After Huang Feihong agreed, Yu Ke returned to Yu's mansion and informed his wife, Yu Quan, and Yu Mo of the incident.

The family members were very worried about Yu Ke's safety, and even said:

"Even if the French call, our family will go back to Tianjin, and the major affairs of these countries will be handled by the imperial court, why should you, a doctor who treats diseases and saves people, get involved and risk yourself?"

Yu Ke said firmly:

"Under the nest, Ann has finished eggs? If Lord Zhang Zhidong is defeated, the French will inevitably be even more rampant! ”

"At that time, the British, the Americans, the Russians in the north, and even the Dongying people will take the opportunity to encroach on China. Since I have this talent, of course I have to contribute. ”

Although Yu Ke is now less than ten years old, he has already started a family and has the ability to stand alone.

Yu Quan saw that he couldn't persuade him, so he stopped persuading.

At the same time, I am worried, but I am also proud!

This is my own grandson, a good man who stands up to the sky!

After Yu Ke settled down at home, he and Huang Feihong rushed to Guangzhou on the second day.

When I arrived in Guangzhou City, I found that there were indeed many people carrying swords and martial arts on the street.

It is estimated that most of them are members of the Heaven and Earth Society.

The two did not stop, and went directly to the governor's yamen to meet Zhang Zhidong.

With the help of Liu Yongfu of the Black Flag Army, all the matters of the Governor's Mansion were smoothly on the right track. The public servants in the governor's palace came in and out in a hurry.

The full name of the position of Governor of Liangguang is Governor of Liangguang and other places, Governor of Liangguang and other places, military affairs, food and salary, and governor.

The name is enough to see the weight of the authority of this position.

When I entered the main hall, I saw Zhang Zhidong discussing something with an old man in a military attache uniform, who was forty or fifty years old.

Yu Ke and the others met with Zhang Zhidong, and after some conversation, they learned that the old man in the military attache uniform was Liu Yongfu, who was in charge of the Black Flag Army in the Heaven and Earth Society.

Under Zhang Zhidong's matchmaking, Liu Yongfu has accepted Zhao'an.

Before coming to Guangzhou, Yu Ke had inquired about Liu Yongfu's information.

As early as the seventh year of Xianfeng, Liu Yongfu joined the Heaven and Earth Society and participated in the Heaven and Earth Society uprising.

A few years later, he led more than 200 people to join Wu Yazhong's rebel army against the French army, with the seven-star black flag as the team flag, called the Black Flag Army.

Later, because of the identity of the Heaven and Earth Association as a thief, it was too eye-catching in the Qing Dynasty.

In order to avoid attracting the encirclement and suppression of the imperial army, he led the army into the border of Vietnam, entered the territory of Baosheng, and the number of people expanded to 3,000.

A few more years later, about the twelfth year of Tongzhi, the French invaded Vietnam.

At the invitation of the Vietnamese king Nguyen Phuc Thi, Liu Vinh Phuc led the Black Flag Army to resist the French, and won the battle, killing the leader of the French army, An Ye.

The king of Vietnam wanted to appoint Liu Yongfu as the defense envoy of Xinghua, but Liu Yongfu did not accept it.

A few months earlier, the French army invaded Vietnam again, and Liu Yongfu once again assisted Vietnam in resisting the French army, killing the French commander Li Weiye in the west of Hanoi, and was named the governor of Sanxuan by the king of Vietnam.

And now, with the help of Zhang Zhidong, Liu Yongfu accepted the imperial court's recruitment, and now leads the post of the general soldier of Zheng Erpin, under the jurisdiction of Zhang Zhidong, the governor of Liangguang.

Cixi promised to wait for the victory over the French army, and also confer the position of Admiral Liu Yongfu.

Yu Ke and the others discussed with Liu Yongfu and Zhang Zhidong for a whole afternoon.

