The study of basic necessities of life is the study of ancient wars. Of course, this is not entirely the fault of scholars. Comparing Chinese and foreign history books, we can see that the description of events in China history books is very brief, and the description of war is fleeting, which is far less detailed than that in western history books.
For example, in the battle of Changping, there are more than 500 words about the cause and effect in Historical Records, including 130 words about Lian Po being driven away by the State of Qin. Such uncommon words don't give much information.
The Expedition of Alexander describes how far Darius came to camp in the battle of Goga Milla, what kind of army formation he arranged, how far the army led by Alexander was from the Persian army and how to arrange it. It also describes how the two armies can't see each other across the hill, how Darius sent various troops to attack Alexander's phalanx after the war, and how Alexander sent someone to take the troops to deal with it until Alexander led his partner cavalry to lead Darius to escape from the Persian army. In the Chinese translation of Alexander's expedition, the whole content of the Battle of Goga and Milla accounts for 10 page!
After analyzing the actual strength, the command and communication ability of ancient armies, and the equipment of different armies, combined with the terrain of Milla, the logistics of the two armies, the formation arrangement of the two armies, and the direct confrontation between the two armies, this paper makes a modern comprehensive estimate of the combat strength of Gao Jia Milla. It is conceivable that through the study of the war history restored by combining historical materials and theories, the reliability of the force estimation is certainly not comparable to that of the water-filled figures in the ancient expedition, and similarly, China's Historical Records and other ancient historical books are not comparable.
However, they are all written in the form of historical records, and they know nothing about the details of the battlefield. It is naturally difficult for modern China scholars to learn from the West by restoring the ancient battlefield. This lack of attention to details limits modern research, and it goes far beyond military aspects. And we are still relying on poetry, garrison, etc. To study the population of Chang 'an in the Tang Dynasty, the west has already calculated the population of Rome through the information such as the number of apartments in Rome, because China's ancient history books have never used accurate figures to describe what Chang 'an was like (the figures are basically the figures of the whole area of Jingzhaofu).
On the other hand, since the time of Greece and Rome, there have been a large number of books in the West. For example, 3000 sheepskin scrolls were found in a family in the ruins of Roman times, which brought people all kinds of information of that era. The western countries began to interpret and study these cultural relics a long time ago, and the number of Qin and Han bamboo slips found in China is not small, but the sorting work has not been completed so far, let alone the comprehensive historical materials of various cultural relics. This backwardness in the excavation and collation of historical materials and cultural relics will naturally affect all aspects of historical research, and ancient wars cannot be immune to it.
The ancients actually admitted the moisture of the number of troops. "Biography of the Three Kingdoms, Shu Wei and Guoyuan" says that "breaking a thief's document is the first level of the abyss, so it is." That is to say, in the Three Kingdoms and before, it was normal to falsely report the meritorious military service, which clearly explained what the ancient forces were all about.
According to this ratio, the loss of Zhao in the battle of Changping is actually more than 40 thousand people, which looks much more real. After all, after Changping, Zhao quickly launched a series of wars and pulled out "hundreds of thousands" of troops in history books ... Don't think that 40,000 is an easy number. For a country with a population of one million, the loss of 40,000 troops is equivalent to the loss of/kloc-0,000 troops in modern China.
Of course, the more direct evidence is in various art books. As Gong Wei's The Art of War pointed out, an army of 20,000 people needs to deploy 6,000 people to protect the trenches! Guard is second, the farther the distance, the greater the power needed for transportation. Shen Kuo calculated an account in Meng Xi's written conversation, recruited hundreds of people, and removed the trench and other services, leaving only 70,000 troops on the battlefield. To maintain this 654.38+10,000 troops, it takes 300,000 civilian workers to travel back and forth on the supply line! At this level, you need to increase manpower, because it is no longer practical for people to eat by themselves and protect their own troops. Even with animal power, cattle and horses should eat themselves. For example, in the Tang dynasty, a horse needed to be rationed with 3 liters of horse feed every day, so it was difficult to improve the supply efficiency.
At the same time, since the Song Dynasty, the description of war in Sun Tzu's Art of War has been more detailed, so we found that the large array of Pingrong Wanquan, which was regarded as an invincible killer by the emperor in the Song Dynasty, did not mix hundreds of thousands of people as expected, but only used 654.38+04,000 troops, that is to say, the number of troops that could really be used in the Great Song Dynasty, which could not be reached by a generation ago, basically did not exceed this value. Therefore, we saw that in the Battle of Gentleman's Pavilion, tens of thousands of people were lost in the Song Dynasty, and the whole army was wiped out. Song Jun is almost elite, and 80,000 Song Jun in the city trounced the Liao army. These are top battles.
