Sunlight blazed bright. On the mountain road between Zizhou and Huangming County, people crowded everywhere.
Medical teams and supply units advancing forward, civilians and wounded being brought back from the battlefield at Huangming County, communications troops running back and forth relaying messages… figures of every kind filled the winding road, a blend of commands, weeping, and shouting all mixed together.
“All units keep to the right! Right! Right! Folks, this side’s the right, make way—”
The red-armbanded traffic wardens shouted from the middle of the road, barely managing to keep the whole route moving.
Amid the constant coming and going, the soldiers, already thoroughly trained in every regard, directed traffic without too much difficulty. The hardest to manage were, naturally, the civilians being evacuated from the Huangming County battlefield. They had just lived through the most terrifying scene of their lives; many were covered in blood, some perhaps still reeling from the deaths of family members. Some walked forward in a daze, seemingly unable to hear anything at all; occasionally someone would stumble into an oncoming column, and once touched, collapse to the ground weeping.
The red-armbanded wardens had to quickly direct people to help such folks back into their group.
In rare cases, these people, having lost all reason, would even start shouting at those around them, and at such times some measure of forceful intervention was the only option. Not humane, perhaps, but necessary under the circumstances.
Since all manner of contingency plans had already been prepared in advance, though various frictions kept arising, not once had there been a major delay that truly held things up.
The stretch of road from Huangming County to Zizhou was, in any case, relatively easy going by comparison. The stretch the Jurchens were currently marching through, from Jiange to Huangming County, naturally faced far more trouble. Among the various contingency comparisons drawn up by the Huaxia Army’s staff office, their side, with its smaller numbers, still came out ahead in terms of logistics.
On an open stretch of ground partway along the road, the tents of the camp responsible for housing civilians stretched on and on.
The Wu Dynasty civilians who managed to survive the Huangming County battlefield were, upon arriving here, first subjected to monitoring and quarantine. In this process, the Huaxia Army had assigned a large number of propaganda personnel to first hold briefing sessions with them, having them identify possible Jurchen spies within the crowd. Only after this screening would they be sent on to the settlements further to the rear.
Among the hundreds of thousands used as cannon fodder, as long as the Jurchen commanders had even a little sense, they would be sure to mix in spies—most of them, in fact, members of the Han armies who had surrendered to the Jurchens. Their attitudes were ambiguous, hard to sort out; if the Huaxia Army came out on top, many of them would even be willing to switch sides, but given the bounties the Jurchens offered and the shifting circumstances, such people could just as easily turn into ticking time bombs at any moment.
The lives of surrendered Han soldiers meant nothing anyway—casually stuffing an entire army’s worth of such men and sending them to the other side would only give the enemy a headache.
If I were the villain, this is exactly what I’d do—though Ning Yi had always been a good man, on matters like this, he had quite a bit of insight all the same.
“…At the Huangming battlefield, Balishu launched his full-scale assault around the hour of Wei in the afternoon… with Meng’an Wulitan leading a thousand men as the vanguard to scale the walls. When the assault on the city failed to produce results and this thousand-man unit found itself unable to withdraw, Balishu then ordered the Han army in the front line to launch a full assault. The frontal attack was blocked by our artillery corps, with heavy casualties…”
There was a watchtower standing tall on the mountain peak beside the main road; Ning Yi and the inspection team climbed all the way up. Looking forward from this mountainside, Huangming County could be faintly seen at the far end of the rolling sea of trees, and deep within the mountains, columns of smoke still rose—wildfires were still spreading. Xu Shaoyuan of the secretarial office recounted the previous day’s battle.
“…In order to rescue Wulitan’s unit, Balishu subsequently launched three large-scale assaults, and even ordered cannon fire on the civilians, throwing the entire battlefield situation into chaos. Under this new wave of attacks, the Jurchens once again drew close to the walls of Huangming County and engaged in fighting on the walls themselves, inflicting some damage on us… The message relayed by Division Commander Pang is that our own casualties for the twenty-fifth were only around a hundred men, and most of those were from the boulders and bombs they hurled at us.”
“…The Jurchens’ casualties, by conservative estimate, exceeded five thousand. After the unit under Yu Xian’s command was subjected to three rounds of saturation bombardment, a large-scale rout occurred; the Jurchens’ military police even killed some of their own men to enforce order. What’s more, at that point Balishu gave the order to shell the civilians…”
“One to fifty!” Hearing this figure, Ning Xi in the group could not hide her excitement. Ning Yi smiled faintly. “Most of the dead were probably Yu Xian’s Han army troops.”
