Pax's Alternate History Snippet repository.

[Imperator Pax]

The hunt and the banner
Part 4​

There was a discharge that managed to do nothing but kill a chicken. The men were going to need to eat of course after this but first to put things back in order Allen lifted his left hand and squeezed once, the bandit stumbled back and a face paces scrambling into a heap into the dust of the road clawing at his ruined eyes. Biting the urge to curse he readjusted and shot him this time cleanly through the hand and out the back of his skull, where a final thrash sent him into the dirt for good he stepped over the tube fed repeating rifle the man had dropped in his injury and raised his right to let both automatics chatter into the backs of the fools heedless trying to loot one of the stalls. The few who turned in time found the appearance of fifteen inch blades at the end of mausers to meet them as the infantry section menaced them from his left side. "Sergeant take this men into custody." He ordered the mustachioed man cradling one of the Broomhandles Edenborn had sent years previously. The RPF veteran nodded swaggered forward with three of the men and let a daring string of invectives inviting the bandits to give him any lip.

They didnt. The colour sergeant seemed a bit peeved at being denied the option to give them cold steel on the spot. They were encountering markedly less resistance than he'd expected. Much of the bandits had blackpowder revolvers, apparently of largely spanish production, and only a handful had ungainly long arms, and none designed before 1890. He had expected at least some Gewehr 88 commission rifles, but most were tube fed guns from Europe.

If they had been this close and in column they might have been dangerous still, but they weren't, and this was not a infantry square of 1890. They were armed ruffians usually serving as, presumably, body guards to travelling merchant spies not line infantry... and given the opportunity they'd gotten cocky and happy to try and loot stuff that they could load into their baggage before no doubt fleeing.

Allen loaded the left automatic dropping the still partially loaded magazine into his breast pocket for safe keeping as a lieutenant rushed up to him, "Horsemen are coming." Was the abbreviated declaration after the salute. He replied with 'show me' and the pushed to the old town gate. "See?"

"I see them." He replied evenly. "Run to second platoon tell them to join me on the high ground, and send a runner to third to form with their bayonets at the gate." The lieutenant, from baker company, grabbed two riflemen from his company as runners and rushed to comply as Allen holstered the brownings, and unslung the rifle on his back. Eight hundred yards give or take maybe five, and placed the post just above the man's breast bone, and exhaled.

He saw the flash of the gun and the red spray from the man's side. The horse he was riding reared, as did the one behind him, but there was no time to watch the spectacle unfolding. He tracked sideways and repeated the shots until the follower locked the bolt and he was forced to reach for the stripper clip at his belt. Twelve rounds later as a group of men from Baker began to file up the town gates. Corporals with scoped rifles leading groups of six men, and Cole threw down beside him, "Having fun without me?" He slid his muzzle through the crenulations and tracked into throng of horses.

"Its a hundred men ahorse." He replied.

"At least." Cole agreed as seven mill rifles cracked. "I've got the Vickers being brought along just in case." They fired, "Shang is rallying something, but I wasn't going to interrupt him."

He hadn't given him any specific orders other than to rally a second line of personnel. They needed to get the fires outs and the situation in hand. Allen lowered the reticle and squeezed. They were getting close enough now his zero on the rifle required him to shoot low. "They're going to try and get close enough to volley at us."

"Short of sixty yards they won't hit anything." It would make a hell of a racket, but that went without saying. A fierce whoop raised from somewhere on the side and rear. Allen paid no mind to it, engrossed in the world atop the perch that was the crenulated centuries old town gate and the sandy stone expanse leading into the hills and mountain pass beyond in the north. Cole pulled his rifle back and began to reload, "Well look at that."

He didn't have time to, Cole had stood up and the troops along the gate had begun firing from unbraced and standing positions as the enemy made their last approach beginning to slow for their cavalcade to present their rifles. The vickers had not yet arrived, but the full force of over fifty rifle men into firing ranks opened from the gates.

The point had been to hold the gates as a choke point but a large banner lead the platoon out and into the field before it as second platoon progressed through the portal with bayonet tipped mausers firing at they advanced. Upon a blue field sat a reared dragon in red.

It was the rifle fire doing the work of course, and Allen shouldered the mauser and worked the bolt.

"Wonder who's idea that was?" Cole questioned as the rout took hold.

... he grimaced, "Jun I suspect." He said before centering the crosshair on a fleeing bandit's spine and squeezed the man tumbled from the saddle much of his neck blown away. "Lieutenant," He called to another man in gray, the Chinese man saluted, "Send runners to all platoons and ascertain the lines of defense. I want to know the progress of putting those fires out." He glanced at second platoon standing well outside the town gates and out in the open. Another sergeant, this one a reed tall northern Chinese man, carrying a browning automatic shotgun had taken prisoners and was between them and the beginnings of a lynch mob. He was half tempted to tell the sergeant that the mob should be told the magistrate would be allowed to deal with bandits after everything was done, but decided to withhold. If bandits had taken hostages it might be worth trading a bunch of thieves and ruffians for them if they'd agree to that.

At least to keep it as an option in the short term. He spared a glance at the prisoners, another towards the mob, then the gate, the banner. This was not the scene the newspapers painted. Too often the papers continued to paint Bai Lang's mob as robin hood reporting attacks that had been mounting in the west but the articles written as if they were the same as Bai Lang's earlier ones. Any pretense of politics was absent with this lot. There was another reason of course to keep the prisoners from getting lynched of course... there was a chance that they might be able to shed some light on what Bai Lang had been up to since he had been forced to abandon Sow Gorge back in March... or even for that matter what had developed since he'd been repulsed outside the gates of Xian.

It took more than a quarter of an hour, not quite half, to get word and send word back and start putting things to order. They were getting used ot it, and it wasn't as if Bai Lang's predations were unusual for bandits either, whatever the reason for his sudden enmity or need to vent on the moslem hui and turkish sorts were remained poorly understood but it was looking to be, "Going to be a hot summer." In both temperature and and in terms of fighting.

"So it seems," He agreed. "Put the prisoners in the railway stockade," Improvised as it might have been, "And keep them under guard, I reckon I'll cable Cao Kun, and Peking." Technically they were over the border but he he had no idea where the provincial governor was or how to get ahold of the governor of Gansu... and there was no telling if the political situation regarding leadership in Shensi had stabilized enough that whoever was supposed to be in charge would even know either. Better to cable the capital and let them figure that shit out.
--
Commentary: this is the last part of the penultimate chapter of the white wolf rebellion. The final chapter of this part of the timeline covering the summer of 1914, and the death of the bandit king. Which brings us what has happened by this Bai Lang having been forced into the interior 'the west' of China his forces have largely been scattered and while militarily superior to ethnic Hui, and Han militias under the Ma clique the latter have been able to trade land for time and attrit Bai Lang's relatively large bandit force of in particular ammunition, and horse fodder. By this point in addition to being short on most supplies Bai Lang's forces seemed to have been splintering due to the lack of booty with various groups haying off. This will end with the destructive conclusion in southern Shanxi.

My speculation is that Bai Lang's thrust into Shanxi in mid 1914 (assuming he was actually apart of that force) was that his ultimate goal was the Machine bureau that would be rechristened later as Taiyuan Arsenal in hopes of looting ammunition and weapons from the provincial army. There are some indications in primary sources that Bai Lang had died of his wounds by this point and that Yan Xishan subsequently smashed the bandit army and drove the survivors back south.

 

[ATP]

So,Bai Lang was kind of modern Khan.Which keep power only so long as they could deliver spoils of war.No spoils,new Khan is coming who could deliver it.

 

[Imperator Pax]

So,Bai Lang was kind of modern Khan.Which keep power only so long as they could deliver spoils of war.No spoils,new Khan is coming who could deliver it.

Click to shrink...

I think thats a better explanation than some, the 'outer tribe' equivalents simply grew too large to be manageable without an income. Bai's bandits had a lot of season turn over, but his core followers all remained pretty loyal and coherent, but they were also a small portion of his men, and as they died and his relatives died or were injured he had to increasingly rely on new recruits and people who lacked the ideological component.

Interviews with some of his former bandits who made it down south in the twenties amounted to 'boss said these things, but I don't know what it means' regarding a lot of the political positions Bai Lang espoused. Most of them were in it to get money, and the ones that weren't tended to be in the most dangerous attacks because they could be relied on. So in spite of being personally popular the majority of the bandits weren't committed to the specific political cause

 

[Imperator Pax]

The White Wolf Part 1​

He was thinking about the Phillipines again. More so because of the way they had pitched camp... not because of the fight ahead of them.

The dutch ovens merrily sizzled with their victuals of sausage in the bacon grease. Bacon, sausage, beans, eggs, black bread and so on the campaign rations were meant to insure a man had the strength to get through the day. Men would march for belief, or for pay. He aimed to have both in the fight forward of them.

The year before the 'Shansi revolutionary corp' had been displaced from southern Shansi ... most likely because they had been too late in rising for the second revolution and for their own lack of organization. There had been previous 'revolutionary groups' in the local Beiyang army affiliated with Sun's party ... even Yan Xishan had been forthright in declaring with that group during the revolt in 1911 though he had elected not to get involved in the recently dispersed 'second revolution'. Yan's professed neutrality there had likely contributed to the 'Corp's' displacement. The Corps had chosen to throw in Bai Lang, and their avowed politics did seem to line up but the latter's displacement from Honan and subsequent actions made excellent fodder to rouse the men spiritually with.

So even though they were in the field the camp, what the cavalry would have called a fort, had involved knocked together cabins of logs put together by individual squads to house them. More than that though buildings housed the apparatus the battalions involved to run english language classes that would have ordinarily been conducted at garrison. Some fifteen hundred men gathered on to handle the fighting were supported another third just intended to handle supplies and motion... and their workings were in turn forward of laborers from the regular rail side of things.

Even without their numbers there was no assurance that Yan would march to catch Bai in the North... the most likely case to assure Bai Lang actually fought with Yan's provincial army was that if Bai pushed forward to try and take Taiyuan first in order to then turn around and face them from a defensive position and fresh supplies... and that was still a risky strategy for him. By all reports Bai Lang had shed most of his lesser troops sending them into the cities of Gansu corridor and even against the Tibetans.... and most likely that was to consolidate his best troops under him with the best weapons in hopes of reforging his forces from a new stronghold.

It was a desperate gamble, and the cornered fought hardest. If Bai Lang decided to slip Taiyuan and move north... if he got too far north into Mongolia it'd be the Russians problem, Manchuria would mean it might be both the Russians and Japanese... and that would have repercussions of a potentially even more dire sort. If that were to happen, it was to happen he couldn't justify a more northern march beyond Taiyuan... and if they did get that far the way home would be pivoting eastward and returning to the arsenal. If Bai Lang was then out of the field, it would be easier to take a train for Xian, or to Peking or wherever from there on.

First though the wolf.

Bill must have been having similar thoughts, "What are the chances that us running him to Taiyuan actually happens?"

They couldn't really be certain. Even with optical sights and high explosive magnifying the lethality of their batteries the cannons had to actually be in a position where they could burst upon the enemy... and there was no way to be sure that Bai Lang would meet them, "I would say maybe fifty fifty. Maybe not even that. He has to be short on ammunition, the force they were chasing had only a meager baggage column besides and was favoring speed over all else. It was not the kind march that the Beiyang army would have been suited to following, but as the core formation of the bandit king's army they were willing to go through with it, presumably expecting that the results would be worth it... that and now that they were in Shansi, "This is home territory for some of them. I expect that someone has convinced all the rest that they can defeat Yan and take the arsenal and that they can from there somehow hold out against Yuan."

"Could they?"

"No." Without any sort of other distraction and the months passed that had given Yuan Shikai chance to consolidate, "Not with the way Yuan's started talking about reforms to the army." Shensi might never had had Beiyang army divisions formed for the province but Shansi poor as it was was too close to the imperial heart by comparison not to. In theory he supposed taht went back to the Boxer Rebellion or even the Sino Japanese war and the fear of an invasion of Peking. Divisions would be spread two to a province for political reliability but could be called up in the event of invasion. "I'd suspect if Duan wasn't sick he'd be given a chance to bring things to bare," But most likely if conditions worsened it would be a certain qeue wearing fellow. Zhang xun was the most reliable of the old guard, though there were questions that he might be too prone to letting his Wu Wei corp engage in the depredations of the ancient regime... looting would do long term harm and probably help the republican cause in a province where they really didn't need the help. "Anyway I don't think we can insure he rushes to attack Taiyuan, or turns to face us. We can move forward and trying to catch him, and if that brings him into engagement it works," but he still had the chance to take one of the passes and bypass the city, and disappear... or circle around and lose them.
--
They had advanced north and forward a screen for forces, his only real reason to be present was ... really to reign in any too exuberant independent action. The officers needed to be capable of independent action, and then men prepared to fight but they didn't need to take too many cues from Bobby Lee either. The germans of course called it something else, but the mission was to conduct bounding advances of tactical maneuver. He was here such that if the foreward contact came he could direct the smaller units into.

The first contact with the enemy had come about five miles east over the river. Bai Lang's troops had been sighted in the village and the local constables had carried word that identified the leadership of those as scouts under a man named Hsu.

That had been four hours earlier.

The crack of rifle fire echoed in the valley, but neither side showed the tell tale white plumes of black powder. A detachment of cavalry screened in the north east preventing an advance over the river but the horses well back having already experienced what a gallant charge would provoke. The terrain as it was prevented, and benefitted both sides in similar ways, and Hsu was clearly disinclined to to commit to the fight.

It had not gone unnoticed by him that there was distinct lack of brightly colored silk blouses. In a similar fashion to his own troops Hsu's men wore the standard dark gray jackets and trousers established as part of the last army regulations to be promulgated by the Qing in response to the latest fashion of Europe's greatest army.

There was minor qualitative difference in equipment. Hsu's troops largely had the older 88s, with the exception of his cavalry carrying what he was relatively sure were 1895 Lever Actions. A significant step forward in time from the Kropatchek carbines encountered weeks earlier, though larger and less nimble due to their weight. "Are the guns in place?"

"Not yet, and if he runs we're going to have to unlimber them and move."

He wasn't sure if he wanted to chase Hsu. The man was acting cautious and had to have to dispatched a messenger to whatever larger force he belonged to. "If we cross the river it'll take time and bear us down," And it was while not as severe as his native Georgia, at a hundred degrees the humidity was approaching painful. "We're not going to move the guns. Dig them in for elevation," He half expected some lip, but it didn't come, and the red leg departed returning only after the lines had been dragged.