In the end, Zhang Zhidong granted Yu Ke the position of staff officer of the new army according to the letter, and assisted Liu Yongfu in recruiting and training the new army.

And Huang Feihong was also appointed as the head of the new army. A master of the realm of raising dirt is more than enough as a leader.

Today, the new army has only more than 2,000 people, and it has not yet been recruited.

After discussing with Yu Ke, Zhang Zhidong planned to form a new army according to the model of the modern army provided by Yu Ke.

Ten people are a squad, three squads are a platoon, three platoons are a company, four companies are a battalion, and three battalions are a regiment.

Coupled with the positions of squad leader, platoon commander, company commander, and battalion commander, as well as supernumerary miscellaneous soldiers and cooking soldiers, a regiment has about 1,300 people.

The new army had to form three regiments with a total of 4,000 recruits.

Of course, this is not a big problem, and now the new army has only been formed for less than a month, and it will be full in half a month at most.

Yu Ke had been a soldier for several years in his previous life, and he remembered the training content in the army in his previous life very clearly.

It took him a few days to write down the training content of the troops in his previous life, but he deleted a lot of changes.

Of course, it is impossible to copy it completely, after all, this era does not have the material conditions more than a hundred years later.

The recruits were also illiterate 90 out of 100 illiterate people.

Yu Ke handed over the training plan to Huang Feihong, the head coach, and the other party praised it after reading it, and bluntly said that Yu Ke was a talent.

Yu Ke was noncommittal, and he had many other issues to deal with.

In the past few days, Yu Ke has been so busy that he doesn't have enough time to sleep.

The new army had just been formed, and there were too many things that he needed to help with as a staff officer.

Food, salary, selection, military law and discipline, training grounds, military equipment, ......

He had to take care of almost everything himself.

Even Zhang Zhidong came to ask him about some things from time to time.

As the governor of Liangguang, Zhang Zhidong has a lot of things to deal with, which is not easier than Yu Ke.

He has recently been preparing to set up some foreign affairs industries in Guangdong.

In the history of the previous life, when Zhang Zhidong served as the governor of Liangguang, in addition to building fortifications and facing the French army, he also founded some foreign industries.

For example, learning from the West to prepare for new enterprises, set up gun and ammunition factories, ironworks, coin foundries, machine weaving layouts, mining bureaus, etc.

After defeating the French army, the Guangdong Naval and Land Division School was established.

However, except for the Shui Lu Shi School, other industries have not improved.

Now that Yu Ke has helped deal with the affairs of the new army, he has implemented these ideas some time in advance.

In terms of the ironworks, mints, weaving layouts, and mining bureaus, Yu Ke didn't understand them and couldn't help much.

However, in terms of the gun and ammunition factory for casting firearms, Yu Ke can still give some help.

Now whether it is the New Army or the Black Flag Army under Liu Yongfu, the guns used are only flintlock pistols.

The flintlock pistols equipped by Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army were obsolete products bought from the Yankees, and there were only more than 3,000 guns.

The quality is not good, the accuracy is not satisfactory, and there are always accidents with explosions.

The new army was even more miserable, and the number of firearms sent by the Imperial Firearms Bureau was sufficient, with more than 5,000.

But most of these guns were rusty, and most of them were arquebuses that had long been obsolete, and they could not be used at all.

When Zhang Zhidong saw these broken copper and iron, he almost fainted with anger, and he couldn't eat all day.

How to fight a war with these firearms?

However, Cixi probably didn't know about this matter, after all, she supported Zhang Zhidong to train the new army.

Zhang Zhidong is an important chess piece he uses to balance Li Hongzhang, and it will not do her any good to do so.

Don't think about it, this matter is probably inseparable from Li Hongzhang!

As early as 1879, in order to support Zuo Zongtang, Zhang Zhidong made 20 twists and turns, demanding the abolition of the "Ili Treaty" signed by Chonghou.

At that time, he formed a bond with Li Hongzhang.

