Ian Slater: Force of Arms

Cheng was stunned. At this point he had expected to be shot, or at least humiliated. There was a long silence — all over China and the world. “Upon your honor?” Freeman added in Chinese. All over China, chopsticks froze above rice bowls, the tension palpable, as millions awaited Cheng’s answer.

Cheng nodded. “I will serve the people.”

Freeman returned the sword to the general.

The silence was broken then by a sound like soft rain that soon became like that of a rushing train. It was the people, over a million of them, students and workers and children flooding out upon the enormous square, unstoppable in their joy. And those who had waited so long for the goddess of democracy to be resurrected from the flames of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 knew no end to their joy. It was deafeningly noisy, awe-inspiring, and frightening.

Cheng and Freeman ascended the steps in front of the Forbidden City to stand on the podium above Mao’s portrait, and they looked south over the square that was now a seething sea of people. Years before, in those few moments on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when the students and workers thought they had won against the tyranny of the Communist party, when the People’s Liberation Army had become the army of the party instead of of the people, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” had burst forth from the loudspeakers only to be silenced moments later by the machine guns of the Thirty-eighth Army. But now “Ode to Joy” boomed once more, together with the thunderous roaring of the crowd. It was Freeman’s finest hour.

Freeman’s stunningly chivalrous treatment of Cheng made it clear that the United States had no territorial aspiration in China, and this raised America’s prestige enormously overnight. All those Chinese spiritually and financially imprisoned by the stop-again, start-again inflexibility of dogmatic Chinese Communist ideology were swarming to the new leaders of China, who included Admiral Lin Kuang, who had also been surrounded by rapturous crowds on his triumphal march from Xiamen to Hangzhou, where he fulfilled his pledge and burned Mao’s villa to the ground.

Exhausted, Freeman was returning home in triumph, but en route he received an urgent message in which the president of the United States, offering him his congratulations, asked the general to forego the usual celebratory victory march down Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas and to cancel any homecoming leave for Second Army. Instead he was to go to the White House — to the president— ”Immediately!” Another crisis was brewing.

Along with the many inconveniences for others that the president’s leave cancellation caused, it meant that it would be awhile before Robert Brentwood would see his Rosemary and his son, whom Rosemary adored. Despite his premature arrival, Robert Brentwood, Jr., was now out of danger and thriving. The leave cancellation also meant that Aussie Lewis and Alexsandra Malof’s honeymoon would have to be cut short. Aussie was most depressed, however, by the fact that he had lost all bets taken at the beginning of the campaign. Not a single SAS/D trooper had fallen into the Zhongnanhai lakes or into the moat about the Forbidden City.