by Mo Yan
Zhu Bajie concentrated his strength in his paunch. Sun Wukong twirled his cudgel over his head, took aim at Bajie’s paunch, and swung with such force that he recoiled backward when he hit his target. Bajie massaged his belly and laughed—ke ke ke.
General Yue said:
“If there are those among you who do not believe, come forward to see for yourselves.”
A young hothead by the name of Yu Jin, who had once felled an ox with a single punch, leaped into the ring, picked up a brick, and flung it at Wukong’s head. The brick disintegrated, but Wukong’s head suffered no injury. So then Yu Jin asked Sixi to fetch a cleaver from his shop.
“General,” he said, “may I?”
General Yue smiled but said nothing.
Zhu Bajie nodded his approval.
Yu Jin raised the cleaver and swung it with all his might at Bajie’s paunch. There was a loud clang, as if he’d struck iron. Bajie’s belly sported a new white mark; the blade of the cleaver was ruined.
There were no more disbelievers in that crowd, all of whom asked to be taught the magical boxing skills.
General Yue said:
“The most wonderful aspect of divine boxing is speed. You may lack the strength to tie up a chicken, but if you are pure of heart, the spirit will come. When you drink the ashes of an amulet, that spirit will attach itself to your body, and whichever divine host you desire will be yours. If you ask for Huang Tianba, Huang Tianba will be there; if it is Lü Dongbin you prefer, he will come. And when that divine host attaches himself to your body, you will be a master with unimaginable power. Drink down another tally, and you will have a body that can ward off all weapons and attacks, be impervious to water and fire. The virtues of Righteous Harmony fists are legion. In battle you crush the enemy, and off the battlefield it keeps you safe and healthy.”
“We accept General Yue as our leader!” the crowd erupted as one.
————
3
————
On a misty, drizzly morning ten days later—during the 1900 Qingming Festival—Sun Bing issued an order for the army whose training had just ended to launch an attack on the shed that served as the German engineers’ construction headquarters.
For ten uninterrupted days, day and night, before a divine altar erected at the bridgehead, he and his guardians, Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, had spared no effort in drawing magic tallies and chanting incantations to propagate the physical art of warding off bayonets and bullets.
Every able-bodied young man in the township was a member of the divine army; they worshipped at the divine altar and practiced divine boxing skills. Even young men from surrounding villages came carrying their own provisions to join the army. The young shepherd from the south bank of the Masang River, Mudu, and the hothead Yu Jin became Sun Bing’s staunchest disciples. Mudu took the role of Zhang Bao, who preceded Yue Fei’s horse; Yu Jin took the role of Wang Heng, who followed it. During the training, each man chose the heroic figure, celestial or mundane, ancient or modern, whom he most revered as his possessing spirit. Yue Yun, Niu Gao, Yang Zaixing, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, Huang Zhong, Li Kui, Wu Song, Lu Zhishen, Tuxing Sun, Lei Zhenzi, Jiang Taigong, Yang Jian, Cheng Yaojin, Qin Shubao, Yuchi Jingde, Yang Qilang, Huyan Qing, Meng Liang, Jiao Zan . . . in a word, characters from opera, heroes in books, and strange figures of legend emerged from their caves and came down from the mountains to attach themselves to the bodies of Masang Township men in order to display their magic powers. Sun Bing, the great loyalist general and leader of the resistance against Jin, Yue Fei, gathered all those heroes and paladins, the epitome of loyalty and righteousness, whose martial skills were second to none, and in the short span of ten days trained a cadre of indestructible warriors who hungered to fight the German devils to the death.
General Yue’s prestige was at its zenith—his every call drew a response from his followers in an army that numbered eight hundred. He recruited local women to dye red cloth for use in making turbans and sashes for the warriors under his command. He personally designed a fiery red battle flag embroidered with the seven stars of the Big Dipper. His eight hundred men were divided into eight contingents, each further divided into ten squads. Contingent commanders and squad leaders were appointed. Squad leaders reported to the contingent commanders, who took orders from the two guardians, Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, who in turn obeyed the commands of Yue Fei.
