Dragon Seed: The Story of China at War

VI

EARLY IN THE ELEVENTH month the enemy was near the city. When the day was still, if Ling Tan lifted his head as he worked in a field he could hear like distant moaning the sound of battle. Now and again a deep roar broke out of the east, and none knew what it was until some coming back from the city one day said that it was the huge foreign guns the enemy had.

The stream of those who fled had ceased. All who could go were gone, and there remained only those who knew that whatever happened they must stay. Ling Tan made himself busy all day with the winter’s work, and at night he sat long to make straw sandals from the strong rice straw. There was one light snow, and under it the winter wheat grew green, but the snow was soon gone, and day measured off day and now each day brought its own bad news.

On the seventh day of that month the last of the rulers went away. There was an army left in the city to fight the enemy when it came but what army would be brave when its rulers were gone? The people groaned when they heard of it, and all around the city for twenty miles the villagers armed themselves with knives and ancient swords their fathers had left them and their pitchforks and old guns they had bought long ago in thieves’ markets to use in times when the bandits were bad. First they made ready to defend themselves against their own retreating armies, for well they knew that soldiers in retreat whatever their flag will take what they see, because they know that they will not pass that way again and what they do will be blamed on others. Ling Tan armed himself with an old broad-sword his great-grandfather had. It had lain at the bottom of a pigskin trunk for two lifetimes, but now Ling Tan brought it out and his wife polished it with ashes and he swung it a few times and found it could be used like a scythe, and he hung it on a nail near his gate ready to use. Thus half a month passed, and all knew that any day might be the last that they were free, and they learned to measure the time of the enemy’s coming by the daily growing clearness of the sounds of battle. Those roars of great guns were so near now that sometimes the dishes on the table jumped and the children cried.

In the last few days, the worst news that Ling Tan had heard came from the villagers nearest the city. For Ling Tan and his kin were lucky in this one thing, that their village was something more than three miles from the city. Within two and three miles the defending soldiers had burned the villages to prevent the enemy from plunder. Now bands of farmers and their families came by, their goods on their backs, and their small children swinging in baskets from carrying poles, as though it were a famine year, and they were hastening inland. When Ling Tan asked them why, they said:

“Our houses and our harvest are burned. Our land now is only scorched earth and why should we stay to be killed by the enemy?” And they hastened on their way.

That day, with the noise of battle loud in his ears, Ling Tan went out and looked on his land. Should he, too, scorch his earth? But where would he go with his household and among them so many women and little children and who would feed them if he burned his harvests of rice and grass? Deepest of all his unwillingness was the wish not to leave his land.

“If I could roll up the land and take it with me,” he told his wife in the night, “then I could go. But my land goes deep under the skin of the earth and it goes down through the bowels of the earth, and I will not give it up. I will stay here, whoever comes, and keep this land mine.”

“Then I will stay with you,” Ling Sao said.

Days passed and with the rulers gone the people held themselves the more steadfast knowing that they and they alone were left to stand against the enemy and upon each man himself now depended what would happen. So it had happened again and again in other times, for rulers anywhere are always the first to fly, and the people must stay behind to be steadfast. And the noise of the battle grew more strong, hour by hour.

On the tenth day of that month like wind blowing through the countryside it was known that in three days the enemy would come. Now though Ling Tan was lucky in that his land was on the farther side of the city, and so the enemy would not come first to him and then to the city but would march on the city from another side, yet he was unlucky in this, too, for the defending army broke and ran without law and order, seizing all as they ran, and they streamed through villages, wild and frightened men, anxious only to be away from there, and their leaders being gone already they did not care how they disgraced themselves before the enemy so that they saved themselves.

Against these Ling Tan must now lock his gate and though there were those who beat on it he had made it so strong that in their dire haste it did not pay them to wait to break it in. When they found this gate did not open readily they went on and fell upon some other place and so his house was safe. But the ruin they left in the village and in all the villages in that direction was shameful to see and plenty there were who cried out that the enemy could not be worse than this, and there were even some who said plainly that they wished the enemy would come in and rule, that at least then there might be order. For now the robbers and bandits began to spring up everywhere like evil weeds. When a man sold some of his harvest and had a little money, these roving homeless men heard of it as though they smelled it, and they came down in the night and took what they wanted. To all other sorrows, there was added this ancient sorrow.

Wu Lien was one who wished for order at any cost. After the last of the defeated armies had passed he came out and walked up and down the street of the village and groaned to see every little shop emptied of what it had and the bakery cleaned of its last loaf and all gone without a penny in anyone’s hand.

