Over seventeen thousand troops on the rolls, with an actual strength of over thirteen thousand: these were very healthy, very solid figures. Clearly, Xie Shang's old prestige still held, and the court had done its utmost to provide replacements over the past two years.
This was not sarcasm. It was the plain truth.
Shen Jin's two thousand men came with their own reserve of replacements, and maintaining full strength all along was excellent, impressive work. But was it possible that he and his troops were simply monsters? He supported and controlled those two thousand men with the resources of half a commandery, stockpiles accumulated over decades, and the countless retainers he had recruited and supported in Wuxing. That was how he achieved that freakish full strength.
Everyone else, whether Liu Huzi's three banners, Gao Heng's one banner, or the six banners under Wang Xia's control, was missing ten to twenty percent of their men. Even Liu Cheng's Attendant Secretariat Supervisor cavalry had seven or eight vacancies.
Men went home to visit relatives, fell ill, died in accidents, or ran away, and replacements could not arrive in time. Such things were inevitable.
What Liu Cheng had seen at Huan Wen's headquarters was much the same. Units had to be reorganized and replenished before battle to ensure a full complement of fighting men. In their usual garrisons, they too had a routine shortfall of roughly twenty percent.
This had little to do with bleeding the soldiers dry or drawing pay for nonexistent men.
Under the clan-chief protector-general system of the time, each general and each banner was responsible for itself. The very concept of drawing phantom soldiers' pay did not exist. Your superiors gave you the funds, grain, and authorized manpower for one banner, and the banner handled its own allocations and