Chapter 438 Then play together

Duan Qirui, who was in Guangzhou, heard that his men said that there was already news from Wuchang. Although the attitude conveyed by Wuchang was a little difficult for Duan Qirui to accept, they gave Duan Qirui a positive answer anyway, and the rest was nothing more than some competition for interests between the two sides.

Naturally, Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong don't need to worry about this kind of thing. They each have a group of hands to negotiate in detail and secretly.

In the negotiations, the Southern Federation made a big opening. First of all, the first is to require the Anhui army to withdraw from Guangxi and ensure that heavy troops will not be deployed in the border area between Guangdong and Guangxi in the future.

The second article is similar to the first one, that is, the heavy troops deployed by the Anhui army in Liling on the border between Jiangxi and Hunan must retreat to Pingxiang and hand over Liling, a strategic place to enter and exit Hunan, to the Southern Federation.

In addition to the above conditions for the withdrawal of the Anhui army, the Southern Federation also proposed to buy arms directly from foreign countries through Guangdong, a province controlled by the Anhui army, and asked the Anhui army to ensure the safety of their internal transportation of arms.

And there is a more direct one, that is, the southern federal government is now short of finances, and the purchase of these ordnance needs to be paid in advance by Anhui.

To put it bluntly, it is to ask for money and territory.

Looking at the conditions put forward by the Southern Federation, Duan Qirui frowned: "This Zhang Nanpi's mouth is big enough. He wants Wuzhou or Liling, and he also wants us to buy them armor, and he doesn't want to see what they are!"

For these conditions, Duan Qirui refused without thinking about it. Just kidding, unless the enemy sent troops to seize it, the Anhui army has never taken the initiative to send the territory out. It was not before, not now, and it will never happen in the future.

"Since they have raised the conditions, the explanation can still be discussed. Tell them that we can suspend the attack on Xunzhou and temporarily withdraw our troops to Wuzhou, but it is impossible for us to give up Wuzhou and withdraw from Guangxi, but we can guarantee to reduce the number of troops on the front line of Wuzhou, Guangxi. Well, set a No more than 10,000 people. If you are still worried over there, the bottom line is 5,000 people!"

Duan Qirui thought about it while joking that it was impossible to withdraw troops from Guangxi. If it hadn't been for the current situation, he would have continued to attack Guangxi and completely take Guangxi.

However, the Anhui army is now facing too much pressure on the Feng army in southern Anhui, northern Jiangxi and southern Zhejiang. Duan Qirui is bound to continue to transfer the troops of Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and other places to fight against the southward pace of the Feng army. Therefore, even if it does not cooperate with the Southern Federation, the Anhui army actually does not have enough troops to continue in Guangzhou. If the West launches an attack, it will definitely reduce its troops, but it is absolutely impossible to completely withdraw from Guangxi.

The same is true in Hunan and Jiangxi. This Liling is a military important place and an important barrier in western Jiangxi. It is impossible for the Anhui army to give up casually.

In terms of the support of ordnance and military expenditure, Duan Qirui also does not intend to give Zhang Zhidong anything for nothing. What a joke. Every penny in the Anhui hand is extremely important. After losing Jiangnan, a tax-bearing land, Duan Qirui can only rely on a Guangdong to provide himself with military expenses, although Guangdong also It was a large tax province in the late Qing Dynasty, but it was still very difficult to support the current Wan army, not to mention that Duan Qirui also planned to resume the formation of the third brigade of the Fourth Division. While expanding the army while fighting, it cost a lot of money. Not to mention that Duan Qirui has no money now, even if he has money, it is impossible to give it directly to Zhang Zhidong.

"Money cannot be given, and ordnance can never be sent, but if they pay for ordnance, we can give them a promise that they will never intercept, and even send troops to escort Guangxi or Hunan." What Duan Qirui said has shown his mind that he did not intend to pay any practical price, especially on territory and money, to cooperate with the Southern Federation this time.

