I want to be emperor

Chapter 184 Titled Relief for Work
On June [-], the eighth year of Chongzhen, Luo Zhixue officially led his army to Nanyang City, and was greeted by many local civil and military officials of the rural protection army and local gentry, and stayed in the Tang Palace.

Of course, it is no longer called Tang Wangfu, but it has the signboard of Nanyang Biefu, the general of the rural protection army.

But after entering Nanyang Beppu, Luo Zhixue held the first meeting of the day before he had time to rest.

Luo Zhixue who arrived in Nanyang City will be very busy. He will use these few days to further improve various military and political institutions and deal with many problems.

Before he officially entered the city, he had already arranged four meetings and waited.

In the afternoon of that day, less than an hour after Luo Zhixue entered the city and stayed, today's meeting was held, which was an arms conference.

The participants were mainly middle and senior generals in Xiangyang City, and they mainly discussed issues such as recruiting and equipment replenishment for the [-]st Infantry Brigade, [-]rd Infantry Brigade, [-]st Artillery Brigade, and [-]st Cavalry Brigade.

At the same time, promote the preparation of the Seventh Infantry Brigade.

These questions are easy to say, anyway, on the way, the personnel of the Ordnance Department and the Logistics Department have already made relevant plans, and Luo Zhixue only needs to listen to the plans and approve them.

It is worth mentioning that in this meeting, the issue of changing the uniforms of the officers of the Rural Protection Army was finalized, and the military rank system began to be implemented.

The Rural Protection Army did not have any rank system in the early days. After the establishment of the General's Mansion, the rank and post were finalized, but this was only limited to civilian officials and military advisors for surrendered generals.

As for the matter of military adviser, it seems that the word "military" is attached to it, and those involved in the matter are indeed related to the military. For example, now Chen Yongfu is making various military suggestions to Luo Zhixue in the name of a special military adviser.

However, strictly speaking, Chen Yongfu is still not under the jurisdiction of the military. Military advisers at all levels are directly under the general's mansion, which is under the jurisdiction of Luo Zhixue, and have nothing to do with the four major military departments and field troops.

In other words, at present, the generals of the Rural Protection Army do not have a hierarchy corresponding to civil servants, only a simple job system.

And that's obviously not normal.

Even in traditional feudal dynasties, such as the Ming Dynasty, generals are all ranked, and the grade of generals is actually similar to military ranks to some extent.

However, Luo Zhixue did not intend to directly link the ranks of generals with those of civil officials. This was to completely reverse the situation in which civil officials discriminated against military generals in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.

Luo Zhixue wanted to directly distinguish the grades of civil servants from those of military commanders, each of which has their own opinions, and at most arranged for the soldiers to retire and change jobs in the future to carry out practical job linkage.

To this end, he plans to implement a new military rank system.

The military rank system can better adapt to the development needs of the Rural Protection Army today.

After all, the tactical system and even military philosophy of the Rural Protection Army are different from those of the traditional army, and it is not acceptable to directly apply the traditional nine-rank system.

According to Luo Zhixue's plan, the military rank system was directly finalized at this meeting. Luo Zhixue's military rank system is very simple. There is no other military rank system with various names created by himself. Instead, the military rank system commonly used in modern countries is directly used, which is simple and easy to understand. .

Sub-officers, non-commissioned officers, soldiers and so on.

Officers are general, lieutenant general, major general, brigadier general, colonel, lieutenant colonel, major, captain, lieutenant, second lieutenant, warrant officer.

The above is an officer, who serves as an officer at all levels above the captain. This is the backbone of the rural protection army. Among them, the warrant officer is only awarded to the students in the military academy accompanying the battalion. For example, new officers recruited from scholars, soldiers newly promoted to enroll new officer.

Non-commissioned officers are Sergeant Major, Sergeant Sergeant, Sergeant Sergeant, and Corporal.Served as corps chief, special chief, brigade chief, as well as various technical arms, senior backbone soldiers, and branches of the Rural Protection Army.

