On the seventh day of the second month of the 25th year of Guangxu of the Qing Empire, the breath of spring had just descended on the land of Qilu, and a war that was not big or small but had far-reaching impact broke out. The newly appointed acting governor of Shandong, Yuan Shikai, sent his cronies, and the newly appointed Caozhou town guard Cao Kun led the elite of the three battalions to the east and went straight to Caozhou. When Cao Kun's troops arrived at Mengshan Mountain in the southwest of Mengyin County, they suddenly divided into multiple routes and surrounded this lofty mountain, and under the guidance of the Yizhou garrison, all roads out of the mountain were blocked by the officers and troops.

The errand of Cao Kun's department was to completely exterminate the Mengshan bandits who had been in the three counties of Mengyin, Feixian, and Surabaya for more than ten years.

At the beginning of the year, Yuan Shikai, who was rewarded by the Ministry of War for his meritorious service in organizing and training the new army at a small station, was promoted to the rank of official and acting governor of Shandong.

This is the real job that Yuan Shikai dreams of. So he led more than 7,000 elite soldiers and guards trained by himself to go south to Shandong, and while vigorously expanding the strength of this army that was destined to support his great cause, the first major event in Yuan Shikai's policy program was to suppress bandits.

Suppressing bandits is a major matter that every magistrate will not slow down. But the suppression of bandits requires capital, that is, a strong army. In this regard, Yuan Shikai has unique conditions, he has more than 7,000 troops equipped with all foreign guns and cannons and completely trained in Western style, and this army has a very high loyalty to him, like an arm. However, Yuan Shikai's attitude towards the bandits in Shandong was very different from that of his predecessor Yuxian, and his attitude towards the Boxers, which had arisen in Shandong and had spread to Zhili, was by no means the connivance of his predecessor who was removed by the imperial court under the pressure of foreigners. The Boxer of Righteousness, which played the banner of exterminating foreigners and supporting the imperial court, did not let go, and it was only natural for the Namon thieves to open the knife.

After all, exterminate bandits, no one will say a bad one. Lord Yuan sent his men to recruit and suppress bandits, not only for the peace of the people, but also for actual combat training.

Cao Kun set up the camp in Pingyi County. According to repeatedly verified information, the thieves' lair is in the Temple of Light. Starting from Maoyang Town, there is a big road leading to Mengshan Guangming Temple, starting from Dafuning Village to the east, passing through Sucheng, Lianghe, Zhangjiazhai up the mountain, crossing the mountain beam commonly known as donkey legs, passing through Liucheng, Dongyu, Louzi, Tianmen to Guangming Temple. This main road will be guarded by Cao Kun to lead the main force to attack, and another general will lead the army to occupy Mengyin and block the way for the thieves to flee eastward.

Cao Kun, who was born as a cloth dealer, has the nickname of Cao San's fool in the Wuwei Right Army, which refers more to the fact that there are too many "simple" elements in Cao Kun's character, not that Cao Sanye's IQ is low. He didn't pay much attention to the errand delivered by Yuan Dashuai, and Cao Kun really didn't pay attention to the small group of Xiangma entrenched in Mengshan, but they were just a group of bandits who occupied the mountain as the king, and they could withstand the thunderous blow of his well-equipped and well-trained 3,000 elite soldiers. However, Yuan Dashuai's military order clearly stated that he wanted to completely exterminate the Mengshan bandits, and for Sun Dewang and other Mengshan bandit leaders, they must see people alive and corpses when they die. Therefore, with the help of the local government and the defense camp brothers, Cao Kun carefully collected information on the topography of Mengshan Mountain and the bandits of Mengshan Mountain, and made full preparations for this battle.

In addition to his own standard of men, Cao Kun's troops also strengthened a field artillery team for him, with a total strength of 3,500 men.

The hinterland of the Lunan Mountains has always been barren, the mountains are majestic, the ravines are vertical and horizontal, and there are many people who occupy the mountains since ancient times, because of the remoteness of the geography, it will not cause the imperial court to pay too much attention, but this strongman who was called the Mengshan thieves in the four counties of Mengyin, Feixian, Surabaya, and Pingyi did a stupid thing last year, which angered the imperial court, so that Governor Yuan issued a requisition order at the beginning of his tenure.

Last winter, the Mengshan thieves robbed a group of merchants on the official road of Fei County, robbed not to mention the property, and killed four bodyguards, took 12 merchants (one of them a female dependent) up the mountain, cut off the ear of one of the bodyguards, and let him go down the mountain with a letter from the leading merchant to deliver a huge amount of ransom. This is the old routine of occupying the mountain as the king and the strongman. What I didn't expect was that the female dependent was the concubine of a big man in Beijing who returned to his hometown and province, and this Lord Zhao named Zhao Qiaoshu is now a saint, and Yin of Shuntian Mansion is the secretary of the Criminal Department, and he is about to enter the military department.