As the sun rose on a hazy Qingming morning, General Yue and his two guardians set up an incense stand and planted the General’s flag at the bridgehead. Red turbans and sashes had been distributed the night before. When the cock crowed the third time, the order to muster at the bridgehead was given. Women in all the homes had risen before dawn to prepare food. What exactly? General Yue ordered: Today before the fight, warriors must eat their fill, white flour cakes and red preserved eggs will hunger pangs still. To improve the taste of the food, he told the women of each family to prepare yellow onions in broad-bean sauce. The women, who loved hearing General Yue speak, did as he asked. General Yue said that anyone who did not do as he was told was asking for trouble. What sort of trouble? On the battlefield, their amulets would lose their power, and a bullet does not have eyes. General Yue also told his warriors that they must abstain from relations with a woman that night so their bodies could ward off enemy bullets. Everyone took General Yue’s words to heart—their lives depended on it.
When the early birds had exhausted their songs, all the many heroic warriors, in twos and threes, mustered at the bridgehead, as if on their way to market. General Yue was disappointed in the sloppy way they answered the call, but upon further consideration, he decided not to punish them, as he might have done. Ten days earlier, after all, they had been farmers, used to being carefree and undisciplined, and joining him now, during a holiday season between crops, spoke well of them. In fact, some of the more committed individuals had actually shown up before him.
General Yue looked up into the misty sky. Though he could not see the sun, he figured it must be mid-morning. He had wanted to surprise the Germans in their beds, but it was too late for that. The plan to attack, however, would not be affected, given the difficulty in bringing together so many people at one time. The good news was that enthusiasm was running high. The men were talking and laughing, unlike the days soon after the massacre, when so many families had lost loved ones. After conferring with his two guardians, General Yue decided to start without delay by performing rites before the altar and the flags.
Sixi, the youngster in the cat-skin cap, who had been assigned to transmit General Yue’s orders, raised a ferocious beat on his gong to quiet the noisy gathering of warriors. The General jumped onto a bench and issued his orders:
“Find your contingents and squads, then line up to pay your respects at the divine altar.”
Following a brief commotion, they managed to fall in line, all sporting red turbans and red sashes. Some of them—descendants of men trained in martial arts, families in possession of weapons of war—carried spears; others held cleavers, and still others had shown up with tiger-tail whips. Far more men had arrived with ordinary tools: shovels, pitchforks, double-sided hooks, and manure rakes. But there is strength in numbers, and seven or eight hundred men made a force to be reckoned with. General Yue’s excitement was palpable, for he knew that only by being fired in a furnace does iron become steel, and only by the baptism of battle does a group of men become a fighting force. Transforming a bunch of farmers into the assemblage before him in a mere ten days was nothing short of miraculous. Having no experience in the business of organizing and deploying forces, he had relied on instructions passed quietly to him by Zhu Bajie, who had put in time as a soldier at a small military center in Tianjin, where he had received training in modern drilling, and had even had the privilege of seeing the famous Yuan Shikai, who was overseeing training at the center.
“Pay respects at the altar!” General Yue ordered. “And to the flags!”
The so-ca
lled divine altar was in reality an octagonal table with an incense burner. A pair of flags on fresh, unstripped willow branches had been planted in the ground behind the table, one white, the other red. The red flag was the altar banner, with the seven stars of the Big Dipper embroidered in white. The white flag was the commander’s banner, with a large “Yue” embroidered in red. The needlework was the contribution of two nimble-fingered unmarried daughters of tailor Du. Married women were not permitted to do this work, since the hands of married women are considered dirty and would break the spell.
A drizzle began to fall while they were paying their respects to the flags; there was no wind. Both flags hung limply. A flag that did not wave spoiled an otherwise perfect scene, but that could not be helped. On the other hand, the red turbans were resplendent against the overcast sky and in the light drizzle. The red wetness filled General Yue’s eyes and raised his excitement to a fever pitch.
