The Eastern Knight (6)
The army was a truly peculiar institution. That, at least, was how Hong Beom-do had come to feel about it — Sergeant of the Armored Infantry, 3rd Regiment of the People's Army.
It had been about a month ago.
"Can you ride a horse?"
"Sir?"
The day had arrived without warning.
The Battle of Shengjing had ended more easily than anyone expected, and for some time afterward Hong Beom-do had been assigned to sorting prisoners of war and tracking down remnants who had fled into the nearby mountains of Geumseok and Bonghwang. He was on his way back to the barracks after another grinding day when his company commander, Nam Man-ri, stopped him in his tracks.
His superior held out a sheaf of sweat-dampened papers.
"As of today, you're Hobunwi."
"Me, sir?"
Just like that?
"That's right."
"Why...?"
"Look. This is the army."
Hong Beom-do was still flipping through the orders with a dazed expression, unable to make sense of any of it, when Nam Man-ri crossed his arms and frowned. Perhaps the man most unhappy with this sudden, unreasonable directive was Nam Man-ri himself.
He was a commander who looked after his men and, without any fuss, took careful measures to accommodate the local people. To him, Hong Beom-do was like a powerful bull — a terror to the enemy, a man who more than earned his keep among the civilians, and an exceptionally capable soldier. And now they wanted him to hand this precious subordinate over to those horse-obsessed lunatics.
He clicked his tongue irritably toward somewhere in the south, then composed his face and spoke.
"You'll be serving with the Hobunwi for the time being. This order came straight from the top. They'll already have prepared to receive new transfers."
"Hold on — if they tell me to change posts, I just say 'yes sir' and go?"
Hong Beom-do's own face soured with a look that plainly said he didn't want to go. Nam Man-ri smiled inwardly, then answered with a stern expression.
"Fine. I'll write you a leave request, and you can take it to the Wolf's Lair yourself. I don't have the guts to do what you do."
"..."
"It's an order from Supreme Command. Don't question it. Just go."
And that was that.
Hong Beom-do was left speechless by the consideration of his comrades, who had already packed his kit for him. Then they told him not to turn in the breastplate and war club that were the emblems of the Armored Infantry — to take them with him. At his commander's words — "Once an armored infantryman, always an armored infantryman!" — he shed a few tears.
And so Hong Beom-do was transferred to the Hobunwi, a unit so infatuated with its horses that a peculiar rumor had it they couldn't contain their dawn-stirred lust and would take their mounts from behind. He soon discovered the rumor was nonsense.
There was no beating — that terrible initiation rite that has been a military tradition in every age, East and West. Had Hong Beom-do known that even among the yangban who had passed the civil service examinations, under the previous dynasty of tyrants, there had existed a hazing ritual of force-feeding filth, he might have considered the Hobunwi a remarkably progressive outfit.
They didn't seem particularly intimate with their horses. But for some reason they harbored an intense dislike — no, a visceral hatred — of Qing Chinese, and they despised them with a fervor that suggested something in their heads had gone seriously wrong.
On a platform where, under ordinary circumstances, a unit Political Officer would gather the men for ideological instruction or recite a prepared speech, a thoroughly drunk gentleman was now waving a liquor bottle and bellowing at the top of his lungs.
"Opium, opium, opium! These damned Qing pig bastards live on the stuff! New recruit. I've heard all about how you were the best at cracking Qing skulls in that fancy turtle unit of yours — but you're going to have to smash heads even thicker than any you've ever cracked in your life!"
It was utterly shocking. That the unit commander — a gentleman two ranks above Hong Beom-do's previous commander, Nam Man-ri — was carrying on like this.
At the welcome ceremony for the new recruits assigned to the Hobunwi, Hong Beom-do was staring dumbly at Battalion Commander Yi Gyu-tae, who was swigging forbidden liquor straight from the bottle — something that would have been banned in any other unit — when a cavalryman approached from behind, thrust a cup at him, and offered an explanation.
"Don't look at him like he's a complete idiot. Opium junkies can't be put down just by taking an arm off or crushing a leg."
"Sir?"
