In 1918, Zhang Zongchang was appointed commander of the First Division, and once, after coming to Beijing to receive two months' salary, he was pulled by a fox friend in Beijing to gamble money, and lost a fine light overnight. In the end, it was Feng Guozhang who ordered another half a million yuan to be approved, which allowed Zhang Zongchang to pay the officers and men of the First Division back to the arrears.
In the spring of 1920, the great war between the direct line headed by Cao Kun and Wu Peifu (Feng Guozhang had died of illness) and the Anhui family led by Duan Qirui and Xu Shuzheng was like an arrow on the string, and it was about to erupt.
In late May, Wu Peifu led his troops to leave Hengyang and went north to the Beijing-Hankou railway line directly under the Anhui Dynasty, preparing to fight against the Anhui Clan, he handed over the defense of Hunan to the Xiang Army's Zhao Hengti Department to take over, and promised to help the Xiang Army expel the Anhui Governor Zhang Jingyao, so the Hunan Zhi Army retreated to Hubei. In early June, Zhang Zongchang also led the First Division to withdraw from Xiangdong and moved from YouXian and Liling to the area around Yuanzhou in Jiangxi.
After the First Division entered Jiangxi one after another, it concentrated in Yuanzhou and stationed. Chen Guangyuan, the overseer of Jiangxi, was afraid that Zhang Zongchang would seize his territory, so he deliberately courted and bought a woman who stepped on a soft rope with huge funds (stepping on the soft rope is an acrobatic, and the performer walks back and forth on the two overhead wires, and performs various figures), and gives it to Zhang Zongchang as an aunt to show friendship. This woman was Zhang Zongchang's ninth aunt (the woman later fell out with Zhang Zongchang and still returned to the acrobatic troupe).
While showing overtures, Chen Guangyuan actively mobilized his army to guard against Zhang Zongchang. Chen Guangyuan was an old man of the direct lineage, and although Zhang Zongchang was promoted by Feng Guozhang of the direct lineage, he was neither of the direct nor the Anhui lineage, so the direct family took great precautions against Zhang Zongchang, while Duan Qirui of the Anhui clan in Beijing suspected that Zhang Zongchang had fallen to the direct lineage, so he also stopped paying military salaries.
After Zhang Zongchang arrived in Jiangxi, he personally went to Beijing many times and asked Duan Qirui for military pay, but he was not allowed to return. Without military salaries, food for the troops became a problem, and Zhang Zongchang had to send people to the nearby county offices to forcibly borrow grain, thus creating sharp contradictions with the Jiangxi region.
In order to maintain his territory, Chen Guangyuan mobilized the direct army of jiangxi province to the vicinity of Yuan Prefecture and formed a siege of Zhang Zongchang's first division. At that time, the direct army in Jiangxi consisted of a division directly under Chen Guangyuan and the troops of four town guards in Gandong, Gannan (Ji'an), Ganxi, and Northern Gan (Jiujiang). A town guard was directly under a brigade or at least one regiment at the time. These units were under the unified command of Chen Guangyuan's younger brother Chen Guangkui.
Before the war began, Chen Guangyuan first dismantled Zhang Zongchang's First Division from within, and he spent a lot of money to buy Wang Kangfu, the commander of the Fourth Regiment of the First Division, who led his troops out of the city; later, Chen Guangyuan sent Chu Yupu, the commander of the Third Regiment of the First Division, tens of thousands of oceans, asking Chu Yupu to return to his direct lineage and promise the post of brigade commander. After Chu Yupu was bribed, he also did not move.
Zhang Zongchang had always trusted Chu Yupu until one night he found out that the password used by Chu Yupu's department was not the password issued by the First Division, and he realized that something was wrong. Next, during the battle against Chen Guangyuan's army, Zhang Zongchang's troops were demoralized, their troops had no fighting spirit, and they were defeated and retreated, showing a trend of disintegration. When Zhang Zongchang saw that the general situation had gone, he sneaked out of Yuan Prefecture in disguise and fled to Beijing, and all the units of the First Division retreated without a fight, and were besieged by Chen Guangyuan's army, and successively surrendered their weapons and were dismissed.
