Chapter 6 chapter Five

From the early morning of December 13, 1937, Wilson Church had actually lost its neutrality.My aunt Meng Shujuan and her fifteen female classmates would never have imagined that Father Ingeman brought them back to the church from the riverside, and after they were pushed into a deep sleep by extreme exhaustion, a Chinese soldier sneaked over the church wall and hid Into the churchyard.This soldier was the regimental deputy of the Second Regiment of the 73rd Division of the National Army, a 29-year-old major. My aunt described this major surnamed Dai to me as "a natural soldier", "a soldier with ideals", and "a soldier for his ideals and not for a living." Major Dai is very handsome, which is what I imagined.Because ideals can give people temperament, and temperament can shape masculine beauty better than correct facial features.This kind of man is also more attractive to women, to girls like my aunt who long for male protection.

Major Dai's unit was an elite division that Chiang Kai-shek used to fight the Japanese in Shanghai.Chiang Kai-shek has three elite divisions like the 73rd Division, and they are the jewels in his palm.The chief instructor of the three divisions is General Falkenhausen, a German nobleman who is not angry and has a slightly German temper.It was Major Dai's troops that nearly drove the Japanese into the Huangpu River within a week. On the evening of the 12th, Major Dai planned to take half a battalion of officers and soldiers to defend the fort on the Central Road.When it was dark, a large number of soldiers and officers ran towards the river.From their unfamiliar dialect, he roughly understood the meaning: Commander Tang convened a meeting of senior officers in the afternoon and decided to retreat to the riverside. The retreat order had been issued an hour ago.

Dai Tao thought it was impossible.His walkers received no orders to retreat.If the elite division where he was the deputy head of the regiment had not been ordered to retreat, how could these miscellaneous troops who spoke the barbarian language throw away their weapons, bury their ammunition, and retreat first? What followed was the negotiation of retreat and counter-retreat, yelling and even firing.Of course, on the military record, it was a "misfire".A company commander under Dai Tao was overthrown by the retreating army. The company commander stood up and shot the person who pushed him.All the soldiers who were ordered to stand guard immediately split into two, and most of them were swept away by the retreating crowd.The remaining 20 or so officers and soldiers retreated relying on their own weapons, and the army disarmed themselves, and began to formally fight against the deserters.After fighting for five or six minutes, the retreating brigade Mali mixed into tanks and trucks.The tanks and trucks were blocked by Dai Tao's small blocking force. The soldiers retreating on foot took the opportunity to climb onto the vehicles and were pushed down by the people on the vehicles. I have tasted it.As a son of a military family like him, the end of the world would not make him more sad than such a defeat.That's when he ordered a ceasefire.

It was already ten o'clock in the evening when he and his adjutant arrived at the riverside.Every inch of the beach by the river is crowded with desperate flesh and blood, and the side of every boat is full of desperate hands. Dai Tao was taken here and there by the adjutant, but no one heard the adjutant report Dai Tao. Backing away from their rank and unit designation, they approached the last few escape ships.At one o'clock in the morning, there were dozens of times more people who wanted to get on the boat than the maximum capacity of the boat. The pair of hands clasped on the side of the boat continued to clasp there with inhuman endurance until the boss on the deck faced each other. Those fingers swung the axe.

Dai Tao decided to stop everything in vain.It was already 3:30 in the morning, and there were not only motor boats and wooden sailboats floating on the river, but also wooden bathtubs, camphor wood boxes, and washboards.When people despair to such an extent, they will become idiots, using the washboard as a ferry, delusional to cross the natural dangers of the Yangtze River, and cross to the other side of safety.Dai Tao reckoned that the first person to take the wooden bath and camphor box had already died in the river in December.He and the adjutant turned around and squeezed back. It was four o'clock in the morning when the adjutant left him.The road was still crowded with soldiers and citizens running towards the river. A soldier was ripping off the long gown of a cursing citizen. He was unwilling to wear the military cotton coat given to him by soldiers in "equal exchange".Major Dai yelled at the soldier, but the soldier didn't seem to hear him at all.If the major hadn't been reluctant to part with the only five bullets left, this soldier disguised as the shopkeeper of the Nanjing shop would have been the victim of another "misunderstanding and firing".

