Chapter 195: A Promise!

Before withdrawing, the Qin soldiers did not leave a single captive alive.

It was not a venting slaughter to "avenge the dead"—such thoughts might flash during the heat of battle, but they faded once the fighting ended. Their comrades had died at the hands of the Chu men, yet even more Chu men had died at their own hands; this debt could never be reckoned clearly.

Killing captives was a long-standing habit of the Qin army, done for safety's sake and to satisfy everyone's hunger for head-count merit. No one raised any objection—not even the army judge Qiu Xiao—except that Qin Mohist Cheng Shang, who stepped forward and protested a few words.

"The Chu men did not kill Qin captives—why must the Qin men kill Chu captives? Killing captives is inauspicious…"

This man was probably following the Qin army abroad for the first time; everyone looked at him with strange expressions.

"The officers and soldiers need head merit."

Li You, lying on the cart carriage, answered as though it were a matter of course.

Cheng Shang's eyes widened. "Head merit… you have already taken plenty of heads and seized banners—is that still not enough? Besides, they have already laid down their weapons. What harm would there be in letting them go? Wasn't it said that the Qin army does not slaughter the innocent indiscriminately?"

Zhai Chong, standing nearby, said, "'Innocent' refers to common folk and civilians who bear no weapons. Anyone who has ever raised blade against us does not fall under 'innocent.' Furthermore, if we release them, someone will surely leak our whereabouts and movements. On an ordinary day that might not matter, but right now we are still trapped in a predicament, and we do not know when the Chu men will dispatch troops to pursue us. We absolutely cannot afford to be soft-hearted!"

Cheng Shang still could not quite accept it. Since he could not persuade them by reason, he could only appeal by sentiment. "Commandant Li, you were once a Chu man of Shangcai. Centurion Heifu, you are a man of Nan Commandery. Nan Commandery and Huaibei both belong to Western Chu. Though you now belong to two different states, your speech is the same and your customs are close. These Chu captives are your own countrymen. Why must you exchange mutual hatred instead of mutual love, and insist on killing them before you are satisfied?"

Li You's face immediately darkened with displeasure. Heifu knew this Qin Mohist had poked a hornet's nest—though Li You used his own native-place ties to win over the Nan Commandery troops, he deeply resented being called a Chu man by others.

So Heifu laughed and said, "Master Cheng, do not come here preaching grand principles and tangling us up. For us, the king raises armies and we sharpen our spears and halberds; we merely follow orders and have no other choice. Since Qin and Chu have already gone to war, then until this war ends, the soldiers of both sides are mortal foes who will not rest until the other is dead. Love the enemy as we love our own comrades? This Mohist 'universal love and non-aggression'—forgive us, but we cannot emulate it. Besides, since you Mohists still uphold the ideals of universal love and non-aggression, why then do you help Qin attack Chu?"

Cheng Shang's face turned somewhat ashen. He murmured, "Because the Qin Mohists have reasoned through one principle… Only when all under heaven is unified into one can war be eliminated, can universal love and non-aggression be realized, can the world be brought into Great Harmony… We merely wished to speed this unification process along. I did not expect…"

"You did not expect war to be so cruel, the Chu resistance so fierce, and that Qin would even lose battles?"

Heifu shook his head. Idealists were always so naive—though, to be fair, the Qin Mohists were already the more realistic and clear-headed faction among these idealists.

Cheng Shang nodded. "At this rate, who knows when the wars and chaos under heaven will truly end, and how many more will die. If the killing goes on like this, will the enmity between Qin and Chu not grow deeper and deeper, the hatred more and more entrenched? This seems to run exactly counter to our original intent—like driving the chariot south when one means to go north."

Seeing that his persuasion was fruitless, he cast a shamed glance at the hundred-some Chu surrendered soldiers squatting in the distance, turned despondently, and walked back toward the town, sighing, "I will go back to making stretchers."

Although they had captured the carts and horses the Chu men abandoned, there might be times when they would have to abandon the carts and travel through wild forests; the wounded who could not walk would then have to be carried by hand. So Heifu had drawn a rough sketch and asked Cheng Shang to find materials inside the town and, with the help of the soldiers, make a batch of stretchers of a kind common in later ages—at least they no longer had to tear down door planks to carry people.

After Cheng Shang left, Heifu again consulted Li You, but Commandant Li still did not change his mind.

So, with a single order from the officers, the slaughter began. Everything proceeded in orderly fashion: first the Chu men were forced to strip off their armor, then the Qin soldiers advanced in silence, raised their crossbows coldly, while behind them men followed with swords to finish the job…

After only a brief moment, the last screams ceased abruptly. Over a hundred corpses now lay on the ground, and the army judge made a broad stroke of his brush, recording these men into the head-count tally.

Watching this scene, Heifu could only sigh. "Cheng Shang was right. The chain of hatred between Qin and Chu has tightened a few more notches."

Heifu turned his back and watched the soldiers and carts filing out from the town, and Dou Ran, trussed up tightly and likewise tossed onto a cart. Dou Ran's eyes were completely bloodshot as he stared at the slaughtered Chu captives. Only two Chu officers and squad leaders, who still had some use, were spared; they would be taken back to Qin as spoils of war, together with Dou Ran.

Tu Si and Man came over to report: "Acting Five-Hundred-Leader, everyone in the town has come out. Together with the dry provisions captured from the Chu army, we have enough to feed everyone for five days!"

"Good." Heifu gave orders to Zhai Chong, Tu Si, and the others: "Have everyone change into the Chu soldiers' red armor, hide our banners, and raise the Chu banners and insignia!"

