A Nobody in the Three Kingdoms: Chronicles of the Red Cliffs Camp

Chen Liu is an ordinary farmer conscripted into the Sun Wu army under a late Eastern Han recruitment decree. From his hometown of Lujiang, he is sent all the way to the battlefield at Wulin and Red Cliffs. He knows nothing about military strategy or the “grand plans” of Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang. He only cares about whether he’ll get enough to eat today, whether sharpening his spear will wear his hand raw, and whether the squad leader’s whip will come down on him.

In camp, he follows the squad leader in drilling formations and practicing thrusts. He helps veteran farm soldiers carry the new wheat and dry the army’s grain, gradually learning the rules of the military system: five men to a cooking group, ten to a squad. During the preparations for battle, he forgets to record how much grain has been put into storage and is beaten with a military cudgel. Only then does he understand that “one character on the army register can mean the difference between life and death for a foot soldier.”

On the night the flames rise at Red Cliffs, he doesn’t see Zhou Yu’s heroic feat of summoning the east wind. He only remembers clutching a plank and drifting in the river as a fire ship bore down, hearing his fellow villager A Fu cry “Save me!” before sinking beneath the water, and finally being swept ashore with the fleeing soldiers. During the postwar tally, he receives half a dou of millet for “meritorious service protecting the grain” (in truth, he merely managed not to lose his sack in the chaos), but never sees the three fellow villagers who enlisted alongside him again. At last, covered in scars and clinging to the hope of making it home alive, he leaves the battlefield, carrying only a rough notebook recording things like “millet mixed with sand” and “spearhead sharpened bright.” This is Red Cliffs as he saw it, nothing like the “legends of heroes.”