Chapter 32: Fantasy
If you take too large a step, you're liable to pull something. Chen Jian understood this truth well. As long as he could ensure his people and their future civilization would not be dominated by another culture, he had plenty of time.
If, hundreds of years from now, one of his descendants turned out to be a worthless ruler who would rather submit to foreign conquerors—shaving his head and adopting their customs—or use foreign mercenaries to suppress his own people, Chen Jian swore he would rise from his grave and slap him against the city wall. He didn't want it to happen, but reality was cruel, and he knew all too well the depravity of which a ruling class was capable.
So, they had to learn to fight from scratch, accumulating experience through bloodshed. When the nation was at risk of being conquered, the power of weapons would always triumph over the weapons of words.
Theoretically, if every one of his men were an invincible gladiator, they could run rampant in this era without needing any formation. But that was obviously impossible, as proven by the fifty-odd men standing before him now.
They had little talent, poor aim, and a weak charge. Their only path to victory was through cooperation.
At this moment, these fifty men were looking at Chen Jian eagerly, wondering what they were supposed to do. Should they just rush forward like the other group had practiced?
"Jian, what about us? What weapons will we use?"
"Don't worry," Chen Jian said. "For now, find the four people you know best and form a group of five. From your group, choose the person you trust the most to be the leader. Go!"
He knew this initial organization would take a while, and it might not even be finished by nightfall, so he let them sort themselves out.
Fortunately, the tribe was used to Chen Jian's methods. It was the same when they built the houses; he hadn't started with the main structure but with something that seemed completely unrelated.
A chaotic chorus of names filled the air as the men formed teams based on seniority and friendships. Chen Jian hadn't asked them to form lines, only to get into groups, and that was proving troublesome enough.
Amid the shouting and laughing, Chen Jian ignored them and walked over to the other thirty men.
Song approached him. "Jian, are we really just going to charge like that?"
"Of course not."
Chen Jian took a rope, stretched it straight on the ground, and had Song stand at the far left end.
"Don't move."
Once Song was in position, Chen Jian grabbed a few of his former clansmen and placed them in a line next to him.
He was like a kindergarten teacher wrangling children, arranging them one by one. He formed three rows of ten men each, with a step and a half of distance between each row.
After they were in line, the men were still fidgeting and talking. Chen Jian shouted, "Quiet! Don't move! Anyone who does will be carrying stones later!"
When they finally calmed down a little, Chen Jian walked to Song's side. "From now on, you're in charge here. If anyone talks or moves out of place, pull them out of the line and put them on stone-carrying duty."
"What's the point of this?"
"You'll understand in the future. Every night, as long as it's not raining, you will all practice standing like this for a while. The goal is that whenever I give the call, you can immediately form these three rows. If you can do that, you won't need to practice anymore. I hope you can remember how to stand by the time we finish building the houses."
Song looked back at the formation, thinking it looked very simple. "It won't take that long," he said. "One day is enough."
Chen Jian shook his head and gave a wry smile. "Then try it."
He didn't want them to stand at perfect military attention, just to line up properly. This simple discipline would be immensely useful when they charged in the future.
Song had underestimated the problem. After Chen Jian dismissed them, even with the rope still on the ground, it took the group nearly ten minutes to re-form the lines, and they were crooked and uneven.
Many had forgotten their original positions, and the men in the front row didn't know where to stand and kept shuffling around.
Song was completely convinced. He asked, a little embarrassed, "Jian, are we just going to stand here? When will we practice charging like you did?"
"You'll practice charging when you can form up properly at a single command. Practice this first. Don't assume things are so simple, and don't be impatient."
He patted Song on the shoulder encouragingly. Before leaving, he added, "Song, with my methods, fewer men will die in a real battle. Carrying stones isn't a punishment; it's a way to save their lives. It's the same as the herbal medicines you want to test."
Song nodded grimly. He returned to the group, had them disperse, and then tried to form up again. Unfortunately, the result was the same chaotic mess as before.
Chen Jian watched for a while longer. Over on the other side, the fifty men had managed to divide themselves into ten teams of five and had chosen their trusted leaders.
Chen Jian wrote down the names of the ten leaders. The men were already getting restless. From their perspective, fighting was about charging in with stone axes and spears. Why was all this so complicated?
They thought that after being divided into teams, they would finally get stone spears and axes. But they didn't. Instead, they just learned a new term: "corporal leader," which was what Chen Jian called their team leaders.
He had each five-man team form up with three men in the front and two men a step behind.
With fewer men per group, lining up in rows of three was much easier than lining up in rows of ten.
"Your task for today is to practice lining up like this. Once you can form up correctly at any time, you can go to sleep. If you can't, you'll stay here and practice. Tomorrow, you'll be back to building the houses with the mud bricks, so you can take your time with this."
After speaking, he tirelessly inspected each team. The smaller groups learned much faster, and after a short while, they could all reliably form their five-man formations. Satisfied, Chen Jian sent them back to sleep.
Langpi and the other archers had already finished their practice. They were pointing at the thirty men still struggling to form lines, but Chen Jian shooed them away.