Chief of Staff Li Yi, standing off to the side, nodded at this. “Wulitan is one of the Jurchens’ elite; Balishu ordered him to storm the city hoping to press the advantage while momentum was high. But most of Pang Liu’an’s men are veterans—they wouldn’t have gained any advantage scaling those walls. Once Balishu saw this happening, he immediately ordered the Han troops and other auxiliary forces into a saturation assault, and had them shell the civilians on the battlefield to throw the situation into chaos. First, this let Wulitan’s elite unit slip back under cover of confusion; second, he was probing the killing power of the cannons on the city walls.”
Having said this, Li Yi glanced at Ning Xi. “There’s a key insight hidden in all this—can you see it, Ning Xi?”
Ning Xi frowned, thinking it over for a moment. “They… they can accept this kind of loss?”
“…It means they don’t look down on us.” Ning Yi sighed, patting his child’s shoulder. “The Jurchens have been winning easy victories for twenty or thirty years now. In their own minds, they surely believe they are the strongest army under heaven. With that kind of mindset, in theory they shouldn’t be willing to accept excessively high casualties. Using a fierce vanguard commander like Wulitan for the first wave reflects exactly this mindset. If everything had gone as it normally would, Wulitan’s unit should have gained a foothold on the wall, and Huangming County should have fallen on the twenty-fifth.”
“But that’s not what happened. Balishu immediately sent the Han army cannon fodder charging forward, then launched three consecutive waves of assault, pushing the battlefield attack to full saturation. And afterward, without committing his elite main force, he withdrew after suffering enormous casualties… This tells us that, at least in the eyes of a high-ranking Jurchen commander like Balishu, he judged it necessary to accept this level of loss in order to probe the limits of the Huaxia Army’s fighting strength. That word ‘necessary’ proves they are not underestimating us in this war—quite the opposite, they think highly enough of us that they’ve launched this entire southwestern campaign because of it.”
Ning Xi nodded. Li Yi went on, “Zonghan and Xiyin believe that the Jurchens’ rise has already reached its peak, that internal corruption has already set in, while the Huaxia Army, risen from among the Han people, is still very much on the ascent. If this continues, the Jurchens will face the peril of decline as a kingdom—which is why they regard this southwestern campaign as the single most crucial battle for the Jurchens’ long-term survival. From how the first day at Huangming went, we can already tell: they can accept a quick victory, but they can also accept a wide gap in strength between the two sides and a long, grinding war of attrition. That second scenario is the one that would give us the most trouble.”
Ning Yi turned his gaze down toward the refugee camp beside the road below. “How many civilian casualties?”
“The Second Division’s figures are only a rough estimate. Over the whole day, somewhere between fifteen and eighteen thousand civilians were driven to the front. In the end, we managed to save…” Xu Shaoyuan checked the report, then looked down at the camp below, “…a little over three thousand six hundred. Of those, more than seven hundred were wounded.”
The group by the watchtower fell silent for a moment. Then Ning Yi laughed. “You know, back when the staff office was drawing up its initial plans, that fellow Chen Tian came up with a really nasty strategy on the Jurchens’ behalf. His idea was that, by the time the Jurchens attacked the southwest, the whole realm would already belong to them—so they could mix surrendered Han troops in among the refugee cannon fodder, forcing us to accept them, when sorting them out would be enormously difficult.”
“Building on that, Chen Tian suggested that the Jurchens could consider driving a million, even several million civilians from the Xianghu and Sichuan regions—confiscating their homes, seizing their grain and everything else—and then driving one million, two million, even three million of them toward us from the Jiange pass. Whether as cannon fodder or simply handed over directly, all the Jurchens would need to do is keep one route open, and we’d be completely unable to absorb them. Within a year, we’d all be dead…”
The refugee camp on the slope below looked wretched enough, but even that was only the beginning of what such a scheme could bring. As Ning Yi told the story of Chen Tian to lighten the mood, there was a note of genuine feeling beneath his laughter, and Li Yi beside him wore a similarly complicated, wry smile. Ning Xi frowned, thinking it over. “If that really happened, what would we do… Though Zhou Jun Wu just pulled off quite the reversal down by the Yangtze…”
“It couldn’t play out here—whether at the Jiange pass or any of the mountain passes along the Jinniu Road, as long as the Jurchens held those, a million civilians could never make it back through. And there’s no fighting our way through either.”
