Chapter 30: Training

The words of Du Yushi did remind Emperor Jiayou.

He wanted to use Wei Yuan because he created a set of military training methods.

But he ignored or did not pay much attention to Wei Yuan's military talent.

"I have been busy with political affairs recently, but I forgot that he relied on 3,000 people to resist the attack of 50,000 Liao troops."

"Di Qing, even if you are stationed in person, it's just like this, right?"

Emperor Jiayou murmured.

Over the years, he was proud of being an emperor who could live up to the people of the world.

Except for not fulfilling the ancestral wish to recover Yanyun, except for being a little too weak in foreign policy, except for being indecisive in many things, except for the death of Di Qing.

It seems that there is no one or anything that he is sorry for.

At least, during his reign, few people in the world starved to death.

——

Mid-March in the second year of Jiayou.

After Wei Yuan arrived in Daizhou, he almost lived in the barracks inside Yanmen Pass.

Now, the training of the whole army is gradually getting on track.

On this day, he was discussing the next plan with Xu Changzhi.

"In the past, the way of training soldiers focused more on the formation of the soldiers, but in the future, we will face the Xixia and Liao armies."

"They all have cavalry that is incomparable to our Great Zhou. Cavalry is best at charging, and we can no longer attach too much importance to the formation as before."

The peak period of the Han army formation was in the early Tang Dynasty.

In that era, if the generals who led the army did not know how to form a long snake formation or a three-talent formation, they could not be said to be able to lead the army.

However, with the development of cavalry, various countries attached importance to the heavy cavalry, and the shortcomings of the formation also appeared.

That is, it is not flexible enough and it is difficult to successfully resist the attack of the cavalry.

In response to this phenomenon, Di Qing figured out a way to let multiple arms fight in a mixed manner while maintaining the formation unchanged.

Later, Zhang Fu also carried forward this method, so that he had a slight advantage when fighting against Yelu Renxian.

In Wei Yuan's previous life, Yue's army abandoned the formation in the field and switched to a more flexible mobile operation.

The various arms were further integrated into many corps with different missions in wartime.

For example, the Beiwei Army, as the finale corps, would be sent to influence the battlefield situation whenever the war was unfavorable or stalemate.

Another example is to break the enemy army and be responsible for the frontal charge.

The cooperation between the various arms was further sublimated into the cooperation between the corps.

This was epoch-making in ancient battles.

Wei Yuan also wanted to work in this direction, so he proposed the idea of ​​unified organization and training to the governor of Daizhou.

"Brother Wei, there are only you and me here, why not tell me your ideas, so that I can know how to help you."

Xu Changzhi asked.

Wei Yuan said bluntly: "I will divide the 7,000 armored soldiers into three camps, namely the Xianzhen Camp, the Qianfeng Camp and the Youyi Camp."

"Each camp must have various arms, so that they can forget all the arms they have learned before."

"Cavalry, shield soldiers, spearmen, archers, chariot soldiers, scouts, to ensure that each camp has a variety of arms."

"Focus on training in one direction according to the characteristics of each camp."

After a pause, he came to the sand table and inserted several flags of the Liao army outside Yanmen Pass.

Then put three Zhou flags inside Yanmen Pass.

"The first flag represents the Qianfeng Camp. This camp focuses on physical training and fighting the enemy head-on when the battlefield is in a stalemate and there is no one better."

"Then use heavy cavalry to break the formation and influence the battlefield situation, while the Youyi Camp mainly practices archery to achieve the purpose of harassing the enemy outside the front battlefield."

The Xianzhen Camp mainly practices the art of horse archery.

But each camp, and even each soldier, must be able to master various military equipment.

When a shield soldier in the camp dies, he can pick up his comrade's shield in time and form a shield formation with the rest of the shield soldiers.

After listening to Wei Yuan's words, Xu Changzhi gradually understood,

"The soldiers have been trained for a long time. For example, the crossbow soldiers are best at using crossbows. If they are asked to focus on swords and swords, what if they fall behind in archery? Wouldn't it be a loss?"

Wei Yuan said: "There is no need to focus on training, just let them improve their existing close combat level."

"The only change is that after physical training, the inherent military coordination will be replaced with corps coordination."

"When the war is about to start, each corps will perform its duties, support each other, and complement each other. It is no longer simple, with shield soldiers in front, cavalry charging, and crossbow soldiers holding the line."

Xu Changzhi suddenly realized, "Such a novel way of training, if it works, will be enough to change the existing military system."

Wei Yuan is very confident about this.

In fact, the set of plans he said, no matter how it changes, it will not deviate from the essence, and it coincides with the three-three system tactics of the previous life.

That is, attack-cover-support.

But the difference is that Wei Yuan's three-three system is larger in scale, because it is difficult to subdivide it to each soldier.

The unit is the du.

Thirty people are responsible for charging, breaking through the enemy's formation, and harassing.

But these thirty people have a focus, such as focusing on charging or harassing.

One hundred people are a du, and the other two teams of more than 30 people are the same.

And these thirty people can be subdivided into three teams of ten people, and ten people can be subdivided into three teams.

Further subdivision is impossible.

In this way, the previous set of military formation combat mode was completely abandoned.

"Change is good, but I'm worried that such a change will eventually be worse than the previous battle formation."

Xu Changzhi also talked about his concerns.

Wei Yuan said: "How can we know the result if we don't try? The previous battle formation is too easy to be targeted. For example, if we build a shield formation, the enemy will break it with heavy cavalry."

"We have a crossbow formation, and the enemy will quickly charge and break it with light cavalry."

"But if we use this set of troops to fight together, these shortcomings will be completely made up. There will be attacks and defenses between each other, and when we break through the formation, there will be amazing effects."

He was right. If no one tries these methods, no one can analyze whether they are good or bad.

Improving the military system is only the first step of Wei Yuan's training.

"Tomorrow, the soldiers will cross the country for hundreds of miles in armor, just like a forced march, which is a big burden."

"You must ensure that our baggage supplies can keep up, and at least one meal a day is guaranteed to have meat."

Wei Yuan couldn't help but remind him.

Training soldiers cannot be accomplished overnight. We need to be down-to-earth and climb to the top step by step.

A hundred-mile cross-country race is just an appetizer.

Later, there will be a devilish training week every once in a while.

Soldiers are required to exercise endurance and physical strength.

After discussing some details with Xu Changzhi, Wei Yuan plans to train with him and the soldiers tomorrow.

As a general, he should lead by example, so that the soldiers will have no complaints.

After Xu Changzhi went down to make arrangements.

Lin Zhaoyuan, who was far away in Yangzhou, sent someone to deliver a letter, briefly describing some of the situation of the Sheng family in Yangzhou.

There are two key points.

First, Wei Shuyi is about to give birth, and Wei Yuan's second sister has also come to the Sheng family, and now everything is ready.

Second, Gu Tingye, the son of Gu Yankai, was assassinated.

However, it is said that he finally used a trick of dragging the knife to kill the thief who was about to kill him, and fortunately escaped a disaster.

Seeing this, Wei Yuan smiled and said:

"Gu Tingye's grandfather, Old Master Bai, was a famous wealthy businessman in Yangzhou. Before he died, he entrusted most of his family's inheritance to Gu Tingye."

"Those people in the Bai family naturally didn't want to, so they took a risky move and wanted to assassinate Gu Tingye."

"In "Do You Know?", Gu Tingye was forced to jump into the river by the assassins hired by the Bai family, but now, because of the tricks I taught him, he didn't jump into the river, but let him kill in the battle."

"So he held on until the arrival of the yamen police. In this way, did I save his life?"