It was a calculated move. Dug in Krupp claimed the three inchers would give them five miles, they were going to have to see if that was true. They hadn't brought the fifteen centimeter beasts, it would have been too much of a burden to bring them but Bai Lang didn't seem to have any artillery that they'd seen, and Hsu certainly didn't. "Alright I've given the order, but they're spread out enough that they have to be expecting us to do so... and if we do everyone for miles will hear it." So even if Hsu's presumed runners hadn't gotten there they'd know something was going on.

He surveyed the spilled ground, and the almost a mile between the two extremes of each. The tail of Hsu's host in the west had trickled across the Fen to rejoin the rest but his line had largely solidified into what were presumably companies. Neither army had much in the way of the great trailing baggage trains of the wars of a century ago. No drummer boys. No swarms of oxen, or horses, and at least for the moment no buzzards looking to filch the flesh from corpses though that would change as the heat went to work.

"Howitzers."

There was the explosive roar, the bombastic discharge of the cannons from the rear and then to the north their descent and explosion. He expected that there were probably something similar to their sections, easily at least a dozen men maybe as many as twenty and each company looked close to two hundred men. The first desultory phase of shooting though came in low, falling well short of the enemy force.

Dawes groused about overcorrecting for the distance, picked up the field telephone and repeated his complaints to relay it to the layers. The effect had been spoiled though the opening strike had convinced Hsu to expedite his withdrawal, and in good order. Grey uniformed troops filed away from the field by company even as the seconds went out. Dawes returned to the telephone and called the firing to halt. "Do we cross the river?"

Was it better to cross the fen here? Or try further north? What was Bai Lang going to do? The questions forced him to consult the map, but he remained cognizant of the forested tracks of mountains to their west, they would get steadily closer as they moved north, eight miles to three if they followed the western course of the river.

They would move the regiment up... and in a few days prepare for a battle all the while still receiving copies of papers and telegrams from the east bringing word from all around the world.
--
Commentary: This is part 1 of the final chapter for this part of the timeline, we will finish up this year, and in the new year, most like first of the year we will open in July of 1916 after Yuan Shikai's death and then break down that follows into the core years of the warlord era.

 

[Imperator Pax]

The White Wolf Part 2​

They had advanced several miles dropping the distance between them and Taiyuan to under forty kilometers. They had kept the river between them and the enemy and dug trenches and light fortifications where possible and to put together shelter to get the men out of the sun.

That had become doubly important when they had crossed the river yesterday.

It was hot, humid, and the sun was painfully bright with a hard wind blowing down through the valley. It was the sort of weather it wasn't worth shooting in, and there was a general directive to hold fire unless fired upon against targets at range. The five hundred meter had been brought in to the two hundred meter zero of the rifles.

It was in part to conserve ammunition. It was also to maximize the destructive power of the rifle company. Each company opening up from their defenses at that close had a much better chance of bringing the enemy to a dead stop, and if not the ranks of repeating rifle fire within a minute would savage an attacker. That had been the doctrine even before the advent of the machine guns that anchored the positions turning the open rice fields into killing fields.

Conservation of ammunition though applied to the enemy as well. Their strategy seemed originally to keep them at arms length, and to avoid a decisive clash. That had been their initiation consideration of this engagement... that Bai Lang or which ever of his lieutenants would not choose to contest the afternoon. That was less certain now... which might have suggested he had been replaced, or perhaps reinforced. There was no way to tell.

No way to tell before the killing started. "No sign of any blackpowder." Cole declared throwing himself down haphazardly onto the bench seat behind the rammed earth wall. The news wasn't really news. The billowing white smoke could be seen for miles if a force was large enough. He settled for asking the real question, and not playing any games. "We can't tell. Hsu's force of cavalry have pirouetted smartly but I'd lay money that all their ponying is a bait."

No sign yet of the Shansi Revolutionary Corp, but all that remained of Bai Lang's once eclipsing swarm of locusts were equipped with modern rifles and the gray uniforms of the late Qing...and agreed with Cole that at least they weren't assaulting up the mountain. They were fighting up the valley as it were towards the provincial capital... and that meant eventually if they kept playing this game of hop scotch that they'd reach the end.

There was a volley of rifles in the north somewhere.

"Reason we might not be seeing them is the the Shansi boys might be having a go of it, and Bai has this lot here to check us."

"You think so?" He questioned. Those reports had been audible even if the sound had been wrong to be pointed at this line.

"Well we hadn't heard Bill shoot back."

True. There had been no return fire, second battalion could have been directed to hold fire entirely... or the shots had been so off the mark that they hadn't realized they'd been the intended targets. That seemed less likely. Surely Bai Lang hadn't had troops stumbling around... of course everyone did seem to be dressed greyback today.

It was the hot part of the day, and dusk was almost six hours off. Dog company the last of the four of 1st​ Battalion was ordered to hop up out of their firing positions and move up... or more correctly Dog split dividing into pairs of platoons to maneuver. Under their officers one half watched the others dig the shallow US doctrine style foot deep fighting position. It was designed to offer protection to fire a rifle from, and would do little against artillery, but Bai Lang didn't seem to have artillery.

A few hundred yards hopping forward... and no one started shooting at them. Allen exhaled. They weren't being contested. "Move your commandos up." He ordered. Cole nodded while A-C Companies remained where they were. The game of hurry up and wait continued through the day, and the following into an advance that narrowed the valley to about twenty miles wide. Some of hte villages to the north east had been looted and burned, probably over the last few days, but there was no indication that he had moved from the river plain into the town proper

Almost fourteen years earlier the boxers had carried out a massacre here with the governor having been either unable or unwilling to stop them, just as Yan didn't seem to have the ability to stop the several thousand bandits sweeping up from the south. As if to flaunt this Bai Lang had taken to flying the Wuchang banner from what was probably his central position. Along with it flew the Shansi revolutionary corp, and his personal standard.

"Bring the guns up." He meant effectively to where they would be on near to direct fire. They could dig them in if the battle called for it. It had not escaped either himself or the correspondence by telephone and telegraph that command of a regiment was most typically the responsibility of a full bird colonel. How funny that back in Tietsin no one was making such comments about Bai Lang's rank within the beiyang was somehow reason to prevent his leading a brigade sized force at least. "Direct the batteries to prepare for continuous fire."

He supposed though that in a way that might have been true. The brigade was probably the largest size force that Bai Lang could manage effectively. It had been this way early last year... the outbreak of a second revolution had swelled it, and his head apparently, and now it had reduced back down to its current size of several thousand.

1st​ battalion had the river to its left providing some measure of screen as second spread out along their right facing north. They were careful in spreading out and had given the enemy a choice of escape routes if it came to that where they could make a run for it south. It wasn't really even a trap, if they had had more artillery and machine guns it would have made sense to cover that whole flank... but the idea was to avoid convincing the bandits on the flanks to fight.

"Lets see if it works."

There was a strategy in mind. Whether it would succeed, who could say. He wondered if Bai Lang had received word of his cousin's death at the hand's of old man Ma.... or more accurately their troops. He had been hoping that Bai Lang would be caught in a position where he had been under the fire of the city's guns... but Yan's old cannons probably didn't have the range... or he was husbanding them until he was sure his gunners would hit what they meant to. There was no real way to be sure from here.

They had made the objectives of maneuver as clear to each of the lieutenants as was possible. They either understood the orders, or they didn't by this point... whether they could carry them out would remain to be seen... and that might be wholly separate from understanding. Some of the heat had bled off along with the humidity. It hadn't been a lot of rain, but enough to take some of the edge off... but it was looking like the killing would be done out under the sun in the plain south of the city.
At eleven o'clock in the morning a scant few hundred yards behind an infantry company's spread out platoons the three inch guns of Battery A opened. Fifteen minutes later the Krupps of B joined them. Sheltered behind locally harvested pine timbers troops like the rounds go out and looked to their sergeants for indication of when the order to go up and over would come.

They, the cannons, were certainly not his final resort.
He picked up the field phone. "We are going to make Duan look bad." Bill's voice sounded tinny along the phone line.

Maybe, "You think so, well always a good excuse to justify new guns." Their guns were more modern... and it was true that the improvement to the wheels did make them more manageable.... but he doubted that had been the only impediment. The rail line running up as far as it did already had been the real help... as had the ability to expand on that. They had work crews averaging just shy of twelve miles of track a day and that meant trains could run from the farmstead in Jin where they had started this last phase of the march.

 

[ATP]

Good,and interesting chapter.
During WW1 Fire-roller/Feuverwaltze/ was invited by polish generał Tadeusz Rozwadowski/https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiV24nOo-30AhWSlosKHUFFC6IQmhN6BAgPEAI&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Jordan-Rozwadowski&usg=AOvVaw1RS_St273W74SuhLHtxT0Y
/serving in A-H army in 1915 which let german beat russian in Gorlice battle in 1915.
Your SI could do the same earlier.

 

[Imperator Pax]

The White Wolf Part 3​

The killing fields of the artillery and machine guns that had joined them in the afternoon made the matter of engaging a numerically superior force easier. Not easy, of course, any dismissal that these were just Chinese bandits missed that he was almost certain that the entirety of the other side were deserters from China's first western style army. Their rifles were just as modern as their own, but it really was the lack of machine guns and artillery... and probably for that matter the communications to accurately lay guns on target.

The brigade of brigands was standing admirably too in face of all of that. Bravery, elan did not win in the face of superior firepower. Though ensigns flew pennants with their respective Jia, most of Bai Lang's troops were not deployed in squares, or double lines. They remained largely near their banners spread out as company size formations. There was a singular exception to the disposition of his ranks. Though they wore gray uniforms not dark blue they mirrored the troops of Japan in deployment of a war near a decade gone.

To their opposite a red dragon flew on a silk banner, and graybacks in the same general cut of uniform spread out by sections with the more forward soldiers still half a kilometer distant from the enemy. In contrast to a western force, of European Infantry, every lieutenant of the constituent platoons carried a mauser rifle.

They were close enough that he could see the trees on the mountainside. They had pushed Bai Lang as far north as he was going to go. Going any closer would mean putting his backside into range of Yan Xishan's forces. Yan was if admittedly disappointing, somewhat understandably carefully husbanding his troops... he was biding his time waiting to see what would happen. It wouldn't have been a surprise that Yan might try and claim the glory of being the one to finally dispatch Bai Lang in hopes of currying favor with Yuan. As long as it ended with Bai Lang's forces broken then that would be fine with Allen.

They were now in what would be the final positions they took before the moment of decisive battle. Bai Lang could no longer maneuver. They had given him the opportunity to make an escape so as not to have to fight a cornered dog, but he had declined it... probably out of pride. "His lack of maxims surprises me."

"even if he had 'em, don't imagine he has the ammo." Was the reply.

Allen considered the arsenal's main structure. A hundred miles wasn't that far these days... well excepting that it wasn't really a straight line. "It'll probably to wait until next year," He said lowering his field glasses from where he had planned the eastern side of the enemy, "We're going to cut a line through that pass, run a rail line straight to this town." That would be after they ran the south spur line north to Taiyuan. "Signal Cole to move his him men," To swing their left flank around. The fourth rifle companies of each battalion were weaker than the three main ones, they were volunteers of drilled infantry and had all the same equipment, but they weren't quite up to the same standards as the main force of battle. They had been rotated as they had redeployed their troops, and now those companies along with Cole's own force were on the left flank where they would push north to where river turned and gave more space between the river and the foothills and the mountains in the west.

They didn't have the numbers to go for an envelopment of course. They were going to attempt to close the frontage of battle to ten miles. Bai Lang would probably attempt to mount a frontal assault by then... but it was already too late. He should have mustered an attack earlier during the redeployment of troops... or if not then than immediately after.

The lieutenant manning the line rang the eastern force. The wind shifted blowing more south east now. Not that at this point it was going to make much difference. Both sides had long since been ordered to hold fire at anything that wasn't nearly spitting distance. Battery A was just over four miles from the bend in the river that was supposed to be the point Cole was supposed to take.

The lieutenant held the phone out looking a little wilted. Allen took the handset. "What is it?"

"Give me two minutes, then hit the river with the smoke, and high explosive after." Allen turned to the red leg, relayed the order, ignored the cursing and started the clock. He then reminded him that Bai Lang still had at least a squadron of cavalry somewhere in reserve. "I want the smoke to cover our advance and to shelter setting up the Vickers." He replied. "Once it clears my rifles should able to stop any cavalry charge."

Should be was less than definitive. The problem was the terrain of course there was a mix of rice paddy cultivation and millet, but there were wide swathes of trees that were in the way. Then there were all the decrepit irrigation ditches. It was those that were providing Bai Lang's men, those that were near them, the only real fighting positions. Apparently bandits hadn't brought entrenching tools. Two minutes on the dot, and silver shells streaked and exploded into silver white burning clouds along the river bank. The wind if it picked up would blow it away, but for the moment it would mark how fast the wind was blowing, and in theory shield the advancing infantry from view... of course as Battery A adjusted their throw for the change to high explosive the enemy were probably going to have to worry about other things. Four rounds per minute per gun began to open, a rate designed to be effective, but conserve shells.

Men in blinds with german spotting scopes relayed their observations back to Battery A to where they were splashing. "What about those shells we're keeping in reserve?"

The new fuzes weren't entirely trusted by Dawes or some of the older artillery men, Griswold swore that the german timers would work, but they were waiting. "Shrapnel is being kept in reserve, we want them a bit more bunched up in case the fuses go early." Or such was the advising of the experts. Allen's experience with artillery was to listen to the red legs, and they wanted to be closer, and the enemy more enjoined together before switching to the newer shot.

The heat had reached its peak, and with it swarms of flies. It would start to cool, but they had hours of day light left... and frankly they had illumination by flare shells to bring this off. What he didn't want to risk was Bai Lang mounting a night attack, which was something he had some experience with.

The advance to full contact was directed from the battalion level distributed to the company level, who maneuvered platoons to take designated ground and lieutenants to hold that ground by the maneuver and fire. It was a hideous mixture of Prussian and American doctrine, and the instructors at the academy would have been appalled with the sheer volume of fire being thrown out, but he was certainly not about to mount a bayonet charge until he was sure the enemies had broken to rifle fire... and probably not even then.

