Chapter 204: Looseness
After the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Song Dynasty began to implement martial law from north to south.
Beacon towers were set up in Puzhou, Huazhou, Zhengzhou, Kaifeng Prefecture, Henan Prefecture (Luoyang), Shanzhou, and the part of Henan that formerly belonged to Mengzhou. The number of soldiers patrolling along the Yellow River embankment and the fleet monitoring the opposite bank of the river was doubled.
The troops in the imperial camp re-counted their headcounts, checked the inventory of all military supplies, including ordnance, food, fodder, and war horses, and conducted a unified inspection and cleanup of the forts along the river.
In Henan Province, which is located along the Yellow River, the families of soldiers, the elderly, the weak, women and children were advised to go south to the Huaihe River and Nanyang area for resettlement.
The envoys, ministers and generals from all over the country, together with the prefect of Nanyang Prefecture Yan Xiaozhong, received the imperial edict, and they worked hard to improve the defense and take action accordingly. The rest of the military and state governors in Henan also received imperial edicts issued by the palace and the capital, asking them to arrange their defenses and cooperate with the envoys, ministers and generals from all over the country. Without the order of the central government, they were not allowed to disobey.
At the same time, the imperial court sent a special decree to various places in Guanxi, emphasizing the absolute power of Yuwen Xuzhong and the special status of Li Yanxian of Shanzhou.
The transportation of materials to the southeast, Jingxiang, and Huainan is also being urgently deployed.
Things seem to be going in an orderly manner, but the center still has its own worries.
After all, no matter how much preparation is made, it is just preparation. Once the Jin army attacks, who knows what will happen? Moreover, from a military strategic point of view, although the Song army has the imperial camp troops in Henan, which gives it a little confidence, it still has two huge military holes in front of it that cannot be ignored.
This is the problem with Kansai and the problem with Tokyo City.
From the Kansai side, things were too urgent and too hasty.
You have to know that in order to make good military preparations, one thing is naturally excellent soldiers, and the other is naturally complete logistics, and Guanxi does not seem to lack these... Guanxi is recognized by the world as a place of excellent soldiers, and there is also a ready-made elite seed force, that is, the more than 10,000 elite soldiers from Jingyuan Road (from this perspective, Qu Duan did do something); and the economic strength of Bashu is also unquestionable, especially Zhang Jun's bold use of Zhao Kai, his deputy in finance, who led an outstanding financial reform, making Bashu's original financial plate of more than 10 million strings of cash still bigger.
But the problem was that the Guanxi Troika had just killed Wang Xie in July and unified the military power for only a month. Before the central government made up its mind to increase taxes, a considerable part of Bashu's financial revenue was sent down the river to Nanyang... So they were not well prepared in terms of manpower, supplies and actual conditions.
It just so happened that the old rival here was Wanyan Loushi, Wanyan Nianhan's military deputy and the actual deputy military commander of the Western Route Army.
I must add one more thing here. Wanyan Loushi was a figure that could not be ignored in this era. He was also a figure that made all the Song army tremble with fear... There was no other way. Open the booklet compiled by Wang Yuan, the king's deputy, and come to the pages about this person. You will find that this person was most likely a family slave of the Wanyan family or the head of a servant tribe (the two identities are not contradictory). He fought all the way from Liaodong to Henan, and his record was truly dazzling.
The main force of the Liao Kingdom was defeated by this man who led his troops on a long journey to the battlefield to change horses, and then launched cavalry assaults on the Liao Kingdom's central army nine times in one day together with Yin Shuke; the main force of 30,000 cavalry from Western Xia supporting the Liao Kingdom was defeated by this man who continuously divided the troops and attacked; Fan Zhixu's 200,000 Western Army reinforcements were dispersed by this man and ten Meng'an; in the Battle of Taiyuan, it was he and Yin Shuke who defeated hundreds of thousands of reinforcements one by one.
It can be said that he participated in almost all the major battles during the rise of the Jin army, and was always responsible for the toughest and most difficult battles, yet he was always invincible.
It is truly invincible.
Even Li Yanxian's military miracle in Shanzhou was accomplished after he turned to Guanxi and northern Shaanxi; even in such a hurry last year, this man led his army to steadily swallow up Yan'an Prefecture and forced the surrender of the three states outside the Yellow River, which was truly impeccable.
In history, Han Shizhong and Yue Fei never encountered such a person, and it is hard to say if they had encountered him. Anyway, among the people that Emperor Zhao could use before his death, those who had encountered this person, such as Zhang Jun, Li Yanxian, Qu Duan, and Yang Yizhong, were all defeated by him... Of course, this statement is not accurate enough. The accurate statement is that these people were the remnants of Wanyan Loushi's defeated generals at that time, and they were not worthy of being called defeated generals.
At that time, tens of thousands of Song troops were defeated by the Jin army, which was mainly led by Wanyan Loushi and Wanyan Yinshu. Zhang Jun, Li Yanxian, and Qu Duan became important military officials mainly because Wanyan Loushi gathered the defeated troops after withdrawing his troops.
Not only that, this man and his old partner Yin Shuke went on continuous conquests, capturing alive the King of Xi, Emperor Tianzuo of Liao, and even Yelu Dashi (who successfully escaped after serving as a guide for the Jin army for a few days)... To put it bluntly, if he had not been at the gates of Tokyo during the Jingkang Incident, this man might have achieved an unprecedented achievement in Chinese military history, that is, capturing emperors of four major countries.
Who wouldn't be worried when faced with such an opponent, who was leading the main force of the Jin army and targeting their weakest point?
As for Dongjing, there is no need to say more. Dongjing is too far forward. Once the Jin army crosses the river, it will be another siege of Dongjing. The four words "siege of Dongjing" almost made the whole Song Dynasty suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
So, I don’t know if it’s because they knew that Guanxi had nothing to worry about, or because they were in the middle of it, but after the entire Song Dynasty central government entered a state of war readiness, they started to make arrangements for the defense of Tokyo City, and everyone’s focus was on it.
Putting aside the inevitable panic at the beginning, as the city gradually readjusted to martial law, the city's inner and outer areas, which had recovered to a population of more than 300,000, suddenly generated an unexpected explosive force around city defense construction.
This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading!
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
