Eastern Wu's officers and soldiers had already had their rations cut. After a full day of marching, they were starving so badly their chests nearly clung to their backs, and pitching camp had drained much of their strength. All they wanted now was to lie down and wait for supper; none had any desire to bathe in the river.
August had already brought the first hints of autumn. With the Eastern Wu army camped beside the river in such cool weather, there was no need to cool off in the water. After Zhu Ju spent half the day rallying them, only a little over a hundred men went to the riverbank—and they merely washed their faces and feet.
Go into the river to catch fish? Night was nearly upon them. They might fail to catch any fish, exhaust themselves until they could not crawl back out, and instead become human bait to chum the waters.
Lu Ju's elder brother, Lu Xian, had died young. At this time, Lu Ju was the legitimate son inheriting the Lu Clan's noble title. Seeing his words treated like so much fart in the wind, he could not keep his face from darkening. He summoned his personal guards and forcibly drove the soldiers into the river, turning what had begun as a voluntary effort into outright coercion.
That coercion proved disastrous. The hungry soldiers had already been nursing grievances, and as they headed toward the riverbank, people gradually began stirring up a clamor amid the crowd. The matter of the family letters spread like a virus.
When they heard that Jianye had fallen and the family letters had been burned, the officers and soldiers who had been driven to catch fish stopped in their tracks. Led by several Military Simas, they turned around and questioned