The later the times, the less soldiers were used in ancient dynasties.
Since the Tang Dynasty, written materials have greatly increased, but the number of troops on the battlefield in ancient books has become less and less. The more unified, the less available troops are, and the more chaotic the number is, the more uncertain it is. For example, in the Song Dynasty, hundreds of thousands of troops were dispatched occasionally. When Mongolia destroyed the Song Dynasty, it took 40,000 troops to enter the fishing city Cheng Jian. Hundreds of thousands of troops were also common in the founding war of the Ming Dynasty. For example, Chen Youliang's 600,000 troops fought Zhu Yuanzhang's 200,000 decisive battle, while Wanli only dispatched 80,000 people to fight the Korean War. By the end of the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng's 20,000 troops had entered Beijing, and the Qing Dynasty's 65,438+05,000 troops had entered Shanhaiguan all over the country. During the San Francisco Rebellion, Wu Sangui was the king of the day and had many allies, so it was difficult to muster 50,000 troops. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, facing the allied forces of Britain and France, the Qing Dynasty could not come up with 65,438+10,000 troops to fight at the gates of Beijing. In the heyday of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, less than 200,000 Taiping rebels crossed more than half of China, and 30,000 Xiang troops could besiege Tianjing. ...
Thanks to the rich preservation of official documents in the Qing dynasty, especially those of the imperial court, we can proudly glimpse the preparations and progress of some wars. Throughout the Opium War to Eight-Nation Alliance, we can see that the Qing army was always deployed at a speed of 1,000 to 3,000, but by Baliqiao, the legendary 100,000 imperial soldiers did not appear, and the 30,000 monks were the last barrier in Beijing.
The more I look at it, the more I feel that China in the Warring States, Three Kingdoms, Five Dynasties and Sixteen Countries seems to be farther away from us, even if it is a long-term war, even if there are only a few provinces.
Squeeze the digital water of ancient army with mobilization rate
Although the details of ancient battlefields are difficult to know, there is no other way to indirectly estimate how many troops there were in ancient times. After combining the development of military mobilization with the history of western wars, it is found that with the development of science and technology, the ability of countries to participate in wars is getting stronger and stronger. In particular, the implementation of technologies and measures such as social management, railway transportation, military station, professionalization of noncommissioned officers, and reserve service has made the proportion of troops/civilians that modern countries can use in the overall war more and more.
In ancient wars, civilians were not widely mobilized and quickly trained on the battlefield as in World War II, and all relied on the standing army. At the same time, railways and highways provide a channel for the efficient assembly of troops and materials, and solve the logistics problem that was stuck in the throat of ancient troops in the past.
Professional noncommissioned officers provide the possibility of cooperation among large forces. In ancient times, military training often depended on the individual generals, and laws and orders were different. For example, Qi Jiajun was implemented in Qi Jiguang, but its Yuanyang law was not frozen by other Ming armies. In this way, when your troops from all over the world gather together, it is difficult to cooperate effectively. You can only be scattered and cannot gather effective combat effectiveness. Therefore, many excellent generals in ancient times did not use a large number of soldiers, and often only took tens of thousands of people at most. In modern times, all countries have established their own unified standardized military training codes, and used these codes to train non-commissioned officers in the army and military schools, while non-commissioned officers are responsible for training new recruits, so that soldiers everywhere can receive exactly the same training, so that they can cooperate with each other when assembling.
For example, compared with ancient times, the European army in the Napoleonic era had more powerful wagons and more advanced wagons, and the transportation capacity of bicycles was nearly doubled compared with that in the Middle Ages. Coupled with unified logistics systems such as standard training and military stations, there are 300,000 to 400,000 troops in a battle in the European battlefield. Some people don't understand the technical accumulation needed to concentrate so many troops. They also imagine that Napoleon is not as good as Tian Lei, but just a firearm.
In the era of World War I and World War II, the social organization ability, transportation ability and civilian learning ability are getting stronger and stronger, and the troops that can be organized and mobilized are getting bigger and bigger. During the Civil War, both the North and the South of the United States almost reached the limit of their respective mobilization. At that time, the population of the United States was 3 1 10,000, the total strength of both sides reached about 1 10,000, and the mobilization rate was 3. 19%.
