Revolutionary

This chapter's epigraph comes from a famous poem by a famous poet. The poem begins, "The battlefield is ever-changing / If you cannot even handle a small test, how can you expect you to be the guardians of your state?" The poem is a response to the question, "If you are loyal, means you have to die." The poem asks the reader to imagine a situation in which a general is imprisoned and the army is divided into factions. If the general is killed, the vice general will be gone, and most of the worries of the general will now be gone. The question is not a test of loyalty, the poem says, but of one's reaction to the death of a general.