01
On an autumn night in the fifteenth year of Chunxi (1188), on the shore of the lake, the study of Jiaxuan Manor was still brightly lit.
The owner of the manor, Xin Zhiyi, has always had the habit of reading before going to bed. Recently he had been reading the Chronicle of History, and tonight he happened to read The Biography of General Lee. When he read that the outgoing Li Guang was ridiculed by the drunken lieutenant of Baling, Xin abandoned the book, turned his head and sighed softly outside the window.
It was not the first time that Xin had read the Biography of General Li, in fact, he was already familiar with Li Guang's deeds, and this famous general more than a thousand years ago had always been his idol.
△ Image of Li Guang drawn by the Qing Dynasty
Eleven years ago, a friend surnamed Li went to Hanzhong to serve in the military, and Xin Abandoned Disease once filled in a gap of "Manjiang Hong, HanShui Dongliu", using Li Guang's fame to encourage his friend; twelve years later, when he was forced to live in seclusion in Lead Mountain because of his disagreement with the political views of those in power, Xin Abandoned Disease would fill in another gap "Bu Suanzi" and express his indignation by the injustices suffered by "General Li in the Ancient Ages".
Tonight, Xin Renyi read Li Guangchuan at night, thinking of his agreement with two good friends Chao Chulao and Yang Minzhan to live in the mountains. In these days of idle life in Shangrao, he has praised the comfort of pastoral life in a Tao Yuanming-style tone, but deep down, at the age of 48, he still believes that the merit of rectifying Qiankun is really worth pursuing.
However, even a great hero like Li Guang could only retire to the countryside in his later years because he could not be enfeoffed, so what would be his fate?
In Li Guang,Xin Shuyi saw himself: the same famous and spirited person he had been in his early years, the same depressed in the later years, the same could only spend his last prime years in the countryside, the same sad and sad life.
The fierce Xin Ren disease was no longer sleepy, he got up to study the ink, and filled out a gap of "Eight Voices of Ganzhou":
Therefore, the general returned from drinking and night, and the long pavilion uncarved the saddle. Hate Baling drunken lieutenant, hurriedly unrecognized, Tao Li is speechless. Shooting Tiger Mountain rode horizontally, and the cracking stone sounded in shock. Fallen into the marquisate, late in the field.
Who asked Sangma Duqu to take a short coat and a horse to move to Nanshan? Look at the generosity of the wind, talk and laugh over the years. Han Kaibian, the name of the thousands of miles, even at that time, the healthy people were also idle. Outside the screen window, the wind and rain, a light chill.
Xin abandoned the disease to Li Guang, which is the tradition of frustrated scholars, and Wang Bo of the Tang Dynasty also lamented that "Li Guang is difficult to seal" in the "Preface to the Pavilion of King Teng". For thousands of years, Li Guang, like Tao Yuanming, has become the spiritual sustenance of the frustrated. Whenever people feel that they are not in time and have not met with talent, they will always think of this famous Han Dynasty general with a bad fate, so as to touch their own sad things, and they will have infinite sorrow and sighs.
△ Li Guang sculpture
Li Guang was a famous general of a generation whose martial arts and courage could impress the enemy countries, Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty was also an eclectic generation of heroes, and the centuries-long Han-Hungarian War was an excellent stage to show the true colors of heroes. Despite this, Li Guang was still unable to be enfeoffed, but instead the evening was desolate, and finally ended up with a shameful and angry suicide.
The ancients attributed this to the creation of people, as Wang Weishiyun said: "Wei Qing is undefeated by Heavenly Luck, and Li Guang has no merit." ”
From a literary point of view, Li Guang's story is an individual's failed struggle against fate, which is a typical classical heroic tragedy, full of romantic literary tension. However, we all know that individual struggles are often tied to the course of history. From the perspective of history, Li Guang's lament is not so much a prank of the god of destiny as it is a tear of the times.
02
In 1972, a large number of bamboo janes were excavated from the Yinqueshan Han Tomb in Linyi, Shandong, of which more than 50 bamboo janes were identified as fragments of the famous ancient military book "Liutao".
Liutao, also known as Taigong Liutao, is said to have been written by Jiang Taigong and was first included in the Book of Sui, but it has been suspected of being a forgery since the Southern Song Dynasty. The excavation of the Yinqueshan Han tomb "Liutao" proves that this book has been widely circulated in the early Western Han Dynasty at the latest, so it has supporting significance for the military history of the pre-Qin and even the early Western Han Dynasty. The military thinking in "Liutao" precisely reveals the truth of Li Guang's difficulty.
The tactical positioning of the cavalry in "Liutao" is "the service of the army", the means of attack emphasize "being able to ride and shoot, front and back, left and right", and the main tactics are "thin" and "wing", that is, close shooting. The word "trap", which refers to close combat, appears only twice in the section of Liutao on cavalry, one of which was a coordinated cavalry charge. It can be seen that in the early Western Han Dynasty, the Central Plains cavalry was in the form of a light cavalry unit that mainly attacked with bows and arrows and carried out less close combat.
"Flying General" Li Guang can be said to be the peak representative of this type of cavalry general. He came from a cavalry family at that time, and his riding and shooting skills were unparalleled in the world, both the proud record of killing three Xiongnu archers without injury, and the ancient story of "drunken stone edges".
However, although Li Guang's own strength value exploded, this traditional light cavalry mode of warfare relied too much on the quality of individual soldiers, and on the whole, the riding and shooting skills of the Central Plains cavalry were obviously not comparable to the Xiongnu cavalry that grew up on horseback. In this mode of operation, the Central Plains cavalry could only rely on infantry and cities to fight defensive battles, and once Li Guang and other old-fashioned generals led the cavalry to launch an attack, it was inevitable to encounter defeats such as the Battle of Longcheng in the sixth year of Yuan Guang (129 BC).