That's the trouble. Although he received the woman named Hexian after paying the ransom silver, the Mengshan thief and the Liang Zi of the imperial court were married. The woman was captured by the strongman, and her innocence was naturally difficult to protect, and the Manchu Dynasty was a dynasty that believed in Zhuzi's etiquette, and Lord Zhao was forced to kill this flower-like concubine after the redemption of Hexian, and used the same year to send a document to Shandong through the Ministry of War, asking the local government to completely exterminate the Mengshan thieves who were in trouble in central and southern Lu. However, Shandong has not yet reacted, the officialdom has changed dramatically, and he has made great contributions to Wu Changqing in North Korea and has been valued by the imperial court, and Yuan Shikai has trained a new army in Tianjin to govern Shandong. Lord Zhao immediately repaired a letter to Yuan Shikai, who was still on the road, and begged for mercy, hoping that Lord Yuan, who was famous in North Korea, would vent this evil breath for him.

It's no wonder that Lord Zhao, such a shame is not a trivial matter in the imperial officialdom, and it will even bury the future of officials.

Yuan Shikai readily agreed. Not to mention that he is a dignified second-class member of the dynasty, he is the main officer of the six departments, and Yuan Shikai's character will also accept it wholeheartedly. So as soon as he arrived in Shandong, he secretly ordered Cao Kun to use a false way to exterminate the Mengshan thieves who were calamity to Yizhou.

Since the Mengshan thieves have been a disaster for decades, of course there are many ears and eyes. The news of the large-scale invasion of the official army could not be concealed from them, and as soon as Cao Kun's army entered Maoyang Town, west of Mengshan, the news spread to the cottage. How to deal with this attack of the official army, several leaders of the cottage did not reach a unanimous opinion, and after two days of quarreling, the opinions of the Sun brothers of the cottage took the upper hand, and if they did not leave, they would meet the official army in Mengshan! This is not the first time that the officers and soldiers have entered Mengshan, and it will not be the last time. The soldiers are coming, the water is coming, there is nothing remarkable.

There are five leaders in Mengshanzhai, and the minions of the cottage all call them the masters, the big leader is called Sun Dewang, the second leader is called Liu Yucai, and the third leader is Sun Dewang's younger brother, called Sun Deming. The fourth master is called Zhou Huanan, and the fifth master is called Nong Mengfu.

The strength of Mengshanzhai is roughly divided into two shares, the largest one is Sun Dewang's sitting faction, Nong Mengfu, and Sun Deming, all of whom were the first to fall into the grass with Sun Dewang. Liu Yucai and Zhou Huanan are outsiders. In the twenty-first year of Guangxu, Liu Yucai and Zhou Huanan, bandits who had been wandering in Henan, could not gain a foothold in Henan Province, and took more than 300 people to Mengshan. Sun Dewang opened the door and took in Liu Yucai and Zhou Huanan's department, and the two shares were combined into one share. Although the number of people brought by Liu and Zhou is not very large, the original people and horses of the Mengshan Cottage are elite soldiers in a hundred battles, and Liu Yucai is quite strategic, and Zhou Huanan is outstanding in martial arts and good at training. Due to the addition of Liu and Zhou, the cottage flourished.

Sixty years ago, the empire had a bad relationship with the British because of trade, which led to the first head-on confrontation between the empire and the Western powers that completed the industrial revolution, and there was only one result: defeat and reparations. Opium, a special commodity, officially flowed into the interior, especially after the defeat of the Second Foreign War 20 years after the Battle of Guangzhou, when the British and French forces entered Beijing and burned the Old Summer Palace to the ground. This was followed by the rapid spread of opium in the north, and the demand for opium became the most important imported commodity of the old empire, which was gradually forced to open its borders, and it was more deeply loved by the subjects of the empire than those fanciful and ingenious Western gadgets. The influx of opium led to the rapid reversal of the foreign trade deficit from the surplus to the foreign deficit of the empire over the years, the outflow of a large amount of silver, and the growing trade deficit, which caused the empire's economy to collapse rapidly. The insightful people of the empire realized that since opium could not be stopped, why not grow it themselves? This is not a high-tech thing, when it comes to the long history of farming culture, how can Britain and France and other Western Yi be our dignified opponents of China?

