In the Chinese military tent, there is a plate of barbecue, a chicken, a fish, a few salted duck eggs, and a pot of wine next to it. Du Zhongxiao, Yang Jin, and Yang Wenguang sat around and discussed today's teaching.

The Song army had a system of meeting meals, requiring the main officers of wartime to eat together, either daily or once a few days, depending on the tasks performed and the identities of the participants. The reason for this is that the system stipulates that the main generals communicate with each other and keep abreast of the situation of various departments. Because the army is not as good as the locality, the commander will not rise day by day, and the exchange of documents is not timely.

Teaching and reading is compared with combat, and there is also food, and Du Zhongxiao stipulates that he must have a dinner every day. The generals are the three people in the tent, and the rest of the officers are organized into battalion units to organize officers at all levels. Do not drink alcohol, and give a briefing and discussion after the meal. There is also an extra clause that must be recorded.

After eating a few bites of bread, Du Zhongxiao said: "For more than a year, the people who are qualified and of the right age in the camp and field affairs have been taught several times. According to each person's situation, plus the performance of the teaching and reading, some outstanding ones should be selected and grouped separately. These people teach for half a year, farm for half a year, and can be pulled out to fight at any time. If there is something in the court in an emergency, you can go into battle. ”

Yang Ji said: "If there is something, there is a forbidden army to fight." The formation and training of the box army is just to prevent local thieves and prevent the recurrence of Wang Lun and Zhang Hai in the past few years. Although the firearms in the army are sharp, in my opinion, if they fight against the western thieves and the northern captives, there are still shortcomings. ”

Du Zhongxiao said: "It's because it's still a little worse, so I have to choose some exceptionally good ones and organize them separately." Most of the forbidden troops of the imperial court were in the north, and there were few garrisons in the south. If there is something on the border, I am afraid that the forbidden army will not be able to rescue it. ”

Yang Zhen shook his head: "What can happen in the south?" At most, the barbarians of Hunan and Guangxi are in rebellion. Their various departments are not subordinate to each other, and it is difficult for them to be a large force, and the troops of one state are enough to pacify. If tens of thousands of troops need to be mobilized to pacify, then the world will shake. ”

Du Zhongxiao said: "Don't despise the barbarians to make trouble. A few years ago, Ou Xi Fan was in turmoil, so he used troops from several states to fight for thousands of miles. Later, Meishan was in turmoil many times, and he personally led the troops and fought for several years. I heard that Nong Zhigao of Guangyuan Prefecture in Yongzhou is not small, and he also defeated Jiaozhi in the past few years, and his momentum has been greatly boosted. He begged for attachment but could not, and he was quite resentful of the court. ”

Yang Jin has been on Jinghu Road for several years, and has pacified the chaos several times, but he doesn't care about it at all, and feels that Du Zhongxiao is unfounded.

At this time, the most frequent rebellion was Meishanman near Tanzhou, and the big chaos was once every few years, and the small chaos was almost every year. Meishan barbarians cut off Tanzhou and Dingzhou, connected to the Sichuan Gorge region through the adjacent Chenzhou, and connected to Guangxi in the south, and a large number of barbarians occupy a land that is thousands of miles wide. If the chaos is up, there are several roads, the mountain roads are difficult to travel, it is not easy to encircle and suppress, and it is impossible to catch up with them for thousands of miles in the barbarian battle, which is very troublesome. Only when Meishanman is pacified can Jinghu South Road be developed, otherwise it can only be centered on a few big cities and cannot be connected into a piece.

Yang Ji has been on Jinghu South Road for several years, and has pacified the chaos many times, but he does not attach importance to this. In his view, as long as the magistrates do not have problems and do not take the initiative to intensify the contradictions, there is no great harm. Du Zhongxiao's views are different, Tanzhou is the Changsha of the later generations, Dingzhou is the Changde of the later generations, the two cities are the pivot of the north-south traffic, to develop Hunan, the two places are indispensable to connect together. Meishanman happens to be in the middle, and with the development of Hunan, the intensification of contradictions is inevitable, and it cannot be avoided. Meishan is in chaos, and if the barbarians in Yongzhou in the south respond, half of the country will be shaken.

Nong Zhigao got into trouble, and the barbarians on Jinghu South Road would inevitably respond. Du Zhongxiao still wanted to take the opportunity of counterinsurgency to earn some military merits. In the midst of the chaos, the battalion and field army were the most convenient army to go south to quell the chaos. If the railway from Xiangzhou to Gangneung is completed this year, you will take a car to Gangneung, board a boat from there, and go south along the waterway, and the traffic is very convenient.

