Chapter 122: The Baitu Village Expedition

The campaign against Baitu Village finally began officially after Xi Yazhou took office. This fatty, after moaning and groaning in recuperation for more than half a month, was kicked out by Wu Nan Hai for trying to steal chickens. Although he repeatedly argued that the disappearance of a pair of ducks from the farm was not his responsibility, Wu Nan Hai still unceremoniously told him to “stay far away.” The budding Army Club thus died an early death.

Baitu Village was a small port village, located between Lingao and Danzhou. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides and had a good harbor, making it convenient for ships to enter and exit. It had always been the main shipbuilding center in Lingao. The reconnaissance team’s report indicated that the land route to this place was not easy to travel, with only a few mountain paths. The locals had set up chevaux-de-frise, abatis, and forts at the intersections to guard against bandits, and incidentally, against government soldiers and bailiffs. A frontal assault would not be very difficult for the current New Army. Xi Yazhou felt that even if this force were given broadswords and pikes to deal with Baitu Village, it would not be a problem, just that more people would die.

“However, our action should only be a police action,” Xi Yazhou studied the map drawn by the Military Committee’s reconnaissance team for a long time. “Since we want to use these shipwrights, we can’t have too many of them die.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“A grand armed parade. Force them to surrender without a fight.”

“In terms of cost-effectiveness, I think our reconnaissance team is the most suitable,” Bei Wei suggested. “The surrounding mountains are not very precipitous. It’s easy to infiltrate, go in directly and capture the main leaders, and the matter will be settled.”

“That’s right, but Baitu Village is a soft persimmon, just right for these new recruits to have a taste,” Ma Qianzhu said.

“To embolden them?”

“Exactly. These people were farmhands just a month ago. The officers are all modern people. I’m afraid they haven’t coordinated well yet. They need to smell some gunpowder.”

“Alright, then we’ll make it more varied, as an exercise.”

Baitu Village itself had no real armed forces. It had not formed a militia, but it was a case of all the people being soldiers. It was said that they had repelled several small-scale pirate invasions. According to the investigation by the intelligence department, Baitu Village had a population of more than five hundred, with half of them being able-bodied men, mostly shipwrights who had fled from Guangdong and Fujian. This village was originally just a small fishing village with only seven or eight fishing households. It was only after the immigrant shipwrights fled here that the population slowly increased.

Huang Xiong was promoted. This former Ming army Bazong was on pins and needles after being summoned. He was not stupid; this posture clearly showed that they did not trust him. Would these Australians “click” him just because they suspected him? After a few days of fear and doubt, he had thought of running away, but thinking of the fugitives who had all been caught and paraded in public without exception, he knew he would not be an exception either. And with his identity, once he was caught, he would surely die.

After a few days of trepidation, he was appointed as the squad leader of the eighth squad of the third company of the training battalion. The commander of the third company was a man named You Laohu, who liked to wield a broadsword. Hearing that Huang Xiong was a Ming army officer, he insisted on competing with him with broadswords. Huang Xiong hesitated for a moment whether to deliberately lose to him, but in the end, he decided to show his strength to this group of Australians—he knew that the Australians had no prejudice against the locals based on their social status. Whoever had the ability and strength would be given an important position.

But the victory did not come easily. This You Laohu actually had no real moves, just a series of powerful chops and slashes. But he was extremely strong and had a great deal of combat experience. It took Huang Xiong several minutes to knock his sword away.

“You lose! Company Commander.”

“If we were using real swords, you wouldn’t be my match!” You Laohu roared unconvinced. “I have a Green Dragon Crescent Blade!”

“That’s a prop for plays. You’d lose even faster with it!”

You Laohu stared at him angrily for a long time and then roared, “A real man, you have some skills.”

Huang Xiong thus inexplicably became You Laohu’s “brother” and was forced to practice martial arts with him every day after training. He had originally thought that You Laohu wanted to promote him to be his personal guard or something, but apparently, the Australian army did not have this practice. You Laohu, as a company commander, was in charge of 100 men, which was equivalent to the rank of a Dusi in the Ming army, but he only had one “guard.”

“The resolution of this operation is to subdue Baitu Village,” Xi Yazhou explained the mission at a meeting of all commanders at the platoon level and above in the battalion. “Minimize casualties in combat and maintain restraint during the operation. There are many new recruits participating this time, so the discipline of the troops must be strictly enforced. How is the progress of teaching the ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention’ song in each company?”

“It has been taught for three days, and everyone can basically sing it,” reported Wei Aiwen, who was temporarily serving as the battalion’s political instructor.

“Not only do they have to be able to sing it, they also have to understand the meaning of the lyrics,” Xi Yazhou said. The “Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention” song was catchy and explained the army’s discipline and how to get along with the common people in a simple and easy-to-understand way. It was a rare educational military song.

“Next is the logistics issue—”

Since the failure of his ** attempt, Ye Yuming had returned to his promising job of raising rabbits. These past few days, Ye Yuming’s ears, which were originally only bothered by mosquitoes, were now filled with this sentence. “According to private conversations with the army, this is the first large-scale expedition since the transmigrators established the new army.” The Ministry of Agriculture faced a huge challenge: military rations.

“The troops haven’t moved, but the grain and fodder go first.” Now, the leaders of the army had reached a consensus on whether to dispatch the new army—not only to dispatch them, but also on a considerable scale, to create a demonstration of armed might. But undoubtedly, no matter what you planned to do, you had to eat.

