The transformation of a social system from a loose state of peace to a compact state of war is like upgrading a computer's operating system from XP to VISTA. It is a painful experience. Various incompatibility problems such as crashes, crashes, information loss, etc. will come one after another.
If it can survive, then a strict and efficient wartime system will rationally use every social resource for the war and play a great role in winning the war. But if you cannot survive, you may be defeated from within by your own people before the enemy attacks.
It is a pity that the Song Dynasty has been in a state of being defeated from within by its own people from beginning to end, and has never had a wartime system that can maintain operation. During the entire upgrade process, the vast majority of programmers in charge of the keyboard (literati officials) ), out of their own short-term interests, are working hard to do a disservice, trying to make the computer freeze forever and prevent the wartime system from ever appearing.
Therefore, this cowardly empire with splendid culture was destined to go from one collapse to another until its final destruction.
For example, at this time, Emperor Qinzong Zhao Huan was shocked to find that even if the invading Jin soldiers had been destroyed, the court still had no way to regain the lost territory!
Specifically, they couldn't even send several groups of people to serve as "reception officers" in the fallen states and counties!
"...It's really unreasonable! The current imperial court actually only has 10,000 soldiers and horses available at full strength? And that even includes the imperial guards who guard the palace? Am I the lord of the Central Plains who rules over tens of millions of people, or am I a small remote country? The chief?”
In the imperial study room of the Bianliang Palace, Emperor Qinzong Zhao Huan, who had just returned from a banquet in "New Tokyo", knocked on the imperial desk angrily and scolded with great displeasure, "...Don't you know, if it's Hebei If the land cannot be restored for a long time, will the world be in trouble? ”
"...Your Majesty, although it is difficult to discuss this matter, the imperial court does have only 10,000 troops left, which is barely enough to defend the capital."
Prime Minister He Su replied with a look of helplessness, "...Although I have the intention of the Northern Expedition, there are no more available troops in the court. What can I do?!"
——Comrades who have read "Water Margin" should all know that the Northern Song Dynasty had the so-called "800,000 Forbidden Army", and its standing force size was second to none among all Chinese dynasties, far superior to that of the Han and Tang Dynasties. But this fighting ability... is a bit terrible.
In the military system of the Northern Song Dynasty, the Forbidden Army was equivalent to the national regular army, the Xiang Army was equivalent to the local armed police force, and the rural soldiers were the militia.
Unlike previous dynasties, the "Forbidden Army" in the Northern Song Dynasty did not refer to the Royal Guards, but a collective name for the standing regular armies of all countries. Theoretically, the Forbidden Army does not recruit soldiers from the civilian population, but selects the best from the Xiang army. But from the middle of the Song Dynasty, laws and regulations in this area became useless. Not only did a large number of soldiers begin to be recruited from the private sector, but the source of the soldiers and the purpose of recruiting soldiers are simply incredible in the eyes of future generations!
——Like other feudal dynasties, famines often occurred in the Northern Song Dynasty, and when famines occurred, they would inevitably produce a large number of victims and refugees. These people often number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. If not handled properly, a peasant uprising will inevitably break out. In other dynasties, most of the hungry people were allocated grain relief or divided land for resettlement, but the Song Dynasty was completely different. Once a famine occurs in a certain place, the first thing the emperor does is not to release food for disaster relief, but to send officials to raise flags and recruit soldiers, and recruit all the young and middle-aged men among the victims into the Forbidden Army. As a result, after every famine, the number of the Song Dynasty's forbidden troops increased significantly.
Why did the emperor of the Song Dynasty do this? Because in the emperor's view, the large number of victims who gathered was a huge threat to the ruling order. If we simply provide relief, there will definitely be oversights. For example, officials are corrupt and falsify accounts, etc. If the rescue fails, it will trigger civil unrest. In this case, it is better to take the opportunity to recruit him into the army. Because the army is the most organized and has dedicated barracks and guaranteed funding. In this way, it not only appeased the victims and avoided civil unrest, but also took the opportunity to recruit a large number of young and middle-aged people and expand its military strength. It was the best of both worlds. Even if someone wants to take the opportunity to cause rebellion, because all the strong men of the victims have been taken away to join the army, the remaining old, weak, sick and disabled cannot be fought, so even if they want to rebel, they cannot start a rebellion.
