18th century total war

Chapter 343 Prussian National Mobilization Reform

In 1806, in the Imperial Palace of Vienna, the western capital of the Roman Empire.

"When did the British war against the Far Eastern Empire start?"

"Reporting to Your Majesty, according to the speed of the fast boat between the British Isles and the Far Eastern Empire, this news should have been sent half a year ago.

The lag of the news was as short as eight months and as long as one year. Therefore, the British should have launched a war against the Far Eastern Empire in early 1805. "

"This information shows that the British Expeditionary Force took only two months to break through Guangdong City, the provincial capital of the Far Eastern Empire. Is this news true?

Is this still under the premise that the Far Eastern Empire has done a good job in the southeast coastal war?
Moreover, the British army landed at most less than 5000 people, including logistics personnel. Most of the soldiers were Indian soldiers, and there were less than [-] real white soldiers.

Hehe, even if there are less than [-] white soldiers, less than half of them are actually British.

It was these rubbish troops who couldn't even fight a small-scale decisive battle in Europe, annihilated tens of thousands of Qing troops, and also took down important county strongholds and a provincial capital along the way!
Is this intelligence really not a 'story' made up by British spies? "

Li Wei, who didn't learn history well in his previous life, and traveled back almost 20 years, didn't know the result and process of the first Opium War in world history in his previous life.

Therefore, historically illiterate Li Wei relied entirely on his search to compare the information about the Far Eastern Empire.

No matter how corrupt and degenerate the Manchu Empire in the Far East is, it is still decades away from 1840!
And Li Wei has already inquired that the current emperor of the Manchu Qing Empire in the Far East is not the Daoguang Emperor who was scolded as a faint emperor in his previous life.

At least, Li Wei has heard the "allegory" of He Shen's fall and Jiaqing's fullness.

If the deviation between this parallel world and the world in his previous life is not completely distorted, even if many celebrities have changed their personalities, but the historical trend is here, Li Wei also ordered people to check the names of the emperors and ministers of the Manchu Qing Empire in the Far East.

The characters of Qianlong and Heshen can definitely be compared, and Heshen is indeed the veritable No. [-] corrupt man in the Qing Dynasty, and he was indeed killed by Jiaqing in the end.

It stands to reason that even during Emperor Qianlong's reign, he only knew how to spend money and whitewash the peace, leaving a huge financial hole for the Manchu Empire. Jiaqing also searched a lot of money from Heshen, so the money should not lead to a disarmament To the point of Li Wei's impression of the old soldier with two guns in the late Qing Dynasty!
How did you achieve such a brilliant record?
If you count the lag time of news transmission, the Manchu Qing Empire would not have been beaten by the British to sign an unequal treaty...

Moreover, looking at the posture of the London government, it is completely driven by the four anti-French wars. It will definitely not stop at the "Treaty of Nanjing" in Livy's previous life, and will definitely increase its plundering efforts at all costs.

Today, the expansion of Britain's major colonies around the world has hit a bottleneck.

The bottleneck here is not the weakening of the United Kingdom's 'plenty of martial virtue', but the increasing cost of expansion and colonization.

After all, Britain's colonial policy does not mean that the overthrow of the local aboriginal regime is considered a victory.

You have to produce value!
No matter how cheap the bones of the conquered natives were, they wouldn't give free work to the invaders, the Britons, right after they were beaten.

Moreover, it is not enough to rely solely on the generals who lead troops to fight in order to organize the indigenous territory. Administrative officials must need it.

The most important thing is that the backward production mode of the original native kingdom made it impossible for the British colonial government to tap much interest.

How much money can you earn by searching for the agricultural products grown by the indigenous people?

Relying on the sale of grain in this era of lack of long-distance transportation and preservation means is an ordinary bulk trade, and it is still close!
And if those natives want to grow valuable cash crops obediently, or enter factories to produce the goods that the British need, the management cost invested is not a small amount!

The colonial policy still relies entirely on force, and part of the garrison must be kept, or the garrison must be recruited from the local area, and money will be spent everywhere.

