Post by StaolDerg on May 30, 2024 1:21:48 GMT -5
(OOC: This takes place immediately after the UST War’s conclusion. These posts are meant to build more context to Bianguo and its government, economy, and people while affecting current OC situation minimally.)
Patience is a virtue.
Master Sun Ye had taught him that first when he was still a disobedient child, who had been caught trying to sneak outside to play in the flooded paddies when he ought to have been studying. He’d bawled then, shouting and thrashing in the iron grip of the elder as he’d been dragged back into the house.
He reminisced the memory with a subdued smile. What he wouldn’t give to have the old officer by him now, as he leaned against the wall, listening to the arguing of his kinspeople as they tried to assemble a coherent government in the face of war. Today marked the sixth day of essentially no progress: he’d been sympathetic to the Blacksmith Society when they’d first approached him some four years ago, but now they’d fragmented perfectly along Community lines, digging trenches in the sand against the same people they’d previously marched arm in arm with against the UST soldiers in Pozhal. Nominally they still possessed the same goal– restore the Empire– but it was increasingly clear that no one actually had a concrete idea of just how to do that, nor did anyone want any other community leading the charge for such an effort except for their own.
There was a sense of separation between him and the crowd in the discussion. Where they wore the traditional Bian clothes, their robes largely identical to the sort worn in Elenria, Zhang still wore the UST officer’s clothes, though granted without the original livery of the nation they were now in rebellion of. They carried knives and swords to mark their defiance to the UST: he carried a revolver.
And there was also the fact that of the people guarding this meeting, none of the sentries were community militia: all of them were Bian defectors or his own men who had unquestioningly launched into insurrection against the UST the moment he’d ordered them to, and whose uniforms though were shoddy and weapons old, had their holes patched, and creases straightened, and their rifles oiled and well-maintained. They might be from every single Bian community imaginable to the region and beyond, but their shared cause allowed them to do what their Community militia counterparts could not and set aside their differences.
He eyed the meeting again, now with unease. He could build such trust with people who he’d never known prior, but here were people of his own community. They didn’t simply expect him to side with them: they had the leverage to make threats if he so much as hesitated. These were his family after all, he’d known them his whole life, but they– they’d changed his clothes from that of a child to a man, fed him from wooden spoon to a bowl, taught him from hauling buckets of cooled slag to forging his own tools. They knew him better than he knew himself, and for someone whose job it was to lead an army, the prospect of having to face down his own family scared him.
They ended the meeting around four in the morning, but Zhang had grown tired of the bickering and retired home hours before. He spent the ruck back to the house deep in thought of the future–
Of the UST’s original military, many Bian recruits were aboard only because they needed the pay and the food. Even though both were quite awful, it was better than nothing. At home their communities had even less to share with them, and in this way they might perhaps be able to protect their kin from the excesses and zeal of the tax collectors. But even in the army, the officers were dismissive at best and outright hostile at worst. The very things they joined to receive: a meager pension, food, were often themselves late or withheld for any number of reasons. This led to poor soldiers— ill disciplined, distrustful of officers, abysmal training and skill.
What Zhang had accomplished during his time as an officer in the UST then, was nothing short of a miracle by some standards. To him, the UST’s military academy at Osena Lake had been a joke compared to the world-class tutelage of Master Sun Ye. When he finally was given a post as a battalion lieutenant-colonel, he took many of the outdated ideas of the UST’s military structure and immediately discarded them, building his own unit along UST organization but Sanshan doctrine and training.
But he didn’t completely throw all the ideas of the UST away. Sun Ye had cautioned him over and over in his dying days of what had killed the Sanshan’s once glorious armies: overcautious leaders, inability to adapt, complacency. He would not– could not– make the same mistakes.
Artillery, for example, had evolved drastically from 1200 pound cannons cast in local forges, to armory produced field guns of 800 pounds that could hurl shot twice as far, and then at the start of the nineteenth century breech-loaded rifled guns that spun exploding shells even farther than that in all kinds of sizes and angles. And though it took incredible effort to do so, he’d made the difficult effort of buying semi-new military-minded publications from the ships that docked in Pozhal in the summer. Those magazines, reports, and books– by heaven were those damnable greasy tomes ever so expensive– all had only further cemented a conviction that a future war depended on the judicious use of such equipment, and prior to the UST war he’d compiled long, unpublished heaps of proposals and reports to pile up in the private library of Sun Ye’s house.
