As the war approached, people in Xiangtan and Changsha began to flee the cities, and they must not die under the fire of the warring sides like the people of Jinling and Jinan.

The warlords of this era fought wars without regard for civilian casualties, and large-scale shelling of urban settlements did not put any psychological pressure on the generals.

Even if you are not accidentally injured by the artillery fire of the warring parties, then it is possible that the warring sides will capture strong men and engage in the task of digging trenches and transporting baggage.

Whether it is the Feng Army, the Anhui Army, or the Southern Federation, when they are fighting, they all like to forcibly recruit strong men to do some auxiliary work, well, they don't pay their wages, and they even have to bring their own food.

Not to mention the other warlords, the hundreds of thousands of civilians who are responsible for the logistics and supply of hundreds of thousands of troops in the rear of the Feng army are all forcibly recruited, and Zhao Dongyun will not pay even half a cent of salary for this.

Of course, if the Feng army unifies the country in the future, it is estimated that the history books will record that the people enthusiastically supported the front line, and spontaneously transported supplies for the army without fear of fatigue or death.

Those people who were afraid of being arrested and even more afraid of death, especially those well-informed upper-class people, had already left Xiangtan, Changsha and other big cities with their families as early as when the Feng army entered Hunan, some of them hid in the countryside, and some simply went to Shanghai, Jinling and other provinces where the war had stopped.

However, after all, there are still a few people who got the news in advance, and most of them found that death was close when the soldiers were under the city of Xiangtan, so they began to panic and wanted to escape from the city, but the general of the Southern Federation who was in charge of the defense of Xiangtan was also a ruthless person, and directly sent troops to block the passage, and then began to use the guns in the hands of the soldiers to start pulling the strong ding, and the body was directly replenished into the army as cannon fodder, and the general was directly pulled to the periphery of the city to start digging trenches and other fortifications.

Just when the Southern Coalition Army in Xiangtan City was digging fortifications for defense, Gu Lanyu also ordered the troops to attack Xiangtan.

When Gu Lanyu launched an attack on Xiangtan, the Ninth Division, the other main force of the Fourth Army, was also heading north, and their target was Changsha.

Changsha and Xiangtan are strategically dependent on each other, and if only one of them is attacked, then the other side will quickly send reinforcements, so to attack the above two places, the Fourth Army must also attack both cities at the same time.

When the Fourth Army launched a large-scale attack on Changsha and Xiangtan, Lu Yongxiang's First Army and Zhang Guotai's Fifth Army in the Hubei direction were not idle.

Zhang Guotai's Fifth Army marched west to Yueyang, while Lu Yongxiang's First Army was partly resting in the southern part of Hubei, and the other part was returning to the southern Anhui direction.

Lu Yongxiang's troop movements were quite cautious, and the deployment of his troops could be seen at a glance by a discerning person, and it was to guard against Wang Shizhen.

While Zhao Dongyun asked Lu Yongxiang to guard against Wang Shizhen, Wang Shizhen himself was also thinking hard about his own way out.

Wang Shizhen, who has been trapped in northern Hubei for two years, has already understood that Hubei, a ghost place, is surrounded by all directions, and there is no possibility of continued development at all, and with the collapse of the Anhui army, the Southern Federation withdrew from Hubei, and seeing that Hunan could not be defended, if Wang Shizhen continued to stay in Hubei, then what was waiting for him was the attack of the Feng army.

Comparing hearts to hearts, Wang Shizhen thinks that if he is Zhao Dongyun, then after taking Hunan, the next step is not to enter Yunnan-Guizhou or Sichuan, but to take Hubei first.

In this case, if he wants to expand his strength, or find a way back for himself, then the final thing is to go west to Sichuan.

First of all, the strength of the Southern Federation on the Sichuan side is not strong, in the past two years, in order to gather troops to resist the Feng army and the Anhui army, on the one hand, it has recruited troops in Hunan, Hubei and other provinces, and at the same time, it has also recruited troops in Sichuan and other places, but the troops of these Sichuan and Yunnan-Guizhou provinces will not stay in this province, but will be transferred to the front line of Hubei and Hunan.

In other words, Sichuan is now in a state of extreme emptiness of troops, Wang Shizhen boasts that although his own troops are not as many as the Feng army and the former Anhui army, but now there are more than 70,000 people, not much, as long as 30,000 or 40,000 troops are sent into Sichuan, it is enough to control this important province in the southwest region.

As long as he controls Sichuan, then he can still have a certain say in the domestic situation in the future, instead of being like now, he has to worry about whether Zhao Dongyun will beat him every day.

In fact, Wang Shizhen's idea and Wu Fengling's idea are very imaginary, Wu Fengling also wants to capture Shaanxi, and then go south to seize Sichuan, the most important province in the southwest region, but unfortunately Wu Fengling has been fighting for more than a year, but he has not been able to take Shaanxi, which is very aggrieved.

Wang Shizhen marched into Sichuan, Zhao Dongyun naturally paid attention, but he did not express clear opposition, because the 70,000 people under Wang Shizhen's hands are not much, but it must not be considered less, if Zhao Dongyun wants to clean up Wang Shizhen, at least he has to gather more than 100,000 troops.

But now, although the scale of the Feng army under Zhao Dongyun far exceeds that of Wang Shizhen, there are too many directions that need to be deployed, and the troops are somewhat scattered.

The Fourth Army was in Hunan, the Second Army was in Guangxi and Guangdong, and only Lu Yongxiang's First Army was targeting Hubei, while Henan's Third Army had to send one division south, but at least two divisions had to be kept in Henan.

Now the Feng army, which is too scattered, wants to guard against Wang Shizhen, but it is very difficult to take the initiative to gather more than 100,000 main forces to fight Wang Shizhen.