The platoon commanders understood his intent, or at least should have the orders of what the overall goal was here, especially now had been passed down. They understood the fundamental basics of course, the thing drilled into them. Get to the objective in the fastest way possible with the most men possible.

"Theres his cavalry." Indeed they came.

Poor fools. A last saber charge out of desperation hoping to break out against the right flank. Several hundred horsemen thundered, the sound of their hooves on open ground answered by the steady opening of rifle fire.

If he had been closer to the engaging platoon he'd have ordered them to aim low, and regretfully aim for the horses. He was close enough that he could see the glint of ten inches of steel bayonets that he'd been frequently told were too short by people who believed cavalry [charges] were still effective. The bayonets weren't needed to break the charge. The forty odd men of the platoon opened ragged holes in the charge, but that wasn't what broke them. From over their left shoulder a trio of Rexers opened... why the machine guns were in that position Allen wasn't sure. They should have been on the other side anchoring the flank of the advance.

It didn't matter. The mobile machine guns chattered and that was the death of a gallant gesture. He watched the last of the horses drop into the dust, and lowered the binoculars. Allen's lips settled into a thin line, and nodded, before his attention was called away.

The center most remaining solid infantry formation had committed. The Shansi Revolutionary Corp had opted to fix bayonets and press the field with their arisakas. In a sense it made sense, if they could close before the artillery could find them in their position then it might have bought them some time. It did in that respect save them from the artillery.

It didn't save them from First Company or her new Lewis guns. "Let them have it Shang." He ordered. The snakes chattered as a pair of four man teams in light firing positions at the top of the hill opened in enfilading fire from the command post as the corp charged the defending position of first platoon's four thirteen man squads.

They recognized the threat at least. An officer or senior enlisted must have have had some sense, he couldn't hear the words but men hared off pivoted try and charge the hillside forcing them to prepare to defend the hill. It would be the first time he had fired a rifle all day, and Allen checked the methodically the chamber of his Remington. The first round at a man in the same gray uniform he wore a hundred fifty meters. It lanced the man's shoulder, spun him, and he dropped. The fall put the light wood of his arisaka in the mud of a rice paddy.

Other remingtons joined in semi automatic fire, along with mausers as sergeants bellowed for them to aim low, take their time and aim. Gunnery crews manning the lewis reloaded the magazines and then added their own rifles to the defense of the hill.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fall 1914
The August Madness
Epilogue
--​

It was done. Bai Lang had taken a two hundred grain boat tail that had blown open the back of his head... a ghastly wound. Some of his closest retainers had dragged his body from the scene. Fleeing into the hill country and they had not pursued. One of Bai Lang's cousins had been decapitated in the bandit king's place and paraded about to be claimed it was the wolf, and just to drive the point home troops from Peking had sacked and burned Bai's family mausoleum.

It was done.

The wolf had been slain. His army scattered, and broken... many had fled south, far far from the inhospitable lands where they were hated and hunted by all residents and would find no succor there.... but in the mean while that simple byline 'Assassination in Europe' had become something more... Sir Edward Gray had convinced the English Government to war. An impressive feat, if John Allen was being honest. The newspaper in front of him showed the boulevard of Paris awash with the rapturous crowds celebrating the war's outbreak.

Summer was ending in Europe. It was going to be a bloody fall. The only thing he could think, cynically as he looked at the picture, and everyone single headline of the other papers about what was happening... was to think back to seven years earlier in Stuggart. And it only brought a cynical laugh from his lips. No general strike had manifested to halt the war. Men were rushing to the volunteering stations, and to the colors hoping to see action before it was over.

Wars always lasted longer than people thought. Congress had in a panic ordered his class graduated early thinking they'd be needed to fight Spain, but instead he'd gone to the Philippines, and then to observe with the Japanese side of the Russo-Japanese War. Observe, that was what Shinozaki would be going to do, to Observe with Japan's British allies. It would be a crying shame if the boy died over there.

"Its going to be a mess."

"We should look on the bright side, war in Europe means no capital competition from Europe," there only real competition would likely be other American firms... and most of those would be concentrated likely in the south or nearer the coast otherwise.

"More than that," John Allen agreed, "They'll butcher each other, and an army has to eat. An army needs things to march... and the British have the largest fleet afloat," With the launching of Dreadnought they had pulled well ahead of Kaiser Bill's silly attempts to compete with the Royal Navy, even though the USS South Carolina had been under construction as well by the time of Dreadnought's launch. He doubted there was to be some decisive battle for control of the sea... and even if there was it would be much closer to England... "I expect that we will in short order see tenders for larder, and other supplies from all of the entente powers." It was an opportunity not to be missed.

Not only would the capital not be available to European firms to invest in the far east, their governments would be spending capital to buy goods from neutral nations, which could in turn be invested into other projects. "Only problem with that is how much of Europe's exports it cuts us all from, and the fact that Europe will be rushing to buy all they can from the States."

Yes, that was true. They were going to have not only sort out mediums of exchange to be sure, but also compete with buying material from all the firms in America who were sure to be about to be inundated with requests from Europe. "All the more reason to invest in so far as we can, with buying the machine to build the tools to build our own factories.. To do as much as we can to produce what is in demand for export, but also domestic consumption, while Europe cannot, or will not produce those goods."

Europe, and the states for that matter were a far away place. There were matters closer though...

--
She had chosen to summer in Chang'an. Xian's population had swelled with the bandit predations after it had been successful defense. Superstitious peasants eager gathered to look at the great heavy guns, some brave few even dared to try and rub the massive steel artillery pieces for good luck.

The city had swelled to an estimated two million by the time her husband had returned, and news of the Europeans preparing their armies. Jun had made the decision that her first child, her husband's first son should be born here. It was an auspicious thing that he had been born after the mongrel had been put down not long before.

Tao Jun reclined on her couch. The rapacious bandits had cut a swatch all the way to the cities of the Tarim basing scattering hapless persons like leaves in a strong wind, and in all directions. Eventually they would largely return to their villages to rebuild, for now though most of the displaced men found work as laborers in the work of clearing and building new structures, and of course this labor provided them money to buy food from the modern farms that used those beastly tractors her husband insisted on even when it disturbed the traditional farmers.

Those same farmers found it hard to compete, especially given how dilapidated the old dynasty had permitted the irrigation and canals to become. The new farms also weren't beholden to the same financial systems as those indebted family farms. No copper cash taken in to try and pay taxes in silver taels as had been the situation under the old dynasty.

China was rudderless, and disunited. An old, dynasty, tree losing its leaves before a harsh winter. It had taken the Manchu's a long time to finally fall though... it hadn't even been ultimately intentional. The southern doctor had financed more than a dozen failed rebellions over the previous decade before the bomb blast in Hankou. He had been in the united states, and clearly hadn't expected anything to come about because then he'd gone on to France to beg for money.

It would have been better perhaps if the Dynasty had been toppled sooner rather than letting the incompetent and ball less lead the country. "Mistress," The maid deposited the chest of documents obediently where she was bid to, and backed out of the room. The majority of the documentation was in english, very little in the courtly characters she had memorized as a girl.

Of course there was a movement to change to a written language using vernacular characters... and even more extreme a movement to adopt the latin characters to convey meaning, to adopt wholesale the english script styles. England had been the first country to industrialize. The English had humbled the Qing over the poppy, despite themselves having so recently been driven from their own colony of America, and having fought an even greater war on the continent. Her husband would have preferred the latter of course, but he would accept the former. The bigger question was if either would prove practical. The documents in question were predominantly in English excepting various documents referencing other agreements. German, Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian even.

"I would have brought you the books." Allen commented sliding into the room with all the grace of a tiger satisfied with his latest hunt. "Or a paper."

"The Europeans go to war, I read this morning's paper." She was glad he didn't reiterate that she no longer looked pale. The anemia had passed, "They will ruin each other."

He looked at the order sheets, "Its an excellent reason whatever the case to expand our steel production, all this over some fool thing in the balkans." He shook his head, "I'll be returning to Peking, the state department has already sent out cables that the Europeans won't be able to provide the usual security, and administrative fare." Which meant opportunity. That was what much of the documents were about... some of it was simply buying up farmland near Xian, others were buying coal mines or plans for oil explorations.
--
Commentary: And thus so ends the main perspective of 1914. WW1 had absolutely nothing to do with democracy. That is very much after the fact claim. France desperately having been cloying to reclaim the lost prestige and hegemonic state of Napoleon (never mind that much of the Napoleonic myth is just that) had been agitating for a conflict since the 1880s, the stated war aims under joffre were of course nothing short of a full front assault to reclaim alasce lorraine. It was only Gray threatening to resign his post that convinced the British cabinet to aid France and Russia and that was out of as expressed by the Foreign office at the time as much to keep them on side and thus protect for example British India from alleged Russian encroachment (see Great Game) as it was to insure that they didn't lose to Germany and Friends (remember no one was sure what the Italians were going to do) and leave Britain without anyone to play with on the continent. Serbia had been provided support by Russian Intelligence through the Serbian Military Intelligence service to things actually outright against the interests of the Serbian government. Russian Intelligence had penetrated the Austrian military intelligence bureau as well via a number of high placed ethnically Austrian officers. Thus Austria's complaints about its multi ethnic diversity were quite wrong, it was only after the old officer corp was gutted by the war that burgeoning ethnic nationalism really threated to split the country, and really that was just one more problem on top of all the existing AH problems.

Was war inevitable? Due to the alliance system, probably. Germany is at fault, but mostly for not doing more to reign in Austria Hungary. Serbia and Austria Hungary were probably fated to go to war especially after the second Balkan crisis a few years earlier and that might very well have dragged Russia into it... but none of that justifies or excuses the Shliffien-Moltke plan being put into action that resulted in the invasion and occupation of Belgium. The ultimate insurer though of British involvement of war was Edward Gray, who bullied the rest of the cabinet into by threatening to resign all the while prophesying that unless they came to France and Russia's aid the inevitable victor of the conflict (France-Russia, or Germany) would turn on Britain after.

So thus we end the coverage of 1914 with war starting in Europe. This will pick back up chronologically as I've said in Summer 1916.

That brings me to my other side bar, and hopefully my last academic rant of the year. Tuchmann is not a reputable source, there are so many inaccuracies and just generally things she gets wrong, not even touching the extent of personal bias, that I cannot fathom how she was ever taken seriously. I'm not even talking about stuff that might be explained from (as is often the excuse) didn't have access to better records, or alternative sources i.e. The nationalists. She gets things wrong about the American military that are positively blatant. Her attempts to account for Stillwell's service in the first world war and his impressions fly not just in the face of the US's general accounting, but of British accounts, and I suspect French national archives and opinions. (Admittedly like King, a much much more accomplished and able commander, I suspect Stillwell to have been something of an Anglophobe already by 1917.) Unlike King of course Tuchman's own accounting of Stillwell's service in the first world war paints a strictly uncouth, ill-mannered and unprofessional officer that should have had no place in the army. (A position that he retained only by virtue of personal connections.) Tuchman's accountings seemed to be that of a hopeless romantic trying blatantly to engender the object of her affections to her audience, which admittedly is a common problem of anthropoligical accounts of the time the book was written. (ethnographic accounts are especially rife of this during the period.)

Anyway in the New Year we will pick up in July 1916 after the death of Yuan Shikai, and the beginning of new states born from the disintegration of the Beiyang as a coherent political entity. Thus the Warlord Era.

 

[ATP]

Merry Christmas.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Prologue
Eve of the Warlord Era
August 1916​

In the grand scheme of things the office here was almost painfully close to Tietsin. Not that the letter from Reinsch would not still have reached him even in their Xian offices. The last two years had been a whirlwind. Griswold had opined that he should think the war in Europe would never end, but it would have to. John Allen was a tall man and sat behind the large hardwood desk staring at that rambling entreatment.

It appealed with a matter of'factness, an earnestness that told him the academic had never been a business man. That Paul just didn't get it. He took the law and the 'agreements' between nations seemingly wholly on face value.

He spared the two year old a glance as the boy waved insistently at the little jade ornament on his desk. The boy shouldn't have been here of course. This was an office, not a damned play pen. Jun's younger brother was visiting and somewhat reluctantly the maid had brought the boy here to calm the little tyrant. He could walk now which made him somewhat more unmanageable. "That is enough Augustus." he informed the stamping toddler fixing the boy with the same expression his father had used on him enough. Caught on the spot the boy stopped, he picked up the knickknack and held it out gold foot first. Augustus took it and sat on the floor.

That left him returning to the letter... and the business of the last two years. The Europeans couldn't continue the war forever. They didn't have the money for it. The French, the British, and the Russians were all borrowing from each other, and more importantly from New York. Britain had been in an industrial trade imbalance with the states since the start of the century of course and this thing had only made it worse.

He looked at the sheet. He had made painfully clear that in his opinion to Reinsch, as they had eulogized Rockhill... and also to annoy Addams, that neither Christian morals nor democracy had anything to do with what had let the British become the empire the sun did not set upon. It was economics, pure economic calculus. England had imported from the continent, from admittedly a protestant Sweden, various reforms. Various ideas. Everything from its army, to banks, and stock markets, and it wasn't as if Sweden hadn't developed those sorts of things from the law of moses either. No the Swedes had made those innovations not out of protestant work ethic but due to the strife and necessity of the chaotic mess the continent had been, because there had been opportunity to be had in experiments, and innovations. The majority of the English were just as loath to leave their villages as German peasants were they were born they lived they died in their same counties their whole lives for the most part. The opportunity for wealth though had convinced some, for economic enrichment and power had convinced some to try for more than just their base existence in the mouth country.

It was a cynical almost nihilistic cruel reality, and Reinsch hated the brutal pragmatism of the theory. It did nothing to preclude people from being moral, or inherently good or inherently bad for whatever such subjective terms meant. England had industrialized first. Then America, and maybe the Canadians too he supposed. Then after the downfall of Napoleon only then, by importing the lessons of steel and railways from England had France and Germany began to industrialize... and Germany had learned all too well. The Kaiser had inherited a Germany that produced more steel than Britain did per annum... but Britain had her colonial empire, and all the credit that afforded the Empire.

Even with a war on, even with so much capital there, the empires of Europe still believed that they could act the same, and that upset Reinsch. Reinsch believed in the open door policy, and wanted free trade, and the competition of firms on equal grounds. Which would admittedly have been nice... but that wasn't the way the French for example saw it, or the Japanese, or the English, or the Russians.

