Chapter 129: The Rhythm of War

As the prophecy spread, large numbers of common people who had become homeless or had no land left to till chose to sell off the household possessions they could not carry and flee westward toward Li Wenyuan. Along the way, most of them were escorted safely to Xue Ju’s territory by the Night Owls and roving bandit forces that Li Wenyuan had stationed in the various commanderies. Li Wenyuan was not afraid of exposing the bandits he secretly financed. After all, many among them were merely bandit militias and rebel volunteers temporarily hired with generous sums of money. It was precisely the mixture of truth and falsehood that made people believe them.

Once these refugees entered Xue Ju’s territory, they were considered safe. From there, escorted by Xue Ju’s army, they would pass through Jincheng and Xiping Commanderies and arrive at Wuwei Commandery. Xue Renyue, who had long since made preparations in Wuwei, temporarily registered and settled the refugees who had traveled thousands of miles by a winding route. Later, under the guidance of local officials, they would disperse throughout the eight commanderies of the Western Regions, filling the vast and sparsely populated lands there.

For a time, the first wave of refugees—nearly fifty thousand households—almost overwhelmed the administrative system under Li Wenyuan, whose personnel had no previous experience in receiving and resettling displaced people. Once this problem was recognized, however, the governors of the various commanderies increased their investment in officials for the system, and administrative efficiency was finally secured. The first group to reach the Western Regions—more than two hundred thousand refugees from fifty thousand households—was successfully settled. Apart from those who took advantage of interest-free loans to purchase land, Li Wenyuan also recruited another two legions, totaling thirty thousand men, and sent them to the new-recruit camps in the various commanderies for training. There was no such thing as a war without casualties. In a protracted conflict, whichever side handled logistical transport and troop replacements better would ultimately emerge victorious.

“We are facing more than a single war against the Western Turks. After destroying them, we will still have to spend a long time suppressing the steppe tribes that once depended on them. All of this will consume even more of our strength. If I were not worried about exhausting the people, I would make every man in the realm a soldier. You must understand: we have assembled five legions on the western front, seventy-five thousand fighting men, yet scattered across the grasslands, they accomplish almost nothing. What we must consider is war, and survival. Only after we emerge as victors will we have the right to think about living.”

Li Wenyuan said this when the ministers in charge of the Civil Affairs, Agriculture, and Works Departments blocked his gate to protest his decision to continue expanding the army.

Training new recruits did not itself consume an especially large amount of material. Yet after Li Wenyuan, drawing upon ideas from later generations, introduced the concept of professional soldiers ahead of its time, the cost of training a single soldier soared. Such a costly investment subtly made the army’s officers far more cautious in deploying their men. They no longer squandered their troops as expendable cannon fodder, because war, no matter the era, was always a contest of cost and efficiency.

Wars between nations were always fought by making the most rational and efficient division possible of a fixed and limited pool of total resources. Whoever made better use of the resources at hand could fight to the very end and ascend the throne of victory. From ancient times to the present, the essence of war had never changed. Whether men fought with firearms or wooden clubs, it was profit that drove and constrained war, and that had never changed. What changed was that profit had become more complicated and far more difficult to predict.

The three department ministers were all Li Wenyuan’s trusted followers. Each had first passed the imperial examinations and then studied at the School of Political Affairs, emerging among its most outstanding graduates. They were all from humble families, and one of them was a Sinicized barbarian whose grandfather had adopted Han customs. Their opposition to Li Wenyuan’s continued military expansion was simply due to the influx of fifty thousand refugee households into the Western Regions. In the Central Plains, where families still lived in extended clans, each household contained at least five to seven people. But after the turmoil of war, the illnesses and injuries suffered along the migration routes, and the deaths along the way, only four to six people per household ultimately reached the Western Regions.

Distributing subsistence grain to two hundred thousand people was not a problem. Li Wenyuan had prepared for that long ago. Finding homes for them, however, was a far more troublesome matter. The settlements intended for the refugees had already been planned, but an enduring shortage of labor had slowed construction. Just as the minister of Civil Affairs was preparing to use the method Li Wenyuan had first proposed and implemented in the Western Regions—providing relief through work—to solve the housing problem, Li Wenyuan’s conscription order drew away nearly one-third of the able-bodied men. That was what finally drove the minister of Civil Affairs to confront him directly.

The Agriculture Department had come because Civil Affairs was worried that the total grain harvest this year might not be enough to provide subsistence grain the following year. Its minister intended to sit down with Li Wenyuan and calculate the figures. Even so, the Agriculture Department was relatively inclined to settle the refugees as farmers, thereby securing this year’s harvest.

The Works Department had an even simpler reason. Its minister was already dissatisfied because Li Wenyuan had personally ordered that, under conditions of limited labor, resources should be tilted toward Civil Affairs. Now, with the shortage of workers causing the repair of the city defenses to proceed at a crawl, he had been driven nearly to the point of anger and had come to demand an explanation from Li Wenyuan.

Watching the three men argue their cases before him, Li Wenyuan felt a small measure of pride. Only a few years earlier, they had been traditional officials who could do nothing but nod submissively at orders from above and obey without question. Now they dared to use the authority in their hands to argue with him over matters of interest.

It was not that Li Wenyuan possessed some strange masochistic hobby. He simply understood that, if the power structure he had founded was to remain as honest, clean, and efficient as possible, he had to ensure that the waters of officialdom kept flowing. Only flowing water would not rot. Now, seeing the results produced by the democracy he had personally placed around his own neck, he could tell that everything was developing in the direction he had hoped.

But this was a time of war, and everything had to serve the war effort. If they lost, all their arguments would become meaningless. Thus, after Li Wenyuan once again emphasized the necessity of maintaining the army’s strength during wartime, the three men could only depart in disappointment, each returning to find his own way of resolving the problems before him.

Li Wenyuan also knew that the Western Regions were in urgent need of labor. Although the five legions were scattered across the grasslands so widely that they could scarcely be seen, they had not yet beaten the Turks into complete collapse. As long as he controlled the pace of the war and maintained constant pressure on the Turks, he would force them to concentrate their troops as much as possible. Once that happened, a few large-scale annihilation battles would be enough to make the entire steppe of the Western Turks his own. In the plan Zhang Juntai had submitted to Li Wenyuan, he had mentioned the issue of controlling the pace of war for the first time.

Among Li Wenyuan’s generals, Zhang Juntai was one of the most steady and cautious. Even when he occasionally proposed plans imbued with a strong element of risk, he did his utmost to prepare escape routes in the event of failure. Li Wenyuan therefore had considerable confidence in him. After carefully reading Zhang Juntai’s plan, he offered the three ministers who had come to demand an explanation a concession: outside their training duties, they could temporarily draw on the soldiers for other necessary work.

End of Chapter