"A great victory for the Imperial Army!"
"A great victory for the Imperial Army!"
"Our army has won!"
"Our army has won!"
On the sixteenth of the fifth month, beneath the walls of Xuchang City, the heat steamed. Liu Acheng sat atop a makeshift command platform, the folding stool beneath his backside doing nothing to stop him from looking all around, while those familiar cries rang in his ears.
Of course they had to report victories!
A soldier drawing rations might not know how to fight, but he had to know how to report a victory.
And go ahead and investigate these great victories. Every one of them was guaranteed to be real.
For instance, Zhang Yu had abandoned a great many camps and cities, plenty of them proper county seats, concentrating his troops in certain sturdy fortified manors and strategically situated cities. Surely retaking a county seat counted as a victory?
Then there were the fortified manors farther out.
Fortified manors really did come in different varieties. Some were nothing more than an embankment and a drawbridge, easily overrun in the dry season. Others were genuinely difficult to deal with. Even regular troops, even regular troops whose main strength consisted of refugees from the Huai River region who knew fortified manors inside out, were reluctant to tackle them lightly.
But most fortified manors outside a warlord's core territory were fence-sitters to begin with. Add to that the considerable rallying power of the words "Great Jin's Imperial Army," and now that the Imperial Army had actually crossed the Ying River and surrounded Xuchang, not only the wubao lords in the so-called outlying areas but even some local ones had to come offer their allegiance and declare their position.
Could anyone really say it was not a victory when those staff