Chapter 651: Stereotypes

The Wei army's encampment lay at a place later ages would call "Shizuishan" — Stone Mouth Mountain. It earned the name because when the Beiyi Mountains (the Helan range) reach this area, the ridgeline forms the shape of a mouth.

Not a gaping abyssal maw, but a mouth about to close. Along this stretch the mountain range presses closer and closer to the Yellow River, and the far bank does the same — the two rows of high peaks are like upper and lower lips, spitting out the Yellow River like a long tongue.

The river's eastern bank holds Hunhuai Fort, the gateway to New Qinzhong. The terrain there is narrow, too tight for two chariots abreast; a single fortress almost completely blocks the passage south. The Commandant of the Guard, Zang Nu, holds it with several thousand men, so that flank is basically secure.

But the gap between the mountains and the river on the western bank is rather awkward. Call it wide, and yet it's barely twenty-some li — not enough for both sides to deploy over a hundred thousand men in formation. Call it narrow, and yet a single checkpoint can't possibly seal it watertight. At the height of Han power, mobilizing corvée laborers to build a stretch of wall here would have been feasible, but by then the Han army had already pushed north into the Ordos Loop, seized the Yin Mountains, and was even threatening the lands beyond the desert — they would never have been so defensive-minded. After Emperor Xuan, when the Xiongnu submitted, there was even less need, and by Wang Mang's time, when the Central Plains and the Xiongnu fell out again, it was too late to build.

"Therefore I shall make these fifty thousand soldiers my wall. Here we will stop the Xiongnu and force a decisive battle!"

This was Geng Yan's thinking. Once the Xiongnu host emerged from the sands and gravel of the desert, if they found the eastern route blocked, they would have no choice but to smash straight into them — otherwise they could only retreat back to Shuofang.

"The moment the enemy loses heart and withdraws, this campaign is won."

Geng Yan knew his opponent well: "Lu Fang has no real strength of his own. He is purely a fake scion of the Liu-Han imperial line, propped up by the Xiongnu. The officers and common people under him are all resentful. Counting from the first time His Majesty drove him out, Lu Fang has now invaded New Qinzhong and been defeated twice in a row. A thing is not done thrice. He has mustered a great army and come here at immense cost in manpower and resources. If he is defeated again, Lu Fang's prestige will plummet to the depths. Even the Xiongnu Chanyu will no longer tolerate him. The Hu and the Han under him will inevitably fall apart!"

But looked at the other way, Lu Fang would surely do everything in his power to goad the Xiongnu kings into fighting this battle. And the Wei army — were they truly ready for a fight to the death?

"Our army's weakness lies not in numbers or terrain, but in morale."

Geng Yan had only one worry: "In the late Xin period, the Swallow-the-Hu General marched beyond the frontier and his entire army was annihilated. The reason, though partly due to poor troops and incompetent officers, was fundamentally that the Xin army, forced by decree and conscripted here, was constantly whipped and abused, yet had no idea why they were fighting this war at all."

If the troops garrisoning Bing Province were still the "Bing Province Shock Cavalry" he had personally forged — men of Bing defending the soil of Bing — they would know the savagery of the Hu barbarians and would fight desperately to protect their homes and families. But the army Geng Yan had brought this time was mostly soldiers from Guanzhong and the Three Henei commanderies. Some of them had likely never encountered the Xiongnu in their entire lives. As for "knowing why they fight," they were probably little better than the Xin Dynasty's "Boar-Rush Braves."

But Geng Yan no longer had time to make them deeply grasp it. According to scout reports, the Xiongnu host had emerged from the desert, and their roving patrols were appearing ever more frequently — some even daring to probe within a dozen li north of the Wei army's main camp!

A great battle was imminent. Though he had once single-handedly destroyed a kingdom, this was the largest-scale battle Geng Yan had ever commanded. After finishing his meal, he began his final inspection of the camp fortifications.

It had to be said: although both were large-scale expeditions beyond the frontier, compared to the disastrous mobilization under Wang Mang's Xin Dynasty, the Wei army was indeed considerably stronger.

Geng Yan had heard that under Wang Mang, conscription was basically just forcibly dragging off able-bodied men, tying their hands with rope and herding them toward the Hongmen encampment. Many starved or fell sick and died during that process alone. By the time the great army trudged the long road to New Qinzhong, attrition could reach as high as fifty or sixty percent! Yet the Xin officers never reported it, instead comfortably drawing the dead men's pay and rations — though in truth the grain, fodder, and clothing issued from above were already insufficient, since every department, every general, every supply officer had to dip their hands in. By the time anything reached the bottom ranks, next to nothing remained.

These fifty thousand Wei troops, by contrast, were half veterans and half new recruits. The core were the old soldiers who, years ago after Diwu Lun seized Guanzhong, had been recruited to attack Hedong and pacify Longyou. Nearly all of them had received the benefit of land allotments and knew Diwu Lun had not lied to them. The new recruits did have something of a conscripted character — after all, the Wei state inherited the Qin and Han tradition of universal conscription: used for free, fed but not paid. Yet they too had been trained in Guanzhong by Wan Xiu and promised land; not a few were moved by that prospect.

