The Promise

X

WHO CAN KNOW THE hardship of holding in leash angry impatient men when they are eager to be gone and cannot understand why they are held? That night Sheng did not talk long with his General, for he soon found that he knew as much as the General did and neither of them knew anything. He went away troubled and doubtful, and left the General sitting as though he were made of stone.

In the next few days there was scarcely an hour when some of the men did not come to Sheng and ask him when they were to march again. They came courteously making one excuse and another, but the burden of their coming was always the same, “When do we fight?”

What could Sheng say but the truth, that he did not know? His men stared at him and one of the boldest said bluntly, “Why do you not find out, Elder Brother? Ask the General.”

“He does not know,” Sheng said plainly.

The men went away staring and muttering, for these men had not been taught to be silent beasts before their leaders. Each man respected himself and was able to take care of himself in battle, and the price for this sort of soldier is not the same price as the enemy paid for their silent obedient creatures. These men of Sheng’s fought well only when they knew why they fought and where and whom. They talked together and when they thought another way better than the one their leaders chose, they said so, for they were free men and fought as free men.

But, being free, they felt themselves worthy now to be angry and to curse heaven for all this delay, and to cry out against the waiting of their leaders. They were all for sallying into Burma without any foolishness of courtesy or lingering for invitation from the English.

“What cursed this and that keeps us here?” Sheng heard one of his men bawl one day to his fellows, and when they did not know him near. It was noon and the men had eaten their meal and were idling in the sun around their barracks. Some were mending their straw sandals and some were shaving others and some were smoking cigarettes and most were doing nothing. The place was full of noise and laughter and rough voices, but above them all rose this one voice. A murmur began when they saw Sheng, but the young man stood his ground sturdily. Sheng stopped to look at him. He was a heavy-set tall fellow with the burr of the north on his tongue.

“You are not more impatient than I am,” Sheng said quietly.

“I am a small fellow and you are a big one, Elder Brother,” the man replied. “If I were as big as you I would not wait.”

His brown face crinkled with a smile and in his black eyes, sharp and shining, were mingled impatience and laughter.

“I am not big enough to do what I like,” Sheng replied, and went on.

But how could anything quiet the restless young men? They fell into quarrels with each other and with the townsfolk, and looked at women too boldly and broke their vows, and the prostitutes raised their prices, and all complained day and night. None of this was made better by the news leaking in from the south, for there were always those who came in from the south for trade or to escape the war or to travel upon the Big Road, and their words were the same. The foreigners, the Englishmen, were massed along the Salween River, but the enemy had already crossed that river below and had taken the town of Martaban. At Paan the Englishmen still held and fired without mercy upon the enemy ships, but could they go on holding? Did they mean to hold?

Sheng listened to these travelers as gravely as his men did.

“It is not that Martaban is important,” a peddler of small goods said to him one day, from whom he had bought a towel. “But Martaban is a bridge for the enemy coming from Thailand. Over that bridge the two enemy forces can join as one.”

Then Sheng put questions to this man who was a man from India by birth, a man of low caste who because of his many travels had become so mongrel that he took the color of the country where he was. But he was quick and clever, too, and he knew the people everywhere he went.

“Why do the English not let us come in?” Sheng asked frankly of this stranger.

The man leaned forward, his dark hands outspread on his dark bare knees. “The English do not want the people of Burma to see you armed with foreign weapons and fighting under your own leaders,” he said. His face changed and became a quivering mask of hatred. “The English will lose Burma,” he hissed. “The people of Burma will turn against them. It is our chance everywhere to rid ourselves of the English.” Spittle flew in a fine froth from between his clenched teeth and Sheng drew back.

“You are not of Burma,” he said, “why do you hiss and hate like this?”

“If the people of Burma do not hate the English enough then come to India and see how we hate them there!” the man said. His hands were clenching his knees. It was a sight very distasteful to Sheng.

“But the men of Burma do not like the men of India, either, I have heard,” he said. “They wished to be separated from you, too.”

The peddler shrugged his shoulders violently and his dark eyes rolled under their long curly black lashes.

“They remember Saya San,” he declared.

“Saya San?” Sheng inquired, who had never heard this name.

The peddler tossed off Saya San with a flicker of his thumb and forefinger. “He was nothing — nobody,” he declared, “an ignorant man of Tharrawaddy, though he began well enough. He killed an official — well, but his ignorant followers turned against my people somehow and since then — it is all reasonless—”

He untied his turban and twisted it again with long deft fingers. “You understand, the people of Burma are very ignorant. They read, they write, but they are ignorant. Laughter means more to them than freedom. Also—” he grinned and his white teeth glittered, “they hate the Chinese. Why? The gods themselves do not know anything about the people of Burma. Yes, but I know this one thing. The people here will not help the Englishman.”

