Chapter 35: Aftermath (Part 2)

“They won’t take our lives, will they?”

“Oh, my mother must be worried sick,” Ma Peng whimpered, wiping his tears.

Fu Buer’s heart ached. You have a mother, but I have a whole family! His wife was one thing, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his concubines, especially the third one, a woman from Guangzhou. She was a bit older, but she had been a courtesan in a high-class brothel, a xingyuan, and she was fashionable, and could sing, and was far more refined than the local country girls. She had completely captivated him.

And his son was young, his daughter unable to manage the family estate. If he didn’t return, his uncles and cousins would surely embezzle his property. He had long been the object of their envy. The more he thought, the more he regretted his decision to join the fight. The guards were not particularly vigilant, just two young pirates. He fumbled in his robes and found two taels of silver. Fearing it wasn’t enough, he added his gilded silver net scarf ring, worth another two or three qian. Two taels of silver, he thought, should be enough to buy his freedom. The appetite of these small-time pirates couldn’t be too large.

He mustered his courage and approached one of the young pirates, offering the silver. He tried to explain in his broken Guangzhou dialect, pointing to himself, then to the outside, and making a running motion.

The young man was expressionless. He gestured with his bayoneted matchlock, and Fu Buer fell silent. He didn’t dare to withdraw the silver; it would be confiscated in a search anyway. He might as well use it to buy some goodwill. But the young man refused the bribe, pointing instead to Fu Buer’s injured leg and then to a large tent. He was to wait for treatment.

It was evening before the medical team had finished with all the wounded. Fu Buer’s leg had been stitched up with more than ten stitches. The doctor told him he was lucky; the bullet had passed clean through the muscle without hitting bone or major blood vessels. For Fu Buer, it was a novel experience. He had never known that flesh could be sewn like cloth. He had screamed his head off during the procedure.

Two-thirds of the thirty or so seriously wounded had died while they waited. The doctors had little hope for the rest. They had no plasma, a shortage of qualified nurses, and it was unlikely the men would survive surgery.

“Let the military team give them a quick end,” He Ma said. In their current situation, with resources so precious, it was unlikely they would be wasted on these men.

Shi Niaoren pondered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Let’s treat a dead horse as a living one. They’ve held on this long; their vitality is strong. Let’s give it a try.”

“But we have no plasma. We’d have to find donors, test their blood…”

“Just use saline,” Shi Niaoren decided. “No anesthesia, either. Whether they survive is up to fate.”

The medical team was stunned. To operate on these seriously wounded, bleeding, and in some cases unconscious men, without anesthesia or plasma… it was tantamount to murder.

“Didn’t I say?” Shi Niaoren said. “Treat a dead horse as a living one. It’s better than watching them die. At least this way, my conscience will be a little clearer.” He didn’t add what he was also thinking: It will be good practice for us.

“Come on, let’s get to it.” The medical team, already exhausted from a long day’s work, began to prepare. They were short-staffed, especially on nurses, so the doctors had to assist each other. Even the veterinarian, Dr. Yang, was called in. He had just finished treating the three captured horses.

“Old Yang, can you operate on people?”

“I can operate on horses,” Yang Baogui joked. “Debridement, disinfection, suturing… it’s all the same. I can also do amputations.”

“Let’s get to it.”

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At the post-war review meeting that evening, based on the actual situation exposed in the battle, five main problems were sorted out:

1. Insufficient military training and poor fighting will. Most people were not only unskilled in handling firearms, but also had too many ineffective shots. They could not hold on when there was a slight danger, and even fled in disarray when resisting from behind fortifications. If it happened in the wild, it was hard to say what would happen.

2. Extremely poor organization. Except for the members of the military group who could still effectively follow the command of the group leaders to fight, the military group could hardly command the temporarily organized masses. “A motley crew,” He Ming said at the summary meeting.

3. In terms of protection, the equipment of steel helmets + anti-stab vests proved to be effective. But the problem exposed in this battle was that the protection area was too small, and the limbs and face lacked protection. Further protective products need to be developed.

4. The strategy was too cautious, limiting themselves to Bairen Tan and not taking the initiative to attack by taking advantage of their superiority in firepower, communication, and mobility, resulting in a passive and beaten situation.

5. The defense of Bairen City was obviously insufficient and needed to be strengthened.

But the focus of the meeting was the next strategic policy.

