Zhao Dongyun took Feng Delin's 100,000 taels of silver and transferred back to Meng Enyuan's eastward detachment to suppress bandits, but did not withdraw all his military forces, but left Lu Shuanggun and Shi Yang behind, of which Shi Yang's headquarters was stationed in Panshan, and Lu Shuanggun was stationed in Tai'an.

Among these two people, they were all bandits who took the lead in surrendering to Zhao Dongyun last year, and there is a reason why Zhao Dongyun can accept the surrender of these two people among so many bandits, first of all, Lu Shuanggun, this person has a very high prestige under his subordinates, and is very good at boosting morale.

This kind of casualty acceptance rate is definitely at the level of the sky in contemporary times, not to mention ordinary bandits, even the first-class elite troops of the great powers cannot reach this level, but he Lu Shuanggun is able to do this in his bandit army of hundreds of people, which makes Zhao Dongyun very curious, and at the same time he looks at him highly.

As for Shi Yang, this person's reputation is far less than that of Lu Shuanggun, but he is a giant bandit active in the north of Jinzhou, and he also has hundreds of people under him, when he faced Meng Enyuan's attack, he surrendered directly without even resisting, and also attracted several other small bandits to surrender by the way.

At that time, Zhao Dongyun had already accepted the surrender of Lu Shuanggun, thinking that there was already a Lu Shuanggun under his command anyway, and it would not be too much of a problem to come to another Shi Yang, and put them all in the Jinzhou patrol battalion, and they could also contain each other, so he accepted Shi Yang's surrender and was appeased as the leader of the second team of the Jinzhou patrol battalion horse team, and continued to treat his old bandits and dozens of other bandits who defected to Cheng.

Lü Shuangshu and Shi Yang's first and second horse teams were supplemented by some of their troops in the follow-up continuous anti-bandit operations, especially in the process of exterminating Du Lisan, Meng Enyuan distributed the prisoners evenly to Lü Shuanggun, Shi Yang, and Zhang Zuolin according to Zhao Dongyun's instructions, which made the strength of the two of them rapidly expand to nearly 300 people.

This move naturally caused Zhang Zuolin's dissatisfaction, but at this time, Zhang Zuolin was just a bandit with some use value in Zhao Dongyun's heart, and after killing Du Lisan, Zhang Zuolin no longer had much use value for Zhao Dongyun, so Zhao Dongyun simply violated his previous promise to Zhang Zuolin.

He did not hand over Tai'an, Panshan and other places to Zhang Zuolin, but left Lu Shuanggun and Shi Yang in these two places.

Although Zhao Dongyun's arrangement made Zhang Zuolin extremely dissatisfied, it attracted great welcome from Zengqi, because since Du Lisan was exterminated, Feng Delin also accepted the appeasement and became the front road of the Fengtian patrol battalion. Since then, several major bandit forces in Fengtian Province have been appeased one after another in just two years, becoming a rare highlight in Zengqi's political career.

Shengjing General Zengqi naturally knew that he could exterminate and appease many bandits in Fengtian Province and Zhao Dongyun had a lot of relationships, plus Zhao Dongyun also organized a Jinzhou patrol battalion in Jinzhou, and had one battalion of infantry and two horse teams that were trained by a new method, which was regarded as creating a history of training a new army for Fengtian Province.

Although the Jinzhou patrol battalion said that in order to facilitate the third town to defend Jinzhou, it was personally supervised by Zhao Dongyun, but in any case, this Jinzhou patrol battalion is regarded as a local army in Fengtian Province, and the Jinzhou patrol battalion was successfully organized, and Zengqi naturally regarded it as his own political achievement project.

In a recital to the imperial court in January, Zeng Qi said that the situation in Fengtian was difficult, and the ministers worked hard to raise money everywhere, and with the help of Zhao Dongyun, the third town, he had trained 1,000 people in the Jinzhou patrol battalion of the new army, and the results were remarkable......

In addition, it was also said that Fengtian would follow the example of Zhili and the southern provinces to train a standing army to guard the northeastern frontier, and also provide financial support to the imperial court.

Historically, the military reform in Northeast China began only after the Russo-Japanese War, but the arrival of Zhao Dongyun, especially the formation and training of the Jinzhou patrol battalion, greatly advanced the process of training the new army in Northeast China.

However, Zeng Qi has no money and no one under his hands, and it is not so easy to train the standing army, so he can only train the patrol battalion first and appease the bandits slowly.

For this reason, he frequently wrote to Zhao Dongyun, in addition to asking for advice on matters related to the formation and training of the new army, he also wanted Zhao Dongyun to help him organize and train the new army.

After all, ordinary people really can't do this kind of thing to train the new army, and they must be professional officers with modern military skills to do it, and most of this kind of new-style officer talents are concentrated in the Beiyang system, Zhao Dongyun's third town is a Beiyang lineage, and there are naturally a large number of qualified officers in it.