"They've sucked so much of that stuff their brains are gone — they don't even feel pain. Of course, if you tear their limbs off they'll hurt, sure. If you've cracked a skull, check twice. Their vitality is, what's the word? Like a cockroach, they say?"
"..."
The gentleman who had offered this chilling commentary by way of explanation was named Yi Jeong. He added that he would be the drill instructor in charge of the new recruits — their nanny, as it were — then picked up his cup and vanished again.
That was Hong Beom-do's first night with the Hobunwi.
Gray smoke billowed in lazy clouds behind a ruined village.
Beyond a clearing that still crackled and smoldered, a group of people bustled noisily about, turning their backs on a mother clutching her child and the corpse of a dead old man.
"Don't pile the bodies in one place! Keep it natural!"
Even from a distance, they didn't seem particularly interested in cleaning up the scene. If anything, they resembled a flock of crows picking through ruins and atrocity. The gentleman who appeared to be their ringleader was the most enthusiastic of all.
"Hey! The subject needs to be dead center in the photograph — why do you keep drifting off to the side? Photographer!"
"Yes, sir. Understood, sir. Soldier? A bit more to the side! To the side! Yes, that's it! All right, taking it now. One, two—"
"Excellent! Take five more just like that."
"Understood, sir. All right, wrap this up and let's move over here!"
"You there, soldier! Stern expression! And a look of anguish!"
"The expression! The expression! Do you know how much these silver plates cost?! Let's get it in one take!"
Among them, a photographer who had come from across the sea with an American camera went off with a pop of flash powder, then, without even checking whether his work had come out well, was already being hounded by the high-ranking gentleman to hurry the subject of the next photograph.
And Hong Beom-do, the subject of that masterpiece, was in a foul mood again today.
"Ah, for fuck's sake."
This wasn't some clown show — what kind of godawful situation was this? He suddenly whipped his head aside and took in, with both eyes, the conduct of this self-proclaimed "high-ranking" gentleman who had come up from Hanseong. And he thought: No matter how generously you try to see him, that man is not a human being. He is a disgrace to the people.
Whether Hong Beom-do glared at him or not, the gentleman, who had been poking around some alley, waved his hand excitedly.
"Here, here — more corpses! These bandits really did a thorough job. Photographer!"
"C-coming...!"
"This is the kind of place we need to photograph! Come on!"
"Haha, yes..."
Even as Hong Beom-do glared, that damned man who had introduced himself as Lee Wan-yong, Vice-head of the Investigation Committee, was obsessed with finding corpses in a village reduced to ruins by a bandit raid. And that repulsive creature went into a frenzy whenever he spotted a child's corpse. It was, he claimed, powerful evidence of the cruel and barbaric nature of the Qing Chinese, or some such.
And that man had thrown all respect for the dead to the winds, gathering corpses and photographing them with manic zeal. Occasionally he would coerce surviving villagers or orphans who had lost their parents into giving interviews, in exchange for nothing more than a bowl of thin gruel.
And something even more terrible:
They're turning villages the bandits never even attacked into raid sites. Is there a more despicable bastard alive in this world?
Even abandoned hamlets that refugees had simply fled, they would load corpses from nearby battles onto wagons, scatter them about, and stage photographs. Perfectly good rice paddies were transformed into opium fields and burned to the ground, and a farmhouse that had barely scraped by was recast as an opium addicts' black market and featured in newspaper articles.
And so Hong Beom-do, as a human being, found this near-human's outrages utterly intolerable. After glaring at the back of Lee Wan-yong's head for a long time with a rigid expression, he finally spat out a single sentence in frustration.
"That man will be struck down by heaven."
"He will be, someday."
At that moment a man suddenly leaned in from the side, equally indignant. Startled, Hong Beom-do stumbled four or five steps backward and opened his mouth.
"Chairman."
"I've imposed upon Sergeant Hong again today. I am truly sorry."
His name was Jeon Bong-jun. He was the head of the Investigation Committee, who had come up to Liaodong together with that vice-chairman fellow around the time Hong Beom-do transferred his registration to the Hobunwi.
