Chapter 125: The Occupation of Baitu Village

A scout rushed back from the front and came to Xi Yazhou’s horse—that’s right, he was the only officer with a horse, and he was riding Nick’s beloved “Alanchid.” This racehorse was indeed extraordinary. All the natives along the way stared at him. Hainan had few horses to begin with, let alone such a tall, handsome horse.

After entering the mountain march, he rarely rode the horse. The mountains were high and the forests were dense. If someone was ambushed, the first person they would shoot would be the only one on horseback. Although Xi Yazhou was afraid of walking, he still understood that his life was more important.

After trekking on the mountain path for more than two hours, panting, he had already begun to regret why he had promised Wu Nan Hai to send his troops to be his free laborers for a month in exchange for borrowing this horse.

“Battalion Commander Xi, the checkpoint of Baitu Village is ahead.”

“Are you sure?” Xi Yazhou asked while wiping his sweat.

“Yes, we’ve already sent someone to shout, asking them to open the gate.”

“Then let them shout slowly,” Xi Yazhou waved his arm. “All platoons, rest in place! I’ll rest for a while first.”

Xiong Zhanbu had been shouting with an electric megaphone for half an hour. The wooden fort on one side of the intersection was still silent. The road was blocked by thick log barricades, and the gate was tightly shut. Not a single person could be seen on the fort, but the glint of swords and spears could be vaguely seen in the sunlight.

“Alright, let’s bring out something powerful,” Xi Yazhou looked through his binoculars for a long time. This kind of wooden fort could be taken down in 10 minutes with an attack.

“Old Xi, Bei Wei is on the line. They have already infiltrated to the high ground at elevation 41.3, 100 meters to the side and rear of the wooden fort. Should they attack the enemy?”

“Just let them monitor. If we fight all the battles, these rookies won’t get any practice.”

“Understood.”

“All platoons, prepare for battle, fix bayonets!”

Following the officers’ shouts, the soldiers sitting by the roadside quickly put away their canteens, stood up, and formed ranks under the urging of their squad leaders.

The officers, with the help of their guards, opened their backpacks and put on their anti-stab vests—wearing this thing while marching would be deadly hot. They also replaced their rattan helmets with steel helmets.

“Alright, let’s give them a few cannon shots to taste first,” Ying Yu said helplessly.

The first shot smashed the wooden gate to pieces, sending splinters flying. The next two shots hit the wooden fort. One shot blew off the wooden battlements, and the other simply blasted a hole in the stockade wall.

The effect of the 12-pound iron balls flying through the air with trails of smoke was terrifying. The soldiers of the training battalion, seeing their own cannons so powerful, all cheered.

Almost at the same time, white smoke also rose from the stockade wall, and the sound of cannons was heard. The cheering soldiers all ducked. Some even threw themselves to the ground, covering their heads. Some were already preparing to turn and run, and the formation was in some disarray.

“Heavens!” Although Xiong Buyou was not in the officer establishment, he was also fully armed, with his beloved flute, and was even preparing to lead the charge, playing “The Grenadiers March.” He didn’t expect that as soon as the enemy’s cannons fired, the training battalion, which had been painstakingly trained for a month, would fall into disarray.

“Stand firm, stand firm, don’t panic,” the officers all drew their sabers to maintain order.

“‘New recruits are afraid of cannons,’ this is a damn truth,” Xi Yazhou cursed as he looked at his troops. He secretly planned to take them back and repeatedly fire cannons over their heads.

You Laohu pointed his saber up, “Any bastard who dares to look back, I’ll cut him down with one blow! Everyone stand firm. You bunch of cowards!” He viciously struck a soldier who was about to turn around with the back of his saber.

The cannonballs fired from the stockade wall fell to the ground less than 100 meters away. Ying Yu knew at a glance that there was nothing to be afraid of. They were using scrap copper, iron, and stones as cannonballs again.

“Continue firing!”

Xi Yazhou did not immediately order the soldiers to charge. Solid iron balls were smashed over one by one. The logs, under the heavy blows of the artillery, disintegrated like toppled building blocks. The entire fort became a pile of logs, smoking and burning.

Soon, some people rushed out of the fort gate, waving swords and spears, trying to engage in hand-to-hand combat. But the volley fire of the infantry, who had already stabilized, did not allow them to display their combat effectiveness. After the first volley, a dozen people had already fallen to the ground. The rest screamed in terror and fled back, covered in blood.

Xi Yazhou ordered the bugle to sound the charge. This time, there was no disgrace. Each platoon advanced in alternating covering fire according to the training manual and quickly broke into the checkpoint. The ground was littered with people who were dying from being hit by cannonballs and wood. The soldiers began to bayonet them without mercy. The screams were incessant. Xi Yazhou shook his head: these soldiers, their fighting will was not very good, but they were ruthless in killing. Was this a good thing or a bad thing?

The captured prisoners were tied together in strings of ten with ropes. Xiong Buyou hurriedly interrogated them. They were almost all from Fujian and had fled to Hainan to escape the government’s constant additional taxes. Baitu Village had taken them in, giving them some money and rice each month to get by, serving as both short-term laborers and village braves.

As for the cannons and gunpowder, they were bought from the red-haired people who had once repaired their ships here. They had also bought some red-haired muskets, but because they didn’t know how to use them well and they often caused injuries, they didn’t use them.