Soldiers are divided into first-class soldiers, second-class soldiers, and third-class soldiers.

At the same time, the military rank is linked to the grade. For example, the captain is only awarded the rank of second lieutenant in principle, and the rank of lieutenant is awarded under special circumstances;

The infantry post is awarded the rank of captain, and under special circumstances, the lieutenant can serve concurrently;
The commander of the infantry battalion confers the rank of major, and the rank of lieutenant colonel is a special case.

Infantry brigades are awarded the rank of colonel, with the exception of lieutenant colonel.

Other positions at all levels are matched by a priority rank and one or two auxiliary ranks.

In addition, Luo Zhixue also considered that the current cavalry and artillery lacked a battalion-level organization, and directly above the sentinel was a brigade, so taking advantage of the formulation of the military rank system this time, it was also the finalization of the artillery battalion and cavalry battalion organization.

There are three artillery posts under the provisional artillery battalion, and allotment of synchronized soldiers with military ranks.

In the future, the First Artillery Brigade will have a First Artillery Battalion, and a Second Artillery Battalion will be established at the same time.

The [-]st Cavalry Brigade will also set up the [-]st Cavalry Battalion and the [-]nd Cavalry Battalion.

After finalizing the military rank system, Luo Zhixue awarded the military ranks to the senior generals on the spot.

Taking into account the principle of equivalence between positions and military ranks, and also considering the follow-up to give the generals under his command a chance to ensure the scarcity of senior military ranks to ensure the gold content, currently the rank of major general and above is not awarded.

Cavalry Director and First Cavalry Brigade Commander Wang Xiazi, Artillery Director and First Artillery Brigade Zhang Malin, and North Route Army Commander Huang Dingquan were awarded brigadier generals.

Brigadier General is also the highest military rank currently awarded, and there are only three people.

Li Chengtong, commander of the new [-]st Infantry Brigade, Lin Dongsheng, commander of the [-]nd Infantry Brigade, Xu He, commander of the [-]rd Infantry Brigade, and An Yongduo, commander of the [-]th Mixed Brigade who captured Yuzhou City and held on for many days, were all awarded the rank of colonel.

In addition, the heads of the four major ministries, Xu Zhixian, Chief of Staff, Hu Hongzhuo, Minister of Ordnance, Yu Xiujie, Minister of Logistics, and Wei Kaifu, Minister of Military Affairs, were all awarded the rank of colonel.

A total of eight people were awarded the rank of colonel.

There are more people awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel.

After the Battle of Yuzhou, the brigade commander Li Dongshao, who was renamed the Guards Brigade from the Personal Battalion, was awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel. Except for the commander of the fourth mixed brigade, An Yongduo, the brigade commanders of the other mixed brigades were temporarily awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel.

The deputy brigade commanders of the three main infantry brigades, Zuo Yingzhe, the director of the combat department and the chief of staff of the North Route Army, were all awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel.

And there are more majors, so I won’t go into details one by one.

One of the worthwhile ones is that among the many people awarded the major, there is a very different person.

That is Wang Daqian, the former captain of the engineering team and now the director of the Engineering Department of the Logistics Department...

This person was not a soldier yesterday, but today he directly obtained the rank of major!
This is because just yesterday, Luo Zhixue split the original engineering team into two, and transferred some of the technicians of the engineering team, together with the engineering team leader Wang Daqian, directly to the jurisdiction of the logistics department, and established the engineering department.

So, now is the time to confer titles, Wang Daqian, an architect who has only been a soldier for a day, won the rank of major.

This man can't even lift a knife.

However, no one present was dissatisfied or questioned Wang Daqian's conferment of the title.

Because although Wang Daqian was not a soldier before and had never been on the battlefield, what he did was always closely related to the army.

Speaking of which, Wang Daqian was also one of the few non-soldiers in the Township Protection Army, but he had been mixed in the army system all the time.

