Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/177

Rh with him, in particular a certain Wang Hsin. For the defence of Changsha Wang had suggested that an army be raised, and the governor and provincial treasurer had assented, and asked this Wang to raise a force of three thousand men. His original programme sounded well, but the men and their preparation seemed very insufficient to Tsêng. They had had previous disagreements about sending men to the aid of Kiang Chung-yuan. But in the spring of 1854 Wang had a skirmish with some rebels and killed about thirty of them. This he reported as a great victory. When the joint memorial was being prepared about military affairs, Tsêng looked over the draft and approved it. But as to the final copy which was sent to the central government Tso Tsung-tang added to and took away some of the sections, and among the changes thus made was an account of a false victory. This stirred Tsêng to great indignation, since he detested the propensity of officials to make false claims like this for selfish purposes.

Whilst Tsêng Kuo-fan was in Hengchow, the governor sent Lo Tse-nan with two ying of soldiers to put down some bandits, and they passed through Hengchow on January 5. Here the two men in conference drew up the principles according to which the new army was to be organised and governed. The unit of the new force was to be a small regiment or ying of 500 soldiers, with an addition of 180 others serving in various capacities. Each ying was to be divided into four companies called shao and these into eight tui (in the guards a shao was to be divided into six tui only). These regulations were drawn up in great detail, and formed the basis on which all other Hunan armies were organised.

In order to make more rapid progress, additional