His face was smooth again and he put his anger away inside of himself somewhere. It was there burning out of his eyes and muttering in his voice when he said, “Englishman,” but he did not let it out beyond that again, and in a few moments more he had lifted up his pack and gone on his way.

Be sure such words as these found their way among the men, too, and the General heard of it and one day he called his officers to him.

“We can be defeated by our own selves, if we allow it,” he told them. It was an evening in February, but the air was as hot here as it would have been at home in June. On the wall of the room where they were gathered a lizard ran out from a rafter under the roof, and licked its delicate quick tongue at mosquitoes. Sheng watched it as he listened to the General. There was a new officer here among them, a young man whom Sheng had never seen before.

“I have asked our brother to come,” the General now went on, “and to bring us some direct news of our foreign allies, and to tell us of what we do not know, so that we can wait more patiently.”

Upon this the young officer rose. He was an exceedingly handsome man, his face smooth and his features delicate. It was hard to imagine him a soldier until one saw the thin set of his lips. He had slight delicate hands, and these hands he moved now and then as he spoke.

“I am your younger brother from Kwangsi,” he said. His voice was low and unexpectedly firm. “We came, my men and I, on foot. We had no truck, nor even so much as a mule. We carried our mountain guns and dragged what artillery we had. We crossed into the Shan states and we took with us our Chairman’s command. We went to the Englishmen there and told the one in command that we had come. I gave him our Chairman’s greetings, and I said, what our Chairman has said, ‘If Burma wishes help from us, we will send thousands of soldiers here at once.’ ”

“What did the Englishman say?” the General inquired.

“He spoke very courteously through his interpreter,” the young officer replied. “He said there were already many Chinese forces waiting in Burma, and he was glad to know that more could come — if necessary.”

“Is that all?” the General asked.

“It is all,” the young officer replied. “Except that he assigned us to the mountain territory then, for which he said our guns are well suited. There we wait.”

They all sat immobile, listening. When this word “wait,” fell upon them, the same fleet look passed over their faces. They were all hard young men, seasoned soldiers, and to wait was torture.

“But the fighting is very severe in the south,” the General said. “Do the English plan to fight alone?”

“There are Indian troops also, but under English command,” the young officer replied.

“South Burma will be lost while we wait,” the General said.

“They have told me that Rangoon would be defended to the last,” the young officer replied.

“But North Burma must be held at any cost,” the General said, “and not only until the last. Even if South Burma falls, North Burma must not fall, lest our country be surrounded on all sides by the enemy.”

There was a long silence in the room. The men sat gloomily, staring at nothing. The lizard fell flat to the floor with a slap of its full belly on the tiles and scuttled away, frightened by its own noise.

The young officer had sat down again and now he began to speak from his seat, his eyes fixed on his tightly clasped hands on his crossed knees.

“I asked the Englishman why they did not invite us to come in quickly, seeing that all plans had been made for our coming by the Two Above when they went home from India. He said that we would be invited in when all was ready. He said that his brothers were fighting a delaying war in the south in order to give time for the ground bases and the airfields to be prepared for us, and that the main war would doubtless be fought in the central plains.”

The General gave a sharp loud laugh. “We can fight without these mighty preparations,” he shouted. “We are used to fighting without any preparations!” He struck both palms on the table in front of him and rose and began to pace the room. Without knowing he had looked and walked like the Chairman himself.

Suddenly he stopped and looked at them. “I have this news,” he said. “Our men have met the enemy in the northernmost tip of Thailand, where they were trying to cross the river west of Chiengmai, but that is still not inside Burma. I know this, too, that the enemy is gathering forces at Chiengmai.”

“Is the enemy still gathering there?” Sheng asked.

“Yes,” the General said. “It is we who ought to prevent them, but they are not being prevented.”

He stopped suddenly and looked at them with impatience. “I have nothing beyond that to tell you,” he said abruptly. “Nothing at all, for I know nothing. But if news does not come within a few days, I shall tell the One Above that I must be relieved of my command here. I must protest this waiting. Are we to sit waiting like hatching hens while Rangoon falls?” He motioned dismissal with outflung hands and they rose and went away, all faces grave, for where was there a commander to equal this one whom the Chairman had put over them? Young and yet the veteran of many wars, skilled in hill fighting and the bravest among his men, there was none like him.

Sheng went back very gloomy to his own place, and he looked so surly that none of his men, seeing him pass, dared to speak to him.

