“Don’t pay attention to them. The frontlines are crisscrossed, and occasionally a few stragglers show up. Our artillery isn’t meant for single targets—let the local guerrillas deal with them later!” The burly, dark-skinned artillery company commander, Captain Young, didn’t stop for a second. Artillery should be used where there are lots of Japanese. The battlefield was interlocked and chaotic, so it was normal to see a few scattered Japanese soldiers.

“Let me take a look!” Charles Dean snatched the binoculars and looked in the direction Paul Martin was pointing.

A small village, with only a few households. Several Japanese soldiers stood in the courtyard of one house, with a few more coming and going. There weren’t many civilians in sight—maybe they were all hiding.

“Hey, there really are some. Six with Type 38 rifles, two with light machine guns. Look, the one standing at the door is even an officer. Huh, what rank is that on his collar? I can’t tell.” Charles Dean called out as he watched. “Light machine gun” was the common term civilians used for any light machine gun, since the handle was quite curved.

“Probably some kind of quartermaster or something. There’s no need to waste artillery on just a few people.” Captain Young was anxious to get to the battlefield—if they were late, they might not even get a taste of the action.

“It could be a high-ranking officer. Wei, take a look.” Paul Martin said. In fact, he was right.

“Really? Alright, I’ll take a look.” William Thompson didn’t find binoculars particularly interesting. His perspective was different from Paul Martin and the others—planes, artillery, trains, these were all commonplace to him. Unlike Paul Martin and Charles Dean, who treated them like treasures and couldn’t put them down.

“Huh, it really is an officer, and not a low-ranking one either. Where is this?” William Thompson looked at the Japanese officer leisurely smoking in the courtyard. If it weren’t for the limited range of Paul Martin’s Hanyang rifle, they would have already used him for target practice.

The artillery company commander, Captain Young, casually said, “The locals all call that place Shangzhuangzi.” As an artillery officer, he needed a strong understanding of the terrain, since any landscape could affect the outcome of a bombardment.

“Shangzhuangzi, oh, Shangzhuangzi—what? Shangzhuangzi!!” William Thompson muttered, suddenly feeling that the name sounded very familiar.

“I remember now!” William Thompson almost jumped up. If he hadn’t suddenly recalled a history lesson from high school, he might have missed this big fish.

Section Ten

The history teacher was drawing a map on the blackboard, skillfully sketching the map of China with a piece of chalk, every detail precise. Freehand map drawing was the teacher’s specialty—he could make it look just like an enlarged version from a textbook.

On the blackboard was a map showing the distribution of the Anti-Japanese War battlefronts in 1939.

The history teacher looked proudly at his masterpiece, pointing to a spot in the Taihang Mountains near Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, and said, “This is the site of the Huangtuling Campaign in the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region during the Anti-Japanese War. Here, the Japanese, including the so-called ‘Flower of Fascist Generals,’ the highest commander of the Mongolian Garrison Army and commander of the 2nd Mixed Brigade, Abe Nobuyoshi, were surrounded and wiped out by the main forces of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Regiments led by Nie Rongzhen of our Eighth Route Army. On November 7th, Abe Nobuyoshi was killed by our troops at Yanshuyai during this campaign. He was the first Japanese lieutenant general to be killed during the Anti-Japanese War.”

The history teacher paused, only to realize that although he was speaking passionately, few were listening. Only a handful of students were still watching him; the rest were daydreaming or doing other things—reading novels, listening to MP3s, and so on.

“William Thompson, tell us about the situation when Abe Nobuyoshi was killed in the Huangtuling Campaign!” At this moment, the teacher noticed that even William Thompson, usually the most attentive student, was distracted, gazing absentmindedly out the window. This was intolerable to him. As a politics teacher, and with the Anti-Japanese War being his favorite topic, he had prepared thoroughly, hoping to let these students experience what it meant for Chinese troops to fight bravely against Japanese invaders, to let these children who grew up in a peaceful society know what war and national resilience meant. Clearly, he had hit a wall.

William Thompson only snapped back to attention after the teacher called his name several times. He slowly stood up.

“Well, at that time, while observing the battle at Shangzhuangzi on Yanshuyai, Abe Nobuyoshi was hit in the left abdomen and both legs by a mortar shell from the Eighth Route Army’s artillery battalion, and died at 9:50 p.m.” William Thompson was already well-versed in world history from reading extracurricular books, and what he said wasn’t even recorded in the school textbooks.

The history teacher was stunned, flipping through his book from front to back and back to front, but couldn’t find what William Thompson had just said. The textbook only briefly mentioned the place where Abe Nobuyoshi was killed, without the detail William Thompson provided.

This kid actually knows so much. The teacher’s attempt to stump him had failed, and he couldn’t even get angry: “Alright, you win this time. I’ll deal with you later.”

“Okay, sit down.”

The history teacher had no choice but to let William Thompson sit down. After class, he assigned a huge pile of history homework as revenge, causing the whole class to groan in misery.