There is no way for Duan Qirui's stalemate, because as Zhang Biao said, the Anhui system is looking for the Southern Federation to cooperate, not to say that the Anhui system seeks the Southern Federation, but a relationship. Once the Anhui system is finished, the next one is the Southern Federation, precisely because I saw it. At this point, Zhang Zhidong put down his political differences and chose to cooperate with Duan Qirui.

The two sides talked, but in fact, the issues they talked about were all fake. In the end, Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui sent several secret telegrams to each other, and finally the two reached a preliminary intention at the strategic level.

There is no need to sign any black and white paper documents, because both Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui know that the cooperation between the two sides is only temporary, and based on the political tendencies of the two sides, their cooperation cannot be made public in any way, and only a verbal agreement can be reached by the senior management of the two sides.

The verbal agreement reached between Zhang Zhidong and Duan Qirui is very simple, that is, to start to stop all actual military confrontations between the Anhui Army and the Southern Federation and keep the existing actual control boundaries unchanged.

However, in order for the two sides to draw more troops from Guangxi and Hunan to fight against the Feng army, the superiors promised not to deploy more than 5,000 field troops in Guangxi, and the Anhui army in Liling only promised to station only the most basic troops of no more than 2,000.

In terms of the Southern Federation, a large number of troops were transferred from Guangxi and Hunan, and finally stationed troops in Hubei and formed the Sixth Army of the Chinese Federal Empire, which was specially used to launch an active offensive from southern Hubei to the Yangtze River.

As long as the Southern Federation deploys a special force to keep an eye on the direction of Jiangxi Jiujiang in southern Hubei, then once the Feng army completely captures southern Anhui and wants to continue to go south to Jiangxi, it is impossible for the Feng army to launch a direct attack on Jiangxi all the way unscrupulously, because once the Feng army puts it into it. In the south-central direction of Jiangxi, a raid by the Southern Federation will be enough to cause great flank pressure on the Feng army that is going south, and may even be cut off from the supply line.

The reason why Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong reached a private cooperation agreement so quickly is that the pressure brought to them by the Soviet Feng army was too great.

The strength of Fengjun in the first half of 1908 made Duan Qirui lose, but also made other warlords tremble.

No one wants to be a stepping stone for the rise of the Soviet system!

Muxiu Yulin, the wind destroys it, and everyone is so bitter that your family is the dominant one. Isn't it forcing those weak people to unite against you?

Although the secret cooperation between the Anhui army and the Southern Federation has been hidden from ordinary people, it is not enough for Zhao Dongyun. The agents of the Military Intelligence Office of the Command have always been concerned about the military trends of the major warlords in the country. If it is only a small-scale mobilization of the Anhui army and the Southern Federation, it can still be concealed, but this transfer of tens of tens of thousands of people It is still the mobilization of troops from the very ** Guangxi and Hunan to Jiangxi and Hubei. If this inter-provincial large-scale mobilization cannot attract the attention of the agents of the Military Intelligence Service, then Zhao Dongyun will directly dismant the Office of the Military Intelligence Service.

After hearing the report of the Military and Security Department that the Anhui army and the southern coalition forces had large-scale abnormal mobilization in Guangxi and Hunan, although Zhao Dongyun still did not guess what agreement Duan Qirui and Zhang Zhidong had reached for a while.

However, Zhao Dongyun can easily guess that they have reached an unknown agreement.

"Well, it's just a group of grasshoppers after autumn. One is to fight, and two is also to fight. Anyway, we are going to deal with the Southern Federation and just take this opportunity to solve them at one time!"

The speaker is Meng Enyuan, who has just taken a foreign guest reincarnation from Jinling to Beijing to report on his duties.

His tone sounded arrogant at first, but what he said was the truth. Now other warlords in the country are Soviet enemies, and the difference is just to fight first and then fight.