In the age of great voyages, there has never been a shortage of countries that have lost money in colonization!
This is why the whole world has not been completely dyed 'white'.

It's not that the European colonists were not good enough, but that many places have no colonial interests, and forced occupation loses money every year. Who wants to keep investing in it?
Of course, it is also possible to develop in the long term and rely on immigration and other policies to develop a plantation economy, but this is a long-term and low-yield colonial method and will not be carried out on a large scale.

This is why the colonies expanded little by little. If an expedition was carried out regardless of the cost, no capital of an indigenous kingdom in this era could withstand the bombardment of European artillery!
Even in many areas with fierce resistance, even if the output benefits are high, the colonized people give up because of the higher cost of suppression, and adopt the method of supporting proxy puppet regimes or signing unequal trade treaties to obtain profits.

This presents a very embarrassing problem.

Indigenous lands with low conquest costs often have very low productivity and require a little farming to develop, such as the colonies on the North American continent!

And those territories that have abundant output and population after occupation are often very expensive to conquer, and even so high that the gains outweigh the losses.

At this time, the colonial country needs to weigh the pros and cons.

Of course, there are also lands that do not cost too much to conquer, have a large population, and have enough benefits to extract, but almost all such good colonies are occupied now.

The coastal areas of the Indian subcontinent fall into this category.

Going further in, the cost of colonization will continue to increase. This is not to say that the princely kingdoms in the interior of the Indian subcontinent are more powerful, but because the farther the European army is from the coastline, the greater the logistical pressure of the war, and the cost of conquest will naturally be high. Soaring upward.

In the history of Li Wei's previous life, the capital of the Manchu Empire was breached several times, but the armies of the great powers rarely went deep into the interior. This is the reason why only Tsarist Russia, whose territory was on the verge of the Manchu Empire, invaded the Manchu Empire from the interior. .

Of course, the neon people who live next door also like to invade this rich land.

The colonial bottleneck encountered by the Britons is like this now. The sites where the difficulty of conquest is acceptable and the profits are more profitable are gone.

Even the colonial movement in the Indian subcontinent slowed down as it moved deeper into the interior, making conquest more costly.

This is not something that can be accelerated by the urging of the London government. After all, in a war without too many benefits, the executors will often become very slack.

Today, in the landlocked states of India, the British Indian colonial government generally adopts a policy of division and wooing. Even if it sends troops, it only focuses on taking care of the stubborn and extremely hostile state kingdoms against the British army.

This reduces the cost of conquest.

This allowed the caste system of the Indian subcontinent to be largely preserved. Even the territory directly controlled by the British army was filled with a large number of high-caste Indian nobles who helped the British masters control the people.

No way, there are too many Indians. Relatively speaking, the population of the British colonial government is nothing at all!
This is why Li Wei was not surprised to receive the news that the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland was at war with the Manchu Empire in the Far East.

There are very few colonial sites where the London government can quickly gain income and political prestige.

Among them, the Manchu Empire is undoubtedly the richest, much richer than the Persian Empire in Central Asia!
However, Li Wei couldn't understand why tens of thousands of Indian soldiers who were unable to defeat a small country in the European continent could be fierce in the Far East?

Obviously, it was impossible for the Indian soldiers to suddenly drink Indian magic oil. The answer must be that the Manchu Empire was more fragile than he expected.

This made Li Wei, who was illiterate in history, feel unbelievable like other European governments. Even the London government could not believe it when it received the news. After repeated confirmations, it had to admit that the army of the Far East Empire was really big enough ...

As a result, the support rate of "public opinion" for Prime Minister Pete's government, which advocated the war in the Far East, has been significantly improved.

In the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, the public opinion is those capitalists and aristocrats. Naturally, these people are happy to see their side defeat the Qing government at a small cost, which allows them to pay less money to get the trade dividends brought after the end of the war .

It’s not just the cabinet government headed by Prime Minister Pitt that hates the Far Eastern Empire’s high tariffs!
The Indian soldiers who are the main body of the expeditionary force really don't cost much to the current London government, and it is not as high as the cost of strategic materials to support the Far East.