Although this army was still in its most primitive state, the order to develop military rations had already been issued to the Agricultural Committee. The most troublesome thing for the people in the Ministry of Agriculture was to trial-produce field rations that could be carried with the army in the high temperature and high humidity environment of Hainan and still provide sufficient nutrition.

Logically, since this expedition was a low-intensity operation and was expected to last at most three days, and the mechanical group had developed a mobile kitchen, providing hot meals and dishes was the most ideal solution. Field rations, both ancient and modern, have never been tasty and are emergency supplies for emergencies.

Because this operation also had the experimental nature of a comprehensive test of existing equipment, the Military Committee required that enough field rations for three days be provided—the variety could be more, mainly for the troops to try and get their feedback.

The Ministry of Agriculture had already tried making various portable foods from all over China and even the world, such as fried rice, steamed cakes, rice balls, fried noodles, pancakes, naan, rice cakes, and military ration pills. Wu Nan Hai had even developed the rather strange Jinhua shortcake. It turned out that this thing could indeed be preserved for a long time, but it was really hard to swallow. And the shortcake required a large amount of lard, and at the moment, all fats were considered “strategic materials.”

Dry pancakes, fried noodles, naan, and dry steamed buns were all mature portable dry rations and were easy to process. Especially pancakes, which had demonstrated their value in the battle to attack the Gou estate. Pancakes were extremely durable and were a common dry ration for people from Shandong when they traveled far. However, the food situation in Lingao was that there was more rice than flour. Although the main ingredient of Shandong pancakes was actually sweet potatoes, the nutritional value of sweet potatoes was too low to meet the requirements of military rations, so it and other flour products like fried noodles and naan were out.

What remained were rice products. Ye Yuming proposed making fried rice and also proposed using fried rice and maltose to make fried rice cakes. But the preservability of fried rice was not as good as fried noodles, and they had no maltose available. So someone suggested continuing to make military ration pills—they had made some in the past: the taste of this thing was truly terrifying. It was made from cooked rice that was dried and was said to be extremely durable—the samurai of Japan in those days fought while gnawing on this thing every day. The conclusion reached by everyone after a taste test was that only the Japanese could eat this stuff.

Rice flour, rice cakes, rice noodles, rice vermicelli, rice balls, rice skins… all kinds of rice products were dug out from the depths of everyone’s memory. Through the joint efforts of the canteen and the agricultural department, and by fully consulting materials and giving full play to their wild imaginations, a table full of experimental products was quickly produced.

This military ration experiment was given a grand name in the documents, “The Long March Plan.” Later, Wu Nan Hai, considering that this great name might have other uses in the future, changed it to the rather anticlimactic name “The Grassland Plan” in the archives.

Faced with a whole table of grotesque and seemingly more like prank-oriented so-called field ration experimental products, everyone reached a surprising consensus on the matter of taste testing: distribute all these things to the expeditionary force, and then distribute them for observation when the troops are at their hungriest, letting the troops test the truth in practice. But who would be the accompanying observer? The thought of those angry officers immediately made everyone start passing the buck again…

Just as everyone was looking at each other, trying to get out of accepting this life-threatening task, a savior finally appeared, and that was Dongmen Chuiyu, the wise staff officer of the staff headquarters who had been in and out of the new army headquarters recently. At this critical moment, he passed by the farm.

Dongmen Chuiyu had originally wanted to see if he could get some private goods like tomatoes at the farm, and incidentally, to see the little girls at Wu Nan Hai’s place. But after being discovered, and after a brief but ambiguous exchange of glances that was enough to paralyze a pig, everyone very enthusiastically requested Comrade Dongmen Chuiyu to come to the Ministry of Agriculture to observe the development of field food…

Comrade Dongmen Chuiyu, inspired by a spirit of great fearlessness and internationalism, resolutely agreed to act as the Ministry of Agriculture’s field food investigator, and as he wished, he got two tomatoes. The colleagues at the farm saw him off with reverence. As the saying goes: The wind is soughing, the Yi River is cold…

After tense preparations, the Baitu Expeditionary Group set off from Bopu. It included the first company of the training battalion, one platoon each from the second and third companies, more than 160 men, 30 NCO students from the military and political school, 10 men from the reconnaissance team directly under the Military Committee, and more than 40 men from the artillery detachment. There was also a medical team composed of students from the Women’s Technical School, led by He Ma, sent by the health group, and finally, a 100-man baggage train.

The navy dispatched the newly repaired and refitted two-masted sailboat “Fubo” to provide maritime support, along with 6 locally purchased and refitted civilian boats, fully loaded with various supplies. If it weren’t for the shortage of ships, Xi Yazhou would have planned to transport everyone by boat.

The five infantry platoons marched in a four-column formation. The soldiers wore rattan helmets on their octagonal caps. The rattan helmets were made in the style of colonial pith helmets, with a shiny steel plate inlaid on the front, stamped with the unit number, which could also provide some extra protection for the soldiers. A white sun-shading neck flap fluttered behind—in a place like Lingao with extremely long hours of sunshine, this was indispensable for marching and fighting. The canvas puttees were all tightly drawn. The cowhide belts were equipped with double cartridge boxes, with a total of 120 bullets and 130 percussion caps in the four cartridge boxes. Canteens, bayonets, entrenching tools, and miscellaneous bags were hung on the double-shoulder back-baskets made of rattan, which were filled with various items. A thin cotton blanket was also tied on top. Although there would be baggage boats supplying food along the way, each soldier still had a pack of 10 rice cakes in his back-basket. The squad leader had an extra bottle of liquor. This was emergency rations and could only be used when ordered.