The Patriot

by Pearl S. Buck

  “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.

  At last one day I-wan went in a mighty rage to find En-lan.

  “Do you allow this?” he demanded.

  “What?” En-lan replied. He was sitting in a room examining upon a map a certain road where that night they planned to make attack.

  “Look out of the door!” I-wan cried. And En-lan rose and came to the open door and looked out.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Do you see nothing?” I-wan asked him fiercely.

  “No, I see nothing,” En-lan said deliberately, “unless you mean the men at play.”

  “Do you call it play?” En-lan shouted.

  At that moment a buffoon had come out of the laughing crowd and had dug his thumb into the chained man’s eye and his eye burst and streamed out. The man screamed onc
e. Then he bit his lip and was silent. But in the bright air sweat ran shining down his face.

  “You can’t deny these men everything,” En-lan said coldly as he watched. “Think what other soldiers have if they are victorious—extra food, money, wine to drink, loot! But our men throw their lives away every day, and yet they eat the same poor food and we have no money to give them and there is no loot. They are simple men—they must have something.”

  “Not such degrading play as this!” I-wan retorted. “This is the play of savages!”

  “Well, so they are savages,” En-lan replied in a reasonable voice. His brilliant eyes hardened a little now as he looked at I-wan. “Are you still the dreamer, I-wan? Do you still believe the poor will be better than the rich? I hate the rich, but the poor are not gods. They are only children. And at least what they do is done openly.”

  I-wan groaned and came into the room and leaned his arm against the wall and hid his face. He felt sick.

  “You are too squeamish,” En-lan told him after a moment and kindly enough. “You should have been hardened as I was. I killed pigs when I was a small child and in a famine I helped my father kill our ox for food, and I saw my mother kill a girl she bore. And I grew up on bandits and what they did. I saw men’s noses slit and their eyes gouged and their ears gone and their backs flayed, and as long as I can remember a dead man was nothing. Why should I care for a Japanese?”

  I-wan straightened himself, wiped his face, and sat down. “It is not only that a Japanese is a man also,” he said. “It is that I am ashamed to see Chinese do such things.”

  “Do you forget what the Japanese did at Nanking?” En-lan asked angrily. “Nothing we can do will be enough revenge!”

  “I know. I don’t excuse them,” I-wan replied doggedly. “But I say, if the Japanese are like that, it is not my business—but it is my business if my own people also…”

  “Oh, the patriot!” En-lan broke in. “Oh, what a patriot! I-wan, you are a fool. I say it plainly. When you have been through what I have—”

  “The more I see of it, the more I shall hate it!” I-wan said violently.

  “Then you had better go somewhere else, where it is not to be seen,” En-lan declared. “Perhaps you would like to join the benevolent work of the Japanese and become one of the puppet governors—”

  When I-wan heard En-lan say this, he suddenly felt an anger rise in him that lifted him from his feet. Upon its power he leaped forward and fell upon En-lan and En-lan, not being prepared, fell under him upon the beaten ground of the floor, and they struggled together as though they were two boys instead of men. Each held the other with both hands by the hair of his crown and shook as hard as he could, and thus Peony found them at this moment. She had been asleep in the other room and their voices had awakened her and now she came at them shrieking and pulling and scolding.

  “Oh shameful! Oh, I-wan, how can you—En-lan, you foolish—” And then she opened her mouth and bit one hand and then another until they let go. They scrambled to their feet and wrung their hands with pain.

  “I’m bleeding,” En-lan accused her.

  “So you should bleed,” Peony answered him.

  I-wan drew out his handkerchief and wrapped his own bleeding hand and said nothing.

  “Now, what is your quarrel?” Peony demanded.

  En-lan laughed suddenly.

  “I called him a patriot and he fell on me!”

  “No, now, truly, En-lan!” she exclaimed. “I-wan is not so foolish.”

  “It was about the prisoners,” I-wan said suddenly.

  “What prisoners?” Peony asked.

  They looked, but while they had been quarreling the man had been taken away.

  “He is dead,” I-wan said abruptly.

  “Then why quarrel over him?” Peony coaxed them.

  “There will be more tomorrow,” I-wan said.

  “I-wan wants them all gently killed,” En-lan broke in. “And I say the men must have some pleasure out of their hard lives.”

  “And I say,” I-wan retorted, “that we ought to teach them something better.”

  He looked at Peony. “En-lan says I am soft,” he said. “But you were a child in my father’s house, too. Am I right or wrong?”

  He would not care what she said, he thought. He knew he was right.

