Duan Qirui, who was in Guangzhou, heard his subordinates say that there was news from Wuchang's side, although the attitude conveyed by Wuchang was a little difficult for Duan Qirui to accept, but in any case, they gave Duan Qirui an affirmative answer, and the rest was nothing more than some competition for interests between the two sides.

Naturally, Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong don't have to worry about this kind of thing, and they each have a group of subordinates to conduct detailed secret negotiations.

During the negotiations, the Southern Federation can be said to have opened its mouth, first of all, the first article is to demand that the Anhui army must withdraw from Guangxi, and to ensure that it will not deploy heavy troops in the border areas between Guangdong and Guangxi in the future.

The second article is similar to the first, that is, the heavy troops deployed by the Anhui army in Liling, the border between Jiangxi and Hunan, must be withdrawn to Pingxiang, and Liling, a strategic place in and out of Hunan, must be handed over to the Southern Federation.

In addition to the above-mentioned conditions for the withdrawal of the Anhui army, the southern federation also proposed to use Guangdong, a province controlled by the Anhui army, to directly purchase arms from foreign countries, and demanded that the Anhui army guarantee the safety of these arms during their internal transportation.

Then there is a more direct one, that is, the Southern Federation is now financially scarce, and the purchase of these ordnance needs to be paid for by the Anhui Department.

To put it bluntly, it is to ask for money and land.

Looking at the conditions proposed by the Southern Federation, Duan Qirui frowned: "This Zhang Nanpi, this mouth is big enough, do you want Wuzhou or Liling, and you want us to buy them weapons, and you don't see what kind of goods they are!" ”

For these conditions, Duan Qirui refused without thinking about it, looking at the joke, unless the enemy sent troops to seize it, the Anhui army has no precedent for never taking the initiative to give away the territory, there was no before, there is no now, and there will never be one in the future.

"Since they put forward the conditions, then the explanation can still be discussed, tell them, we can suspend the attack on Xunzhou and temporarily withdraw our troops to Wuzhou, but it is impossible for us to give up Wuzhou and withdraw from Guangxi, but we can guarantee to reduce the number of troops on the front line of Wuzhou, Guangxi, well, first set no more than 10,000 people, if you are not at ease over there, the bottom line is 5,000 people!"

Duan Qirui thought about it as he spoke, joking, it was impossible to withdraw troops from Guangxi, if it weren't for the fact that the current situation was really unfavorable to him, he still wanted to continue to attack Guangxi and take Guangxi completely.

However, the pressure on the Feng army in southern Anhui, northern Jiangxi, and southern Zhejiang is too great, and Duan Qirui is bound to continue to transfer troops from Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and other places to the north to counter the southward pace of the Feng army, so even if it does not cooperate with the Southern Federation, the Anhui army actually does not have enough troops to continue to attack in Guangxi, and it is certain to reduce the number of troops, but it is absolutely impossible to completely withdraw from Guangxi.

The same is true for Hunan and Jiangxi, this Liling is a military stronghold, and it is an important barrier in the western part of Jiangxi, and the Anhui army cannot give up at will.

And in terms of the support of ordnance and military spending, Duan Qirui also does not intend to give Zhang Zhidong anything in vain, what kind of jokes, every penny in the hands of the Anhui department is extremely important, after losing the tax-paying place in the south of the Yangtze River, Duan Qirui can only rely on a Guangdong to provide military expenses for himself, although Guangdong is also a major tax-paying province in the late Qing Dynasty, but it is still very difficult to support the current Anhui army, not to mention that Duan Qirui also plans to restore the establishment of the third brigade of the fourth division, and fight while expanding the army. This will cost a sea of money, not to mention that Duan Qirui has no money now, even if he has money, it is impossible to give it directly to Zhang Zhidong.

"Money cannot be given, and ordnance must not be sent, but if they pay for ordnance themselves, we can give them a promise that they will never intercept it, and we can even send troops to escort it to Guangxi or Hunan." Duan Qirui's words already showed his thoughts, that is, he did not intend to pay any practical price for cooperating with the Southern Federation this time, especially in terms of territory and money.

