Pearl Buck - Patriot

“Why should we be those who killed you?” they cried, one and another. “We don’t care who rules us, only let us tend our fields and do our business. We hate our rulers. They are all evil and we are eaten up with their taxes. Why should we fight for them? If you will rule us better than they, why, welcome!”

Then Japanese looked at Japanese and wagged their heads and went away, believing, and wrote long reports to their upper officers that the country folk welcomed their coming and thanked them and wanted their rule. In Tama’s letters I-wan read that the papers told this and she was glad because surely that meant the war would soon be over and she could come to him with the children.

He could not tell her the truth, that the innocent-seeming country men were En-lan’s soldiers and some of them his own men whom he taught and who taught him. For in this strange army there was no high and no low. If a man had something he knew, he taught those who did not know. They ate what they needed of the same food and wore the same kind of garments and no one had more money than another. It was the sort of life his father could never have lived. But that was neither for nor against his father. For I-wan was not now the boy he had been when he weighed in such pain whether or not he must give his father up. He was a man now and he knew that not all men can live the same life. For some poverty is sweet because it is full of freedom. But there are men who hate such freedom and his father was one of these.

And even for himself I-wan no longer felt this way of En-lan’s was the only way. En-lan would choose it until he died. He would never have a home of his own, goods he owned, or children to inherit. He was one to make a war somehow if there were not war already at hand. There would always be something wrong he had sworn himself to right. But I-wan now discovered that he himself was not so. When he had been a boy in his father’s house the imagination of such freedom had seemed the best life he could live. But though he would never have been satisfied if for a while he had not lived it as he did now, yet he became sure as the days went on that it was not enough for the making of a whole nation. These men did now the work for which they were made. But what would they be when the war was over? They would hate any rule as much as they hated their enemy today.

He argued long with En-lan over this.

“What will they be when the war is over?” En-lan repeated. “Why, what they are now — simple honest brave men, and I had rather they ruled over me and made my laws than any other men.”

“Well enough for you,” I-wan retorted. “But you are one of them.”

“Are you not?” En-lan broke in.

“Yes, I am now, too,” I-wan argued, a little impatiently — En-lan saw slowly sometimes! — “But you and I do not make up a nation. A nation today is not a simple society of simple men. It is a great machine and men must know many things to make it perform its service to the people.”

“We do well enough, don’t we?” En-lan exclaimed. “We are fed, we are clothed, justice is done to all. And we are free. These are what men require.”

“But not all they require—” These words were on I-wan’s tongue, but he did not say them. He saw that En-lan was as he was made and that he was one who saw no further than what he himself believed. In his youth En-lan had taken for this belief certain dreams and ideas and then he had not changed. His whole life until now had been spent in making them actual. He had made for himself a sort of world, a kind of nation such as he believed was right. All his life until he died would be spent in this struggle to perfect the same dream.

But I-wan’s dream had changed. The more he lived among these men, the more he lived with En-lan, the more he perceived that what was changed in him was the dream, the perception of what he wanted his country to be. He knew now he did not want to be ruled by these men, honest though they were. Their simplicities were not enough. Honesty and simplicity, surely, were not essential companions! If they were, then honesty was not wide enough. It must be made wider.

He began to ponder very much on these matters. Who, after this war, would make his country and how must its laws be made and what must these laws be? He saw now that En-lan could never be a ruler over that which he could not understand. Enlightenment and knowledge, order and grace, these were things life must have, too, but En-lan would never know it…. And it came into I-wan’s mind that Tama had somehow changed him. She had taught him to love order and right behavior and grace in everyday acts. He had the ten years with her forever in his being. Yes, and though it was bitter to know it, he had the ten years of his life in Japan in his being, too. He was too honest within himself not to see that the people there were more secure than the people were here in his own country. They lived more secure because they lived in order. He dared not say to En-lan that there was anything good in the enemy, for En-lan would not have believed he could be loyal to his own and yet find good in his enemy. But I-wan knew himself and knew that he loved his own country none the less when he saw that its people were too poor and that the freedom they loved had ceased to be freedom when because of it they went in bondage to hunger and flood and fear of robbers and of wars between mischievous and lawless men. He pondered much on what the moment was when freedom and security came nearest to being the same.

And that he thought of such things showed him what he had become as a man. He knew now he could never follow En-lan to the end as once he could have done. To the end of each day, yes, and to the end of this war, yes. But beyond that there must be a new world again. What it would be he did not know now, and then he gave over thinking so far and he thought no farther than to the time when he could bring his wife and children home.

In the days of that long winter when they waited for spring to come and the maize and the kaoliang to grow high enough for ambush by day, he would dream how when the war was over he would bring Tama and the children across the sea and how they would find their home. Where would it be? He considered his vast country. Well, the sunshine of the north, the cool summers and bright cold winters — these were full of health. But there was the rich and fertile beauty of the mid-country, and the fruits and flowers of the south. Tama would love the flowers. It was not easy to choose from such a country where his sons could best grow into their manhood. He thought of all the fine cities where they might live, Hangchow and Soochow, Nanking and Hankow.

And then the enemy began to take those cities, one by one. In the late autumn Shanghai had been yielded. His father wrote him of desperate, useless fighting, of wounded men who were too many to be tended. And Soochow was lost and in early winter Hangchow was no longer theirs — the heavenly city of Hangchow, where when he was a child he had gone with his father and mother for holidays in spring and autumn.

Somehow all this time while the enemy marched inland he had not believed that Nanking could be seized because Chiang Kai-shek was there. He smiled at his own superstition concerning this man. He was as bad as his father, who would believe in no gods, but believed in Chiang as though he were a god! And then they heard Nanking, too, was lost. For a day the men could do nothing but sit and mourn and wonder if now were not the time for them to withdraw to themselves as they were before, and only by holding a great feast and gathering them all together to hear him speak to them could En-lan make them bold again against the enemy.

“What are cities to us?” he shouted to them when they were full of meat and wine. “What is Nanking to us? We have had nothing from Nanking — we shall not know it is lost! And if we withdraw now and the enemy win, must we not fight them alone later? And if we stay by and win, and we shall win, will not the country then be ours?”