And that he thought of such things showed him what he had become as a man. He knew now he could never follow En-lan to the end as once he could have done. To the end of each day, yes, and to the end of this war, yes. But beyond that there must be a new world again. What it would be he did not know now, and then he gave over thinking so far and he thought no farther than to the time when he could bring his wife and children home.
In the days of that long winter when they waited for spring to come and the maize and the kaoliang to grow high enough for ambush by day, he would dream how when the war was over he would bring Tama and the children across the sea and how they would find their home. Where would it be? He considered his vast country. Well, the sunshine of the north, the cool summers and bright cold winters — these were full of health. But there was the rich and fertile beauty of the mid-country, and the fruits and flowers of the south. Tama would love the flowers. It was not easy to choose from such a country where his sons could best grow into their manhood. He thought of all the fine cities where they might live, Hangchow and Soochow, Nanking and Hankow.
And then the enemy began to take those cities, one by one. In the late autumn Shanghai had been yielded. His father wrote him of desperate, useless fighting, of wounded men who were too many to be tended. And Soochow was lost and in early winter Hangchow was no longer theirs — the heavenly city of Hangchow, where when he was a child he had gone with his father and mother for holidays in spring and autumn.
Somehow all this time while the enemy marched inland he had not believed that Nanking could be seized because Chiang Kai-shek was there. He smiled at his own superstition concerning this man. He was as bad as his father, who would believe in no gods, but believed in Chiang as though he were a god! And then they heard Nanking, too, was lost. For a day the men could do nothing but sit and mourn and wonder if now were not the time for them to withdraw to themselves as they were before, and only by holding a great feast and gathering them all together to hear him speak to them could En-lan make them bold again against the enemy.
“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.