This was also why Li You wanted the Chu men exterminated—because they were going to travel in disguise.

Dou Ran's mouth was stubbornly shut; nothing could be pried out of him. The other two Chu squad leaders could not give a clear account either; they only knew that some general was leading a large force in a fierce assault on Pingyu. Pingyu had only three thousand Qin soldiers and probably could not hold out for long. The Chu men might already have advanced to the outskirts of Xincai by now…

The worst-case scenario was that Xincai had also been taken by the Chu men. In that case, Heifu and his men would have to cross the Ru River to the southwest, travel another two or three hundred li through Chu-controlled territory, traverse the entire Huaixi region, and reach the borders of Nanyang Commandery before they could be considered safe.

Heifu had not the slightest thought of opening a base area behind enemy lines. People like them in Chu territory would absolutely be like rats crossing the street, with everyone shouting to beat them. And with the great battle involving over a hundred thousand men unfolding in the direction of Shangcai and Yangcheng, their few hundred remnant soldiers had better not go join the excitement—slipping away quickly was the priority.

While the men were busy stripping the Chu corpses of armor, Heifu, leading his own core troops who had already finished changing, stood beside the great pit where the Qin captives had originally been held…

They had come to bid a final farewell to their fallen comrades.

…

The originally full and orderly hundred-man unit now numbered only seventy, many of them wounded—some with bandaged ears, some with arms in slings. The other twenty-some had all fallen in battle and were buried beneath their feet.

The Chu corpses had all been tossed outside, lying every which way, but the Qin dead had been carried into the pit and laid out in neat rows. The Chu captives had been forced to shovel earth and fill it back in; by now, the ground had been restored to its former hard-packed appearance.

Over a hundred dead shared a single grave mound, with no tombstone—only several dozen broken swords thrust upright in neat rows into the soil. Huaimu's sword was there too, at the very center; the silk cloth tied to the ring at the pommel fluttered gently in the breeze…

Li Xian sighed and said, "When they were born, their parents all gave them names. How is it that after death they have all become nameless men? Without even a single tombstone."

"Who says they have no names?" Heifu asked in return.

"The dead of other hundred-man units—I cannot call out their names. But for any man who served under my command, I remember every name and every native place, clear as day!"

Because they were Heifu's soldiers.

Heifu even remembered, when he had written their letters home for them, the expressions on those young faces, and what each of them had said.

"Zheng, in your letter home you sent greetings to your ailing parents, apologized for not returning for a year, and urged your new wife to be sure to care for them well."

"Huan, in your letter you complained that life in the army camp was too dull."

"Jiu, you fretted again and again over whether the fields and house from your rank had been granted."

"Chaofu, you looked forward to the first meal you would eat when you returned home."

"Que, you asked your sisters at home to send your regards to the girl you fancied in the same village, worried whether she had already married someone else."

"Zhongliu, you promised that you would certainly return for the year-end sacrifice, bringing rewards to bring glory to your village."

Standing here, listening to the wind sigh, Heifu seemed to hear once more those rambling yet simple words echoing in his ears.

Among them was Huaimu's voice.

Heifu still remembered that Huaimu had looked a bit awkward at first, as if writing a letter home was harder than being the first to scale a city wall. But once he started talking, he could not stop, and from the mouth of this warrior, hard as forged iron, came words of tender warmth.

"Huaimu asked with concern whether his wife's hands had gotten chapped again from washing clothes in deep winter. He told her not to go too far when gathering firewood and to beware of wild beasts. At the same time, he asked her to scrape together whatever money the family had and send it to his two younger brothers, who were serving as bondservants—in case they had still not regained their freedom… At the very end, Huaimu said: 'Wife, you have toiled hard. Huaimu will surely return. I will never break this promise…'"

As Heifu recited one by one the contents the dead had written in their letters home, among the men behind him, Dongmen Bao tilted his head high. This reckless man, who feared nothing, who took pride in bleeding and shame in weeping, was struggling mightily to keep the tears from spilling out of his eyes.

The other several dozen men also wore grave expressions, and some had even begun to sob softly.

After a year or half a year of army life together, they had all become brothers in all but name; losing one was like losing a limb.

Ji Ying walked over at that moment, his eyes also red, and said, "Centurion, before you came, Huaimu said his final wish was to be buried in Jingling in the end, buried on a hillside. If that could not be done, then being buried back in Nan Commandery would do as well."

"The bird flies back to its homeland; the fox dying turns its head toward its den…" That was a line by Qu Yuan, wasn't it? But whether Qin man or Chu man, this was the simplest wish everyone had at the moment of death.

Heifu nodded. He crouched down, scooped up a handful of earth, and said to Huaimu, and to all these comrades lying beneath the ground, in apology: "We must leave now. There is no time, and no way, to bring you all back home with us. We can only leave you here, in this foreign land."

"But I will not break my word! I said I would bring you all home—not a single one missing! Whether alive or dead!"

Heifu bowed his head to the ground before this tombstone of several dozen broken swords and swore an oath: "Though the battle has stopped, the war is not yet over. Until the state of Chu is destroyed, the Great King will not let the matter rest. The king raises armies—we shall repair our armor and weapons! I will surely rally the banners once more and return to this place, plant the Qin flag upon this town, upon this land! And when that time comes, with a hundred coffins, I will move all your bones back to our homeland!"

"Gentlemen, wait for me a while yet!"

"This is Heifu, as your centurion, giving you your final military order!"

The earth was silent, the grave mound was silent too — only the broken sword stood unyielding in the north wind, like a warrior dead yet still alive, and its faint, swaying hum seemed to be the final answer to Hei Fu…

"Aye!"

(End of chapter)