in the course of the southward operation, but also stationed several relatively powerful patrol forces in Shandong in the future.

In addition to the three patrol regiments formed on the spot, the Feng army also transferred a patrol police regiment from Jilin Province and a patrol cavalry battalion from Chengde to Shandong Province as the main force to suppress bandits and suppress the ground. Although the patrol force with a total of more than 2,000 is not much, and its combat effectiveness cannot be compared with that of the regular army of the Feng Army, it is still not a problem to crack down on a small bandit and militia group.

Under the strong suppression of the Feng army, now Shandong under the control of the Feng army is the same as Zhili, and the situation has returned to stability!

Jiangbei areas such as northern Jiangsu and northern Anhui, because they are located on the front line, there are more than 100,000 main forces of the Feng army, and some local militia groups and bandits and other civilian armed forces cannot afford to turn up the storm, and now the public security situation in this area is even better than that of Zhili and Shandong provinces.

However, the situation in Henan is much worse!

The Feng army successively invested two armies and as many as six infantry divisions in Henan, but Meng Enyuan's first army turned east after conquering Zhengzhou, then participated in the Battle of Xuzhou, and then went south to Anhui.

The First Army was succeeded by the Third Army under the command of Chen Guangyuan.

At the beginning, the Third Army had only two 11th and 12th Divisions that had not yet been organized into an army, but this Henan was also a place of four wars, with Wang Shizhen in the south, Zhao Erxun in the west, and Wang Zhanyuan in the east.

With Wang Zhanyuan fleeing south and Zhao Dongyun and Wang Shizhen reaching a superficial alliance agreement, Henan's strategic situation can be regarded as slightly better.

Subsequently, he actually controlled many prefectures and counties in Henan, instead of just recovering the entire Henan on the surface as before, but in fact only controlling the Jinghan Railway.

However, at this time, the situation in Henan has become a little chaotic, because it is in the period of war, a large number of defeated soldiers and deserters fled from the front line of the war to all parts of Henan, they harmed the people at the same time, but also let many gentry begin to form their own armed forces for self-protection. Taking advantage of the great war between the two armies in Fengwan and Anhui, armed forces of various names such as militia groups, county teams, and security regiments in various parts of Henan have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.

These local governments, or simply the civil armed forces formed by the big landlords and gentry themselves, together with the original armed groups such as bandits and routs, led all kinds of armed forces to run rampant in all parts of Henan, especially in remote and complex areas.

This greatly weakened the rule of the Soviet system over Henan, and the autumn tax collected at the end of last year was only more than 6 million, which made Zhao Dongyun quite dissatisfied, although Henan is not a big province with wealth, but it is not only a tax of 6 million a year!

Therefore, at the end of last year, Zhao Dongyun strictly ordered the local garrison in Henan to improve the security situation in Henan!

And it was not the Third Army led by Chen Guangyuan who was in charge of this!

Although it is said that the regular army in the Soviet Feng army will also easily suppress bandits, but this kind of thing is not the task of the regular army, the Eighth Division, the Eleventh Division, and the Twelfth Division of the Third Army stationed in Henan are not light, they have to guard against Wang Shizhen, Wu Fengling, and Zhao Erxun, and at the same time they have to send troops to support the First Army's operations in Anhui!

Zhao Dongyun specially set up the Zhengzhou Garrison Command in Henan to oversee the four patrol police regiments formed on the spot in Henan.

However, in the 'Southern Henan Public Security Operation' launched by the Zhengzhou Garrison Command in early January this year, two patrol police regiments were brought together to sweep away the civilian armed forces in the Ruzhou Prefecture and Gwangju area, but they suffered a crushing defeat in Qiyunzhuang, an unworn area in southern Gwangju.

The Zhengzhou Garrison Command received a report in advance that hundreds of routed soldiers and bandits were entrenched in the area, extorting passing merchants, and even levying the so-called Jingjing tax like the locality, which was completely a copy of Zhang Zuolin, Feng Delin, and others in the northeast in those years, and the Zhengzhou Garrison Command naturally would not let them harm the local area, and immediately dispatched two patrol police regiments to prepare to suppress the illegal armed bandits in one fell swoop.

However, the result was very speechless, a patrol regiment participating in the battle had nearly 1,000 troops, but when attacking a small Qiyunzhuang, it was beaten by less than 1,000 people on the other side, and more than 300 soldiers were lost before and after.

The Henan Provincial Government unceremoniously sent a telegram to Xiyuan Jurentang, saying that the public order situation in Henan Province had reached the point where the people were not able to make a living, and begged the President to save the lives and property of tens of millions of people in Henan.

