Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 1282 Order Reorganization ([-])

The rattling "Star of La Plata" train slowly stopped at Shengxing Township Railway Station. With the whistle of the arrival at the station, Zhou Shenwo, director of the State Administration of Precious Metals, walked straight away accompanied by his entourage. He entered the office of the Shengxing Township Military Management Office not far away, and then called the director of the Military Management Office, Nanjiro.

Although Nanjiro was an army official, considering that the senior official from the central government who summoned him for questioning was not something he could offend, and this person had a somewhat tactful personality, he immediately trotted over, making several other people in the office All the army red deer looked sideways at it.

"Director Nan, I heard that Chief of Staff Mo has come to the mountains, where is he now?" Zhou Shenwo asked straight to the point when they met.Standing opposite him, Nanjiro was wearing a clean white shirt, the hem of the shirt was tucked into military trousers, and a pair of old cooked cowhide boots that had not been dyed (maybe faded) on his feet. With a flattering grin, not at all the stinky, hard, "hateful" look of most Army officers.

"Your Excellency the Chief of the General Staff visited the Shengxing Township Railway Station last week. He came back with a team of laborers, but he only stayed for one day and one night before heading north again. We don't know where we are now, after all. There is no telegram there. I suggest that you go to Anyuan Township and Anping Township to have a look. Your Excellency Chief of Staff’s team should be quite large, so you can find out if you go there.” Nanjiro replied cautiously.

"Okay." Zhou Shenwo got up immediately and said, "How do I get there? Do you have a horse here?"

"The horse is gone, but the carriage is still there." Nanjiro said, "Do you want me to send some people to escort you there?"

"The carriage is the carriage. You can choose the guards as you see fit. This is the area that I have cleaned up on the East Coast for many years. I don't believe anyone else can threaten my life." Zhou Shenwo said while calling his men to prepare to set off.

Zhou Shenwo and others soon returned to Shengxing Township Railway Station.Unfortunately, a small fire just broke out near the train station, and a house storing military cans burned for no reason. Fortunately, the patrolling militia found it in time and immediately organized laborers to put out the fire.However, hundreds of boxes of canned oranges, canned sea bream and mushroom sauce, and canned scallion whale meat stored in the house suffered a lot. The two dereliction of duty warehouse managers have been arrested by the gendarmerie, and it is estimated that the end will not be too good.

The traffic chaos caused by the fire lasted a long time before it ended.At three o'clock in the afternoon, Zhou Shenwo and other talents boarded a convoy transporting supplies to the north and embarked on a long journey.On the way to the bank of Wujiang River, there are four settlements on the way, namely Shenglong Township, Shengyun Township, Xingguo Township (newly established, near the small town of Saiertang in later generations) and Xing'an Township, some of which were built before the outbreak of the war. The ones that were established within one year are almost self-sufficient now, and some were established during the outbreak of the war. There are not many residents, and the infrastructure is poor, and it is not much different from a barren land.

This meeting (April 4th) is already mid-autumn, and in well-developed settlements like Shengxing Township, yellow wheat ears can be seen everywhere in the wild, and the growth is extremely gratifying.Some farmers sat in front of the simple houses they built with branches, pine boards, adobe and thatch, happily sharpening their sickles, as if they were preparing for the autumn harvest.

"What a lucky man, he was not transferred to the front line to serve as a former civilian husband, and then returned home exhausted, covered with wounds and diseases, and the reward was just a few bags of snatched tobacco and cane sugar. Maybe good luck If you can drive back a sheep, you can also find two useful farm tools in the house of the Brazilian manor, what else can there be? Is it interesting to be driven to death by the army red deer like chickens and dogs?" There was a slight discussion behind Zhou Shenwo, which made him frown secretly. Is it because he treats people too generously, so that these young interns dare to talk openly about the Ministry of War? This kind of atmosphere But it can't help.