For Zengqi's request, Zhao Dongyun was extremely cautious, first of all, he couldn't agree directly, he had to take into account the relationship between Fengtian and Zhili, he had to consider Yuan Shikai's reaction, and even more importantly, if this Fengtian Standing Army was established, what kind of position would it be in, and then his third town would be back in the Guannai?

There were too many issues involved, so it was difficult for him to make a decision for a while, but sent a telegram to Yuan Shikai to ask Yuan Shikai for his relevant opinions.

Before getting Yuan Shikai's opinion, Zhao Dongyun also casually put forward a few opinions to Zengqi, for example, he rectified the many existing messy old armies in Fengtian, and did not seek to train them into a new army, but at least the troop numbers and the like should be unified, otherwise those messy numbers would be very troublesome.

This is simple, Zengqi didn't say a word, he adopted Zhao Dongyun's Jianyì, and incorporated several training forces in Fengtian Province under his control, including the Shengzi Battalion and patrol battalions in various places, into the Fengtian Patrol Battalion, as for the remaining banner soldiers, green battalions and other combat effectiveness can almost be ignored, so simply ignore it for now. 、

In the end, there are four ways to get out of the Fengtian patrol battalion, the front road is more than 1,000 people from Feng Delin's department who has just surrendered, the left road is more than 600 people from Zhang Zuolin's department, the right road is more than 1,000 people from the original Shengzi battalion and other training armies, and the back road is more than 1,000 people from several other robbery hunting battalions and patrol battalions.

In this way, although the overall military strength of Fengtian has not been changed, it can be regarded as a patrol battalion force with a unified name.

Together with the Jinzhou patrol battalion, which is nominally under the jurisdiction of Mukden, then there are two patrol battalions in Mukden Province alone, with a total strength of nearly 5,000 people.

As for the tens of thousands of banner soldiers, green battalions and other messy troops, whether it was Zhao Dongyun or Zengqi, they directly ignored them, and they were not even interested in reorganizing them.

The military strength of Fengtian Province at the beginning of 1904 was not counting Zhao Dongyun's third town and the infantry battalion in the Jinzhou patrol battalion, and other troops could be described as follows: the soldiers were like the people, and the defense team was like thieves!

Not to mention counting on them to confront the Japanese and Russian armies, they are reluctant to even suppress bandits, and the only thing they can do is to bully the unarmed civilians.

Since the end of the anti-bandit activities in January of the new year, Zhao Dongyun has been immersed in the training and expansion of the army in the third town, and the situation in the northeast and the reform of the military system in Fengtian have been left behind by Zhao Dongyun.

"Now that these German-made artillery pieces have arrived, your artillery team should strengthen training, don't be afraid of wasting ammunition, and carry out more live-fire training, I have asked the Ordnance Department to order a batch of training shells from the Fuyuan Machinery Factory, which is ready for your training!" Zhao Dongyun said: "This time, in order to compete with the first town for this batch of artillery, I have spent a lot of thought, I hope you don't let me down!" ”

Liu Tinggui said: "Don't worry, my department has been training for several months, just waiting for this artillery to come, and now after the artillery arrives, our department will have more than a month to familiarize itself with the performance of the artillery, and it will be able to form a preliminary combat effectiveness!" ”

Zhao Dongyun nodded: "I am still relatively relieved of your ability, but now the situation in the Northeast is tense, and seeing that Japan and Russia are about to fight, there are countless people looking at my third town at this time, just waiting for us to go to the west!" ”

The artillery required by the Third Town was ordered from Germany in the second half of last year, and this batch of artillery is the same as the artillery used in the Second Town before, the field guns are all Krupp Model 1903 75-mm field guns specially used for export, and the mountain guns are also 14 times the caliber rapid-fire mountain guns. Moreover, these types of artillery are all exported by the Krupp factory in large quantities, and there is a large amount of inventory, so after the deposit was paid for this negotiated contract, the German side immediately began to load and ship it over, so it was able to purchase almost hundreds of guns at one time in just a few months, and almost emptied the inventory of these export guns of the Krupp factory.

At the beginning of this year, when I went to Germany to urgently order this type of artillery from Krupp, Krupp's original inventory was bought clean by Yuan Shikai's Beiyang New Army.

After returning to China in January, this batch of artillery was taken by Duan Qirui's fourth town, but the dozens of artillery pieces originally intended for the third town were targeted by Wang Yingkai, saying that they wanted to use the original Japanese-style rack artillery in the first town to exchange this batch of most advanced German-style tube artillery guns, which was naturally opposed by Zhao Dongyun's strict zhòng.

For this batch of artillery, he even went back to Baoding to find Yuan Shikai's mansion, saying that the Jinzhou defense line needed the most advanced artillery, and the first town was good to stay in the rear, why do you want such advanced artillery.

For a time, Wang Yingkai and Zhao Dongyun had frequent conflicts because of this batch of artillery, and even involved Duan Qirui, Feng Guozhang and others for a time.