Chapter 28 With foreign guns, Eight Banners soldiers are useless

Since the late Qing Dynasty, the uselessness of the Eight Banners soldiers has become an allusion.This allusion has been circulated for a long time, and when anyone is said to be useless, they are said to be the children of the Eight Banners. It seems that this allusion has not been a bit outdated until today, and no one has used it for a while.Probably because there were too many braided dramas in the past few years, and there were too many warriors in the braided dramas. In the late Qing Dynasty, the useless Eight Banners wandered around with bird cages. A fighter in armor wielding a sword, subtly, the Eight Banners seem to be rehabilitated.

However, in the late Qing Dynasty, the real Eight Banners disciples were really useless.Any group of people, no matter how vigorous they were at the beginning, if they are put there, eating, drinking, living, spending money, and not doing anything, they will be left alone for more than two hundred years.What will happen?It was originally said that the reason for not doing production was to let them fight, but later on there was no need to fight. Since the rise of the Xianghuai Army, the Eight Banners soldiers even avoided sending troops to show off in the past.There is no need to work, but the treatment is generous. Ordinary soldiers also receive four taels of silver per month, which is not counted as food and rice.In addition to being a soldier, there are Guan Ding, Cao Ding and Yan Ding who are rich in oil and water. You can get money by sitting at home.These errands were reserved exclusively for bannermen in the Qing Dynasty.If the bannermen are literate, their chances of being an official are many times greater than those of the Han people.The barbaric rationale of conquering the country and sitting on the country falls on a small nation, which makes the people addicted, and when the addiction is too great, people will be useless.

The privileges of the Manchus were not particularly hated at the time.The reason is that most of these people don't worry about money because of their hard-core crops.Spend money when you have money, don't bother to bargain with people when you buy things, pay on credit when you run out of money, and take it for granted if you don't.Anyway, the country is theirs, so they don't worry about sending them to jail for debts.So these masters take advantage of it all day long, and they have to spend a penny for what others can buy for a penny.The high-level relatives and nobles can still resist such extravagance. Anyway, they have a lot of income and not enough. Go to the emperor and go to the village head.As for the Eight Banners soldiers in the lower class, they can only eat their own food without money-in fact, with such an income, the Han family can live very well.After a period of time, everyone was so poor that the emperor had no choice but to use the treasury to give them relief and pay off their debts.

The Eight Banners children who don't do anything, the only thing they can do when they are full is to play.Walking birds, fighting crickets, listening to operas, singing operas, all useless things, omnipotent.It's good, it's bad smoking opium.However, cheating.Banner people generally don't do things like killing people and stealing goods.Of course, the emperor counted on their riding and shooting, so don't count on it by the way.Guns and knives are rusting, horses are fattening, no one uses them anyway, no one knows how to ride them.A boy of the Eight Banners stationed in Hangzhou recalled that his father was the only one who could ride a horse in the entire Hangzhou Banner Camp.Even when they are Guan Ding (customs), they also hire someone to do it for them.Anyone who cares about money will be looked down upon by everyone.Whenever a bannerman is in business, when asked by others, they will say that it is not a business, it is just for fun.

In the late Qing Dynasty, the imperial court began to modernize its military, but in fact it also wanted to "modernize" the Eight Banners.However, it is useless to practice the Eight Banners Foreign Gun Team.Master Baqi locked the foreign guns in the cabinet, and he didn't even look at them. Only when someone from above came to check and correct them, did he put the guns there and stand there for a while, pretending to be.Afterwards, the foreign guns were still put into the cabinet.An Eight Banners soldier recalled that he practiced foreign exercises for six years, but only let go of three shots, and he didn't even know the structure of the gun.It is estimated that the poor three shots were mostly the bullets that the servant helped to suppress.And the Huai army, that is, the foreign gun team of the Han people, can at least frighten the rebellious common people, but their colleagues in the Eight Banners can't even do this.

The Eight Banners foreign gun team was useless, the queen mother and the emperor did not give up, and when the imperial court began to implement new policies and train the new army, they began to train the Eight Banners new army again.Although the treatment is good, the equipment is excellent, the whole army is up and down, and the uniforms are bright. The officers wear imported command sabers, and they drag on the ground when they walk.But the masters of the Eight Banners just don't practice well.At the beginning, I did not work hard, and later even hired someone to replace me.Three battalions of the Eight Banners New Army stationed in Guangzhou, more than 1,700 soldiers, trained for two years. The new general spent a lot of effort and conducted a live ammunition shooting. All officers and soldiers were counted, and those who could hit the target, There are not many to count.

In the year of 1911, revolutionaries took frequent actions in Guangzhou.Wen Shengcai, a revolutionary from Malay, single-handedly wanted to assassinate a senior official of the Qing Dynasty. His original target was Li Zhun, the admiral of the navy, but he killed Fu Qi, the bannerman who was acting as the general of Guangzhou.At that time, Fu Qi was sitting in an eight-carrying sedan chair, going to watch the airplane show, surrounded by more than a dozen fully armed soldiers from the new army, but Wen Shengcai calmly assassinated him alone.People at the time recorded that Wen Shengcai ran straight in front of the sedan chair and shot him in the head. Fu Qi was still able to speak and yelled for help. "The flag soldiers started in a hurry, and looked at each other in astonishment. The assassin fired another shot and hit the head again, and the general couldn't speak. The flag soldiers avoided each other." They fled far away in one breath.Then Wen Sheng fired two more shots, and seeing that Fu Qi was dead, he fled calmly.If it wasn't for Wen Sheng's carelessness, he would not have been arrested at all if he was targeted by a Han plainclothes policeman.Later, Fu Qi's wife was very angry and wanted to hold the guards accountable.Unexpectedly, one of the leading co-lings was frightened and fell into a coma after returning home. After being rescued by his family, he came back to life, but he was still incoherent, so his wife had no choice but to forget about it.

Next, the party members launched the Guangzhou Uprising, and it was also the Han bureaucrats Zhang Mingqi and Li Zhun and the patrol battalion led by them who resisted the insurgents.In October of this year, the Wuchang Uprising broke out. The Han bureaucrats in Guangzhou and the gentry in the Advisory Bureau no longer wanted to help the court, and Guangzhou was restored.Although the Zhongqi Battalion of the Guangzhou Garrison accounted for more than half of them, and there were two or three thousand new troops among them, with German-made Krupp cannons and Maxim machine guns, they watched their own country collapse and did not let go.At first, the civilian army was a little worried, but later they found out that the flag soldiers were really silver-like wax gun heads, so they were not afraid.The greatest skill of the Eight Banners New Army is to sit at home and wait for the militiamen to come and be recruited and then dismissed.This is true of the Eight Banners New Army in Guangzhou, as well as the Eight Banners Imperial Guards in Beijing. When the revolution came, only Liangbi, a former bannerman brigade commander (Xietong), expressed his desire to resist. Nobody said anything.As long as the new commander Feng Guozhang said that the treatment of the imperial guards would never change, they willingly sold their ancestors.

That's the end of the good days of the Bannermen.It's not that there are no wise people who want to make recovery efforts, and it's not that they haven't tried hard, but after sitting in the mountains and rivers for a long time, the body and mind are numb, even if they know that waiting is a dead end, everyone still waits.When that day came, he was still waiting to die, not even having the courage to struggle.It seems that when sitting in the mountains and rivers, you can't sit too leisurely or too comfortable - if you are too comfortable, you will be useless.