Two years ago the most destructive war in the history of civilization had begun over some fool thing in the balkans. Of course the origin of Reinsch's letter began earlier in 1914. Yuan had crushed the revolt in the south, run the southern doctor back to Japan, and went back to the thankless business of trying to put the country to rights... or near enough. The whole Seims Carrey business had begun as a grand plan to do what the Manchu's should have done a damn century back... commit to a meaningful rebuild of the grand canal. Not that there had been any railways in France back then, which was of course the other part of the agreement, and it was within the French and Russian spheres in particular that Seims Carrey would have especially intruded.

That would have been headache enough. Naturally of course that wasn't all, heaven forbid that that was all, that that alone would have been enough for Reinsch. Seims Carrey and the corporate interests were concerned with the bottom line and not the vagaries of political machinations of the state department. The program though had started before the war, and before Japan had invaded German Shandong.... before their stupid 21 demands.

That poorly thought out bit of idgetry would have been the sort of heavy handed nonsense had come most probably from Hayashi throwing his weight around. There had been a fleeting moment, a decade ago where he had the shot. Where Hayashi could have been snuffed out with a well placed spitzer bullet... but Eugene had appealed to his better nature. So Hayashi had survived the hermit kingdom... and even if he hadn't Japan would have still gobbled up Joseon. They would have blamed the 'Righteous Army' for the shooting, blamed the Koreans and retaliated against them. It had been that which had stopped him.

That however had been ten long years ago... and the last two years had seen even greater changes. The outbreak of war in Europe had meant a desperate rush for all manner of goods for the war effort, and less competing foreign capital in China.

Seims Carrey was only part of that, because it had predated the war, even if they had tried to finally move on just , only just this spring. Japan claimed it interfered with their 21 demands, Reinsch claimed that their objections (like those of the French and Russians, and British...) violated everyone's previous agreements and affirmations to an open door policy in china.

The development corporation was older than that agreement still, and it had changed as well with the influx of european money to buy material for the war effort. Or Japanese money for goods as well. The Cadre had originally been a hundred members each a one percent buy in into the stock, the initial venture's capital. Each of the original hundred had had an equal share, and equal voice, but that had been before the end of the Qing. The Cadre was still a hundred man body of course, a hundred experts, but there had been turn over. Old shareholders had been bought out, or even died, and that had seen a change on the horizon before war were declared.

Even before the declaration of war between the empires of Europe their rail network had stretched a thousand miles deep into the interior of China. A great feat, and not their only one. American style industry, tooling, factories all of it had been the goal of a program to create a domestic market where people would want to buy locally made modern conveniences and produce steel, and all the rest, as well as to be able to export those goods to overseas markets. Economics. The shares had thus been consolidated by 1914 to a still sizable original membership.

But that had been before the influx of British pounds. British pounds loaned to the French, and Russian to buy arms. British pounds to provide funds to Australia's defense needs. British pounds... well so on and so forth. So instead of finally selling Remington Rolling Block rifles to the Chinese army as had been the plan for hte Qing it was the French, and Russians who ended up buying them in order to outfit second line troops, and colonial forces who didn't need modern rifles. At least that was what they had been told was why the orders were placed. He had no reason to believe that that was untrue... but that was what they had done at the arsenal for almost two years.

Easy money.

Supposedly they now had enough of those outdated arms. He thought of the new pattern Enfields and wondered if they might buy those.

Which brought them back to the matter of what that influx meant. Europe was spending all of its capital on the war. It didn't have the money to make foreign investments and was accruing debt at an astonishing rate. So it was no wonder Hayashi felt he could make the twenty one demands. At least that made sense for their relative position. Reinsch did have a point that France, and Russia really should have been focused on fighting the huns rather than cawing about their asian spheres of influence.

There was still one more facet of the last two years though that just made everything worse. Yuan Shikai had decided that China needed an Emperor and that he should fill that role.... and the south had revolted again. Sun's people had called it the 'National Protection War', which was a stupid grandiose title... but overly grandiose titles aroused the masses more than accurate ones did. Sun's ill prepared, poorly equipped, and broke provincial allies had still been numerous enough to be a headache... but it was really the issue of money that was the issue when you got down to it.

Yuan wasn't exactly flush with cash either with the bankers tied underwriting loans to Europe... and it had strained the Beiyang army. Militarily the professional northern army had won, but it had shown the vulnerability... and Sun had something like twenty? Thirty failed rebellions going back to before Allen had graduated West Point. He had had at least ten before John Allen Forrest had arrived in Joseon. Of course what had a few rebellions meant to the Qing... that had had hundreds in that same time period.

The money just wasn't there though. Yuan Shikai could have won in the field, but it wouldn't have a political solution in the distant south. He couldn't have conquered and held provinces like Yunan. So he had backed down, gone back to just being president. Then maybe, that would have settled things. Things might have worked out.

Yuan Shikai had always been cognizant, had frequently mentioned that the men in his family didn't live long lives. He had died just recently, and now the whole country waited to see what was going to happen. Who was going to be in charge of China?

--
Commentary: alright we are finally to the original part of the timeline and the first update of the year. Yuan Shikai like a number of Chinese leaders during this period may have actually been poisoned, but he was also in poor health, he drank a lot, was under a lot of stress, and was very cognizant in his writings that yeah men in his family didn't tend to live real long lives. So in this, it doesn't really matter if Yuan was or wasn't poisoned.

He died already, and now there are just all the broken pieces. So similar to how White Wolf ran, this opens as the political dominoes fall (in White Wolf Song Jiaoren's assassination occurs at the beginning roughly speaking, here its Yuan's death) as a result of a politician's death. The majority of 'Arc 1' of the warlord era takes place in the following year, 1917, but will conclude the roughly two year arc in July of 1918. At which point we will start Arc 2.

On that note, what will probably happen is that I will start posting some other Alternate History fiction in this thread besides stuff set in the Chinese Warlord CYOA derived timeline. Though it probably won't go up in this thread, I have a SI in Sharpe's (Novel series by Bernard Cromwell) that will probably start in the misc thread soon. Among other projects

 

[ATP]

Chance to grab territories - but,with what army?

 

[Imperator Pax]

Chance to grab territories - but,with what army?

Click to shrink...

First will be Shansi, and Shensi and then move steadily west into provinces that aren't readily being fought over and start assemblying a national guard (Yan XIshan was historically able to staff a reserve army of a hundred thousand (by 1923) men to support his professional core and run the only domestic arsenal capable of producing modern field artillery by holding on to a province that no one ever thought to actually fight over)

Expansion of the army won't really start until 1917 indeed much of the fighting in 1917 from the perspective that story focuses on will be Hu starting a fracas with Chen and the Ma clique near Gansu, and that will occur concurrently to the manchu restoration by Chang [Chang only brought his 'body guards' some five thousand men with him] which actually justifies the other military actions in western Zhili against some of Chang's allies in provincial government

 

[ATP]

First will be Shansi, and Shensi and then move steadily west into provinces that aren't readily being fought over and start assemblying a national guard (Yan XIshan was historically able to staff a reserve army of a hundred thousand (by 1923) men to support his professional core and run the only domestic arsenal capable of producing modern field artillery by holding on to a province that no one ever thought to actually fight over)

Expansion of the army won't really start until 1917 indeed much of the fighting in 1917 from the perspective that story focuses on will be Hu starting a fracas with Chen and the Ma clique near Gansu, and that will occur concurrently to the manchu restoration by Chang [Chang only brought his 'body guards' some five thousand men with him] which actually justifies the other military actions in western Zhili against some of Chang's allies in provincial government

Click to shrink...

Logical,you do not need big army to take province which nobody want to take.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Logical,you do not need big army to take province which nobody want to take.

Click to shrink...

Especially where much of the conflicts in the period of 1917-1919 are local provincial and bandit suppression by provincial forces as Peking's authority detiorated after the Manchu restoration. July of 1920 sees what is really the first major conflict with both sides (in this case the Anhui and Zhili cliques) both fielding mutliple divisions worth of troops, but at the same time being largely confined to a small geographic area (movement made possible by rail), and with that mobility in mind a very short timeframe. The forces fighting here were largely drawn from the roughly half million men northern army that had devolved to its regional leadership with the death of Yuan Shikai. In the lead up to the major wars of the conflict in 1922 due to the regional characteristics and ambitions of these predominantly coastal warlords , beginning or at least notably picking up in about 1918, there is a large scale series of impressment or conscription and large armies of so called neutral troops in northern cliques who were only really concerned with their strictly regional concerns.

And of course most of these new recruits were raised by previously junior officers to expand their ranks and couldn't be equipped were not very popular so going into the major wars of the twenties there is a sharp decline in quality of the Beiyang era army, due to a host of logistical issues and political ones. And while Arc 1 (1916-18) will focus on provincial positions jockeying and so forth its also about the economic involvement and political motions on the world stage. So by the time the epilogue of arc 1 happens in late July of 1919 forces under arms will comprise 3 divisions and some mixed brigades up from the 1916 strength of three brigades (Roughly speaking each several thousand men)

 

[ATP]

Hire cossacks and other whites.They were generally good soldiers,and if you let them live safely with their families ,they would remain loyal.And engineers with workers who made in Russia those 122mmand 152 mm howitzers.Modified version was used by soviets during WW2.
Planes - there were 5 manufacturies in Germany and 3 in A-H.Pick one.A-H had stronger engines/165hp compared to 138 hp germans/
You want bomber - copy Iliia Muromiec.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Hire cossacks and other whites.They were generally good soldiers,and if you let them live safely with their families ,they would remain loyal.And engineers with workers who made in Russia those 122mmand 152 mm howitzers.Modified version was used by soviets during WW2.
Planes - there were 5 manufacturies in Germany and 3 in A-H.Pick one.A-H had stronger engines/165hp compared to 138 hp germans/
You want bomber - copy Iliia Muromiec.

Click to shrink...

That will really be more arc 2 and later, post 1920. Arc 1's conclusion is July 1918. Its also why the Interior MInistry's Gendarmes get to have a foreign legion during the Northern Expedition in 25.

"Hey Chiang you know what we like? Machine guns and artillery."

Fast forward to the second Sino Japanese War

"We like Machine guns and artillery. It breaks infantry charges real well."

 

[Imperator Pax]

August 1916
Prologue II​

All the monarchy business aside the wars of Europe and her empires had been good for business. England had been the first industrialized country, but that had been made possible by earlier changes to Europe, by changes not just access to capital but also agriculture from the old feudal model. It took the downfall of Napoleon before the continent of Europe's large nations started to industrialize properly, but they had the advantage of being able to use what the British had already figured out worked.

China though? Had been using the taoist principles of farm organization for a thousand years, and if the Manchus had been able to maintain the irrigation systems maybe that wouldn't have been so bad. The money just hadn't been there though. It wasn't as if the Old Buddha would have agreed to it anyway. She had put her foot down, despite the trouncing, and the writing on the wall and the old old woman hadn't been willing to hear of anything else.

If China had started to industrialize like Japan had done the world would have been different. China probably would be a peer to the French and Germans... who would probably still be killing each other but it wasn't to be.

He had bought up over leveraged farmland on first arrival. He'd come into more as the first hundred miles of track had started running west, but the intention hadn't been to transition from an agricultural economic system to an industrial one at that point in time. That had come by proxy, a fait accompli. It proved more effective to just modernize the farms that had been bought up because the land holders were in debt due to silver costs. Modernized farms produced higher yields, high yields in turn resulted in other effects, but it also meant his farms provided food to company barracks. Factory messes. So on.

That had started years ago now. It had grown into something beyond what had been discussed during the Qing years. They had not expected to have this kind of capital in the five years since 1911. Of course they hadn't planned to move from simply producing military arms to engaging in what had been called military fiscalism... which was a nice polite way of saying a corporate army. A corporate security force meant to stop bandits from robbing trains... had turned into an army with modern artillery and machine guns in the span of the few years of China's republican era.

Now Yuan Shikai was dead, and the country didn't know what to do about it. Yuan Shikai was dead and of course auspiciously... or not... he had died right before the traditional campaigning season of the chinese provincial strongmen. A war was a coming. Wars, plural probably. The different provinces were sure to go about settling old grievances. That would mean they needed money for all the things an army needed.

Yuan had been talking about wanting to modernize the Beiyang army after the 'second revolution' had been put down. The money hadn't been there then. The second revolution had been expensive. He had wanted new rifles, probably Gewehr 98s but he had been willing to take on whatever modern rifles he could get.

"They Beiyang is already breaking down into provincial lines," And further in some cases. The original Qing model of the army had been two full divisions to each northern province... they had never gotten that far. The original plan hadn't been limited to just the loyal northern provinces they had wanted brigades and divisions else where and that had meant compromises. There were height requirements to the Beiyang Army that had to be reduced to make it possible to recruit southern chinese, a minimum height of five four... and of course money was still an issue. "Duan Qirui can probably keep things together." Because he had the money. As long as the money held.

They couldn't wait for Bill to get back from the states... the texan should have already been on a boat steaming for Tietsin, and Allen looked at the reduced cadre membership. The original hundred had been a joint stock company. One hundred members each putting up one percent of the buy in, and of course with financial support from 'shadows', people back home without shares. That had worked as the system until 1914 had come around. Four years but while there were still a hundred members providing input on policy, the number of share holders had shrank as the company had gotten larger, and more affluent. "The British and Japanese loans have come in?"

"Yeah,"

There was a ruffling of papers beside him as JP foisted the papers from Peking towards him, and he flipped through. He hadn't had a chance to get through them this morning. He had been in Xian with the third brigade and taking... a terribly bitter tea with general Ma as the old man complained about some upstart in the south when the telegram had arrived the day before. He wondered what the word in Washington was to the terms, and was thinking back to 1912 when Wilson had thrown his temper and gotten the American side out of the banking consortium.

A tael was roughly an ounce of silver. He rested a finger upon the sum, "Jordan signed off on this? Or," was "this Grey?" There had been trouble out of the British section since Alston had come onboard, and really probably some trouble in the Foreign office before that... they had raised a great fuss over Seims Carey. Whichever of the two were the approving authority of the loan they were talking millions. "Will this stave off bankruptcy of the government?"

