Since ancient times, given humanity’s inherent nature, people have set all sorts of rules for themselves in pursuit of a better life.
From customs to laws to countless unspoken basic morals, people have bound themselves, marking out boundary after boundary that should not easily be crossed. It could be said that these boundaries protect the foundation of human life — they keep individually weak people from being easily harmed, while making proper use of the strength of each weak individual, gathering grains of sand into a tower, ultimately creating powerful and glorious nations and civilizations.
Beyond that point, the rules humanity has created gradually lose their applicability. Between large groups such as nation and nation, the essential nature of the strong preying on the weak begins to bare its fangs more clearly. It reminds us of the most fundamental truth of this world, telling us plainly that mutual respect between people rests on only two underlying patterns:
First, people are able to make use of one another.
Second, people hold deterrent power over one another.
When some rule between two systems becomes unbalanced enough, all man-made rules, all things that seem self-evidently good and true, may at any moment slip their reins and vanish entirely. From this, war is born.
That is the form in which human society truly stops at nothing. No custom or morality can halt its advance; anything permitted by the laws of physics may happen before one’s eyes. It widens the gap between people to the scale of emperor and beast, scatters countless people from their homes and tears families apart, and makes people realize that the mortal world can be more terrifying than hell itself.
But in another direction, it also exhausts human imagination to its limits. It forces those who wish to survive to keep advancing; it reminds people that nothing good is a gift from heaven but something people must create and defend; it reminds people of the necessity of self-strengthening, and at times, it also drives the renewal of this world, sweeping away the old.
In the first year of Wu Zhenxing and the fifteenth year of Jin Tianhui, the years had already turned over several decades amid war.
There had been war after war that decided the rise and fall of the realm, that decided the direction of history’s great tide. Over the past several decades, these wars had made the Jin people the most dazzling actors on this world stage, and had driven the wheel of history to crush the futures of countless people.
At the end of February, a war of this kind was about to erupt at a place called Wangyuan Bridge on the Zizhou front. By this time, the Jin western army and the Huaxia Army had already been fighting in the southwest for four months. People sensed that a turning point of this kind would come, that it was bound to arrive and place a temporary punctuation mark on everything.
Only, when it did arrive, the course of the entire battle proved astonishing.
To be sure, on the macro level, the Battle of Wangyuan Bridge, as part of the greater southwestern campaign, was filled with grand and blood-stirring scenes — everyone fought with all their strength to seize that single thread of victory. But when the whole battle came to a close, people discovered that it had all been so simple and had followed such an obvious course that its very simplicity felt uncanny.
On the surface, at the level of the fighting itself, this battle involved no clever stratagems at all. At first glance it looked as if two armies, after brief maneuvering, had simply walked straight up to each other, with one side charging the other with everything it had, and fighting on like that until the battle ended. Many people never even had time to react, left stunned and gasping for breath…
Of course, within the greater battle there naturally existed many more tangled threads of cause and effect. To see them clearly, we need to cast a bird’s-eye view over the entire battlefield, taking the twenty-third of February as our turning point.
Taking the twenty-third of February of that year in the southwest as the marker, in the vast mountain wilderness more than twenty li ahead of Zizhou, the Jin forces participating in the southern campaign had, in effect, already split into five columns, each holding steady on one side while pouring southward on the other.
At this time, among the five main forces on the Jin vanguard — roughly one hundred fifty thousand men in total — the southernmost was the Army of Vengeance led by Wanyan Xiebao, built mainly around twenty thousand of the Yanshan Guard. A little behind the Yanshan Guard was the force of over ten thousand men once under the direct command of Cibushi, from years earlier. Though somewhat lagging behind, over the past two months this army had gradually had several thousand war-horses sent up from the rear — of limited use for transport on the rugged mountain roads, but once they reached the flatter terrain near Zizhou, they would once again be able to unleash their full destructive power.
Corresponding to the Yanshan Guard was the force under Balishu, marching steadily along the central route. Its core was over twenty thousand men, but counting the scouts and irregular forces before and behind, it stretched the widest. This Jurchen general, who had broken through Huangming County, appeared somewhat brutal and reckless on the battlefield, giving little thought to human life, yet his methods of command were in fact the steadiest of all, and he was the one who gave the Huaxia Army — which liked to fish in troubled waters — the most trouble.
