Chapter 94 — On Armies

Had this been proposed at any other time, it would most likely have stirred a certain discontent. But at this moment, barely a day had passed since the monster attack, Gao Yang Cecil's prestige stood at an unprecedented height, and coupled with the real, tangible inspiration of his having personally defended the camp, the regulation was announced and carried through on the tide.

And the people took it philosophically enough: after all, laboring at the lord's corvée in ordinary times was also spending one's strength, and attending training now was also spending one's strength—looked at that way, there was really no change at all, so long as one could fill one's belly.

Besides, should there really be a chance to be chosen as a full soldier, then donning armor and taking up a sword was as good as becoming "half a respectable man"—and for the poor folk who spent most of their lives in utter poverty, that was instead a rare way out. Set against such a way out, giving up a bit of slack-season time for training was entirely worth it.

Changes to the military system could not be completed in a single day, and the details involved were far beyond what a few words could make clear. Considering the capacity of his audience and the complexity of the various regulations, Gao Yang did not lay out all his ideas from the platform. He gave only a rough account of the integration of all soldiers into the "Combat Legion" and of basic military training, then left the platform—as for the real details... those would have to be discussed with the two knights and Heddy.

And what he had announced today was only laying a foundation. Frankly, given the territory's present state, what he had said was even a bit too far ahead of its time. The whole of the pioneer settlement held, at a generous count, just over eight hundred people, of whom only a hundred could be drawn out and trained into soldiers—and those hundred were the entirety of Cecil Territory's "army." Its scale stood in stark contrast to the future Gao Yang envisioned.

And small as a hundred might seem, this soldier-to-civilian ratio had already reached an appalling extreme: one eighth of the population converted into professional soldiers. Judged purely by proportion, it was practically the four characters "reckless warmongering" written across his face. In Gao Yang's memory, in this world a kingdom at peace usually had a soldier-to-civilian ratio between one in forty and one in seventy, or even lower; and even in wartime the proportion would not exceed one in ten—unless it was a war of life and death, or a nomadic people like the northern barbarians of old, where every man was a soldier.

Yet in his territory, one in eight was a soldier!

If these were all full-time soldiers, it would mean that nearly all the camp's material output would go to sustaining this one-eighth of a full-time fighting population; all development would grind to a halt, and social stability would decline accordingly. So all the soldiers in the territory were for now not full-time: they trained and stood guard in ordinary times, and whenever there was time they took part in the camp's construction and land-clearing work, to keep labor abundant.

This made them akin to a construction corps, and what Gao Yang counted himself fortunate for was that the soldiers bore it without a word of complaint.

Part of the reason was that more than half the soldiers were militia, themselves of the non-full-time category; the rest were veterans of exceedingly high loyalty; and the Cecil family's consistently strict military discipline ensured that the warriors under the family name would not turn into lazy, pampered soldier-lords. Only thus had the present situation come about.

Even so, this one-in-eight proportion of soldiers was no long-term solution. Gao Yang's next step was to find a way to bring in more population, to patch up the camp's greatest shortfall.

Without patching up the population, everything else was empty fantasy. To plan out a professional, specialized modern army for a camp of only eight hundred people and a force of a hundred—Gao Yang reckoned that even if, when he first flung off the coffin lid and rose, he had lost his grip and been struck on the head by the lid, he still would not have dreamed such a dream.

But he had to set down these frameworks in advance, even if what could be set down now was only a framework—because once a great influx of outsiders came, it would be too late to do many things. By then, without a mature and stable framework to hold things up, all the efforts he had made here would be diluted away by that mixed and motley new population.

After the assembly dispersed, Gao Shao promptly convened the camp's administrators, the two knights among them; and this time he also called in the farmer Norris, who had by now spent more than ten days settling into the post of "Agriculture Director," and the blacksmith Hammer, who had already taken charge of the steelworks' affairs.

(Good heavens, transitional chapters are such a pain to handle.)