The clinic was set up in a villager's home, which had two long dressers that could be used as temporary sickbeds for patients. Bandages and medicines were in short supply, so we had to boil the used bandages and guaze in order to reuse them. Iodine, alcohol and anaesthetic were considered to be extremely precious, used only when absolutely necessary.

A few days after the clinic was set up, an unconscious soldier was carried into the clinic on a stretcher. He had been badly injured in a battle. For the first time, I assisted a surgeon during an operation. We had no other alternative but to cut off both his arms and legs. I tried to ignore the chilling sound of bones being cut through with a small copper saw. When the patient regained consciousness, and found he had lost all his limbs and had only his torso remaining, he became hysterical, refusing to eat or accept treatment.

"Get the hell out of here,"; he yelled when I approached him.

When I attempted to feed him, he tried to bite me. He missed, lost his balance and couldn't turn over by himself. He struggled and swore with the most obscene words he could come up with in his Shanxi dialect.

A month later, the patient was sent back to his hometown. An official accompanied him home. "What happened to him?"; I asked the official when he came back a week later.

"His mother refused to accept her own son. She that it wasn't her son because he hadn't looked like that when he had left home. 'What have you done to my son?' she said. I didn't know how to calm her down. I told her that revolution came with a cost. On the other hand, the wife vowed to take care of him for the rest of his life.";

"What is he going to do?";

"We gave the family two hundred pounds of millet as a settlement.";