"Li Hongzhang, you old horseman! Thieves! Zhang Zhidong scolded.

Then he went directly to Cixi to explain the matter, but only received a letter asking him to figure out his own way.

Cixi also regarded Li Hongzhang as a thorn in the flesh, but now that Li Hongzhang is in power, he can't easily move him.

Moreover, the matter of firearms erosion in the Firearms Bureau, in the final analysis, was actually secretly done by a prince of the Qing Dynasty, and it had nothing to do with Li Hongzhang.

That man was a nail planted by Cixi in the Firearms Bureau, and he had been selling ordnance for seven or eight years, and even Cixi didn't know about it.

However, Li Hongzhang definitely knew, but did not report it.

"Ugh."

In the Chuxiu Palace of the Forbidden City, Cixi sighed softly, and under the service of the palace maid, she took a sip of the 'divine soup' made of thousand-year-old spirit mole and various elixirs.

The smoke fills the air, making the light dim and blurred.

Beside Cixi, Taoist monks dressed as bodhisattvas and immortals, dressed in gold and green, bowed their heads and recited the scriptures softly.

There seemed to be many hideous or serious faces looming in the smoke, indescribably strange......

Three months later, the Governor's Palace.

Liu Yongfu reached an agreement with Zhang Zhidong, and he helped Zhang Zhidong successfully grasp the power of the governor, and supported some money, food, manpower and armament.

After that, he returned to the front line of the Guangxi border and led the Black Flag Army to cooperate with the Vietnamese to fight the French army in the coastal areas.

The Black Flag Army was defeated and retreated under the offensive of the French, but with the support of the imperial court, although it suffered repeated defeats, it was able to hold on.

The battle line gradually expanded, from Guangxi and Yunnan to the entire coast of the South China Sea.

Countless displaced people fled to the northern interior, and the world became even more chaotic, and thieves were everywhere.

According to his memories of being a soldier in his previous life, Yu Ke spent more than half a month drawing a drawing of a firing rifle.

However, the most difficult part of making a firearm is that there is no suitable iron, the casting process is too poor, and the accuracy is too low, not the drawings of the firearm.

A blueprint for a firing rifle is just a recipe for a fireload, and unless Yu Ke immediately solves all the production problems and establishes a complete production line to produce firearms, it will not help the war.

Since the gun and ammunition factory could not produce ordnance in a short period of time, Zhang Zhidong naturally would not sit idly by.

In order to obtain qualified and sophisticated firearms, Zhang Zhidong ordered his subordinate General Administration of Coastal Defense to make every effort to prepare.

Through the ports of Shantou, Xiamen, and Quanzhou, they managed to transport arms to Taiwan, and raised a total of 20,000 taels of Pingyang silver from the Mingying military salary warehouse, and purchased 1,400 new foreign guns, 520,000 bullets, 600 barrels of foreign gunpowder, and 20 new steel cannons.

The guns and ammunition were finally almost sufficient.

After that, Zhang Zhidong traveled to various military points every day. Check the terrain, lay out coastal defenses, block traffic arteries, block sea ports, etc., and be ready to attack.

By the time the Yu Ke Gun and Ammunition Factory was established, it was already half a year later.

At this time, the front line was defeated one after another, and the losses of the New Army and the Black Flag Army were not small.

However, although the French army won one battle after another, its losses were not small, and they did not take advantage of it.

Zhang Zhidong's strategic policy at the beginning was "There is no need to attack the city viciously and consume soldiers, and it is not appropriate to defend the empty city as a cannon tree." However, if it can last for several months, the legal person's skills will be exhausted, and there will be changes. ”

That is to say, we have to fight this battle for a long time, and we don't have to be obsessed with defending the city and using other people's artillery as targets, nor do we need to lose soldiers for the siege.

After all, France is too far away, and it is inconvenient to supply grain and grass, as long as he insists on it for a few months, and when France runs out of ammunition and food, he will not be able to bear it, and then give him a head-on blow.

