He returned to the room he still shared with Kim and found that Yak-san had finished packing his knapsack for him and had gone to bed.
… What might he have become, Yul-chun sometimes wondered, had he not kept within himself the smoldering fire of his hope that some day he would find Hanya and return with her to his own country? He dreamed how it would be, and he set the dream into words for Yak-san sometimes, when they were encamped before battle. When others slept and he kept himself awake from duty, he would talk to Yak-san thus:
“When all this weary fighting is over, when the cause is won, then we will go home, you and I, to my father’s house. Somewhere on the way we will find my wife and my son, and together we will all go home. First we will rest a few days, say for a month, and then we will take up war again, but for our own and in our own country.”
Home was now the word that held the dream, and he would not let himself think of it except at such times or in the night after the day’s bitter warfare. For the year was only one long war. He was proud of his countrymen. They fought with dashing bravery and dauntless leadership. They were eloquent in persuasion of the landfolk and city dwellers among whom they marched and the Chinese generals sent Chinese-speaking Koreans first to prepare the way. The new revolutionary army swept northward, victory upon victory, they reached the Yangtse River in central China, and still victorious, marched on to Nanking.
Then they were betrayed. Their leader went past the city, leaving it to his second in command, while he went with his own army to Shanghai in secret to set up a counterrevolutionary government. The news came at the very hour of this triumph, when the city gates were battered down after three days of siege, and the city taken.
It was not to be believed. They looked at one another, unbelieving. They gathered in crowds in captured buildings to talk. It was true, nevertheless, and when they were compelled to believe, the armies retreated up the river to Wuhan, there to set up a government of their own, and with them went every Korean exile, except those who were killed in battle.
But Yul-chun began to draw apart from the revolution. He knew that sooner or later he must leave the Chinese. Cruelty — cruelty was what drove him away, and hardened though he was, he was not cruel. He saw Chinese killing Chinese, “purges,” they were called, but for him purges were murders, young men, young girls, accused by rightists of being leftists, landfolk and merchants accused by leftists of being rightists. In one day, in one hour, within the space of a few minutes, he made the decision. The day was hot, the air humid and heavy, and the men were as quarrelsome as angry bees in midsummer. A mighty battle was looming, for the great city of Changsha was next to be taken. All were anxious and discouraged as they faced battle for, although the Russian advisers had directed every battle, the revolutionary army had not won a victory since the split in Nanking. Moreover a young revolutionist, Mao Tse-tung, rejected by the Communist Party because he had declared that Russian tactics would not serve in China where the mass of the people were landfolk and where there was no true proletariat, this man now came forward and declared that no battles could be won without the help of the landfolk. Scholar and peasant, according to Chinese history, he declared, could overthrow a dynasty, but separately they could never win a battle. He predicted failure in Changsha, and this frightened the revolutionists while it angered the Russians.
Alas, the prophecy was fulfilled. The men fought bravely, but they could not prevail against the landfolk who swarmed in from the countryside in all four directions to aid, not the revolutionists who announced themselves as their saviors, but the old magistrate and all his court. Many revolutionists were killed, among them not a few Koreans, but this alone would not have changed Yul-chun’s mind. What compelled him was that in retreat to the northwest the revolutionists in angry despair grew mad with despair and they fell upon any hapless peasant who came into sight.
Thus Yul-chun saw before his own eyes the monstrous murder of an entire family in their own farmhouse. Innocent and prudent, they had stayed at home and barred their gate. The retreating men paused to rest, and seeing that the farmhouse was larger than most, they beat on the gate. The family within hesitated long enough to draw a few breaths, wondering, doubtless, whether they should pull back the bar. In that instant the irritable anger of the men burst forth. They broke down the gate and swarmed into the house and destroyed it utterly. The old grandparents they hanged from the beams of the roof, the peasant and his wife they shot and butchered, the young daughters were raped by many men and left bleeding and dead, and the sons were cut to pieces in savage joy, except for one small boy, whom Yul-chun saved, and in this fashion.
He had at first tried to prevent the men by reasonable persuasion, but the soldiers were beyond reason and their ears were deaf. He stood helplessly by, and yet he forced himself to stay, for he must know what these men were with whom he had cast his lot. He must know the worst, for what they did now they might do again and again if ever they came to power. Thus he saw the full horror of what they did and what they could do. Cruelty was in their blood and being. Suffering, perhaps, had made them cruel, but cruel they were, whatever the reason, and as he saw, he changed. No, these too were not to be trusted, and all the fine talk of saving the people could not make him trust them. Whatever the government, it could be measured only by the quality of the men who administered it, and these men could not be good rulers.
“Come,” he said to Yak-san who had stood near him, taking no part but staring his eyes out while he watched.
They were about to turn away when a child fell at their feet, an infant boy, naked and bleeding, tossed there on the point of a bayonet by some soldier. Yul-chun stooped and took the child into his arms and ran, Yak-san following, and in the noise and madness none saw them go.
“What to do with this child!” Yul-chun exclaimed to Yak-san.
“We must leave him with some farm family,” Yak-san suggested.
This they did that same evening. They came to a small quiet village beyond the range of battle, and Yul-chun, asking for shelter for the night, told the story of the child to the villagers as they sat on their benches around the village threshing floor in the cool of twilight. When he asked if any one of them would accept the child, a young farmwife came forward.
“Look at me,” she said, pointing at her bosom. “My breasts are dripping full of milk, for my own child died two days ago of the ten-day fever, and there is no one to drink my milk.”
Her jacket was wet with the milk overflowing from her bursting breasts, and she took the child and let him suckle.
Those were the years of a strange imprisonment. Mountains were the walls of the prison, and they, the vanquished, were the prisoners. At first Yul-chun fell into an empty despair. What could be useful to him in this wild region? He was cut off from the mainstream of the revolution, even from life itself, and far beyond the reach of the underground messengers with whom until now he had maintained connection, however infrequent. Nor was the despair only his. The remnant that was left of the revolutionary armies after the long march north sank into a desperate weariness of mind and spirit far beyond the fatigue of body. Weeks and months passed and in the bitter cold of the winter they did little beyond forage and beg for food and fuel. They sheltered themselves in a deserted temple, they built huts of mats and scraps of wood and tin, they lived in caves, they slept by day as by night to preserve their feeble strength.