Dai Tao groped forward in the alley.The houses that did not collapse were locked.One yard collapsed in half and the front door was charred.Dai Tao went in and found a bunch of dried yams not completely dried under a corridor edge.He yanked them all off and stuffed them into his pockets. He ran eastward according to the map of Nanjing in his memory.Most of the enemies came from the east. If he could successfully transition to the enemy's rear and enter the fallen countryside, he would be able to rely on the vast land and sparse population, and the enemy could survive in the open and in the dark.From there, move on to the next step.Being a soldier is not only based on knowledge and experience, but also on talent.The twenty-nine-year-old major is a young major, and it is his talent that allows him to rise faster than his fellow Baoding military academy graduates.He thought that in this case, getting behind enemy lines was an idea given to him by genius, however daring an idea.

Dai Tao encountered the first wave of Japanese soldiers breaking into the city at around five o'clock in the morning.This small force seemed to come into the city specially to find food, and set fire to every house that could not be found.In this way they entered the courtyard where Dai Tao was hiding.Dai Tao, who had retreated to the yard at the end, found that there were only seven or eight Japanese soldiers who came in, and his heart was itchy.Maybe two grenades will take them out.If you don't fight a battle that is easy to fight, you are a bastard who doesn't take advantage of it.Dai Tao touched the other two grenades on his buttocks, hesitating whether it was worth it.But a good soldier not only has knowledge, experience, and talent, but also has passion; that is, the passion that jumps into action as soon as the brain is hot.The energy to relieve hatred from the war with the Japanese in Shanghai came up.

With his heart pounding, he lay in ambush in the main room in the backyard.There was an alley outside the window, the window had already been opened by him, and it only took two seconds to get out from there.At this moment, he was full of excitement, and the feeling of losing Nanjing City was gone. The Japanese soldiers entered the yard for the last time and entered his field of vision.He held the pistol in one hand, his teeth on the fuse of the grenade, pulled it away, counted to three, and at the fourth he threw it lightly.He wanted the explosives not to be wasted at all, so the grenade had to land in the best position to explode.As he threw the grenade, he turned sideways, and flung himself at the window.Dai Tao, who has never been lazy in basic training, tasted the sweetness at this moment. It took him less than two seconds to turn over the window, and he fell under the wall in the blink of an eye.

It must be admitted that the training of the Japanese soldiers was not bad, and the two soldiers who were not killed quickly approached the rear window.The bullets shot flowers on the tree pole on his left and the broken wall on the right. After a while, he found that his left flank was covered with flowers. At this time, there was a high wall erected in front of him, and the fire not far away illuminated a cross on the building inside the wall.He remembered that this was an American church.He immediately decided that the only way to enter the church was the sycamore tree outside the wall. The trunk of the tree was full of scars. It was his climbing footsteps. With every step of climbing, the bullet hole on the left flank gushed out a stream of blood.

Climbing up to the top of the wall, he saw seven or eight crosses.This is a cemetery with a few cypress trees and some holly trees. Dai Tao took a fancy to a small temple-like building.He quickly crawled under the vault of the house, sat down, unbuttoned himself, and took the first-aid kit from his satchel.He tested the wound with his fingers, and guessed that there was no bullet in it, which was much better than he imagined, and now he wanted to try to stop the bleeding.In an instant, he washed his hands with blood, and his blood-soaked padded clothes turned into frozen iron plates, cold and heavy.

He bandaged the wound, and his teeth were so cold that they were knocked to pieces.The toy-like foreign temple is an elegant tomb.He thought to himself that dying here would also be in the light of a strange dead. When it was dawn, he found that he had fallen asleep. At this time, he heard a group of women making noise.Calculating silently in my heart, I calculated that this day was December 13, 1937.Why are there so many women here? After daybreak, he decided to hide in the cemetery to recuperate his wounds, grab something to eat if he had something to eat, and something to drink if he had something to drink. Dai Tao lurked in Wilson Church for two days. No one had seen him, but he had seen everyone in it, including my aunt and her classmates.He was restless at night, stalking the church grounds as silently as a gigantic feral cat.He lay on the outside of the ventilation hole in the basement of the Qinhuai River women for nearly half an hour, memorizing every face of them. The bunches of dried yams and the water from the baptistery fed him for two days.He already understood that this was a poor church, and if there were no dried yams, the life he recovered from the guns of the Japanese soldiers would be lost to hunger at this moment.