On June 6th, the sky was clear, and it was a good weather for busy farming.

A 12-year-old boy prepares to work in the field at the shouts of his father. Suddenly, a group of Kuomintang soldiers broke into the village and blocked the way for the father and son to go to the fields. The rest of the soldiers spread out in the village, going from house to house. They were not Shao Fei's independent battalion, but an ordinary company of the 2nd Regiment of the New 8th Division.

The soldiers looked agitated, led by a burly company commander with a southern accent.

The company commander asked kindly: "Fellow, do you have a tank at home?" ”

"Yes, yes." The father was still a little frightened when he saw the soldier, and hurriedly invited him into the courtyard, next to a large vat.

"We bought this." Saying that, the company commander took out 5 oceans from his body and said, "This is the cylinder money." ”

"You don't need so much, 2 pieces are enough."

The child's father hurriedly shirked it, and the company commander forced it into the man's hand and said, "Take it, take it and leave the village with your family to run for your life." ”

"Running for your life? Leaving the village? ”

The child's father was delusional and asked, "Are you bandits?" ”

The company commander smiled incredulously: "What? We looked like bandits there, we were from the new 8th Division, and we were stationed on the banks of the Yellow River nearby. ”

The father said, "You are not." Recently, a very terrible group of bandits came to Zhongmu, there are as many as a thousand people. They drove the people, set fire to the villages, distributed grain and money from the landlords' families to the poor, and then told the villagers to leave Henan and go west of the Jinghan line. said that the devil was coming, and told the people to flee for their lives quickly. ”

"There is such a thing. We're not, but you'd better run, devils kill people without blinking. ”

After saying that, the company commander told his soldiers to carry the tank away and leave the courtyard himself.

But in the end, the father and son have not left the village, and who wants to leave the place where their ancestors have lived for generations?

The soldiers of the new 8th Division searched all the tanks in the village, and before leaving, they would say: Hurry up and run for your life. Perhaps, their conscience will be better.

The villagers didn't know what they meant, and they didn't know what the soldiers were doing. In this world, there is chaos everywhere, no one wants to leave their homeland, and the last one has not left.

The 2nd and 3rd regiments of the new 8th Division were responsible for blowing up Huayuankou, plus an engineer company, and the person in command was Shang Zhen. The Chairman appointed him with full powers.

In the afternoon of this day, Shang Zhen personally rushed to Zhengzhou to meet Cheng Qian, commander of the First Theater of Operations, to report on the progress of digging the embankment.

"The progress is very slow, and no one wants to be this sinner for the ages. Once the embankment is blown up, the consequences are known to anyone. Some of the soldiers were digging with tears in their eyes. ”

Shang Zhen was a little helpless. Seriously, no one in this world wants to do something that hurts nature.

"This is a helpless choice, and the chairman of the committee does not want to. In the 35th year, Feng Yuxiang and Bai Chongxi proposed a plan to blow up the Yellow River and 'attack it with water', and Chen Guofu and Yao Chong also drew up a specific plan for blowing up the embankment, but the chairman of the committee still delayed until now. ”

After Cheng Qian finished speaking, he sighed: "Time is running out." As he spoke, he picked up the telegram on the table and said: "The commission has urged us again, telling us to put down our burdens and implement resolutely." ”

"I know, I will find a way to urge the officers and soldiers of the new 8th Division."

Shang Zhen suddenly thought of something and said, "A strange thing happened in the Zhongmu region. The people below reported that there was a bandit team of thousands of people driving the people everywhere and setting fire to the village. They divided the grain and property of the big families among the poor, and then drove them to the west of the Jinghan line. ”

"Something? How is it that no one has reported to me for such a large armed team. ”

Cheng Qian pondered for a moment and said, "No, they can't be bandits. They seem to have known about the explosion of the embankment in advance, so they pretend to be bandits. ”

Shang Zhen asked, "Could that be a Communist guerrilla?" ”

Cheng Qian shook his head and said, "That's even more impossible, how can I tolerate their armed presence in my war zone." But in any case, in a sense, they are to save the people, so let them go, and I will send someone to investigate. The top priority at the moment is to urge the officers and men of the new 8th Division to complete the project as soon as possible. ”

On the embankment at the mouth of the garden, thousands of soldiers are digging the embankment. They are sluggish and weak, which does not mean how tired they are, but they feel that it is a shame to work hard.

