A divine healer, a general, a young marquis! Who can rival them!

March 11, early morning.

After Cui Ting finished counting the last group under the pole in the center of the depression, he closed the booklet.

Six thousand one hundred and eighty-eight.

Three days ago it was 6,309. In these three days, it has decreased by 121.

One hundred and twenty-one.

Captain Pang stood to the side, murmuring the number to himself. The day before the campaign, the general had stated in the central command tent that the maximum casualty figure was one hundred and twenty.

That time it was the sixth day. This time it's the third day.

"What about the seriously wounded battalion?" Yang Hu asked.

Cui Ting turned to the last page of the booklet.

"Of the 403, nine have left."

"nine."

"Nine," Cui Ting said. "General, for the first two days I thought thirty would leave."

Yang Hu took the booklet, turned to the page with nine names, looked at it for a while, and then handed it back to him.

"Write down how you spent these three days."

"Who is this for?"

"Write this down for those who will lead the troops later," Yang Hu said. "These methods from the past three days are worth keeping."

That's how those three days went by.

The first day, the ninth day of the third month.

The dry rations were reduced to one meal a day, and each person received only one slice of meat, so thin that light could pass through it. By noon, people were already digging up grass roots in the low-lying area.

The grass had just turned green, the roots were white, and it tasted a little sweet when chewed, but after chewing it, you felt even hungrier.

In the afternoon, Liu Ye brought back eight marmots.

It was a fat one that the scouts dug up on the western slope; it had about half the meat of a sheep. When they carried it back to camp, people followed along to watch.

When Yang Hu arrived, two soldiers were already skinning the animal.

"stop."

The two men's knives stopped in mid-air.

"General, this is meat."

"I know it's meat." Yang Hu walked over, squatted down, and flipped open the armpit of one of the animals, then the other. When he got to the fourth one, he stood up.

"Bury."

A commotion immediately arose in the hollow. Someone shouted, "General! Sixteen loads were burned yesterday, and today we still need to bury eight otters!"

Yang Hu did not answer immediately.

He turned his head.

"Willow leaf".

"exist."

Do the herdsmen on the grasslands hunt marmots?

Liu Ye hesitated for a moment.

"Hit them," she said. "But not many. I heard from those eight refugees outside the Great Wall that shepherds have rules for hunting otters: don't hit the ones that won't run away, don't hit the ones that come close to people on their own, and don't hit the ones whose armpits are hard."

Why?

"They say that such otters are sick," Liu Ye said. "The elders there say that anyone who touches such an otter will have their whole family worshipped with a memorial tablet."

The crowd quieted down.

"These eight, they won't run away, will they?" Yang Hu asked.

The soldier digging for otter lowered his head.

"Yes, General. Dig a hole and lie there, don't move."

"Then bury it," Yang Hu said. "Dig it deep, weigh it down with stones, and don't peel off the skin or get your hands dirty."

He stood at the edge of the pit, waiting for all eight to be buried.

"I've read about this disease in books," he said slowly. "It's much more dangerous than that batch of meat from yesterday. That batch of meat was harmful only after you ate it, but this stuff doesn't need to be eaten. Just a little bit splashed into a cut on your hand while peeling it is enough. If one person touches it, a whole bunch of people will die within three days."

The two skinning soldiers kept wiping their hands on their sleeves.

On the first night, he ordered the remaining horse hides to be killed.

The horses were slaughtered on the first day; the meat had already been divided up, and the hides were piled up to one side, originally intended for mending shoes and sewing stretchers.

"Boil," Yang Hu said. "Scrape the skin clean and put it in the pot. Boil until it's tender, but don't throw away the broth."

Cui Ting was skeptical. The boiled food was fishy, ​​sticky, and got stuck in his teeth.

The soup that was cooked solidified into a jelly after it cooled down.

"This will keep you full," Yang Hu said. "More filling than grass roots. The amount you get from one skin is enough to feed one person for a day."

That night, sixty horsehides were put into the pot. There were only nine pots, and each pot cooked seven hides. They cooked from 7 PM to 3 AM, with four shifts of people watching the fire. At dawn, each team received two buckets of frozen food, cut into pieces, one piece for each person. It was cold and fishy, ​​but it felt heavy in your stomach after you swallowed it.

