The Patriot (41 page)

He could not tell her the truth, that the innocent-seeming country men were En-lan’s soldiers and some of them his own men whom he taught and who taught him. For in this strange army there was no high and no low. If a man had something he knew, he taught those who did not know. They ate what they needed of the same food and wore the same kind of garments and no one had more money than another. It was the sort of life his father could never have lived. But that was neither for nor against his father. For I-wan was not now the boy he had been when he weighed in such pain whether or not he must give his father up. He was a man now and he knew that not all men can live the same life. For some poverty is sweet because it is full of freedom. But there are men who hate such freedom and his father was one of these.

And even for himself I-wan no longer felt this way of En-lan’s was the only way. En-lan would choose it until he died. He would never have a home of his own, goods he owned, or children to inherit. He was one to make a war somehow if there were not war already at hand. There would always be something wrong he had sworn himself to right. But I-wan now discovered that he himself was not so. When he had been a boy in his father’s house the imagination of such freedom had seemed the best life he could live. But though he would never have been satisfied if for a while he had not lived it as he did now, yet he became sure as the days went on that it was not enough for the making of a whole nation. These men did now the work for which they were made. But what would they be when the war was over? They would hate any rule as much as they hated their enemy today.

He argued long with En-lan over this.

“What will they be when the war is over?” En-lan repeated. “Why, what they are now—simple honest brave men, and I had rather they ruled over me and made my laws than any other men.”

“Well enough for you,” I-wan retorted. “But you are one of them.”

“Are you not?” En-lan broke in.

“Yes, I am now, too,” I-wan argued, a little impatiently—En-lan saw slowly sometimes!—“But you and I do not make up a nation. A nation today is not a simple society of simple men. It is a great machine and men must know many things to make it perform its service to the people.”

“We do well enough, don’t we?” En-lan exclaimed. “We are fed, we are clothed, justice is done to all. And we are free. These are what men require.”

“But not all they require—” These words were on I-wan’s tongue, but he did not say them. He saw that En-lan was as he was made and that he was one who saw no further than what he himself believed. In his youth En-lan had taken for this belief certain dreams and ideas and then he had not changed. His whole life until now had been spent in making them actual. He had made for himself a sort of world, a kind of nation such as he believed was right. All his life until he died would be spent in this struggle to perfect the same dream.

But I-wan’s dream had changed. The more he lived among these men, the more he lived with En-lan, the more he perceived that what was changed in him was the dream, the perception of what he wanted his country to be. He knew now he did not want to be ruled by these men, honest though they were. Their simplicities were not enough. Honesty and simplicity, surely, were not essential companions! If they were, then honesty was not wide enough. It must be made wider.

He began to ponder very much on these matters. Who, after this war, would make his country and how must its laws be made and what must these laws be? He saw now that En-lan could never be a ruler over that which he could not understand. Enlightenment and knowledge, order and grace, these were things life must have, too, but En-lan would never know it…. And it came into I-wan’s mind that Tama had somehow changed him. She had taught him to love order and right behavior and grace in everyday acts. He had the ten years with her forever in his being. Yes, and though it was bitter to know it, he had the ten years of his life in Japan in his being, too. He was too honest within himself not to see that the people there were more secure than the people were here in his own country. They lived more secure because they lived in order. He dared not say to En-lan that there was anything good in the enemy, for En-lan would not have believed he could be loyal to his own and yet find good in his enemy. But I-wan knew himself and knew that he loved his own country none the less when he saw that its people were too poor and that the freedom they loved had ceased to be freedom when because of it they went in bondage to hunger and flood and fear of robbers and of wars between mischievous and lawless men. He pondered much on what the moment was when freedom and security came nearest to being the same.

And that he thought of such things showed him what he had become as a man. He knew now he could never follow En-lan to the end as once he could have done. To the end of each day, yes, and to the end of this war, yes. But beyond that there must be a new world again. What it would be he did not know now, and then he gave over thinking so far and he thought no farther than to the time when he could bring his wife and children home.

In the days of that long winter when they waited for spring to come and the maize and the kaoliang to grow high enough for ambush by day, he would dream how when the war was over he would bring Tama and the children across the sea and how they would find their home. Where would it be? He considered his vast country. Well, the sunshine of the north, the cool summers and bright cold winters—these were full of health. But there was the rich and fertile beauty of the mid-country, and the fruits and flowers of the south. Tama would love the flowers. It was not easy to choose from such a country where his sons could best grow into their manhood. He thought of all the fine cities where they might live, Hangchow and Soochow, Nanking and Hankow.

And then the enemy began to take those cities, one by one. In the late autumn Shanghai had been yielded. His father wrote him of desperate, useless fighting, of wounded men who were too many to be tended. And Soochow was lost and in early winter Hangchow was no longer theirs—the heavenly city of Hangchow, where when he was a child he had gone with his father and mother for holidays in spring and autumn.

Somehow all this time while the enemy marched inland he had not believed that Nanking could be seized because Chiang Kai-shek was there. He smiled at his own superstition concerning this man. He was as bad as his father, who would believe in no gods, but believed in Chiang as though he were a god! And then they heard Nanking, too, was lost. For a day the men could do nothing but sit and mourn and wonder if now were not the time for them to withdraw to themselves as they were before, and only by holding a great feast and gathering them all together to hear him speak to them could En-lan make them bold again against the enemy.

“What are cities to us?” he shouted to them when they were full of meat and wine. “What is Nanking to us? We have had nothing from Nanking—we shall not know it is lost! And if we withdraw now and the enemy win, must we not fight them alone later? And if we stay by and win, and we shall win, will not the country then be ours?”

