Musketeer No. 42

"That settles it then. Training a hundred-odd matchlock gunners, provided the training is rigorous and the reloading steps are streamlined to take the absolute minimum amount of time, should yield a relatively concentrated firepower strike capable of handling small groups of Tatar cavalry—assuming our luck isn't atrocious and we get surrounded by a large Tatar force."

Hearing Wu Zhangkui's words, Wei Guangde clapped his hands together and said with a hint of excitement.

Thinking of this year's northern expedition, Wei Guangde figured that even if his father went, the chances of him encountering a large Tatar force and getting dragged into a fierce battle were slim, so he spoke quite casually.

Be it in this era or even back in the modern world he came from, many elders still held numerous taboos regarding the things they said, especially concerning life-and-threatening topics like this, which were strictly forbidden.

Call it feudal or superstitious, but speaking auspiciously to court good fortune remained critically important.

"Since you put it that way, and since I don't know much about matchlocks and fire-tubes, do you think we should transfer gunners from the other hundred-household garrisons? After all, they have some experience, which would still be much better than making those green recruits learn from scratch.

Well, among my own men, I imagine I can scrap together roughly a hundred skilled gunners or so. Besides, should we also gather the archers and put them through rigorous training?"

Since things had reached this point, Wu Zhangkui had to figure out how to get the men trained as quickly as possible, as this concerned their very lives.

Pulling experienced gunners from other garrisons became his ideal course of action, as it would rapidly assemble a seasoned force of marksmen.

It wasn't that he was unaware of the differences between archers and matchlock gunners in this era. Relatively speaking, the value of an archer actually surpassed that of a gunner, because an archer could loose a dozen or twenty arrows at the enemy in one breath, whereas a skilled gunner during the same period might only manage a few shots.

However, training archers was far more troublesome than training gunners; they could not be turned into an army as quickly.

Archers couldn't just release their arrows and be done with it. Without accuracy—without the ability to land arrows in the required zones as requested—it would simply be a waste.

What archers needed most was arm strength, and the physical condition of those soldiers at present was fine for swinging a hoe, but somewhat lacking when it came to drawing a bow and loosing arrows.

Moreover, the maintenance of bows and arrows was far more troublesome than that of firearms, and Wu Zhangkui didn't believe he could gather an adequate supply of bows and arrows.

Matchlocks, by the looks of it, were at least sufficient in number, provided they could retrieve this batch of firearms from the garrison warehouse ahead of time and spend a little time helping those gunners recover their proficiency.

That was what Wu Zhangkui had in mind, but he hadn't expected his nephew to shake his head in opposition.

"Uncle, it's best to select honest and reliable men from among the garrison veterans for training.

What the proficiency level of the gunners in other garrison units is, I don't know, but as for the gunners in our own Bengshan garrison, most of them have long since lost or pawned their bread-winning tools clean away.

In our fortress, aside from Tang San, who is somewhat familiar with those things because he's in charge of firearm maintenance, as for the rest of the gunners—to put it bluntly—they probably haven't even seen what a matchlock looks like."

Wei Guangde recalled what he had learned from chatting with Tang San back when he was studying the matchlock.

The weapons in the garrison were originally supposed to be issued to the soldiers, but they had all been locked away inside the garrison warehouse.

Wei Guangde guessed that his old man had done this out of fear that the soldiers would secretly sell the weapons for money.

Only the archers had managed to retain their weapons; first, because they needed them for hunting in the mountains, and second, because Elder Wei still hoped his archers could maintain a certain level of combat effectiveness.

And once those weapons were locked up, trying to get them moved out again—well, they had only been brought out half a year ago, but he seemed to recall Tang San saying that the gunners had needed him to take them by the hand and teach them several times before they could barely remember how to use them.

These were the skilled gunners his uncle spoke of...

Wei Guangde certainly didn't agree with that by a hundred and twenty percent.

Yet, recalling articles he had read in the future, he vaguely remembered that it was around this era that the Great Ming produced a military commander—actually two, with the most famous one named Qi Jiguang, and another named Yu something-or-other, whose last character Wei Guangde didn't recognize.

That latter figure wasn't very familiar to Wei Guangde; it seemed few people in posterity commented on him, with most focus centering on Qi Jiguang.

And the reason Qi Jiguang achieved fame naturally relied on the Qi Family Army, which was composed of miners from Yiwu under his command.

He remembered the articles he read at the time stating that Qi Jiguang recruited his men from the mines in Yiwu, but he also vaguely recalled it being said that Qi Jiguang recruited them after witnessing peasant clan feuds. Anyway, it felt a bit contradictory, but the Zhejiang soldiers recruited from those parts seemed truly capable of fierce fighting, ultimately forging the renowned Qi Family Army.

That very last detachment of the Qi Family Army even seemed to have fought against the Manchu Tatars. Although they were defeated in the end, it appeared they only succumbed after being besieged by an overwhelming force.

The Qi Family Army seemed to be a military force with an exceptionally high proportion of firearm equipment during that era, even surpassing Westerners of the same period.

What did this indicate? It indicated that as long as an army was well-trained, using the firearms of this era actually gave them a chance to defeat Tatars of comparable strength.

Yet the real Qi Family Army not only exercised strict selection at the very source of recruitment, but also endured grueling hardships in subsequent training. At the same time, Qi Jiguang didn't conquer the world solely through matchlock guns; in reality, it was the combination of matchlocks, cannons, and wagon formations that allowed the Qi Family Army to carve out such a formidable reputation across the northern steppes.

However, success can be attributed to the same factor as failure. Because the army's combat effectiveness was so formidable, it directly caused the Mongolian Tatars of that era to lose their nerve.

Ever since the Qi Family Army was transferred to the north after pacifying the wokou pirates, following a few skirmishes, the enemy began actively avoiding Qi Jiguang. This completely robbed him of the chance to win major battles and establish grand merits; lacking sufficient military exploits, he never received a peerage until the day he died.

The saying "Those who excel in battle have no renown for great exploits" perhaps referred precisely to this principle.

Conversely, Li Chengliang of the same period adopted the strategy of nurturing bandits to preserve his command, periodically shearing them like sheep to accumulate military merits, and was ultimately ennobled as a marquis during the Wanli reign.

Of these things, Wei Guangde was naturally unaware. In his impression, the great hero Qi Jiguang ultimately met a bleak and desolate end.

He also had no idea how the Qi Family Army actually won its battles; wagon formations and mandarin duck formations left no particular impression on him.

Perhaps in the future, he would find out.

Or perhaps, he never would.

Right now, however, Wei Guangde brought up the section on soldier selection used by Qi Jiguang that he remembered reading.

"We can select soldiers from the entire thousand-household garrison—not only those who are physically fit, able to run and jump, but also men who are honest, obedient, meticulous, and conscientious in their work."

Wei Guangde carefully rummaged through the meager inventory left in his mind. "If soldiers aren't honest, the moment they see the wind turning unfavorable, they might run even faster than Dad and you, Uncle.

That is to say, no matter how strong their combat prowess might be, those veteran scoundrels absolute cannot be accepted.

Next is training. Afterward, I will thoroughly summarize my insights on playing with matchlocks and teach them to that bunch of gunners. It will surely multiply their combat effectiveness several times over..."

Wei Guangde had never been a soldier and didn't understand military training, but as a modern man, he was very clear about the developmental history of rifles. Moreover, he knew several methods from the intermediate period for enhancing firearm combat effectiveness; he had even experimented with them when shooting birds with guns. Naturally, he felt he was the person in this room best qualified to speak on how to maximize the lethality of the matchlock.