Forged in Iron

Amid the smoke and gunfire on the plains, sixteen-year-old Xiao Bao gripped his sharpened bayonet. When the Japanese invaders’ iron hooves crushed the old locust tree at the village entrance, and his parents fell in a pool of blood, the thing beating in his chest was no longer a boy’s heart. It was an unquenchable fury and blood that had yet to run cold.

“Stick with me, and if there’s food to eat, there’ll be guns to fire!” The old squad leader patted his shoulder as muddy water rose past their knees in the trenches. From trembling the first time he pulled the trigger to dragging a wounded comrade through a heap of corpses; from chewing tree bark while hiding in the sorghum fields to sneaking into a Japanese blockhouse at midnight to blow up its ammunition depot, Xiao Bao’s back grew straighter under the artillery fire, and the calluses on his hands grew harder than his rifle stock.

He had seen the looks in the eyes of villagers as bayonets ran them through, heard wounded comrades moaning in the freezing night, and counted the new scars on his own body. Every scar bore a name, and every gunshot asked the same question: When would wild chrysanthemums finally bloom on his parents’ graves?

When a collaborator’s gun was aimed at his back and the last grenade’s fuse was lit, Xiao Bao suddenly understood what the squad leader meant by “iron bones.” It wasn’t being impervious to bullets and blades. It was the stubborn courage to charge forward even when you knew you couldn’t win, the resolve to save your final bullet for yourself and give your brothers the chance to live.

At dawn, when the smoke had cleared, someone found half a bloodstained red sash in a shell crater. It was the talisman Xiao Bao’s mother had prayed over for his safety. And on the distant horizon, more boys like Xiao Bao were gripping their rifles. Their bones rang louder than the Japanese soldiers’ steel helmets and were harder than the rocks of the Taihang Mountains.

This is not the story of one hero, but the answer forged from the flesh and blood of thousands of boys like Xiao Bao: when your home is gone, you must use your own bones to hold up the sky.