Hawaii - James Michener [253]
In the entire army only one person dared look at the houses where the old people were left, and that was General Ching. He was not really a military man, in the honest sense of the word, but he had seen a great deal of fighting and much killing, and now as he stood at the village gateway, he was not ashamed to look back at the living tombs, for they held men and women who had been kind to him in days past. One old woman had given him her daughter, the mother of the three children who had starved to death, and for these patient old people he felt a compassion wider than the plains of China.
Suddenly he raised his arms to the cloudless spring heavens and shouted, "Old people inside the walls! Die in peace! Be content that your children shall find a better home! Die in peace, you fine old people!" And biting his lips he led his band down onto the plains.
But they had gone only a few miles when by prearrangement, from behind a rock on the trail, stepped forth Char's old mother, and Char announced firmly, "I have told her that she can come with us."
General Ching rushed up and thrashed his hands in the air, screaming, "This isn't military! She has got to stay with the others." Char looked at the general coldly and said, "Who hid you in the fields after our triple murder? Who had courage that night?" "Don't speak to me of murders!" Ching roared. "You are murdering the chances of the entire army."
"Who ever said that you were a general to lead an army?" Char shouted, and the two men, almost too weak to march, began fighting, but their blows were so weak that neither damaged the other, so that soon Nyuk Moi had pulled off her husband Char, and Siu Lan had pacified her new husband, the general.
"Brother Char," the general said patiently between gasps, "from the beginning of history there have been soldiers, and soldiers have rules."
"General Ching," Char replied, "from the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons." These simple words were to live in Chinese history as the filial words of Char the farmer, but at the moment they did not much impress General Ching.
"She cannot come with us," he commanded icily. "She is my mother," Char argued stubbornly. "Does not the old man Lao-tse tell us that a man must live in harmony with the universe, that he must give loyalty to his parents even before his wife?"
"Not even a mother can be allowed to imperil our march," General Ching responded. "She will stay here!" he cried dramatically, pointing to the rocks behind which she had been hidden.
"Then I shall stay with her," Char said simply, and he seated his old mother on a large rock and sat beside her. To his wife and five children he said, "You must go on," and the assembly began to disappear in the distant dust, so that Char's mother said, "Faithful son, the other old people were left behind. It is only right that I too should stay. Hurry, catch up with Nyuk Moi."
"We shall stay here and fight the Tartars," Char said stubbornly, but as he sat he saw a figure running back from the disappearing mob, and it was General Ching.
"Char," he said, in surrender, "we cannot go without you. You are a stalwart man."
"I will rejoin you, with my mother," Char replied. "You may bring her," General Ching consented. "She will represent all of our mothers." Then he added, "But I will not accept you, Char, unless you apologize to the entire body for having made fun of me as a soldier."
"I will apologize," Char agreed. "Not from shame, but because you really are a very fine soldier."
Then General Ching said to the old woman, "Of course you know that you will not live to see the new land."
"If a journey is long enough, everyone must die along the way,' the old woman replied.
As GENERAL CHiNG's resolute group moved south from Hunan Province they acquired people from more than a hundred additional villages whose sturdy peasants, like Ching's, refused to accept Tartar domination. In time, what had started as a rabble became in actuality