"Your Majesty, the London government may have exaggerated this information, but occupying a provincial capital should not be faked, unless the commander of the British army in the Far East wants to go to court-martial.

As for other aspects of intelligence, there is not much to exaggerate.

After all, if you want to capture the capital of a province, the military points along the way must be occupied. The Britons can't always drive their warships to land to escort their army.

For a huge empire with a population of hundreds of millions and a regular army of more than one million, it is easy to understand that the capital of a province has more than ten thousand regular troops when it is prepared for war.

If the British Expeditionary Force in the Far East claimed to have wiped out [-] Qing troops, it might be lying, but it only wiped out more than [-] people, so this figure should not have much water. "

Manid, director of the General Administration of Military Intelligence, said rationally.

"In other words, the Far Eastern Empire, which has always been taboo in Europe, is just a paper tiger?"

Li Wei glanced sharply at the cabinet ministers present.

At this moment the Secretary of the Navy stood up and said:
"Your Majesty, our naval warships are being built at full strength, and within two years, we will have the strength to compete with the Mediterranean Fleet of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. At that time, we will also have three first-class battleships!

However, we do not yet have the ability to deploy large numbers of troops into the Far East until Britain, the number one enemy, is dealt with.

If it is forcibly delivered, the sea transportation line will always be under the threat of the British Royal Navy. "

"I know that I will not launch a large-scale military operation against the overseas colonies until the Britons are dealt with. If the British Royal Navy bombards and sinks a few troop carriers, it would be too worthless.

However, the London government is now focusing its energy on the Far East, which is of great benefit to the Roman Empire.

Let us do more things. "

"Your Majesty, if the Empire rashly declares war on European countries such as the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire, the London government will inevitably forcibly end the war in the Far East and turn its attention back to the European continent."

The foreign minister, who seemed to have noticed something, remonstrated.

At this time, the Roman Empire was trying its best to expand its navy and digest the fruits of the fourth anti-French war. If the war broke out, all of this would have to stop, and those European countries that were licking their wounds would inevitably spend money on support at all costs. On the revolutionary forces within the Roman Empire.

Instead of using fiscal revenue on domestic production and military reform as it is now.

Now European countries, after experiencing tragic war defeats, have carried out reforms in different directions and to varying degrees. Among them, the Kingdom of Prussia, which has the greatest crisis of national destruction, has the strongest reforms.

The national mobilization mechanism has been completely illuminated by the Kingdom of Prussia, and the government has used the power of the government to carry out mandatory reserve training against the wishes of the people!

However, the domestic military factories did not reduce their production capacity at all because of the end of the war. Just like during the war, they continued to produce weapons and ammunition for large-scale reserve militia training.

Although the army has been abolished a lot (otherwise, no one would be farming and working in factories), those abolished soldiers are not retired in the true sense, they are just assigned to work during non-war periods, and local governments around the world Supervision has been carried out to ensure that the descendants of the outbreak of the war will be recruited into the army as soon as possible.

The method of supervision is very simple. Veterans in the area are summoned for military training every once in a while, which not only ensures that they will not forget their combat capabilities in the army, but also regularly checks out the 'escaped veterans'.

The martial arts of the Kingdom of Prussia allowed the inhuman reserve military system of the Kingdom of Prussia to continue, but it did not arouse strong dissatisfaction among the people.

Of course, this national reserve model is not without sequelae. At least the hard-hit Lindenwan Brotherhood has recovered and developed very quickly under the additional military tax and mandatory reserve policy imposed by the Kingdom of Prussia.

The nationalism of this era has not been fully awakened. Many Prussian nationals feel that their burdens during peacetime are no lighter than during wartime, and they have to regularly participate in reserve militia training without military pay, wasting precious time for work and money. dissatisfied.

When dissatisfaction accumulates to a certain level, people will naturally join the Lindenwan Brotherhood that promotes revolutionary ideas.

The Kingdom of Prussia is also the only major area of ​​development for the present-day Lindenwan Brotherhood.

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(End of this chapter)