Under this kind of thinking, the Forbidden Army of the Song Dynasty quickly degenerated from the country's elite armed force into a refugee camp for all kinds of losers in life.
——Since the Renzong era, the number of imperial guards in the Northern Song Dynasty has expanded rapidly. By the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, the number of forbidden troops nationwide had reached an unprecedented number of more than one million! After adding the Xiang army and rural soldiers, the total number of troops in the Northern Song Dynasty reached a terrifying two million! ! The number of the Forbidden Army stationed in the capital Bianliang alone reached 800,000... This is the origin of the so-called "800,000 Forbidden Army in Tokyo" in literary works such as "Water Margin".
What's even more frightening is that this "800,000" is only the number of soldiers. In fact, more family members accompanying the army must be included - because the Forbidden Army has recruited a large number of victims, and most of the young and middle-aged people among the victims have their families. There are family members who need to be accommodated. So an incredible scene happened: in Kaifeng, the majestic capital of the Song Dynasty, the Forbidden Army barracks that was supposed to be heavily guarded was actually as busy as the family area all day long, filled with a large number of old, weak, women and children! The soldiers of the Forbidden Army lived with their wives and children in the military camp, and even opened restaurants, tea shops, etc.! And this is actually legal! !
—— Such a rapidly expanding army soon exceeded the financial capacity of the imperial court. Coupled with the massive corruption of military pay by officers at all levels, many imperial officers and soldiers could not survive and became deserters. For this reason, the court had to allow the army to do business or farm to support itself.
Due to the fact that there has been no war for more than a hundred years and the economy is highly developed. As a result, the imperial army in Bianliang, the capital, had no intention of training soldiers and martial arts. The officers were busy collecting money all day long, and they had no time to rectify the army. The soldiers opened small workshops, and the officers opened black brick kilns; the soldiers saved money to buy land to plant small vegetable gardens, and the officers seized the land to open large farms; the soldiers relied on themselves and their families to run the business, while the officers directly drove the soldiers to work as coolies... The entire Imperial Forbidden Army began from From small soldiers to officers, the whole army no longer practices martial arts, but instead engages in business and farming to make money!
As it later developed, the "Song Army Enterprises" had covered all aspects from grain sales to brothels, creating huge profits for officials' private pockets every year and saving the country a lot of military expenditures... but it resulted in The total destruction of the army's combat effectiveness.
Due to the low status of soldiers, officers generally withheld military pay, embezzled soldiers' property, and even seized soldiers' wives and daughters. They even raped soldiers' wives and daughters and then sold them to their own brothels! The result was a large number of desertions. In the beginning, the imperial court also pursued deserters or recruited soldiers to replenish its troops. But the officers discovered that they could take advantage of the opportunity to embezzle military pay by reporting shortfalls! So they concealed deserters, reported false names, and even took the initiative to drive soldiers away from the barracks, and then reported some false names... There were even ghosts who had been dead for more than thirty years and were still receiving pay on the salary list of the imperial court. The strange things happened, which caused a serious shortage of personnel in the Bianliang Forbidden Army, but there were a lot of them on the books.
Such an absurd approach eventually led to a ridiculous scene: In the first year of Jingkang, the Jurchen cavalry drove straight in. When crossing the river south to Bianliang, facing the Jin army approaching the city, Song Qinzong finally broke through many obstacles in the preparation process and completed the battle against Bianliang. An inventory of Liang's Imperial Guard revealed that the capital had 800,000 Imperial Guards on its books, but in fact it only had 30,000! They ate the free wages of 770,000 people!
What's even more terrible is that even the remaining 30,000 Bianliang Imperial Army are mostly of no use.
