The Gods of War

by Christopher Stasheff

  Not that they hadn't tried. With the ninety-one airplanes in the Chinese Air Force and the Italian-trained pilots, Chennault had sent groups against the Japanese bombers who flew over the coastal cities every day. Fighters against bombers. Insane, Chennault's old cronies would have said. They did not see the fast, tight-turning fighters rip into the heavy-laden bomber squadrons, shredding their thin wings, piercing their armor with machine guns.

  Ninety-one airplanes, of which only half were reliable. And some were gunned down. A Chinese pilot, shot out of the sky, managed to escape and recover his machine gun. He asked Chennault for a new airplane for his gun. Only there were no more airplanes. The Japanese had hundreds, thousands, more than the sky could count. They flew heavy bombers.

  After the first raids by the Chinese, the Japanese never flew without fighter escort. Only there were so many days, there were so many bombs, there were so many planes. And by October, Chennault didn't have a plane that was skyworthy. Human courage and blood alone couldn't prevail against the dark clouds of bombers that appeared daily over Shanghai and Nanking.

  So now he was leaving. He was under orders from the only man who could give him orders, the only superior he had never offended. He took off and looked below where the Japanese were beginning to celebrate their days of victory in Nanking, celebrate with Amaterasu at their first conquest in China.

  Three hundred thousand voices were raised together. Three hundred thousand pleading, crying, screaming in a single chorus. And those were only the victims, not their families and their relatives, not those who had died quickly in the massive bombing of the city nor those who had been cleanly shot by Japanese soldiers.

  Kwan Yin was overwhelmed. Never before had she heard so much misery, so much sorrow all in a single month. Not in the tens or even hundreds, but thousands every day crying out. The women who were raped and then gutted on bayonets, the old men who were dragged into the street and made to perform obscene acts before they were decently killed, the children who were thrown against a wall or stomped in the street by polished leather boots until their brains ran pink-grey over the stone.

  Never, never in any defeat had so many been tortured and murdered for the sheer pleasure of it. The numbers were more than Kwan Yin could bear, more than she could attend. There was nothing anyone, no god nor being of celestial might, could do to stop the insane victory tide of the Sun Goddess' chosen.

  This was not war. Kwan Yin had known wars before. She had seen villages lost to the Mongols. She had heard the screams of the poor when her children, undefended except by faith and fury, attacked the British gunboats and the troops of the Empress Dowager. She had seen the British sail into the harbor and hold Shanghai, forced China to accept the opium trade. She had seen all this and bled with all the people who had bled. But she had never seen the like of the victory in Nanking.

  What was once a great and prosperous city became a charred waste. The only color was the blood that ran in the gutters, that stained the houses. And the blood rapidly faded from red to rust-brown, ugly like the city had become.

  Surely they would come to their senses. Surely Amaterasu wasn't finding pleasure in this outrage as a victory. The gods themselves could not enjoy the fruits of triumph with this noise assaulting Heaven.

  And yet it went on. Kwan Yin silently haunted the streets of Nanking. She could hear no other voices. Only these, where there was not one person alive who did not plead with her to come to them.

  Come she did. There was little she could do. She could touch one officer here and recover his decency enough that he would try to discipline his troops. She could hide one ten-year-old girl from the men who would rape her, give this granny a heart attack and quick death before the invading army could drag her into the street and urinate on her respected elderly body. She could make the walls of a bombed-out shop tumble in on the looters who had carelessly killed the owner when they had gouged too deep cutting out his eyes.

  But there was too much and she could not do it all. She was a goddess, but she was too small for the task of Nanking. She took no comfort in the horror of humans throughout the world. She took no pleasure in the outrage other gods might feel. She knew only that she had been called here to the greatest calamity ever in the universe, and she had failed. Amaterasu had won this time, won far too much. And Kwan Yin was angry as she led survivors to safety. Then back in the bloody looting of the city, the white-clad goddess of Mercy raised her hands and screamed in fury, her first fury. "No, Amaterasu," she said to the burning sky that answered with laughter.