The next day was the tenth day of the third month.

The difficulty on the second day was not hunger, but the epidemic.

Of the sixty-seven people lying down, two had died the day before. Of the remaining sixty-five, about twenty had begun to recover, while the others were still suffering from diarrhea.

Su Heng redrawn the land into three circles.

The innermost circle consists of those still having diarrhea, the second circle consists of those who have stopped but cannot get up, and the outermost circle consists of those who can sit up and eat. The three circles are separated by ropes, and people changing their cloths go in and out.

The people serving the innermost circle were twelve selected from the forty-one military medical teams. They were only allowed to do this one thing and were not allowed to go anywhere else.

"General, this method was modified from the well-sealing and division of camps at Qing Shi Kou," Su Heng said. "But we don't have wells, so we can only divide the troops."

"That's a correct division."

By the evening of the second day, the number of people in the innermost circle had decreased from over twenty to eleven.

Beyond the three laps, no new members were added to the entire army.

The third day, March 11th.

The third day is the most difficult.

The horsehide jelly was all gone, the grass roots had been dug up until half the depression was bare, and there was only one meal of dry rations left. The sky was overcast, and it had been drizzling with snow since morning.

That afternoon, something happened.

One of the squad leaders in the seriously wounded battalion, who had lost a leg, has gone missing.

It was the stretcher bearers who discovered him. The sign read "Never Give Up," and the registration list was four pages thick, but the squad leader himself refused to acknowledge it. Taking advantage of a shift change, he used both hands to support himself and crawled out from under the felt blanket. The ground was muddy from the sleet, and he left two tracks where he crawled, one deep and one shallow; the deeper track was from his good leg.

I crawled more than two hundred steps and lay down in the rain.

He was found by an old soldier in his fifties who could barely lift one arm. When the old soldier carried him back, both of them were covered in mud.

When Yang Hu arrived, the squad leader was lying on the ground, his face turned to the other side.

"General, don't remember my name," he said. "My leg is useless; carrying me would take up two people's space. The camp is short of food right now."

Yang Hu squatted down.

How old are you? Where are you from?

Thirty-one. In the clouds.

"How many miles is it from Yunzhong to here?"

The squad leader was stunned for a moment.

"...more than 1,400 li."

"More than 1,400 li," Yang Hu said. "You crawled out 200 steps by yourself, thinking you could save 1,400 li."

The sergeant's lips moved.

"The two men who carried you were the ones who registered themselves." Yang Hu stood up. "No one held a knife to their throats when they registered. By crawling out today, you're canceling their registration on their behalf."

He took off his robe and covered the squad leader with it.

"I won't chase after you if you climb any further. But I'm going to cross your name off those four pages."

The squad leader suddenly burst into tears.

A 31-year-old man cried like a child in the sleet.

The rain stopped on the third night.

After the rain stopped, Liu Ye returned from the north, bringing back something.

The group of patients that the barbarians moved north with were abandoned.

"Did you abandon it?"

"They were thrown into a ravine, about fifty people, without tents or water," Liu Ye said. "The guards left yesterday."

Cui Ting gasped.

Yang Hu stood on a high point in the depression and looked north for a long time.

That's how the third day went.

On the morning of March 11, 6,188.

One hundred and twenty-one people did not come, including nine seriously wounded soldiers.

Cui Ting tucked the booklet under his arm and followed Yang Hu up the slope to the north.

Yang Hu stopped at the top of the slope.

"General Choi."

"Your subordinate is here."

"They abandoned over fifty of their own men," Yang Hu said. "We've lost 121 men in three days, but the 403 seriously wounded soldiers are still alive."

Cui Ting was stunned.

"General, you mean..."

"They're saying they can't hold on any longer," Yang Hu said. "The side that can't hold on should throw people out first."

He turned his gaze away from the north.

"General Cui, of those fifty-odd people who were abandoned, how many are still alive?"

Liu Ye didn't dare to come closer.

"Send her there again tomorrow," Yang Hu said. "She doesn't need to get close, just look from a mile away. I need to know two things: how many are still able to move, and whether the guards have been removed or are dead."