You must know that the Song Dynasty has lived in peace for more than a hundred years. Not to mention young people, even the white-haired old people on the border have not known how to fight in their lifetime. After more than a hundred years without war, the capital's armaments have long been ruined. Those soldiers of the Forbidden Army are good at provoking chickens and chasing dogs in the market, bullying good people, but when it comes to fighting in battle, few of them can hold a sword and a gun firmly.
——In general, the Bianliang Forbidden Army in the late Northern Song Dynasty is like the Eight Banners in the late Qing Dynasty. There is basically no need to count on their combat effectiveness.
In the just-concluded Second Battle of Bianliang, the Song army defending the city was said to number 70,000, but most of them were "irregular troops" such as rural soldiers and militia recruited temporarily. Even monks and Taoist priests were forcibly Conscripted to fight - this kind of completely untrained troops can at best guard the city and throw stones. Going out to fight in the city is tantamount to courting death - the real ban The army originally had only 30,000 soldiers, but 10,000 of them fled during the first attack. Although the second raid was fruitful, the 4,000 warriors who left the city were almost wiped out... plus the defenders. Due to the losses in the city battle, Bianliang now only has about 10,000 forbidden troops left, plus those very unreliable militiamen. How can they still go out to recover the lost territory?
——The Imperial Guards in the capital are completely rotten, and the remaining good ones have been wiped out. So what about the local Imperial Guards?
Since the main military pressure of the Song Dynasty was in the north, the local Forbidden Army was mainly divided into two parts, the Hebei Forbidden Army stationed at the border of Song and Liao and the Guanxi Forbidden Army against Xixia. Among them, after the Tan Yuan Alliance was signed and the Song and Liao truces were suspended for peace, the Hebei Forbidden Army, like the Capital Forbidden Army, had not fought for a hundred years, and they were also in a terrible state. The Kansai Forbidden Army maintained a certain combat effectiveness due to their constant struggle with the Xixia people, and became the only mobile combat force capable of fighting in the late Northern Song Dynasty - whether it was the Northern Expedition to Yanyun, the annihilation of Fangla, or the entanglement with the Jin soldiers on the battlefield in Hebei Fighting relies on the Kansai Forbidden Army.
But the problem is that after a full year of high-intensity war of attrition, the Kansai Forbidden Army has been annihilated by the Jin soldiers with more than 200,000 active forces, and 200,000 more have become deserters. Coupled with the two major defeats at Yanjing City when Song and Jin allied themselves to conquer Liao... At present, every household in Shaanxi is mourning and every family is mourning. Even the strong men who cultivate the land are almost wiped out, and the remaining With so few troops and horses, we still have to defend Xixia. We really can’t send out any more troops!
As for the Forbidden Army in various parts of the south, they were already sparse in number, and together they were less than a fraction of the Forbidden Army in the north. However, the deterioration of their armaments was even more serious. The few troops that could barely fight had already been dragged to King Qin of Bianliang, and then were annihilated one by one by the Jin soldiers... The Jiangnan and Huguang areas are currently completely undefended. If the Fang La Rebellion breaks out again, only I am afraid that it will sweep hundreds of states and counties immediately!
Faced with such an unprecedented dilemma of "no soldiers in the world", what should the war-minded scholar-bureaucrats in the court do to go to the Northern Expedition to regain the lost territory?
——The army of the Song Dynasty adopted a professional mercenary system. There was no local reserve system. Once the limited number of professional troops were exhausted, it would be difficult to quickly replenish them. And it would take at least half a year for an army to recruit young men and train officers until it forms combat effectiveness!
What's more, today's Song Dynasty, with its mountains and rivers in ruins, is also facing the haze of an internal struggle among the royal family...
"... Let me tell you that the Guanxi Forbidden Army has suffered heavy casualties, and it can no longer be mobilized in such a hurry, otherwise it will be like giving the west of Tongguan to the Xixia Party members. The Hebei Forbidden Army and the Capital Forbidden Army have been beaten to pieces. ,ten Without Cunyi...the Song Dynasty now has no more soldiers to fight against!" Prime Minister He Su said, "...Besides...I'd like to put it bluntly, the biggest worry for our family now is not with the Jinlu, but within Xiao Qiang. Ah!”