  Finally there was nothing left to take in Nanking. There was no more blood, no more rice, no more pleasure for the place. And so the invaders became quiet, behaved like other invaders.

  Kwan Yin was not appeased. She knew this was the work of Amaterasu and that the Sun Goddess would be happy for her children to rape all of China as they had Nanking. Hadn't the Japanese always had a great love and admiration and a far greater hatred for China ? She, Kwan Yin, who was worshipped in Japan as Kannon, knew them both. She had always had compassion for both. But this time she had been pushed too far. She had seen too much. And she could not forget.

  She walked out of the wreckage that had been Nanking and vowed that she would somehow stop this slaughter, stop this evil. This was what Amaterasu had wanted in her war. This was no cleansing of the Westerners from Asia, this was the annihilation of all that was not Amaterasu's own domain.

  Outside the city there was a mountain that had not been touched. The forest here was still green and smelled of early morning and shade, though even this freshness had been touched by the perfume of cordite. Here Kwan Yin sat on a fallen pine tree, her long white robes covered in scented needles in the deep shade. She wondered what to do.

  She was no goddess of war or of thunder to scare and kill the enemy. She was no goddess of the tides to wash their ships from the sea, nor of the air to tear their airplanes from the sky. She was only the gentle goddess of Mercy. And she try though she did, she could think of no way that Mercy could protect her people from the scourge Amaterasu had let loose on the world.

  As she sat thinking a great Tiger came up and lay his head in her lap. He was at least as large as she and his head alone was heavier than her whole body. His fur was grizzled and faded, its markings no longer strong and fearsome. And he was more than weary. He was limping, hurt, as if he had been crippled but not killed by a hunter.

  Hunters should know not to cripple tigers without killing, she thought idly. Everyone knew that hurt tigers were far more dangerous, would attack anything that moved. Everyone knew that a tiger in pain was more terrible than anything on this world. Except the army of Amaterasu.

  "Kwan Yin," the Tiger said. "It seems that you and I are alone against Amaterasu and brothers and all their children, and all the spirits of Japan and their armies. We must do something."

  The goddess of Mercy wiped her eyes. She knew this was the Tiger of China, so different from the powerful god she had seen in the great feasting cave not so long ago. "I know. But I don't know what. You can attack and kill, but I am a goddess of Mercy and I don't know how mercy can defeat invaders like these."

  The Tiger closed his eyes. Kwan Yin understood. Mercy had never been a weapon. How could she stand against these invaders, what power of hers was useful to her people in this war? Her heart cried out but she knew only despair. Against such things as bombers and machine guns, what could mere Mercy do?

  As the men appeared, Col. Chennault was worried. He had wanted younger men, in their twenties and with three hundred hours of flying time. After all, the American Volunteer Group was paying well. Better than the Army paid, six hundred dollars a month and high bonuses for each enemy plane shot down.

  He was disappointed. He was used to being disappointed, that had never stopped him before. It had not stopped him when the Russians were in charge of the Chinese air defense after the fiasco in Nanking, it had not stopped him when he went to Washington to request bombers and c
ame back with a hundred P-40 fighters that no one else wanted.

  In fact, even with the volunteers he was getting, Chennault realized that he could prove the points he had tried to make for an entire decade before. The points that had gotten him kicked out of the War College and passed over for command. He was a brilliant aerial strategist, was Claire Lee Chennault, and a lousy politician.

  But in this war China needed him. Chaing trusted him. The mere hundred P-40s might not win the air war, but they were a start. He could prove what fighters could do against bombers. The two-plane element working together could trap the fat, slow bombers and then climb away faster than the bombers could follow.

  He had seen it, seen it all so clearly on the night almost twenty years ago, the night he should have died. And he would have to make do with these men. Not the fine young fighter pilots he had envisioned recruiting, but these older, harder, more mercenary fliers who were all misfits in the U.S. Army. Just like himself.