"That's right, I wanted to say that a long time ago." Another voice echoed behind him, and Zhou Shenwo listened patiently to them: "Look at these rotten earthen houses, rotten wooden houses, and the Duck Lake Basin, and Is there any comparison in the prairie area on the east coast? There are durable and solid brick houses, and there are beautifully manicured vegetable gardens around the houses. Wheat and alfalfa are planted in the farmland, and every household raises 8-10 head of cattle. The fruit trees on the edge of the field are full of forests. The children can climb up to pick the fruits to eat after school, and they can also go down to the canal to touch fish and shrimp. The abundance of life is not comparable here. Why are these people’s lives so difficult? Is it just because this is a new settlement? Of course not, it’s because the army and the war took up a lot of resources and money. This is the root of their poverty. It’s ridiculous that these people still support the army unswervingly. It's ridiculous!"

In fact, what this person said just now may not be without merit.For example, with the increasing size of the army and the sharp increase in daily military expenditures, the Ministry of Finance has insufficient funds for national construction. Of course, the increasing number of immigrants is also a reason that cannot be ignored, but white shirts will naturally not mention this. ——In addition to the outbreak of the East-Portuguese War, all kinds of construction funds were greatly squeezed out, and all the diversions were needed, and domestic construction was naturally left behind.

In rural areas like these new settlements, in the early days, people on the east bank built houses and waited for immigrants to come, and then let the immigrants pay for the house construction with mortgage loans; later, because the number of immigrants was increasing day by day , and other aspects of the surge in expenditure, this form can no longer continue, the Ministry of Construction gradually began to require new immigrants to pay "down payment" to raise housing construction project start-up funds; and in recent years, this payment "down payment" The method of "funding" is not enough to fill the massive construction deficit. The Ministry of Construction began to freeze most of the housing construction projects in new settlements indefinitely, and only selected some key areas for concentrated construction (preferably with convenient local transportation. If it is opened building materials factory would be even better), and asserted convincingly that each newly-built settlement must be self-reliant and not "wait, rely, and ask". The words almost clearly said that I have no money and can't take care of it, and you should solve it yourself first. housing problem.

So, you can see now that there are self-built cottages of this kind everywhere along the road, which are very simple and unattractive, but they can only make do with it.Moreover, these people do not have enough money to build houses, and there are no building materials companies nearby. The cost of buying building materials from afar and transporting them back is really touching.It's better to make do with it first, and wait for two years to have some savings on hand, and when the railway transportation capacity is no longer crowded by military funds (this means that building materials can be transported from other places at a relatively low cost), it will be almost enough The brick house was built.

"There is no agricultural machinery rental team here, and Dafeng Factory probably doesn't have the money to produce enough agricultural machinery to cover the area; the number of livestock is not large enough, and the size of the animals they see is also very thin. Can they really be used to plow the fields?" echoed and said.

Hearing this, Zhou Shenwo couldn't bear to listen anymore.Although he is one of the major backers of the white shirts in the mouth of the Ministry of War, it does not mean that he will ignore the facts. In fact, the living conditions of the residents here are poor, and the main reasons for the lack of livestock and agricultural machinery are inconvenient transportation and poverty.Many of the livestock that the army has robbed from Brazil are already trying to find ways to sell them on credit at a low price, and this is actually the reason why these people support the army, otherwise you think they are stupid?Therefore, Zhou Shenwo coughed heavily at this time, interrupting the unreliable discussions of the followers.

The convoy continued to drive forward unsteadily. Due to the use of the latest steel axles (forged and processed by blacksmith series hydraulic presses), the performance of this type of heavy cargo carriage has been greatly improved, and the mean time between failures has been greatly improved. promote.Coupled with the advancement of shock-absorbing springs and the convenience brought by the widespread use of solid rubber tires, it is no longer an unbearable thing to use a freight wagon to drive among low hills-at least the failure rate has been reduced More than one-third, which is enough for the supporters who suffered from the breakdown of their trucks.

Not far from the convoy, you can see black laborers leveling the ground everywhere. The conditions of these laborers transported from Angola, Swahili, and Congo are, to be honest, much worse than those who first worked on the prairie on the east coast. up.Without him, because of the needs of the war, the supervisors are constantly urged and questioned by their superiors, so they are driven to work like mad dogs all day long. On these construction sites where people are exhausted everywhere, it is impossible for anyone to sit down and rest for a while. I had an extravagant hope, and sometimes even if my hands and feet were slow, I would be served by leather whips and military sticks.Everyone was squeezed out of twelve points, and made every effort to advance the opening time of the railway, which naturally caused the death rate of construction workers to remain high-the people on the east coast were almost overdrawn by killing chickens and eggs. These laborers are gone.