"It should, Duan will be able to pay salaries at least, clean up some of the mess without having to wrangle parliament for it." Which was a bit odd given his title was Prime Minister, and not succeeding to Yuan's position as President. "Duan is already talking about more Chinese going to the western front, which will mean more money." Why exactly the French and the English even had a labor shortage given the size of their colonial empires was another matter entirely. Finished goods or precursors and raw materials needed to be consumed certainly... but the french didn't trust their colonial troops to fight on the front why would they have a labor shortage for ditch diggers... but it didn't matter. Not really. "Duan being able to pay salaries means he will have directly or de facto the majority of the beiyang reporting for duty." Which made him the government of China, barring a couple of the southern most provinces, which if Duan was smart he'd leave well enough alone and not waste the money right now.
--
The number of share holders in the corporate structure had decreased as people got out, and the value of shares individually increased. Part of that would have happened without the war, the opening of the rail line that reached to Xian as a central trunk line that had been planned befor the downfall of the qing. Investments to market and sell their own goods produced locally to both locals, as well as for export before the war. They had been making steel and mining coal before 1911, and banditry had been a problem.

Not long after they had chased Bai towards Taiyuan Europe had set itself inevitably into war... and in summer 1914 the demand for everything had increased. Everything. That funded things domestically with British pounds, and two years on the war didn't look any closer to being over. Shellman had brought over a collection doctors, and Dawes had eventually along with Stockwell put together twice that in animal docs largely recruited out of the states, it was enough to staff the hospital hear, and the one in the west at Xian, which was something in a country that still had the plague. There were shortages though... they couldn't rely on doctors from the states even if America was out of the war... and Pershing had made it all too clear that there was a clear political will back east for the US to join England against Germany. The only real impediment that stopped it was inertia, and the catholic lobbies of the Irish, and to a lesser extent the Germans. Lobbies that those who wanted to go to war would be happy to marginalize and ignore if they could find a reason to. Grey was hoping the US would enter the war soon, but with Wilson campaigning on America First, and having kept the country out of the war something would have to give if the US were to join England and France.

The race in November would be close and there were letters from home not just from Pershing about the US being on the precipice of a great adventure. What that really would mean, was even fewer skilled professionals willing to come to work out on the fringes, not when they could go see gay paris, or fight the huns. More than that it would mean even scarcer access to machine tooling... and all of that just pointed to a greater and greater need to build local.

"How serious is Qirui about sending a corp to Europe?"

"I haven't the foggiest."

Yuan had probably been serious about the proposal, just for the sure grandeur of the gesture, to be able to say that his Beiyang army had gone to fight on a European battlefield... but Duan was less focused on the sweeping gestures sort. He couldn't just backpedal away from the motion entirely, it wasn't like it was the monarchy, and Qirui need the money... and he would need Parliament to approve a declaration of war, which didn't seem likely. That didn't stop Qirui from wanting to spend money on arms and ammunition... and in a world at war and too many of China's arsenals in cities with revolutionary sentiments Qirui hoped to supply the Beiyang from the same sources Yuan had used.

"He's brought the parliament back," Or the new president had insisted on it, but the effect was the same. The parliament that had been sworn in in 1913, the parliament that would have had Song Jiaoren as premier were supposed to be retaking their seats. Their numbers were reduced, and he doubted they'd have full intended powers of a parliament but China claimed to the international community it was going back to the provisional constitution. "Which might not mean-," Dawes paused as the 12:15 train whistle blew on schedule, carrying its load of steel east to ports, "Might not mean anything, he has what three divisions in the capital."

"Plus I'd guess half of Cao Kun's troops," The Beiyang "Third division, who knows who else." Allen replied, Cao represented ties to the Ma clique in the east, in addition to probably being closer to Feng. I don't know if they'll fight," not this soon. There were a couple of reasons for that, the first was of course the southern provinces most had 'cancelled' their 'declarations of independence', which struck him as a strange concept, but Yuunan continued to stubbornly proclaim its independence, "Not with Tsai O still publishing fliers."

There were other reasons to consider the Dujun of Yunnan a problem. A portion of Bai Lang's army had separated from the main body fled south after being cut off while trying to march to Nanking to assist the second revolution. They'd found patronage and support in Yunnan. Not enough to probably be enough to be a real threat but they formed a core of ex Beiyang troops in one of Tsai's brigades.

Bai's specter still existed in other ways. Parts of the Shensi Revolutionary Corp had joined with one of Yan Xishan's rivals in the province, and were still around despite Yan having driven most of the rest of the bandits out of hte province. Of course those had had to go somewhere, and while some had returned to their home province there were still problems in the west. It was banditry and irregular fighting, but it was still there.
--
Commentary: Up until 1920 most of the conflicts (of several hundred) in the warlord era occurred on an almost feudal basis. Individual local strongmen with their own troops fought provincial 'grudges' usually in the down time between harvests. [The usual high point being as one might expect July] Most of these lasted in the summer months sometimes only a few weeks. The devolution of regional authority during the qing continued to mean authority devolved at the provincial level so that within a province a warlord might control only a small portion of it, and use that as his own personal tax farm, controlling for example the salt trade in order to make money. (Or opium).

This would continue for a long time, but was overshadowed by the conflicts that developed of the cliques, Anhui Zhili war, Fengtien north south conflicts, and so on where you on paper had hundreds of thousands of troops involved in the twenties usually over the same coastal provinces and cities. Those conflicts would get much of the attention, but there continued to be strictly local ones with small time warlords fighting without any concern for who was in Peking, or later Nanking.

 

[ATP]

I read,that both rifles and M before WW1 ws costly in production,becouse of too many parts.During WW1 that changed.Your SI could do the same now for whatever rifles and HLG he is making.Or LMG - madsen was arleady made.

 

[Imperator Pax]

I read,that both rifles and M before WW1 ws costly in production,becouse of too many parts.During WW1 that changed.Your SI could do the same now for whatever rifles and HLG he is making.Or LMG - madsen was arleady made.

Click to shrink...

Pre world war one the cost of a full power rifle semi automatic was a hundred to several hundred dollars (US) involved lots of complex machining, weird parts (the original Lewis guns used clockwork springs), fast forward to US entry to world war 1 a garand had a typical price point around 75 to 85 dollars by 1945 once everyone was tooled up the Garand was the same price numerically to a pre ww1 nice Model 8 thirty bucks for a semi automatic gas operated mass produced 30-06 and there was very little new in the Garand that didn't exist at the end of ww1

It was a gas piston gun, en bloc clip, purely conventional stock. Mechanically it was very similar to the Chauchat (though that was a magazine gun, not a packet loader) which was very similar to even earlier designs, but the improvements in simplification and machine availability made all the difference in the world price wise

 

[Imperator Pax]

August 1916
Prologue III​

The Germans were bombing London with their Zeppelins.... presumably they were still doing it, though the paper recounted events from last week. Airpower was unlikely he thought to determine the course of the war in Europe, it was still maturing... and there was already an immense shortage in the necessary wood to make airframes as it was. It was however clear that in spite of that the Zeppelin was not the future. Six years after the flight at Kitty Hawk at one of Yamagata's festivities one of the navy boys had gotten enough whisky in to boast that his imperial majesty would one day fly from ships... not that Japan wasn't the only one. The Navy and the Army, under the signal corps at the time, back home had been working towards it... and of course Yuan had used the handful of French planes to harass and observe the southern rebels by dropping sticks of dynamite during the Xinhai revolt, and again during the second revolution.

Yuan's solution had been purely ad hoc. In Europe though whole squadrons were being stood up and consuming the wood in great quantities that Europe was having trouble already sourcing spruce, and that meant France and England were eager for any lumber that could come out of the pacific northwest, and if they couldn't get that then they and the rest of the Entente... like Australia who had just opened their first flying academy were buying whatever else they could get.

That meant that it was an expense to bid on that was unpalatable in 1916 especially for Duan Qirui... the new Premier wanted his air force to still fly of course but it was too expensive to buy new planes right now. Not that Qirui didn't have entirely practical interest in air planes, far more so than his predecessor, he wanted them to spot for his artillery, and to observe and report on what the enemy were doing. Qirui was looking at the next fight with the south, that much was clear even when his exotic list was looking at buying three or 'perhaps four' aircraft whenever funds became available.

It seemed unlikely he'd be able to buy anymore French G2s. John Allen wasn't sure the French Caudron firm were even still making that model given the Germans squatting in the French industrial heartland. With the Germans at War with the Brits, there was no way for German goods, even if they had been available to reach markets in China that normally consumed them. That wasn't to say the war was bad for the economy. Far from it, Allen had expected in 1913 with the free trade and dropping of tarrifs by wilson that they'd see tidy profits selling goods into the states certainly the US was larger trade partner... but the war had done something Allen hadn't expected it to. The British needed goods, and that meant being able to sell goods into India without having to contend with Raj's prohibitive tariffs for once. A year and a change earlier they'd inked deals with the British, and Japan to sell steel in order to help meet demand for the insatiable war machine... and that was why the shares of the company were no longer divided between a hundred men.

It was why Seims Carey though had been such a headache as well. Realistically, Reinsch's involvement in the schme aside, that would have involved a great deal of money... and probably with Reinsch having stirred the French and the Russians up they'd still make money. Yuan Shikai had well understood that the movement of armies depended on the logistical backbone that the railways provided. To mix biological metaphors it was the circulatory system to move supplies and troops to combat infection.

As much though as Yuan Shikai had been a friend, Duan's ascent to leadership of the Republic wasn't without its benefits either. Yuan had dreamed of a grand return, a resurrection of the social Confucian halcyon days of old extolling the standards of gentlemen scholars like the Ban family of the Han dynasty... and those call backs to the ancient regime had to also go hand in hand with adopting modernism, because Yuan Shikai had been committed to modernizing the country at least from an economic and military perspective. He wanted to be like Germany, to whom he saw that the Japanese had based themselves off of.

... and to an extent Yuan had been successful in in insuring that Duan's new government would not be burdened by having hundreds of thousands of southerners in the army. The beiyang military had been loyal to Yuan, and in theory so long as Duan could keep paying them and avoid quarrelling with the other generals they'd stay with him. Even if they did split, the division were more likely to strike off on their own, and that meant that Duan was prepared and able to use them to keep the bandits in the northern provinces mostly under control through the application of the army.

So as September approached and the currents of dissent and resentment in the provinces towards the old government ebbed a new one began to try and put the country together. After all the various provinces in the south had all sort of kind of agreed in principle that htey didn't want Yuan to be emperor, but now that Yuan had passed away the question was of what then. Duan was definitely looking south though.

"Can he do it?"

"If he can't, its got a good chance of turning into 1911." It would be over the same province even. Hunan, and Szechwan, had both rescinded their declarations of independence after military defeats but they had also had newpapers circulating talking about drafting constitutions for the provinces and so both before and after. "But Tsai O is the only army left in the field and he won't leave Yuunan." and Yuunan was still clinging to its declaration of independence because Tsai knew Duan couldn't march the army that far south and fight so far from Peking.

Intercepted telegraphs demonstrated that Tsai didn't trust Duan, but he also didn't trust Sun since the latter was getting money from the Japanese... but the question was, "Are we sure?" Allen questioned, Tsai claimed to be governor of Szechwan, but it wsa unknown how much he was actually willing to act on that, "Does he really mean to keep Yunan independent?" Not that the latter was a great issue. "What does he want?"

"We don't know." Dawes replied, then spared a glance to Griswold. "He could be sick or something."

"You think so?"

"He visited a hospital when he was in Japan, I think its consumption, but I haven't been able to prove it. Whatever it is he's using opium to treat it." That suggested if nothing else whatever it was it was severe if the Japanese were issuing a prescription for Opium to treat whatever it was. "Either way Tsai was insistent he return to Yunnan to oppose Yuan, now that Yuan's gone he might return for treatment, which means he might not be in charge."

That was on the national scene though. Duan's movement into Hunan still moving northern power too far south to be sustainable. The prospect of Yunnan's dujun dying wasn't likely to help stability in the south any.
--
The prospect of things falling apart had been endured ... well even before the qing. Indeed the final fall of the qing had been a surprise. Yuan in his lead up to his enthronement had proffered that it was because the Manchu were a much degraded foreign dynasty. Republic was just a grand work brought from overseas, but really it had been the Manchu finally being too weak to manage central control... but that could have just been Yuan trying to justify his part in forcing the abdication of the last, the infant, emperor.

Unlike in Xian, though Peking had not seen any mass lynching or destruction of the Manchu quarter... and he still wasn't quite sure what had touched that off in 1911.The RPF of five years earlier had been an emergency, an ad hoc expansion of simple railway security... after all their authority extended fifty miles on either side of the tract you needed some body to keep order. The modern brigades were larger professional forces but a direct response to the tide of deserters that had swelled Bai Lang's horde, and threats like that. Szechwuan was crawling with bandits, and Hunan wasn't much better due to its proximity, and if the Beiyang was serious about going in the bandits would slosh out like from a bail.

They might stay south of the yangtze... they might not.

There was a rippling volley from the firing line of the range. "I am not comfortable reducing the training time." He told Griswold. The men were not supposed to be volleying their shots, but as was a tendency at the firing line the man to the side of you shooting tended to result in you shooting.

"Not what I'm here for actually." Griswold doffed his hat and sat down, "I'm certainly not going to say we should reduce the time at all. Not what I'm here though for," He repeated, and Allen quirked, "I need you to go to Tiestin and talk to some people."

That wasn't good, "Go on." He muttered watching the young graybacks shuffle to the line as they rotated.

"Bill has been told," Bill had been told that was a deflection to distract from the fact Griswold had probably told the Texan where to look, "That British still have the German Garison at Shangtung's equipment."

"That's not news." He replied.

"They didn't spike the guns."

"Ah," And Griswold wanted them, of course, but, "And the British don't want to give them to Duan Qirui for what reason?"

"The general doesn't want to... China is a non belligerent country he thinks it would be-"

"dishonorable?"

A shrug, and a maybe, "But the General also knows we're doing business on behalf of the Foreign Office, and the Munitions, and while he outranks Colonel Matheson, Matheson has high friends, and the general's brother is an anglican missionary who thinks your a stand up fellow keeping the hordes at bay sort," Allen snorted, "the Foreign Office can convince the treasury that trading us the supplies and ammunition saves his majesty six pense and shillings in guard duty and space in exchange for bread, beer, and beef for the troops." The General's troops ate well, and always had even before he had come on scene the china station was a nice posting.

"And how much of this have you already worked out?"

"Jordan is returning to London soon."

"For vacation." Though... why anyone would go to London to vacation escaped John Allen... Paris made sense... when there wasn't a war on, but London felt like it was a giant bank before it was anything else. "He'll be coming back?"