During World War I, Britain and France mobilized in an all-round way, with 40 million people pulling out more than 8 million troops, and the mobilization rate reached more than 2 1%. In relatively backward Germany, 63 million people mobilized 1 1 10,000 troops, and the mobilization rate was 17.5%. As for Russia, it is even more backward, only 8%.
By World War II, Germany was more advanced than World War I, and the mobilization rate reached 2 1%, while the Soviet Union was more advanced than Russia, but social organizations and railway transportation were not as good as those of Britain and France during World War I. Although we tried our best, the mobilization rate was only 14. 1%. ...
Therefore, it can be clearly seen that the more advanced the comprehensive level of society, the higher the mobilization ratio can be achieved. What about China?
During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression period, the Kuomintang mobilized 6.5438+0.4 million people, with a maximum force of about 8 million. At that time, the population of the occupied area was about 2 10/00000. If calculated by force, the mobilization rate is only 3.8%, and if calculated by general mobilization, it is only 6.67%, but there must be double counting in general mobilization.
Some people say that the anti-Japanese country * * * didn't do its best, so let's take a look at the civil war. The population of China reached 530 million in 1953. According to this calculation, the population in 46 years should be around 520 million. In order to get a higher mobilization rate, we will reduce it to 460 million.
In the three-year civil war, the number of troops of both sides added up to the highest level in 47 years, with 6.45 million troops. Including the militia and other non-combatants, the number of * * * militia reached its peak in 49 years, and the total mobilization figure was120,000, with a mobilization rate of only 2.6%.
That is to say, in the thirties and forties when there were railways, military stations, unified rules and regulations, non-commissioned officers, cars and highways, China people tried their best, and even if the calculation of cheating was put together, the mobilization rate could not reach more than 7%. Of course, we all know that China at that time, not to mention Germany during World War I, was far behind Russia during World War I, and the figure of mobilization rate was also in line with the reality of China at that time.
What will happen if those ancient figures are true? Zhao, whose Changping fell to 400,000, has a population of five or six million at most. Two years later, in the Battle of Handan, Zhao pulled out another 300,000 troops, including elite100,000. After five or six years, Zhao's 130000 troops went to break the Yan state ... this mobilization rate at least exceeded 10%!
In the Battle of Feishui, the former Qin dispatched 800,000 troops, excluding the China garrison, with a population of 8 million and a mobilization rate of 10%.
In the battle of defending Dagang in Jin and Liao, Liao had 700,000 troops and a population of 9 million, with a mobilization rate of 7.78%.
In the battle of Poyang Lake, Chen Youliang had 600,000 troops and a population of 8 million, with a mobilization rate of 7.5%.
Which one is much higher than the mobilization rate of the anti-Japanese countries * * *, and although China at that time was very backward compared with Europe, America and Japan, compared with ancient China, it had railways, highways, cars, telegrams, telephones, military stations, petty officers, certain industrial production, agricultural technology updates and medical and health reforms ... Anyway, China at that time was far more advanced than ancient times.
However, ancient scholars have thus drawn up a magical army with a mobilization rate of 10%, which was far from being achieved by China during the Anti-Japanese War, even by Russia in World War I. ...
The production capacity of ancient military industry is far less than that of modern times.
Many people thought that fighting in ancient times was simple, and a bamboo pole could be used as a soldier, unlike the war in the era of hot weapons, which required a lot of gunpowder and guns. Yes, but in terms of price, the price of a modern rifle may be several times that of a sword. However, many people forget that behind modern rifles are modern prosperous economy and developed industrial production capacity.
The manufacturing of cold weapons and related metallurgical technology in Song Dynasty were fully mature, and it was difficult for future generations to make a big breakthrough. So what was the weapon manufacturing in Song Dynasty? During the Northern Song Dynasty, the workshop stipulated that every seven craftsmen should make eight bows in nine days, every three craftsmen should make 150 arrows in two days, and every eight people should make five swords in six days ... With such a low unit capacity, the overall quantity is naturally unsightly.
After the reunification of the Northern Song Dynasty, almost all weapons were made by the central and local governments. The North and South workshops directly under the central government produce only 32,000 pieces of armor, vests, guns, swords, knives and bed crossbows every year ... The crossbow yard produces weapons such as bows, crossbows, arrows, bowstrings and armor pieces, while the total output of this kind of crossbow pieces produced by the central crossbow yard every year is 6,543,800+065,000, and there are even fewer places.