When the rebellion had initiated in earnest he’d found his preparations and studies were well-founded. Infantry assaults preceded by shattered artillery bombardment had proved effective, but now that the Bian possessed their own state, he had to find a way to prevent these machines from falling into disrepair, plus maintain the quality of his fighting force.
He poured over his notes and memories of Sun Ye’s teachings, formulating a plan.
The current forces consisted of a mish-mash of levied militia volunteers from the communities and his own professional former Union soldiers. The Union soldiers themselves only numbered just over three battalions, with the gaps in fighting lines and flanks being plugged with militia. This had worked against an enemy who were themselves largely on the backfoot and unable to seize the initiative, but militias were a stopgap solution: any determined force would mop the floor with them, not to mention their manpower was still needed to run the economy at home.
Therefore, he had had to disband the militias, which slashed the whole of his forces to just under four thousand professional soldiers, even when counting the units in training, off-duty, and recovering personnel. This would not do: Bianguo, nascent country born out the bleeding belly of Southern Touli, already had too many enemies out the womb. He needed more soldiers, but more importantly, more bullets.
Sun Ye had always warned him that when considering casualties in personnel versus equipment, always choose equipment: a rifle needs at worst months to be produced, but people already take decades to grow to adulthood, never mind an always finite pool of people he could conscript, and needed time to train.
The general gnashed his teeth as he exchanged one book of accounting logs for another. What’d he’d give to have Sun Ye back– the old man would know what to do with politics, as easily as he knew war. He tried to picture the old inselni sat beside him, red pupils drilling straight into his head.
“Think, Feng Lai!” the specter snapped, waving a bony finger at him. “What are the basic fundamentals of waging war?”
“Logistics. Ox-carts, horses, barrels of food in supply trains, or–”
“Think deeper! I taught you better than this! Do people still light candles for illumination in their windows? Do you see the people of today writing books with brushes on strips of dry bamboo? Now, try again! Think! Start with the ox-carts!”
Zhang pinched his chin in thought. “No, of course. I’m thinking about war when it’s declared. I need to think about fighting war when there is none. I need roads for the carts, and they have to be in a single standard. This means an engineering academy–”
“An appetite too big for a stomach too small. Will you be building an engineering academy with prayers and hopes when you don’t even have a way to make guns? Who will donate money to your cause now that the war is over to build such a thing, when they’re busy trying to feed their families and heat their homes? This is a pitiful start. You’re better than this!”
Zhang paused. “The communities are in gridlock over leadership. Mutual animosity runs far too deep for me to coax them back together without an external threat, and I do not have enough sway with my fellow kinspeople to try and worm my way through politics to achieve compromise. I cannot force people to–”
“You cannot? You can’t or you won’t?”
The general shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not a politician.”
Sun Ye wrung his hands in exasperation. “It’s not that you can’t, Feng Lai– it’s that you remain scared of your own family, your own community. In the Imperial Army your community loyalties only mattered if you were a member of an Expediton’s attached fighting forces, but for you? For me? The Niaoren did not wait for the Imperial Court to hash out compromises and verdicts over community disputes to raid the borders. The many disparate tribes of vast Touli did not bother to try and understand the complexity of our people when they carried out attacks! You don’t have time for this, when tigers stalk the forest edge, peering into villages.”
Zhang put down the book. “That is rich, coming from you! You emphasized how the community independence allowed for our people to remain cosmopolitan and absorb new peoples into the Empire! ‘Rich soil comes from untamed forests–’ your words!”
“See past your own biases and listen to me!” the old inselni commanded, rising from his seat. Zhang could hear the clinking of mail links under his robes as he rounded the table to face him frontally.