"Yes, sure, but the scrapping in the office, or what for Englishmen passes for that in an office could derail the whole mess. Ply him with some brandy and about the bandit situation in Shansi, tell em about Bai Lang's folks running south, and get a letter. Once its done it won't matter a'tall. Alston won't be able to do a damned thing about it."

Allen wasn't quite sure about the new guy. Alston had... proven hard to read, but he almost certainly wanted Jordan's job, and the rumor was originally that he had been slated for it. "Hickling thinks he will be an issue to it."

"General Hickling doesn't have a grasp on the man, other than he's constantly cabling London." That seemed an exaggeration, but it was well known Alston had come to China expecting a much grander post than just replacing MacKay.

"I was going to Peking, anway" Bill was still up at the hotel there anyway, and there were other concerns, "Tiestin is going to be potential issue bsides the Far Eastern Department gossiping like hens."

The consensus was that they needed to expand. There was still an argument over whether or not brigades had to give way to division structures and if so who should command divisions while the world in the field was handled. "Xian is a big city, getting it electrified is a big project." A brigade was a fine size for a town in zhili and second brigade out of Zhengzhou was actually split up to its regiments along the rail line... but third while well equipped felt small for the city it was responsible for especially with the disputes between different regional powers who insisted on shooting at one another.

--
Commentary: there is one more part to the prologue as we delve into among other things the Bang style action driven rifle of General Liu and the matter of arms, and we'll talk about arms in a moment.

Yamamoto Eusuke came from a naval family and its probably apocryphal that he got into a discussion at a Christmas or new years party in 1909/10 and enthusiastically declared that Japan would fight with metal ships in the sky (I've also heard metal birds but that is almost certainly a later translation convention), but he was convincing enough to the Diet, and politically connected enough (he came from and established samurai family, and this was alos one of the few things the army and navy both agreed on) for the diet to approve funding of a project study on balloons and the military application there of... which of course the army and navy both immediately took the money and went looking at fixed wing aircraft (planes) because of course they did. (but surely Yamamoto's response to being asked would have surely been: "Its for the emperor its fine", which I'm sure the liberal party who was in power at the time (this was right around the Taisho crisis) would have been so thrilled by.)

Tsai O (or Cai E) did in fact die of tuberculosis, he was not so far as it is known an opium addict but opium was a traditional treatment for tuberculosis and Tsai O made several trips to Japan for medical treatment, including his ultimate final trip where he passed away in 1916 several months after Yuan Shikai. So a few months after this chapter's events... and his death coupled with existing instability in Szechuan and Duan Qirui's own actions in Hunan as well as other factors made 1917 a very awkward year for the republic. Szechuan would be a hot bed of bandit activity for decades

 

[Imperator Pax]

August 1916
Prologue IV​

Yuan Shikai had had the exact opposite reaction to the RPF, or rather what the RPF had become, than some of the southern newspapers. Of course if Allen honest those same southern newspapers only disliked it because of the hand they had played in Bai Lang's death. Yuan Shikai readily admitted that provinces still needed provincial militaries, even if he was convinced by political necessity to make it difficult for them to exist due to distrusting the southern provincial leadership... but the brigades of foreign trained modern soldiers guarding the big western line?

Yuan Shikai had been happy with that. It meant he didn't need to tie down Beiyang troops hunting bandits outwest, and the line to Xian made it easier to collect tax money in the western provinces. The Ma Clique simply brought their taxes to Xian from Kansu and Xinjiang it got put on a train, and thus it passed through far far fewer intermediaries.

It still wasn't a great deal in tax revenue, but that wasn't the point. Yuan pointed to the railway and said progress, and said it reduced corruption and that was good for the country. He had used that argument to try and press for Seims Carey's audacious building plan.

The plan that had elicited such an outrageous petulant tantrum from the French and Russian concessions despite their ongoing war. Seims Carey had been opened to discussion and planning in 1914 before the war. Two years. Two years and who knew how many Europeans dead on European soil, and millions more to die in all likelihood ...

But at the same time he could understand why. The French were not the English. Even though they were allies, France would never be the Empire that the British were. French was no longer the language of diplomacy, and English had superseded it as the language of trade as well. Edward Gray was an old fool to think England needed France... but that didn't make the Republic weak they had lasted this long against the huns... which was more than Allen had expected to be honest. Of course the Russians had thrown who knew how many men into eastern Prussia on a fool's quixotic charge to buy Paris time... but the Russians had another rival of their own, to their east.

Japan, who was also a British ally.

John Allen tossed the newspaper aside. The man across from him was older, but age was not what made the difference between them. John Allen Forrest was not a small man, tall even by western standards and with his hair freshly trimmed he wore chinese sleeved silk suits cut by a tailor who had been in the trade longer than John Allen was alive. He'd doffed the jacket, which ordinarily would have covered the asiatic buffalo hide holsters for the ivory handled browning automatics he wore. The holsters were new, a gift made to avoid wasting the hide of a fine old bull. The medallions inset in the ivory grips bore not colt's rampant stallion but the castles of the US Army engineer corp. Oak leaf clusters engraved the above the safeties.

A testament to what had been a life time ago.

Paul, the older man, was dressed more like he'd be going to lecture. The president had snatched him him from some university in the midwest and he dressed like it. Most of the time. His suits were broader, fitted but cut to sack suit styles popular with those emulated England. Reinsch didn't carry a gun, but in the last two years had become inured to the 45s. This was the ambassador of the United States and minister plenipotentiary and all the rest of so on and so forth to the Republic of China. "Will you actually build a rail to Lhasa?"

"Probably, eventually." He was hardly going to admit that Yuan had wanted one out that way. "I don't want trouble or to here anything about Simla Paul. I build a line out that way its because the locals are alright with me building one to Xian."

"But you could." Ability yes. "Talk them into it?"

"Tibet is a complicated mess of tribes." Some of whom had fought against Bai Lang's western most reavers in 1914, which made them positively disposed to him. "IF," He stressed the word, "If we build anything out west its because old Ma is alright with it."

"Aren't there a couple of Old Mas."

Allen shrugged, "There are, but thats also part of the reason Cao kun has the rail billet."

"That's how it will get through government. Cao Kun will handle the paper work for it." He seemed a bit displeased about not going through 'official channels', "Ma Anliang, what about Mr Yang?"

The Old Mas had most of the old Hui Braves.... barring the ones saddled up north who had only just recently, before Yuan's death, finally getting around to replacing their black uniforms for the gray ones. "Yang knows Cao Kun will approve it, so Peking approves it. He doesn't mind so long as its in writing."

"Because you were Yuan Shikai's friend."

Well that and rifles and other military accoutrements, nothing heavy, to the Ma Army, certainly didn't hurt. "We have an understanding Paul. He pays his taxes to Peking, I make sure that it gets ferried to Peking."

"You mean that it doesn't end up in the capital with funds missing."

"That's what I said." He shook his head, and the question turned to what he could get out of such a horse trading scheme, "Look what I get out of it is that no one will attack my trains. A bandit attacks my trains," He gestured to the map, "He has to run pretty damned far to get clear of it."

"The brigade in Xian,"

"And the Ma have whole divisions of men, do you have any idea what Ma Fuxing," One of the other Old Man Mas, "does to railway thieves," Well according to rumor most thieves, "The ones he catches? Yeah, well its classical." was the word he settled on. He had almost said biblical.
--
He eyed the long case with curiosity as William McCulloch stepped to one side to let Reinsch depart. Bill was one of only a few people that made Allen look normal sized. The Texan glanced at the closing dark stained wooden door, and pushed it with his foot to make sure it was good and closed. "Hell of wind that hit back home, I just missed that storm you know."

"How is your daddy Bill?"

"The old man is fine. The colonel is still sporting," The Texan shrugged because no one who knew the colonel would have been surprised. Colonel McCulloch was eighty years old, "Oil is doing good." He paused, "The wells have been on about just a year now."

Allen glanced at the case at a hint, but Bill ignored.

The texan made a pointed show of putting it down and then turning around to look at the door that Reinsch had left through tsked and shook his head, "I tell you what Al, we get more belly aching from preachers, god I don't even know."

"The school?"

"You know it." The Texan declared wandering around to the wet bar and fishing through the bottles finally finding what he was looking for. A glass slid down the mahogany filled with a caramel colored whisky, "Belly aching chicken shits." Bill grunted draining the glass.

"How do you think I feel, I need doctors and chemists." He shook his head and picked up the glass that had been slid over to him, "Hell I need surgeons." He sipped. They needed veterinarians. They needed a lot of damn specialists. Teaching the bible didn't get you anywhere the kids needed to learn math. They needed to learn English just so they could use it to learn other sciences. It was industry that built a country up. "What was the problem?"

The Texan deflected from the question and then gestured to the case. "Problem, no problem." He gestured to the leather shooting case he'd brought along, a little more insistently so Allen walked over as Bill gave his monologue, "Made with Pratt and Whitney tooling," He unzipped the case, "Liu thinks he can get Hanyeng that he can make 'em." Allen felt his eyebrow raise in skeptical surprise. Quality control was terrible there, in no small part because Liu was never around to run the shop, it was why all of their stuff was made in a factory of their own in Xibaibu. He stared at the rifle. It was semi automatic, like his model eight or the M1907 that they had bought up before the war had gotten underway. "Yeah Its in the 8 mil Mauser, which we got plenty of that. Mild enough that Liu can shoot it from a horse, that was a sight I tell you."

That was an understatement. Their little army was majority equipped with German rifles. "This is the thing he's been working on for two years?"

"Going on, yeah." Allen gave a low whistle as he took the rifle, and Bill continued to talk. "Soren Bang did something like this, I remember a 6.5 Krag. We have a couple of the Danish Madsen's too, If I remember."

He unscrewed the gas system at the front "Yeah, this looks like a Steyr's rifle of 1909," He rescrewed it all back down. "How many has he made?"

"Twenty twenty five maybe." Bill took the rifle back, "All built back in Connecticut though, I got to take this back to him."

Of course, but, "See if you can rustle Cole up." Pretty much the entire cadre were proficient at least with a rifle. There was a difference between simple proficiency and expertise. Cole was one of the few people who could match Allen's skill with a rifle.

Bill looked at the rifle, and sighed a little with regret. "Cole ain't goin' like it. He's going to argue that sure in theory its nice you can swap it to being a bolt action, but he's going to argue that that shouldn't be necessary, and complicates the gun." Which was true Sig had produced a rifle for Mexico that had done that sort of thing, being able to function as either a semi automatic or bolt action... and Cole had been unhappy with it. Even though with proper training those had worked fine.

"He might." Allen replied it was certainly possible. "He might complain, but he certainly will complain if he doesn't get to see it sooner rather than later. Actually take it to him, and to Griswold."

"What about Phillips?"

Allen paused, "Yeah, that'd be a good idea, if I knew when he was getting back." He shrugged, "Don't get me wrong I'm sure Phillips will have plenty of feedback but I've yet to hear from him. Cole will be faster to get a report."

"I promised Andy," His nickname for the dapper general, "that you'd shoot it. Peking is supposed to test it. Two more are going to the Peking Arsenal."

"He has been told Yuan is dead right?"

"He knows."

Allen looked at the rifle's fine machining cuts in the receiver. "Qirui will never go for it," He muttered quietly in disappointment, "We need more of,"

Bill blinked, "He's going to bring tooling back, Yuan might be dead but he gave Liu the money for the machine tooling, and its paid for." Which was surprising.

"We need more machinists, and engineers I meant. More semi automatic rifles yes, I wouldn't turn them down, but I'd rather have more men who can make the guns than the guns. The Mauser is fine, and that is exactly what Duan is going to say to justify not spending the money." Because of course the money wasn't there for the Republic of China to spend, "This is a specialists weapon corporals or gunnery sergeants more like."

--
Commentary: ANd that is the conclusion of the prologue which sets up for the autumn of 1916 and conflicts in central China, Shansi and Shensi, as well as loosely the other more western bandit wars in Szechwan that broke out after Tsai O's death from his succumbing to tuberculosis So chapter 1 will start in September of 1916

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1916​

It was neither really humid nor particularly dry. The rain was keeping the dust manageable. Everyone was focused on the coast... and that was fine. But contrary to the thousand odd papers that were read from Canton to Peking and further north even the posturing between the north and south, wasn't the only thing going on. The Beiyang were disorganized without Yuan, even if plenty of them had been less than thrilled with his intention to become emperor.

Those big scope political issues might have made headlines, but there were other issues. Provincial issues that would never make anything more than the local papers if they were lucky. They didn't need any comparisons to the East India Company, and having the brigade shoot it out with a munch of bandits had been one thing when Yuan had been alive, but might prove to be something wholly else now that he was gone.

It was unlikely though that this would make the papers... this was minor enough he probably should have been leaving it to junior officers... but as war was politics' continuation there were bigger things at stack. Shensi, and Shansi shared a land border but the main rail line, that trunk ran through Honan. That meant you had situations like this., where in the down time of the reasons brigands would jump the border and go try and blunder the neighboring province. They'd still things, abduct folks for ransom, so on and so forth, and just generally make a nuisance of themselves. They hadn't tried to rob the railway, but they had tried to steal from one of the coal mines.

John Allen was inclined to take that personally.

They needed to nip this in the bud, now. Failing to do so would mean that come winter there would brigand problems spilling across the border and feuding over other older grievances. It was probably unavoidable to dodge being entangled, but this issue could be dealt with now. Six companies organized as two battalions were converged from the rail hub at Zhengzhou. Not that they were consolidated as a force, but the railway had let him run them along the rail. They were in effect casting a net. The companies eventually delineated in 13 man squads, which while larger than their British equivalent didn't change the fact that the battalions with only three apiece were smaller over all to the British organization.

He was hoping to keep this confined to a local area, where each of the company commanders could establish their CPs, run field lines for phones to the main telegraphs and report back. The theory was that that would allow them to close the encirclement, and then as they had originally planned to do against Sow Gorge in 1913 to push the artillery forward and drop significant volumes of shell into the enemy position.

Allen recognized from the way the weather was that might actually be feasible. The ground was dry, and solid. They could actually offload the guns from rail and maneuver the batteries overland and set them up, but they needed to identify the enemy first, and fix them in place. It would be the first time the red legs had fired their guns in anger since 1914 as the last of Bai Lang's troops had been driven into the hinterlands.

