from Okazaki—were now on the battlefield. And the thirty thousand stakes had become a long, serpentine palisade.
'Let the picked troops of Kai come on!'
The construction itself, however, could not be used to attack the enemy. And to annihilate the enemy in the way Nobunaga had described, they would have to draw him toward the palisade. To lure him, one of Sakuma Nobumori's units and Okubo Tadayo's gunners were sent outside the palisade to wait for the enemy.
Suddenly a chorus of voices lifted skyward. The Takeda had been careless with their enemies, and their shouts of dismay came when they saw the black smoke rising from the direction of Tobigasu, behind them.
'The enemy is behind us, too!'
'They're pressing in from the rear!'
As their agitation began to turn to panic, Katsuyori gave the command to charge. “Don't delay for a moment! Waiting for the enemy will only give them the advantage!'
His own self-confidence, and the faith of his troops that was based on that self-confidence, amounted to this creed: Don't even question me! Have faith in a martial valor that has never known defeat since the time of Lord Shingen.
But civilization moves on like a horse at full gallop. The Southern Barbarians—the Portuguese—had revolutionized warfare with the introduction of firearms. How sad that Takeda Shingen had not had the wisdom to foresee this. Kai, protected by its mountains, ravines, and rivers, was cut off from the center of things and isolated from foreign influences. In addition, its samurai were consumed by an obstinacy and conceit particular to the men of a mountainous province. They had very little fear of their own shortcomings, and no desire to study the ways of other lands. The upshot was that they relied completely on their cavalry and picked troops. The forces under Yamagata fiercely attacked the troops of Sakuma Nobumori outside the palisade. In contrast, Nobunaga had planned a fully scientific strategy, using modern tactics and weapons.
The rain had just stopped; the ground was muddy.
The left wing of the Kai army—the two thousand troops under Yamagata—received their general's command not to attack the palisade. They took a roundabout route to by-pass it. But the mire was horrible. The downpour of the night before had caused the brook to overflow its banks. This natural calamity was unforeseen even by Yamagata, who had fully surveyed the lay of the land beforehand. The soldiers sank into the mud up to their shins. The horses were unable to move.
To add to their troubles, the Oda gunners under Okubo began to fire at Yamagata's flank.
'Turn!' Yamagata ordered.
With this short command, the mud-covered army changed its direction once again and thrust toward Okubo's gunners. Tiny sprays of mud appeared to spatter all over the two thousand armored men. Struck by the rifle fire, they fell, yelling as red blood spurted from them. Trampled by their own horses, they cried out in pathetic confusion.
Finally the armies collided. For decades, warfare had been changing. The ancient fighting style in which each samurai called out his own name and declared that he was the descendant of so-and-so, that his master was the lord of such-and-such a province, was fast disappearing.
Thus, once hand-to-hand fighting broke out—naked blade biting against naked blade and warrior grappling with warrior—its horror was beyond words.
The best weapons were first the gun and then the spear. The spear was not used for stabbing, but rather for brandishing, flailing, and striking, and these were the methods taught for the battlefield. Advantage, therefore, was perceived in length, and there were spears with shafts anywhere from twelve to eighteen feet long.
The common soldiers were lacking both in the training and in the courage that the siuation demanded, and were really only capable of striking with their spears. Thus there were many occasions when a skillful warrior would rush into their midst with a short spear, thrust in every direction, and, almost with ease, win himself the fame accorded a single warrior who had struck down dozens of men.
Attacked by swarms of these men, both the Tokugawa and the Oda forces were helpless. The Okubo corps was wiped out almost instantly. The reason the Okubo corps and the Sakuma forces were outside of the palisade, however, was to draw the enemy in, not to win. For this reason it would have been all right for them to turn and run. But as soon as they saw the faces of the Kai soldiers in front of them, they were unable to keep years of animosity from igniting in their hearts.
'Come and get us!' they cried.
Neither would they stand for the jeers and insults of the Kai warriors. Inevitably, the Oda men cast caution aside in the midst of all the blood, and thought only of their own province and reputations.
While this was going on, Katsuyori and his generals must have thought that the time was right, for the center battalions of Kai's fifteen-thousand-man army began to advance like a giant cloud. Their orderly formations broke up like a gigantic flock of birds taking flight, and as they finally approached the palisade, each corps simultaneously screamed its war cries.
To the eyes of the Takeda, the wooden palisade clearly appeared to be nothing much at all. They thought they would force their way through, breaking through with a single charge, boring right into the central Oda army like a drill.
Raising a battle cry, the Kai forces charged the palisade. They were determined— some tried to clamber over, some to beat the fence down with huge mallets and iron staffs, some to cut through it with saws, and some to douse it with oil and burn it down.
Nobunaga had left the fighting to the Sakuma and Okubo corps outside the palisade until then, and the ranks on Mount Chausu were silent. But suddenly…
'Now!'
Nobunaga's golden war fan cut through the air, and the commanders of the firearms regiments competed with each other in yelling out the order:
'Fire!'
'Fire!'
The earth shook at the volleys of gunfire. The mountain split open and the clouds were shredded. Powder smoke shrouded the palisade, and the horses and men of the Kai army fell like mosquitoes into piles of corpses.
'Don't retreat!' their commanders urged. 'Follow me!'
Recklessly charging the palisade, the soldiers leaped over the dead bodies of their comrades, but they were unable to avoid the oncoming rain of bullets. Screaming pathetically, they ended up as corpses themselves.
In the end, the Kai army could no longer stand its ground.
'Retreat!' screamed four or five mounted commanders, pulling back their horses, the command somehow wrung from their throats even in their panic. One fell, covered with blood, while another was thrown from his whinnying horse as it went down under a hail of bullets.
No matter how badly they had been beaten, however, their spirit was not broken.
They had lost almost one-third of their men in the first charge, but the instant they retreated, a fresh force once again hastened toward the palisade. The blood that had spattered the thirty thousand stakes had not yet dried.
The gunfire coming from the palisade answered their charge directly, as if to say, We've been waiting.
Glaring at the palisade dyed red with the blood of their comrades, the fierce soldiers of Kai screamed as they charged, encouraging one another, vowing that they would never retreat a single yard.
'It's time to die!'
'On to our deaths!'
'Make a death shield so the others can leap over us!'
The 'death shield' was a last-ditch tactic in which soldiers in the front rank sacrificed themselves to protect the advance of the next rank. Then that rank in turn acted as a shield for the troops following, and in this way the troops pressed on step by step. It was a terrible way to advance.
These were, indeed, brave men; but surely this charge was nothing more than a futile display of brute strength. And yet there were able tacticians among the generals leading the assault.