“The Empire succeeded for so long, because we were able to adapt. We Bianjingren would not even be here had we not realized the time to fight was over.” The elder began to pace before Zhang, pulling one of his notebooks from the many disorganized stacks thrown about the room. “Your room is a mess. What is the excuse for such unkemptness, if you are not actively campaigning?”
“I haven’t had time to organize.”
“Incorrect. You are not at war– so study your victories, and scrutinize your defeats in the meantime. Organize your studies properly, not just for yourself, but so that your staff may be able to themselves learn from the recent past, and therefore emerge victorious in the future. Time and place, Feng Lai, there is a time and place for everything. You don’t have the luxury of being sentimental to the community now, not when you have noticed the leering gaze of predators over the backs of relatives as they work the fields. You are their guardian— your task is to protect them! You too, must adapt!”
He tossed the book before Zhang, and it landed with a bang on the table before him. “There is only so much an old man can teach you with his decaying memories and dusty books. Enroll yourself into the university of the now, soldier! Learn to cut up and forge lessons of the past into tools you can use! Mold your callow flesh into cold steel– your people depend on it, even if they do not realize yet!”
Steady footsteps returned to Zhang’s side, faster than any person should able to walk. Like a sudden breeze the door slid open, and slammed shut even as the general scrambled to turn around, sputtering. He was too slow; Sun Ye was already gone.
He paused again, then absentmindedly scratched his hair as he turned back to the table. The book was still there, waiting for him.
He picked it up and wiped the thin layer of dust from its surface— had it really been so long since he organized the place? He was greeted by bold, but faded characters upon the cover of the book: “My Thoughts on the Meidun Incident.”
This was a memoir, Zhang recalled, written by one Sun Ye’s colleagues during the total collapse of the Empire, left to him by way of inheritance from the elder’s library. He noticed a number of bookmarks and annotations as he skimmed its loose, fragile pages. The shaky, almost illegible markings were alien to him, their messages bordering on rambling— it could not have been Sun Ye’s neat, collected style. The inselni had not changed the way he wrote even in his final breaths. And his handwriting, even though Sun Ye had called it sloppy, was not this bad.
But he chose to disregard that for now, as he started from the first of the many bookmarks.
Patience is a virtue.
Master Sun Ye had taught him that first when he was still a disobedient child, who had been caught trying to sneak outside to play in the flooded paddies when he ought to have been studying. He’d bawled then, shouting and thrashing in the iron grip of the elder as he’d been dragged back into the house.
He reminisced the memory with a subdued smile. What he wouldn’t give to have the old officer by him now, as he leaned against the wall, listening to the arguing of his kinspeople as they tried to assemble a coherent government in the face of war. Today marked the sixth day of essentially no progress: he’d been sympathetic to the Blacksmith Society when they’d first approached him some four years ago, but now they’d fragmented perfectly along Community lines, digging trenches in the sand against the same people they’d previously marched arm in arm with against the UST soldiers in Pozhal. Nominally they still possessed the same goal– restore the Empire– but it was increasingly clear that no one actually had a concrete idea of just how to do that, nor did anyone want any other community leading the charge for such an effort except for their own.
There was a sense of separation between him and the crowd in the discussion. Where they wore the traditional Bian clothes, their robes largely identical to the sort worn in Elenria, Zhang still wore the UST officer’s clothes, though granted without the original livery of the nation they were now in rebellion of. They carried knives and swords to mark their defiance to the UST: he carried a revolver.
And there was also the fact that of the people guarding this meeting, none of the sentries were community militia: all of them were Bian defectors or his own men who had unquestioningly launched into insurrection against the UST the moment he’d ordered them to, and whose uniforms though were shoddy and weapons old, had their holes patched, and creases straightened, and their rifles oiled and well-maintained. They might be from every single Bian community imaginable to the region and beyond, but their shared cause allowed them to do what their Community militia counterparts could not and set aside their differences.
He eyed the meeting again, now with unease. He could build such trust with people who he’d never known prior, but here were people of his own community. They didn’t simply expect him to side with them: they had the leverage to make threats if he so much as hesitated. These were his family after all, he’d known them his whole life, but they– they’d changed his clothes from that of a child to a man, fed him from wooden spoon to a bowl, taught him from hauling buckets of cooled slag to forging his own tools. They knew him better than he knew himself, and for someone whose job it was to lead an army, the prospect of having to face down his own family scared him.
