Lin Hai gave a look, Cheng Guorong stood up and strode forward, then grabbed the imperial edict and turned around to hand it to Lin Hai.
Lin Hai read quickly. Apart from the clichés that were always used to fill the word count in imperial edicts, there were probably only three important things.
First, the Emperor refused the request to send reinforcements to Qinghe. This was expected by everyone. After all, Lin Hai did not want outsiders to interfere in Cambodia, and the Emperor did not want to send reinforcements to Lin Hai even if he could.
Secondly, His Majesty promised that if Lin Hai could capture Taijing, he would be promoted to Duke. This was already the pinnacle of nobility within the Daliang Empire for people of different surnames.
The third point is very interesting. His Majesty, who had been very calm throughout the whole article, suddenly changed his tone and sternly asked Lin Hai to "effectively control the casualties in the attack on Cambodia." And he did not mean to control the casualties of his own soldiers, but to control the casualties of Cambodian civilians.
His Majesty's original words were: "Attacking Cambodia will cause too much harm to the civilian population. The army must not slaughter them indiscriminately. Therefore, the death toll of Cambodian civilians in this campaign should be between 1.5 million and 2 million. There is no upper limit, but the minimum requirement of 1.5 million must be met."
In the second half of the imperial edict, in order to help Lin Hai better understand this statement, it even wrote in detail which Khmer civilians should be recorded in the "war losses".
His Majesty the Emperor said that since the war was fought by young people, Cambodia would naturally suffer a lot of losses among its young and middle-aged people, especially young and middle-aged men. Therefore, the population structure of Cambodia should be adjusted to match such losses.
To put it bluntly, for every young man the Khmer lost, the Qinghe Army should have killed at least two elderly people. If a young woman was lost, at least one elderly person should have been killed as well.
If the Khmer collapses too quickly and there is not much damage on the battlefield, then the Khmer should be selectively massacred according to this ratio.
This will ensure that Cambodia will still have a relatively healthy population structure after the war and will not cause excessive "man-made disasters" due to lack of labor.
this...
Lin Hai was a little confused.
He handed the imperial edict to Shi Zhen'er, Cheng Guorong, and Ding Lin, asking them to read it first. He then asked, "The entire Khmer nation has only eight million people. Your Majesty wants me to kill one-fifth to one-quarter of the Khmer people? And this must be a selective massacre?"
Hong Jiu smiled slightly and said, "Yes, that's what your majesty meant. Before I set out, Master Gan told me to relay that both the Imperial Army and the Chen Dynasty Army have already begun such operations in the central battlefield. However, it is difficult for both sides to achieve the desired results with their own strength, so we still need your help, Master."
"What?" Lin Hai, who had been acting calm all this time, was truly shocked at this moment.
Did the Imperial Army and the Chen Dynasty Army begin a planned and organized massacre of each other's citizens, or a proportional massacre? And at least both sides reached a tacit understanding on this?
What kind of devil's contract spirit is this?
"You may have misunderstood one thing, my Lord." Hong Jiu smiled and said, "You want to conquer the entire Cambodia, so you only need to selectively kill more than one million people. But whether it is the Imperial Army or the Chen Dynasty Army, they are only fighting on the central battlefield. They can't go to each other's territory to carefully identify and kill them selectively."
Hong Jiu paused, as if wanting Lin Hai to laugh at what he had just said first, and then continued: "They only massacred the city. The specific adjustment of the population structure is the business of the other court."
"How can the empire sit idly by and watch the other side slaughter its own people?" Cheng Guorong said in horror.
"Of course we can't sit idly by, so the empire also slaughtered the other side's people as a way to avenge them," said Hong Jiu.
"Why is there such a bloody and weird rule?" Lin Hai took a deep breath and waved his hand, interrupting the generals who wanted to ask questions.
"I don't know either. But in war, killing more or less people is not a big deal. If the soldiers find it hard, just drive them into the river. His Majesty said that the method is not important, but the result is." Hong Jiu smiled and nodded, saying, "This is what His Majesty told me personally when I was leaving. When Gan Ye said that the Lord must accept the order, he was referring to this matter."
"You don't know the reason?"
"I am a humble person with little influence. I used to be just a manager at the laundry department..."
"Okay, does Yan Zipei know?"
"I don't know either, but he said it's a tradition. It's been fought this way for years."
"Then do you know how many people we should kill?"
"This uncle didn't say it, but he did say that with your intelligence, you should know how to calculate it."
"Calculation?"
Lin Hai fell into deep thought.
If the massacre rate in all countries is like this, then...
According to the population statistics of various countries before the war, if everyone lost 15% to 20% of their population, the entire continent would have to have lost nearly 20 million people!
That’s 20 million fucking people!
Could it be that both the emperor and the regent prince of the Chen Dynasty have gone crazy?
wrong!
It's not just the two of them who are crazy, it's all of them.
A few days ago, intelligence came from Zhongxing Prefecture that Wei Mingyuan, who had just gained power, was carrying out a large-scale purge in the country. Within a single day, dozens of families were sentenced to death with nine generations of their clans executed.
Lin Hai thought that Wei Mingyuan was carrying out a routine reshuffle after the coup in order to consolidate his power. He also lamented that Wei Mingyuan might have gone a little too far. How could one consolidate a regime only through large-scale killings? But now he understood that he also had this goal.
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