204 CHINESE LITERATURE
Ambulance waggons block the way : our men succumb to flank attacks. Their officers have surrendered : their general is dead. The river is choked with corpses to its topmost banks : the fosses of the Great Wall are swimming over with blood. All distinctions are oblite- rated in that heap of rotting bones. . . .
" Faintly and more faintly beats the drum. Strength exhausted, arrows spent, bow-strings snapped, swords shattered, the two armies fall upon one another in the supreme struggle for life or death. To yield is to become the barbarian's slave : to fight is to mingle our bones with the desert sand. . . .
" No sound of bird now breaks from the hushed hill- side. All is still save the wind whistling through the long night. Ghosts of the dead wander hither and thither in the gloom : spirits from the nether world collect under the dark clouds. The sun rises and shines coldly over the trampled grass, while the fading moon still twinkles upon the frost flakes scattered around. What sight more horrible than this ! "
The havoc wrought by the dreaded Tartars is indeed the theme of many a poem in prose as well as in verse. The following lines by CH'EN T'AO, of about this date, record a patriotic oath of indignant volunteers and the mournful issue of fruitless valour :
" They swore the Huns should perish :
they would die if needs they must. . . . And now Jive thousand, sable-clad,
have bit the Tartar dust. Along the river-bank their bones
lie scattered where they may, But still their forms in dreams arise
to fair ones far away
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