Song was growing impatient, and Chen Jian saw that it was getting late. He let them break up for the night; there was still work to be done tomorrow.
Granted a reprieve, the men rushed back to the village. Chen Jian remained outside, holding his piece of bark and a charcoal stick, thinking about the future under the moonlight.
The monster of war, he knew, would soon be unleashed from its cage by the development of primitive agriculture. Before the popularization of metal tools and ox-drawn carts, the most efficient system of production was slavery, and the primary source of slaves was military conquest.
The village-commune structure would persist for a long time, and since tribesmen were needed for war, they would retain political power. He had to ensure continuous victories, plundering more people for his clansmen—the future slave owners—to maintain his own position as their military leader.
Slash-and-burn agriculture required a vast amount of labor just to ensure a basic harvest, where planting one seed to reap three was considered normal, much like in medieval Europe. Unpredictable natural disasters, village irrigation projects, land reclamation, and mining all demanded a large slave population.
Chen Jian didn't consider himself a genius who could conjure victory from a magic bag of tricks. If he wanted to win consistently, he could only rely on a superior military system.
For the fifty men, he planned a five-man squad system equipped with long and short spears. The enemies of this era would have no cavalry, so a dense phalanx was unnecessary. These small teams would anchor the formation, advancing in ten-step increments to the beat of a drum to approach the enemy.
The fifteen archers would be the main source of damage. The spear squads would act as a mobile wall to screen them, allowing them to get as close as thirty or forty meters to the enemy and fire more arrows.
The archers would be in the center, flanked by the spear squads. If the enemy charged, the archers would fire two volleys before retreating behind the spearmen for cover. If the enemy didn't charge, they would advance slowly, with the archers harassing the enemy and inflicting casualties.
Once they were about forty meters from the enemy line, the thirty shock infantry would form their three rows and charge.
Once the enemy formation was broken, the spear squads would follow up, fighting in their coordinated five-man teams to completely shatter the enemy line and divide their forces.
As long as the front line wavered, the rest of the battle would be a one-sided massacre. An army without organization was just a mob.
The principle was similar to the pike-and-shot formations of the arquebus era. However, since he didn't have to worry about cavalry, the formation could be more dispersed. And because the enemy wore no heavy armor, bows and arrows could replace muskets as the main offensive weapon, with no concern about their inability to penetrate armor.
In the future, if they domesticated horses, they could use chariots for shock attacks. At that point, the shock infantry could be positioned on the wings to protect the flanks or to charge once the enemy front had been shaken.
No formation remained unchanged forever. Once the enemy also tamed horses, his own formations would naturally have to become denser to ward off cavalry charges. After the emergence of heavy armor, a formation that relied on bows for its main killing power would become obsolete. It would only regain its prominence with the appearance of muskets that could pierce plate armor.
For now, the tribe they had to deal with numbered only one hundred and ten. Even if they had bows, archers without horn-reinforced recurve bows firing scattered volleys from a hundred meters away would be no more than a nuisance. If the enemy fled instead of fighting head-on, it didn't matter. They could run, but their village couldn't. He would destroy their homes and capture their women and children. The remaining men could try to survive in the wilderness.
Besides, with the development of bronze, he thought, with the technology required to cast the Simuwu Dafang Ding, the challenge of making bronze cannons wouldn't be too great, as long as one had the idea and the gunpowder.
A hundred years from now, when his people could cast great tripods, they could produce nine great bronze cannons, which would be known as the Jiuding.
Bronze cannons had significant advantages. They were still used in large numbers up to the American Civil War era. Because of bronze's metallic properties, they didn't explode catastrophically, and if a casting failed, the metal could simply be melted down and recast.
Muskets were more difficult. He probably wouldn't see them in his lifetime, but it was still thrilling to imagine the wars of his fantasy Bronze Age.
Cavalry would charge the enemy, forcing them into tight square formations. Bronze cannons would seize the opportunity to bombard the dense ranks. After his light cavalry drove off the enemy's, grenadiers using black powder bombs would charge, throwing their explosives to tear apart the enemy front line.
At that time, due to the limits of control and communication, the lands would be divided into fiefdoms to occupy the still-wild territories, establishing a foothold for the civilization to come.
Ritual vessels, called tripods, would in fact be cannons. The number of cannons a lord—from duke to baron—was permitted to own would be their "Ritual"; the thunderous roar of gunpowder would be their "Music."
Hundreds of years later, as the forces of production developed, the old social order would no longer be suitable. Nations would contend, and a hundred schools of thought would argue, each casting cannons to vie for supremacy. This would be the "Collapse of Ritual and Music"...
"Four or five hundred years should be enough."
He fantasized about it all, a silly smile on his face, until Yu Qian'er came out and draped a fur pelt over his shoulders.
"Are you still not sleeping? We have to move mud to build the house tomorrow."
Chen Jian let out a groan. The vast gulf between his grand fantasy and his mundane reality left him speechless. He got up and went back into the house without another word.
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