As a result, opium took root and blossomed in the land of China, and the two provinces of Shandong and Shanxi were the most troubled. Large tracts of fertile land were planted with opium, and only those barren areas that were not suitable for growing opium were sown with corn or sorghum, and even wheat, the main crop in the north, was rare. In the case of private ownership of land, the landlords understand this. Opium is a cash crop with much higher returns than ordinary food. But what they didn't realize was that the result was a sharp drop in grain production, and the problem would be exacerbated by a natural disaster.

However, the north suffered from successive disasters and droughts, and the empire, which lacked water inputs, was powerless to reverse the agricultural failure. The most direct result of the natural disaster was that the strength of Mengshanzhai once exceeded 2,000 in one fell swoop. A large number of hungry people took risks in desperation, and were willing to fall into the grass in order to survive, because it is better to be a thief than to starve to death. In fact, the peasants of the Qing Empire were the most docile people on the planet, but even the most docile people would take drastic measures when faced with the danger of starving their entire family. The severe drought in Shandong provided Mengshanzhai with extremely abundant soldiers, making Mengshanzhai once the largest mountain bandit on the boundary of Shandong. This is still the result of careful selection, if there are no restrictions in terms of physique and age, I am afraid that the total number of people and horses in Mengshanzhai will double.

Although Sun Dewang likes a large number of people, he also knows that Mengshanzhai cannot feed thousands of people, so he can only loot more frequently. But this is not an easy task, first of all, the feeding of 2,000 people is a big problem that is difficult to solve. And Mengshanzhai is such a place, it is not easy to solve the problem of eating, and accommodation is also troublesome. In this way, Mengshanzhai is faced with a problem, whether to disarm or go down the mountain to expand its territory? According to the suggestion of Liu Yucai, the second master, Mengshanzhai should send the main force out of the mountain to develop in the direction of Mengyin, instead of trapping the cottage. But the Sun Dewang brothers, who held the real power of the cottage, believed that attacking the county seat was to show the imperial court that they were no longer a group of grass robbers who occupied the mountains as kings, but intended to subvert the imperial court like Hong Yang. How powerful was Hong Yang at that time? Even the Twist Army that later crisscrossed Shandong was by no means comparable to Mengshanzhai, weren't they all wiped out by the imperial court?

The Sun Dewang brothers didn't want to invite the revenge of the imperial army in exchange for a thousand cuts. As for the disarmament proposed by Zhou Huanan, the fourth master, it is even more ridiculous, how can he think that he has too many soldiers? What is called the elite soldier line, it's all nonsense. Sun Dewang knew that Zhou Huanan was all instigated by Long Qian of the eighth team, if it weren't for Long Qian's outstanding martial arts and ability to train soldiers, he would have driven this guy full of cranky thoughts out of the cottage long ago.

In the final analysis, what the Sun Dewang brothers sought was nothing more than to be a bandit, and Liu Yucai, the second dominant force in Mengshan, who later joined the gang, seemed to have the same ambition as Hong Yang, which caused a conflict between Liu Yucai and Sun Dewang.

Instead of grabbing more territory, the bandits of Mengshanzhai had to rob the surrounding villages more frequently, which attracted the attention of the government.

Now that the official army has sent troops to suppress, it is an advantage to have more cottage soldiers and horses, but fortunately he did not listen to Zhou Laosi's bad idea of cutting troops. At the military meeting of the leaders, the third grandson Deming was the first to speak, and he finally had an opportunity to laugh at Zhou Huanan.

What Sun Dewang and the other leaders didn't realize was that the 3,000 armed guards under the command of Cao Zhenshou far exceeded the officers and soldiers they knew about in terms of equipment and training. This is an elite army fully equipped with Western firearms, and it is the crystallization of Yuan Shikai's painstaking efforts in Tianjin for several years. Cao Kun's troops were even armed with 75mm German cannons—not bulky old cannons that could only fire stone projectiles, but the gods of modern warfare that were so powerful that they could cause massive casualties.

The cottage is not without sober people, the captain of the eighth step team, Long Qian, when he heard that it was Yuan Shikai's Wuwei Right Army that was attacking this time, he asked to see the big boss Sun Dewang, and strongly advocated abandoning the mountain and avoiding the elite of the official army. But he was reprimanded by Sun Deming, the third master who was present at the time: It's not that I haven't seen a battle with the official army, the official army has foreign guns, and we don't have burning sticks in our hands! There is also our Mengshan natural danger, what are you afraid of!

