That afternoon, after waiting in vain for Wu Jingfeng and Zhuge Yang to arrive, they simply began the executions.
Great Dragonhead Zhang kept his word. Even those who had survived the hell of the stampede still faced execution: one officer in every two, one soldier in every five. As for the two commanders, whether a tiger's son from a military family or a powerful local magnate, Jia Yue dispatched each with a single stroke, and their heads were hung above the camp gate early on.
At this point, the numbers of people and bodies were also tallied. Astonishingly, over six thousand government troops had survived, including more than a thousand wounded... The Exorcising the Dragon Army had cruelly and tacitly finished off the wounded on a large scale while clearing the battlefield, so these injuries had mostly been caused by the stampede. Meanwhile, the Exorcising the Dragon Army had lost seven or eight hundred men, most of them during Half an Hour of the initial fighting.
All one could say was that, in an age of cold steel, when professional armies made no mistakes, the killing inflicted by battle itself was indeed limited. Yet at the same time, the deaths in war often came from something other than the fighting itself.
Next, Zhang Xing continued to honor his promise. Wherever possible, the government troops' wounds were bandaged and their broken bones set. Then these prisoners, stripped of their armor and even their winter clothes, were ordered to carry their lightly and severely wounded barehanded, drag the equally stripped corpses and severed remains, and head north immediately-including the heads of the two Gentlemen of the Palace Generals.
By then, it was already approaching evening.
And in late October, even at the tail end of the so-called little spring, how could things