"The machine guns are set up," The old potato diggers were due to be replaced, he considered selling them off, the old Colts had done their job when they'd been knew, but Lewis's guns were something that could be made now. "Are the colts distributed?"

"Yes sir."

They had pushed two to each company Headquarters, to cover each expected company's defensive frontage of about three hundred meters. Of course that was due to other concerns. Each company could have covered twice that if they tried but he wanted the volunteers focused on narrower tasks. "Chang," The man's face bobbed taking a graven expression, "What exactly are our chaplains doing?"

The major, because that was the rank that Chang held, looked cross eyed at the question. "I do not know sir."

It wasn't a trick question. It wasn't intended to trip the man up. "Neither do I, find out." He considered telling Chang what he had in mind, but the buddhist chaplains.... which was predominantly what they were... might have been doing something useful and if they were he didn't necessarily want Chang snatching them from it. The man snapped a parade worth salute turned sharply and marched like a prussian out of the of train office, which towered over the village headman's house that was nearby.

John Allen glanced at the lieutenant operating the telephone, "Anything from Zhengzhou?"

"No sir."

Allen nodded and moved his ruler along the map tracing the lines he'd already made in it with his pencil, and the distances from everything. He clucked his tongue, "Ring them and ask for a report. Then have someone from the office check the telegraph office and find out how busy they've been." This was good campaigning weather... and he couldn't have been the only one to notice that.
--
Fox Platoon was on their far left forming a distant mass of dark troops in the fading daylight that made their stone gray uniforms look nearly black. Each Company had four platoons under it. Each of those had four rifle squads. Thus roughly each battalion massed six hundred rifles to direct at an enemy.

"Chang," He turned to the Battalion's commanding officer, "Are those firecrackers?"

"Yes sir."

Allen shook his head, "Its your decision major." He returned his attention to the farmland sprawled out from his vantage point even as Chang rushed to commit to the attack. It wasn't just firecrackers of course, there were other piles of white smoke from black powder rifles, but the firecrackers were a common tactic used to make noise and distract but also to save ammunition. Conserving ammunition wasn't his concern.

Chang ordered the lieutenant manning the field telephone to command Fox to use their machine guns to cover an advance to contact with the enemy. That would remove Fox's platoons from the company headquarters and mean having to send runners, but Chang had to know that. If he didn't that would be a conversation for after.

Black powder in the hands of a capable rifleman could drop an enemy officer at more than a kilometer, but smokeless powder was an entirely different fuel. So much so that when it had arrived the Europeans had expected massed infantry engagements to volley at one another from twice that... and then of course found that wasn't quite true in practice... and then the British had been surprised to find any man who let a Boer get within half a kilometer was volunteering for his own funeral. All it mattered though was practice, and nurturing that skill.

Ammunition expenditure wasn't a concern here. The men having the chance to actually test themselves against someone who was shooting back would provide far more insight than any cost for ammunition, and be more valuable than any amount of ammunition expended on a rifle course of fire at a gunnery field in camp.

Within about fifteen minutes he heard the first delineations of individual half platoons, two squads, beginning to open fire. There was no indicator of white smoke from Fox's positions. There was still too much light that he couldn't really make out muzzle flashes at this distance, but he could hear the mausers when the potato diggers slackened.

Chang had returned to the map table. "Ask the question." Allen remarked.

"Why are we here?"

"In what sense?"

"They are bandits." That was true. "Not even particularly a large group. The whole gang is less than two hundred men if we're told right," Even if they did claim to be affiliated with a larger provincial brotherhood... or had claimed such to threaten the county magistrate in any event... the jury was still out if they were telling the truth. He had been hoping it was true, that they could clear the whole nest actually, "But they are so few, hardly worth the time."

"Of course its worth the time Major. Soldiering is a perishable skill," Set of skills, "We could have done this one battalion," Or less probably given the bandits real numbers, "And some people will say that this is really just police work." And they kind of need police... if Bill carried on about the Texas rangers much longer he'd probably get his way, "But a unit needs to know how to move in the field. Needs to be able to march, and needs to be prepared to entrench itself after a march even in the dark." Something that the Russians fighting the Japanese in 1904 had been unwilling to. This command could not be permitted to fall into that... not with how the fighting in Europe was reiterating the lessons of the Russians fight with Japan.

They were south of the yellow river. The bandits had crossed it to raid into Shansi as in the west the course of the river served as a natural boundary to the province. They were fighting in the bandits home territory, their home counties. The enemy theoretically have used their superior knowledge of the local terrain to be inventive, just because they hadn't didn't mean it was impossible.

Allen glanced to him, and then in a lower tone where the junior officers wouldn't here, "The Japanese victory against the Russians hinged on two factors. On the Japanese part the decade of training day in and day out, and on the Russian side, Russian complacency and unpreparedness. The Russians were confident that they could win any fight, and any fight that was going to happen would be one they started, and fought on their terms."

... which of course... could also apply to the Qing courts thinking, but he didn't come out and say that.

Chang returned to glance at the map, and the disbursement of the two battalions, "Then are we not lacking in troops?"

Allen considered the conversation regarding Tsai O's troop numbers with Bill two weeks earlier, that leader of the still proudly proclaiming to be independent province of Yuunan, who had significant influence in Szechwan might have as many as fifty thousand troops some of whom were veterans of the forces who had fought under Bai Lang's banner but had been cut off and forced south in 1913 during the failed 'second revolution. "You would be correct." The brigade numbered more troops than Black Jack was using to chase Pancho all over Mexico, but it wasn't enough. "That has already been recognized, but that will be something we will address in the next fiscal year as we take the time to train new recruits."

Their entire conversation was in English. The telephone operators were using English. The written orders and documents were in English. These were western style infantry along anglo american lines of drill, with facets of the German strategic thought. This was the first time Chang had been commanding his battalion in the field instead of just acting as a staff officer or directing from an office filing away reports.

--
Notes: this gets us out of the prologue, but to underscore a number of the early chapters were written with no assumptions made that I'd posted White Wolf Rebellion or that that material had been detailed. in Short there wouldn't be any need to explicitly have read the prequel, which is what it was, because this is based off the cyoa and is the original story.

 

[ATP]

Good building chapters.About 1905 war - i read in memories of polish aristocrat -/Hipolit Korwin-Milewski - unfortunatelly,you need polish to read it - 70 lat wspomnień'/ - war started,becouse some rich russian dude wonted rights to forest in Manchuria.And tsar followed,becouse nobody thought that some yellow dudes could fight them.

He also wrote about 1914 russian army behaviour - they could take East Prussia and more,but strong faction of pro-german generals prevented that.And,according to him,when russian fought A-H seriously,fighting against germans was not for real - they do not wonted really defeat them.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Good building chapters.About 1905 war - i read in memories of polish aristocrat -/Hipolit Korwin-Milewski - unfortunatelly,you need polish to read it - 70 lat wspomnień'/ - war started,becouse some rich russian dude wonted rights to forest in Manchuria.And tsar followed,becouse nobody thought that some yellow dudes could fight them.

He also wrote about 1914 russian army behaviour - they could take East Prussia and more,but strong faction of pro-german generals prevented that.And,according to him,when russian fought A-H seriously,fighting against germans was not for real - they do not wonted really defeat them.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, like in the Russian general staff no one was willing to disagree with the Tsar that any war would occur in Asia except unless the Tsar wanted to start one... which is never a good sign. Like of the commanders in the Far East only one of them I know actually was familiar with the Japanese army and took them seriously, and everyone dismissed his ideas, including his subordinates who outright ignored orders to do things like prepare defenses, or post watches or basically normal basic army stuff. The navy while unwilling to sortie was a little off, as they had the sense to dismount ship guns to reinforce their land base defenses offloading of those guns helped but not enough, Japanese 'human bullet' wave attacks were very costly, and the Japanese coordination with artillery was nonexistent at times but the Japanese willingness to mount attacks and to take prepatory measures and engage in maneuver and then fortify their position helped, but Pershing wrote that neither side really covered themselves in glory and that both sides had made mistakes, which was something that happened in 'real war'.

and with the general staff being an officer in the Russian army required you to be a noble, if you weren't it was hard to get promoted and you werne't considerd politically reliable, a lot of the nobility were ethnic (northern) germans who were not comfortable with the idea of fighting Prussia were as, as you you highlight, punching Austria in the face was not something they had a problem with... and this probably contributed to low Russian morale among the troops were if your officers aren't thrilled to be doing something the enlisted men are going to be wondering 'why the fuck are we even here'

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1916​

He would need to return to a major city if not actually Tietsin or Peking soon. There was just too much to do regarding the insatiable appetites for men, material and money caused by the war that seemed as if it was going to go on forever.

The village, town, magistrate wasn't happy with the situation. Shan's, commanding 2nd​ Battalion, driver laid angrily on the horn and the ugly iron wagon lurched forward menacingly. The Major riding steerage in the back shouted something over the fuss and hopped off the rear of the Ford with part of his headquarters company.

Shan Chen, or James anglicized, was an old hand having been a part of the Railway Protection Force, and was actually by age older than Allen, being somewhere approaching, or at least nearer to forty than thirty. The Chinese major did not look happy, which was not a good indicator for the magistrate. Shan was shorter than Allen, not really a surprise, and had come from a minor noble family in Zhili who had expected him to take a job with some secretariat or other after writing the eight legged essay, which the major had never successfully mastered before the boxer rebellion had broken out.

Seemed so long ago now, and just because they'd been out here a couple of weeks.

The major probably hadn't had enough troops for the search, and that had meant it had taken longer but from the haranguing that could be made out he must have found the bandits stash. John Allen swung his boots off the railing of the train station, and stood up from the wrought iron bench under the awning. He pulled the sleeve of his shirt back to look at the wrist watch reading not quite a quarter to one, and then pulled the grey sleeve back down.

It was a matter of money. Allen would be willing to bet on that. The institutions, like any, needed funding. Magistrates were supposed to have a certain amount of staff paid for by the government of course, but not enough to actually fully do their job apparently... evne when the provincial or national government actually had the funds to pay for magistrate's staff... and there was no telling when last that had been. So these folks probably didn't see the harm in robbing someone the next province over or ransoming someone else.

Well, except in this case Shan had his Mauser automatic pointed at the magistrate's forehead and the safety off. If the major had intended to shoot the magistrate it would have already happened, given the fact his aide kept glancing to the man in the Ford' turret manning the Maxim up there, Shan was wanting the magistrate to give him an excuse. That left Allen with the quandary of did he tell Shan to put it away, or wait for it to happen on its own. Part of what shaped his decision ultimately was that the hammer on the mauser was down.

"You are a thief, a bandit." Shan hissed.

The magistrate protested this, though not terribly convincingly... which admittedly it was hard to be convincing facing down the barrel for some people even when they were innocent. Some people always looked guilty.

Shan hissed invectives at the man, and his lineage, but didn't take a step forward. No from one of the other Fords a couple of cases were unlimbered and brought out. There was tobacco from one of the farms, which admittedly the cases could have been lawfully acquired. There was nothing to say that they had been purloined.

The magistrate protested that he had gotten that from a local trader... which was probably even on the letter true. Maybe he had gotten the tobacco from a trader. The taels of silver were a bit too much for a county magistrate in a poor community to have. Not impossible but in the sum of money but extremely unlikely that all the coins would have come from mints based in other provinces. A bit more damning, but the real noose was the last box, and the crest and English writing on it.

"Let Shan do it," He muttered stopping the 1st​ battalion major before he stamped up to stand beside second's, as Shan pointed to the markings that established the strongbox's provenance... and declared its contents to be dynamite. The steel case was still securely locked so John Allen had no idea whether or not they had known what had been stolen or if they just assumed that the heavy box was valuable. It was of course, but not easily spent.

... and if Shan was particularly happy to embarrass the magistrate who had passed the old examination system well... that was alright.
--
Allen pushed the finished bowl of lamb soup aside having drained the last of the broth. "We don't have the men for this, and Bill is right that we need some sort of actual police to investigate this sort of thing."

As he would later put into writing, Yuan Shikai's death ultimately had little to bear on the economic transitions effecting China. Even the great war ravaging Europe had only a partial impact. There were people in Honan involved in overseas trade, but there were plenty of others whose traditional livelihoods had been slowly being rubbed out and had been since the end of the 18th​ century as the Qing had dropped further behind the English speaking world in productivity... and that had only exacerbated with the debut of the French and Germans as Industrial nations in the decades after Boney had been thrown down.

Japan while a British ally was not committed to sending millions of troops to French fields to die and thus now must have seemed excellent for pushing the Russians out of the north entirely. If only it were just that. The war though would have to end eventually.

"We will be recruiting new troops in the spring though," Shan declared, "The rail lines to the west will continue to be built."

The Qing railway proposal, and since Yuan had been involved in getting it written, and agreed to as it had continued under him, were like most of those written at the end of the 1800s and the years before their deal had been inked. They'd build, operate, and maintain the rails. They would have the rights to land eminently fifty miles on either side, those same rights entailed standing up what had been the RPF. Siems Carey would have been carried out under a different scheme but it would have meant an influx of political capital to the coffers... and at the time no one had though that a war would have been around the corner and that that would bring in its own windfall.

"1917 will be quite a busy year." He agreed, he could feel that already, "The arsenal has finished up the last of the new production orders." The steel mills would still be feeding off to Japan, and British needs closer to home, which would mean money, and so to would the shipping of foodstuffs to both. "Even without those rifles, exports will increase."

"The mortars."

Simple thing really, simpler and better than the german equivalent but also newer. Stoke's three inch in what was so typical of entrenchment from the old guard had depended on who one knew. "Lloyd George," The minister of munitions, "feels it would be remiss if the Australians and New Zealanders were not armed and trained to the same standard as heartland troops."

"Will we be using it?"

"One more change due in in 1917. Phillip says that they're light artillery and that makes them his bailiwick," Of course Phillip also wanted to set them up in groups of five in the back of a truck and fire them as unit, which was getting a bit ahead of themselves, "depending on the ammunition we may press them down to company level once inventory is built up." That would depend on recruitment in the spring, and then training though, they were simply spread too thin otherwise.


The dining car of the train had electrical lighting. Coal was available. The men who had stolen the dynamite strong box from the mine had probably just assumed well protected meant valuable, but hadn't gotten around to forcing the box. They would have been disappointed... or more dangerous as after they had. The coal fired power plants with their turbines and drivers though had a regular appetite for coal and that meant it was easier to employ coal men all year around. The power plant fed the electricity to the factories, and the mills.