And that's exactly what happened.

Less than half a year later, a great victory at Zhennanguan made France completely unable to bear it, and asked for an armistice and peace.

Zhang Zhidong naturally did not agree, and originally wanted to take advantage of the victory to pursue, but soon received an armistice and peace decree - the Qing court had reached an agreement with France to withdraw troops from the armistice.

He suspected that this edict was an overkill, after all, even a fool could see that France could not bear it, and he should take the opportunity to completely defeat the French, and he could not let the tiger return to the mountain.

In fact, throughout the Sino-French War, the imperial court was always worried that "soldiers and calamities" would provoke "popular uprisings" and "mutinies".

As a result, he always made peace with the French invaders, either implicit or overt, directly or indirectly.

In this great victory, Li Hongzhang and other peacemakers advocated "taking advantage of the victory and reaping the rewards."

Seeing the victory at Zhennanguan as a golden opportunity to seek a compromise, he advised the imperial court to conclude a peace treaty with France immediately.

After Zhang Zhidong learned that it was Li Hongzhang who 'accepted it when he saw it', he played the court three times in succession, saying:

It is okay to negotiate peace, but now that the French army has suffered a great loss of vitality and several high-ranking generals have suffered several casualties, it is better to postpone the armistice and withdraw troops and recover Hanoi before talking.

However, the imperial court rejected his offer.

In other words, it was Li Hongzhang who rejected his proposal.

Li Hongzhang, the minister in charge, sent a telegram to rebuke Zhang Zhidong, saying that since the armistice date had been set, it must be observed, and the French could not be distrusted......

Eventually, the imperial court and France signed the "Sino-French Agreement on Vietnam".

The Qing dynasty recognized French suzerainty over the colonies of French Indochina; recognition of France's right to protect Vietnam; recognition of the treaties concluded between France and Vietnam; The land border between China and Vietnam is open to trade, and two treaty ports are opened within the Chinese border;

The goods transported shall be subject to various taxes on the border of Yunnan and Guangxi, and the trade tax shall be reduced according to the current standard;

In the future, when China builds railways, it should consult with French operators.

Zhang Zhidong's efforts in the past few years have gone down the drain.

Liangguang Governor's Palace.

Yu Ke looked at the content of the contract, and the bruises on his forehead flared up.

Lao Tzu worked tirelessly for a year or two, in exchange for this? Li Hongzhang, why don't you die?!

"Kezhi, forget it."

Zhang Zhidong sighed: "This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened, and there is no need for the old man to say more about who Li Zhongtang is." I had expected this today. It's just that he is the governor of Zhili and a Shangguan, what can the old man do with him? ”

Yu Ke's eyes were shining, and he said word by word: "You can't, it doesn't mean I can't." ”

"What do you want to do?" Zhang Zhidong frowned.

"Won't do anything yet." Yu Ke's tone changed, "Now that the gun and ammunition factory and the ironmaking factory are on the right track, I can't get out of it for the time being." ”

Yu Ke continued: "Now the production line of the gun and ammunition factory to manufacture firing rifles and ammunition has been preliminarily established. ”

"The Dingguo firing rifle manufactured by the Gun and Ammunition Factory, although in terms of range and accuracy, is not as good as the Yankee's mechanical repeater gun for the time being, but it is not far behind."

"Give me another year or two, and I can build a more advanced firearm than the Westerners!"

"And now, we have no shortage of money and food in our hands, and the entire Liangguang region is under our control."

"5,000 new troops, 3,000 Black Flag troops, after two years of war and rich experience, the Qing army, which has long been erosive, is by no means our opponent!"

"You're crazy!!" Zhang Zhidong looked at Yu Ke incredulously, trembling all over, and scolded loudly.

Yu Ke turned to Zhang Zhidong, his eyes seemed to be lit with flames: "I'm ready to rebel, Governor Zhang, are you with me?" ”