《人生大道：朱德传》以细腻、生动的笔触，真实记录了朱德同志从普通农民成长为革命将领的传奇人生。记述截至1946年，史沫特莱一直渴望重回中国，但最终没能成行。尽管如此，朱德的伟大形象早已跃然纸上，而他所处的这个波澜壮阔的时代也如画卷般展现在读者眼前。
Chapter 1
SITTING across the little table between us, with the candlelight playing on his lined face, General Chu’s eyes gleamed and he seemed consumed with curiosity to hear what questions I would ask about his life.
“Begin at the beginning,” I said.
He was born, he began, on a Chinese date which is the equivalent of December 12, 1886, new calendar, near Ilunghsien in Szechwan Province, just twenty-two years after the Taiping Rebellion was crushed by the Manchu court and its foreign allies. He gave the date by the old lunar calendar which the Chinese Communist press later said was November 30th, and which a Chinese writer who started to write his biography — but fell by the wayside — said was December 18th. It may be that General Chu did not know the exact date of his birth; but that he was born, there can be no doubt.
Though he had a regular name in childhood, he said, he was nicknamed “Little Dog” at birth because boy babies were given animal names to deceive the evil spirits which lie in wait for sons. Girls were so insignificant that even the evil spirits did not molest them.
“What do you remember first in life?” I asked, and General Chu said, “Nothing very important.”
“Tell me the unimportant things,” I urged.
He lowered his head and sat in silence for some time, staring at his clasped hands. He then began speaking falteringly — of light, color, sound, high mountains and forests, fragrant wild flowers “as big as my outstretched hand,” flowers that “scented the land for miles around”; of sunshine, a running river, and a little lullaby.
His mother sang the lullaby and, to his delight, acted it out with her eyebrows as she sang:
The moon is like an eyebrow,
The moon is curved with two ends dangling.
The moon is like an eyebrow,
The moon is like a sickle.
It’s not like an eyebrow that’s forever frowning.
This lullaby aroused both pleasure and pain in him — pleasure because his mother sang it to him; and, later, pain because she sang it to his baby brother. He had thought it belonged to him alone.
He remembered that his infancy and childhood were almost barren of love, and that he grew up “wild,” forced to depend on himself for all but food, clothing and shelter. He knew that his mother loved him and he could never recall one harsh word from her. She was so hard-worked that she found time to caress only the baby she was suckling at the moment. There was always a baby.
“I loved my mother, but I feared and hated my father,” Chu Teh remarked calmly and naturally. “I could never understand why my father was so cruel.”
As soon as he could hold a spoon he fed himself, and later came the rough chopsticks. When hurt he cried alone or not at all because no one had time to comfort him. He ran about all but naked in warm weather, but in winter was sewn into a little padded jacket and trousers. The trousers were open in the back to enable him to squat by himself when necessary. Was he ever sick? No, he had never been sick in his life.
With strange wonder he remembered his playing. “I played so hard that I would fall down on the ground and sleep anywhere, then get up and start all over again until I fell down and slept again.”
He smiled a little as he remembered the shafts of sunlight through the shade trees and which eluded him when he tried to capture them in his dirty little hands. There were some fruit trees at a distance from his home, and when they were in blossom he would shake the branches to make the petals fall in a shower about him. There were wild flowers everywhere, a rustling bamboo grove behind the house, a long swing slung from the high branches of a shade tree, and a seesaw across a log. There was a nearby river, narrow and swift, bathing the foot of the mountain that arose beyond, with red pebbles on the bank, and a bridge, small boats and bamboo rafts, and flashing fish.
To the west of the house was a long low hill, Sleeping Dog Hill, and just beyond it the Big Road, wide enough for a cart to pass — an adventurous road stretching into misty distances, coming up from the south and disappearing into the northern mountains.
As General Chu talked there emerged the picture of a chubby little child with a shaved head, a small bellyband about his middle or a little apron as his only clothing in summer — a gay and tough little fellow like a tiny, sturdy boat launched on a stormy sea.
One of his earliest memories was a feeling of injustice; he and his brothers liked to fish in the river or pond, but they had to fish secretly lest a steward of their landlord catch them — because all the fish in the river, and even in the pond on their small farm, belonged to landlord Ting who sent men to sweep them up in nets and carry them away. Little Dog and his brothers would scream in protest, but his elders watched in sullen silence, and his father cursed when the men were gone. The same men were sent to pick the fruit from the fruit trees in autumn, and sometimes they cursed the Chu family as thieves who had stolen some of it. All the fish in the ponds and rivers, all the fruit on the land of the tenants, all the forests on the mountains, were claimed by landlord Ting — for China, for all the talk of its basic democracy, was a feudal country.
Chu Teh remembered how he used to play the game of jacks such as American children play, except that he and his brothers played it with little stones and a ball of paper rolled very tight. In the autumn he and his older brothers made kites and flew them from the mountainside as they sang the ancient daisy song of escape from disaster:
The daisy is yellow, we are strong,
The daisy is fragrant, we are healthy,
On the double ninth we drink daisy wine.
Men and daisy drank on the double ninth.
That song was to run through his life like the leitmotif in a symphony. In ancient times, ran a legend, a magician warned his disciples of a flood which they and their families could escape provided they fled to the mountains, which they did. Ever since that time the people of China had flown kites on that day and sung the daisy song.
Preface...........................................001
Prelude...........................................001
Book I The Road’s Beginning ...................001
Book II The Road to Revolution ..................075
Book III Scourge and Pestilence...................133
Book IV The Quest.................................185
Book V On the Great Revolution...................219
Book VI The Agrarian Revolution Begins............259
Book VII“Now Listen Closely to My Song”.........323
Book VIII Red Phalanx.............................375
Book IX The Long March........................ . 407
Book X Rendezvous With History...................467
Book XI “We Have One Secret Weapon”.............511
Book XII “The Great Road”.......................547
人名对照表........................................600
地名对照表........................................606
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