The River. Part Two. Chapter Two

The respite in Beiping was as fleeting as a breath drawn between two commands.

Yesterday’s wounds remained unsealed, yet the air already reeked of carbolic acid, sweat, and the damp soil of the parade ground. The military cadence returned like a recurring fever: roused before dawn, the marching, the barks of the sergeants, the crushing weight of the rifle. But now, new faces stood among them — boys untouched even by the rigors of cadet school. Their eyes were too wide, their wrists too fragile for the steel they carried. They gazed upon the survivors as though they were demigods, men who had already waded across the river where the waters run black. Their stares pleaded: “Teach us to die with such grace.” To them, Ichiro and his comrades had ceased to be flesh and blood; they had become myth.

Ichiro saw his former self in them — the boy he was before the gorge, before the blooming of the scarlet chrysanthemums. They still harbored faith in a noble death, in glory, in the illusion that war was merely poetry articulated through other means. Daisuke fed them in silence, lacing their rice with slightly more salt than usual, as if attempting to mask the bitter foretaste of their destiny. There was a vulnerability in their eyes, akin to pups newly severed from their mother’s teat.

To galvanize these raw recruits, General Itagaki orchestrated an assembly with two officers — Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda. They strode onto the parade ground like deities from an ancient scroll: towering, immaculate, their features wiped clean of both terror and fatigue. Their tunics were flawlessly pressed, their gunto swords polished to a blinding, mirror-like sheen.

“We fought side by side,” Mukai began, his voice resonant as struck bronze. “And we resolved to determine which of us is the truer samurai. Who could sever more lives in the crucible of hand-to-hand combat.”

He recounted the slaughter with the breezy detachment of a student discussing an archery tournament at a summer festival.

“Initially, I held the vanguard,” he continued, “but then Noda matched my pace. We advanced shoulder to shoulder, like two tigers prowling a bamboo grove. Every arc of the blade — a flash of lightning; every kiai shout — a clap of thunder.”

“I recall,” Noda interjected, “how the blood sprayed across the snow like sakura petals caught in an April gale. We did not tally the strokes; we tallied only honor.”

“By the day’s end,” Mukai declared, “I had cut down one hundred and five men. Noda — one hundred and six.”

He smiled, and within that smile lingered the innocence of a boy parading a new toy.

“Yet the number is immaterial,” Noda said. “What matters is being worthy of the blade. Being worthy of His Majesty.”

The recruits listened, spellbound. To them, these lieutenants were not mortal, but living avatars of the Bushido they had been spoon-fed since infancy: absolute duty, immaculate honor, eternal glory.

Ichiro observed them, noting a profound artificiality in their narrative, reminiscent of sanitized folktales where the heroes invariably triumph, and blood is not blood, but mere vermilion ink brushed upon parchment.

“To kill with the sword is an art,” their academy instructor had once lectured, echoing the maxims of some long-dead master. “The first strike demands everything. The second requires less. And eventually… eventually, you cease counting altogether. It simply becomes a profession.”

He remembered, too, the words of Senior Officer Shintaro Uno, who, in a rare lapse of candor, had confessed:

“In the mud of battle, all illusions dissolve. There is no honor there, no aesthetic beauty. There is only raw terror and absolute exhaustion. The rest is fabricated for the morning papers.”

The theater concluded. General Itagaki stepped to the fore.

“You have borne witness to true heroes,” his voice thundered. “Soon, this supreme honor will fall to you. In two days, we march on Nanjing.”

The recruits erupted into a feral roar of “Banzai!” Their cries were saturated with juvenile ecstasy and an insatiable thirst for martyrdom. Ichiro remained mute. He watched the retreating backs of the lieutenants. They did not resemble heroes to him; they appeared as high priests of some archaic, blood-drenched cult. And he, adrift in the cheering mass, was but a lamb being herded toward their sacrificial altar. The sole distinction was that he, unlike the boys beside him, could already feel the glacial kiss of the ritual blade against his throat.

That night, when the parade ground lay desolate, Ichiro sat for a long time on the barracks steps, examining his hands. They trembled — not from dread, but from a profound, marrow-deep fatigue. He pondered the city that awaited them, a city that had transitioned into legend before they had even breached its gates. He considered how legends invariably carve out space for heroism, but possess little tolerance for the truth.

Daisuke settled beside him, offering a bowl of steaming rice.

“Eat,” he instructed. “They say Nanjing will be a hungry place.”

Ichiro accepted the bowl. He inhaled the vapor, a synthesis of soy, scallions, and an elusive phantom of home. He reflected that, perhaps, the purest form of courage was not the severing of a hundred heads, but the simple act of remembering the taste of hot rice on a bitterly cold night.

Two days. A mere two days until Nanjing.

Part Two. Chapter Three →
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