With all the old magic of his brilliant eyes and deep voice and simple speech always to be understood by any man, En-lan drew them back once more and they fought on. And I-wan could not deny that magic, but he knew that when the war was over and men needed not so much to be led to battle as to the daily building of a great new nation, the magic would not hold. No, in that day En-lan himself perhaps would grow weary of patience and work and go away to be his old self somewhere and start another revolution. But now he had his use.

And under his magic after this, each time a city fell to the enemy and with it the region where it was, the men went more firmly to their hidden vicious warfare. They made no great battles, there was no open victory nor vanquishment, but the drain upon the enemy was like the bleeding of a secret wound. Nothing was told, no one knew, and newspapers printed nothing, but one night a hundred men were swept clean from an enemy post in a country town and another night a bridge fell and the river swallowed up half a regiment, or a train was wrecked, or mines were hidden in the dust of a country road and exploded beneath the wheels of an enemy truck, or a strange fire broke out in an enemy camp, or a shipment of rifles was taken or a gun captured from the Japanese who were left dead where it had stood, or a dike was broken and a flood seized the enemy.

This was the sort of warfare they knew how to make, these men of En-lan’s. And it was the wisest way to fight, I-wan became sure. For when he read in his father’s letters how in the south the Chinese armies fell, he grew sick while he read. They would do anything they were told to do, they were so brave, his father wrote. When they were told to march in the open in ranks against the enemy, then they marched, though only to fall before the machine guns of the enemy like wheat beneath the scythe. The more he thought of this the more I-wan could not bear it, and he wished that Chiang would give over trying to fight as the foreigners fight and go back to these old ways of their own which En-lan had learned so well to use.

One day his father wrote for the first time as though he were fearful of the end. “Our men have nothing but courage. They go into battle as good as empty-handed, with little popping hand guns to stand before machines. All our best young men are already gone. We cannot train them fast enough for such massacre.”

He went to En-lan with his father’s letter and showed it to him and asked him, “Will you go to Chiang and explain our way of fighting and persuade him to it?”

They talked for a long while. En-lan was not willing at first, for he suspected there might still be those who wanted to kill him.

“Why do you not go for me?” he asked I-wan. “You are always safe, being your father’s son!”

“Chiang would not listen to me,” I-wan replied quietly, ignoring En-lan’s hidden taunt against his father, “but he knows what a foe you are!”

En-lan laughed and gave in then, and I-wan telegraphed his father, who arranged it that MacGurk came to fetch En-lan. They had one moment of laughter together, when suddenly En-lan, who had never feared anything in his life, was now afraid to go up in the air, but I-wan’s laughter drove him and he was gone. I-wan watched the plane rise and lose itself in the sky. Those two meeting thus, he thought to himself—what a thing it would be to see!

And I-wan was right. When En-lan had been back a few days—and he came back without delay, shouting that he could not endure that city for another hour—Chiang announced everywhere that hereafter the Chinese armies would fight not after the western ways they did not know, but after their own ancient ways. When the enemy advanced, they would retreat. When the enemy retreated, they would advance. When the enemy did not expect it, they would attack. They would never again meet the enemy in pitched battle as western armies did.

When this pronouncement was made it seemed as though every Chinese took heart again. If this war could be fought as they knew how to fight, they would win. And I-wan took his own private comfort in the knowledge that fewer would die uselessly now. In the future, he thought grimly, they must make armies to match any in the world, armies and navies and thousands of airplanes of every sort. But now they must make shift as they could to save themselves.

For in their way of fighting he and En-lan lost almost no men. It was counted as a fault if a man lost his life, that is, a clumsiness somewhere that ought not to have been. But steadily they counted the lives of their enemies taken day after day.

Now peace between En-lan and I-wan grew to be an uncertain thing, and more and more as time went on, especially as the maize and kaoliang grew high enough for ambush and the men went out every day for warfare. When they killed their enemy I-wan said nothing, but they brought back prisoners—and upon this En-lan and I-wan could not agree. In his own way in this, too, I-wan had grown beyond En-lan, who must always remain something of what he was born. It seemed En-lan could never forget his poor childhood and the famines which he had seen and the hardships he had suffered. He held mankind responsible for all he had suffered, and though he loved his own loyally, he hated all who were not like him and therefore not his own. If a man were not poor he hated him and was ready to kill him. And to him every Japanese was something less than man.

But I-wan had been gently reared and he had no great bitterness to remember. All the things he had once thought bitter now seemed small. In his childhood he had hated his grandmother. Yet when she died in the second month of this year and her body had been encoffined and put in a temple to wait for peace, since these were no times for the display of a great funeral, I-wan wondered then that he had grown so bitter over the smell of her opium and had not remembered rather that she loved him most tenderly and steadfastly and had always coaxed him when he was sullen.

So this was another difference between him and En-lan, now that they lived together day upon day in such closeness. It was about the killing of the prisoners they took. Sometimes it came almost to open quarrel, and then Peony must come between them to scold them and explain them to each other.

“You, En-lan, are too stubborn in your own mind! You are stubborn like an ox. And I-wan, you are stubborn too, but you are stubborn as a swift willful horse who has been fed too daintily and never known anything but a golden bridle. Now, ox, do not ask horse to become ox, and, horse, remember he is ox!”

But about this one thing not even Peony could make them laugh or agree.

It had been a habit of En-lan’s men, when I-wan came, to kill all the men they captured except a few—some who, they thought, looked the strangest or who were young and troublesome and did not yield, or those for whom, for one reason or another, it seemed quick death was too easy. Very often they brought these back with them and then by slow merry ways they made them die. First they locked them in cages or chained them to a tree and let any who liked come and see them and spit upon them or prod them with pitchforks or hold blazing torches to their fingers and toes, or any such things as amuse common folk who have an enemy at their mercy.