At the end of Qin, I became a son of the plane

Chapter 679: The Unbearable Huns

And this is indeed the case. At the Global Alliance Conference in October, even though the Han Dynasty did not invite Hun envoys, the Huns still sent a large delegation of envoys headed by Prime Minister Zhang Ying. The reason they came to Chang'an City was very simple, which was to end this protracted war.

Zhang Ying said in grief at the Global Alliance Conference: "Over the past six months, more than 100,000 soldiers have been killed on both sides, and millions of civilians have been displaced by the war. The war in Seleucus has become a blood-and-blood mill that devours souls. The Han and the Huns are brothers by blood, and this is a wrong war that happened at the wrong time."

Then Zhang Ying bowed to Xu Aimin and said, "Your Majesty, you are not only the leader of the Global Alliance, but also the emperor of all the Chinese countries. Those who died in the war are all Chinese people. You have the responsibility to end this war."

Hearing this, Xu Aimin sneered and said, "The door to the alliance's peace talks has never been closed, it's just that you Huns are unwilling to come in."

The Huns' behavior made Xu Aimin realize that Zhou Yafu's strategy had really hit the Huns' soft spot, otherwise they would not have been so eager to end the war.

Zhang Ying said with a sad face: "I came to Chang'an City to end this war."

The situation in the Xiongnu country is now very bad, extremely bad. The people of the Xiongnu country originally saw that their army was unstoppable and thought that the war would end soon, but they never expected that this war had lasted for more than half a year and had not yet ended.

The cost of maintaining a war operation with an army of 150,000 was extremely huge. The Huns had already cut off global trade and could only rely on their own accumulation to withstand the consumption of the war.

So the people of the Xiongnu found that although the army in the front had frequent victories, the spoils transported back to the country were getting less and less. Later, not only were there no spoils transported back, but the Xiongnu country kept transporting food, cloth and various weapons and equipment to the battlefield. At the same time, domestic prices were getting higher and higher. The prices of luxury goods such as tea and sugar had risen to the sky, and even the price of food was getting higher and higher. Now the price of food in the Xiongnu country is five times that before the war. After September, the Xiongnu people could not buy food even if they had money. The Xiongnu country began to implement a food rationing system, and then cloth, various non-staple foods, vegetables, and canned meat began to be rationed.

This series of policies caused complaints from the people in the Xiongnu country. They no longer had the excitement they had before the war. Instead, they began to worry that they would be defeated and that the entire Xiongnu country would be punished by the Han Dynasty.

Xu Aimin suppressed his inner joy and said expressionlessly: "I can arrange for someone to negotiate with you, but whether it will succeed depends on the sincerity of your Xiongnu country."

Xu Aimin ordered his men to find a hall and arrange for peace talks between Zhang Pijiang, the Seleucid envoy Diodotus, and the Xiongnu envoy Zhang Ying.

Zhang Ying said sincerely: "My Xiongnu Kingdom is willing to give up the territory west of Seleucia to end this war."

From this point of view, the Huns were very sincere. Seleucia was the secondary capital of the Seleucid Empire in the east, and its location was roughly near Baghdad in later generations. This was almost half of the territory occupied by the Huns.

But Zhang Pijiang shook his head and said, "The envoy is still not sincere. My Han Dynasty has long made it clear that the bottom line for ending this war is that you, the Xiongnu, admit your mistakes and completely withdraw from the territory of the Seleucid Empire."

Diodotus snorted coldly, "Withdrawal from the territory was our bottom line before. The Huns have committed all kinds of atrocities in my Seleucid Empire, killing more than a million of our citizens. To end this war once and for all, you, the Huns, must apologize to our citizens who died in vain and pay 60 billion in war reparations."

"Puff!" Zhang Ying shouted angrily, "You Seleucids are so desperate for money that you dare to ask the Xiongnu for 6 billion."

Then he looked at Zhang Pijiang and said, "Zhang Lingjun, our Xiongnu Kingdom is sincere in negotiating. Are you just going to watch this white man messing around here?"

Diodotus said seriously, "Not much at all. The Allied Forces have spent 10 billion coins on military expenses so far in this war. This money was incurred by you because of the Huns' invasion of our country. If you want to end the war, you naturally have to compensate for this part of the military expenses. Moreover, you Huns killed a million citizens in my Seleucid Empire. It is reasonable for our country to ask you to pay 1000 billion coins in compensation. It is only coins per citizen who died. I don't think it is too much at all."