A bit to the north of Balishu’s army, coming down from Yushui Creek, were the forces of Dalai and Shaba, moving in parallel and forming the largest concentration of troops. Because there were simply too many of them — over fifty thousand men in total — their pace had instead become somewhat sluggish. After the New Year, Wanyan Zonghan, the western campaign’s supreme commander, who had once been seen at Yushui Creek, had vanished from view; some Huaxia Army staff officers guessed that he was traveling with this army, alongside his most trusted right-hand man, Wanyan Shaba.
Of course, some staff officers also believed Zonghan might be stationed within Balishu’s centrally positioned force. Events would later prove this second guess correct.
Further to the northwest, there remained roughly thirty thousand Han troops, cutting toward the edge of the battlefield — after the army passed Yushui Creek and Huangming County, the Jin state had finally finished separating out the Han troops who had surrendered from the Central Plains and Jiangnan. Some had broken and fled on the battlefield; others had been assigned to push forward at unimportant flanking positions.
This roughly thirty-thousand-strong force was now led by the Han general Li Rulai. The Jurchens did not expect much of them — so long as they could draw the Huaxia Army’s attention to some degree, divide its forces, and avoid breaking and stampeding back into the main battlefield, that would be enough.
Four months into the war, the main force the Jurchens could send to the front amounted to roughly this one hundred twenty thousand; adding the wounded and the rear garrison might raise the total somewhat further, but it had become very difficult to push more troops from the rear to the front.
On the Huaxia Army’s side, by contrast, the campaign had begun with a main force of four divisions, over fifty thousand men, later joined by roughly twenty thousand new recruits. By the end of February, the First Division had roughly eight thousand men left. The Second Division, after its defeat at Huangming County, had been reinforced with some of the wounded, and by the end of February had a little over four thousand men remaining. The Fourth Division, under Qu Zhengyan, still had seven thousand men. The Fifth Division had over eight thousand. Adding the six thousand men directly under Army Commander He Zhicheng — the special brigade, the cadre corps, and other active forces — the troops actually engaged in blocking the enemy’s one hundred fifty thousand men at the Zongxi and Leigang front amounted to roughly thirty-four thousand.
Xigua was suppressing bandits in the rear, commanding a special operations force that was not, in fact, very large. Entering February, Ning Yi finally pulled out the manpower he had been preparing all along. The six thousand men under him included the security regiment, the bandit-suppression forces, some special operations personnel who had taken part in front-line fighting, and a small number of technical troops.
The thirty-four thousand-odd men gathered at the front were not, in fact, concentrated in one place. Relying on the rugged roads through the mountains before Zongxi and Leigang, which prevented large formations from deploying, a great many troops had been sent out to fight in dispersed engagements.
On the morning of February 23, several Jin forces had already launched large-scale infiltration raids. Once the Huaxia Army side reacted, the roughly fifteen thousand troops gathered in the first wave met the weaker forces under Xiebao, Balishu, and Shaba with three columns of four, five, and six thousand men respectively. Fighting broke out in the mountains from around midday.
The Huaxia Army’s strength kept being drawn in and gathered further.
Ning Yi’s departure from Zizhou happened to coincide, “by pure coincidence,” with the very moment the Jurchens had chosen. But with this move of his, February 23 took on an entirely different meaning for the whole southwestern campaign.
Everyone understood that the battle had reached an extremely critical juncture. But hardly anyone could grasp Ning Yi’s motive for making this choice.
For the Jurchens, entering Jiange with a main force of two hundred thousand men and now having only one hundred twenty thousand at the front, with the usable Han troops nearly exhausted — historically speaking, this was an extremely humiliating scene. But war does not follow a simple exchange ratio. To wear down the Jin army with a force of only a few tens of thousands would put enormous pressure on the Huaxia Army; as its numbers gradually dwindled, it was more likely to be the patched-together Huaxia Army, now reduced to only forty thousand, that would collapse at some point.
