Volume VIII 1295 Curfew Naha

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Night enveloped the Ryukyus, enveloped Naha, and the first port in East Asia was completely in a state of collective restlessness tonight.

The port has been cordoned off, the streets in and out of the city have been sentry posts, and although all the places of entertainment and leisure are not closed, there are also police officers guarding the gates, and no one knows what they are guarding.

The streets were patrolled by militia and policemen, who rarely discarded rattan cards and short sticks, and were armed with rifles that had been worn out by the military, and their bayonets shining brightly in the gas light.

At the moment, the Ryukyus were under a state of complete curfew, and after 6 p.m., the people had to return to their neighborhoods and only move around a limited area.

You can go to drink and eat, you can also go to tea and chat, go to Xiyuanzi and Qinglou and no one will care about you, but all of them must be within the block where you live, which means that your face must be familiar to the police and militia, if you move across the block and let the police who are not familiar with you see it, it will be more or less a trouble.

The mid-night curfew was officially promulgated by Wang Huaiyuan at nine o'clock in the morning, and as soon as this order spread in the city, the hearts of the people had already risen to their throats, and many people who knew the way said one after another.

"There must be a war, it's definitely a war, otherwise a curfew will not be issued, this is to prevent enemy spies from leaking news......"

"Then why don't you just ban people from the streets?

"Of course, we can't just curfew! The more than 600,000 people in Naha City are not allowed to eat, drink, and Lazar? All of them are blocked by curfews, so we must not starve to death......

"And this is also a way to stabilize people's hearts, all curfews will make the people inexplicably nervous, if this person is nervous, it is easy to be cranky, and when the time comes, there may be some rumors spreading everywhere, have you forgotten when the French attacked the Ryukyus? We just suffered the loss of rumors......"

People suddenly realized, thinking about the scenes of the French fleet shelling Naha back then, one by one as if they were a world away.

An elder in the crowd sighed, "Yes, ten French wooden-hulled warships were able to block Naha Bay and open fire, except for the Shuri Battery, which was a bit dangerous to the enemy, the other batteries could not suppress the group of French at all......

"That man is dead......! Why is there a bronze statue of a mother protecting her young son outside the rice boss shop? That is the mother and son who trampled to death in the panic and rice grabbing incident in the city!

The statue of the mother and the child was cast by Xiao Letian himself, and it was cast at the site of the tragedy at that time.

They attacked grain warehouses, unleashed false news of the prime minister's death, and spread gossip that supplies were in short supply...... All kinds of vicious tactics plunged the newly independent Ryukyu Kingdom into turmoil, and at that time, even King Shotai personally went out of the palace to appease the people, but the effect was not good.

Mi Fu, Mi Boss! Now the second largest merchant in the East Asian grain trust, at that time was just an ordinary businessman who dominated the Ryukyus.

His grain store was looted by the people, and of course there were still many spies in the crowd, and the responsibility was not all on the people. But in the end, the looting and trampling were the sins of the people.

In that stampede, a mother and son were trampled into flesh and mud alive, and countless people were injured.

After the war, the grief-stricken Xiao Lotian invited Italian sculptors to cast this bronze statue on the street outside Mi Fu's shop pù with this story, distorting the expression of pain, the exaggerated torso bent, and the mother protecting the young son under the body.

The frightened child seemed to have seen death beckoning to him, but the child's eyes were staring at his mother's face, and his little hands subconsciously grabbed his mother's chest, as if he wanted to drink a sip of milk before he died.

The sculptor's skills are simply superb, the child's expression and eyes have both the fear of death, but also the absolute trust and security of the mother, the child seems to know that danger is approaching, but the child naturally thinks that as long as he is in the mother's arms, he is the safest in the world, and nothing can hurt him.

And the mother's expression was even more nuanced, she was already desperate, surrounded by trampled feet, she already knew that there was no escape, he and his son were going to die here.

But the mother has to protect the child before she dies, not only to protect his body, but also to protect his soul, so the mother also has to show a smile, and she wants to use the smile to give her son a sense of security before he dies.

If he is destined to die here, the mother also hopes that her son will leave this world in that sense of security, and not be afraid that the mother will be there.

After the statue was shaped, almost everyone who had witnessed the trampling wept bitterly, and some even wanted to apologize with death! Who can stand the kind of condemnation that strikes the soul of mankind? The purest feelings of mankind, the love of mother and child, are like a whip that beats into the depths of everyone's soul.

At the bottom of the sculpture is engraved a sentence from Xiao Letian: "In the snow disaster, every snowflake thinks that he is innocent!"

The elder wiped a handful of tears, and since the topic of the statue of the Mother and Protector of the Child, it has become extremely depressed and dull, and people's hearts are like a big stone blocked, unable to spit out or swallow.

At this time, a boy wearing a high school uniform suddenly walked in front of everyone, and he said sternly, "It is precisely because we Chinese people have experienced countless hardships that we are getting stronger and stronger......"

"Thinking that ten French sail battleships back then, that kind of old-fashioned wooden-hulled battleship could beat our Ryukyu into chaos, not to mention countless casualties, and even a tragedy of hurting oneself occurred......"

"But what about today? The Russian Expeditionary Force, with dozens of the most advanced ironclad warships and more than 30,000 troops, did not dare to approach our city...... They actually avoided us!"

"Why is that? It's because we're strong, we're scared of the enemy!"

"Instead of drowning in the grief of the past, let's think about what we should do! Why is this why thousands of French troops forced us to impose martial law in the whole city, and now 30,000 Russian warships are only exchanged for our limited curfew?"

"This is because our Chinese people are not only stronger in our hands at this moment, but also our Chinese hearts! We are no longer in the past where we only knew selfishness and only knew how to protect the interests of our own small family!"

"We are now able to look at the problem from the perspective of the interests of the entire ethnic group, which shows that we have condensed the spiritual core of our Chinese people!"