When Zhang Pijiang heard this, he found that it was indeed not much at all. However, he also understood that it was impossible for the Huns to come up with so much money. Now it was a negotiation, and it would be good if they could come up with an agreement. Moreover, the Huns really needed to be taught a lesson to let them know that the world belonged to the Han Dynasty, and even the Huns could only act within the rules of the Han Dynasty.

Zhang Ying scolded, "What qualifications do you have to ask the Xiongnu to pay compensation? If it weren't for the Han Dynasty's help, you Seleucids would have long been slaves of the Xiongnu. Strength is the key to success in this world. The Xiongnu have reduced your Seleucid Empire to only two cities. You have no right to speak here."

Then Zhang Ying looked at Zhang Pijiang and said, "Zhang Lingjun, just watch this lunatic disrupt the venue."

Zhang Pijiang said calmly, "I think what the Seleucid envoy said makes a lot of sense. It was the Huns who started this war of aggression. Now that the war cannot be continued, it is you Huns who want to end it. It is not reasonable for you Huns to pay the price for this war."

Zhang Ying's face suddenly turned ugly when he heard this: "Since Zhang Lingjun is so insincere, this peace talk cannot continue."

After saying that, he slammed the door and left the negotiation venue. If he agreed to this condition, he would be punished by the people of the Xiongnu Kingdom after returning home, and he didn't want to be a guilty lamb.

"Lord Zhang, should I reduce the war reparations?" After the Huns left, Diodotus became a little panicked. He came to Chang'an City to ask for support.

The Huns' desire for peace talks was a pleasant surprise to him. The Seleucids were more eager for peace than the Huns, because this war was fought on Seleucid land. Because of this war, the cities of the Seleucids were bombed into ruins by artillery fire, and even the capital Antioch was not spared. The casualties of the people in the country were incalculable, not to mention the people who were displaced in the war. In the most intense defense of Antioch, the main forces of both sides were Seleucids, which means that the Seleucids were bleeding and sacrificing at twice the rate. This war killed a generation of young people in the Seleucids.

Moreover, the Seleucid Empire owed the Allies a huge amount of war expenses. The war lasted for more than half a year, and the Allies spent more than 50 billion, most of which was spent on weapons and equipment. The most important reason why the Seleucids were able to hold off the Huns on the brink of defeat was the almost unlimited arms support from the Allies. However, the Allied military expenditures were also terrifyingly high. The salary of a soldier was tens of thousands of coins, and a soldier who died in battle would receive a resettlement allowance of 12 coins, which was 10 times more expensive than the most expensive mercenaries in Daqinzhou. The Seleucid Empire did not dare to use such a luxurious allied force, which led to the Seleucid commanders on the battlefield preferring to use their own soldiers to resist the Huns' attacks rather than let these noble soldiers enter the battlefield. Even the leader of the alliance, Zhou Yafu, planned to expand the number of allied forces when he saw the Huns expanding their forces.

But the leader of the Seleucid rebel army, Chiron, directly sent 5 young and strong men from the Seleucid Empire to Zhou Yafu for training. At least the domestic soldiers did not need to spend so much military expenses. In this situation where people died and money was spent, Diodotus actually wanted to end the war. If the war continued, even if he sold the Seleucid Empire to the Han Dynasty, he would not be able to repay the military expenses. Zhang Pijiang said calmly: "Don't worry, envoy. With the Han Dynasty here, the Seleucid Empire will not be defeated. This war reparations is what you Seleucid Empire deserves. If you don't ask the Huns who started the war for this money, do you want the people of the Seleucid Empire to bear this expense? This is 60 billion coins. Based on the tens of millions of people in the Seleucid Empire, it is equivalent to each citizen carrying a debt of 600 coins."

With the support of the Han Dynasty, Diodotus finally felt relieved. If he didn't ask the Huns for the 60 billion yuan, the Seleucid Empire would not be able to bear it. Now he could only rely on the power of the Han Dynasty to transfer the debt to the Huns.

That night, the Hun Embassy.

Zhang Ying told his men the content of today's negotiations, and the Hun envoys were naturally furious.