As for the Huaxia Army’s purpose in taking the initiative to stir up trouble along the mountain roads, the Jurchens understood part of it. A siege defense needs only to be held out until the attacker gives up, whereas a mobile field battle offers the option of striking at the enemy’s leadership — for instance, in this most complex mountain terrain, launching a surprise attack on Zonghan, or on Balishu, Shaba, or Xiebao. If they could crush just one main force, they could achieve results that a siege defense could never easily obtain, and might even force the enemy into an early retreat.
To guard against this possibility, Zonghan had adopted the most cautious posture of all, unwilling to let the Huaxia Army know his location. At the same time, his eldest son, Wanyan Sheyema, had also not appeared on the front line.
The only bait actually put forward was Wanyan Xiebao. Zonghan’s son had a reputation outside for recklessness, but was in truth careful and meticulous at heart. His Army of Vengeance, built mainly around the Yanshan Guard, was, among all the Jin forces, second in strength only to the Tushan Guard. Even though Loushi had died years earlier, this force — trained ever since under the goal of wiping out its disgrace — had always been the core strength of the Jurchen advance into the southwest.
If the Huaxia Army wanted to carry out a decapitation strike, Xiebao was the best target — but to decapitate Xiebao, they would need to be willing to stake their own lives on it.
In their advance over the past month or more, the Jurchens had moved with great difficulty and suffered heavy losses, but on the whole had made no fatal mistakes. In theory, once they crossed Leigang and Zongxi, the Huaxia Army would have to turn back to Zizhou and fight a siege defense it had no wish to fight. And at that point, the many lower-strength troops — such as the Han army — could be sent charging straight ahead by the Jurchens, free to ravage the Huaxia Army’s rear base on the Chengdu Plain.
This would put the Huaxia Army in a very difficult position, but the other side had to make this choice regardless — of course, Zonghan and the others had also once considered another possibility for what might happen once the enemy crossed Leigang and Zongxi: that Ning Yi, realizing that holding Zizhou meant only waiting to die, would cut off his own arm to save his body, abandon the Chengdu Plain, and retreat back into the Liangshan mountains to resume his life as a mountain bandit chief. That, too, would count as one way the Southwestern War might come to an end.
No one had expected Ning Yi to come out and fight.
Cutting off one’s own arm to this degree? Once the line was crossed, launching an all-out battle with only forty thousand men?
Zonghan knew the story of burning one’s boats and fighting a desperate battle to victory, but under the present circumstances, such a choice seemed thoroughly unreasonable — even laughable.
Because of this bewilderment, the night of the twenty-third into the twenty-fourth in the Jurchen camp was far from calm. The high command, while outwardly making routine troop movements, was at the same time deliberating with the core command group over at Balishu’s position.
Dalai, Shaba, and the others naturally all believed there was some trick involved. Wanyan Xiebao, following his “assigned role,” began pushing forward madly, adopting the posture of a man determined to seize the first opportunity for battle, while the force of over ten thousand men that had long been held in reserve behind him also rushed rapidly forward. Gao Qingyi at one point offered his counsel: “This Ning Yi is staking everything on one throw — whatever he is calculating must be extraordinary indeed. Better to order King Baoshan to halt at once, and send another force forward to probe first.”
Wanyan Sheyema held the same cautious view, but Zonghan did not make a decision right away, while Balishu, as always, kept doing his steady work — pressing the central army forward calmly, so that even if something happened, it would not become completely disconnected from Xiebao’s forces.
“…Ning Yi’s six thousand men charge out — however astonishing their fighting power, what will his next move be? What is his goal? To strike head-on at every force that steps beyond Leigang and Zongxi? How many can he possibly defeat?”
For half the night, Zonghan and the others went on working through the map, but could reach no conclusion. Before it was fully light, Xiebao’s messenger arrived, bringing a letter and statement from Xiebao himself.