“Let no one say that there can be worse than what our own have done to us,” he said, and when he was back in the house he said, “as soon as the enemy has occupied the city I shall go and open my shop again for I believe we shall be better rather than worse with their coming.”

“If you are right, when they come, then I will say you are and take their rule for mine, too,” Ling Tan answered. For while the soldiers had fled past his house he had climbed up on a corner of roof where he could be hidden and yet look down, and he was so angered by what he saw and by their wild ruthless looks that it was all he could do to hold on and not fall upon them, even though he knew that when a man becomes a soldier he ceases to be a man and goes back to the beast he once was in some other life.

But at last there was an end even to these retreating men. In that silent time between the retreat of the defending army and the coming of the enemy Ling Tan called the villagers together in the tea house and there they took counsel as to how the enemy was to be met. They knew the time was short.

“Surely they will see that we are a defenseless village,” Ling Tan said, “and even an enemy will not fall upon those who have made themselves willing for their coming. Let us therefore think how to meet our conquerors courteously, not to welcome them falsely but to tell them that we are men of reason who can accept what has come in their life.”

To this all were agreed, and then some asked, “When and from what place will this enemy come and on what road shall we meet them?” and others asked, “How should we meet them?” For not one of these men had ever seen a foreign conqueror before and though they all hoped for good and each told the others the good things he had heard of foreigners, they did not know what should be said to them or what the behavior ought to be of those who were vanquished by them.

Then the ninety-year-old said out of his long wisdom, “What ways do we know but our own? Let us do as we would do to any new gentry coming to our village.”

Because of his great age all listened to him as he spoke, and they agreed that what he said was best. So it was planned that when they heard the enemy draw near they would go out in a body from the village, and that this oldest man should go first, and after him the others, and that tea should be prepared here and small cakes and fruits, and thus in decency and honor the conquest would take place. And as they planned there were some who said aloud that they hoped for order and peace at least, and that it would not be hard for the conquerors to be a little better than some of their own magistrates had been to them.

All having been decided, the inn keeper was called to the front of the tea house and it was told him to have tea and small cakes ready for the next few days and he said he would make some of his own small sesame cakes, and so they parted to wait.

In those next days while they waited there were those who went to the city and bought small enemy flags of paper for the people to hold in their hands when they went out to welcome the enemy, and to comfort themselves the villagers told each other that in the city they had heard, too, that foreigners were always better than their own people and in foreign countries there were more law and order than there were here and so in hope and fear all waited for the day of the enemy’s coming.

… Thus dawned the thirteenth day of the eleventh month. On the morning of that day when he rose Ling Tan knew what day it was. All sound of battle had ceased. The air was as still as it had been in the years before the enemy ever came to the coast. A quiet wintry morning it was and the first heavy hoar frost was white on the land. He had risen early, for he slept badly now every night, and alone he went to his gate and looked over his whitened fields. The winter wheat was green under the white and he thought, “Shall I cut that wheat or will there be another in my place?” Upon the thatched roofs of the village the frost was beginning to melt from the smoke slowly curling upward as women lighted their fires, and without answering his own question he went into his house where Ling Sao had lit her fire, too.

He went to her in the kitchen where so often in their life he had found her and there she was behind the stove.

“This is the day we dread,” he said.

“I know it,” she answered. She lifted her eyes to his face and he saw they were steadfast.

“I fear no man,” she said.

The old words came out of her with new meaning and he felt it.

“Nor will I fear,” he said quietly.

In silence he washed himself and rinsed his mouth and in silence one after another of the household came out and took his place at the table. Even the children who on other days cried and laughed and quarreled and made commotion today were silent, too.

When all had eaten Ling Tan spoke to them as the head of the house. “By the stillness over the land I know that the battle is over. Our army has retreated and perhaps even by this time the enemy has taken the city. But here we must all stay within the walls of our own house. None of you is to go out without telling me and especially no woman or any child is to go out for any reason. I myself will work only where I can see all roads and if I see a stranger coming I alone will speak, and none of you is to show his face except my eldest son and he only if he sees me distressed, and especially no woman is to show her face for any cause.”

Each bowed his head after he had spoken and so within those walls the long silent day began. The women went to their work and Wu Lien withdrew to his room and each son went to his task of winter work of weaving sandals and twisting ropes, but Ling Tan sat smoking his pipe. His mind did not move, and after a while he perceived that the reason was that he was listening, listening, and yet he could hear nothing. He waited a long time and at last it seemed to him that he must know what was happening and what the full meaning of this great silence was, and so at mid-morning he opened his gate a little. The frost was gone from his fields and the sun was warm. The dog, which he had thrust out of the gate so that it would warn him if any stranger came near, leaped fawning at his feet and whined for food. Not another living creature was to be seen. Each man had shut himself behind his own doors as Ling Tan had and from the city none came or went. As far as eye could reach the roads stretched empty.