On this matter, Shan had more insight than the younger of the two chinese Majors. Shan Chen had been apart of the railway division dealing with the on loading offloading, rolling stock management, and the whole business of moving goods from production sites, to warehouses, to distribution points even before he'd volunteered for a uniform and a gun. Shan understood those things, had been with the outfit longer, and that was why he'd been leading second battalion here while he had hung around with the first.

He reached down to the table leg and lifted the files up, not that the cadre had finalized the plan in question, but the writing was on the wall... and it was more likely that if not this plan, then one larger expansion a run up would follow not smaller. "There are thirty five hundred troops in the brigade," That discounted the red legs, and so on, it was just the infantry. "The general consensus is to follow what was done in 1913, and to stand a similar recruitment to arms. Rather than establish a second brigade," As they would effectively be doubling in size, "We will be restructuring into a division structure."

"Two brigades would make a division."

"In the German allotment yes," He replied to Shan's foray, "And that was true for the United States in the eighteen hundreds, but we're going to move brigades as separate attachments, Divisions will be constituted from Regiments who will have their own home garrison. That would take time to organize and stand up as well. If we do move to other brigades," They would be firefighters, or possibly specialists, Dawes seemed to think organizing artillery as brigade was the more sensible course, but that would be something for the cadre to hash out. That might take years.

 

[ATP]

Brandt made adjustment to Stokes construction later,making it better.And invented 60 and 120mm mortars in 1935.Your SI could do the same earlier.And,when he face soviets,made PAW600 as AT gun.Japaneese tanks are not worth it.
In OTL Japan send 70.000 troops to Syberia,but USA take Vladiwostok,made them leave,and gave Vladivostok to soviets.All Magadan gulags victims families should sue USA for that crime.Japaneese was not good,but never as bad as commies.Well,except Nankin.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Brandt made adjustment to Stokes construction later,making it better.And invented 60 and 120mm mortars in 1935.Your SI could do the same earlier.And,when he face soviets,made PAW600 as AT gun.Japaneese tanks are not worth it.
In OTL Japan send 70.000 troops to Syberia,but USA take Vladiwostok,made them leave,and gave Vladivostok to soviets.All Magadan gulags victims families should sue USA for that crime.Japaneese was not good,but never as bad as commies.Well,except Nankin.

Click to shrink...

In the OTL the Japanese logistics train was a lot worse than it will be here, as in the OTL they had a pretty hefty amount of US food and material aid, on top of Wilson being PO-ed at them and having their loans to call in, and really it was the latter issue of money that convinced Japan to divest of its siberian adventure despire the army wanting to stay.

Here Japan, or rather here in 1918+ Japan has a stronger logistical base plus actual Chinese auxillaries in the form the of Zhang Tso Lin assisting instead of Duan's empty promises of support... also we can't discount ole Winston actually getting his way over the Foreign office wanting to undermine the soviets in anyway he can, which admittedly here is helped by the Tsar and family surviving

 

[Imperator Pax]

September 1916​

There was a distinction developing. Infantrymen and specialists. Infantry privates and the other sorts of jobs that needed doing in a modern army. Lewis's gun and mr stokes's mortar were not the only bit, there were scoped picked rifled, and the self loading rifles, and other things. It had been a development in years... hadn't a century ago rifles just been first stepping from specialist weapons to thus start to supersede the old firelocks? The Railway Protection Force small as it had been in 1911 would have butchered any force from before the war between the states so long as the ammunition held.

The Mauser was a fine rifle, but its days were likely numbered already. The 98 was too long, and a product of Europe's perverse fascination with the bayonet. At the same time though now that they had enough of them, and under Cole's careful tutelage, his corporals, and the future gunnery sergeants would be capable of taking a man at eighteen hundred meters. Those men would be better served with scopes of good glass for their rifles. Germany was at war, so they would have to make their own. A specialist's weapon.

A weapon the previously only the indulgence, due to the expense, of cadre men from their collection. It would be joined by production of others. Browning's patent of 1900, the self loading 35 remington rifle was too useful, and train men had been carrying its shotgun cousin the Auto 5 even before then. There was Winchester's 351 as well. Twenty and thirty dollars each from the catalog, and that had been before the war had greatly reduced supply.

The tools to make them had also become scarcer. Liu had been lucky that Yuan had given him the money to buy from Hartford... it was just a question of making sure that that tooling actually got there. Griswold wanted to try and talk Duan into letting them buy the tooling out and having Edenborn ship the tooling to tietsin so they could put it on a railcar and ship it all to Xian... which was far from the worst idea. There were problems, impediments whatever word one wanted to use, to it. Duan probably wouldn't want the tooling to go to Hankou, even though, yes the tooling there did needed to be upgraded, and the updating of the machinery was needed, but he wasn't going to want the tooling that far south.

What Duan wanted or didn't want wasn't the only issue. Parliament was a god awful mess. In any western country rather than give the dissolved parliament their seats back, new elections would have been held. If the parliament in England was dissolved, new elections were held, and you seated the winners from that one.

Democracy wasn't the point of seating the 1912 winners though, nepotism was. It was just cover for giving influential winners their seats as a measure. It was an interpersonal dynamic contingent on who knew who, or perhaps more accurately which cliques were owed favors. Reinsch complained it was undemocratic, but more than that his complaints were that were the instructions of the state department. It was fine to be undemocratic so long as the country was stable. Instability was less desirable than democracy. Reinsch's letter seemed to have been written in a state of shock. A good example for John Jordan to cite towards the professor's unpreparedness to the nastiness of statecraft's reality.

The stopper went back in, "Is it about the food situation?" JP asked sniffing the whisky.

"No," He shook his head. The drafting of Europe's labor had stripped farmers of their labor, everyone's and that was meaning food shortages. The entente was making it up by shipping what they could in grain, and beef and so on from overseas, but it wasn't enough. Russia was a good example of that two years of war and the agrarian kingdom of the tsars had left only women and the infirm what was worse was that the tsarists need for draft animals and stock had stripped the fields of even more. The harvests were failing, and and it was going to be worse next year, and no amount of grain from Canada or the United States would settle that. The only good that would do would be for the cities, and that would mean foreign currency needed for that, the Russians were already dependent on the British, or Wall street in New York. "Its about Peking. Why what's going on with the food situation?"

"Is mechanization a priority? How important is it."

"I wish I could say yes, the less people we have tied up in farming, the more people can do factory jobs. A tractor, and combine harvester and the rest makes land tilling simpler."

"It does." He shrugged, and tilted slightly but rested the urge to play with the pen in front of him, before reaching for his drink again, "You know why the Chinese built the Great Canal system?" The Cedar in Cedar Forrest asked.

Allen mirrored the gesture and reached for his own glass, "Its a canal. The river is prone to silting up, prone to flooding, and its easier to move goods down a canal than it is overland," He sipped, "especially since railway wasn't invented yet."

"Exactly." JP toasted the summary, "That's right Al. Thats it. Peking wasn't the capital back then either," He started to protest, "No, no John Allen listen this isn't about the French, or the Russians."

"This has nothing to do with Siems-Carey? This has nothing to do with that clusterfuck back in may?" Reinsch had wanted the State Department to tell the Russians to stuff their protest up their ass... not in such coarse language of course, but it had been the first demonstration he was will to say something... but the board had no interest in the legal debacle that would emerge from any political controversy... not when they could just divert south.... which JP had known was going to happen.

JP waved his glass and flipped the paper, "The Qing ratified our bit in 1909, gives us legal rights to build infrastructure"

"Sounds like Siems-Carey."

"Hear me out, we built down, running south from Kalgan for the Qing, and up from Shijiahuang, hell its the original reason we moved the office there." Two hundred fifty miles of track roughly, it had been done by October and well that had been the start. "Now like I said back when the canal was built, Peking wasn't the capital, and the canal was supposed to pay for itself. Transit fees so on that way it could maintain itself."

.... which hadn't exactly worked out. The Chinese had a strong sense of history, and the Grand Canal had been an expansion of older canals, and water way links, or linked, the four corners of the empire. That meant goods, and people could move around... and of course without telegrams and all the modern business the book keeping had been near impossible. "Which is why they don't have the money. Yeah, I'm familiar with the Qing's problem, and the problems that problem caused."

"But we don't. Railway is better. Think about it, think about all the canals operating in the US a century ago, in 1816, railroad changed all that. We still have to build dams, but in moving goods the rail made the canal and the river barge even steam river ships," He waved his hand as if swiping dust away. "and unlike the old canal system, you can't skip paying transit fees for a train hauling goods off."

Allen shrugged, "Fair point." He sipped the scotch, "Small problem though. Peking is the capital now."

"That's not a problem. Not at all, we have a central location, large population, base for workers, and we keep building the western line, we link Taiyuan. That gives us east to west, as well as north, but not too far north. We can stay out of Manchuria. Bypass this whole brouhaha with the Russians and Japanese. Don't go into Honan we don't step on the British, don't go further south than that, what are the French going to do?"

"So why the question about mechanization of farming?"

"Food prices, purchases from the states are starting to inflate. Russians, English, French they're buying food. The Japanese are buying food, the war will end eventually. It has too," JP remarked though it wavered at the last, "We can't buy those tractors from Italy, and the states are possible but they're more expensive now. We don't have the personnel right now to build tractors, and certainly couldn't spare them from other tolling and machine work."

"JP get to the bloody point."

"You remember that paper I wrote that they never graded, before we graduated early. Before we shipped for the Philippines."

"The land grant schools."

"Yeah them."

"We've built schools."

"Yeah, so no one will so much as squint if we build a couple more, not even if we run railways right up to the Great Hall." He shrugged, "To include the courses of military science, and not to exclude those other scientific and classical studies we should strive to teach the branches of learning related to agriculture and the mechanical arts. Paraphrasing."

"Small problem still, is the people to run the school." And then also, "And that you should note that we have two colleges already, and while the Cadre supports one in Xian, any more than that... it'll smack of government. Especially if you go quoting Lincoln."

"Lincoln didn't write it, Morril did, that's why its named after him."

He drained the glass, "I forgot, but the point stands. So where does that leave us?"

"Short on manpower, of course, but Eddy has a solution for that."

"You've talked to Edenborn on this,"

"He says a wars John Allen, or rather that we're going to enter the European war. Not everyone is happy about that." Allen raised his eyebrows, and waved for him to get on with it, "So what he proposes is we draw up contracts of employment, it'll be Irish and Germans mostly," John Paul shrugged, "it'll guarantee employment for the duration of the european war in the margins. Edenborn says that for the legal bits we will want to say five years, possible extension, and if the state department asks well we're making, whatever it is we'll be selling to England or Japan. Edenborn says that lawyers can shape the contract that the teachers are assisting with on the job training or something like that."
--

--
Commentary: This will not actually matter until November of this year, when Lansing tells Reinsch to tell Cao Kun that the US doesn't care what the Russian minister thinks and the US has officially taken the position that the Russians don't have an exclusive sphere of influence... which admittedly in the OTL was too little too late.... especially as Reinsch then decided to double down and poke both Russia and Japan... which Lansing supported despite him actually hold the notion that Japan did have special prerogative (as would to be made clear in Lansing-Ishii), unfortunately this ended up with France and England getting involved and doubling down on their objections. Lansing basically told the French politely to eat a dick, which the old lion's government wasn't thrilled by, and continued to lobby for both recognition of the old status quo, and economic concessions on the US's part related to the perceived common cause of the war. The French claimed that the basis of their sphere was earlier, and lots of waffling that well by that point it was 1917.

These economic transitions are an important, and recurring factor in this entire timeline. To that extent September 1916 really does set up or establish the financial ground that makes what will become the Xian government capable of financing itself in later years as it talks about and covers some of the economic developments both before the war when there was a mostly unified legitimate chinese government going back to the Qing, as well as the profits made from the wars demands for goods. This will be touched on in part 2, covering late september, and October's part 1 and indeed the other part is that conflict at the present is largely confined to the dissolution of civil authority in Szechwan, and spreading in Yunan and Honan at this point. There some issues in Canton and some of the eastern provinces, but they're not immediately relevant. Most of Arc 1's 'martial matters' are the conflicts in Honan spilling into Shansi, and Shensi and internal county level disputes in the west prior to politics in Peking culminating in the aborted Manchu restoration of July.

 

[ATP]

Mechanization of farming do not need tractors - smaller machines could be pulled by horses,it worked in 19th century.
Specialists in army - i read,that as long as they remain intact/HMG,mortars,tc/ ,units which lost even 50% of troops still could fight effectively,at least in defense.
Russians money - tsar hoarded over 1000 tons of gold,in OTL almost all get Lenin,100t gave to germans in 1918,reast pay USA for weapons,war materials,and luxury food for him&his cronies.5 milions died from hunger in the same time,but who cared ?
If you could liberate that gold when boshewiks send it to USA,do so.USA banksters could not officially say,that they send anything to bolshewiks,so they could not complain.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Mechanization of farming do not need tractors - smaller machines could be pulled by horses,it worked in 19th century.
Specialists in army - i read,that as long as they remain intact/HMG,mortars,tc/ ,units which lost even 50% of troops still could fight effectively,at least in defense.
Russians money - tsar hoarded over 1000 tons of gold,in OTL almost all get Lenin,100t gave to germans in 1918,reast pay USA for weapons,war materials,and luxury food for him&his cronies.5 milions died from hunger in the same time,but who cared ?
If you could liberate that gold when boshewiks send it to USA,do so.USA banksters could not officially say,that they send anything to bolshewiks,so they could not complain.

Click to shrink...

Specialist units were well received better training, and typically had better unit morale, this was ussually compounded in the defnese where you're not comitting to an action of movement, defensive actions also tend to mean you'r fighting either somewhere the defender picked or at least knows he's going to fight there. And well as it happens heavy combat engineers actually make pretty good infantry in a pinch when it comes to holding a bridge... and they can ussually blow the bridge if the enemy gets too cheeky.

As to the mechnization of farming, thats true, and indeed its one of those instances here where the appealing thing is lets mechanize we have tractors, versus the practical solution of do we have the resources to do it on a wide scale? The answer is no to that question. Xian down further in the timeline doesn't fully mechanize farming into the fifties, but in this case, they're talking more about mechanization of a select few farms (a couple hundred thousand acres) which is something of a middle ground.