“Then… is there any way to counter it?”
“An open scheme like that is very hard to counter.” Ning Yi laughed. “When Chen Tian first said it, everyone just sat there stunned. It’s unlikely to actually happen—the outcome would be too unpredictable for them to control, and the Jurchens can mobilize several hundred thousand to a million troops whenever they want, so there’d be no need to resort to such a shameful tactic. But if they really did get that desperate—fighting us while relentlessly funneling more and more people in—we genuinely wouldn’t even be able to cry about it. The odds of total collapse would be very high… That’s exactly why everyone in the staff office says Chen Tian’s got a belly full of dirty tricks—a match made in heaven with Qu Zhengyan…”
Looking down at the refugee camp below, Ning Yi’s expression, after telling this joke, gradually turned serious.
“There’s no room for optimism here. One to fifty at Huangming County—people call it a saturation assault, but really the Jurchens haven’t gone all-out yet. Once their elite troops step in, once the catapults and cannons are all brought forward, the casualty ratio will narrow considerably. Balishu is a veteran Jurchen commander—since he’s already mentally prepared for this, he’ll find the breaking point of Huangming County’s defenses soon enough. At Rainwater Creek, Elili is holding back, also waiting to see how Balishu’s assault turns out. That’s when the real test will come for us.”
Ning Yi looked over the battle report, gave it a flick with his fingers, and handed it to Li Yi with a wry smile. “Sigh, look at this—more people coming to collect their debts. I told them again and again before the war started, go easy on the shells. Now Pang Liu’an and Li Dong, these two, went and blew through a whole day’s worth, firing on five thousand-plus men—having the time of their lives, weren’t they… And now that they’ve tallied it all up, here comes the report, warning us the shells might run short.”
Within the Huaxia Army, purely military matters were handled by the staff office and the various army commands; although Ning Yi oversaw the overall strategic picture and occasionally offered analysis, he rarely intervened directly. But logistics and supply—the production, procurement, and allocation of every kind of material—remained squarely in Ning Yi’s hands. Earlier, when analyzing the Huangming situation, Ning Yi had spoken seriously, but hadn’t actually been all that worried underneath. Now that people were coming to demand payment from him directly, his shoulders sagged, and he laughed out of sheer exasperation.
“Years of savings, all poured out. Round-the-clock production at full tilt ever since, and where exactly am I supposed to squeeze out more for them from?… Xu Shaoyuan, go write them a letter and give them a proper scolding for me. The plan is the plan. There’s nothing more.”
He clapped his hands together. “Well, there it is—I knew it. Three months into this fight and everyone’s already down to drinking the northwest wind.”
Ahead, the mountains rolled on endlessly, the road winding through them. As Ning Yi talked about all this up on the mountain, he still wore a trace of amusement. Beside him, his son had been frowning, working through the numbers with difficulty; once they reached a quiet spot, he finally turned to his father and asked, “Dad, is it really not enough?” Ning Yi looked at this son of his, who was gradually growing into a man, and couldn’t help but laugh. “Come on, let’s go do the books together.”
By the afternoon, father and son returned to the command post and sat down with an abacus to work through the accounts. Pang Liu’an, having spent an entire day firing off cannon shells, was already using his battlefield results as leverage to request more supplies—and really, which army wasn’t hoping for a little more?
In the pre-war task allocation, the supplies for each army had already been carefully divided up, and the output expected from the rear over the coming months had likewise already been apportioned. Ning Yi kept only a small margin in reserve, but every army was doing everything in its power to squeeze more out of him regardless. This sort of thing was, over the past while, exactly what had most often left Ning Yi sighing and slapping the table.
To him, fighting the Jurchens felt more and more like being an aging landlord watching his sons carve up the family estate beneath him—there was a kind of desolate feeling that no matter how long he lived, he’d never manage to hold onto a single copper coin of it. He was occasionally driven to laughter by the reports from the various armies, finding what bitter amusement he could in it all.