  Their assignment was to protect China from invasion from the south by protecting the Burma Road. It seemed simple and straightforward, flying out of Rangoon in the P-40s while the Japanese were testing out their Zeros. Every day over the hills of Burma the men of the AVG, their planes painted with angry looking shark mouths and eyes, went on the prowl. At least those who were not too hung over.

  The things China needed came over the Burma Road. Convoys full of food and rifles, ammunition and warm winter coats came over the sharp hairpin turns through the mountains and gorges. And over the passes came the Japanese bombers, trying to get through into the interior of China to Chaing's headquarters in Kunming.

  The bombers did not get through. The AVG flew over the high passes in their shark-painted P-40s. They wore jackets that had a patch with, "I am an American flyer and a friend of the Chinese," written in Chinese on them, so when they were shot down they were not taken for the enemy.

  The American media loved them. Claire Boothe Luce wrote stories about these brave young clean-cut American boys who were fighting to keep China free.

  The image caught on, and if it wasn't quite the truth, well, it roused spirits and was good for public morale. Who in the States needed to know about the rickshaw races in the streets of Rangoon, about American pilots whistling derision at British Army officers in their tropical shorts, about the Zeros and bombers by the hundreds massed over Burma day after day after day?

  Day after day Rangoon was battered. The British troops were worn down and needed on other fronts. Day after day the three squadrons of Flying Tigers went out against the enemy in their hundred planes.

  And the planes were shot down. Planes came back with holes in the fuselage and the wings, with leaks, with shredded tires. The tires were the worst, the hardest thing to replace. There were no parts coming in. And so, bit by bit, there were fewer and fewer planes for the AVG to fly.

  The ancient Tiger turned his head on Kwan Yin's lap. "What can Mercy do?" he repeated, the rumble deep in his throat like the throttle of the planes taking off in the hills. "Can Mercy spare one life? Can Mercy go and do one single deed, save one man?"

  Though her mouth still seemed sad, Kwan Yin smiled in her eyes. And her smile was great enough to make the whole world shine, brighter than a thousand suns. "Yes, surely I can save one man," she agreed quickly. "But tell me what to do, tell me that my people will be saved, that this terrible thing will not happen again."

  The forest above Nanking was deep and full of shadows, the smell of pine perfumed them more luxuriously than the richest incense in Amaterasu's Cave. Here they were hidden from the sun, from the fury of the fire and the screams that had settled below. Kwan Yin was a sliver of silver-white against the deep moss, shining as the great Tiger of China gained strength from her care.

  "Would you go back and prevent this thing from happening?" the Tiger asked gently.

  Kwan Yin drew in a sharp breath. "Prevent it?" she asked, with a great hush. Then the silence took over. The scent of blood hung just under the dampness. "No," she said finally. "This is a truly evil thing that has happened. I do not have the power to stand against all the evil in the world. Perhaps someday people may learn from this, and that will be well. And the people of Japan, they are my people too. I want only to help defend the one, not punish the other."

  Her perfect almond-shaped eyes were as soft as snow, her touch as cool as the mountain air. The Tiger looked at her and took heart. He was over five thousand years old. He had prevailed against invasions and epidemics, famine and foreigners and opium. He remembered the time before the gods of Japan had been born, the time when only the small tree spirits and animal ghosts and ancestors ruled there in schism and anarchy. He was the oldest of the ancient ones, and this war was no new thing to him.

  Time, he thought, was all that China ever needed. China had always prevailed in the end. What was Chinese lasted forever, once it had roots in the earth.

  "Can you save one foreigner who will defend us?" the Tiger asked softly.

  Kwan Yin nodded solemnly. And then the forest north of Nanking dissolved and the black air of night rushed around them and time dissolved. She could see the years melting back, time turning in on itself. Then they were in a not foreign place that was damp and smelled evil. Smelled of death.

  The Tiger led Kwan Yin to a small hut, a place that reeked of disease and dying. He touched his great paw to the head of a young lieutenant who lay dead on a cot, a bottle of whiskey tucked under his arm.

