Pearl Buck - Patriot

“You know what we did. Six years ago we declared war upon Japan. They laughed at us. Then three years afterwards we made our Long March. Our feet were torn and we were starved and many of us died. But we knew even then who was the real enemy. Though Chiang Kai-shek had pressed us and driven us backward over thousands of miles, we knew there was an enemy greater than he.” He raised his voice. “Our enemy was Japan, who even then was attacking our people!”

He paused, and a low roar went up from the people. He put up his hand in an old gesture which pulled at I-wan’s heart, he remembered it so well.

“What I tell you, you know. Not many months ago Chiang Kai-shek was kidnaped in Sian. We held him there — in our hand.”

En-lan held out his strong rough hand, cupped.

“We might have closed it — thus.” He closed his hand. “Then Chiang Kai-shek would have been no more. He who fought us so bitterly, for so many years, was here in our hand.” He opened his hand again and stared into it. Over the whole multitude there was not a sound. Breathless they gazed at En-lan. He looked up, over his hand. “There were those of you who said, ‘Kill him — kill him!’ If your leaders had heeded you”—En-lan’s thumb went down—“he would have been dead in an hour. You blamed us then, because we did not move. You blamed us bitterly because he lived and returned safely to his home. Some of you still are angry because today he is still alive.”

He dropped his hands now and held them lightly clasped. It was En-lan’s strength that without movement, merely by the power of his voice and his words, he held men silent and subdued to him. I-wan felt it, all the old power, but infinitely deeper and more perfected.

“But we remembered who the real enemy is. It is not he. We said to you then, ‘If he could so relentlessly pursue us year after year, he can thus pursue our enemy.’ We said to him, ‘Will you fight Japan?’ He said, ‘Until I die.’ So we let him go.”

Now they could feel what was coming. Now they knew this mounting rising terrible power coming out of En-lan meant he would demand sacrifice from them. His eyes began to burn, his voice grew deep, he held himself higher. Their eyes were fixed upon him.

“Today he is the only one who can lead us on to war. There is no other.”

But now they stirred. “You! You! You!” This word began to break from the crowd here and there. But En-lan caught it and tossed it away.

“No, not I! I am a communist. This nation will not follow any communist! And Japan would use us still more as an excuse for war—‘China is communist,’ they say already! No, we must serve our own country, not the enemy.”

They fell silent. What he said was true. What would he say next?

“There is only one who can save us all,” he said. “He who has seemed to be our enemy. If we come under his flag — not he under ours, but we under his — what can our enemies say? Before the whole world we shall be a united people, fighting together!”

I-wan, staring at En-lan, was sobbing within himself. This fellow, this magnificent man — demanding of his people this supreme self-denial — telling them they must subdue themselves now to one who had so persecuted them — who but En-lan could have made so huge a demand!

“Forget yourselves!” he commanded them. “Remember only that you are Chinese!”

Not a sound, not a word! Peony at his side was smoothing with her fingers the dust upon the ground and writing two characters—“China.”

“Those who will, let them raise the right hand!” En-lan commanded.

Up came their right hands — hundreds of hands.

“Those who are not willing!” En-lan demanded again. His blazing eyes dared them.

Not a hand dared. He dropped his head and turned away, and slowly, as though from dreaming, the people began to struggle up, some to walk away, some to stand talking.

But it was over. They had done what En-lan wanted them to do. I-wan saw him stride across the court to his own room. And Peony rose quickly to follow him.

“He is always tired for a little while after such a thing,” she whispered. “Something goes out of him.” She hurried toward the court.

And I-wan, after a moment, went out toward the field, where MacGurk was oiling the plane. The daze of the past hour was still upon him, as bright as a dream. When he stood again before Chiang, he would say, “Let me go back.” Yes, he must come back. Somehow En-lan made this his country, even as he had done in those other days.

“When shall we go?” he asked MacGurk.

“Four o’clock in the morning,” MacGurk answered. He nodded toward the dispersing crowd. “Get what he wanted?”

“Yes,” I-wan said.

“Great fellow,” MacGurk remarked. “Almost as great as the big chief — not quite, though. So I stick by the biggest one.”

“I’ll be here at four, then,” I-wan said at last, not knowing what other answer to make to this. Well, he would say to Chiang, “That is where I can serve you best.” And there was no reason for delay. He could be back within five days, if Chiang were willing.

“O-kay,” MacGurk replied, and began to whistle through his teeth while he polished the wings.

Sometimes everything except this life he now lived seemed an imagination, years which he had dreamed in his sleep. Days and weeks went by when he did not think once of Tama or the children, when indeed it seemed as though he and En-lan had always worked together like this, as though they were two hands, driven by the same brain. Day upon day they talked of nothing but of the plan of war which they were now following. This army was a flexible, tireless machine. They drove it night and day, a little council of men at its heart. With him En-lan had two others, men whose stories I-wan never knew whole, but whose brains he came to know as he knew his own.

They had to make war with nothing. Chiang Kai-shek had told them there was nothing. When he could give them money he would. But his own armies were only a little more than half-equipped. And he must keep always enough money ready to buy loyalty from the warlords and their armies. There were only a few whom he could be sure of without money.

“I must be able always to pay more than the Japanese.” He had told I-wan this calmly, while I-wan felt his own heart angry in his breast.

“Are there truly Chinese who even now can be bought?” he had cried. He did not believe it.

But Chiang Kai-shek had said, “I know them. They cannot be changed, and I must use them as they are.”

Yes, I-wan thought grudgingly, perhaps MacGurk was right. En-lan was not so great as Chiang Kai-shek. Nevertheless he belonged with En-lan and so he had gone back to him.

“We do not need money,” En-lan said, and then corrected himself. “Well, we do need it, but we can do without it. We have fought a war for years without it, and we will go on as we have been.”

And this, I-wan soon found, was by the old hide-and-seek of the guerillas. There was not one of these soldiers of En-lan’s who did not know how to fight with anything he had in his hand. If they had only twenty machine guns, they seemed to have a hundred. If they had no guns, they fought with old-fashioned spears and knives or they threw javelins or even slung stones from ambush. They did not scorn the single death of even the least of the enemy, although they could kill a hundred so swiftly that it seemed nothing. And all this they did, not massed together in the solid marching regiments the enemy had, but in small scattered handfuls of men here and there and everywhere, hidden in trees and ambushed in caves and working among the farming people with hoes in their hands and pistols and knives under their blue cotton shirts.