He came out of his gate then, and stood a while, his pipe in his hand. He looked toward the city but he could see no sign of any great fire. The high city wall circled those who lived inside, and there was no sign to read of what they were suffering. But there was no sign of suffering either. And as he stood there others who had opened their gates a little saw him and slowly one or two and then others came out of their houses and five or six until cautiously there were twelve or thirteen men in the street looking at one another. They moved toward Ling Tan.

“Have any of you heard anything?” he asked.

“Nothing,” they said, and others shook their heads.

“Ought we not to discover something?” Ling Tan’s third cousin’s son asked.

“How can we?” Ling Tan asked. “Are you brave enough to go to the city and see what there is? You are the only one here without a wife and children and children’s children he must think of.”

“I will go,” the young man said. “I am not afraid,” and he shook back a lock of long black hair that hung over his eyes.

“Ask your father first,” Ling Tan said. “I will not have your going put on me if any harm comes to you.”

“My father lets me suit myself,” the young man said wilfully, and to prove it he went off as he was that very moment, and the rest of them stood and looked after him as his one person moved along the empty road to the city.

“I am glad he is not my son,” one said and all agreed with him.

Then because there was nothing else to say, they parted and each man went back to his own house and locked his gate again, and so did Ling Tan and thus noon came and afternoon. In all those hours the silence held except for a few times when a distant gun roared out.

By mid-afternoon Ling Sao was weary and the children who had been so quiet and good all day could be good no longer and they grew fretful and whined to go out of the courtyard to play, and Wu Lien who had heard from Ling Sao of the cousin’s going to the city began to want to go out of the gate and Ling Tan was afraid for him to go, because he looked a rich man and an enemy seeing him might think there were food and goods in the house that such a man came from.

“If there are many days like this, our walls will burst apart from within,” Ling Sao said, and so Ling Tan opened his gate a little and by now there had been other houses like his, and out in the street a few boys were playing and some of the gates were ajar, and a shop or two open. When he saw how peaceful all was, he called into his house:

“Let any who will come out on the threshing floor but no further than I can bid them back quickly if there is need to lock the gate.”

They came gladly and looked around and everyone was astonished to see that all was the same.

“I swear I thought to see the very color of the ground changed,” Orchid said laughing.

Ling Tan looked carefully everywhere himself and saw no one strange and nothing new and since after a while the afternoon was quiet he thought he would go to his cousin’s house and see if there had been anything heard of his cousin’s son. He walked down the street, and from the few open gates men called to him, and one or two laughed and said:

“If this is the way the enemy attacks us we can bear it!” and one said, “they leave us to ourselves, this enemy!”

Ling Tan agreed, meaning nothing, and went on to his cousin’s house. There he found his cousin’s wife all in a stir because her son was not yet home, and she had supper hot and she hated to waste the fuel to keep it so, and yet if he did not come there was nothing to do but wait. She seemed not afraid of any ill so much as of the waste of her fuel, and so Ling Tan told her to calm herself, because perhaps her son chose to come back by night. His cousin himself had eaten and sat picking his teeth and reading an old newspaper he had by him.

“It says here the enemy have sent down writings from their flying ships telling us all not to be afraid, because they bring only peace and order,” his third cousin said.

“If it is true then they are good,” Ling Tan replied, “and certainly today has been peaceful enough.”

Somehow the words gave him comfort, and as he let down his heart, suddenly he was tired and he yawned and remembered how badly he had slept. Now the day he had feared was over and they were all alive and he had seen not the shadow of an enemy and so he felt his heart loosen in his bosom.

“I think I can sleep,” he told his cousin, “I will go home, but if your son comes let me know.”

“I will,” his cousin promised and rose a moment for courtesy while Ling Tan went out, but his eyes were still on what he read for he was a man who valued what was printed on a paper more than anything a living mouth could say.

It was twilight when Ling Tan next looked out of his gate. He had eaten, and all his house had eaten and the children were in their beds, and he himself was about to go but he said to Ling Sao he would look out once more before he slept. When he opened the gate he thought he heard a moan. He listened and then he knew it was a moan, and his heart trembled with fear. He was about to shut the gate and lock it fast, not knowing whether what he heard was spirit or human, when a voice cried out faintly:

“Cousin!”

He threw the gate open at that and shouted for Ling Sao to bring the lamp and she came as soon as he called and they went out and there on the ground lay his third cousin’s son, that young man who had left so wilfully this morning to go to the city.