  “But Peony was a slave,” En-lan said sharply. “A slave in a rich man’s house has to suffer—”

  “Yes, but still I-wan is right,” Peony said slowly. “It is not good for our men, En-lan. I know what he means. Sometimes when his grandmother used to—to burn me with her pipe”—she glanced at I-wan and flushed a little and went on quietly—“I remember I used to say to her in my heart, ‘But it is you who are cruel and wicked and mean—it is not I. I have only a bit of aching flesh on my arm, but you have become wicked!’”

  “Did she do that?” I-wan asked in a low voice. She pulled up her sleeve and he saw on her thin upper arm deep round scars, many scars running in together.

  “You never told me,” he whispered.

  “I couldn’t tell—anyone,” she said mournfully. “I don’t know why—except it seemed to make me a real slave and so I hid it.”

  “You should have told me,” I-wan said. He wanted suddenly to weep with anger. “I hate every torture!”

  “I also,” Peony said simply. She drew down her sleeve and turned to En-lan. “I-wan is right,” she told him.

  “Perhaps he is,” En-lan agreed. It was impossible to tell from his face how much he had inwardly yielded. But from that day on I-wan at least saw no more torture.

  It was soon after this that I-wan began to perfect a plan which for a long time he had been musing upon in his mind. It had begun many months before, when it had occurred to him to imagine what he would do if some day when he led his men in a secret attack, one of those whom he must kill or see killed should happen to be Bunji? He put the thought away as soon as it came. There was so little chance that this would happen that he could think of it as no chance.

  And yet there was enough chance left so that he never looked from ambush at Japanese upon a road where he was hidden or through an open door suddenly upon men surprised without taking his first quick look to see that none of the faces was Bunji’s face. No, and he never killed a man from behind, lest the man be Bunji, and if a man tried to make his escape and he had not seen his face, he let him go…. Yet he had heard nothing of Bunji. Tama never told him where he was, if indeed she knew herself. She only wrote that he was still alive and well, and that his little son was walking now, and that Setsu longed to have her second child. But who knew when that would be? This war was endless in spite of all the times set for it to end… And as long as he knew Bunji was alive, I-wan was afraid.

  He knew, of course, what he would do if Bunji were among the ones they captured. He would help him to escape. That he had decided long ago when first he had thought of it, so that if it happened he would be ready. But first he would talk with Bunji and explain to him the evil of this war which his people made upon I-wan’s people. For I-wan had talked to many prisoners and he now knew that they were not told why they had to leave their homes and families and die in such hundreds and thousands. And he found very often the letters and writings in the pockets of those dead, and he read them that he might know what they thought and felt before they died. And always they said the same thing, that this was a righteous and necessary war which they fought to save their own homes and their own country. And I-wan longed to say to them, “We do not want your country and you have nothing you need to save yourselves from with us, so why have you died?” But they were dead.

  And then he thought of how the men used to bring back many living prisoners until En-lan put a stop to it for mercy’s sake after Peony had showed them her burns, and he thought, “Why should we not teach these prisoners the truth and treat them kindly and send them back to their own army, to spread knowledge of the truth among their fellows?”

  He went to En-lan wi
th this plan, not being sure at all what En-lan would think of it, and if he would not say again that he was too soft. But En-lan, when he had heard it, seized it at once as a good clever plan.

  “It makes a man’s arm slack if he does not believe in what he does,” he said. “And if we can spread doubt among them and make them distrust their leaders, it is a clever thing to do.”

  The more En-lan thought of it, the more he liked it. He clapped his hand against I-wan’s and laughed and cried, “It’s as good as capturing a trainload of guns—well, I will say that skull of yours has something in it, I-wan!”

  Somewhere or other, I-wan knew, his idea and En-lan’s idea of the same thing did not quite hit together. But he let it go. If the thing were accomplished, the end was served. And the men, when En-lan explained it to them, were pleased with what they thought was such clever trickiness, and so the thing was done. And thereafter a certain number of prisoners were taken alive and fed and given courtesy and kindness and “educated,” as En-lan said, for a week or two, and set free again, looking, every man thus freed, so bewildered at what had happened to him that he was wholly dumb and did not know what came next.

  But for Bunji it was no use after all. In the autumn I-wan had a letter from Tama and in it she was all grief and mourning. Bunji had been killed in the fighting at Taierhchwang. I-wan, after he had read and burned her letter as he must all her letters, sat awhile in his own room in great sorrow, remembering Bunji as he had known him when first he went to the Muraki house. How warm a heart had been his, and how merry! If there had been no war, how long and happy a life would have been his desert! But war had soon spoiled him. He was too simple for the strain and cruelty of war, and it had broken him…. And so all I-wan’s fears of meeting him were useless. And all Setsu’s hopes were useless, too. She would never have a second son.