[Lightscreen]
[To put it in modern terms, it's like this.
You can give up the first tower. The second tower can go too. The dragon can be ceded. Baron can be ceded. High ground surrendered. Elder dragon handed over. In the end, even the base is given away.
Always managing. Always getting beaten. Always claiming it's not a loss. Always ending in defeat.
The Song dynasty even officially compiled the Seven Military Classics, setting a precedent for systematic military theory. Northern Song scholar-officials could be said to have read more military texts than anyone.
Yet when it came to actual battlefield execution, they were the most naive of all.
Zhao Er's disastrous decisions certainly played a role, but the scholar-officials' habit of aiming high while lacking practical ability was just as responsible.
They all half believed that with Zhao Er's battle formations protecting them and the Seven Military Classics memorized, each of them was the reincarnation of Han Xin, every one a second coming of Zhuge Liang, able to destroy enemies with a wave of the hand.
But in reality, do you think only you are clever when it comes to war?
One of our founding marshals once said that his reputation as a "constantly victorious general" came not from any special genius, but from doing one thing right.
Never waste the chance to win a battle. Never let that chance slip away, because once it's gone, it will never return.
This most simple and direct understanding of war was exactly what the scholar-officials of the two Song dynasties lacked.
As for another thing the same marshal said, "In all tactics, the most important tactic is to fight to the death. If we're wiped out, we're wiped out. If we're finished, we're finished," that was something the scholar-officials likely understood even less.
And if we look back at the most admired generals of the Song, they were precisely the ones who grasped this principle best.
Han Shizhong once charged two thousand Jin cavalry with only fifty riders at the Hutuo River, routing them. After breaking free, he still wasn't satisfied and pursued with his smaller force for dozens of li.
Among Yue Fei's commanders, Yue Yun fought at Yingchang with nearly twenty thousand men against Wuzhu's fifty thousand elite Jin troops. They clashed back and forth dozens of times. Man and horse alike were soaked in blood. From morning until night they fought, grinding the Jin army down until it finally collapsed.
Yang Zaixing, with three hundred elite cavalry, encountered twenty thousand Jin soldiers. After sending word back, he led his men into battle without hesitation. All three hundred died, but they killed two thousand enemies. Yang knew they could not outrun the Jin cavalry. There was only battle. Only death.
Examples like this run from Wei Qing and Huo Qubing to Li Shimin and Li Jing, then to Yue Fei and Cao Youwen, and later to Xu Da, Chang Yuchun, and Qi Jiguang of the Ming.
No tactic is unbreakable. Only willpower that cannot be crushed.
From its founding to its fall, the Song borderlands were in constant friction. Advance, retreat, advance again. Generals forged on those front lines understood best what we now call "every inch of land paid for with blood."
But the Southern Song emperors and scholar-officials?
Very well then, let us make peace. Submit. Call them elder brother and uncle.
The classical military tradition of the feudal age was first framed by giants like Jiang Shang, Tian Rangju, Sun Wu, Wu Qi, Sun Bin, and Wei Liao. Later generations of strategists such as Han Xin, Li Jing, and Liu Bowen refined it further. By then the system was nearly complete. Almost any battlefield problem could be answered from the books. That was the confidence scholar-official commanders relied on.
But Sun Wu said at the very start that a general must possess wisdom, trustworthiness, benevolence, courage, and discipline. Of these, the courage that drives a man to fight to the death, eyes split with rage, liver and guts torn apart, can never be learned from books.
In this sense, East and West are the same.
During the First World War, at Gallipoli, the Ottoman colonel Mustafa Kemal told his soldiers:
"I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die."
In the end, with barely a thousand men and at the cost of near annihilation, he held back twenty thousand British and Australian troops supported by battleship bombardment, buying time until reinforcements arrived. It allowed the dying Ottoman Empire to preserve its dignity before the end.]
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Though he kept saying they would wait for Luo Guanzhong and Liu Sanwu to arrive before testing the truth of all this, in Empress Ma's eyes her husband's body was far more honest than his words.
Right now, for example, he was busy praising the marshal's remarks.
"I like that," Zhu Yuanzhang said. "Once the chance for battle is gone, it's gone for good. Just like Xin Qiji said, ideas can be discussed together, but once the order is given it must be decisive. If everyone dithers, before a decision is made the central army's already been ambushed."
Empress Ma sat calmly on the bed, leaning over the small table that had been moved up earlier. She wrote and sketched as she tried to record the youth's many unfamiliar concepts in the most concise way possible. From the corner of her eye she watched her husband pacing restlessly near the screen, hopping up and down as if he wanted nothing more than to climb inside and drag out those military books and maps.
The emperor seemed to sense her gaze and quickly settled down, turning instead to her notes.
"What did you write, little sister? Let me check if you missed anything."
"Well… it mentions dragons of different sizes. So there really were dragons after all. But these 'first tower, second tower' things… were they still devoted to Buddhism in that era?"
Rolling her eyes, Empress Ma pushed him away.
"If you like it so much, then keep watching. Who knows, the thing might go dark in the next moment and never appear again."
Then, curiosity surfacing, she asked,
"But that marshal's words about 'fighting until wiped out'… they don't sound like something a commander would say. Isn't impatience the worst flaw for a general?"
Mention military matters and the emperor immediately gained three parts swagger. He shook his head.
"The Wei Liaozi says that if you can kill even half the enemy, your power will awe the world. Being wiped out entirely is not so easy.
Just like how the Marquis of Huaiyin could win with his back to the river. Anyone else copying that blindly would be seeking death. Trusting such ideas without preparation is fatal.
If that marshal could say such a thing, it means his training, strategy, and preparations were already complete. Once battle began and opportunity appeared, of course he would fight to the death.
Take Cao Youwen. His brother lured the enemy. He himself marched in the rain. The pincer was already formed. Given time, the Mongols would certainly lose. Who could have guessed that Wang Shixian would wander into the area and become their reinforcement?"
But the explanation was getting long. When Zhu Yuanzhang glanced up and suddenly spotted the names Liu Bowen and Chang Yuchun on the screen, his interest dimmed a little. He waved it off.
"In the end, the art of war comes down to training troops and making decisions in the moment. Nothing more than holding to the orthodox and striking with the unexpected. Those Song scholar-officials couldn't even train soldiers, let alone anything else."
Fortunately, the changing images on the screen quickly captured Empress Ma's attention.
Something sharp, larger than a man's arm, was shoved into a chamber. With a shouted command in a foreign tongue, the object shot forward through a passage, then launched into the air. It traced a terrifying arc before plunging into a mountain hollow and exploding with earth-shattering force, dirt spraying like rain.
As the smoke climbed skyward, a scene beyond imagination appeared before the couple in Kunning Palace.
An ocean dyed red by fire roared beneath the night. Giant iron ships floated upon it, still thundering. One after another, those same sharp objects were launched skyward, falling onto the land in endless explosions.
Along the coastline, strange armies advanced inland. Deeper inside, scattered defenders could be seen, faces set in grim resolve.
Artillery fire ignited the sea. Black smoke choked the sky. Soil and shattered stone rained endlessly down, mixed with broken limbs.
The Ming emperor's brows knotted tightly. His voice came out hoarse.
"…This… is also a battlefield?