The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) (22 page)

“A generation will not undo the hatred we are making for ourselves, that we side with the white men in this war and not with our own,” he told Sheng sadly. “It is we, they all say, who are betraying our side of the world. The enemy is spreading it everywhere that it is only we who help those who have ruled us. If it were not for us, and this is what I hear everywhere, the war would be won by now, they say, and the white men gone.”

Sheng sat apart from his men at night to talk with Charlie, and tonight he sat on a rotted stump near the edge of a jungle where they had encamped well away from a village, so that if any came near they could see him coming. All around the encampment soldiers were awake and watching, for well they knew their danger. He sat there, his big slender hands clenched on his knees, his knees apart, and his head up and his eyes watching. He did not cease to turn his eyes here and there as he answered Charlie.

“If I had not suffered what I have suffered at the hands of these East-Ocean dwarfs, and what I suffered I will tell no man, if I had not seen what I saw in the city near my father’s house and if I had not seen what happened in the village of my ancestors, men I might have said that these people do well to say we have betrayed our own. But I have seen and I never forget. White men I do not know. I never spoke to one since I was born. But the East-Ocean dwarfs I do know and I have seen them, and they are my enemies until I die, and after I am dead I will not forget.”

His voice came out of the night like low thunder and he went on. “Do I love the white men whom I have never seen? Am I a fool? No, it is not to save the white men that I sit here tonight, my feet on this earth that is not mine, whose sands and winds are strange to me. But if the white man is the enemy of my enemy, then the white man is my friend.”

“The country is rotten with spies,” Charlie said. He pulled his ear restlessly. “Among the priests nine out of ten are for the Japanese. Among the people not one will lift his hand against them.”

“Then these people are my enemy, too,” Sheng replied heavily. He rose and looked out over the dark alien land spread around him. He sniffed the night wind. “Even the winds smell evil,” he said. “There is a rotten smell to them.”

“It is the jungles,” Charlie said. “The jungles are rotting.”

They were silent for a long moment, each unwilling to speak out his fear to the other.

“I am going to sleep,” Sheng said at last, his voice as hard and dry as a dog’s bark.

“Well, I will sleep an hour or two and then be on my way,” Charlie replied. “I shall meet you somewhere or other. Do not look for me, but before night falls again I shall fit my footstep to yours.”

“By the third dawn from this we should be there, unless the white men have retreated still farther,” Sheng said.

“Retreat!” Charlie repeated. “They cannot retreat. They have not a single road open to them now. And they do not know how to travel without roads for their machines.”

The two young men laughed without mirth and so parted.

… In silence the march went through the last day. By now the General knew to the third of a mile where the white men were waiting for rescue. He had communication by messenger with the American but he did not rely on it. The American was even more strange here than he was himself. No, he thought through that last long day, he must lean only on himself. To fight this war was beyond the white man who knew well only his own kind. He was filled with a strong scorn of these white men, all of them, who had left their countries to come here to fight among people whom they could not tell one from the other. He smiled bitterly many times as he marched that day, on foot like his men, his face spotted with shadows from the tree twigs around his hat.

“These white men!” he thought in mingled fear and scorn. “They cannot tell one brown face from another. Let an enemy stand before him and say he is a friend and the white man does not know the difference.”

For his spies had brought back hundreds of stories. The enemy did not wear a uniform but went in a pair of drawers and on their feet were only sandals or rubber-soled shoes and they mingled with the people of the country who clothed themselves thus, and the white men took them all for one, not knowing the language of any of them. Here they had ruled for hundreds of years, and yet they knew not one face from another nor one tongue from the next.

“And we go to rescue these,” the General groaned, and his scorn grew so high that when the American commander sent through his orders again in the afternoon where he was to go and what he was to do, the General crushed the papers into the palm of his hand and threw them away.

“I must trust to what wisdom I have of my own,” he told himself.

Be sure that his scorn filtered through his voice and eyes and words, so that all of those whom he commanded felt it and breathed it in without knowing it. They went to join their allies, and yet they put no trust in those allies, even with all good will to do so. For some had a good will, and even those who had none knew that at least they had no choice. They must fight beside the white men or against them and to be against them was to join the enemy and this they could not do.

Then, too, who did not remember the Chairman as he had stood before them the last time? His high voice had cut through the air like a whip above their heads.

“You bear our honor like a flag,” the Chairman had cried. “Now let the white men see what we Chinese can do. If we acquit ourselves well I do not doubt that they will accept us at last as full allies in this war against the East-Ocean enemies. Where else shall we look for allies against these who would take our country for theirs, except to the men of Ying and Mei? I still put my faith in their victory. Obey that one, therefore, whom I have put over you. Not that you need a white man to be your leader, but he is to stand between you and the men of Ying, who are harsher and less friendly to us. And yet we must all be allies. Show that one what soldiers you are. Our whole people look to you. Men! I command you!”

Behind them as he spoke had stood that lady, and as the Chairman shouted these words she had raised her small clenched fist over her head.

The General remembered her as she stood there, a beautiful creature, but was she too not foreign? Often men had talked among themselves that it was she who kept the Chairman the ally of the white men. For she had spent the years of her childhood abroad and she had been nourished by the earth and wind of a country not her own. It was said she spoke their language better than she did her own. Certainly she spoke her own with a foreign curl to the words—book words, too, she used, long ancient words that came out of classics now dead, and she seemed not to know the sharp new short words of today. But then she lived apart from common folk indeed, being a lady, her ears jeweled and rings upon her hands.

He lifted his head to free himself of all these useless thoughts. He was a soldier and he had a soldier’s duty ahead, clear and simple. He knew his enemy, at least, whether or not he knew his friends. He looked at the watch upon his wrist. By dawn tomorrow they should be over the river and in sight of the white men—if those men were still alive.