Ling Tan would not have known him except that the young man had what none other in the village had, a red satin short coat without sleeves which he wore every day because he loved it and he had bought it in an old clothes’ shop in the city before the last new year. This red satin Ling Tan now saw, but its brightness was dulled.

“Oh, my mother, how he is bleeding!” Ling Sao cried, and she gave the lamp to Ling Tan and was about to turn the young man over but her husband stopped her.

“Do not touch him,” he told her, “else his parents will say we made him worse. Hold the lamp and I will run to call them.”

He gave her the lamp back again and ran down the shadowy street to his third cousin’s house, and pounded with both hands on their locked gate and the dog inside helped him by barking and soon he heard his cousin’s wife’s voice asking who was there.

“It is I, Ling Tan,” he called back, “and your son has come back wounded, how we do not know, but he fell at our gate because it was the first gate he reached and there he lies. We have not touched him.”

The woman gave a great scream and called her husband, and the man came staggering out of his sleep, wrapping his coat around him, and he opened the gate, for the woman had forgotten to open it in her distress, and they all ran down the street together, the dog behind them, to where Ling Sao stood holding the lamp. By now the noise had roused Ling Tan’s sons, and there were others, too, who heard it and these came out of their houses, so that in a few minutes there was a crowd about the young man, but none touched him until his parents came. His father was frightened when he looked at him, but his mother bent and turned him over and thought him dead and then she screamed.

There the young man’s impudent face lay, pale and quiet in the flickering lamplight.

“What has wounded you, my son?” his mother cried in his ear, but he did not hear. “Oh, his red satin coat is spoiled and he will mind that!” she moaned, and then she struck off with her hand the dog who had followed them and now smelled the flowing blood and pressed forward eager to taste it, and the father was angry with the dog and gave him a great kick.

“I, who feed you,” he cried to the beast, “and you would drink my own son’s blood!” And he cursed the beast.

But moaning and cursing did not bring the young man back and at last Ling Tan said:

“We ought to lift him to his bed and call a doctor to see how deep the wound is.”

He said this gently and in the kindness of his heart but the mother turned on him and cursed him bitterly.

“Yes, but it was you who sent him to the city this morning — I heard of it! He would not have gone alone, and he went out of the house without thinking of such a thing, but then you said—”

Ling Tan burst out to defend himself then, and he looked around at his neighbors and sons and called upon them to witness for him.

“Did I not tell my cousin’s son I would not say he was to go and did I ask him if he went of his own will?”

“You did,” they cried in his defense, and so the woman was silenced.

But Ling Tan forgave her, knowing it was fear made her angry, and he stooped and lifted the young man’s head and bade his cousin take his feet, and the mother held his middle and so they carried the young man home and laid him on his bed and covered him. Yet where could they get a doctor? There might only be doctors in the city, if they had not fled, and who dared to go there, seeing how this young man had come back? None dared and they all went home except Ling Tan and he stayed by the young man’s bed with his cousin and his wife.

Now Ling Tan believed this young man was not dead, but only wounded and faint from loss of blood, for if he felt the hands and feet cold, he felt the body warm where the heart was, and so he asked his cousin for a little hot wine and he poured it into the young man’s mouth and though he heard no swallow, yet after a while when he looked the wine was gone, and so he poured more in and then that was gone. All the time he was doing this his cousin’s wife was moaning and reproaching herself and all of them, and out of her came a bitterness that Ling Tan did not know was there.

“He has never been the same since you paid us to let your son have Jade,” she mourned. “Ever since then he has not cared whether he lived or died, and we ought not to have listened to you, and you ought not to have asked it of us and tempted us with your silver. We are poorer than you and it is hard for us to refuse silver.”

This made him angry, for in times past he had done much for this cousin of his who read books instead of earning his own food, and many a winter Ling Tan had sent one of his sons here with a bundle of straw for fuel or a measure full of rice or a cabbage or two, and now he set down the wine cup on the table and he said:

“Curse me if I ever give anything to anybody again, for it seems to me that the surest way to get hatred for myself is to feed the hungry and to lend to those poorer than I am! How it is you can be so surly with me because I give you something to help you, I will not ask or care.”

This quarreling made his cousin anxious, for he did not ask where his food came from or his fuel, so long as he was left to his book, and so now he coaxed his wife, “Why do you anger a good man like this?” And he turned her anger on him, and she screamed at him that he was less than a man and she wished that she were a widow, and then she would sit and fan his grave dry night and day so that she could the sooner marry another and better man.

All this noise woke the young man from his faint, and in the midst of the fury he opened his eyes and spoke.

“Father!” he said.

They all stopped at the sound of that small voice from the bed, and the moment they saw him alive all the anger went out of them.