For this reason, Zhao Dongyun once again sent a telegram to the commander of the Zhengzhou Garrison Command, Major General Qin Luanyun, asking the Zhengzhou Garrison Command to strengthen public security operations in Henan, and personally ordered the 14th Division, which had recently moved south, to send a part of its troops to cooperate with the operation.

Qin Luanyun, like several other high-level officers of the patrol force, is from the army, and has served as the head of the patrol regiment in Fengtian, Heilongjiang, and northern Jiangsu, and has rich experience in public security warfare. He was also given the rank of Major General of the Patrol along with the other three garrison commanders.

After Qin Luanyun received Zhao Dongyun's telegram, he also felt a little helpless!

It can be said that the public security situation in Henan began to deteriorate at the beginning of the civil war between the north and the south in 1906, and today in 1908, there are countless illegal armed groups of all kinds in Henan, and the total number does not add up to 70,000 or 80,000, but there are still 30,000 or 40,000 people. As for the patrol police force under him, although there are four patrol police regiments, these four patrol police regiments were formed on the spot after the Feng army conquered Henan, and their combat effectiveness is very low, not to mention compared with the regular army of the Feng army, and even compared with the patrol police units that conduct public security operations in Shandong, northern Jiangsu and other places.

Just as the combat effectiveness of the various units in the regular rules is strong and weak, the combat effectiveness of the patrol police units in the Feng army is also strong and weak, and the best of them are those patrol cavalry battalions, the combat effectiveness of these patrol cavalry battalions is not inferior to the cavalry units under the jurisdiction of the regular army of the Feng army, such as the sixth cavalry battalion of the patrol led by Wu Junsheng, which is currently stationed in Mongolia, and once suppressed the rebellion of the Mongolian kings, with 300 cavalry against the enemy's 900 cavalry and won a big victory.

Although the patrol cavalry battalion still bears the name of patrol police, it is used as a regular army in the Feng army sequence, and it is often used in conjunction with the regular army of the Feng army.

The second class is a number of patrol regiments formed in the early years in the Mukden and Tangshan areas, because these patrol regiments have been established for many years, the soldiers are also recruited from good families, and there are also more specially trained patrol officers, although these patrol regiments are not equipped with heavy weapons, and the amount of daily live-ammunition training is not as good as that of the regular army, but they can barely be pulled out to fight. Therefore, these few patrol regiments have maintained a full strength, and except for a few deployed in important areas such as Tangshan, most of them are deployed in northern Jiangsu, Shandong, and other places, shouldering the heavy task of maintaining the logistics supply lines of the Fengjun army in the south.

And once again, the first to wait is those ordinary patrol police units, most of the soldiers of these patrol police units are accepted by various patrol battalions, county teams and other former Qing Dynasty troops, equipment and combat effectiveness are poor, but although they are poor, but it is barely possible to fight bandits and bomb the locality.

As for the worst, that is, the patrol forces that have just been formed, and they are still formed by collecting the enemy's old army, and the personnel, training, and weapons and equipment of these patrol units are very poor, and sometimes they can't defeat the bandits.

Among the four patrol police regiments in Henan, they were all formed locally, and their combat effectiveness was generally even poor.

As for why the Fengjun Command did not send patrol troops with strong combat effectiveness to such an important place in Henan, it was because the northern Jiangsu region needed more powerful patrol troops, and it was also related to the overall strategy of the Command, and the task given by the Command to the Third Army was not to control the entire Henan, what was the biggest task of Chen Guangyuan's Third Army, which was to hold the Jinghan Line, and as for the rest of Henan, the combined importance was not as important as any town along the Yangtze River in the eyes of many staff officers of the Command.

And the Jinghan Line is personally controlled by the Third Army of the Feng Army, and there is no need for patrol troops at all!

As for replacing the Third Army with patrol units and freeing up the Third Army, to be honest, even the formation of a few patrol regiments with strong combat effectiveness in the early years was not qualified.

The Jinghan Line is the lifeline of the southward troops of the Feng Army, and countless trains carrying guns and ammunition depart from Tangshan every day, and then go south along the Jingfeng Railway and the Jinghan Railway, either to Xinyang or to Zhengzhou and other stations on the Jinghan Railway, and then to the Third Army and the First Army of the Feng Army by land.

The safety of this railway is so important, it is not surprising that Fengjun attaches so much importance to it!

This leads to an equally strict problem, that is, the Feng army lacks effective control over other areas of Henan, especially the cheaper areas, while the patrol force, which is the main force in the public security war, has low combat effectiveness and too few people.

Under such circumstances, it would be quite difficult for Qin Luanyun to solve the various chaotic illegal armed forces in Henan.

However, no matter how difficult it is, he Qin Luanyun also knows that he has to grit his teeth and harden it!