After some adjustments by Zhou Shixian, Xue Lao Er is still the chief military officer, directly commanding the soldiers and horses of the headquarters and the Ma Huabao who were scattered and reorganized, more than 1,000 veterans of Lu Jiude's department, and more than 4,000 slender men selected from the 20,000 slender men, formed a mixed battalion, and Zhou Shixian personally named it "Tianwei Zhong Military Battalion".

Weng Dajie and Kong Tao are battalion officers, and the two soldiers and horses are still more than 500 veterans each after supplementing and adjusting, and they also lead more than 2,000 ordinary slender men to form two battalions of "Yangwei" and "Zhenwei", with a total of more than 10,000 troops in the three battalions, and they are stationed in Yangzhou together.

Zhang Hong, Li Daxi and another battalion officer named Zheng Hu together, each led more than 500 veterans and 2,000 slender men, forming three battalions of "Wu'an", "Wuyong" and "Wuyao", stationed on the north bank of the Yangtze River in Yingtianfu, among which Zhang Hong led the most powerful slender man.

In this way, there is also the only cavalry battalion under Zhou Shixian led by battalion officer Wu Xingye - "Wufen Battalion", the only firearms battalion under Zhou Shixian led by battalion officer Sun Hu - "Jinwu Battalion", and the battalion battalion led by battalion officer Zhou Tong - "Wuying Battalion", and the three battalions are stationed in Zhenjiang Mansion.

At this point, all the units of the new army under Zhou Shixian had basically taken shape, with a mixed battalion, a cavalry battalion, a firearms battalion, and six combat battalions as the main body, and the main generals who followed him all the way from the capital to Nanjing got what they wanted.

Zhou Shixian finally had a field army that could be on his own.

However, this is only the beginning, the training, supply, weapons and equipment of the army are all problems that Zhou Shixian needs to solve.

It is not a simple matter to cultivate a strong army, not to mention that the placement of the army has irreconcilable contradictions with the original local forces.

The more than 25,000 troops and more than 20,000 family members who accompanied the army were all placed by Zhou Shixian in the suburbs of various prefectures and counties, basically with battalions as units, scattered in three prefectures and nine prefectures and counties. The construction of their camps, the supply of food and salaries, as well as the supporting weapons and equipment, and military uniforms and tents, were nominally allocated by the Nanjing court.

Of course, the funds allocated by the Ministry of Household Affairs are only part of it, and they cannot meet all the needs of the army. Not to mention, although this army of soldiers and horses was personally taken care of and led by Zhou Shixian, those officials who handled it were still looted layer by layer.

Originally, a soldier was based on five taels of silver in a Chinese New Year's Eve, and a cavalry was fifty taels, but Xue Laoer, the chief officer, actually received the military salary in hand, and it was evenly divided, and each soldier was less than three taels of silver a month.

This includes all the expenses of the army, and the shelter, bedding, armor, swords, and guns alone cost twenty or thirty taels of silver per person. The cavalry consumed more horses, especially when training.

In other words, if the money allocated by the household department was to meet the equipment standards of the army, the soldiers had to starve to death, and if the soldiers were to be fed, their weapons and equipment could not be used. If the officers are corrupt, the soldiers may not only starve, but also have no high-quality weapons to use, let alone maintain a high level of training.

This is also the reason why the generals in the late Ming Dynasty always supported their families, and the money they received, in addition to honoring the officials, after their own corruption, they could really only equip a small number of family members, and then more than 100 family members went to war with thousands of "peasants" with incomplete armor and weapons.

And now, if it weren't for Ni Yuanlu, the head of the household, who was heavily checked, I am afraid that there would be no twenty taels left in this army of soldiers and horses. With a number of 25,000 soldiers, maybe it would be good to be able to train 10,000 in the end.

The problem of corruption, which is deeply rooted in the bone marrow of the Ming bureaucracy, is not something that can be solved in a short period of time.

This is why many capable Ming generals want to set the minimum annual salary required by a border soldier who can fight well at 75 taels of silver. Because more than half of them are going to be looted.

However, in any case, the cost of training and maintenance of the field army in this period is extremely high, 100,000 regular troops, at least four million taels of silver a year, to maintain training and combat, and the Ming Dynasty to ensure their own safety, at least 300,000 such troops, from which we can also know why Chongzhen's Liao salary has been repeatedly levied.

Moreover, with the financial system of the Ming Dynasty, for every extra one million / tax increase in the treasury, at least three or four million must go into the pockets of the officials and gentry, and half of the taxes collected through hard work can not be embezzled by officials at all levels, and those money and grain that are not embezzled can be sent to the army, and half of them can go to the hands of ordinary soldiers, which is considered a great luck.

This is also the reason why the financial problems of the Ming Dynasty, or in other words, the hundreds of thousands of troops of the Ming Dynasty have been repeatedly defeated. Zhou Shixian is bound to reform, but it is still the same sentence - freezing three feet is not a day's cold, this is not something he can solve for a while.