“Oh, my son, tell us how you were wounded!” his mother cried and she ran to his side.

The young man tried to tell her then but they had to bend to listen and to piece together his broken words and what they heard and put together was this, that he had been caught with others and stood against a wall and shot and left for dead. But he was not dead and in the night by crawling and moving he had crept into a street and there a rich Buddhist at this last moment escaping the city in a cart had taken pity on him and put him in the cart and left him near the village. But when the young man had crawled the distance to Ling Tan’s house he lost his wits again and remembered nothing until now.

“Why should they kill you?” Ling Tan asked astonished.

“We ran,” the young man gasped. “So fearsome were their soldiers I ran with the others — all who run are killed—”

The elders looked at each other and they were able to make nothing of this. Why should innocent men be killed because they were afraid?

At this moment the first light of dawn came into the small room and the young man moaned that his breast hurt him, and that was where the wound was. Yet when they touched him he screamed with pain and lost his wits again, and so they could only cover him and let him lie.

Thus it was when full dawn came and then Ling Tan knew that he ought to go back to his own house, and he told his cousin he would go and return later and so he left them.

That was a strange gray dawn, and made stranger by what Ling Tan now saw as he came toward his own house. For in the distance when he looked toward the city it seemed as though the gray land itself were moving. He stood still and stared, and then he saw that it was many people moving on foot out of the city gates toward his village. One instant he looked and then he went into his house and shut the gate and locked it.

“Where are you?” he shouted to Ling Sao, and at the sound of his voice she ran out. She had been combing her hair, and the great twist of it was between her teeth to hold it while she fastened the red cord that held it at her neck and so she was speechless.

In his terror Ling Tan pulled it out of her mouth.

“The enemy is coming,” he gasped. “Bid all get up and put on their clothes and be ready for what is to come.”

He himself ran out of the house and in doubt and yet not knowing what else to do except what they had planned, he roused the men of the village and bade the ninety-year-old to put on his best garments and his third cousin to put on his scholar’s robes and he roused the inn-keeper of the tea house and told him to get his cauldrons boiling for tea and his cakes set out on the tables, and in a very few minutes they were all standing in the street, shivering with fear in the misty chill of that wintry morning. And for some reason which Ling Tan did not know himself the tears welled into his eyes at the sight of this handful of village men in their best clothes and the bent old man at their head and all with little enemy flags in their hands going out to meet the conquerors they had never seen. His heart misgave him and yet what could he do but go with them?

Down the road in the mists they could now see strange huge shapes.

“Let us go,” he said, and he went slowly at the old man’s side, and they went along the cobbled road of their village and beyond the last house to where the fields lay, and they held up their little flags.

But the strange huge shapes bore down upon them as though they were ants in the dust and to save themselves they had to step aside and let them pass. Now Ling Tan and his fellows saw these shapes were machines, and how could they speak welcome to machines? Ling Tan and his fellows could only stand aside, gaping and waiting, and the machines went through the village and on.

Then they asked each other, “Is this the enemy?” None had seen such machines before, grinding upon their own wheels as they went. But who could answer?

They waited a while longer in the cold cloud around them debating whether to return to their houses, when they heard the sound of tramping feet, and then they saw the dim shapes of walking men and these they knew were the real enemy. Now they gathered close together and in the road they stood waking and when the leaders of the enemy drew near, they bowed to the enemy, and the old man took off his cap and the cold wind blew on his bare skull, and he began to speak the few words of welcome he had by heart and he lifted up his old piping voice,

“Friends and conquerors,” he began, and then his heart misgave him and he stopped. The faces of those leaders were not good. They were fierce and savage faces, and upon them now were unnatural smiles.

When Ling Tan heard the old man fail he quickly took his place and stepped forward.

“Sirs,” he said, “we are only farmers and a small merchant or two in a village and my cousin the scholar, and we are men of peace and reason, and we welcome law and order. Sirs, we have no weapons, but we have prepared a few cakes and some tea—”

At this point one of the enemy shouted out:

“Where is your inn?”

Ling Tan scarcely knew what this enemy said, so broken and guttural were the words.

“In the middle of our village street,” he said, “and it is a poor village for we are poor men.”

“Lead us there,” the enemy said.

Ling Tan’s heart misgave him more and he did not like the looks of the enemy as they came out of the mists and now close to him but what could he and the other villagers do except go on in front? Beside him the ninety-year-old hobbled as fast as he could, but it was not fast enough, for one of the enemy behind him prodded him in the back with a knife at the end of his gun and the old man cried out and then he began to sob with pain and surprise because no one in the village was ever hard with such an old man, and he turned to Ling Tan.

