In 1918, on the banks of the Hutuo River, the villagers pulled out their foot, and only bones remained.
Geographically, the Ussuri River may be an insignificant river, but historically, its position is irreplaceable!Because this small river has participated in at least two major historical events.
In October 1860, the Anglo-French army defeated the Qing army on the banks of the Ussuri River and captured the Chinese emperor, thus opening a humiliating chapter in China's modern history.
The obscure Ussuri River witnessed the invasion of the Western powers, and also saw the suffering and struggle of the country and the nation!
On the banks of the Hutuo River, another human tragedy occurred, this time on a larger scale and more tragic. In the winter of that year, the cold was unusually cold, and coupled with the previous floods, many places in northern China were affected.
Rare floods and cold spells have put people's lives in a difficult position. The banks of the Hutuo River have been transformed into lakes, villages and houses have been washed away in half, and the flood has submerged an area of 20,000 square miles, forming a triangle.
Tianjin is located at the top of this triangle, with the northern boundary stretching from Tianjin to the west, and the southeastern boundary running west along the canal to the southern part of Baoding. Wen'an County was the hardest hit, with water depths of 20 feet.
Since Wen'an County is lower than the surrounding rivers, it takes at least 5 years for the water to dry up naturally. In the course of the disaster, many of the young and able-bodied people had been displaced, either by the magistrates or by other places.
According to the survey, the number of refugees in Wen'an County has reached more than 75,000, all of whom are struggling to survive in the harsh winter and are in urgent need of rescue.
When the bitter cold covers the land, the hungry people struggle in despair. Their primary desire is not food, but to find a place where the ice is solid so that they can walk easily, rather than being stuck at home.
The ice in the river piled up, the river froze and collapsed again, and the winter wheat planted nearby was washed away. Nearby farmers have planted seeds on the receding fields three times, and the third time they have grown seedlings, but they have all been damaged by the ice.
When the weather first starts to get colder, life is difficult for the poor, but they can go out and find a livelihood. However, by the end of December, during the extreme cold, their hardship became even more unbearable, and it had become very difficult to go out.
A few people who escaped were described as "miserable here, full of deserted villages and ancient towns, bitterly cold, cold and hungry, and countless people who died directly or indirectly from forcibly stepping on the ice."
There are only a few places where bridges can be built, otherwise they will become dead places, and the victims will not even have a chance to call for help. When a septuagenarian couple was seen weeping at each other, and the husband asked the old woman to go out begging to stay alive, the old woman sighed and said, "Even if we can go, will there be food alms in the surrounding villages?"
We'll just have to sit back and wait. "In Yangkouzhuang, a person stepped on the ice to go out to chop wood, when he came back, his body was warm, the ice on his feet melted, when he took off his pants to see, the flesh on his legs was already bloody and blurred, it turned out that the meat on his legs was frozen, and fell off with his pants piece by piece.
He could no longer put on his shoes and could only wait for death to come.
With the arrival of the cold winter, the cold suffered by the victims is getting worse and worse. At the end of 1917, many victims froze to death due to a lack of cotton wool and fuel. Beiyang** sent personnel to the disaster area, but in one village, they found out in just a few days that more than a dozen people had died of cold and hunger.
Last fall, some churches and Red Cross personnel sent to the disaster area** would run out of food and firewood by December if they ran out of relief supplies. Unfortunately, this ** was confirmed.
A villager dragged his young daughter to the edge of an ice cave and forced her to jump into it. The young girl cried that she didn't want to go down, but her father told her it wouldn't be cold and threw her into the ice cave.
The villager did this because one less child would allow him to feed his family for a few more days. This is really a cruel saying: "In order to cure the immediate problem, you can only rip off the flesh of your heart."
A child was abandoned in the suburbs, and his mother reluctantly left as she walked. When asked why she did this, she replied that her home had been washed away by the water and that she didn't even have a handful of rice at home.
Her husband had not been home for four years after working outside the previous flood. The child had been thrown into the well twice before, but was rescued by a neighbor.
There is also a twelve-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son at home, and because they are a little older, they cannot be abandoned, so they can only abandon this child. On a December night, the Hutuo River dam burst due to the push of ice chips, and residents had no time to prepare, and the cold water filled their homes.
People desperately rescued, and women, the elderly, and children crowded to the roof together. It was very cold, and they stayed on the roof for three or five nights, until the water in the house froze into ice, and then they could return to live in the house.
The ice in the house was one or two feet or three feet thick, higher than the roof of the kang, and all the utensils were covered with ice. People can only eat the dried leaves of the plant and some sorghum by soaking them in water.
However, three meals a day is still difficult to maintain, so it can only be reduced to two meals a day or one meal a day. When the ice melted, the river was ** again, the walls of the house began to melt, there was water inside and out, and the house became soft due to the soaking, and finally collapsed.
Disasters cause more damage than when they freeze. After the freeze, it was half a month, isolated from the inside and outside, and could not go out. Moreover, residents in the affected areas have cut down their houses and trees to keep warm, their livestock have been slaughtered, and the seeds of spring have barely been found, and there is no hope ...... sowing seedsThe list goes on.
Acts of God?The water and snow caves are miserable, and the worries about the future are not endlessThe ancients said: "Heaven and earth are unkind, and all things are used as dogs."
However, what happened on the banks of the Hutuo River that year could not be entirely blamed on natural disasters?The river god is affectionate, and he must weep for the common people. 100 help plan