Thanks to their efforts, the Shasheng section of the northern railway (about 58 kilometers) was miraculously completed at the end of January 1661, making the mileage of this railway an astonishing 1 kilometers (including those that had been repaired before. The Pingliu line is 214 kilometers long), which can continuously and quickly transport the material resources from industrial and agricultural areas such as Ping'an County to the Brazilian plateau, and then transport them to the front line with mule and horse teams and freight wagon trains to support the combat operations of our soldiers on the East Coast.

This section of the line that is leveling the roadbed is the Shengxing-Shenglong section of the Northern Railway, with a total length of about 51 kilometers, and the construction is not very difficult.After a large number of construction workers moved to this section, the progress of the most labor-intensive and time-consuming roadbed leveling work has been greatly accelerated. In just two or three months, about half of the work has been completed. The final opening of this section of the railway will be completed in the second half of this year. The realization made everyone feel very excited - the work efficiency during the battlefield is indeed not comparable to usual.

The convoy of Zhou Shenwo and others finally crossed the Wujiang River on the last day of April and arrived at Anyuan Township on the north bank.Here, he really met Mo Ming, Chief of Staff of the National Armed Forces, and his party. At that time, he was escorting a group of prisoners of war back south with the disbanded Dongfang County Security Regiment. When he saw Zhou Shenwo also came here After the treatment, he was a little surprised at first, but then he seemed to think of something, smiled and said nothing, but directly sent someone over to invite them to the township government for a detailed discussion.

The Anyuan Township Government is a fairly majestic stone building. It used to be the town council of the Portuguese colonial government. Now it is naturally transformed into a township government by the people on the east coast. It also serves as a bank, warehouse, police station, etc. All in one.Mo Ming’s adjutant brought everyone the popular yerba mate tea, and then served some snacks—mostly spoils looted from the north, such as Brazil nuts—then quietly went out and closed the door, Space is left for the two parties to discuss in secret.

"Chief of General Staff Mo, I was actually entrusted by the central government to come to the new northern occupied area this time. In fact, it's not a big deal. The only thing is to rectify the almost collapsed economic order here and make it operate normally. And the first One, it’s about your excessive issuance of military tickets and IOUs of various names…” Zhou Shenwo took two sips of tea lightly, then raised his head and said, “Especially those crudely printed military tickets, if If I expected it to be right, you have printed a lot recently, right? And the types are different, and each army even prints its own. This is a mess of demons. Chief of Staff Mo, this is not good, it will be very serious Affecting the reputation of our army and our government..."

"What am I supposed to do? So it's these." Mo Ming lit a pipe by himself, took a puff of smoke, then looked at Zhou Shenwo and the others, and said, "The IOUs are mainly in Anyuan Township, Anping Township, Port of San Vicente and other places are issued to some Chinese businessmen, mainly in kind, mainly to donate military supplies. This kind of material consumption is very fast during the war, and the rear cannot be transferred in time, so it can only be I have to find someone to deal with the emergency. As for the military tickets, there are indeed quite a few. The South Route Army, the East Route Army, San Vicente, and the Rio area have all printed a batch, and the format is different. Most of them are circulated in the occupied areas. In the hands of the Portuguese and Indians. Especially after the liberation of a large number of Indian slaves, we need to pay for hiring them to work and exile, but there is no such expenditure in the plan made in advance, so we have to print military tickets What? Your finance department wants to recycle these military tickets? So rich? It’s amazing!”

"Yes, we want to recycle military tickets, but not all of them, mainly the whites or Indians who are still in the occupied areas and have chosen our nationality (more than 95% are Indians). Chairman Qiang said that they will be moved to If you want to settle in an overseas colony, then it is best to recycle the military tickets in their hands, whether it is money or in kind, this problem must be solved after all, and this is also the first step for the executive committee to rectify the order in the newly occupied area." Zhou Shenwo replied.

(End of this chapter)