“I am hurt!” he cried, piteously.

Ling Tan turned to make protest to that enemy who had stuck the old man, but what he saw on the faces of those men behind him dried the spittle in his mouth and he went on, only putting his arm around the weeping old man until he came to his own door and then he thrust him in and told his son to go with him to care for him. So without these two they went on to the tea shop and there the keeper was ready with hot tea and cakes and his two sons had stayed to help him and the smiles were as thick as lard on their faces.

But the enemy swelled into the tea shop like an evil horde, and they sat down at the tables. By now Ling Tan and all the villagers knew that the outlook was not good with these men their conquerors and so he and his fellows stayed near the back door to the tea shop and waited while the keeper and his two sons poured tea. As soon as the tea was in the bowls a low roar went over the enemy and Ling Tan and his fellows could understand nothing of it, until that one spoke who could speak and that one said,

“Wine — we want wine, not tea!”

Ling Tan and his fellows looked at each other. Where could they find wine to feed so large a company of greedy men? Wine the villagers drank sometimes at the feast of the new year, or once or twice more when they went into the city after they had sold a good harvest, but there was no wine here.

“Alas, we have no wine,” Ling Tan faltered, and he moved nearer to that back door.

This the enemy told the others, and the men looked darker than ever and muttered together and then that one spoke again, to Ling Tan:

“What women have you in this village?”

Now Ling Tan could not believe what he heard and for a moment he looked silly, thinking the man must have used one word for another.

“Women?” he repeated.

The man did not speak but he made an evil gesture toward himself and Ling Tan knew then that he did mean women, and now he looked at his fellows and he gasped out a lie to save them all.

“We will go and find women,” he said, and then he and all his fellows ran out of that back gate and he stopped only long enough to tell the women in the kitchen of the inn,

“Run — run — hide yourselves — they look for women!” and then he ran to his own house and every man with him ran to his own house to save his own.

Inside his own gate Ling Tan drew the bar across and shouted to Ling Sao to get the household together, and he took down the old broadsword as he spoke and Ling Sao for once said nothing. She ran and called to her sons and daughters and their children, while Ling Tan stood and waited by the gate.

In a while he heard the sound of many feet come toward his gate, and he listened to this until it seemed he could not bear it, and then he opened the gate a little to see what went on outside. Well it would have been for him if he had borne his anxiety and kept the gate locked, for at that moment when he opened it there those faces were before his eyes, angry and full of fury, and under soldiers’ caps he looked into eyes black and fierce with lust. They were like men drunk, their faces so red, and when they saw Ling Tan they plunged at him with a great shout. He stepped back and locked his gate at the same instant and the points of their guns struck into the wood. He heard his faithful dog, who had been barking and snarling at the enemy, yelp and then howl and then grow still.

“Our good old dog is gone,” he groaned, but he could not help a beast now.

Well he knew there behind his gate that even its heavy wood could not hold and that he must prepare for the instant when they broke through, but he had this instant between. Now he thanked his fortune that he had seen war before this and that he knew how men in battle looked. He knew too how a man embattled is no longer himself but a creature with his mind gone and only the lowest part of his body left, and so his first thought was for the women in the house.

He ran back therefore into the house while the gate held and there he found all his household gathered in the main room, the women holding their children and the men’s faces green.

“We are lost,” his eldest son cried, but Ling Tan raised his hand for silence. Long ago he had made his plan for this hour.

“Every one of you is to go to that little back gate that has been locked all these years, and the vines hang over it so that it is not easily seen. Go out of that gate and scatter over the land through the bamboos and behind any hillock you can find. Let each man know where his own wife and children are, but pay no heed to others, and my third son is to look after his younger sister and his mother.”

“I will stay by you,” Ling Sao said.

“You cannot,” he said, “I must climb the rafters and hide in the thatch.”

“So will I,” she said.

There was no time to deny her, and so he ran before them to the back wall and there he found the gate and he pulled aside the vines and wrenched off the rusty latch. It was such a narrow gate that he and Wu Lien saw at once Wu Lien’s mother could never be pushed through it, and so he bade her stay until the last so that the others could be saved. Then he tried to push her through and Wu Lien pulled but it was true she was too fat and there was no way to do it without cutting her and that they could not, so Ling Tan pulled her back again and he told Wu Lien to leave and he would do his best for this old soul if Wu Lien would help the others. So Ling Tan saw them gone and over the sobbing old woman he let the vines hang, and he hoped for her safety but he could stay no longer to see to it, for she was not his own mother. The strong gate was giving now, and he could tell it by the yelling triumph of the voices.

