New Age Artists

Chapter 639 Frost Blood
The movie continues.

Scattered battle scenes began to appear.

On December 12, the Japanese 12th Division attacked Yuhuatai and was met with stubborn resistance from the defending 9th Division.

The Japanese invaders then broke into Guanghua Gate and fought fiercely. Fires broke out and the battle was extremely tragic.

This is also the day.

December 12, Nanjing, Purple Mountain, Beiji Pavilion Buddhist Temple.

The smell of sandalwood mixed with gunpowder was steaming, and the command knife was leaning against the gilded Buddha statue.

The sound of the Buddhist bell startled the crows, and the shoulder straps of Nanjing Garrison Commander Tang Shengzhi wrinkled the title page of the Diamond Sutra.

The celadon candlesticks reflected the broken "defend until death" handwritten note, and the sandalwood mixed with the smell of burnt corpses on the other side of the river formed a gray mist in front of the gilded Thousand-Armed Guanyin statue.

When he kowtowed three times, the Buddha's eyes suddenly reflected the stampede tragedy on the Yangtze River. Those who drowned were all the soldiers on the roster that he had burned.

The Nanjing city sand table in the fruit plate was cracked into two halves, the Nanjing city defense map was soaked with bloody fingerprints, and a tributary of the Qinhuai River oozed rust-colored liquid.

The guardian deity Wei Tuo's demon-subduing pestle suddenly pointed in the direction of Xiaguan Wharf, and the golden characters of the prayer flag "Live and die with the city" fell off.

It turned into Chiang's damned secret order, "If the situation cannot be sustained for long, you may retreat at any time to regroup and then counterattack."

The moment the guard knocked on the door, the key to the motorboat in the secret compartment of the Buddhist shrine suddenly sprouted, blossomed in the Buddha's light, and fired a bullet with the words "Great Compassion, Great Mercy, Save People and the World" engraved on the shell.

The eight characters carved have historical reasons. Tang Shengzhi was very depressed when he saw some Hunan generals fighting for power and profit, fighting openly and secretly just for their own promotion and wealth.

He met Gu Boxu, a lay Buddhist of the Tantric school. After hearing Gu Boxu's advice, Tang Shengzhi became his disciple and converted to Buddhism.

After converting to Buddhism, he took the Dharma name Fazhi and the pseudonym Mande. He appointed himself a Buddhist general and used Buddhism to command the army. All the soldiers wore badges with the words "Great Compassion, Great Mercy, Saving People and the World" on them.

At this moment, Tang Shengzhi, who was a devout believer in Buddhism, saw that the war situation was difficult to save, so he convened an emergency meeting of officers above the rank of division commander on the afternoon of December 12, and ordered them to abandon Nanjing and break out separately.

Some army and division commanders did not pass on the order to break out and just left, leaving the group leaderless. They all rushed to the Yijiang Gate in the north of the city to escape, causing extreme chaos.

Song Xilian's subordinates were in charge of the martial law troops guarding the Yijiang Gate. They were unaware of the retreat order and suddenly saw their friendly troops retreating wildly. They thought they were running away, so they immediately turned their guns around and fired at the chaotic soldiers, killing each other.

By the evening of the 12th, it was inevitable that the Japanese invaders would capture the city.

Old Qin stuffed half a salted duck between the two brothers and told them, "Run! The Guanghua Gate guards are using silver dollars to buy plain clothes."

In a panic, the two brothers saw a bride in a tattered wedding dress. It was the wife of the rice shop, who was looking for a hairpin among the ruins.

July 12th night.

Tang Shengzhi led a small number of people and fled across the river on a reserved motorboat. The headquarters burned the documents on the same day.

Only a small part of the defenders managed to escape. The large number of troops that failed to retreat across the river threw away their weapons, took off their military uniforms, blended in with the common people, and stayed in the city.

Morning of May 12th.

Three Japanese divisions entered the city one after another and Nanjing fell.

The tragic Battle of Nanjing ended.

The film spends more than an hour laying the groundwork for the darkest moment in the modern history of the Chinese nation.

From the Opium War to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, and then to the Nanjing Massacre, the backbone of the Chinese nation was almost crushed, causing the Chinese people, who firmly believed in the "world view" and transcended the concept of nation, to embrace concepts such as "Chinese nation" and "Han nationality."

The big transition between Jiang Dedam and Tang Shengzhi in the movie echoes each other.

On the screen, Buddhist scriptures floated in the blood and the church's stained windows trembled in the explosion waves.

The shots of the two scenes resonate: the Buddhist temple and the church, the knife and the scripture, the liquid statue and the solidified candlelight.

At this moment, history trembles.

This is magic, but also reality.
Because this is history, bloody history.

Japanese military planes dropped a "surrender advice" promising "not to kill prisoners and to protect cultural facilities."

On December 12, the Japanese 13th Division was the first to enter the city from Zhonghua Gate, and on the same day, they massacred tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians who had laid down their arms at Zhongshan Wharf.

After breaking into the city, the Japanese invaders carried out strategic fraud, using false promises to induce the Chinese army to give up street fighting, and actually slaughtered the disarmed soldiers at Yijiangmen.

Relying on the map they bought, the two brothers kept moving and were trapped in the dyeing workshop.

