A few days after the victory celebration, Roland devoted himself to farming again.
Sitting in the office, the ticking outside the window kept ringing, as if it were raining. It was the sound of snow melting. When he was in the countryside for Chinese New Year, he liked to lie down by the window and watch the long ice prisms under the eaves turn into transparent water droplets, dripping little by little. Although there is no such leisure at this moment, it is not bad to listen to the voice of the earth's recovery while writing a plan.
According to the experience of previous years, it takes about a week to melt the snow, but the road between the town and the fortress will take at least a month to pass. Roland could imagine what would happen to a dirt road without hardened pavement and drainage measures after the snow and ice melted. If he can successfully win Changsong Fortress, the first thing he has to do is to build a hardened road between the two places for carriages to pass.
However, the priority to be solved now is still the issue of army building. Without a reliable and strong army, it is impossible to defeat the garrison army with a numerical disadvantage. Converting the militia into a regular army is only the first step. The specific organization, rules and discipline, rewards and punishments are his headaches.
Although I played military chess when I was a child, I have already forgotten about it at this moment. After some thought, Roland decided to make it up himself. Anyway, he is the creator of the new army, and no one will find out if the setting is unreasonable.
Therefore, the establishment of the First Army in Border Town was soon released: the army, division, battalion, team, and group were used as the overall framework, with five people as a group (considering that one artillery requires at least five people to operate), ten groups are one team, ten The team is a battalion. As for the number of divisions and troops, he decided to consider it later. Given the overall level of combat in this era, as long as two or three battalion-level units are sufficient to defeat the vast majority of opponents in the field.
After the most basic framework was settled, Roland sighed.
The next rules and regulations are much simpler, except for the old-fashioned rules such as obeying military orders, obeying the superiors at all times, not fleeing, not betrayal, etc. Roland’s first discipline was to prohibit looting and disturbing the people. .
The disadvantages of indulging in looting are numerous, and the bad effects on the local population can take years to make up for. That's why he insists on using civilians as the military's composition.
When the nobles respond to the lord's call to go out, it is a fantasy to not participate in the looting after defeating the enemy. Including those innocent civilians on the territory.
As for mercenaries and bandits, not to mention. It looks sturdy and fierce, but in fact it can only fight against the wind. At the same time, robbery is also a major source of their income. Military discipline is meaningless to this group of people.
Only an army composed of civilians will not regard other civilians as lambs to be slaughtered. Of course, discipline and severe punishment alone are not enough. As time goes by, the greed in my heart will continue to expand with victories one after another. Therefore, incentives must keep pace with looting and other disciplinary violations.
In order to make the reward motivating enough, Roland decided to release the ultimate killer - Military Merit Grant. Fields can be granted to those who have made great deeds in battle. Roland had already thought about the source of the land. It was the land to be reclaimed between Border Town and the fortress.
This is definitely a huge prize in an era when 90% of the land belongs to the noble class. Once there is Hengchan, these people will be closely attached to themselves, and anyone who wants to overthrow him will meet the fiercest resistance of the beneficiaries.
The people are driven not by words and whips, but by real interests. In other words, as long as it can always represent the fundamental interests of the people under its rule, its dominance will be unshakable.
Different from traditional fiefs, Roland controlled the area of land granted to between a few mu and a dozen mu, which could be used to build houses, buy serfs or hire farmers to take care of the fields, but could not establish industries. In contrast, a knight's territory is nearly two thousand acres, an area equivalent to a small village. The income from the above operations can provide the combat needs of knights and attendants, such as the purchase of weapons, armor and horses.
Such a small area of land reward will not cause strong resistance from aristocratic interest groups, but also weaken the independence of the recipients. In Roland's view, it is equivalent to a retirement pension, which can ensure that soldiers will have some stability after retiring. income.
At the same time, in order to strengthen the centralization and avoid the situation that "the servant of the servant is not my servant", the person who grants the field only has its ownership, but no autonomy. That is, the land still enforces the laws, regulations, and institutions of the lord's jurisdiction. In a sense, they are more like the farmers of later generations.
After transcribing these initially conceived systems one by one, Roland stretched his back. Next, he can finally devote himself to the field he is good at - research and development of weapons.
As musket manufacturing increased, continuing to have pikemen to protect musketeers would be a waste of manpower, who had to be able to fight independently in close-to-hand combat.
The solution is very simple, which is to add a bayonet to the gun. Roland didn't expect his troops to take the initiative to launch a hand-to-hand charge on the enemy. He only needed to have the power to fight when the opponent jumped over the wall and the artillery failed to completely destroy the enemy's courage.
Something like a bayonet is not difficult to make. If you pursue simplicity, it is a sharp cone. The key is how the bayonet is connected to the gun: the original bayonet was a thin wooden rod wrapped around the handle, and the wooden rod could be inserted directly into the barrel. The advantage is that it is simple to manufacture, but the disadvantage is also very obvious. You cannot shoot in hand-to-hand combat, and it is very laborious to pull it out after the battle.
What Roland intends to produce is an improved second-generation bayonet—the casing bayonet. There is a corner at the end of the handle, which is connected with a piece of iron casing. The inner diameter of the casing is slightly larger than the barrel, with a zigzag groove, and only a small piece of iron strip needs to be welded on the barrel for the groove to be embedded to fix the blade. The blade is a triangular iron, with a V-shaped cross-section, and all three sides are edged. After piercing the body, it will not affect the extraction, and at the same time, it will leave a wound that is difficult to heal.
The sleeved bayonet will be slightly higher than the barrel after installation, which has a certain impact on ammunition loading, but compared with the folding bayonet, it is simple enough to facilitate mass production. As long as you make a sample, you can hand it over to the blacksmith to make it yourself.
The key to making the bayonet useful in combat is training soldiers on how to use it.
Roland knew nothing about this. Fortunately, he still remembered that the chief knight once boasted that any military weapon could be used well, so he simply asked him to teach the musket team how to fight bayonet.