“…Our side has one hundred fifty thousand men on the march. Your son takes twenty thousand men out ahead of Leigang and Zongxi first. Even if the Huaxia Army is formidable, it has at most forty thousand men in total to meet us. If that is so, then even should your son alone offer battle, the rest of our forces will all have made it through, and the southwestern campaign will be decided… If the Huaxia Army cannot meet us with its full forty thousand, and it is only Ning Yi’s six thousand men, then what does your son have to fear? At worst, should he defeat your son’s twenty thousand with his six thousand, your son will simply regroup and fight him again…”
“…In battle, the moment of opportunity is fleeting. Since Ning Yi is proud of his fighting strength, this is exactly the moment for your son to strike head-on. The only thing to be wary of is that Ning Yi may use his six thousand men to lure us in, gathering our main strength before encircling and swallowing your son’s entire army whole — this would be the strategy of preferring to lose one finger rather than injure ten. But even this would not be difficult to counter…”
For Ning Yi to charge out so arrogantly, the most likely explanation was that, seeing Leigang and Zongxi could no longer be held, he wished to concentrate superior force and swallow up one portion of the Jin army before the full one hundred fifty thousand had all emerged. But even this was not necessarily a bad thing — in battle, one does not fear the enemy having a scheme, but fears that he does not, for then he becomes truly unpredictable. And so, as King Baoshan put it, if Ning Yi wanted to eat, they would stuff him until he burst.
As for the rear, so long as Balishu, Shaba, Dalai, and the others kept the Huaxia Army in the mountains pinned down firmly, preventing it from withdrawing many troops, the chances of the Huaxia Army pulling its chestnuts from the fire were slim — if it could still withdraw troops under these circumstances, that in itself would be extraordinary.
Looked at another way: if Ning Yi came with six thousand men saying he wanted to swallow the two or three tens of thousands of main troops under Xiebao, and Xiebao’s reaction was anything other than “let him try, please do finish the meal,” then the Jurchens would truly have no business contending for the realm any longer.
Even facing a force four or five times his own, Xiebao — commander of one of the Jurchens’ strongest armies — had prepared for the possibility of defeat, planning at worst to “regroup and fight him again.” In fact, the term by which the Jurchens referred to the army opposing them had, without anyone quite noticing, shifted from “the Black Banner Army” to “the Huaxia Army” — this, too, was the respect the Huaxia Army had beaten into the Jurchens’ faces over the past four months.
On the twenty-fourth, Zonghan made his decision, approving Xiebao’s plan. At the same time, Balishu’s army pressed steadily forward, while to the north, Dalai’s and Shaba’s forces maintained a conservative posture — a deliberate response to the Huaxia Army’s suspected guess that “Zonghan is with Shaba.”
Worth noting: after receiving his father’s approval, although Xiebao ordered his rear columns to speed up their advance, at the front he kept only a swift posture while making sure his troops committed as fully as possible to fighting the Huaxia Army’s main force — stretching out by an entire day the time it would take for all his troops to cross Zongxi.
Twenty thousand men still did not feel secure enough to him, and so he wanted to gather thirty thousand before charging at Ning Yi — this move was itself also a test of Ning Yi’s true intent. If the other side really did intend to fight him to the death with only six thousand men, then Ning Yi ought to wait for him.
In the early hours of the twenty-sixth, Xiebao’s first column crossed Zongxi. He had originally expected to be met with a head-on strike, but no such strike came — Ning Yi’s army was still gathering several li away. It seemed to be angling toward meeting the Jurchen main force head-on, then edged sideways, striking a posture of deterrence.
— Deterrence, my ass!
At this same time, in Balishu’s central formation, Zonghan’s command banner had already been raised, pressing directly against the Huaxia Army’s main force at the front. The fighting in the mountains escalated further, the attack-and-defense turning into positional warfare. The Huaxia Army used its artillery emplacements to seal off the mountain passes, gaining advantage after advantage, while the Jurchens were equally determined to pin down the Huaxia Army’s main force so it could not withdraw. In truth, everyone was waiting to see what would happen next — Ning Yi’s behavior was strange enough to leave people utterly baffled.
By the twenty-eighth, Xiebao’s force of nearly thirty thousand had all been gathered up, including three thousand cavalry brought in. Ning Yi edged forward unhurriedly, and Xiebao followed suit, edging forward himself, still convinced that the other side ought to try some trick at some point — but it never came. The interaction between the two sides looked like nothing so much as two children shouting taunts at each other.
“Come at me if you dare!”
“I did!”
“Come at me!”
“I did!”
“If you don’t strike, you’re a coward—”
Someone had to strike a blow eventually, or else it would become a standoff like Sima Yi’s.
On the afternoon of the twenty-eighth, the mountains ahead were already ablaze with fighting. Near Wangyuan Bridge, Wanyan Xiebao brought his blade down.