Dispatch making Zhang Yan commissioner for urging on the battle lines at the front of the Luzhou army張晏充廬州軍前催陣使
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) 桂苑筆耕集 · Choe Chiwon · 886 (Tang, 6th year of the Zhonghe era · Silla, 12th year of King Heongang) · 1 passages · 138 Chinese characters · reading time 0.6 min
Gyewon Pilgyeongjip (A Plowing of the Brush in the Cassia Garden) Book 14 — Notices A collection Choe Chiwon made by choosing out of the writings of his four years in the headquarters of Gao Pian, military commissioner of Huainan under the Tang, binding them into twenty volumes and presenting them to King Heongang of Silla in 886. It holds 366 pieces — memorials and reports sent up to the emperor, the proclamation denouncing Huang Chao, letters to the several military commissioners, orders and dispatches issued to those under him, Daoist and Buddhist texts for services, funeral offerings, records written for the outer wall of Chengdu and for a painting of Annam, and the reports and poems he sent up to Gao Pian. Here is the first report, which begins "I am a man of Silla," and the proclamation against Huang Chao with its line, "Not only do all the men of the world think to kill you openly; the ghosts under the earth have already discussed cutting you down in secret." The last volume holds the poems he made on the voyage home to the country he had left at twelve. It is the oldest collection by a Korean that survives, and when Hong Seokju and Seo Yugu printed it with movable type in 1834 they called it "the root and the beginning of the writing of our Eastern Country." Their two prefaces are translated with it.
This dispatch carries out the decision handed down. An army's victory lies in harmony, and troops hold speed dear. If the enemy is allowed to take his time over a good array, we shall truly be broken by his rare blade. Use it and it works. The moment must not be lost. The officer named above has a will fit to hand on the arts of strategy, and a name fit to stop a child's crying. He has waited to meet the hardship of tangled roots and knotted joints, and wished to unfold his art that runs crosswise and lengthwise. Now Shu still rebels against Chu, and Wei has already struck Xing. The rain has been good for raising the army, but the clouds have not yet cleared for drawing up the lines. So the fierce force of the fish-scale array is kept from sweeping away the foul air, and the stubborn crowd swarming like ants dares to sit safe in its burrow. Do you drive them with the horse whip and drill them by the arts of war. The task rests on a single wave of the banner. The merit must be brought about in a hundred victories. The army's reward is soon to be met, and we wait for the dispatch of victory to be sent. This matter must be sent as an appointment to the post of commissioner for urging on the battle lines at the front of the Luzhou army.
Interlinear notes 1
Here 彼 is taken as referring to our own side. It can also be read as blunting the enemy's edge, but that does not follow from the next clause, "the moment must not be lost." — translator