• The Book of Songs, the earliest collection of Chinese poetry, dating back to around 800 B.C.E., includes not only poems that glorify the valiant military victor, but also ones that look at war from the side of ordinary soldiers forced to march and fight. These poems can be compared to others written by poets at court in south India, which were preserved in Patirruppattu, an anthology from the classical period of Tamil literature, about 150 B.C.E.–250 C.E.

Soldiers’ Complaints in the Book of Songs

Minister of War,

We are the king’s claws and fangs.

Why should you roll us on from misery to misery,

Giving us no place to stop in or take rest?

Minister of War,

We are the king’s claws and teeth.

Why should you roll us from misery to misery,

Giving us no place to come to and stay?

Minister of War,

Truly you are not wise.

Why should you roll us on from misery to misery?

We have mothers who lack food.

. . .

What plant is not faded?

What day do we not march?

What man is not taken

To defend the four bounds?

What plant is not wilting?

What man is not taken from his wife?

Alas for us soldiers,

Treated as though we are not fellow-men!

Are we buffaloes, are we tigers,

That our home should be these desolate wilds?

Alas for us soldiers,

Neither by day nor night can we rest!

The fox bumps and drags

Through the tall, thick grass.

Inch by inch move our barrows

As we push them along the track.

The Waste of War from Patirruppattu

HARVEST OF WAR

Great king

you shield your men from ruin,

so your victories, your greatness

are bywords.

Loose chariot wheels

lie about the battleground

with the long white tusks

of bull-elephants.

Flocks of male eagles

eat carrion

with their mates.

Headless bodies

dance about

before they fall

to the ground.

Blood glows,

like the sky before nightfall,

in the red center

of the battlefield.

Demons dance there.

And your kingdom

is an unfailing harvest

of victorious wars.

BATTLE SCENE

You might ask,

“This Porai, so fierce in war,

how big

are his armies, really?”

Listen,

new travelers on the road!

As the enemy mob scampers and flees

and kings die on the field,

I’ve no body count

of those who kill as they fall,

and falling,

dance the victory dance

with lifted hands.

I’ve no count of the well-made chariots

that run all over them,

wheel-rims hardly worn,

nor of the horses, the men,

numberless,

I’ve not counted them.

And those elephants of his,

they cannot be pegged down,

they twist goads out of shape,

they stamp even on the moving shadows

of circling eagles,

and stampede like the cattle

of the Konkars

with pickax troops on a wasteland of pebbles, they really move, those elephants in his army:

I can see them but I cannot count them.

Sources: Excerpt from “The Minister of War” in The Book of Songs, translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley. Published by George Allen & Unwin, 1937; reprint Grove Press, 1960. Used by permission of The Arthur Waley Estate; A. K. Ramanujan, ed. and trans., Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 115–117. Copyright 1985 by Columbia University Press. Reproduced by permission of Columbia University Press in the format Textbook via Copyright Clearance Center.

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