This man was just an ordinary mason in the early days. He was "voluntarily" recruited by the rural protection army during the Funiu Mountain period. Later, because of his hard work and good ability, he gradually became the captain of the engineering team. The construction of Wuliguan and the construction of the Songshan line of defense.

After the army went south, Wang Daqian continued to go south with a group of craftsmen and hundreds of people. He first built various fortifications in Li Qingdian, and was also responsible for building the factories of Li Qingdian Arsenal and many other factories. Later, he went to Nanyang City Build fortifications.

Immediately afterwards, they arranged for people to take Xiangyang and build the fortifications of Xiangyang City.

To put it simply, almost all the fixed military fortifications of the Rural Protection Army were repaired by the engineering team under Wang Daqian...

Wang Daqian's engineering team was actually engineers in the military system. Such Wang Daqian and his engineering team were naturally regarded as their own by Wang Xiazi and other generals early on.

And Wang Daqian also formed a construction team with hundreds of various craftsmen through continuous recruitment and requisition of various construction craftsmen in the process of building various fortifications.

Of course, these are technicians, and it is impossible to complete a large number of engineering constructions only by relying on these hundreds of craftsmen. In fact, the engineering team also manages a large number of prisoners of war, young and strong in the reclamation camp, and ordinary civilians hired directly from the people.

When the large-scale construction was carried out in Liqingdian, in order to build up the major factories in a short period of time, the rural protection army directly used the tactics of crowds. At the peak, there were more than 2 prisoners of war, soldiers from the reclamation camp, youth Strong and healthy women work for the engineering team.

After the Battle of Yuzhou, because of the construction of the Yuzhou defense line and the improvement of the Luyangguan defense line at the same time, the task of the engineering team will be very heavy.

Considering that the engineering team has more military construction task attributes, at the same time, the engineering team also takes care of the construction tasks of many factories, docks, bridges and other ordinary buildings.

Luo Zhixue simply divided the engineering team into two, and one part was included in the logistics department. A new engineering department was set up to be responsible for various military buildings, including fixed barracks, forts, forts, docks, roads, bridges and other military buildings required by the military. The construction of related tasks.

The ordinary labor force is mainly prisoners of war and surrendered soldiers. For this reason, Luo Zhixue specially set up a construction battalion, which is a construction unit of the same nature as the reclamation battalion.

The other part is included in the Ministry of Industry, and the Construction Department is set up to be responsible for other official non-military buildings, such as the workshops of various government-owned factories, ordinary private docks, roads, bridges, and office buildings.

Its labor force is dominated by young and healthy women from the folk, especially those refugees.

Nowadays, there are still a large number of refugees in Nanyang Mansion and Xiangyang Mansion, but they have not yet become refugees, but there are still more low-level people who cannot feed themselves.

The Construction Department, like many factories affiliated to the Ministry of Industry, gave priority to recruiting young and healthy women from refugees as workers. This not only gave them a way to survive, but also prevented them from becoming bandits or even rogues.

To some extent, this is one of Luo Zhixue's measures to implement work-for-relief to reduce refugees and restore people's livelihood.

At the same time, young and strong refugees were organized to carry out reclamation, and young and strong were recruited to build various water conservancy facilities.

These measures are Luo Zhixue's lessons learned from the Ming Dynasty's suppression of uprisings in Shaanxi and other places.

Without settling down the local refugees and the people who cannot survive, it is impossible to truly quell the civil unrest of all walks of life.

Luo Zhixue doesn't want the Nanyang Basin that he won with great difficulty to still be full of refugees, thousands of miles away!
He also counted on the Nanyang Basin to become the granary of the rural protection army!
Given the superior natural and geographical conditions of the Nanyang Basin, even if it has suffered from drought in recent years, as long as the measures are taken properly and a part of the housing investment is made, the Nanyang Basin can completely resume agricultural production and become a granary again.

But if you want to restore the people's livelihood in Nanyang Basin and make this place the real foundation of the Guarantee Army, then the problem of refugees and various bandits must be solved.

(End of this chapter)