In his role as the young hero Ai Hu in the novel The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants, Sixi raised an ear-splitting din on his gong; he had been banging it so hard over a period of days that he had nearly destroyed the brass instrument and had broken the skin on the hand that was holding it, which was now wrapped in white cloth. The urgent beat of the gong focused the men’s minds and bodies on the task before them. A solemn, reverential mood settled heavily over the assemblage; a mystical aura grew in intensity. Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie lifted a lamb with its legs bound onto the octagonal table. The animal struggled, raising its head up off the table, and rolled its eyes as it pierced the air with a fearful bleat, a cry that wound its way around the men’s hearts and aroused sympathy for the animal. But sympathy was an emotion that had no place at that moment. War entails sacrifice. Before taking on the foreign devils, it was important to first sacrifice a lamb in anticipation of auspicious results. Sun Wukong pressed the lamb hard onto the table and stretched out its neck; Zhu Bajie picked up a hay-chopping knife and gripped the handle with both hands after spitting in them. He then took two steps backward, raised the knife over his head, and, with a shout, chopped the lamb’s head off. Sun Wukong held the severed head up to show everyone as a fountain of blood spewed from the animal’s truncated neck.
General Yue, a grave look frozen on his face, caught some of the blood in his hands and splashed it onto the limp flags, then got down on his knees and kowtowed. His men fell to their knees. After the General was back on his feet, he splashed the remaining blood over the heads of the people; there were far too many people and too little blood to reach more than a few of those nearest to him, who were thrilled to have been so honored. As he released the blood in his hands, the General chanted something, a request to all the spirits, since, as he had made clear to all, there would not be enough time to invite each and every spirit to attach itself to one of the men’s bodies. And so General Yue assumed the task of inviting all the spirits. “If you are pure of heart, the spirits will come,” he had said. Now he told them to call up their individual spirits in their minds and to enter a semi-hypnotic state. After the passage of some time, the General intoned loudly:
“Spirits of Heaven, spirits of the Earth, I respectfully invite you patriarchs to make your presence known. First, the Tang monk Tripitaka and Zhu Bajie; second, Sandy the Monk and Monkey Sun Wukong; third, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang; fourth, Guan Gong and Zhao Zilong; fifth, Ji Dian, the Buddha; sixth, Li Kui, the Black Whirlwind; seventh, Shi Qian and Yang Xiangwu; eighth, Wu Song and Luo Cheng; ninth, Bianque, curer of maladies; and tenth, I invite the Heavenly King Natha and his three sons—Jinzha, Muzha, and Nazha—to lead a hundred thousand celestial soldiers down to earth to help exterminate the foreign army, for when that is done, the world will be at peace. I beseech the Jade Emperor to urgently give the command——”
The response was immediate, as a rush of extraordinary power infused the body of every man there; blood vessels dilated, energy levels rose, muscles grew taut—they were bursting with strength. A chorus of shouts rent the sky as they leaped and jumped, like big, predatory cats; they frothed at the mouth and glared in anger, flexing arms and kicking legs, every one of them assuming a superhuman pose.
General Yue issued his command:
“We march!”
The General, club in hand, set out on his horse. Sun Wukong, with the red altar flag, Zhu Bajie, with the white commander’s flag, and the little hero, Ai Hu, the gong beater, were hard on his heels. The spirited army marched behind them shouting out a cadence.
Masang Township had been built on the bank of the river; its southern boundary was the great Masang River levee, while a seemingly endless plain marked its northern end. A semicircular defensive wall, with a western, an eastern, and a northern gate, had been built to keep roving bandits at bay. The wall, as tall as an average man, was fronted by a moat with a drawbridge.
General Yue, at the head of his army, passed through the northern gate, followed by a contingent of thrill-seeking children. Armed with tree branches, dry sorghum stalks, and sunflower stems, they had painted their faces with ashes or red coloring. Taking their cue from the adults, they raised shouts in immature voices and swaggered in high spirits as they marched along. Old folks had taken positions on the wall to burn incense and pray for a battlefield victory.
General Yue picked up the pace when they reached the outskirts of town. Ai Hu’s urgent gong beats increased the speed of marching. The railroad shed was not far from town; in fact, it was visible as soon as the army passed through the gate. A light drizzle created patches of mist over the fields. Winter wheat had already turned green; the smell of mud was in the air. Flowers on the sowthistle facing the sun in ditches and furrows looked like specks of gold. Roadside wild apricots were in full bloom, turning the trees a snowy white. A pair of turtledoves, startled by the marching column, flew out of the underbrush; cuckoos made a racket in a distant grove.