The moderates still insisted on taking the two points and one line as the main activity center, strengthening the defense of the base, and after creating a fait accompli, taking industrial and technological development as the core, forming a complete urban and industrial and agricultural system, and using rich materials, superior life, and advanced technology to form a “beacon effect” to attract local people to join the circulation and construction, and finally achieve the goal of “peaceful evolution.”

The radicals, on the other hand, ridiculed the moderates as a true “turtle school.” They were clearly three centuries stronger than the other side, but they were as timid as a tiger, only shrinking behind trenches and barbed wire, not daring to fight for the initiative. They reminded the other side that if they did not take the initiative to attack and destroy the local Ming Dynasty ruling center, the resources of Lingao would never be used by them, and this ruling center would organize all kinds of hostile activities again and again.

“Lingao County can launch such a two-pronged attack today, and maybe tomorrow they will send people to launch a sneak attack. They have done it before. And in the future, we will definitely leave the base and go further and further to collect various materials. Will we rely on the military group to escort us every time?”

The radicals listed the various benefits of occupying the county town: first, a large number of people in the county town could be captured as labor; second, taxes and grain could be collected through the captured tax and corvee registers, and a large amount of materials, money, and grain in the county treasury could also be obtained…

These benefits made many people’s hearts flutter. Although the moderates used historical materials and reality as weapons: telling them that there were not many residents in the city who could be captured as coolies, and from the Ming Dynasty’s Lingao County Annals, this county had never been very rich, and there would not be much material and grain in the county treasury.

At this time, the representative of the radicals, Ma Qianzhu, unexpectedly proposed to temporarily shelve this issue and focus on solving the problems of training and organization exposed in this battle.

The training work was indeed a blank: they had been working every day for more than ten days since they came ashore, and there was no time at all. They had only done live-fire target practice once, and each person fired five bullets, which made the Planning Committee’s heart ache. Five hundred people would need two thousand five hundred bullets. The biggest loss for the transmigrators in this battle was their ammunition consumption. In this battle that lasted less than an hour, they consumed nearly three thousand rounds of ammunition, which was a considerable number. And the total ammunition stock was only one million rounds… This kind of training and small battle used up so much ammunition, how would they fight the next battle? When would they be able to produce metal-cased cartridges?

As for the problem of organization, it was obviously directly related to the lack of military training. Xiao Zishan proposed at the meeting: the various professional groups performed well in the battle, which was obviously the result of working together and being familiar with each other. The problem mainly came from the various so-called “basic labor groups” that were temporarily formed every day. This kind of group was a fixed establishment at the beginning, but the actual situation was that it was temporarily formed every day according to the deployment of the human resources department. As a result, everyone was not familiar with each other and lacked a sense of trust. It was fine to work at ordinary times, but it was difficult to unite in a critical situation.

After discussion, the Executive Committee reaffirmed the group plan: all transmigrators, except for family units, would form fixed four-person groups on the premise of free combination. Each group would elect a group leader to be responsible, participate in labor together, and their housing would be arranged in the same dormitory as much as possible. Friendship would be enhanced through eating, living, and working together—the relationship between dormitory brothers in college was relatively strong.

Each group was issued an SKS rifle as group equipment, so that everyone would have the opportunity to practice with the rifle at ordinary times. This would not only avoid the situation where everyone was not familiar with the weapons when they were issued only in wartime, but also prevent the situation where everyone had a rifle, resulting in the loss of control of firearms.

With these groups as the basic unit, a certain amount of time would be set aside each week for military training to enhance mutual coordination. Immediately after, Bei Wei threw out a new training plan: “Hunting.”

“Each time, our military group will dispatch 5 people, and then bring 2-3 ordinary groups,” he explained the plan in detail. “We will break away from our current mode of only acting along the Wenlan River, and conduct reconnaissance in depth in all directions, correct the map, and investigate various resources—”

When the group was on the move, they would capture single or small groups of pedestrians, and if necessary, attack various local armed personnel to train the team through combat. By training while on the move, it would be closer to actual combat than marching in formation and practicing target shooting at the base. The authority of the transmigrators would be spread to every corner of the county, so that the common people would know of their arrival and spread the necessary terror.

This plan obviously had a bloody smell, but the moderates decided not to oppose it. After all, the reality of twenty-one people being injured was there. If they were to veto this plan, the radicals would inevitably re-propose the proposal to attack Lingao County. With the current sentiment, the moderates did not think they would win in a vote. In the end, the moderates agreed to this “hunting” plan as a compromise for the radicals not to propose occupying the county town again.