Moreover, corruption in the Wei army was far less severe than in the previous dynasty. Officers and clerks hardly dared to eat empty pay. On the march north, though about ten percent of the troops did fall ill or die of exhaustion, compared to the Great Xin Imperial Host, that ratio was nothing at all.

As the winter clothing urgently stitched together in Guanzhong arrived in batches, the Wei soldiers wore thick padded coats, draped themselves in the small wool blankets each man carried, warmed themselves over campfires of dried cow dung, and drank thin congee. At least they did not shiver from cold. That they could manage this was the result of Guanzhong draining its granaries and treasuries to support them. Next year, perhaps even the year after, Diwu Lun truly would be unable to fight a single battle.

And Geng Yan had also discovered that what truly transformed the Wei army's spirit were those "attached court gentlemen" the Emperor had assigned to the ranks.

Having learned the lessons of the Huaibei campaign, Diwu Lun had devised a new system: the Emperor personally appointed trusted Palace Gentlemen and embedded them in the brigades. A brigade numbered 2,500 men, and this time over twenty such gentlemen were dispatched in one batch.

Geng Yan initially assumed this was merely an increase in the number of army supervisors and privately had some minor objections — but he soon realized it was not so simple.

Leading these "attached court gentlemen" this time was the Remonstrance Grandee Cheng Gong, a most unusual figure. Cheng Gong, like Fu Long — who had been promoted to Inspector of Xu Province — had been a first-class candidate in the very first civil service examination, placing tenth. Diwu Lun himself had personally approved his rank!

He came from humble origins. Before passing the exam he had been nothing but a poor schoolteacher, leading a group of students from equally impoverished backgrounds, walking on foot from You Fufeng to Chang'an to sit the examination. Diwu Lun greatly appreciated Cheng Gong, for his speech and conduct were grounded and earthy. After keeping him at court for a time, he sent him out to serve in Wan Xiu's army in Longyou. Cheng Gong's disciples, unable to squeeze into the increasingly cutthroat examinations, chose another path: all who failed the exam could enter the ranks as minor officers.

This produced a rather sizable cohort: failed-examination military clerks, men who genuinely lived among the troops and had risen from the provinces. The previous year, Diwu Lun had selected the most outstanding among them, obtaining over twenty men, promoted them to Palace Gentlemen, and ordered them to join the northern expeditionary army. On one hand, they were to cooperate with the army judges in keeping watch over the generals and various officers, to prevent a repeat of the Huaibei campaign's repeated breakdowns in command. On the other, they could directly convey the Emperor's will, and even use their relatively high level of literacy to, well, wash the soldiers' brains a little...

On his inspection round, Geng Yan happened upon Cheng Gong once again expounding to the troops on "the distinction between the Yi barbarians and the Xia."

Though Cheng Gong held the exalted rank of Grandee, his background let him get close to ordinary officers and common soldiers. He did not stand aloft delivering a speech, but sat cross-legged among the officers and men, holding a copper speaking-trumpet to amplify his voice a little.

Cheng Gong was, as one would expect of a former teacher, no purveyor of bureaucratic boilerplate. He began like a casual chat over the hearth, singling out a few men and asking where they were from.

"Chang'an."

"Henei."

"You Fufeng."

Cheng Gong nodded and, amid easy conversation, spoke of the foods and customs of those places, stirring a sense of closeness — and a good deal of homesickness.

Yes, if their homes were so wonderful, why had they toiled and trekked all the way to this desolate northern frontier to fight a war that had nothing to do with them? Even if the Emperor and the generals promised land after the war, was it truly worth the risk of losing their lives? And if the higher-ups went back on their word and settled them on military-agricultural colonies on the border, then they could only weep without tears!

Had this backfired? Sensing this mood, Cheng Gong asked again: "Are there any natives of Bing Province here?"

Quite a few hands went up. Cheng Gong smiled and said: "Though the people of the five regions speak different dialects and hail from different provinces and commanderies, we are all, in truth, one kind of people..."

"The people of Huaxia!"

He rose and stepped onto a platform where all could see him clearly, pointing to his own attire: "We have a system of robes and caps, a code of rites and decorum. Even a man from the remotest countryside understands the basics of decency, shame, and filial duty. We all owe loyalty to the same Emperor, His Majesty, and we all fight beneath this same five-colored banner."

Cheng Gong thrust his hand northward: "But the enemy we face, the Xiongnu, are different!"

"They are Rong and Di barbarians! Their speech is unintelligible to the Central States of Huaxia, their desires are different, and their rites are utterly alien!"

Cheng Gong stressed the differences between the Central Plains and the Xiongnu: the Rong and Di wear their hair loose and disheveled, dress in animal hides and feathers, live in felt tents, subsist on meat and curds, despise the elderly, never bathe, and have no notion of filial piety at all — even if their Chanyu, aping the Han Emperor, styles himself with the title "Filial," he will still murder his father and then sleep with his stepmother!