They ended the meeting around four in the morning, but Zhang had grown tired of the bickering and retired home hours before. He spent the ruck back to the house deep in thought of the future–
Of the UST’s original military, many Bian recruits were aboard only because they needed the pay and the food. Even though both were quite awful, it was better than nothing. At home their communities had even less to share with them, and in this way they might perhaps be able to protect their kin from the excesses and zeal of the tax collectors. But even in the army, the officers were dismissive at best and outright hostile at worst. The very things they joined to receive: a meager pension, food, were often themselves late or withheld for any number of reasons. This led to poor soldiers— ill disciplined, distrustful of officers, abysmal training and skill.
What Zhang had accomplished during his time as an officer in the UST then, was nothing short of a miracle by some standards. To him, the UST’s military academy at Osena Lake had been a joke compared to the world-class tutelage of Master Sun Ye. When he finally was given a post as a battalion lieutenant-colonel, he took many of the outdated ideas of the UST’s military structure and immediately discarded them, building his own unit along UST organization but Sanshan doctrine and training.
But he didn’t completely throw all the ideas of the UST away. Sun Ye had cautioned him over and over in his dying days of what had killed the Sanshan’s once glorious armies: overcautious leaders, inability to adapt, complacency. He would not– could not– make the same mistakes.
Artillery, for example, had evolved drastically from 1200 pound cannons cast in local forges, to armory produced field guns of 800 pounds that could hurl shot twice as far, and then at the start of the nineteenth century breech-loaded rifled guns that spun exploding shells even farther than that in all kinds of sizes and angles. And though it took incredible effort to do so, he’d made the difficult effort of buying semi-new military-minded publications from the ships that docked in Pozhal in the summer. Those magazines, reports, and books– by heaven were those damnable greasy tomes ever so expensive– all had only further cemented a conviction that a future war depended on the judicious use of such equipment, and prior to the UST war he’d compiled long, unpublished heaps of proposals and reports to pile up in the private library of Sun Ye’s house.
When the rebellion had initiated in earnest he’d found his preparations and studies were well-founded. Infantry assaults preceded by shattered artillery bombardment had proved effective, but now that the Bian possessed their own state, he had to find a way to prevent these machines from falling into disrepair, plus maintain the quality of his fighting force.
He poured over his notes and memories of Sun Ye’s teachings, formulating a plan.
The current forces consisted of a mish-mash of levied militia volunteers from the communities and his own professional former Union soldiers. The Union soldiers themselves only numbered just over three battalions, with the gaps in fighting lines and flanks being plugged with militia. This had worked against an enemy who were themselves largely on the backfoot and unable to seize the initiative, but militias were a stopgap solution: any determined force would mop the floor with them, not to mention their manpower was still needed to run the economy at home.
Therefore, he had had to disband the militias, which slashed the whole of his forces to just under four thousand professional soldiers, even when counting the units in training, off-duty, and recovering personnel. This would not do: Bianguo, nascent country born out the bleeding belly of Southern Touli, already had too many enemies out the womb. He needed more soldiers, but more importantly, more bullets.
Sun Ye had always warned him that when considering casualties in personnel versus equipment, always choose equipment: a rifle needs at worst months to be produced, but people already take decades to grow to adulthood, never mind an always finite pool of people he could conscript, and needed time to train.
The general gnashed his teeth as he exchanged one book of accounting logs for another. What’d he’d give to have Sun Ye back– the old man would know what to do with politics, as easily as he knew war. He tried to picture the old inselni sat beside him, red pupils drilling straight into his head.
“Think, Feng Lai!” the specter snapped, waving a bony finger at him. “What are the basic fundamentals of waging war?”
“Logistics. Ox-carts, horses, barrels of food in supply trains, or–”
“Think deeper! I taught you better than this! Do people still light candles for illumination in their windows? Do you see the people of today writing books with brushes on strips of dry bamboo? Now, try again! Think! Start with the ox-carts!”