“What the hell is this world,” Xiong Buyou said indignantly after finishing his questioning. “The Ming Dynasty is about to end. Even a fart-sized village is recruiting its own soldiers and buying its own horses.”

“The Ming Dynasty is about to end, but the Later Jin is no good either,” Xi Yazhou sighed. Although the cycle of order and chaos seemed to be an inevitable cycle of Chinese civilization, the cycle at the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties was a rare great historical regression—at a time when various countries in the old world were about to step into the threshold of modern civilization, China had become a cruel and backward slave-owner state. The people became poor and ignorant, science was destroyed, culture was castrated… what was left was only a “prosperous age” that Macartney commented as “China is becoming barbaric.”

Xi Yazhou was not a Ming fan, but no matter how bad the Ming was, there was no ugly tail on their heads. For this reason alone, he could not let this time and space repeat the tragedy of history. It was not many days until the first month of the second year of the Chongzhen era. Huang Taiji was about to begin his plundering activities in the Central Plains. The current army was still so naive… a strong sense of crisis welled up in his heart.

“Little Wei, you take the first company and advance at a run. Reach Baitu as soon as possible, but don’t enter the village for the time being,” Xi Yazhou called Wei Aiwen to give him his mission. “Block all land exits of the village, don’t let them run away!”

“Understood!”

“As for the naval blockade, the ‘Fubo’ is there. They should have arrived already. After you’ve set up, fire a red signal rocket to notify them.”

The remaining soldiers cleaned up the battlefield. The bodies were thrown into the mountain gully, and the wood was cleared from the road. Seeing that the mountain terrain here was relatively steep, Xi Yazhou ordered a platoon to be left here to guard the rear. The other troops continued to advance towards the village.

At 3 p.m. that day, Baitu Village surrendered. The village was fortified, with a stockade wall of mixed wood and rammed earth, and watchtowers built of thick tree trunks. What was rare was that the four corners of the village were actually bastions, looking less like a Chinese rural earthen fort and more like a simple European-style castle. Some people tried to escape by sea, but the volley fire from the “Fubo” forced them back. With no hope of breaking out, and after a 12-pounder mountain howitzer neatly demolished a watchtower, the village surrendered. This made Ying Yu slightly relieved—he was almost out of ammunition.

After detaining all the elders who came out to express their surrender, Xi Yazhou ordered the troops to enter the village to take it over. After a tour, he found that this place could be considered a small paradise. Although the houses were simple, most of the villagers had healthy complexions and neat clothes. They also showed normal fear at their arrival, unlike some dirt-poor villages where the common people had dead-fish-like eyes.

The village’s warehouses and various workshops were all sealed and inventoried. Xi Yazhou personally toured the village. The discipline of the soldiers was still strict—of course, this was the result of the transmigrator officers being present.

The navy’s fleet sailed into the harbor, unloading supplies and ammunition from the ships. They also brought the Planning Committee personnel who were to inventory and receive the spoils of war, and Wen Desi himself—he had come as a shipbuilding expert. The greatest wealth of Baitu Village was its shipyard. They had to assess whether Baitu had any value for continued use as a shipyard. If moving the shipyard meant abandoning a large amount of existing infrastructure, then establishing a shipbuilding base in Baitu would be more economical.

The shipyard was on a beach outside the village, near the bay. Several unfinished or under-repair ships were still on the slipways.

After a field inspection, Baitu’s shipbuilding facilities were very complete, with dedicated ironworks, ropeworks, tung oil workshops, and paint workshops, and even a small lime kiln. But Baitu Port was too small. Although it was surrounded by mountains on three sides and the water was more than ten meters deep, the entire harbor could only accommodate 8-10 hundred-ton ships. The village’s shipbuilding capacity was also about the same. There were no finished ships on the slipways, only one was a 400-liao ship, and the rest were small fishing boats used by coastal fishermen.

“This place is really not bad,” Wen Desi’s eyes lit up when he saw such complete ancient shipbuilding facilities. He looked left and right, almost forgetting his purpose for coming here.

“Unfortunately, it’s too small. It’s fine as a haven, but as a shipyard, the scale is too small.”

“A bit of a chicken rib,” Wen Desi felt a sense of reluctance to part with it. Not only was the harbor small, but the open space was also very limited. It could be seen that the current scale was almost its limit.

After discussion, it was decided to relocate the entire village. First, the women, children, and the elderly would be moved, leaving some craftsmen to finish the ships on the slipways. All the materials and supplies that could be transported would be transported, especially the large amount of high-quality timber, which was a scarce resource for the transmigrator regime’s shipbuilding industry.

Xiong Buyou announced to the village elders that they must all move to Bopu to live. There, the transmigrators would help them re-establish their shipyard, and they would also be provided with housing and private plots of land.

Xi Yazhou did not give Xiong Buyou much time to promote the superiority of the “new countryside.” He sat on a stool, leaning on a long military saber, and looked at these few people with a murderous aura.

“Cut the crap. Go back and tell the villagers to pack up and prepare to leave in batches!” Behind Xi Yazhou stood a row of infantry with fixed bayonets, making his words more persuasive.

There was not much nonsense, nor was there any need for political mobilization. Bayonets and cannons were the hard truth. The villagers were ordered to pack their things and prepare to move. It was estimated that the entire relocation would take a long time. For the time being, Li Jun would lead a platoon to be stationed here until the entire relocation was completed.