On the periphery of the embankment, there was a regiment on guard. For them, this is a highly confidential matter.

In order to improve the motivation of the soldiers and speed up the completion progress, Shang Zhen ordered the political office of the new 8th Division to find a field service team to give a condolence performance to the soldiers who were digging the ground.

These female soldiers are as beautiful as flowers, sassy and heroic, wearing green short-sleeved and short-sleeved military uniforms, and their snow-white skin is undoubtedly leaking, and men will salivate and get carried away when they see it.

Shang Zhen's trick "Beauty Encouragement" really had an effect. The soldiers began to gain momentum, and the progress was slightly accelerated.

In order to complete the chairman's order, Shang Zhen came up with another trick "money inducement". He sent his chief of staff to the construction site to comfort the soldiers on his behalf, and promised: if it is completed in the early morning of the 9th, each person will be rewarded with 2,000 legal currency; If it is completed at 6 a.m., each person will receive 1,000 fiat money.

These soldiers knew in their hearts that sooner or later the mission would have to be completed. Sooner or later, the levee must be blown up. Rather than delay, it's better to finish it sooner. As a result, the officers and men of the new 8th Division began to dig embankments amid contradictions.

On the night of the 8th, the embankment digging operation was basically completed, but there was still the last work, which was to plant explosives. Before, dozens of tanks were bought in the village to place explosives.

At the junction of Zhongmu and Zheng County, Shao Fei and the independent battalion are still sparing no effort to drive away the villagers. Now that it was the last moment, Shao Fei knew that it was time to leave.

"It's time for us to go."

"Where are you going?"

Shao Fei looked at the south and said, "Wuhan." ”

Gao Yi looked back at the soldiers of the independent battalion. When I first came to Henan, the independent battalion was only 700 people, but now it has nearly doubled. However, except for the original troops, the rest of them were not even soldiers, and they didn't even shoot guns.

"Do you want to take them all?" Gao Yi asked.

"Take them all. I am responsible for driving out the people, and you are responsible for going to Zhengzhou to contact the office of the Eighth Route Army and using the underground party comrades to evacuate the masses. We don't know the effect, but we did everything we could. ”

Now Shao Fei is a little negative, and he is weak to speak. The military's duty was originally to protect the people, but now it is sacrificing the people to achieve a certain strategic need, which is a kind of sadness for the Chinese soldiers.

Shao Fei left Yuwang Mountain, gave up going to Wuhan, and deliberately went to Henan to witness history. But Shao Fei couldn't judge whether this was right or wrong.

As soon as the embankment explodes, it will inevitably set off a monstrous wave, and hundreds of thousands of people will be buried in the belly of the fish; Millions of people will be displaced as refugees; Tens of millions of people will suffer. Most of the land in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces will become a yellow flood area, and this disaster will be long-lasting.

However, in terms of the form of the war, if the Yellow River is not bombed, the Central Plains may fall, which will lead to the fall of the entire rear area, and finally China will be destroyed. Between blowing up the mouth of the garden and keeping the Central Plains, the chairman of the committee made a choice between two bad choices, "the lesser of two evils". This is the final choice.

(PS: In fact, the Nationalist government troops near the Central Plains are no longer able to fight, the Nationalist government troops on other battlefields are beyond their strength, and the armed forces led by the Communist Party of China are still quite weak enough to resist the attack of the entire Japanese army.) Therefore, in this situation, "replacing soldiers with water" is the only realistic option. If it is said that the responsibility for the bursting of the embankment at Huayuankou should be borne by the Japanese aggressors who launched the war of aggression against China, and without the heinous war of aggression launched by them, nothing would have happened. Don't forget, to the west of Zhengzhou is Shaanxi. Finally, Zhengzhou fell in 1944. ）

(End of chapter)