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MOTHER AND MY three-year-old little uncle already had spent a day and a night hiding in the drywell. The morning before, she had gone to the working well with two earthenware¹ jugs² over hershoulder. No sooner had she bent³ over to see her face in the water than she heard the clang of agong from the village wall and the shouts of the night watchman, Old Man Wu: ‘The Japs arehere, they’ve surrounded the village!’ She was so frightened she dropped the jugs and carryingpole into the well, spun⁴ on her heel, and ran home. But before she got there she met her parents,my maternal⁵ grandfather and grandmother; he was armed with a musket⁶, his wife was carryingher son and a cloth-wrapped parcel.
Ever since the battle at the Black Water River, the villagers had been preparing for thecalamity they expected to come any day. Only three or four families had gone into hiding; theothers, though frightened, were reluctant to give up their broken-down homes, their wells – bitterand sweet – and their quilts, no matter how thin and tattered⁷ they might have been. During theweek of the lull⁸, Granddad had taken Father into the country town to buy bullets, driven by adesire to settle accounts with Pocky Leng. It never occurred to him that the Japanese bloodbathwould inundate⁹ his own village.
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Zhang Ruolu the Elder – he withone large eye and one small, he with the extraordinary bearing, he the intellectual who hadstudied in a private school, he who had played such a vital role in the burial of the martyredwarriors – mobilised all able-bodied residents to reinforce the village wall and repair the gates,and appointed night watchmen to bang gongs and shout warnings at the first sighting of enemytroops. The villagers, male and female, young and old, took turns manning the wall. Mother toldme that the voice of Ruolu the Elder was loud and crisp, almost

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