The Qingdao-to-Gaomi portion of the Jiaozhou-Jinan line was basically completed; the tracks lay cold and detached in the open field, like a dragon whose head was visible but whose tail extended out of view. Men were already out working on the tracks, pounding spikes into the ground and creating a symphony of metallic rhythms. Milky white smoke streamed into the sky from the railroad shed, and even at that distance—several li—General Yue detected the aroma of meat cooking.
When he was about one li from the railroad shed, General Yue turned to look at his troops. A disciplined army when it set out from town had devolved into a ragtag assemblage of men with mud-caked shoes, stomping along like wayward bears. The General had Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie slow down and told Ai Hu to stop beating the gong. Once the main body of troops had caught up, he issued his orders:
“Clean the mud from your feet, my sons, and get ready to attack!”
They did as he commanded, but gobs of mud wound up in other men’s faces, which led to unpleasant grumblings. Some of the men shook their feet so hard that their shoes flew off with the mud. Seeing that the time was ripe, General Yue announced loudly:
“Iron head, iron waist, iron stockade, impervious to bullets. Valiant warriors, charge the enemy, tear up the tracks, kill the foreign soldiers, and bring peace for generations to come!”
After exhorting his troops, General Yue raised his club and, with a war whoop, bravely led the charge, with Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie right behind him, holding high the war flags. Ai Hu fell face first into the mud and lost his shoes to the gooey mess. But he scrambled to his feet and took off running barefoot. Shouts emerged from the throats of the rest of the army as they launched their attack on the railroad shed like a swarm of bees.
The men working on the tracks thought it was an opera troupe heading their way, not realizing that the masses were rebelling until the invaders were nearly upon them. They threw down their tools and fled for their lives.
Guarding the work under way was a squad of German marines, a mere dozen men. The earsplitting shouts interrupted their breakfast, and bad news greeted the squad leader when he stepped outside to see
what was happening. He rushed back inside and ordered his men to grab their rifles. By the time General Yue and his men were ten or fifteen meters from the shed, the armed Germans were already outside with their rifles.
General Yue saw puffs of white smoke emerge from several of the German rifles and heard the crack of gunfire. Someone screamed behind him, but he had the time neither to turn back to look nor to think. He envisioned himself as a piece of driftwood propelled by surging waves as he virtually flew into the German devils’ shed, in the center of which stood a large table with a pot of stewed pork and some shiny silverware. The meaty smell filled his nostrils. The top half of a German marine had made it under the table; his long legs had not. Zhu Bajie’s rake quickly made its mark on the man’s legs, producing a long and loud shriek. The words sounded like gibberish, but the meaning was clear—he was crying out for his mother and father. General Yue ran out of the shed to lead the pursuit of the fleeing German marines. Most were headed for the sub-grade of the tracks, trying to escape the mob of shouting men behind them.
One of the marines was running in the opposite direction. General Yue and Ai Hu went after him. The man did not seem to be running all-out, and the distance between them shrank rapidly. General Yue watched in fascination as the man stumbled along stiff-legged, as if he had sticks for legs. It was almost comical. Then, without warning, the German dove into a ditch, out of which a puff of green smoke rose almost immediately. An instant later, Ai Hu, who was running ahead of the General, jerked upward before tumbling headlong to the ground. At first he thought the youngster had gotten his legs tangled up, but only until he saw fresh blood seeping from a hole in his forehead. Ai Hu, he knew for certain, had been hit by a bullet from the German’s gun, and he was grief-stricken. He charged the enemy marine, swinging his club over his head, and was nearly brought down by a bullet that whizzed past his ear. But in no time he was upon the German, who came out to meet him, a bayonet attached to his rifle. One swing of his club knocked the rifle out of the man’s hands; with a fearful shout, he turned and ran down the ditch, with General Yue hot on his heels. The German’s high-topped boots slurped in the mud with every step, as if he were dragging mud buckets behind him. General Yue swung his club again, this time connecting with the nape of the man’s neck. A strange bleat burst from the man’s lips, whose body released a muttony odor, and the General’s immediate thought was that the man’s mother might have been a ewe.