The General watched the young officers as they went out of the room. Each of them walked with the long easy step of soldiers trained to walk but not to march. They were slender, graceful, their very skeletons resilient under the spare smooth flesh. He was a hard man and he could be cruel but his heart was soft as a woman’s toward his men. They were precious to him and he knew them, men as well as officers. Name and face went together in his mind, and though he risked his men resolutely to gain ground against his enemy, when he lost men needlessly he went aside alone and wept in secret, not for anger but because the hearts he trusted had ceased to beat and the bodies he had taken pride in were mangled and destroyed. Thus it was his passion not to lose his men without exacting the full price from the enemy.

He sat drinking tea thirstily, for in this climate it seemed to him he could never put in water as fast as it poured out of him in sweat, and then he went to the door and locked it and, having done this, he unlocked a closet in the wall, and took out a small radio. It was his most precious possession for it needed no wires or machinery to link it to the air. He had not known there was such a thing until it had been brought to him in some booty taken from the enemy in one of their battles, and he had not known how to use it until he had seen one like it in the house of the Chairman. He had struggled with himself for a moment as to whether he ought not to tell that one about it, so rare were these machines, but he had downed his conscience. He would need it sorely when he made this campaign.

Now he set it on the desk, and turned the knobs on its face, and set it to this wind and that. This magic thing could make him forget every worry and ill. It was as though his soul could leave his body and go wandering out on the winds and the clouds. Music came to his ears, sweet and wild, voices speaking languages he did not understand, moans and sobs and stammerings not human. But now and again there came words he could understand either in his own language or in the language of the enemy. He understood the enemy very well, for as a boy he had been in Japan for five years, studying. Because he knew the people there so well he could fear them and hate them. And it had stood him well to be able to know what they said.

Now over the evening air, as he faced the instrument south toward Thailand, there came a harsh brassy voice, shouting abrupt syllables.

“Rangoon burns! The defenders are defeated, and they put the torch to their own city. Today our forces bombed the city without mercy and those fires also burn. The British locked thousands of coolies upon the docks, fearing they would run away under our bombs. They perished a cruel death, unable to escape. The British officers and residents are safe in the hills. In the city their offices are being held by natives. The British care nothing for the lives of natives. But we come to liberate the slaves. Our forces are eighteen miles only from Rangoon. Do not flee, people of Rangoon! You are about to be saved.”

He turned the voice off. Could these things be true? He turned the knobs again, this way and that, but there was no other voice, nothing but that enemy voice, shouting into the skies.

“We are building roads through to the north of Burma. North and south we attack. The enemy is caught between our two hands. Take heart, people of Burma! You will be delivered from your tyrants. We are your brothers, men of one race. Will the white men ever give you equality? They do not allow one of us to enter their sacred countries. Asia for the Asiatics!”

He turned it off again. It was impossible to endure the voice, lest there be even a fragment of truth in it. This was the fear that kept him sleepless at night. Could it be that when they had fought and won their war even then freedom would not be theirs?

He sat heavily by the table, his two hands clenched and lying on the top, motionless.

Who could tell? Had the Japanese not been so cruel, had they not invaded, had they used other means than death and destruction, they might have been right. But now, whom could his people trust? There was nothing to do but to fight on, one war at a time. When this war was won, if another war waited, then that war too must be fought. But today Japan was the enemy.

He rose after a moment of such thought and locked the instrument away again, opened the door and shouted. A soldier came running and he asked, “Does any man wait to speak with me?”

It was late and he was tired, but at night there came to him often his spies who spread over the country everywhere, before and behind them as the men marched.

“Two men wait, General,” the soldier replied, saluting.

“Tell them to come,” the General commanded.

Almost immediately two men came into the room and closed the door behind them. He recognized them as two of his own men whom he had sent into Burma weeks ago. They wore the dress of Burmese farmers, and their skins were stained dark and their heads wrapped in cotton cloth turbans.

He greeted them with smiles, while they stood waiting to speak.

“You have chosen your coming very well,” he said. “If you have come from the south, is it true that Rangoon is burning?”

“Doubtless it is true,” the elder replied. “For any eye could see what must come there. We left there days ago, and we came here by foot and by cart, but we could see that the city must fall. There is no preparation made to hold it, our General. It was never meant to hold. Ships of the enemy come in from the sea, and the enemy is bearing down on it from everywhere, in spite of the heat and their thirst. They suffer from great thirst, and they fear the wells are poisoned and they dare not drink, yet they march on.”

He listened, his eyes fixed upon them. Yes, he knew that terrible courage of the enemy. Their courage was whole, like a rock without a seam. It could not be cracked, the indomitable courage of the enemy.

“The enemy comes laughing to Rangoon,” the younger man said sadly. “Now that Malaya is lost, all those forces can join them here.”

“You must not say that all is lost,” the General said in a low voice. “All is not lost when we are here waiting.”