Duan Qirui's stalemate, the Southern Federation has no way, because as Zhang Biao said, the Anhui system is looking for the Southern Federation to cooperate, not that the Anhui system seeks the Southern Federation, but a kind of relationship between the teeth and lips, once the Anhui system is finished, then the next one to end is the Southern Federation, it is precisely because of this that Zhang Zhidong put aside the political differences and chose to cooperate with Duan Qirui.

The two sides talked back and forth, but in fact, the issues discussed were all fake and empty, and in the end, Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui sent several secret telegrams to each other, and finally the two reached a preliminary intention at the strategic level.

There is no need to sign a document in black and white, because both Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui know that the cooperation between the two sides is only temporary, and based on the political tendencies of the two sides, there can be no public disclosure of their cooperation, and it can only be a verbal agreement reached by the high-level of the two sides.

The verbal agreement reached between Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui was very simple, that is, from now on, the Anhui army and the Southern Federation would stop the actual military confrontation and keep the existing de facto control line unchanged.

However, in order to allow the two sides to draw more troops from Guangxi and Hunan to fight against the Feng army, the above promised not to deploy more than 5,000 field troops in Guangxi, and the Anhui army on the Liling side only promised to station only the most basic troops of no more than 2,000 people.

On the Southern Coalition side, a large number of troops were drawn from Guangxi and Hunan to the north, and finally troops were stationed in Hubei, and the Sixth Army of the Chinese Federal Empire was formed, which was specially used to launch an active offensive along the Yangtze River from the south of Hubei.

As long as the Southern Federation deploys a force in the south of Hubei that is specifically focused on the direction of Jiujiang in Jiangxi, then once the follow-up Feng army completely takes southern Anhui and wants to continue to go south to Jiangxi, then it is impossible for the Feng army to recklessly launch a direct attack on Jiangxi all the way, because once the Feng army puts all this place in the direction of central and southern Jiangxi, then a surprise attack by the Southern Federation will be enough to cause great flank pressure on the Feng army that is moving south, and in the end it may even be cut off from the supply line.

The reason why Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong reached an agreement on private cooperation so quickly was, in the final analysis, because the pressure brought to them by the Soviet Fengjun was too great.

The strength of the Feng army in the first half of 1908 made Duan Qirui defeated, but also made other warlords tremble.

No one wants to be a stepping stone to the rise of the Soviet Union!

Mu Xiu is in the forest, the wind is more devastating, everyone is so hard to force your family to be the only one, isn't this forcing those weak people to unite against you?

Although the secret cooperation between the Anhui army and the Southern Federation has been concealed from ordinary people, it is not full of Zhao Dongyun, and the agents of the Military Intelligence Department of the General Headquarters have always paid attention to the military movements of the major warlords in the country, and if only the Anhui Army and the Southern Federation are only small-scale transfers, they can still hide it, but this kind of transfer of tens of thousands of people is still from the very sensitive Guangxi and Hunan to Jiangxi and Hubei, and this kind of large-scale cross-provincial transfer cannot but attract the attention of the agents of the Military Intelligence Department. Then Zhao Dongyun will directly remove An Yutong, the director of the Military Intelligence Department.

After hearing An Yutong, director of the Military Intelligence Department, report that the Anhui Army and the Southern Coalition Army had large-scale abnormal movements in Guangxi and Hunan, although Zhao Dongyun still did not guess what agreement Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong had reached for a while.

But Zhao Dongyun saved the hearts of others with his own heart, and he could still guess that they had reached an unknown agreement.

"Hmph, it's just a group of grasshoppers after the autumn, one is a fight, two is a fight, anyway, we are also going to clean up the Southern Federation, just take this opportunity to solve them at once!"

It was Meng Enyuan, who had just returned to Beijing from Jinling on a foreign passenger ferry to report on his work.

His tone sounded arrogant at first, but what he said was the truth, and now the other warlords in the country were enemies of the Soviet Union, and the difference was only that they fought first and then fought.

