Twenty-Three Gamble

After sending away the messenger who came to ask for weapons, Chris knew that he should develop his weapons and equipment more urgently.

He has been building up his industrial base for a long time, and now is the time to test his strength.

So, on the tenth day after the messenger left, Chris held a plenary meeting to discuss the direction of the next stage of development.

At the meeting, Chris first asked Gurlo about the popularization of education, because he clearly knew that in order to develop the industry systematically, the reserve of talents is an issue that must be paid attention to.

Before, the model of individually hand-crafting weapons and equipment, like Chris, who personally took the lead in staying up late and working overtime, could not support a large-scale war.

Hearing Collins' question, Gurlo lifted the glasses on the bridge of his nose and said, "According to the development needs, we have built 30 primary schools and 9 junior high schools. Using the movable type printing technology you provided, we have made A large number of textbooks were distributed to all students for free."

"It only takes a year for us to develop a lot of talent, and then there will be enough people in the factory to use," he said, pushing a report to Chris: "We purchased from nearby A large number of young people are very handy to cultivate.”

"It's really self-willed to have money..." Hearing that even the population of this world can be collected with gold coins, which expands like an opening, Chris feels that being rich is really a very pleasant thing.

In fact, there are many more problems that can be solved with money. In order to support its own industrialization process, Serris City purchased a large amount of industrial raw materials from the three surrounding areas, but basically did not export anything of value.

Gurlo imported a large amount of cotton and stone from the Arland Empire. Cotton was used to support the textile industry and the production of some explosives, and the stone was completely used for the infrastructure of the Duchy of Ireland.

According to Chris's request, the crushed stone was stored and prepared to be used for the laying of the railway subgrade in the future, while the whole stone was used in the construction of the factory building. At almost any cost, countless factories have been erected, many of which have not even had time to install machinery, so they can only measure the size and leave them vacant.

Similar constructions with only investment and no return can be found around the city of Serris, but there are also projects that have been put into production for profit. For example, the two newly built cement factories are currently the busiest factories. Manual cement manufacturing has been going on around the clock, but there is simply not enough cement produced.

Everything that was procured was used in the construction of Ireland Hill, and nothing was wasted. The products of the cement factory and the stone materials are used to build buildings, and the minerals are used to smelt into metals-the quality of life of the civilians in the entire principality is improving at a speed visible to the naked eye, and the hundreds of thousands of gold coins brought by Des, It is also disappearing at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"I'm desperately buying food." Deans, who was almost out of exhaustion, reported: "Our population has at least doubled in the past two months... The food reserves are definitely not enough. so we have to prepare in advance.”

His report fully proves how the money is gone: food procurement is definitely a major direction, in order to feed the growing population, food can only be ensured by purchasing. This is by no means a one-shot deal, because the population of the Duchy of Ailan Hill will definitely be larger next year.

The population must be gathered because there is a shortage of people, and sufficient food must be provided because the population must be gathered. This is almost an endless cycle. Most of the time, in order to allow the surrounding civilians to immigrate to the territory of Ireland Hill, Chris will also order food subsidies for all residents.

Now he has enough manpower and enough troops, but the pressure is passed on to Deans, who manages the population and civil affairs. This middle-aged man is too busy now.

There is very little time to sleep.

Strid's side wasn't much better: "I just got back from the Higgs kingdom yesterday...the kerosene over there...well, no, it's the oil price that's gone up by 50 percent. The biggest problem. Yes, the output of this thing is not that big. We have money, and we can't buy much stock."

Although there is consumption of alchemy in this era, in most cases, kerosene is only a weapon used when defending cities, so the output is also small, and the demand is not large. Now that Chris is consuming a lot of oil, and plans to reserve more, it's a bit of a tough guy.

The bald-headed Mr. Stryd bought almost all the kerosene in the Higgs Kingdom, but he couldn't meet Chris's requirements - not even a fraction.

Because the number of purchases and the number of products sold are too many, the current situation of Ireland Hill is that what is sold plummets, and what is bought soars. In order to grab the speed of development, such an annoying thing, the Principality of Ailan Hill can only recognize it by pinching its nose.

"The construction of the factory is very fast! After all, most of the expenses of Ailan Hill are piled up on the industry I am responsible for." Smith, who is already the best engineer in Serris City, said.