The output of more than 20 million seems not small, but most of them are arrows and armor pieces. You know, in the Song Dynasty, a pair of armor was needed 1825 pieces of armor (Song History 197 Military System XI Armor System). Arrows are more equivalent to disposable consumables, and there are not many opportunities for recycling, especially when they are defeated.
So what is the production level of modern military industry? Take the Republic of China as an example, which is regarded as a very weak military industry. 1936 alone, the arsenal directly under the Ministry of War Industry of the Republic of China produced 98,900 rifles, 65,438+27 million rounds of rifle bullets, 247,000 mortars, 0,976,900 grenades/kloc-0, 33,000 aerial bombs and 44,000 pairs of gas masks ("The Third Plenary Session of the Fifth Central Committee of the Republic of China in February,
The above figures are only the output of factories directly under the Ministry of War Industry, and as we all know, various factions in China still had their own arsenals at that time. It can be said that even the weakest country in modern times, the Republic of China, has dozens of times the production and supply capacity of the ancient empire. However, compared with the ancient prosperous times, the population of the Republic of China did not have the advantage of 10 times. Regardless of the Song and Ming Dynasties, there was a population of 1 100 million at the peak, and the population of the Republic of China was no more than five times.
In ancient times, it was only an illusion that all the people were soldiers.
Many people fantasize that people from the warring States, Sparta, Mongolia and other ancient powers have given birth to children in peacetime and can be pulled out as soldiers in wartime, so hundreds of thousands or even millions of troops just broke out. As we have seen before, the production capacity of ancient weapons is extremely low, and even an extra army of 654.38+10,000 people can't meet it quickly, and the damage caused by the suspension of production to ancient society is much higher than that of modern times. It is written in Hanshu Shihuozhi that a family of five (a young and strong male worker) can plant 100 mu of land, and each mu can receive one stone and a half millet. Excluding taxes and household consumption, there are only 45 stones left. It takes 1.350 yuan to sell 30 stones, while it takes 1.500 yuan for a person to change a suit, which means hard work.
Besides, the war won't happen until you are free. At the same time, only in the preparatory stage, it will take several months to mobilize civilian workers from all over the country and rush to the combat area to organize and rectify. Coupled with the slow pace of ancient wars, many wars lasted for several months. Just like the battle of Changping, Qin and Zhao were in the decisive battle stage of Changping, that is, from April to September when Zhao surrendered. Another famous water war began in August in midsummer and lasted for 65438+ February. Cao Cao launched Battle of Red Cliffs, prepared for battle from the first month of Jian 'an in 13, and sent troops south in July, but the fire of Chibi only burned to 12. In the course of such a long campaign, where can we wait for slack season?
War is not just about soldiers eating. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sent Wei Qing and Huo Qubing to the Xiongnu, with a maximum of 6,543,800 troops, while hundreds of thousands of people in the rear were responsible for the transshipment of grain, grass and ordnance. These hundreds of thousands of people also need to eat. The so-called one-off, one-off, one-off is often accumulated for several years to support such a battle. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty used foreign troops several times, all of which were tens of thousands or 65,438+tens of thousands, which seemed ridiculous to many people, but led to poverty and chaos in the country. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty also deeply blamed himself for "the task now is to ban cruelty, stop being good at taxes and help farmers". In other words, normal taxes alone cannot support a war with only tens of thousands of people, and extra money is often apportioned to the people.
Although the so-called ancient militarism was severely punished, the actual production capacity could not be changed, and even the cruel army had to have food to fight. Spartans look like men and soldiers, but behind them are heroic slaves whose population is several times that of Sparta, maintaining the agricultural and handicraft production of Sparta. The cultural scenes accumulated in decades have also been squandered by several "small fights" of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, which shows that the low productivity in ancient times can really support large-scale wars. Many people fantasize that they can become soldiers with bamboo sticks unless everyone tries to cross the valley.
Numbers mixed with water is a common problem of all ancient people, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, and rigorous writing of facts is not the demand of ancient people to write history books. The core purpose is to express personal thoughts with articles, and real historical research itself is the product of modernity.
For ancient civilizations, it is normal that specific individual technologies have their own advantages and disadvantages. In the ancient society, which developed slowly before modern times (15th century), new things appeared slowly, but spread much faster. As long as there is communication with each other, one party cannot overwhelm the other. It is the proper attitude of modern people to get rid of false pride or inferiority and treat the ancients with a normal heart.