During the Battle of Songhu in 1937, the remnants of the 19th Guangxi Route Army stepped into that flesh and blood mill twice. The regimental commanders Xie Dingxin, Chu Zhaoyue, and Cai Chaoyu died for their country one after another, and the 176th Division was littered with casualties. A seventeen-year-old young man from Guangxi understood the old saying for the first time on the scorched earth - "It's a matter of taking one's life and exchanging one's life."
Five years later, this unit changed its defense to Qianshan, Anhui, and the division headquarters entered Dawang Mountain in the back mountain of Savage Village. The messenger Chen Wangsheng followed the regiment leader Mo Di and witnessed the Sikesong night attack in the Qianshan battle and the Meicheng counterattack that shot down the enemy plane. He also witnessed after the Shuihou Ridge massacre, a woman sang the folk song in a low voice in the ruins. Halfway through the song, she suddenly stopped.
The folk song is still the same - "To eat vegetables, you must eat cabbage hearts, and to marry, you must marry a Guangxi soldier." But it was sweet in the past, then painful, and in the end, it became the weight of 985 graves.
In the cemetery of Yerenzhai, 985 clay pots are lined up. Chen Wangsheng had been writing his name on the bamboo stick for five years. At the end of the writing, there was a word that was soaked by the rain and could not be read.
He suddenly remembered that his eldest brother Chen Wangshan had left Songhu and never came back.
This book is not about who won. It only says one thing: the person is gone, but the name cannot be lost.