“You are waiting indeed, Elder Brother,” the older man said. He was lean and dark and his skin stuck to his bones. “And sir, you will wait and wait, until the city falls.” He turned to the other. “Shall we not tell him what we saw?”

“Is it not our duty?” the other replied.

“Why should anything be hid from me?” the General asked.

So they told him, now one and now the other, that on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay so sure had their own people been of the enemy’s victory that upon a hundred miles of roadway they had destroyed foreign-made trucks and cars and vehicles.

At this the General struck the sides of his head with his hands. “And my men walking a thousand miles and dragging their weapons behind them!” he groaned.

The two men looked at each other and the younger said quickly,

“Yet it is better to have burned those vehicles than to have left them for the enemy to bring their men into Burma.”

“How did they burn them?” the General asked. He had rubbed his hands through his hair until it stood up on all ends, and his face was haggard with weariness.

“They poured foreign gasoline over them,” the older man said slowly.

“Gasoline!” the General yelled. “Oh my mother!”

The two men looked as guiltily at each other as if they had done the deed, for gasoline was dearer than silver since it was not to be had except at great cost of the distance from foreign lands from which it was brought.

“How many vehicles?” the General cried.

“At least two hundred,” the older man said.

“All new,” the other man said mournfully, “and each had six wheels and in one single town I saw twenty-three burned together and they were loaded with foreign machinery and rubber tires.”

The General gnashed his teeth and tore at his hair again, and cursed the mothers and grandmothers of all those who had set torch to the vehicles. “They could have run them away, curse them and all their female parents!” he roared.

“But the enemy was between them and home,” the older spy said.

“Have we not been told that nothing must fall into the hands of the enemy?” the other said. “We have been commanded not to let so much as a bowl full of rice or a stick of steel or a wheel or a rivet or a weapon of the smallest sort, be left for the enemy. Be sure those who burned the vehicles felt it sorely. I saw the tears running down their faces and the villagers who watched the fires wept with them.”

But the General would not yield. “If it had been I, the vehicles would have been saved,” he said stubbornly, and the two men seeing that he would not let his wrath be cooled, excused themselves and went away.

Late that night when the General could not sleep in his room because his anger burned in him still, he heard a commotion in the inn yard, and being still full of impatience, he leaped from his bed. He had lain naked, for he had drawn the grass-linen curtain of his bed close because of the mosquitoes, and he chose the heat instead of them. Now he stopped only to pull on his under garments as he went, and he burst out of the door impetuous with rage at this new noise.

“Mother of my mother of my mother—” he bawled and then he stopped short. The inn yard was full of women, and they stood there astonished to stare at him. He saw their eyes all turned upon him in the light of the great torch which the innkeeper held, and at their head and nearest to him was Mayli. Her face quivered with instant laughter, and so dismayed was he that he clutched his garment to him, and for a second stood his ground, forgetful of himself in what he saw.

And Mayli, her lips curving and her eyes dancing, although a moment before she had been too weary to draw her breath, saluted him and said, “We have only just arrived, Sir, and where are we to be billeted?”

Then he came to himself and he choked and in one leap and two steps he was in his room again and pulling on his uniform and buckling his belt around him. A moment more and he opened the door as though he had seen none of them before.

He looked very stern and he shouted, “Have you come? Where is your superior?”

“The doctor lost himself, I think,” Mayli said gently. “He must have turned the wrong way. We were following him until about fifteen miles back, and then we could not find him and came on alone.”

“Ha!” the General shouted and his aide came to his side.

“Take these women to the Confucian temple which was set aside for them,” he said.

The General stood waiting, very straight and firm on his legs, while the girls fell in behind Mayli. She led them proudly but at the gate he saw her turn and her eyes met his, under the lamp over the gate, and he saw them shining with laughter. Then she was gone.

And he went back into his room and stood still in the middle of the room, and then it came to him how he had looked bouncing into the inn yard full of rage, naked except for the little cloth about his middle — he the General! And suddenly he began to laugh and he sat down to laugh and laughed a long while. When at last he went to bed again he felt eased and ready to sleep, and he was about to sleep until something came into his mind to wake him for yet one more moment, and this was the thought that waked him. Here were Sheng and Mayli, and Mayli had told the General that Sheng was not to know where she was. Would he tell Sheng or not that she had come? He pondered this for a moment and weighed the pleasure of surprising Sheng so joyfully and of teasing Mayli because she had laughed at him when she passed through the gate.

Then he thought, “No, this is war, and I must not forget it even for a moment. It is better that they do not meet, lest each forget their duty and think of love and it be my fault.”

This he decided and he yawned two or three times loudly and shook himself so that the dust fell down out of the grass cloth canopy above him and he cursed once or twice more at all that the day had brought and so he fell asleep.