And from a military perspective, once the main fourth army of the Feng army goes south to Jiangxi, it is definitely impossible for the Feng army to stare at Zhang Zhidong of the Southern Federation, which has more than 100,000 troops. If the Feng army wants to go south to Jiangxi, it must first solve Zhang Zhidong in Hubei.

In this case, Meng Enyuan said that it was a helpless reality to fight these two together. Of course, this is also Meng Enyuan's self-confidence.

Although the fourth army under his command is still fighting in southern Anhui, it fought very smoothly, but due to the influence of the terrain in southern Anhui, it is difficult for the fourth army to expand on a large scale, and the overall march speed after the deployment is also quite limited.

This situation occurs not only in southern Anhui, but also in southern Zhejiang.

The mountainous and hilly areas in southern Anhui and southern Zhejiang make the Feng army, who has been used to fighting in the plains, quite unaccustomed to it. In the past, when the Feng army fought, although it was also affected by the weak logistical force, it could barely raise enough artillery to fight. However, when fighting in the mountains and hills, let the Feng army The plain field troops in Liqing started a war and shrank their hands, especially the maneuver of the artillery, which made a large group of front-line generals want to scold their mother.

If you want to cross the 75mm field guns weighing more than one ton and successfully reach the front line, the speed is simply unsightly. When fighting, the infantry troops on the front line are often in place early, but the artillery troops behind them are late, which makes the Feng army have eaten a lot in many battles. Loss.

And in the process of actual combat, the front-line generals found that the mountain cannons that they did not pay much attention to in the past are more practical than field guns, which is actually very obvious. The mountain cannons were originally allocated for mountainous and hilly areas, and it is normal to perform better in the mountains than field guns. Therefore, many front-line generals of the Feng army reported to the command and asked for more mountain cannons.

In fact, this time Meng Enyuan specially returned from southern Anhui to report on his duties in Beijing, which actually brought the idea of asking Zhao Dongyun to dispatch more mountain cannons.

However, although the Feng army suffered terrain troubles in southern Anhui and southern Zhejiang, resulting in a slow progress, it was only slow. After the war, it was still unambiguous. It was still slightly difficult in southern Zhejiang, but in southern Anhui, the Anhui army could not resist the joint attack of the Fourth Army and the First Army of the Feng army at all. The day to completely take down southern Anhui is not far away.

In fact, not only Fengjun himself thought so, but also Duan Qirui of the Anhui army thought so. In fact, he never expected that he could keep southern Anhui after the defeat in the south of the Yangtze River. The reason why he let the Sixth Division of the two rivers continue to defend southern Anhui, no It was just to buy more time for his reorganization and deployment of troops in Jiangxi.

Although southern Anhui is fighting, Duan Qirui has begun to draw a large amount of manpower and material resources to build a defense line in Jiangxi.

In this case, everyone knows that it is a matter of time for the Feng army to capture southern Anhui, and this time will not be too long. After the Feng army completely goes south to southern Anhui, everyone knows that the Feng army will definitely enter Jiangxi.

Now Zhang Zhidong has deployed a large number of troops to station troops in the southern part of Hubei. Although it is absolutely impossible for the Southern Federation to send troops to take the initiative to help the Anhui army defend Jiangxi, Zhang Zhidong will never give up giving the Feng army a fierce opportunity from behind after the Feng army enters Jiangxi.

According to the habit of Feng army generals taking the initiative to attack, they will definitely not let the hundreds of thousands of troops of the Southern Federation stare at them behind their cars. They must want to take the initiative to completely solve the threat of Hubei.

Meng Enyuan's attitude can be said to represent most of the front-line generals of Fengjun.

Zhao Dongyun reacted quickly to the secret cooperation between the Southern Federation and the Anhui Army, but this time he did not directly order the Feng army to take the initiative to attack the Southern Federation. Instead, he asked the people of the second division of internal affairs to contact Wang Shizhen.