Someone stretched out his neck and shouted, "The train has arrived, hasn't it?"
"What's the matter?" asked our hungry colleague, "We're all right if we stay here. No problem!" And maintaining his imperturbable calm he showed no intention of moving. To listen to this man, it seemed that it didn't matter whether the train arrived or not. He was phlegmatic in spite of his hunger pangs.
Shortly afterwards, the cry of "Banzai!" erupted on the platform one or two hundred meters in front of us. The shout passed in a wave from one person to another until it came to me.
"What's the matter? No problem, n...."
The people lined up on either side of me shouted in unison a "Banzai!" that muffled the rest of this utterance from our starving friend. The shouting was still going on when a general, giving a military salute, passed in front of me. He was a short man, with a tanned face and sporting a pepper-and-salt beard. The people at my side, seeing that the general was leaving, once again shouted "Banzai!" Now, it may seem strange but I had never once in all my life shouted "Banzai!" It was not that, as far as I can remember, anyone ever told me not to. Nor was it because I disapproved of it—obviously there is nothing objectionable about it. But, impeded by this lack of experience, now that I was on the point of crying out "Banzai!," no sound came out of my mouth, as if I had a pebble stuck in my windpipe. Whatever I did, the "Banzai!" remained stuck in my throat, noiseless; however hard I tried, I could make no sound. Nevertheless, I had determined some time in advance that a sound would indeed come out of my mouth. In fact, I had been telling myself as I waited that it would be best if the opportunity would present itself as soon as possible. I was not the man next to me; but I found it reassuring to insist to myself that there was no problem. As soon as the asthmatic whale had bellowed, I had held myself in readiness for the moment that was to come, and when the people surrounding me had shouted so loudly, I tried instantly to join in. In fact, it is strictly true that the "Banzai!" had started to rise from the depths of my throat, but the general had passed at the very moment it reached my mouth. And then I saw his tanned face and his pepper-and-salt beard and my "Banzai!" was stillborn. Why?
How could I know why? To understand something and identify the precise reason for it, we need to reflect calmly on the event after it has happened. It is only by going over the facts and analyzing them that we can arrive at an understanding of them. If I had known why the cry would be strangled in my throat, well, I would have taken steps at the outset and made sure that my "Banzai!" did not stick in my gullet. If it were possible to address human actions in that way, how peaceful human history would be! It must be said that my "Banzai!" had been blocked by something transcendent, beyond the scope of my right of intervention. At the same time as the "Banzai!" was blocked, spasms difficult to describe shook my breast and two tears rolled down my face.
Perhaps the general had a swarthy face from birth? But most people who have endured the winds from the Liatong6 peninsula, or experienced the Moukden7 rains or been burned by the sun at Shu he,8 come back darker skinned than they left. Someone whose complexion is naturally pale will become browner. It is the same with a beard. A few white strands will probably appear in a black beard once its owner has left for the front. Those of us who were looking at the general for the first time, had no way of drawing a comparison between what he had been before and what he was now. Presumably his wife and daughters, who had anxiously counted the days and nights, would be surprised by what they saw. War, when it does not kill people, ages them. The general was extremely thin, but perhaps his thinness was attributable to the cares he had endured. The only aspect of his physique that could not have changed from what it was before he left for the front was his height. People like me who live with their noses in books are like hermits, withdrawn from the world, and we know nothing of what is happening beyond our places of work. This is not to say that I do not ordinarily read newspapers or express my views on the war poetically. However, the imagination is limited to fantasy, and the newspapers, however intently we read them every day from front to back, end up as waste paper. Thus, when there is a war, we do not genuinely feel as if it is really taking place. For a carefree person like me, fortuitously engulfed in the crowd that invaded the station, what most struck me was that face burned by the sun and that beard tinted with frost. I have never seen war with my own eyes, but when the consequences had furtively passed in front of me, or, more precisely, a fragment of the consequences, and moreover a living fragment, under the influence of that fragment I could see very clearly in my mind's eye the post-combat scenes on the plain of Manchuria.
Furthermore, all around that little fragment, which we can consider as an image of the war, were the cheers of the people shouting "Banzai!" This was nothing more than the echo of the war cries that had resounded on the Manchurian battlefield. The meaning of "Banzai!," if we take the literal interpretation of the Chinese characters that comprise it, is "May you live for a thousand years!" When a war cry sounds, on the other hand, its form and meaning differ singularly. The war cry is a short and simple "Aaah!" Unlike "Banzai!," it has no particular meaning, but just because it has no meaning does not prevent it from having an extreme and deep significance. There are different kinds of human voices. Some are piercing, others harsh, some clear, some deep. The linguistic structures and inflections they express are equally varied. For 23 hours 50 minutes of every 24 hours people use words that have a precise meaning. Whatever "domain," whatever field of knowledge or activity, whether it is clothing or food, negotiations or deals, greetings or trivial gossip, everything can be expressed vocally. Ultimately, it could even be argued that a domain does not exist if nobody is talking about it. But people do not usually utter sounds that make no sense and do not refer to a particular domain. In purely economic or utilitarian terms, however often we may utter a particular sound, we will be wasting our vocal energy if it has no recognizable meaning. Only in extreme situations are we forced to try to make ourselves understood through apparently meaningless sounds which needlessly assault the eardrums of innocent people. The war cry is a vocal distillation of the emotions of someone in a critical situation or threatened by great danger. It is a natural cry of the deepest sincerity which rises straight up from the depths of the diaphragm when a man, his whole body trembling, balances dangerously on a tensed metal wire, hovering between life and death, between this free world and hell. When someone yells "Help!" the sincerity of his cry is clearly expressed in the word. The howl "I am going to kill you!" is clearly not without credibility, but precisely because the words have a meaning, the degree of certainty is reduced. As long as we retain sufficient discernment to use words that make sense, it cannot be said that we are uttering truth straight from the heart, unalloyed with anything else. Moreover, there is not the slightest crumb of humanity in a war cry. The war cry is "Aaah!" In a war cry there is no sarcasm or common sense. It contains no good or evil. It is as devoid of falsehood as it is of any attempt to manipulate. It is, from beginning to end, only "Aaah!" The emotion that it crystalizes, explodes and sends out shock waves in all directions; that is what causes this "Aaah!" to resonate. It has not that sense of sinister augury conveyed in expressions like "Banzai!," "Help!," or even "I am going to kill you!" In other words, "Aaah!" is mind; "Aaah!" is soul; "Aaah!" is humanity; "Aaah!" is truth. And I think that it is only when we are able to hear this truth expressed simultaneously by tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people that we can appreciate the supreme, unfathomable and infinite dimension of it. The fresh tears that rolled down my face when I saw the general were perhaps a reaction to this sense of a supreme truth.
After the general, two or three officers passed in front of us, sporting the new tan-colored uniform. They had apparently come to meet the general, judging from their expressions, which were very different from his. I have known from childhood, because I have heard it so often, that saying of Mend us,9 "the dwelling changes the attitude of the mind," but now, seeing how much the faces of those returning from the war differed from the faces of those who had stayed in the city, I felt I understood it more acutely than ever before. I wanted to see the general's face once again, for good or evil, and I stood on the tips of my toes—but in vain! I could see only a crowd of several tens of thousands of people, gathered outside the station and shouting war cries so loudly that I thought they would shatter the station windows. The crowd all around me finally broke the ranks it had formed and headed in a mass towards the main entrance. It seemed to me that the people shared my desire to see the general again. I, too, pushed by the black wave, was carried three or four meters in the