△ Li Guang shoots the tiger figure
The Han Empire took the initiative in the Battle of Han and Hungary precisely because Emperor Wu of han launched a huge cavalry technical revolution after that.
Emperor Wudi of the Han Dynasty appointed young generals such as Wei Qing to introduce the tradition of infantry attention to discipline into the cavalry, and equipped with melee weapons on a large scale, replacing the traditional riding and shooting tactics with melee shock tactics, thus changing the form of cavalry warfare, evolving from long-range shooting to melee shock, and making cavalry warfare evolve from traditional single-body competition to group confrontation of the army.
In this new form of war, the Central Plains regime has a higher degree of social organization, better discipline among soldiers, and more daring to engage in brutal melee combat. At the same time, due to the more stringent requirements for armor and weapons in close combat, the metallurgical technology developed by the Central Plains civilization can also play a more effective role. When the Han Empire equipped its cavalry with iron armor and superior ring-headed swords on a large scale, its combat effectiveness was no longer weaker than that of the Hun cavalry equipped with only short swords.
At the juncture of historical change, Wei Qing and Huo Fu, who started from a slightly cold, because there was no historical inheritance, there was no burden and shackles, and as a result, they became the tide of history; and Li Guang, who came from a cavalry family, stuck to traditional cavalry tactics, and as a result, he missed the trend of history and became helpless to become the tears of the times.
Through the analysis of the military perspective, we have come to the conclusion that the ancients did not come to: the difference between the fates of Wei Qing and Li Guang has the inevitability of the military dimension, rather than the so-called "providence", breaking the traditional cognition that "Li Guang has no merit and several oddities".
In history, in addition to "Li Guang is difficult to seal", there are many problems that have been attributed by the ancients with metaphysics, and these problems can actually be analyzed from a military perspective to obtain more rational answers, such as the success or failure of the Chu-Han struggle for hegemony.
When arguing for hegemony between Chu and Han, people often focus on the personal character of Liu Xiang and Liu Xiang, believing that Xiang Yu is self-respecting and meritorious, and cannot listen to the opinions of others, while Liu Bang can endure humiliation and burden, and know people well, and can control talents well, so in the end Liu Bang can defeat Xiang Yu.
This view cannot be wrong, but it is too general. Specifically, the key factor in the success or failure of chu and Han was geopolitics.
The terrain of Qin's homeland is dangerous and the land is fertile, and under the situation of hegemony and chaos, the geographical conditions are very superior. Since entering Xianyang in the west, Liu Bang has tied his own interests with the interests of Qin, and changed from a foreign ruler to a protector and spokesman for the interests of the qin.
Through the inheritance of the Qin system and culture, Liu Bang inherited the strategic advantages accumulated by the Qin Dynasty over the past hundred years of hard work in Guanzhong and Bashu regions. To some extent, the confrontation between the East and the West at the end of the Qin Dynasty and the beginning of the Han Dynasty is actually the historical continuation and reproduction of the Great Qin Sweep Liuhe.
03
In traditional historical narratives, the military is often an overlooked dimension.
There is a cloud in the "Left Biography": "The great affairs of the country are in the worship and rong." "The fate of the individual, the rise and fall of the family, the change of regime, is often determined by one or two wars. The outcome of war will change the course of history, and the military is often a direct shaping factor of history. In a certain sense, the dark line behind the history of five thousand years is actually a military history.
However, "soldiers are weapons of war, and saints have to use them as a last resort", and under the traditional concept of Chinese "heavy taoism and light skill" and emphasis on benevolence and morality, the military is considered a tool used by saints to govern the world. For tools, gentlemen can grasp the metaphysical concept, as for the specific technical details, they can be handed over to professionals, there is no need to circulate widely.
Under such a concept, the historical narrative of the ancient Chinese tradition has always been missing from the audience, and the details of military history have always been missing. The description of military and war in historical books is often limited to telling the personal deeds of heroes, focusing on the transmission of subjective values, and lacking systematic exposition and objective analysis.
△ Northern Song Dynasty Yan Wengui's "Yang Whip Urging Horses to Send Grain Busy Map" part
Military is a three-dimensional complex system, including institutional, geographical, economic, equipment, training, logistics, strategy, tactics and many other dimensions. Without an analysis from these dimensions, it is impossible to understand a war or a military event on a rational level, but to attribute it to elements of "metaphysics", which limits the understanding of history.
To exaggerate, it is impossible to read military history, or even to really understand history, without looking at these details.
For example, people often attribute the rise of the State of Wei in the early Warring States period to Wu Qi's small favor of sucking abscesses for his soldiers, while ignoring his efforts in training military formations, organizing martial pawns, and so on, as well as the system behind the tax exemption privileges, land, and cattle cultivation granted to Wei Wushu to ensure its combat effectiveness.
It is precisely because these factors have not been analyzed that the ancients could not understand why Li Guang, who was also able to share the hardships of the soldiers, could not always make meritorious achievements, and when he went out on expeditions, he often had a clumsy disciple' Huo Qi' disease but always achieved remarkable results, so the ancients could only attribute it to the so-called "Providence".
Only by proceeding from the technical details of the military field can we truly understand military history, and even understand history.
"Chinese History in the Military" is such a work that interprets Chinese history from a military perspective.
This book selects dozens of topics that are more discussed and controversial in history from many aspects such as monarchs, famous generals, battlefields, rivers and lakes, systems, geography, food and clothing, etc., relies on specific historical records, analyzes them through empirical perspectives, in the form of archaeological excavations, expert examinations, and restoration introductions, and interprets what kind of kernel and logic are behind the military war events that determine the direction of China's history, and which law determines our current degree of civilization and social form.