Under the influence of the military system created by Zeng Guofan's extermination of the Hongyang Taiping Army, especially the advice of Liu Yucai and Zhou Huanan, who were obviously more knowledgeable than the Sun brothers, the bandits of Mengshanzhai also carried out military system innovation in the summer of the 24th year of Guangxu (1898), dividing the soldiers into two types: soldiers and soldiers, but the proportion was completely different from the ratio of infantry battalions and soldiers set by Zeng Hou, basically half to half. The existence of such a large number of troops is mainly the feeling of the big leader Sun Dewang, and it is different from Liu Yucai, the second leader who advocates the reform of the arms to improve the combat effectiveness of the troops. In Sun Dewang's eyes, first, as long as they are cottage people, when they start a battle, they are all soldiers who want to charge into battle together, what kind of soldiers are soldiers! Second, Sun Dewang has occupied the mountain for many years, the idea of pleasure is becoming more and more serious, the cottage has a large number of idle people, and the camp prostitutes to satisfy the sexual desires of the minions have long existed, and the aggressive village eight miles away from the Daying Guangming Temple is both a warehouse and a prostitute. Needless to say, the chef who was invited from Jining Mansion to cook for the leaders even raised a troupe - Sun Dewang except for playing with women, his biggest hobby is watching plays, and he sang on the stage built opposite the main hall of Guangming Temple every three or five days to meet his spiritual needs.

However, Liu Yucai's suggestion (actually Long Qian's idea) to divide the battle into soldiers is really beneficial to the cottage, first of all, the problem of weapon shortage can be partially solved. The battle of the official army in the 20th year of Guangxu to attack Mengshan has made it clear to the Sun Dewang brothers that the weapons used by the ancestors for thousands of years are completely useless, and no matter how well the martial arts are practiced, they cannot withstand the concentrated fire of foreign guns. However, the foreign guns in the cottage were all captured in battle, and the number was limited, and most of them were collected from the cottages around Mengshan, some were made in Germany, and there were also products from the Hanyang Arsenal. Ammunition is even more scarce, and one shot is missing. Things are so strange, because of the existence of Mengshanzhai, the wealthy families in Mengyin, Feixian and other counties have strengthened their Zhuangding armed to the greatest extent, and spent money to equip them with as many foreign guns as possible to resist the possible robbery of Mengshanzhai.

Separating the functions of the soldiers is undoubtedly a huge progress, and at least the limited number of foreign guns can be used intensively, which is more conducive to training. So last year, in the fifth month after Long Qian went up the mountain, Mengshanzhai carried out military innovation for the first time, and set up eight teams, each team of 120 people, almost an infantry company of the regular Western army, equipped with 50~80 foreign guns. There is also a horse team, with about 100 people, led by Sun Deming, the third master.

Long Qian is the captain of the eighth team. Long Qian saw that the three masters were angry, and explained in a low voice that the official army that came this time was Yuan Shikai's Wuwei Right Army, and it was the new army that the imperial court was stimulated by the defeat of Xiao Dongyang in the First Sino-Japanese War, and spent a lot of money and made great efforts to reorganize it. What's more, according to the spies' report, it is Cao Kun's thousands of elites who came this time, and with our hundreds of foreign guns, they are really not their opponents.

Long Qian still had a sentence in his heart and didn't say it, when it came to training, he was not the opponent of Yuan Shikai's new army.

"Third brother, don't be angry. The dragon brothers are also for the cottage. The big leader Sun Dewang drank the angry third brother Sun Deming. Although the young man in front of him has been on the mountain for less than a year, he is brave and strategic, and he is by no means afraid of death. What's more, this person not only has good marksmanship, but also outstanding martial arts, and even Zhou Huanan, the fourth master of Bajiquan disciples, who entered the hall, was defeated by him. What's even more rare is that this guy is literate! Mengfu, the farmer of the fifth master who has the highest degree of Chinese in the cottage, is quite admirable, and often asks Long Qian for teaching questions. Although Long Qian went up the mountain for a short time, he made many great contributions, otherwise he would not have been promoted to the position of captain. Although his eighth team was established at the latest, under Long Qian's tutelage, his combat power was extraordinary, and he had the momentum of the main force.

"Brother Long Qian," Sun Dewang put down the polished brass cigarette gun in his hand, "How can our two thousand soldiers and horses retreat without a fight, how can we mix in Luzhong and South like that?" Don't let others laugh to death? If you don't give them a good one, they don't know who my Sun Dewang is! Sun Dewang stood up, he was not tall, but he was very strong, and his eyes were staring at Long Qian with blazing eyes, "Even if you withdraw from the cottage, you must let the officials and soldiers know how powerful our Mengshan cottage is." ”