Zhang pinched his chin in thought. “No, of course. I’m thinking about war when it’s declared. I need to think about fighting war when there is none. I need roads for the carts, and they have to be in a single standard. This means an engineering academy–”
“An appetite too big for a stomach too small. Will you be building an engineering academy with prayers and hopes when you don’t even have a way to make guns? Who will donate money to your cause now that the war is over to build such a thing, when they’re busy trying to feed their families and heat their homes? This is a pitiful start. You’re better than this!”
Zhang paused. “The communities are in gridlock over leadership. Mutual animosity runs far too deep for me to coax them back together without an external threat, and I do not have enough sway with my fellow kinspeople to try and worm my way through politics to achieve compromise. I cannot force people to–”
“You cannot? You can’t or you won’t?”
The general shifted uncomfortably. “I’m not a politician.”
Sun Ye wrung his hands in exasperation. “It’s not that you can’t, Feng Lai– it’s that you remain scared of your own family, your own community. In the Imperial Army your community loyalties only mattered if you were a member of an Expediton’s attached fighting forces, but for you? For me? The Niaoren did not wait for the Imperial Court to hash out compromises and verdicts over community disputes to raid the borders. The many disparate tribes of vast Touli did not bother to try and understand the complexity of our people when they carried out attacks! You don’t have time for this, when tigers stalk the forest edge, peering into villages.”
Zhang put down the book. “That is rich, coming from you! You emphasized how the community independence allowed for our people to remain cosmopolitan and absorb new peoples into the Empire! ‘Rich soil comes from untamed forests–’ your words!”
“See past your own biases and listen to me!” the old inselni commanded, rising from his seat. Zhang could hear the clinking of mail links under his robes as he rounded the table to face him frontally.
“The Empire succeeded for so long, because we were able to adapt. We Bianjingren would not even be here had we not realized the time to fight was over.” The elder began to pace before Zhang, pulling one of his notebooks from the many disorganized stacks thrown about the room. “Your room is a mess. What is the excuse for such unkemptness, if you are not actively campaigning?”
“I haven’t had time to organize.”
“Incorrect. You are not at war– so study your victories, and scrutinize your defeats in the meantime. Organize your studies properly, not just for yourself, but so that your staff may be able to themselves learn from the recent past, and therefore emerge victorious in the future. Time and place, Feng Lai, there is a time and place for everything. You don’t have the luxury of being sentimental to the community now, not when you have noticed the leering gaze of predators over the backs of relatives as they work the fields. You are their guardian— your task is to protect them! You too, must adapt!”
He tossed the book before Zhang, and it landed with a bang on the table before him. “There is only so much an old man can teach you with his decaying memories and dusty books. Enroll yourself into the university of the now, soldier! Learn to cut up and forge lessons of the past into tools you can use! Mold your callow flesh into cold steel– your people depend on it, even if they do not realize yet!”
Steady footsteps returned to Zhang’s side, faster than any person should able to walk. Like a sudden breeze the door slid open, and slammed shut even as the general scrambled to turn around, sputtering. He was too slow; Sun Ye was already gone.
He paused again, then absentmindedly scratched his hair as he turned back to the table. The book was still there, waiting for him.
He picked it up and wiped the thin layer of dust from its surface— had it really been so long since he organized the place? He was greeted by bold, but faded characters upon the cover of the book: “My Thoughts on the Meidun Incident.”
This was a memoir, Zhang recalled, written by one Sun Ye’s colleagues during the total collapse of the Empire, left to him by way of inheritance from the elder’s library. He noticed a number of bookmarks and annotations as he skimmed its loose, fragile pages. The shaky, almost illegible markings were alien to him, their messages bordering on rambling— it could not have been Sun Ye’s neat, collected style. The inselni had not changed the way he wrote even in his final breaths. And his handwriting, even though Sun Ye had called it sloppy, was not this bad.
But he chose to disregard that for now, as he started from the first of the many bookmarks.
“In times like this, governance is a talent left to creativity…”