Back in the main room he climbed upon the table and swung up to the big beam above it and behind him Ling Sao came like an old cat, and he stooped and gave her his hand to pull her when she stuck and thus they reached the roof. Into that thick thatch which his forefathers had put over this house and which once in ten years or so each in his time mended and added to, he burrowed a hole above a side beam and he and Ling Sao clung there, suffocated with dust and straw, but still able to live.

Scarcely had they made themselves secure when the gate groaned and gave and he heard the noise of angry men surge into his court and then into the room above which he hid, but he could see nothing nor did he dare to move. Ling Sao clung to him and he to her, drawing their breaths only enough to live, and he prayed his forefathers to help him so that they would not cough or sneeze in the heavy dust. Lucky it was that the straw after all these years made a heavy mat woven together with cobwebs and with damp so that it held around them and the beam was beneath and yet they must not move lest dust or straw float down and tell where they were.

But it was only a moment that the men were in the room below, for when they saw it empty they howled and ran from one room to another of the eight rooms and the kitchen and Ling Tan and his wife heard their good dishes thrown down and broken and they heard their furniture broken and smashed, and they only trembled lest the house be set on fire and they burned with it.

They waited for this to happen next and Ling Tan planned how he would jump and pull his wife after him. But instead of the roar of flames they heard something else. It was a scream, which at first they thought was one of the two pigs, for it sounded like a pig stuck for butchering. Then they heard a word or two and a gurgle and a long moan, and they knew what it was. The enemy had found Wu Lien’s old mother under the vines. Ling Tan moved to go down to her when he knew what it was, but his wife had her arms about him like a strong iron band.

“No,” she said in the smallest whisper. “No! She is dead. You must remember us all. She was old. There are the young to think of.”

And she held him and he knew she was right and he stayed.

So at last the wild enemy went away, but long after there was silence Ling Tan and his wife did not dare to move or to speak. They waited until their limbs were aching more than they could bear and until their lungs were choked and they must cough and spit out the dust, and their bodies were streaming with sweat, though it was a winter’s day.

Then at last he whispered in her ear,

“I will go down because some of the children may come back and think us dead.”

For herself she would not have allowed him to move but when he spoke of the children she let him, and she followed him, and down they crept again into what had been their good and ordered home.

It was ordered no more. They stood at last on the tiled floor of the main room and looked about them. There was nothing left whole, scarcely a chair and not the table even which now fell beneath their weight, nor the bamboo couch that the third son slept on, and they went from room to room, their two hands clasped together, and without one word of speech between them they saw the ruin of the house. When they had seen all, Ling Tan said:

“They have taken nothing but the rice. You see they wanted nothing we had and so in wantonness they broke to pieces what they did not want.”

This the enemy had done, and they had torn garments and slashed the quilts on the beds and why they had not set fire to everything Ling Tan could not think except that in their wantonness they wished him to see ruins instead of only ashes.

“Oh, my good red pigskin boxes that I brought here as a bride!” Ling Sao moaned when she went into their sleeping room and saw them slashed and burst open. And among all the disorders of their ruined garments and burst boxes they saw a torn snarl of human hair and Ling Tan stooped.

“What is this?” he asked.

Then Ling Sao picked it up to see. “It is Jade’s hair she cut off from her head that day,” she said.

“Lucky it is not on her head now,” Ling Tan groaned.

And yet they knew that worse than this was waiting them at the small back gate and so slowly they went toward it, dreading what their eyes must see,

“But we must be the first to see it,” Ling Tan whispered. “We must not let any of the children come in first.”

They crept through the ruined kitchen and out of the door and so to the small back court. There at their feet the old woman lay dead. It would have been enough had she been dead. But she was worse than dead. She was naked, and so wounded that they could see in a moment that in their fury those wild men had used her as they might have used a woman young and beautiful.

Now Ling Tan groaned for if this could happen to an aged soul, heavy with her years and half dazed in her wits, what of the young women in his house and what even of his own wife? He turned to Ling Sao, the blood all gone out of his face.

“The first thing I must think of is where to keep all of you who are women,” he said. “Myself I can hide and the men can scatter themselves, but if the enemy is like this, what is to become of women?”

For once she could answer nothing, for she saw too that what had happened here might more easily have happened to her, and she could not speak a word to help him. She turned her eyes away in shame even before her own husband and she bent and picked up the garments the old woman had worn and put them over her nakedness. They could not lift her, the two of them, for the old dead one was too heavy, and three or four strong men would have to work together, and all they could do was to leave her where she was. And Ling Tan stepped beyond her and opened the gate a little and looked out. There was no one to be seen, and the sun shone down that day on the land as fair as it had ever done and he cursed Heaven in his heart that it could be so merciless. Then he told Ling Sao to come with him away from this old woman.

