Wen | Qiu Tian
At this point, I will
Always stare at the target
Pursue, move forward——
Take life to pave this boundless path,
I know, though, that someday
The blood will dry up and the body will be tired!
- Mudan, "Eve"
Mu Dan, whose real name is Zha Liangzheng, was once China's most dazzling modern poet. But between 1942 and 1943, the trajectory of Mudan's life, which had been called a "poet," changed dramatically. A poet who should have been in a study hall and a teacher in a university became an anti-Japanese fighter, a hero who returned from nine deaths.
Since the sound of the drums in 1937, there has been no pure land in China. In 1940, Mu Dan graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of the United Nations University and stayed on to teach, and began his career as a teacher at the Xuyong Branch. However, the situation of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression changed rapidly, and Kunming in 1941 was particularly unstable. Students took to the streets to hold anti-Japanese marches, and students from the Department of Foreign Languages participated in the translation training class of the Field Service Corps.
In response to the call of the state, many young people had already enlisted in the army to resist Japan and save the country. The eldest son of Mei Yiqi, president of the United Nations General Assembly, served as an interpreter for the US army, and the eldest daughter served as an army nurse; the son of Jiang Menglin, president of Peking University, and Zhang Boling, president of Nankai, also served in the army. Many of the students in the Department of Foreign Languages of the United Nations General Assembly worked as translators in the US military, and in 1943, the Ministry of Education recruited all the male students of the Foreign Languages Department of the UNITED Nations General Assembly to urgently enlist in the army and undertake the task of translating the US army. When Mu Dan learned from his teacher Wu Mi in 1942 that the Expeditionary Force was recruiting teachers from the English Department to join the army, he resolutely signed up for the army. This was the glory of his life and the nightmare of a lifetime.
After Joining the Army in 1942, Mu Dan served as a major interpreter under Du Yuming, commander of the First Road of the Expeditionary Force, and later went to the Fifth Army to translate for Luo Youlun, chief of staff of the 207th Division. Although his time in the army was not very long, Mu Dan and the commander and soldiers all formed a deep friendship. After only three months of enlistment, he and the expeditionary force experienced the most terrible "Savage Mountain".
For China, the Burma Highway is tantamount to the lifeline of the War of Resistance, and the victory or defeat of this war is related to the fate of the country. But this is a war that has been doomed to a tragic fate from the beginning. The first is the issue of cooperation within the Allied forces, there is no clear deployment, lack of unified command, and insufficient cooperation and tacit understanding between them. It was even a war without air support and without local guides. The titular commander-in-chief, General Stilwell, could not command anyone, and everyone fought their own battles. In burma's war against Japan, the Chinese army can not be said to be brave, nor can it be said to be strong, but in the face of a complex jungle environment, the allies who do not retreat, inappropriate long-range command, and huge casualties still arrive. Perhaps no one ever imagined that the greatest casualties of the Chinese troops were on the way to retreat. A misguided decision to retreat from Savage Mountain buried tens of thousands of heroic souls.
Savage Mountain is located in the Hukang River Valley of Myanmar, which means the place where the devil dwells in Burmese. There are dense jungles, miasma raging, mosquitoes rampant, and no man's land for hundreds of miles. The troops under the flood, malaria, and ants were left with a lot of white bones along the way. More than 15,000 people were evacuated from Savage Mountain, and only three or four thousand survivors eventually survived. Only 4 of the women in the army survived. Du Yuming was a witness to this great retreat and a witness to this human tragedy. He recalled: "A person with a high fever was unconscious, and with the ants sucking blood, the ants nibbling, and the heavy rain erosion washed away, it turned into white bones within a few hours. "At that time, the tragic scene of corpses strewn across the field made the predatory soldiers unbearable to witness, let alone a poet who danced and inked all day?
We have no way of knowing what Mudan experienced, and it is hard to imagine how he spent the days and nights of those savage mountains, but from his silence in the future, from the nightmares he woke up night after night, and from the repeated disenchantment in his verses, we may be able to glimpse a little of the tragic image of that year.
Mr. and Mrs. Mudan (right) and Former Anti-Japanese Expeditionary Force General Luo Youlun and his wife (left) visiting Chicago in March 1950
It is said that after Mu Dan survived, he once talked about the war under Wu Mi's questioning, but we don't know what their teachers and students talked about. Regarding the expeditionary forces, about Burma, Mudan left almost no memorable writing. The only fragment is the record of his friend Wang Zuoliang, and the memories of Mu Dan's daughter many years later.
The June 1946 issue of the British magazine Life and Letters published Wang Zuoliang's account of Mu Dan's retreat at Savage Mountain, a little bit of what he told under the pressure of his friends. In his days at the Savage Mountains of Burma, he developed for the first time a fear of the earth and nature, the kind of primitive jungle, the primitive rain, and the ubiquitous ants and mosquitoes in the jungle devoured his comrades little by little. Under the flourishing foliage, there is the decaying wet body of the comrades-in-arms, and the tired white bones along the way. Mudan's horse died, and then so did the messengers. Time seemed to stand still by the Hukang River, space seemed to freeze, and the darkness and dead silence increased day by day, as if it were a nightmare that could never wake up. In the poisonous rain of the tropics, Mudan tiredly wondered, "And above all this is maddening hunger." He once ran out of food for eight days."
We can't imagine the impact of 8 days of food shortages and uninterrupted marching on people's physical and mental bodies, not to mention the white bones at their feet and the constant fallen comrades-in-arms. On the way, he once saw a white bone in boots that belonged to his friend. After finally arriving in India, Mudan recuperated for 3 months and almost died of gluttony after starvation.
Mu Dan's daughter Cha Yan told the story of a father and Du Yuming. Mudan, who had contracted malaria during the march on Savage Mountain, was dying, and his commander took out a life-saving medicine. There were only two pills of this medicine, and Du Yuming told Mu Dan that if he was lucky enough to live, he really couldn't live and did his best. Fortunately, the poet eventually survived.
It was not until the victory of the War of Resistance in 1945 that Mu Dan wrote the famous poem "The Charm of the Forest - Sacrifice to the Soldiers Who Died on the Savage Mountain / Sacrifice to the White Bones on the Hukang River" to commemorate the comrades who died. He said, "Your bodies are still struggling to return, and the nameless wildflowers are already blooming on your head." ”