At the same time that Li Yongji integrated the family resources, the recruitment of troops was not pulled down, but the specific recruitment process was handed over to Wang Sanwu and Zhang Wei. At the same time, because this is the second official recruitment of the Jingwu Army, it is also called the second recruitment plan.

In this second recruitment plan, not only will the number of recruits be more and the scale will be larger, but also not mixed with the previous nursing homes in the future, not on the original basis, but into a separate army, and will be used as the main force of regimental training and armament in the future, so this time the preparation is more sufficient, and the requirements are also a lot stricter, specifically the five-point rigid requirements.

The first is age. The person who came to serve in the army must be a man over 16 years old and under 20 years old.

The second is height. Everyone must be over 1.65 meters tall!

The third is eyesight. Li Yongji provides an E-shaped eye chart, and those with visual acuity below 1.0 will not be considered.

The fourth is health. All applicants must be carefully examined by Lang Zhong to ensure that they are free of serious diseases, infectious diseases, and bad habits such as smoking.

The fifth is knowledge, all those who have passed the above four requirements must also gather to answer the exam in public. The test papers are all multiple-choice questions, and the content is all "Thousand Character Text", "Hundred Family Names" and "Three Character Classics", that is, the content of 300 thousand miles.

Three hundred thousand is the basic enlightenment reading of the Chinese before the end of the Qing Dynasty, so using these contents as a topic is very simple for most people who have read books, and generally only need to go to Mongolia for three years to study, they can easily answer it. And as long as you can read three hundred thousand, it is enough to cope with the needs of writing in ordinary life, and it is enough to be at least a soldier.

It can be seen that compared with the last recruitment, the second recruitment plan is much stricter, not only increasing the requirements for eyesight and health, but also more formal in terms of knowledge inspection.

The treatment of the conscription is also written in advance, once admitted, all the food and lodging are included, clothes, shoes and socks are all included, on this basis, two taels of silver will be given every month, and the lightly injured will be treated by the elite army, and the silver will be halved during the treatment, and once there is a disability or death, fifty taels of silver will be given to settle in, of which the disabled will be given a job in addition to the settlement fee, so that the disabled can have a livelihood to live.

In addition to the treatment, the punishment, or obligation, is also specified. That is, once anyone signs a contract to join the Jingwu Army, they cannot quit on their own unless they are allowed or expelled from the Jingwu Army. During the period of military service, all those who disobeyed the order could be punished with a cane at least and executed with a heavy punishment, and as for deserters, in addition to being executed themselves, the family members of the deserters were also required to pay a penalty of 100 taels of silver.

Obviously, this is a dual strategy of implementing heavy remuneration and heavy punishment, the heavy remuneration aspect was proposed by Li Yongji, the purpose is to select outstanding talents to serve as soldiers, and the heavy punishment aspect is proposed by Wang Sanwu himself, he believes that if the heavy punishment is not explained at the beginning, then for such a high treatment, there will definitely be many people to cheat and drink, and then leave, so the impact on the morale of the army is huge.

Why couldn't the armed nurses recruited by Li Yongji change their habit of stealing chickens and touching dogs at the beginning? It was related to the fact that Li Yongji only talked about the treatment at the beginning, and did not mention the heavy punishment, but later Wang Sanwu took over and increased the punishment to kill the unhealthy tendencies, but also forced more than 40 people away.

In addition, in consideration of the current situation, especially in consideration of the problems of personal energy and study efficiency, Li Yongji no longer specifically recruits or buys minors to form the so-called Youth League, and only recruits young soldiers over the age of 16 and under the age of 20 for the second recruitment.

In other words, so far, Li Yongji's personal guard youth league has only purchased the 80 children who are Li Yongji's domestic slaves, including 50 boys and 30 girls.

These children are still living in Li Yongji's newly bought mansion in Qingpu County, all they have to do every day is to read and write, neither participate in military training, nor do they do the work that slaves have to do, on the surface, they are a group of pure student babies who don't listen to things outside the window and only read the books of sages, and they have to eat and drink well, so it can be said that they don't have to worry about anything except reading, which makes the new slaves envious.

However, this matter is envied and envied, but no one dares to have any objections, after all, the identities of these people are Li Yongji's personal guards, except for Li Yongji and the four personal maids, no one has the right to care about these children, not even Li Zhengxiang and his wife.

Moreover, even if the later domestic servants were envious and jealous of the lives of these young slaves, there was no place for them to have a seizure, because these children usually lived in a courtyard and basically did not come out, and the guide had no opportunity to interact and contact with outsiders.

To put it simply, these children are currently locked up in a courtyard with high courtyard walls in the house, which is fully enclosed. Except for Li Yongji's four personal maids who occasionally appeared outside the courtyard, no one was allowed to leave the courtyard without Li Yongji's permission, and outsiders were not allowed to enter the courtyard without Li Yongji's permission. This outsider not only includes the newly recruited subordinates in the house, but also the nominal head of the family, Li Zhengxiang and Li Wang, who have moved in.