All the rest of the day they sat alone in their ruined house and they did not think of food or fire. They sat listening and waiting for the night when surely one of their sons would come back to tell them how the others were. Those in the village had fared as ill as they, they knew, but they dared not go and see. It was a time when each man ought to stay in his own house.

So night came on at last, at the end of this longest day that they had ever spent, and in the night the eldest and the youngest sons came creeping home. Sitting in darkness he heard the faint sound of their footsteps and then a noise of someone caught on a piece of furniture and then Ling Tan heard his eldest son’s voice whisper:

“They are gone!”

“No, we are not,” he said out of the darkness, and then he put out his hand and touched his son, and they found each other, still in darkness, for none dared to light the lamp.

“Where are the little children?” Ling Sao asked first, for all day long she had been thinking of those little grandchildren tortured perhaps and made playthings by such cruel men.

“All are in the city,” the eldest son whispered and Ling Tan groaned out “In the city!” For it seemed to him the worst of all things that they should be there. But his son hastened to tell him how it came about.

“We took a long circle around the city,” he said, “and we came to the little water gate, and there the people told us that though the city was full of death and grief, yet there was one safe place for women and for children. And, oh my father, by then we had heard enough to know that this enemy is worst of all against women, and we dared not bring ours back here, for what can our bare hands do to save them? This only safe place is inside the water gate, and there inside that gate you know the land is empty and quiet and they told us the enemy had not come to that place seeing there was nothing to be taken, so we waited until darkness came, hiding in groves and behind houses all day and fleeing if we saw an enemy come near, and then at darkness they opened the water gate and we crept through and we took our women and children to the place of safety. It is a foreign school, father, and there is a foreign woman there. I saw her close and she had a good face though she eats the foreign religion and not ours. But there is a high wall around the school and a great gate and when we knocked on it, the gate opened and the white woman looked out of it and when she saw our wives and little children, she opened the gate wide and took them in.”

“Why did you not stay there, too?” Ling Tan asked.

“They have only room for women and children,” his son replied.

“Are they truly safe there?”

“As safe as anywhere can be when devils are let loose,” his son said sadly.

Now Ling Tan made up his mind what he must do.

“I have a command to put upon you,” he told his sons. “If women are safe there, you must take your mother thither, too, now while the night is still dark.”

The two young men looked at their mother wondering and she hung her head before them, ashamed because they were men and she a woman, and for the first time in all their years she could not say, “I fear no man,” and so she was silent.

“But — but she—” the eldest stammered.

And their father told them what had happened to the old woman and listening they answered not a word, until he had finished. Then the eldest said:

“Come, mother, I will take you and my third brother can stay here with my father. When you are safe I will come home and the three of us will keep together somehow and we can if we know you all are safe.”

So the two young men turned their heads away while their parents parted. Never in their lives since Ling Sao came to this house when she was eighteen had she and her husband slept a single night away one from the other, and so how could they do it now? When their sons’ backs were turned, they clung to each other as they would not have dreamed of doing in any presence in other days and she moaned, “Must I leave you?”

“Yes,” he said, “and for a reason I would not have thought could be at your age, mother of my sons.”

Wars he had seen and lustful soldiers among his own people, and yet never had he seen one who would have touched a woman of her years and place. That the enemy could do this told him more than anything that they were savages and wild men, beasts and animals. He held his wife’s hand one moment more, and then he stepped back and called his eldest son.

“Take her, and do not let a harm befall her.”

“I will not,” his son said.

And so Ling Tan sent out of his house his own wife, and when she was gone he sat all night, not sleeping, but waiting until his son came back again. He wished a score of times that night that he had gone with his son; and yet what use would it have been? Two were better than three and he could not have left the third son alone, and four would have stepped twice as heavily as two.

“Find yourself a place to sleep,” he told his third son, and the boy was still so young that he could clear a place upon the floor and sleep for weariness, and in spite of sorrow.

But Ling Tan could not. He sat in the ruin of his house and waited, and after a long time his eldest son came back safe and not having met the enemy.

“I put my mother into the gate myself,” he said, “and the white woman took her in and said she would be safe if any can be safe.”

Ling Tan sighed and did not answer. Now that his wife was safe, it seemed to him he was too tired to speak or move or sleep. But his eldest son dropped down where he was and slept a while, and Ling Tan sat on by his sleeping sons and did not know what time of night it was until he heard a cock crow.

“Does a cock still crow?” he thought and wondered that it could, and he sat on until the dawn broke and he saw the pale light fall upon his sons, sleeping in the ruins of his house.