Lu Dachuan taught his brother how to wrap his legs with cloth strips soaked in salt water to prevent frostbite, smear indigo dye on his face to pretend to be a patient, and bribe traitors with salt in exchange for a pass.

A group portrait appeared in the camera.

Zhou Zhenyue, a 29-year-old deputy company commander of the eighth term of the Whampoa Military Academy, is still defending the Zhongshan Gate position.

Using a bayonet to pry open the ammunition box, they found it was full of rocks. In the distance, the Central Daily News was heard falling: "Commander-in-Chief Tang vows to live and die with Nanjing."

The messenger came running over with a limp, speaking in a panicked tone: "The divisional headquarters crossed the river last night!"

Jinling University Auditorium, safe area.

The stained glass windows were shaken into spider-web-like cracks, and the sunlight cut spots of light on the face of Professor Xu Wenyuan, who was wearing gold-rimmed glasses.

He was stuffing a fragment of a scroll into the suitcase when Hongyu, a prostitute in the corner, suddenly lifted up her cheongsam, revealing a corset full of silver dollars: "Mr. Xu, take me to Shanghai, and all these will be yours."

Silk and satin shop on Taiping South Road.

Chen Zi'an, the young master of a silk shop, dipped the last half piece of plain silk into the dye vat, and the blood-red quickly devoured the white.

The accountant, Lao Zhou, held his hand with trembling hands and said, "Master, this is the material for wrapping the dead."

Chen Zian grabbed the copper spoon in the dye vat, scooped up the scarlet liquid and splashed it at the "Ren Dan" advertisement outside the door: "Now use it on living people."

This is because the Japanese invaders collected blood-stained white cloth to make bandages.

The Japanese invaders were really poor and had nothing. They were called poor imperialism. Some people called them by a wrong name, but they did not call them by a wrong nickname.

But so what?
The organized versus the unorganized, the efficient versus the inefficient, it is a crushing and massacre.

Confucius Temple Teahouse.

The storyteller Cheng the Blind sings "Liang Hongyu Beats the Drum" while playing the sanxian. Xiaoman, a mute boy who has fled from famine, curls up under the tea table.

Suddenly, the wooden wall was split open by a bayonet, and Blind Cheng smashed the sanxian towards the Japanese soldier's throat.

Xiaoman grabbed the boiling copper teapot and threw it at another soldier.

Blind Cheng died tragically at the hands of Japanese soldiers, and Xiaoman was chopped into two pieces on the spot.

Outside the Yijiang Gate.

The defeated soldiers and refugees were squeezed into a human whirlpool at the city gate.

Zhou Zhenyue tore off his collar badge and yelled, "Sichuan Army! Yunnan Army! Follow me to the Central Bank warehouse!"

Only five soldiers stopped, one of whom was carrying a makeshift "bulletproof vest" made of books.

Deputy Commander of the Military Police Xiao Shanling chose to commit suicide for his country.

Before we knew it, frost had formed on the ground.

The frost turned into blood.

This is the first time a group portrait appears in the movie, but it is so desperate that almost no one of these people can escape.

On December 12, the Japanese invaders posted notices asking refugees to return home.

The "peace of mind" notices were issued to lure the hiders out, and then a house-to-house search and massacre were carried out.

Refugee shelters in the safety zone that flew Japanese flags were still looted. For example, more than 10,000 women took refuge from Jinling Women's College, but the Japanese invaders still abducted hundreds of them every day.

Zhou Zhenyue arrived at the Central Bank and found that the iron door of the bunker was actually made of galvanized biscuit boxes. He smiled bitterly and stuffed the Blue Sky and White Sun cap badge into the gap in the door.

When the Japanese invaders attacked with flamethrowers, he hummed a Cantonese nursery rhyme as he lit the fuse of the explosives.

The camera shows the prostitute Hongyu, who bribed the Japanese soldiers with silver dollars to stuff three orphans into a corpse cart, while she was raped to death.

Chen Zi'an distributed red-dyed white silk to the refugees as identification, and was killed by the Japanese invaders who broke into the house.

The entire family of nine was wiped out. The wife had committed suicide and her corpse was raped. The children were stabbed to death by the Japanese invaders with bayonets.

Xu Wenyuan lit up ancient books in the basement of the library and recited "Song of Righteousness" in the firelight.

The Lu brothers were trapped in the dyeing factory in the south of the city, desperate to survive, while Lu Dachuan observed the actions of the Japanese invaders.

The five-man squad of the Japanese invaders always formed a diamond-shaped formation, and the bayonet bearers would be rotated every time they slaughtered twenty people.

Countless corpses lay before my eyes, men, women, old people, children, regardless of age or gender, their blood dyed the ground crimson.

The theater audiences had never seen such a large-scale movie. They were suppressed by the heavy plot and could not breathe. Some people even started sobbing.

"1937" does not adopt the theory of historical cycles. The scenes and characters are not dull and silent. The pictures are no different from ordinary movies. In some scenes, the colors are even more intense.

The film took great pains to establish the city of Nanjing in 1937. The stories about ordinary people's food, clothing, housing and transportation make the audience feel involved and immersed.

This way, the emotional impact is even greater.

(End of this chapter)