In this case, outsiders can occasionally hear the sound of neat reading inside when they deliver food, and they don't know anything else. Therefore, no one in the outside world knows what these children have learned and done in the courtyard, so they can only infer that they are reading by the sound of reading they hear every time they deliver food.

In other words, Li Yongji's eighty juvenile slaves are the group with the most special identities and the most mysterious behaviors in the Li family's new house, except for Li Yongji, no one can command these people, and even their figures are rare to see.

In short, after discussing the criteria for the second recruitment, except for Wang Sanwu and Zhang Wei who continued to stay in the Li family's new house in Qingpu County and led the earlier recruits to protect Li Yongji and his cadres, others such as Zhou Da, Lin Chunsheng, Jiang Yun and Jiang Hai acted in groups of two and went to various villages near Qingpu County to openly recruit troops.

Because the treatment is too good, even if there are restrictions such as the so-called prohibition of quitting without permission once entering the barracks, everyone is still enthusiastic to join the army. This is not to say that these people do not know the strong constraints of military law, but in the eyes of these people, this elite army is a local regiment training after all, and generally speaking, when the flag is waved and shouted, the danger of transporting money and food is much lower than that of the official army, so the restrictions seem to be strict, and it is estimated that it is actually like that.

To put it bluntly, most people only see the benefits, and ignore the possible punishment, and only after experiencing the power later, can the authority of military law be established, but obviously this strict punishment law cannot be implemented when recruiting soldiers, so everyone is so enthusiastic. It was precisely because of the good treatment that not only did it attract a large number of displaced people, but even some children of good families with small land, that is, yeoman farmers and wealthy tenant farmers, also rushed to sign up for the army. In the actual recruitment process, the people who can meet the standards are mainly those who are from good families, and there are very few real poor and displaced people.

The reason for this phenomenon is that Qingpu County is a prosperous area and a large agricultural county, and there are indeed many poor people in such places, but it is often difficult for them to let their families go to school with peace of mind.

In fact, there are many, many young people who have reached the standard of familiarity with 300,000 knowledge in Qingpu County, so age and knowledge are not a problem, eyesight is not a big problem, and health can be generally passable, but the height of 1.65 meters is a big limit.

Although the average height of Chinese has not been too short since ancient times, at least much taller than the ancient Japanese, due to the single food and general lack of nutrition, the height of one meter six and five in the Qing Dynasty, especially in the Jiangnan region, is relatively high, so this limit is the biggest limitation.

However, even if the height limit is relatively high, it can't stand the crowd. Qingpu County alone had nearly 300,000 people at this time, including more than 80,000 young men, and the surrounding counties also had about the same number. Moreover, Qingpu County, as a county, has always had a relatively high level of nutrition, so there are many young people who can reach a height of 1.65 meters.

In fact, Zhou Da, Lin Chunsheng and others have a lot of hearts, they don't plan to recruit only 500 people at all, but as long as they meet the standard, the more the better. After waiting like this for more than half a month, when Li Yongji took a little time to start asking, he found that their recruitment footprints had spread all over Songjiang Prefecture, and the number of people who had recruited to meet the requirements had exceeded 3,200, and this number was still growing.

Finding that there was so much excess, Li Yongji hurriedly shouted to stop, and then sent Li Jinbao and Sun Wang to let them go to the two recruitment teams respectively, and let the two recruitment teams bring people to Yangxinju in batches.

Later, Li Yongji asked Zhang Wei to recruit a group of plasterers and carpenters in Qingpu County, and first followed Li Yongji to learn how to build a color steel house.

Because the structure of the color steel house is very simple, and the drawings are also very simple and clear, so the learning ability of the plasterers and carpenters is stronger than that of Li Yongji.

Finding that these people were already able to build color steel buildings, Li Yongji asked Zhang Wei to take these masons, carpenters and their own apprentices, and bring the color steel materials that Li Yongji had gotten, and load them on ships and transport them to Yangxinju in batches.

After arriving there, these people will first use color steel to build the barracks dormitory under the supervision of Zhang Wei, dig trenches, build barracks, level the large playground, and if there are not enough people, they will let the more than 3,000 people help, and if the materials are not enough, they will buy them. In short, the new recruits did not need to learn how to train in formation at first, they only had to learn how to build houses and dig fortifications.

After more than half a month, when Li Yongji integrated the Li and Wang families in Qingpu County and the business matters, Yangxinju also relied on the joint efforts of more than 3,000 people, relying on the original buildings, with the help of resources such as color steel and wood that were continuously sent from Qingpu County, and initially rebuilt a barracks. According to Zhang Wei's letter, that barracks is more than enough to support 10,000 people.

In addition, Li Yongchang has always been in charge of the food supply for so many people in the Yangxinju barracks, although he can't do it for a meal, but three meals a day, a meal of rice is full, and he still does it by drinking broth once a week, and this alone has won everyone's praise, and it has also made the more than 3,000 people feel at ease to serve as soldiers.

In this way, in the middle of October of the lunar calendar, Li Yongji finished explaining the affairs of Qingpu County, and then took his young personal guards, plus Wang Sanwu and 30 cronies and armed men personally selected by him, and drove to Yangxinju by boat to start a formal military training journey.