Fortunately, he also had more than one million taels of enthusiastic officials in the capital, and the military salaries that the king of the Zhu family was forced to donate, before he reorganized the financial and taxation system of the Nanjing court, these military salaries and the silver allocated by the household department were enough for him to build a strong army of 25,000 from scratch.

In the south of Liuhe County, on the north bank of the Yangtze River in Yingtianfu, new mud houses are being erected, and many farmers around are coming to help, including the families of the soldiers.

After Zhang Hong arranged for his officers to take the recruits in line to train in formation, he personally came to inspect the construction of the barracks.

At first, it was built as a soldier's residence, but now it is almost tiled, and other works have been basically completed. Soldiers with families and soldiers without families lived on opposite sides, with a single soldier in a room of ten and a separate room for those with a family. And the housing situation is different, and the rent is also different.

This is Zhou Shixian's humane side, but also his market-oriented side, he pays so much military salary, the soldiers' food is also free, and those with family members also provide basic rations, so it is natural to recover some costs from some aspects.

But that's all, he didn't want to be a charter man, as long as the construction cost was recovered, the accommodation allocated to them would no longer collect rent.

Zhou Shixian ordered to recruit people to repair instead of using soldiers, so that the soldiers could step up their training, so Zhang Huangyan, the chief instructor and logistics commander of the army, was responsible for recruiting farmers and masons near the various military camps, and also bought materials from the shops of local squires and officials nearby, which cost a lot of money.

Of course, this also alleviates the contradiction between the army and these land snakes, since there is money to be made, then many things are easy to talk about, originally they were disgruntled because Zhou Shixian forcibly occupied a lot of abandoned land around, but now there are quite a few people who have not suffered much, and their attitudes have changed.

In fact, these abandoned lands have not been cultivated for many years because of low fertility, tenant desertion and war. Even if we start leveling the land and fertilizing the fields again, the yield in the previous years will not be high.

But these squires and bureaucrats saw that their land was occupied by a group of Qiu Ba, where did they swallow that breath? If I hadn't heard that it was a soldier with a horse, I am afraid it would not have been as simple as being disgruntled.

And Zhou Shixian is in line with the principle of "occupy everything that should be occupied, and occupy it if it can be occupied", and he was not polite at all. He knows that these people don't dare to provoke him, and he also knows the social operation norms of this era, he is a concubine, this is the biggest reliance, sue him, that is, sue Chongzhen, Li Banghua is also his person, no one's music can be handed to Chongzhen's eyes.

After the soldiers' barracks were built, the farmers and masons recruited by the silver also had to build training grounds, as well as bedding uniforms, weapon forging workshops, and repairing the surrounding wasteland and water conservancy, and Zhou Shixian planned to hand over the work to the recruits.

The massacre of the city without the Manchu Qing Dynasty was relatively light due to the impact of war and natural disasters, and the population of Nanzhili was still very dense and the labor was cheap. In times like these, people are the least valuable.

In addition, Zhou Shixian also planned to build a primary school in each military camp, and when the time came, he would invite missionaries, craftsmen, and scholars to train some of the talented children of these slender men into officials, craftsmen, and scientific and technological talents, which would be a core force that would always be loyal to him.

And those bedding and military uniform workshops, the wasteland, are places to house the families of soldiers, and the weapons workshops are for the craftsmen who are about to be invited.

Zhou Shixian is not a good man, when a man is a soldier, that is, when he is a livestock, when a woman works, he is used as a man, and if a child can't learn a craft or read, he goes to farm and help women work.

Although there is not much land, only more than 1,000 hectares, the more than 7,000 soldiers with families can get an average of more than 10 acres, and the output is still very considerable, except for paying tithes.

He needed to keep the cost of raising an army to a minimum, and tie all aspects of this army together to ensure their loyalty and reliability, as well as their combat effectiveness. These must be done, there is more land, but there is no excuse to grab it for the time being.

After Zhang Hong saw the construction of the barracks, he went to the logistics team again, and dozens of members of the logistics team were preparing to go to the vicinity to buy supplies, rice, grain, salt, and meat, all of which were within the scope of their purchase.

The soldiers now maintain a training intensity of three days and one drill every two days, and need to replenish enough salt, oil and water, which can only be procured from the vicinity. There are even some squires who saw the business opportunity and took the initiative to contact the head of the logistics team to supply them at a fixed point.

After inspecting the round, Zhang Hong was very satisfied with the newly renovated barracks, and then happily returned to the abandoned land that was temporarily used as a training ground, where officers at all levels were coordinating the queues of those recruits to stand in formation and walk in formation.

Although they were now scattered, they quickly adapted to the new team under the batons and slogans of the officers, and their training progressed very quickly, reflecting the excellence of the slender men as a source of soldiers.

There is no unified military uniform, except for some swords, guns and armor, the rest of the equipment has not been issued, and the soldiers are still dressed in tatters, and it still looks like there are shortcomings.

"Battalion officer, Chief Instructor Zhang is here." Zhang Hong's personal guards suddenly came to report.

When Zhang Hong heard this, he was slightly stunned, and then immediately turned around and walked in the direction where Zhang Huangyan came.