Lake Baikal is the oldest lake in the world, the seventh largest lake in the world, and is rich in flora and fauna. The lake has good water quality and transparency of up to 40.5 meters, and is known as the "Bright Eye of Siberia".

At its deepest point of 1,637 meters, it contains about 20% of the earth's total freshwater volume, which is equivalent to the total water volume of the five Great Lakes in North America and more than the entire Baltic Sea, making it the world's largest freshwater lake.

The Buryats, who live in the area around Lake Baikal, belong to the close branch of the Erut Mongols. Their ancestors were originally nomadic in the Transbaikal region, and later developed north to the area between the Yenisei and Lena rivers.

Although the Buryats are still in an extremely backward primitive clan tribe, they have the characteristics of a nomadic and warlike people. Since Russia implemented the strategy of eastward invasion, a large number of Cossacks had just reached the upper reaches of the Guska River, a tributary of the Yenisei River, and the local Buryats fought an extremely fierce war with the Cossack expeditions that arrived in advance, and this battle was fought one after another for more than 20 years before finally surrendering to Russia.

However, a considerable part of the Buryats resisted to the end, migrating their tribes south into the Khalkha Mongol territory of Mobei. Another part of the Buryats, when the Qing army defeated the Russians west of the Heilongjiang River, defected to the outer northeast of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was given the name "Balhu people", incorporated into the Eight Banners, and settled in the ******** region.

Since the Far Eastern Army launched the campaign to the north, in a very short period of time, the two corps annihilated the Nayan chieftains of the Buryats and the elite tribal cavalry of the tribes, and sent a large number of troops to carry out a bloody sweep of the Buryats scattered around Lake Baikal.

After several months of fierce fighting, the Buryats and Yakuts in the area around the Baikal River were basically wiped out, and not only a large number of cattle, sheep, horses, and deer were captured, but also precious skins, dried meat, dried fish, and golden sands and other booty were piled up. In addition, a large number of young men and women, as well as old and weak women and children, were also captured. All of them are concentrated in various regions along the shores of Lake Baikal and the Segelen River.

A large number of captives were registered, screened, and purified, then placed under the management of various nomadic detachments in the Far East, and then a harsh winter training began. In fact, the management of the Buryats in the form of clans and tribes is almost the same as that of the Mongol tribes in the steppes of the southern and northern deserts.

In such an extremely harsh climate, the essence of nomads is still to follow the law of the jungle. Only a very small number of clan leaders have control over the vast majority of the resources of the tribe. For ordinary Buryats. Cattle, sheep, horses, grain, women, furs, and golden sands were far away from them.

Every winter, most of the herdsmen of the tribe will survive the long cold winter with great difficulty, and the days will be as hard as they can be. After spending a period of time in the concentration camps of the Far Eastern Army, these hard-working herdsmen gradually adapted to it.

Concentration camps where Buryat prisoners were held were separated from men, women and children. After registration, screening and purification, everyone was given uniform clothes, shoes and hats, and three meals a day were rough. But at least it's full.

Every day, they have to do all kinds of heavy labor, some go to the nearby mountains and forests to cut wood, some load and unload materials at the wharves along the coast, and some build woodcarved flutes in various places. I have to work more than ten hours a day.

Even the elderly, women and children of the tribe are not idle, and they are responsible for taking care of the cattle and sheep, collecting the manure of the cattle and sheep, fishing in the nets, drying the dried fish, and many other tasks.

There are still more than two months until October, and October in the Baikal region is actually the beginning of winter. The temperature is already very low. Winters here are very difficult for months. All of them are in a low temperature state of minus thirty or forty degrees.

The Northern Corps and the Eastern Corps, which participated in this campaign, had to be stationed in various areas of Mobei and Lake Baikal this winter, and a large number of Mongolian nomadic detachments and tens of thousands of Buryats were taken prisoner, and they also had to spend a long winter here.

Therefore, the troops should prepare all kinds of wintering materials needed by hundreds of thousands of people more than two months before the beginning of winter. Including wintering grain, housing, heating coal, winter cotton clothing, felt, cotton door curtains and other materials, and the quantity is also very huge.

In order to meet the wintering materials needed by troops and nomadic detachments in Mobei, Baikal and other regions. As early as this spring, the company's warehousing department and the logistics department of the Military Commission mobilized a large number of materials and transported them to the forward base in Monan.

Including grain, compressed biscuits, canned food, fried noodles, jerky, dried fish, pickles, dried vegetables, tobacco, liquor, salt, sugar, tea and other staple and sideline foods, as well as cotton clothing covers, farm tools, felt blankets, weapons and ammunition and other materials.

The Far Eastern Company organized a large number of nomadic detachments and formed a large-scale logistics wagon brigade. Thousands of four-wheeled wagons were driven from the Keshiketeng Ferry Terminal, delivering grain to the north every day.

The supplies destined for the north were transported to the area along the Segelen River near Kulen, and then by ships sailed all the way to the Baikal region via the Segalan River.

These four-wheeled carriages were not ordinary carriages equipped with nomadic detachments, but standard field carriages manufactured by the company for the Military Commission. It has a steel frame, a wooden body, four tall wheels covered with rubber, and advanced accessories such as bearings, steel axles, leaf springs, canopies, steering mechanisms, and brake systems.

Modular loading components are also used to flexibly accommodate the transported supplies, with each wagon being towed by eight Mongolian horses and carrying up to two tonnes of supplies.

In addition to these thousands of taels of field wagons, tens of thousands of four-wheeled and two-wheeled carriages of various nomadic detachments were also recruited to transport various materials for the front-line participating troops.

In this era, the horse-drawn carriage has been the main land transportation of all countries in the world, and the application in the Napoleonic wars in Europe in the 18th century reached its peak, in the war of Napoleon's invasion of Russia alone, the French army mobilized 38,700 heavy and light four-wheeled carriages, each heavy carriage can carry 1.5 tons of supplies, and it is said that the number of horses used by Napoleon's army to tow the carriage reached 187621.

The wide application of the four-wheeled carriage is also one of the important military reforms of the modern army, and it is also an important aspect that is different from the medieval army. Not only did it greatly improve the mobility of the army, but the carriage itself could also be used as a chariot formation, and the most classic tactic of the American immigrants was to line up the four-wheeled carriage in a circle, with which it could withstand the siege of the Indians dozens of times.

(To be continued.) )

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