Du Fu Does Not Like Conscription (1/n)

Don't press gang the young and the old!

The Sergeant of Xin’an
Du Fu

A visitor walked on the road to Xin’an,
When he heard the hubbub of conscription brigades.
He asked why the sergeant would call up troops here:
“The county’s so small, are there still men of age?”
“The prefecture sent down the order last night
For a new draft of men aged twenty or less.”
“The kids under twenty? They’re too small and weak!
What good will they do in protecting Luoyang?”
Some chubby boys’ mothers were seeing them off,
While scrawnier kids stood alone to one side,
And a river flowed pale into oncoming night,
And the purple hills seemed to be weeping.
“Don’t cry so, don’t mop at your eyes like that,
If you dab any harder you’ll rub to the bone!
And this pitiless world won’t be changed by your tears.
The army was all set to take back Xiangzhou,
We thought news of the peace would arrive any day,
It’s just that the traitors were hard to mop up.
Now demobilised squadrons are dotted in camps.
Anyway, we’ll be fed at the fortress nearby,
And the training camp’s right by the walls of Luoyang.
When they put us on ditch duty, shallow is fine,
We don’t even dig down to the water line.
And minding the horses is very light work.
The generals and emperor have a clear plan,
And they know that they have to look after us men.
So no tears of blood as you send us off, mother!
The Marshal is just like our father or brother.”

---

In the middle of the An Lushan rebellion, Du Fu travelled through the country. When he saw devastation, he wrote about it. He essentially invented his own genre of poetry as reportage. The form of these reportage poems seems to be consciously loose: though he maintains a meter and rhyme, he doesn’t craft tight couplets or use grand metaphors. It leaves the poem feeling fresh and immediate - something like a shaky camera technique in film making. I tried to reflect the same feel with a rolling blank verse.

This poem is part of a series of six that have been grouped together as Du Fu’s poetic travelog from this period.

Xin’an: a place in modern Henan.

Under Tang law, men whose Chinese age was 22 or more were full adults. That would make them anywhere between 20 and 21 (the Chinese age system counts babies as 1 year old at birth, and their age increases by 1 every Chinese New Year, so Chinese ages are 1-2 years older than real age). The 20-and-under category referred to here was 18-22 by the Chinese count, so youths of 16-20 years old.

The speech that starts on line 13 of the poem, and runs to the end, is often understood to be Du Fu speaking. But it seems more dramatically satisfying to hear the conscripts saying them, and this is consistent with other Du Fu poems. The speech seems to be reassuring someone that the conscripts will not have a terrible time in the army. It makes sense that the chubby boys might be trying to console their mothers - more sense, I think, than the idea that Du would address himself directly to a weeping woman on the road.

Xiangzhou was the scene of a major defeat for the Tang armies in the fight against the rebels. By this time, An Lushan was dead (killed by his own son), and the rebellion was drawing to an end. Xiangzhou should have been an easy victory for the Tang forces, but the new emperor wanted to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of any single general. As a result, he divided the command, and the generals were unable to coordinate effectively. The siege of Xiangzhou dragged on, and eventually two rebel factions joined together to defeat the imperial army.

The young men, whose fathers and brothers are probably already dead, bluster to their mothers about how easy their military service will be, without actually knowing anything about it.

---

杜甫  新安吏

客行新安道，喧呼闻点兵。

借问新安吏：“县小更无丁？”

“府帖昨夜下，次选中男行。”

“中男绝短小，何以守王城？”

肥男有母送，瘦男独伶俜。

白水暮东流，青山犹哭声。

“莫自使眼枯，收汝泪纵横。

眼枯即见骨，天地终无情！

我军取相州，日夕望其平。

岂意贼难料，归军星散营。

就粮近故垒，练卒依旧京。

掘壕不到水，牧马役亦轻。

况乃王师顺，抚养甚分明。

送行勿泣血，仆射如父兄。”