  Kwan Yin looked down on him and felt great pity. She reached out one white hand and touched his forehead. She felt the destiny written, that this was one of the brilliant and cursed ones, and it was his time to die.

  But Fate was her sister, and Kwan Yin had delivered others from Fate before. So she touched, and the life entered the young man again. She touched the bottle and it became a blessed thing, filled with the pure livingness of the Lady of Mercy.

  The young man drank. He drank until the bottle was empty, until he was so drunk he didn't care anymore if he died. But he wasn't going to die. He was chosen for China.

  Finally Rangoon was abandoned. The British packed up, the foreigners left. Millions of Burmese crowded the Burma Road to escape into China. Families loaded their pots and pianos on top of ox-drawn wagons and tied suitcases onto the trunks of their cars as they made their way over the torturous road up the mountains. Steep grades, unpaved, led to treacherous hairpin turns that brought travelers to a narrow bridge across the Salween Gorge.

  The refugees pushed into China, a long slow caravan that took forever to cross the mountains. The British had left, the AVG was leaving and the Japanese were following behind, columns and columns of infantry and artillery coming up the Burma Road. The luckiest of the refugees made it across the Hweitung suspension bridge, hanging high above the Salween River. The unfortunates were those caught on the other side when the Chinese blew it into the muddy water below.

  The Americans were among the last out. In their planes the Adam and Eve First Pursuit, the Panda Bears Second and the Hell's Angels Third brought their battered P-40s out of Rangoon. Below them the ragged refugee column crossed the bridge, and the last across set fire to it.

  The Japanese were less than a day's march behind. Up through the Salween Gorge, across the pass, then there was nothing between them and Kunming. No army garrisoned the south, no Chinese troops guarded against the Japanese coming up the Burma Road. Once through the gorge, the Japanese would be in control of China.

  Men and material stood bottlenecked on the hairpin turns of the Burma Road down the Salween Gorge. The Japanese waited for the engineers, for the pontoons to float a bridge across the river. They were out in the open, unprotected, the victors. There was nothing at all they feared and nothing that could stop them.

  Amaterasu laughed with them. Finally China would be hers. She had desired this day above all others. The Chinese had invented civilization, but the Japanese were the rightful masters of it. She had nurtured her children well, grew them anxi
ous to fight for her many-times great grandson the Emperor, to fulfill their true destiny. The destiny she had chosen and for which her father had given her the jewel to rule.

  So she watched in the silent pool the masses of men, of tanks and mortars and armored vehicles, all waiting on the arrival of the engineers. She saw them arrive, the pontoons ready mounted on trucks. She licked her lips and drops of ruby blood fell into the pool.

  And the planes came. Four tiny things with painted teeth and tongues spitting out bullets emerged from the mountains and clove. Piloted by four ex-Navy dive bombers, the new P-40Es had bomb racks under their wings. And like the birds of Amaterasu's Cave, they plummeted toward their prey shrieking in the wind.

  And the whole column began to burn, burning like Amaterasu's sun. Burning red as the incendiaries rained down on the twenty-mile column. The planes turned, low on fuel. The Japanese felt false relief, for once the planes had been refueled they returned and wrecked vengeance on the trapped column. Their own gasoline and ammunition became the enemy as the fragmentation bombs of the AVG hit the invasion force.

  The Japanese had no air cover. They were too far from their own air bases, out of range for the fighters in their Zeros who could shoot the bombers down. In the deep gorge there was no place to hide. There was no place to run. There were sheer rock walls and a burning road into the thick river. Smoke rose thousands of feet into the air like the incense at a great festival or a mass cremation.

  Claire Lee Chennault pressed the attack further. For four days the skies over Salween bloomed with bombers, with fighters strafing targets left on the ground. Nothing at all was left of the force massed on the Chinese border.

  Kwan Yin looked over the destruction at Salween. Nothing was unburned, nothing was alive. There was nothing at all to call out to her for pity. And she cried for the ones who were the enemies, knowing that too soon they would be calling on her as well. Against all the evil of men what could Mercy do?