After Zhang Zongchang fled to Beijing in defeat in Jiangxi, he initially wanted to take the route of his direct line cao Kun (the Battle of Zhiwan, which occupied Beijing after the victory of the direct family) and reorganize his army, but was strongly opposed by Wu Peifu. Later, Zhang Zongchang became acquainted with Zhang Xueliang in Beijing, and through this relationship, he was able to go to the northeast to join Zhang Zuolin.
At the beginning of his defection to Zhang Zuolin, Zhang Zongchang was not valued, and about 200 of his cronies remained in Shenyang as a Duke of Yu. Zhang Zongchang lived in a private house in Yushu Hutong, Dabeiguan, and the old departments were scattered and divided, with no organization or name, and the living expenses of these people were provided by Zhang Zuolin. At this time, Wu Guangxin, Ma Liang, Liang Hongzhi, Zhang Shuyuan, and others of the Anhui clan went to Fengtian to see Zhang Zuolin and instigated a war against the direct clan in an attempt to unite with Fengwan and make a comeback. When these lobbyists of the Anhui clan were in Shenyang, they also often contacted Zhang Zongchang.
On the eve of the First Zhifeng War, the main force of the Feng army was deployed in the area of Changxindian on the outskirts of Beijing and Yangliuqing near Tianjin. Zhang Zuolin's plan was to directly attack the rear of the Zhi army and strive to cut off the Jinpu Railway as soon as the end of the battle began, so as to reap the effect of a two-sided attack. Therefore, Zhang Zuo decided to first send Zhang Zongchang to organize the old department, infiltrate the Sulu Border Region, unite local forces, and expand military activities to cooperate with the operations in the Beijing-Tianjin area.
Zhang Zuolin appointed Zhang Zongchang as commander-in-chief of the Sulu Special Forces, and Zhang Zongchang also appointed his close associates Chu Yupu, Cheng Guorui, and Wang Wanjin as commanders of the detachments.
In early April 1922, Zhang Zongchang led more than 600 subordinates from Fengtian to Qingdao by Japanese ship in three batches via Dalian. Before the departure of Fengtian, many members sent letters to relatives, friends, and colleagues in Kannai to gather in Qingdao in order to expand the team.
After Zhang Zongchang's basic team arrived in Qingdao in batches, they lived in two Japanese merchant warehouses, and they received meal expenses and scattered them to eat on the street. The people who had written the contract in advance also came to Qingdao one after another, and soon formed a plainclothes Einsatzgruppen with more than a thousand people. Zhang Zongchang saw that the number of people was almost gathered, so he began to set off by boat from Qingdao, he rented a large Japanese ship, secretly boarded the ship at night, and landed at the Shiusho station in Rizhao County. Because Zhang Zongchang had already spent a lot of money to buy li Sen, commander of the Fifth Brigade of the garrison in the Linyi area, and the Fifth Brigade took the initiative to give way, Zhang Zongchang's Einsatzgruppen was able to land smoothly and use the Linyi area as a forward base.
After landing at Shiusu, the Einsatzgruppen of more than a thousand people marched for several days, unimpeded along the way, and also captured several villages and towns. However, due to the disastrous defeat of the Feng clan in the battle with the direct family, 20,000 killed, 40,000 captured, and 10,000 scattered, Zhang Zuolincang led the remnants to the northeast in defeat.
Zhang Zuolin retreated to the northeast, zhang Zongchang and these thousand people can still set off a storm, seeing that the general situation has gone, Zhang Zongchang had to take his cronies and flee from Lunan by boat back to Fengtian. Although Zhang Zongchang failed to enter Lulu this time, he won the favor of Zhang Zuolin and laid the foundation of his trust in the future.