Most of this was basically true, though not without exaggeration. These classic "stereotypes" were also the building blocks for constructing the soldiers' rudimentary sense of peoplehood. A person raised in one culture, when looking upon the customs of a foreign culture, is often shocked and unable to accept them. Starting from food, clothing, and language is the easiest way to make humans distinguish "us" from "them."

Compared to those imagined, detestable, shameless Xiongnu, a certain man from You Fufeng now looked at the man from Henei beside him — whose speech he had originally found nearly impossible to understand — and discovered that the fellow's features suddenly seemed rather clear and pleasant.

Having helped the soldiers construct a basic sense of peoplehood, Cheng Gong next began to proclaim the many crimes the Xiongnu had committed.

"The Xiongnu are lecherous. In Han times they forced the Central Plains into marriage alliances. A dignified Han princess was made to serve three generations of a Xiongnu Chanyu — father, son, and grandson — in succession. What humiliation! As for the serving maids and slave women sent as dowry, they were beyond counting!"

"The Xiongnu are also addicted to slaughter and plunder. Even when marriage alliances were in place, they repeatedly broke their word. In Han times they frequently raided the frontier. Bing Province, You Province, and Liang Province suffered grievously. From the Former Han all the way into the late Xin period, it never ceased. In recent years, Xiongnu incursions in large bands number over ten thousand, mid-sized bands several thousand, small bands several hundred. They not only kill imperial officials and officers, but the officers, commoners, and livestock they plunder are beyond reckoning."

Wives and children, property, life itself — these were things every soldier treasured deeply. Who wouldn't fear losing them? Yet these men had, after all, lived through chaotic times. Wasn't it the same when the various regimes clashed? To them, it all sounded like tales from a distant horizon, stirring no great resonance. So Cheng Gong paused and asked: "Gentlemen, you were born in Guanzhong and the Three Henei commanderies. Even during the late Xin, you never suffered Xiongnu raids, did you?"

The men shook their heads. They indeed had no such experience, and so could feel no visceral pain. Cheng Gong then told them a fact: "It is precisely because the frontier commanderies shield the north that the Xiongnu's horses' hooves have never reached Guanzhong or the Three Henei commanderies!"

He then had a local officer from Bing Province take the platform. The man recounted how frequent Xiongnu raids had left his parents killed and his wife and daughters carried off, their fate unknown to this day. As he spoke, tears streamed down his face. In the past, the soldiers might not have empathized. But now, having been made to recognize that they were all "subjects of the Great Wei" and "descendants of Huaxia," they listened until their fists clenched tight.

Seeing the mood was about right, Cheng Gong at last began to elevate and sublimate it for them: "Gentlemen, do you now understand why we have come to this foreign land to fight the Rong, Di, and Hu barbarians?"

"Because if the commanderies of Bing Province are lost, the Xiongnu's horses' hooves will cross the Xiao Pass and reach straight into Guanzhong and the Three Henei commanderies. Those trampled and ravaged will be your own homelands. Those slaughtered, violated, plundered, and enslaved will be your own parents, your own wives and daughters!"

His hand slashed down, his voice rising to its fullest:

"Therefore, what we are guarding here is not a foreign land."

"It is our homeland!"

In that moment, the officers and soldiers' emotions surged and churned. The stirred rose to their feet clapping; others shook their fists, raised blades and spears high, and roared the slogan the officers had drilled into them over and over during their training in Guanzhong:

"Defend our homes, protect our country!"

This cry, first shouted by Diwu Lun, Ma Yuan, Wan Xiu, and the others during their first battle against Lu Fang in New Qinzhong, now resounded across this land once more — but no longer shouted by a mere few hundred men. It was the shared roar of entire brigades, of the whole army!

When Cheng Gong, clutching his hoarse and aching throat, emerged from that brigade's encampment, he came face to face with Geng Yan, who was smiling and cupping his hands in salute.

"We are deeply indebted to Grandee Cheng."

Geng Yan's last trace of worry had vanished.

"Now the soldiers of the three armies know why they fight!"

Cheng Gong dared not claim credit and hurriedly returned the courtesy: "This was by His Majesty's decree."

Apart from a few flourishes drawn from his own experience as a teacher, everything he said was essentially the script Diwu Lun personally drafted. Each of the other twenty-odd "attached Palace Gentlemen" also had a copy in hand and, after Cheng Gong's personal, detailed training, they carried out propaganda in the battalions they were assigned to.

After laying the groundwork all along the way, they had finally raised the troops' morale to its peak just before battle! This surge of excitement ought to last until the moment they truly clash with the Xiongnu and see blood...

"This humble officer must go and speak to the next battalion." Cheng Gong, a mere man of letters, could only fulfill the duty he was bound to. He made a deep bow to Geng Yan: "In the matter of military conflict, the lives of these fifty thousand soldiers now rest entirely upon you, General!"

No sooner had Cheng Gong left than the Embroidered Uniform Commandant Zhang Yu, who was also accompanying the army to keep watch, came to see Geng Yan and told him a tremendous piece of good news.

"Grand General of Chariots and Cavalry, a subordinate general of the Hu-Han pretender emperor Lu Fang has sent a man to make contact!"