It was with this hope, therefore, that he paused at the place where the General had told him to wait, and he and his men waited above an hour, while the others gathered, and in talking he could not but show his hope, and his men caught it from him, and grew hopeful, too. They could hear clearly the sound of guns, and they listened. There were no great guns and they wondered at this. Had the white men no great guns?
Then by great luck Charlie Li came limping it. He had been scouting the countryside since three o’clock or so, and though he had a stone bruise in the sole of his foot, he had found exactly where the white men were.
“The enemy attacked them in the night,” he told Sheng, “but the white men are still fighting.”
“Do they have their machines?” Sheng asked eagerly.
“They have some machines,” Charlie replied. “I could even see them. They are all gathered together, men and machines, in a shallow valley not above two miles from this spot. But they are hard pressed. A few are escaping. I saw here and there a handful of white men breaking away in their own cars.”
“Then they have lost this battle, too,” Sheng said soberly, “for men do not desert in victory.”
But still he would not give up hope and soon the General came up with his men, and slowly all the forces gathered, and they were ready to go on as soon as the General had considered all the news. The enemy, he now knew, was advancing on three sides up the valleys of the three great rivers. But these were only the main roads. Weaving in and out between them the enemy had made a net, blocking every road. And roads were necessary to the white men. Their great machine weapons were a curse to them for they must run upon roads. They lost their power from their very size when there was no road. The roads were few, and the enemy slipping among the people were hidden as they worked. And the people helped them and soon every road was blocked and all those great weapons were like leviathans cast upon a shore out of the sea, dead hulks, a vast burden upon the men who could not use them and yet were loath to leave them. Trees felled and lying across a road confounded those machines, for while the white men struggled to push aside the trees, the enemy came down on them from the skies and they shot at them from the jungles and the white men died by the score and the hundred at a single spot, trying to save machines.
All this the General knew and had heard from his spies, and he told himself he must press on, though every instinct in his brain told him it was a war already lost. But no one could read his inner hopelessness that day at dawn when he stood on a little hillock above the gathered crowd of men who were to obey him.
“Men!” he cried, and his young full voice rang over their lifted heads. “You have your duty to do. We will not ask what is to become of us. We are here to rescue our allies and to turn defeat into attack. Men! Do not forget that this is the same war we have fought for five years upon our own earth. The enemy is the same enemy and when he is defeated here he is defeated on our own earth. Men! We must defeat our enemy and restore the Great Road into our own country. Fight, then, for your own!”
A low cry went up from the men, subdued, restrained, but deep. Immediately all began to move as a single body westward and Charlie Li went only a little behind the General to point the way. But not once did the General speak except to answer when Charlie pointed out a way more short or a footpath more hidden toward the valley of the white men. So they went and the dawn broke and the sun blazed out with its sudden heat. The air had been hot and still before, but now the sun seemed to set it afire and what had been heat before was coolness to remember. Fresh sweat broke out upon every face, yet the General did not stay his steps.
“They are westward of the next hills,” Charlie said at last in a low voice. The sound of guns was very near, now, cracking the hot air about them.
The General nodded and went on. But the soldier behind caught the words and passed them backward and from mouth to mouth they went and every heart tightened with hope and dread.
Then the General led them up a hill and then he began the slight descent. The column moved behind him down the slope. Ahead of him not far the General saw a motor car, then two. The motor cars stopped in the road and he lifted his glasses to his eyes and he saw white men, stiff with terror, their faces swollen huge through the lens.
“They are afraid,” he said to Charlie in vast surprise. “Why are they afraid of us?”
He handed the glasses to Charlie, and Charlie stared through them. Then he began to laugh. “Doubtless they think we are the enemy,” he said. “The enemy wears green uniforms — when they wear uniforms. But who but fools would wear another color in this green country?”
“Let them sweat and see what we are,” the General said drily. “Luckily we have the white sun upon blue on our caps. If they cannot tell by our faces let them tell by that.”
So he marched on and true enough it was that in a few moments when they came nearer the faces of those white men changed and what had been terror was now joy, and they stood up and waved their arms and shouted out and what they shouted, as the General could hear now, was the Chinese war cry.
“Chung kuo wan shui!”
Who can tell what small thing will free the spirit in men? But so it was those white men shouting the war cry which his men had carried into a hundred battles moved the General and he felt his spirit come out of his heart like a bird from a cage and he shouted in a mighty voice, “Chung kuo wan shui!” and all his men caught the shout and they shouted, too, until the cry went up to heaven itself. Not once did the General let his feet grow slow.
“Ask them where the enemy is,” he commanded Charlie as they came up to the cars.
“Where is the enemy?” Charlie asked the white men in their own language.
“There — there!” the white men roared, pointing with their hands to the rear. Now they could see that these men were not soldiers for they carried no weapons. They were civilians of some sort. “The enemy is there and our men are still fighting,” they shouted.
This the General heard and he listened while Charlie made it into his own language, and all the time he marched on, the column following him, still toward the west.
And behind him, as he passed them, Sheng stared at the faces of these new allies. He had never seen a white man close before. What faces were these — bearded, haggard, bony, the noses huge, the eyes sunken. White? They were dark with filth and burned by the sun to the color of his mother’s red clay teapot!
And far behind Sheng, Mayli still trudged ahead of her women. The spring was gone from her step and her hair was wet with her sweat. But when she saw the men standing in the car and caught their grins she waved her hand at them and called out to them, “Hello, there!”
She knew well enough what power these words would have on those foreign men. Grimed and filthy as they were, their garments ragged and their hairy arms bare, they leaned toward her and shouted at her joyously, “Hello, hello, hello yourself! God! It’s a pretty girl!”
She could not stop, for the General led on, but something young and laughing stirred in her heart. Oh, what good times she had had in America, dancing and talking and flirting with such young men! What good times the young could have together whatever their country! But not in times like these.
“Are they not very fierce, those hairy young men?” Pansiao asked anxiously at her side.