Moreover, from a military point of view, once the Fourth Army, the main force of the Feng army, marched south to Jiangxi, then it would be absolutely impossible for the Feng army to let the Zhang Zhidong Department of the Southern Federation, which had more than 100,000 troops, be eyeing at it.

In this case, Meng Enyuan said that it was a helpless reality to fight these two together, and of course this was also Meng Enyuan's self-confidence.

Although the Fourth Army under his command is still fighting in southern Anhui, it is fighting very smoothly, but due to the influence of the terrain in southern Anhui, it is difficult for the Fourth Army to deploy on a large scale, and the overall marching speed after deployment is also quite limited.

This situation is not only happening in southern Anhui, but also in southern Zhejiang.

The mountainous and hilly areas of southern Anhui and southern Zhejiang make the Feng army who has always been accustomed to fighting in the plain area quite unaccustomed, and when the Feng army fought in the past, although it was also affected by the weak logistics force, it was still able to barely raise enough artillery to fight, but when fighting in the mountains and hills, let the Feng army fight with the flat prototype field troops to shrink back from the battle, especially the maneuver of the artillery made a large group of front-line generals want to scold their mothers.

In order to successfully reach the front line through the mountains and mountains of those 75-mm field guns weighing more than a ton, this speed is simply unsightly; when fighting, often the infantry units on the front line are in place early, but the artillery units behind are delayed, which makes the Feng army suffer a lot of losses in many battles.

Moreover, in the course of actual combat, the front-line generals found that the mountain artillery that they did not pay much attention to in the past was more practical than the field artillery, which is actually very obvious, and the mountain artillery was originally made for mountainous and hilly areas, and it is normal for the mountain artillery to play better than the field artillery. Therefore, many front-line generals of the Feng army reported to the high command and asked for more mountain artillery.

In fact, this time, Meng Enyuan specially returned from southern Anhui to report on his work, in fact, he also had the intention of asking Zhao Dongyun to deploy more mountain artillery.

However, although the Feng army suffered terrain troubles in southern Anhui and southern Zhejiang, the progress of the guide zhì was a little slow, but it was only slow, after the battle, it was still not ambiguous, and it was still slightly more difficult in southern Zhejiang, but in southern Anhui, the Anhui army could not resist the joint attack of the fourth army and the first army of the Feng army, and the day when the Feng army completely took southern Anhui was not far away.

In fact, not only Feng Jun himself thinks so, in fact, even Duan Qirui of the Anhui Army thinks so, in fact, he has never had the luxury of hoping that after the defeat in Jiangnan, he will be able to keep southern Anhui, the reason why he let the troops of the Sixth Division of Liangjiang continue to hold on to southern Anhui is just to buy more time for himself to reorganize his troops and deploy in the direction of Jiangxi.

Although southern Anhui is fighting, Duan Qirui has already begun to allocate a large number of manpower and material resources to start building the Jiangxi defense line.

In this case, everyone knows that it is a matter of time for the Feng army to take southern Anhui, and this time will not be too long, and after the Feng army completely goes south to southern Anhui, everyone knows that the Feng army will definitely enter Jiangxi in a big way.

Now Zhang Zhidong has dispatched a large number of troops to the southern part of Hubei, although it is absolutely impossible for the Southern Federation to send troops to take the initiative to help the Anhui army defend Jiangxi, but Zhang Zhidong will definitely not give up a chance to give the Feng army a ruthless opportunity from behind after the Feng army enters Jiangxi.

According to the habit of the generals of the Feng army to take the initiative to attack, they will definitely not let the hundreds of thousands of troops of the Southern Federation watch from behind their cars, and they must want to take the initiative to attack and completely solve the threat from Hubei.

Meng Enyuan's attitude can be said to represent the attitude of most of the front-line generals of the Feng army.

Zhao Dongyun reacted quickly to the secret cooperation between the Southern Federation and the Anhui Army, but this time he did not directly order the Feng Army to take the initiative against the Southern Federation, but asked someone from the Second Internal Affairs Section to contact Wang Shizhen.