After eating and chatting about the situation for a while, Du Zhongxiao said: "The most important thing now is to practice more." The training of non-commissioned officers is secondary, and the training of generals at all levels is particularly important. Fighting with muskets and artillery is very different from before, and generals need different skills. I am not familiar with the military, but I know that the most important thing is to be down-to-earth and familiar with everything. In the next few months, select the best people and regroup. Then I kept practicing and learning as I practiced. Since the beginning of the unit, generals and officers at all levels must learn from each other in writing and reviewing each other in the course of training and study, and learn new skills in leading troops and new tactics. Those that cannot adapt will be resolutely eliminated. There are about 1560,000 troops in the camp of Jingxi Road, and it is still possible to choose one of the five people and select 30,000 soldiers who can fight. In a year or two, it will be trained to become a capable soldier. ”

This is Yang Jin's job, and there is no objection. Since he contracted miasma in Jingnan, Yang Jin's heart to make contributions to his career was light, and he was not enthusiastic about the battle array. Earlier, he begged to be transferred back to the civil service, and this was the intention. Now he is actively cooperating with Du Zhongxiao and has the intention of paving the way for his nephew Yang Wenguang.

Since the founding of the Song Dynasty, the three states of Linfeng Mansion have been like feudal towns. In less than a hundred years, the Wang family in Fengzhou has completely declined, and has been broken by the party, and the children of the Wang family have lost control of Fengzhou, and now they can only work as petty officials in the mainland. The Yang family in Linzhou is also not as good as before, although it still has power in Linzhou, but militarily it is subject to the Fuzhou family, and the political affairs are under the general judgment of the state, and the people of the Yang family are gradually integrated into the imperial court bureaucracy.

The two branches of the Yang family and the Yang Ye branch have long been separated, belonging to the imperial court general system, and have little to do with Linzhou. Yang Chongxun's one, then the world guards Linzhou, only such as Yang Zhen and others, rely on the entrance examination to go out as officials. Now that Linzhou is slowly losing the color of the feudal town, the status of the Yang family of Yang Ye is more prominent. Yang Wenguang is the third son of Yang Yanzhao, and the two brothers have died at this time, and the future of the Yang family is on him.

The Yang family is a typical general in the Northern Song Dynasty, who has joined the army for generations, but it is far from being as beautiful as the Yang family generals in later generations. Without a marriage with the royal family, Yang Yanzhao has been guarding the border outside, and he has not entered the Sanya as the manager of the army, which has led to the rapid decline of the family lineage. Yang Wenguang's two brothers are both military generals, have no military merits, and their lives are mediocre. If there was no rise of Yang Wenguang in history, the Yang family would probably be over. It is precisely because of Yang Wenguang that he has achieved the position of managing the army in history, and his ancestors and fathers have been crowned, and the status of the Yang family general has risen to a higher level, the so-called glory of the ancestors.

Most of Yang Wenguang's opportunities were given to him by his uncle Yang Ji in the early days. At this time, low-level military attachés were overflowing, and those who could not be really lacking for one or two decades abounded, and the same was true for Yang Wenguang. It was not until the Zhanghai Rebellion in western Beijing that Yang Wenguang got the opportunity to lead the troops to fight and was promoted to the palace because of his merits. Nearly 50 years old, the official position is extremely low, and according to common sense, there is no future. The most important thing is to lead the troops from this, catch up with Di Qing's expedition to the south, accumulate merit and finally manage the army. In this era, as long as you can fight, you really have the ability, and there are quite a few people who have been promoted from the lowest-level officer to the military general in ten years, not just Di Qing and Yang Wenguang.

What kind of person Yang Wenguang is in history and what kind of experience he has, Du Zhongxiao doesn't know. He knew about this person's deeds from the story of the Yang family general. In the story, Yang Wenguang is Yang Yanzhao's grandson, and Di Qing was still a white-robed young general when he conquered the south, which is completely inconsistent with the facts. Since there is no Yang Zongbao and Mu Guiying, I am afraid that most of the legends of the Yang family generals are made up, and they are extremely unreliable. Du Zhongxiao is cautious about such a character, for fear of being pitted by an inexplicable impression. Therefore, when Yang Wenguang arrived, Du Zhongxiao regarded him as an ordinary general, according to the normal procedure, he should train and train, he should use it, and he didn't get too close, everything depends on his own performance.

Yang Wenguang has performed very well, and his understanding of new weapons and his attitude towards learning and training are unparalleled. In comparison, Yang Jin's military in the camp is just a reserve position, and the actual affairs are all done by Yang Wenguang. In Suizhou's Xiang Army, Yang Wenguang is the actual commander.