Jeon Bong-jun had watched the vice-chairman's outrages for a long while, then let out a groan and bowed his head.
"To have taken you from an honorable post and made you participate in such filthy work — I offer my sincere apology."
"N-no, sir. I'm a soldier. I go where I'm told."
When Jeon Bong-jun bowed at the waist and apologized at length, Hong Beom-do panicked and waved his hands hurriedly. After all, unlike Lee Wan-yong, who was openly hunting corpses and photographing them as evidence of Qing army atrocities, Jeon Bong-jun, the committee chairman, was a man genuinely worthy of respect, as far as Hong Beom-do had seen with his own eyes.
Chairman Jeon was an excellent man.
"The source of that unreasonable order came from the circumstances of desk-bound men like ourselves, so it is we who should apologize."
"Not at all, Chairman. The refugee evacuation plans you oversee, the orphanages, the widows' shelters — I've been deeply impressed by all of it."
"Thank you for supporting work that is frankly a nuisance and of little help to the war effort."
Unlike Lee Wan-yong, who had come up to Liaodong with a whole household of photographers and even makeup artists in tow, Jeon Bong-jun had arrived in Shengjing alone and promptly opened an orphanage. He established it in a ruined, nameless shrine, provided a shelter next to it for women who had lost fathers and husbands to the war, and built a free soup kitchen for vagrants and refugees.
Spurred by this, nearby units and the military authorities who had been acting as an occupying force transferred some of the occupied territory's administration to civilian control at Jeon Bong-jun's request, and provided funding. Of course, the greatest role here was played by the ordinary soldiers of the Republic, who had left their hometowns and missed their families in this distant land.
"At first, all we had was the subsidy the cabinet initially provided. But with the generous donations our Republic's fine soldiers so readily contributed, we were able to save a great many lives."
"You're too kind, haha..."
Hong Beom-do was too embarrassed to lift his head, but as Jeon Bong-jun said, the reason the high-ranking generals of the military had so readily granted the Investigation Committee a significant degree of jurisdiction was also to comfort their own soldiers. They had realized early on that watching Qing civilians receive help through donation drives was far more spiritually healing — and better for morale — than having Political Officers from the Public Security Committee bellow ideological lectures at them.
Recently, it seemed this role and these achievements had become known even to the revolutionary government; not long ago, greater authority and additional funding had been granted to Jeon Bong-jun's orphanage, causing quite a stir for a time.
Recalling this, Hong Beom-do spoke with a troubled expression.
"Of course I know there are still more opium farms and bandit strongholds lurking near the occupied territories and across Manchuria. But isn't it going too far to desecrate the dead just to win support for the war?"
"They've been denied even the peace of the grave, so they'll be punished someday. But in a certain sense, I understand the vice-chairman's excesses."
"Sir?!"
It was an answer he had never imagined. Hong Beom-do raised his voice without meaning to, and Jeon Bong-jun scratched the back of his head and spoke slowly.
"The news is a bit delayed, but the series of events unfolding in Liaodong is apparently making quite a stir in Europe."
"Events?"
"Interest, you might say. With interest, our Republic can extract even more support and aid."
Having delivered this cryptic, complicated remark, the committee chairman clasped his hands behind his back and gazed at the distant setting sun. His back looked infinitely small in Hong Beom-do's eyes.
A moment later, having watched the sun sink completely, Jeon Bong-jun spoke.
"War, after all, is nothing but sensational headlines. This is a story of Liaodong, a thousand leagues from the people of Europe — but how could they not take an interest? People who read newspapers are always drawn to sensational incidents and accidents. The military situation in Liaodong is important, of course, but the people of our allied nations also value the exploits of our soldiers. That is what His Excellency the Tongnyeong told me."
"..."
"You still look as though you don't quite understand. Hmm. When you have a moment, take a look at these."
With a deeply pensive expression, Jeon Bong-jun rummaged through his coat and eventually handed Hong Beom-do a thick bundle of newspapers. As Hong Beom-do received them with a dubious look, familiar letters began to catch his eye one by one.
Behind him, Jeon Bong-jun spoke in a meaningful voice.
He had never wanted it. Someone had made it so.