He held a report on the industrial process and said to Chris: "We have built ten blast furnaces and started to use new timers to smelt steel, and the efficiency has increased dozens of times. The pass rate of steel has been satisfactory. There is no problem with producing the new 75mm infantry gun."

"However, there are some things that are not satisfactory." He pointed to a line in the document and complained to Chris: "The amount of copper is seriously insufficient. We have smelted 1 million copper coins, but we still can't keep up with the consumption of copper. speed."

A sufficient amount of copper can be said to be the calcium sheet of modern industry. Many problems that could not be solved in the early industry were solved by using the good metal properties of copper. This metal also has sky-high conductivity, making it the perfect choice for wire and telephone lines.

"The matter of copper can only be solved by increasing purchases." Chris said a little depressedly: "In addition, find a way to use iron as an alternative."

During World War II, Germany was also a country with a serious copper shortage. When they were stretched thin, the Germans even had to make the bullet casings out of iron. Although iron cartridges are not as good as copper cartridges in terms of pumping performance, it is better to have bullets than no bullets, right?

Therefore, under the premise that there is no good way to think of it, Chris can only lower the usage requirements first, and let the factory start mass production of bullets with iron shells. Anyway, the soldiers on the front line should understand the problem of occasionally getting stuck - or that sentence, something is better than nothing, isn't it?

Glancing at Vagron, Chris raised his hand to signal that he didn't need to introduce the military training. Because he only went to see it yesterday, and the situation in the barracks is not ideal: "I'll talk to you about your problems in a while!"

"Yes!" Vagron reluctantly gave up his plan to expose his family scandal. Recently, a lot of money has been invested in military training, but the talents in the army are too scarce. The training barely lasted.

Because the focus of Alan Hill's construction recently was not on the army, everyone didn't want Valgeron to report it. He passed him quickly, and Gurlo went on to talk about the incomparably important question of education.

Making a society move towards industrialization is not an easy task, and the actual operation is more complicated than Chris thought.

Even if he has countless books and knowledge to guide specific actions, the accumulation of a lot of work is still a daunting huge project.

Now, the surrounding area of ​​the original Serris, including Arland in the south, the earth fort in the north, and the Kingdom of Higgs in the west, have all benefited from the crazy development of the Duchy of Alan Hill against the law. They earned a lot of gold coins from Alan Hill, which once made the border area extremely prosperous.

But who would have thought that Alan Hill, who had already been burdened with too many unreasonable contradictions, had already made up his mind from the very beginning that he would use a war to transfer all the domestic contradictions, open up the market, and complete a Gorgeous transformation!

As long as the defeated country can pay for its own development, this kind of illogical leap-forward development can be established. Ailan Hill will be able to eliminate the scourge to the invisible, and then gain a short-term development opportunity.

Of course, if it continues to develop like this, Ireland Hill will still have to expand and attack the next neighboring country - just like a gluttonous glutton, it will not stop until it eats all the neighboring countries. .

"The next thing we have to do is to build an arsenal as soon as possible! No matter what method we use! We have to prepare for a war!" Chris looked at his confidants and said.

He folded his hands on his chest and thought deeply about his decision at this moment: "If we sit and eat like this, we will only have one ending to collapse."

"Yes, I just made a statistic. If we can't get a huge sum of 300,000 gold coins within half a year, we will be insolvent... and we can declare bankruptcy." Des is more sensitive to this aspect. , also before the meeting, reminded Chris to pay attention to the problem of insufficient funds.

If the internal digestion is slow and other new industries are developed, it is not impossible for the Duchy of Ireland to digest its own industrial achievements. But that only slows down your own development and wastes precious time.

Including Chris, Des, Deans and others all know that they seem to have a more irresponsible, or a better choice - war!

The truth is really simple: if war can be won, why not use war to solve problems? From the perspective of being able to win, the war brings alluring benefits!

As long as the war can be won, Ireland Hill can expand its territory, have a larger population, offset part of its debt, and reduce the pressure on the border...

All kinds of things are very attractive in front of them. For the first time, Chris felt the mood of those war madmen: after careful calculation, this kind of gamble can roughly determine the winner or loser, it is too tempting to want to bet.

Unlike everyone else, Chris has a lot of bets and a huge chance of winning. Whether it's Des or Chris, they didn't even think about losing the war--in fact, they didn't need to think about it, because they definitely couldn't live to see the outcome of losing the war.