Of course, no one involved in this had any selfish motives, and this sort of back-and-forth haggling was in fact quite necessary. All Ning Yi could do was periodically issue memos scolding the division commanders at the front, calling them spendthrifts, then head to the rear to push the workers to put in overtime, and push the propaganda department to keep encouraging everyone to make the most of their own initiative. He occasionally joked, self-deprecatingly, that he’d truly perfected his inner black-hearted capitalist to the fullest extent.
Even so, the shortfall in supplies remained substantial. In the earlier years, in order to keep Heden’s three counties running, they had sold off essentially everything that could be sold. The largest volume of trade had been in cannons; what Ning Yi had kept firmly in hand were grenades. After taking the Chengdu Plain, things had eased up somewhat, and full-scale war preparations began, but overall military reserves remained thin—this war had, after all, come earlier than expected.
Father and son spent half the afternoon working through the accounts in that room, and by the time they stepped outside, the propaganda units were already out celebrating the great victory at Huangming County, a fifty-to-one exchange ratio. The propaganda team passed by, beating gongs and drums, and Ning Xi’s expression was that of some foolish young heir who had just discovered his family fortune was actually an empty shell—a mixture of guilt and embarrassment.
“It’s all money… productive capacity.” Ning Yi sighed, patting his son’s shoulder. “There’s a new factory in Chengdu—I’m thinking of sending you there to study for a while. This kind of management, that’s going to be the top priority going forward.”
“…I—I’m not going.” Ning Xi caught on at once. “Dad, you’re tricking me again.”
“Everything I said was true.” Ning Yi’s expression was sincere and calm. “But you’ve got your own ideas, and that’s fine too—stay in Zizhou for now, then.”
Not the slightest flaw showed in Ning Yi’s expression. On the twenty-sixth, Huangming County went through another round of fierce fighting. Pang Liu’an cut back on the frequency of his shelling, and casualties on the battlefield eased somewhat. Even without the cannon fire, the fighting strength atop Huangming County’s walls remained as unyielding as steel. This was still only the opening phase of the war; Balishu relayed the results of the fighting, along with some preliminary conclusions, back to every commander in the Jurchen army.
The fires set off by clashing scout units in the mountains, meanwhile, kept spreading further and further. An exchange ratio of roughly one to six was an unbearable threat to auxiliary units that had come into the mountains chasing bounty money. Even though the Jurchen high command had already forbidden setting fires carelessly, once an ambush hit, who was going to care about following orders at the moment life and death hung in the balance? Whether one meant to slip away in the confusion or simply turn and flee, setting a fire was everyone’s first instinct.
The Huaxia Army’s scouts chose, for the time being, to hold their line and not move. Some of the elite Jurchen scouts gradually began adapting to the Huaxia Army’s style of fighting; occasionally, after pushing forward to seize a key position, they would find themselves cut off by a fire set by their own side, and would curse endlessly upon returning—when they managed to return at all. Some never made it back.
Everyone understood that this opening phase of probing and stalemate would not last much longer. Once the probing was done, what awaited the Huaxia Army would inevitably be large-scale, high-intensity, repeated waves of Jurchen assault, artillery exchanges on both sides, trading blows back and forth—and even then, the Jurchens would never find themselves at an absolute disadvantage. Most important of all: whether in manpower or material, they could afford to keep trading.
On the night of the twenty-sixth, once he’d finished handling business for the day, Ning Yi took out writing paper to send letters to his family in the rear. To Su Tan’er, he wrote something like this:
I’ve noticed that once children grow up, they’re nowhere near as adorable as they were when they were little. Tell Wenwen, Ning Ke, Ning Shuang, and Ning Ning that their father loves them best of all—their older brothers aren’t nearly as endearing.
Oh, and Ning He is still little, so he’s just as adorable as they are.
…
Before long, Su Tan’er wrote back:
Yesterday I received a letter from Xi’er, saying you’re always trying to trick him into going to the rear. That’s really rather an old man’s stubborn habit. He wants to be a bold, straightforward young man, and he says this isn’t something he should be learning from you.
I’m glad to see he has his own judgment now. Of course, I gave him a scolding in my letter too.
Don’t you go picking fights with him over this.
…
—Oh, I will absolutely pick a fight with him!
—Happy for you, my foot!
Ning Yi’s face turned dark with irritation at his wife’s letter.
But compared to the war, matters like these were, in their own indescribable way, rather happy ones.