Joseph incorporated these 9,000 men into his private army, plus his own 300 slave warriors, and a few hundred young men recruited from the Guannei, and now the number of Joseph's private army has exceeded 10,000. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

These recruits were placed in Bouldertown, some of them led by Gould, about 2,000 people, and the remaining 8,000 people were managed by Aloke. But these recruits were untrained and not even militia.

Such an army will certainly not have any combat effectiveness, so the most important thing at the moment is to train these recruits.

José handed over the matter to Aloke, after all, he had defended Boulder Town for several months with 2,000 remnants in the Northwest War, and his military talent was no less than that of the so-called Northwest Army generals. It was not difficult for Alok to train these nearly 10,000 recruits, after all, he already had many low-ranking officers under him, and now he only needed to beat these people into these recruits, and the shelf of Jose's private army would be defeated.

However, although Alok agreed to train the recruits, he also had some concerns about José's behavior of forming a private army. After holding Boulder and these days, the deputy commander has become a loyal subordinate of Jose, but his concerns do not come from the Northwest Army, but from the center of the Empire.

You must know that although Joseph has the title of viscount, from the perspective of imperial law, he can only have dozens of family knights at most, and he is not even qualified to have a private army, and Jose's behavior of recruiting nearly 10,000 private troops at once is obviously against the laws of the empire. Although Alok knew that Joseph was doing this to defend against the Northwest Army, the Imperial side did not know, not to mention the seriousness of this matter after Montevideo IV knew about it, even if they knew Joseph's intentions, I am afraid they would not allow Joseph to do this.

Jose naturally knew these things in his heart, but he put himself in Sadland to deal with the Northwest Army, but he refused to give himself troops to confront the Northwest Army. Joseph is not a fool, although he can't form an army on the surface, but he can train in private, otherwise one day the Northwest Army will fight, will he have to resist tens of thousands of elites of the Northwest Army?

Boulder Town is far from Sadland, and even further away from Valen, and José believes that as long as he doesn't reveal the news, neither the Northwest Army nor the Sistine will find out about their army. Moreover, José also has his own ideas about how to train these soldiers, and these soldiers in Boulder Town will not stay here for long. In a few months, when the soldiers were almost finished, José would have a new assignment for them.

After dealing with these recruits, José soon returned to the city of Sadrandshire, and he sent a letter to Sophia, telling her to stop recruiting any more young and strong homeless people, but to change her strategy and recruit a large number of craftsmen, especially blacksmiths, even apprentices, as long as they can make iron and forge, recruit them all!

After all, in the Empire of Light, the social status of these blacksmiths and tailors is not high, and as long as they spend their own money, they should be able to recruit those blacksmiths to Sadrand.

José did this to enrich his workshop, although the problem of military resources has been solved, but fighting a war is to burn money, not only need people but also a large number of equipment and weapons. Although there was some armor in Sadrand's armory, which could barely equip the tens of thousands of private troops under his command, there were not many weapons. If you want to train your troops, your weapons and equipment must not be burned.

But I can't buy it blatantly, now except for Sadland, the three counties outside the pass are all people from the Northwest Army, if I buy weapons from outside the pass, I'm afraid I can't find anyone else except the Northwest Army. Even if it is bought from the Guannai, such a large number of weapons is not something that any blacksmith shop can afford, and if it is not good, it will be discovered by the Sistine's attempt, and such a result is obviously not what Joseph wants to see.

In desperation, Joseph simply gritted his teeth, since he couldn't buy weapons, then Lao Tzu would build them himself!

In fact, there are iron ores in Moxi Pass, but most of those ores are buried in the desert Gobi of Tadamu, which is difficult to collect and transport to the empire for smelting. The grassland people are backward in civilization, and they do not have any other industries except grazing, let alone metallurgical ironmaking. Therefore, most of the daily necessities of the grassland people are exchanged with the caravans, but some caravans tend to be shoddy and buy inferior products for the grassland people, which is easy to cause contradictions between the two sides.

So for a long time, the steppe people's trade with the empire was plundered by fast horses. After all, the steppe people don't have any side jobs, they don't know how to make pottery and ironware, and even the necessities of life such as salt in many tribes have to be purchased from the Bright Empire, so the trade routes in the northwest will be so prosperous.

However, the Bright Empire has a very strict ban on things like pig iron weapons, especially in border areas like the northwest, in case a large number of weapons produced by these empires flow into the grasslands, it is undoubtedly the ambition to fund those steppe wolves. Therefore, Qiao Se naturally can't get raw materials such as pig iron, and even if he can buy a certain amount of iron tools, I'm afraid it won't be enough to equip tens of thousands of soldiers.

However, these problems are not too difficult for Joseph, because as long as these recruits under his command have not yet entered the battlefield, they will not be able to use swords and iron weapons for the time being, and some training equipment can meet the training of these recruits. Even if this kind of recruit is pulled up from the homeless people, even if it is strictly trained, I am afraid that it will be difficult for him to have any real combat effectiveness without a year and a half of training.

So now José is just recruiting a large number of craftsmen first, and then running his own workshop first, no matter what, it takes a lot of money to do these things. Half a month later, Sophia was summoned back by Jose, along with hundreds of blacksmiths and dozens of other craftsmen.

Jose directly handed over the operation of the workshop to Sophia, and it was not difficult for such a good staff member to manage such a small workshop. However, Jose did not tell Sophia about his secret stationing, but simply explained what had happened in the past two months. Now Gould and Alok are training in Boulder Town, but for the sake of safety, Aloke's claim to the county is to go out to camp for training, and he can't be seen for more than half a month, so it must be quite a matter of effort to train those recruits.

In fact, in the entire city of Sadrand, except for Gray and the Northwest Army under his command, almost most of the officials and generals have been enveloped by Jose into his hands. Especially the hundreds of security forces in the city were originally all under Alok, and after Martin came back, they naturally obeyed Martin's orders, and in this way, Jose was equivalent to mastering the security army.