In early spring I made a great find at a downtown flea market. A bookseller had a rare clothbound illustrated volume of Chinese poetry. I was outlining a novel set in ancient China from a military viewpoint and seized it, hoping that at least one of the dozens of poems would be martial. Ancient people wrote predominantly in verse not prose, in order to aid memory, as hand-written copies were so laborious to produce. And, of course, the oldest tales were past down orally in verse for generations before being committed to writing. Any look into ancient martial traditions therefore entails a poetic journey.

Arthur Waley, 1919

Illustrated by C. Leroy Baldridge and reissued in…

1941, Alfred A. Knopf, 325 pages

The author begins the book by declaring that, “I have not attempted to set up any new gods” and then goes on to note that, “To understand unfailingly anything written a thousand years and more ago is not easy…” Arthur Waley belonged to a now extinct class of English scholar: the ‘China hand’. These men embraced and studied the same world that their masters in London were enslaving with opium and advanced weaponry, and then began to fade from the scene as the Japanese wars of conquest heated up in Waley’s day. Even Mister Walley’s literary British descendents failed to register him in the massive Cambridge Biographical Dictionary. I was lucky indeed to find his book in a Baltimore book stall.

With the help of the wonderful color paintings and black and white illustrations of Mister Baldridge, the author succeeded in transporting me to a different world, with his translation of 199 poems written between 330 B.C. and 900 A.D. Only eleven of these poems are martial, and most of those are from the early period. The other poems are important in providing context for the war-oriented verse. One takes away a sense of a beautiful garden of a world where farmers toil and philosopher-poets worry on behalf of corrupt autocrats.

The soldiers who also serve the autocrats are most often away at the frontier, beyond ‘the habitation of men’, giving a sense of a hostile hinterland occupied by subhuman savages. Civil wars figure prominently in the earliest poems, but by 100 B.C. the concern is with the Huns, and then the Tartars, and finally the Turks; all nomad peoples who harried the Han Middle Kingdom for centuries before heading west to terrorize the Middle East and Europe.

The first poem, Battle, is the most useful concerning the equipment and fate of the chariot-based armies of China. The additional martial poems are : To His Wife; Li Ling; Regret; Day Dreams; Bearer’s Song; The Red Hills; Song of the Men of Chin-ling; Tchirek Song; The Prisoner, a lengthy POW yarn from A.D 809; and finally a satire on militarism, The Old Man with the Broken Arm.

The quality of these poems is touchingly every day. These are verse versions of letters home and diaries. From the lament of officers, to the complaints of weary soldiers, to the larger regrets of war, the martial poems in this collection—especially when set against the backdrop of domestic upper class poetry that evoke the world as a garden—give a sense for what it meant to an ancient Chinese soldier to head out to the borders to repel savage invaders. As an anonymous war protestor wrote well over a thousand years ago, “I was ready enough to bear pain, if only I got back home…”