Who do the Seleucids think they are? Without the Han Dynasty, they would have become slaves of a conquered nation. Yet they dared to demand war reparations from the Huns. They were simply ignorant of their own limitations.

"Prime Minister, if we continue to fight, Seleucus will only have two cities left. What's so great about that? We can't capture Antioch with 5 men, and if we send another 10 men there, can we still not capture these two broken cities?"

Zhang Ying said angrily, "Fight, fight, fight, all you know is fighting. Do you know how much this war has cost our Xiongnu country? Since the war began, our Xiongnu country's military expenditure has exceeded 20 billion. The spoils we got from the Seleucid Empire a few months ago have now all been spent. Now our monthly military expenditure in the Seleucid Empire is 5 million coins. The treasury has been emptied. If we continue to fight, will you use your property to fight?"

The envoys present were all silent. Their property was being taken away, and the military officials had begun to force the big families of the Xiongnu Kingdom to subscribe to the Xiongnu's war bonds. But the upper-class families understood more clearly that the Xiongnu Kingdom was now stuck in a quagmire, and these war bonds would most likely become waste paper, the kind that would not even be enough to wipe one's butt with. What made them most helpless was that the Xiongnu's financial market was strangled by the Han Dynasty. In the past, the bonds issued by the Xiongnu Kingdom would still be purchased by the nobles and powerful people of the Han Dynasty. Although the Xiongnu were barbaric, the strength of the Xiongnu army was still recognized by the Han Dynasty, and the Xiongnu's war bonds were high-quality bonds.

But now the enemy they were facing was the Han Dynasty, and the Huns' war bonds were junk-level. Not only did no other nobles in the Han Dynasty buy them, but even wealthy businessmen from other countries did not dare to buy them. The Huns could only consume their own resources.

Fortunately, most of the founding generation of the Xiongnu people are still alive. These people have fought their way out of the dead, and their experience is much better than those nobles at the end of the dynasty. These people know that their families are sitting on the big ship of the Xiongnu Kingdom. If the Xiongnu Kingdom capsizes, their families will definitely be liquidated. At that time, let alone money, whether their lives can be saved depends on the words of the Han emperor. Chongzhen borrowed from all the court officials and only got 20 taels of silver, but the big families of the Xiongnu Kingdom found a way to raise 20 billion yuan to maintain this war.

It was these bonds that made the big families of the Xiongnu realize that the war was becoming more and more dangerous. Not to mention seizing benefits, if they were not careful, the Xiongnu Kingdom might be destroyed again, and their families might also fall apart. So Zhang Ying brought an envoy to Chang'an City to seek peace.

Zhang Ying said angrily: "Zhou Yafu has been called a tiger father and a dog son in the Han Dynasty. Why hasn't the emperor of the Han Dynasty replaced him yet? The Seleucid army has become a bloody millstone. The vitality of our Xiongnu country will be worn away by this millstone bit by bit. The people of the entire Seleucid Kingdom have been mobilized by Zhou Yafu. Do the generals of the Han Dynasty only know how to mobilize the people to be scapegoats to fight in the war?"

He knew that the predicament of the Huns was caused by Zhou Yafu. As the commander-in-chief of the allied forces, Zhou Yafu had not just been watching the battlefield for the past six months.

On the one hand, he sent reinforcements to support Antiochus and stop the offensive of the Hun army. Later, he discovered that in this battle, the defensive side had an advantage ten times that of the attacking side after digging trenches. Liu Ruyi relied on tens of thousands of remnants to withstand the attack of 7 Huns. Although of them were Seleucus's puppet troops, this also brought the war into a stalemate.

Then Zhou Yafu expanded the advantage of the trenches and found a way to get hundreds of thousands of Seleucid civilians to the battlefield. He had these civilians dig trenches and tunnels, and with Antioch as the core, he dug the battlefield with gullies crisscrossing. The Huns had to pay a heavy price for every step forward.

In the territories captured by the Huns, Zhou Yafu trained Seleucid guerrillas and sent them to occupy Seleucid villages and beat up the Huns' lackeys, preventing the Huns from obtaining food and other war resources in the Seleucid Empire. He then ordered the guerrillas to continuously attack the Huns' food routes and establish strongholds on the food routes, thus putting the Huns in a state of universal military service and ensuring that they would encounter guerrilla attacks anywhere in the Seleucid Empire.