Therefore, he turned a blind eye to Wang Shizhen's move to march into Sichuan, and did not take corresponding military action, as for saying that it was not allowed verbally, it was meaningless.

With the fall of the Anhui army and the retreat of the Southern Federation, whether it is Wang Shizhen or Wu Fengling, they have a very strong sense of crisis, and in this case, their feelings of death will be even stronger, once Zhao Dongyun makes a move on one of them, then the other person will definitely turn against Zhao Dongyun, because if they don't advance and retreat together, waiting for the other person's fate is destruction.

Therefore, if you want to do it to Wang Shizhen, you must also do it to Wu Fengling at the same time, so that it is not enough to have only a few tens of thousands of troops, but you must gather most of the main forces in the army to do it.

Therefore, in Zhao Dongyun's strategy, for Wu Fengling and Wang Shizhen, it is still mainly on defense, and it is not yet time to clean them up, so take down Guangxi and Hunan first.

As for whether Wang Shizhen's strength will increase greatly because of the capture of Sichuan, Zhao Dongyun is not very worried about this.

Now the Soviet system has controlled most of China, and the areas under its control are all China's population and economic elite provinces, if the Soviet system that controls so many provinces can't do just one Sichuan, then Zhao Dongyun can hang himself directly, and play a Mao hegemony.

If there is no major strategic change in the current domestic situation, basically from a military point of view, Zhao Dongyun's reunification of China is already a certainty.

This is also the reason why Zhao Dongyun has not put too much energy into the military since Duan Qirui surrendered!

Today, he has begun to shift his focus to restoring agricultural production and supporting industry and commerce.

In March 1909, Zhao Dongyun specially approved the establishment of Shanghai Industrial Zone and Guangzhou Industrial Zone, trying to integrate the industries of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, two economic powerhouses.

Shanghai and Guangzhou are veritable economic megacities in contemporary China, with a lot of industries, and now they are supported by various policies of the central government, and Zhao Dongyun believes that two large-scale industrial zones will soon be developed in these two economic powerhouses.

Together with the two newly established industrial zones in Shanghai and Guangzhou, Zhao Dongyun has developed a total of five industrial zones in his own jurisdiction, namely Huludao Industrial Zone, Yingkou Industrial Zone, Tangshan Industrial Zone, Shanghai Industrial Zone, and Guangzhou Industrial Zone.

The Huludao Industrial Zone is a light industrial zone that mainly develops the cotton textile industry, followed by the soybean processing industry. In addition to the soybean processing industry, Yingkou Industrial Zone also has a political task, which is to compete with Lushun for investment and suppress the development of Lushun, a public free port. Tangshan Industrial Park is a typical heavy industry zone, with Tangshan Industrial Company as the core, bringing together a number of heavy industry machinery manufacturing industries.

The newly established Shanghai Industrial Zone, according to the plan of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, is expected to build a top diversified industrial zone in the Far East, focusing on the raw silk industry in the early stage, and then the cotton industry, both of which can be regarded as textile industries, and the follow-up Shanghai Industrial Zone will also introduce other light industries and even heavy industries according to its own transportation and economic advantages.

To put it simply, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce's positioning of Shanghai Industrial Zone is a comprehensive industrial zone, whether it is light industry or heavy industry, it is to be vigorously developed.

Guangzhou Industrial Zone is intended to be established as a typical light industrial zone, focusing on the most profitable textile industry in this year, and the others are all kinds of daily small commodities.

Among the above five industrial zones, the largest is Tangshan Industrial Zone, the most potential is Shanghai Industrial Zone, followed by Guangzhou Industrial Zone, and Huludao and Yingkou two industrial zones have developed maturely, and at the same time received geographical traffic constraints are more obvious, and there is a very key factor is that with the gradual southward movement of the Feng army, a large number of northern capital southward, a certain amount of follow-up investment in the two industrial zones of Huludao and Yingkou is somewhat small.

Of course, China's subsequent industrial layout is not only limited to the five major industrial zones, but also some small-scale industrial areas in other parts of the country.

Mainly around the mining area, iron and steel plants, etc., for example, the coal mine in Fushun has developed rapidly in the past two years, in addition to Anshan, with the Tangshan Industrial Company investing heavily in the establishment of a steel plant here, with Fushun and Anshan and other areas of coal and iron mines began to carry out large-scale mining period, it is also to Shenyang as the center to form a small-scale supporting industrial cluster, these small and medium-sized enterprises are mainly to serve the steel industry and mining industry, of which Fuyuan Company is in Shenyang to invest in the construction of a new ash plant.

In addition, there are relatively scattered factories in Zhili, Shandong, Jiangsu and other places, and there are also industrial clusters that have formed themselves without planning, the most famous of which is naturally the textile industry in Nantong.

Nantong brings together the largest number of homespun workshops, machine-made cloth factories, cotton yarn factories and other cotton cloth-related industries in the south of the Yangtze River.

Nantong as the representative of the southern cloth is also the Fuyuan Yarn Factory, Huludao Textile Company as the representative of the second largest competitor of the northern cloth enterprises, the biggest competitor of the northern cotton enterprises is Oriental cloth, followed by other domestic cloth.

As for other places, there are also many scattered factories that have not formed a scale.

In general, the current scale of domestic industry is still extremely weak, let alone compared with the great powers. Even the sun's book across the sea is far inferior.

Now what Zhao Dongyun has to do is to plant the seeds for domestic industrial development, then water and fertilize, maybe in a few decades, it will be able to open to factories all over the country.

Of course, it is also possible that like India in later generations, even bullets will have to be imported after tens or hundreds of years.