The Campaign of 1925

I handle the Chinese. You follow the story.

In October 1925, the armies of northern China were rearranging themselves again.

A coalition of warlords, loosely led by Zhang Zuolin in the northeast and Zhang Zongchang in Shandong, was pushing south. Another coalition, led by Sun Chuanfang, was pushing north.

Between them, across the flat wheat country of northern Anhui, ran a single railway line and a chain of 小xiǎo towns that each side needed.

小xiǎo. Small. 小xiǎo towns means small towns.

One of those 小xiǎo towns was 叫jiào Guzhen.

叫jiào. Called, or named. A town 叫jiào Guzhen means a town called Guzhen. You will hear 叫jiào every time a new name lands.

Shi Congbin, 施谷兰's 爸爸bàba, had a brigade under his command by the autumn of 1925. Four thousand 人rén.

The brigade 是shì a mixed infantry unit, attached to Zhang Zongchang's army, ordered to hold the railway crossing at Guzhen against the forces pushing up from the south.

The forces pushing up from the south were commanded by a warlord 叫jiào Sun Chuanfang.

Sun Chuanfang had five provinces under his authority, an estimated two hundred thousand 人rén under arms, and a political calculation:if he could push the coalition's advance guard back across the Huai River before winter,

he could hold his five provinces through another 年nián.

Shi Congbin's brigade 是shì part of that advance guard.

The two forces met at Guzhen in the 上午shàngwǔ of a day in late October 1925. The exact date varies by source; one of Shi Congbin's own dispatches fixes it as the twenty-eighth.

On the first day, the brigade held.

Shi Congbin had chosen a defensible position on the north side of the railway, with the railway embankment itself as his forward line. The enemy's first assault 来lái from the west across open ground.

The brigade's rifle fire broke it before noon.

来lái. To come. 来lái from the west means came from the west. 来lái works for anything that arrives.

Casualties were heavy on the attacker's side. Shi Congbin wired back to division headquarters that the line was intact and that the brigade could hold another day.

On the second day, the weather changed.

An overnight rain 来lái and turned the open ground west of Guzhen into mud. The mud slowed the attacker's movements on that side.

But it also turned the earthworks Shi Congbin had built to protect his southern flank into a soft wall that collapsed in on itself under the morning assault.

The second assault 来lái from the south and the east at the same 上午shàngwǔ. It hit the brigade's weakest side, and this time the enemy brought field guns.

The line held for an hour.

By midday, Shi Congbin's brigade 是shì broken. The brigade had lost roughly a thousand 人rén killed or wounded. Another thousand had scattered into the countryside.

The remaining two thousand were trapped in a shrinking pocket on the north side of the tracks.

Shi Congbin had three choices.

He could order a charge through the pocket's thinnest edge and try to break out northward, toward friendly lines. Cost: heavy casualties, probable failure.

He could negotiate a surrender to Sun Chuanfang's commanders on the field, trading his brigade's lives for his own custody.

Cost: his reputation, and a lifetime of whatever Sun decided to do with a captured officer.

He could order the surviving 人rén to scatter and fend for themselves, while he made a last stand with the rearguard.

Shi Congbin chose the second.

The official record 是shì short on what happened in the hour after the surrender. What the record preserves 是shì that Shi Congbin handed over his sidearm to a Sun Chuanfang staff officer on the afternoon of the second day of the battle.

That his remaining 人rén were disarmed and marched south to be processed. That Shi Congbin himself was taken under guard to a 小xiǎo farmhouse that Sun Chuanfang's forces had commandeered on the outskirts of Guzhen.

Shi Congbin had 没有méi yǒu way of knowing that Sun Chuanfang had a standing order about captured officers of a certain rank.

The order 是shì that such officers were not to be held for ransom, not to be exchanged, and not to be paroled.

The order 是shì that such officers were to be dealt with publicly, in a way that would discourage other enemy brigades from resisting Sun's advance.

Shi Congbin reached the 小xiǎo farmhouse late in the afternoon.

On the third day, the order was carried out.

That 是shì the subject of Episode Six.

In Shazigang, 施谷兰 did not yet know any of this. Her 爸爸bàba's last telegram, the October wire about crossing the Yangzi, had not yet 来lái through the courier system to the front gate of the 家jiā.

By the time it arrived, he was already a prisoner.

施谷兰 filed the October wire in chronological order, the way she had filed every other telegram for the first 十shí 年nián of her life.

It was the last one she ever filed.

In Episode Six, we follow the prisoner into the 小xiǎo farmhouse outside Guzhen.

That is where we start Episode Six.