Report on Going South after My Illness病後南下狀

Your servant, after his long illness, is worn and broken in vital strength and has not gone outside his gate. Only on the eighteenth day of this month did he at last look over Songsan, and on the nineteenth he gathered with the several ministers and deliberated, and submitted a report.

Bowing low, your servant considers that he has braved and received a heavy charge and has not yet been replaced, while the business of striking the enemy is urgent. As it happened, because of a trifling illness he could not go down south at one time with the commander-in-chief at the first, and has stayed on for several months so that his guilt is heaped the higher. Now, though his strength is such, the condition of the south grows urgent by the day, and he dares not be at ease with himself even for a moment.

This morning he went and took leave of the Commander-in-Chief, and the Commander-in-Chief had his interpreter convey this: "In every matter reckon and dispose of it yourself; only be careful and do not take it lightly." Your servant hears besides that the Commander-in-Chief means to send out a paiwen (牌文) and go back westward. Together with Yu Hong (俞泓), Right State Councillor, he asked him to stay a little and meet the business of the southern edge as it comes; and the Commander-in-Chief answered, "After there is no enemy within the borders I shall duly go back."

Your servant hears that Liu Ting's (劉綎) troops went down south from Sangju on the thirteenth day, and that Vice Commander Luo (駱參將) and the rest have all led their troops and gone. If they unite force with our troops and advance by water and by land together, the remaining robbers may well be swept away upon the sea and the enmity of those with whom we cannot share one heaven repaid. And yet the several commanders have long stood off against one another and there is still no news. Your servant, having no choice, would drag his body down and see the state of it. What else the Commander-in-Chief said today will doubtless be in the report of the Right State Councillor Yu Hong, and so your servant does not set it down in full.