… As for Mayli, she was that night entirely sleepless and with more than weariness. The smell of battle was in the air. All knew that tomorrow there would be battle. But for her it was the first. Now for the first time there would be men bleeding and dying and having to be cared for. Could she do her duty? She felt ashamed of all the uselessness of her life until now. She had lived softly and easily, apart from her own people. She had been a child abroad, and there among foreign people she had grown up. Yes, and even now she had not become a part of her own people. They were something of hers—a blood she shared, a nation whose citizen she was, but she was not a part of them as they were a part of one another. She longed at this moment not to be able to speak any other language except the one that her own people spoke. She wished she had not foreign memories.

“If ever I have time,” she thought, “I shall read and read again, but not foreign books this time, and only the books of my own people—the old poetry and the old philosophy. I want to find my roots.”

And then it came to her that perhaps she never would have this time, for she might be killed, and she wept a little, secretly, in the night, putting her hands to her mouth to still herself, for she lay among her women and they could have heard her. As it was, Pansiao did hear her, for this young girl still waited to see where Mayli laid herself down and she came and put her pallet there. She woke and lay still for a moment and then she put out her hand in the darkness and touched Mayli’s cheek and found it wet. So startled was she to find that this one, too, could weep that she burst into her own tears, and then Mayli had to speak sharply to her, knowing that only sharpness could stop a sort of reasonless weeping like this, which might indeed sweep over all the women like a panic.

She sat up at once and took Pansiao by the braid of her hair and shook her a little. “Stop!” she whispered, “stop or I shall punish you like a child!”

And Pansiao did stop, terrified by fierceness in the voice she loved, and then Mayli lay down again cured of her own sadness.

“What is there for me,” she thought, “except the one duty I see clear ahead?”

I
N THIS MOOD DID
all those men and women rise the next morning long before the dawn broke, and they ate their cold rations and gathered themselves together and began to creep onward. Now the enemy was thick around them and every foot fell softly and not a voice spoke, even though the air hissed and split with the sound of guns not far away. The General had sent down warnings to them that the enemy might be perched like monkeys in the trees above them or hiding like beasts in the jungle, and for this reason he kept as much as he could to open country.

“Let each watch for himself and for all,” were the words he had sent down. “Remember that here we have no friends among man or beast.”

The truth was that none of them felt at ease here in war. They were men and women who could fight forever upon their own earth but they were not used to walking upon the earth of others. Upon their own land strength came up into their bodies, but upon this land they felt no strength coming up. It was an enemy under their feet.

They marched forward to certain battle then with their hearts silent, and because their hearts were silent they were afraid. They had for courage only the commands of those above them, and one of these was an American, and when had they found courage before only in commands laid upon them from above, as though they were hirelings? And the women felt the anxiety of the men and followed in dumb silence and Mayli could not cheer them by anything she did, though with great effort she had coaxed two soldiers to get some wood together and she had made a fire and given them hot tea before they started. But they had given her only wan smiles, and each brooded on some private sorrow that when she was at ease she could forget, but which when other fears pressed, she took out again. Thus Chi-ling remembered her dead children and An-lan her old father, and so it was with each one, and even the few who had no great sorrow felt that this was a dreary day for women, without home or shelter, in a foreign land.

Yet as the day came nearer to sunrise their spirits did lift somewhat, for so far they had gone without attack from the enemy and if they could join their allies before the enemy found them from the sky there was some hope that together they could form their lines anew and find a base for attack instead of the eternal retreat.

As for Sheng, marching steadily with the long steps of a farmer, he was eager to come upon the white men and see what they had for weapons and machines. So long had he fought with nothing but his rifle that it seemed to him if they could have even a few of those war weapons of which the white man had so many, then surely they could use them well and attack instead of retreat. How often had he hoped for a mortar only! But these white men had some tanks and planes even, and surely with these could the tide not be turned?

It was with this hope, therefore, that he paused at the place where the General had told him to wait, and he and his men waited above an hour, while the others gathered, and in talking he could not but show his hope, and his men caught it from him, and grew hopeful, too. They could hear clearly the sound of guns, and they listened. There were no great guns and they wondered at this. Had the white men no great guns?

Then by great luck Charlie Li came limping it. He had been scouting the countryside since three o’clock or so, and though he had a stone bruise in the sole of his foot, he had found exactly where the white men were.

“The enemy attacked them in the night,” he told Sheng, “but the white men are still fighting.”

“Do they have their machines?” Sheng asked eagerly.

“They have some machines,” Charlie replied. “I could even see them. They are all gathered together, men and machines, in a shallow valley not above two miles from this spot. But they are hard pressed. A few are escaping. I saw here and there a handful of white men breaking away in their own cars.”

“Then they have lost this battle, too,” Sheng said soberly, “for men do not desert in victory.”

But still he would not give up hope and soon the General came up with his men, and slowly all the forces gathered, and they were ready to go on as soon as the General had considered all the news. The enemy, he now knew, was advancing on three sides up the valleys of the three great rivers. But these were only the main roads. Weaving in and out between them the enemy had made a net, blocking every road. And roads were necessary to the white men. Their great machine weapons were a curse to them for they must run upon roads. They lost their power from their very size when there was no road. The roads were few, and the enemy slipping among the people were hidden as they worked. And the people helped them and soon every road was blocked and all those great weapons were like leviathans cast upon a shore out of the sea, dead hulks, a vast burden upon the men who could not use them and yet were loath to leave them. Trees felled and lying across a road confounded those machines, for while the white men struggled to push aside the trees, the enemy came down on them from the skies and they shot at them from the jungles and the white men died by the score and the hundred at a single spot, trying to save machines.