Now the Huns had to be vigilant at all times as long as they were in the territory of the Seleucid Empire, and at the same time they had to constantly send troops to protect their food supply routes. In order to deal with the guerrillas, the Huns even conscripted a large number of Seleucid civilians to build fortresses. However, this only aroused more Seleucids to embark on the road of resisting the Huns.

At the beginning, Junchen planned to annex part of the Seleucid territory. He knew that the people in these territories would become Huns in the future, so Junchen maintained military discipline better. At the beginning, the people of the Seleucid Empire even had a good impression of the Hun army, because their military discipline exceeded that of the Seleucid nobles. But as the war did not go well, the Huns began to show the ugly face of invaders. First, they reaped a large amount of Seleucid wealth and sent it to the Huns, and then in order to support the war with war, they even took the food of the Seleucid people. Later, when the war was tense and there was a shortage of manpower, a large number of Seleucid people were conscripted as puppet soldiers to be consumed in the front line of the attack on Antioch, or they were asked to build fortresses to guard against guerrillas.

The Huns became more and more brutal, and more and more of them joined the guerrillas, and the situation of the Huns in Seleucid became more and more embarrassing. Although the Huns' soldiers were brave and good at fighting, they were now surrounded by tens of millions of Seleucid people. This led to the situation of the Huns' army becoming more and more dangerous, even though the Huns had won many battles and were about to destroy the Seleucid Empire.

Zhou Yafu was dealing with the Xiongnu army in the same way that the Han Dynasty had almost destroyed their Xiongnu nation. This was a horrifying discovery made by many Xiongnu generals after studying the war situation for half a year.

These veterans conducted war game simulations for more than half a month and found that as long as Zhou Yafu did not change his strategy, the Xiongnu army would undoubtedly be defeated, because there was no way that 5 troops could defeat the Seleucids, whose entire population was a soldier. Now it was meaningless to capture Antioch. Even if they used all their elite troops to capture Antioch, there were still 5 allied troops who had been trained for more than half a year waiting for them in Damascus. Now their enemy was the Han Dynasty, and the Xiongnu could not compete with the Han Dynasty, which controlled the entire world, in terms of consumption.

So the Xiongnu Kingdom sent its prime minister, hoping to end the war in advance before the Xiongnu showed signs of defeat. However, there is an old saying that goes, the invader can choose when to start a war, but the right to end the war lies in the hands of the enemy.

The two sides obviously couldn't reach an agreement. Now the national sentiment in the Xiongnu was high. If they withdrew from some of the occupied territories, they would be regarded as traitors by the Xiongnu people. If they withdrew completely, even if the Zhang family had been prime ministers in the Xiongnu country for generations, they would not be able to withstand the backlash. If the Xiongnu had to pay 60 billion in war reparations, the Zhang family would probably be completely destroyed. But if they couldn't reach an agreement, he had to find a way to negotiate.

The two sides then negotiated for half a month, but the terms of the peace talks were not reached. The lowest condition of the Han Dynasty was that the Xiongnu army completely withdrew from the Seleucid Empire, the military officials abdicated, and the compensation could be reduced or even waived, but the Xiongnu Kingdom had to hand over all the Seleucid nobles who had surrendered to them and use their property as compensation.

However, the lowest condition of the Xiongnu State was the territory west of Seleucia. At most, the Xiongnu could give up 100 miles. But the Xiongnu could not return empty-handed. Returning empty-handed would mean defeat for the Xiongnu. Not only Zhang Ying could not bear it, but even the military officials could not bear the backlash.

The two sides had a frank exchange, but the differences were still too great, and ultimately the peace talks ended in failure.

However, this peace talk gave Xu Aimin great confidence. In order to end the war, the Huns actually wanted to give up most of the land they had annexed. The seemingly cowardly Allied forces were the ones who took the initiative in the war. The Han Dynasty only paid 1 troops and some military supplies, but was able to suppress the Huns, the second most powerful country in the world. Moreover, these military supplies were purchased by the Seleucid Empire. For the Han Dynasty, continuing the war would promote the development of the military industry. What else can be said? Just keep fighting until the Huns surrender unconditionally and the military officials surrender.

(End of this chapter)