Chapter 99: Rain, Rain, Go Away
Despite the return of Sima Yi to challenge Zhuge Liang, their next few battles follow this pattern:
- Sima Yi says, ah-HA! if they're taking that action, then this tactic will beat them!
- Zhuge Liang goes, ahh, see, I knew you would use that tactic in response to what I did. Have this ambush.
Zhuge Liang's only real loss during this time comes when Zhang Bao is thrown off his horse while he's chasing some fools around and has to be sent home. Otherwise, after taking a string of losses, Sima Yi decides that this game isn't worth playing, and he hunkers in for the long haul. As far as he's concerned, if Zhuge Liang wants to fight him, he can come to the Wei fort where he can't come up with any clever schemes.
(Also as an aside, during this time Zhuge Liang learns via mail that he's being re-promoted to prime minister. But obviously the demotion was never serious to begin with since the book never bothered to address him by a different title in the interim.)
Sima Yi's "do nothing" strategy works pretty well in that Zhuge Liang leaves him alone, and the two armies are pretty much at a stalemate. At least until the Shu camp moves back a couple miles one day. And a couple more the next. And so on.
Zhang He sees this and is practically champing at the bit to go after them. He argues that Shu has run out of grain again because that's just what they do, and they're just pulling out slowly and hoping that Wei doesn't notice.
After this happens a few time, Sima Yi relents and lets Zhang He make his attack; but he also decides to split the army in two, so if it IS a trap and Zhang He gets ambushed from behind, Sima Yi will be there to attack the ambush from behind and turn disaster into victory.
Well, it turns out that yes, it was a trap, and Zhuge Liang laid an ambush for Zhang He. But it also turns out that he predicted how Sima Yi would respond to the potential threat, and laid another more elaborate trap to ambush the ambush of the first ambush (I promise that makes sense).
This means that Zhuge Liang wins yet again. However, he soon learns that Zhang Bao didn't actually survive the earlier incident where he was thrown off his horse, and taking ill, Zhuge Liang heads home. This brings an end to campaign number... three, I think, against Wei.
A couple of months later, Cao Rui authorizes a retaliatory invasion against Shu. So now it's Wei's turn to take the offensive. They march out with 400,000 soldiers.
Zhuge Liang tells his commanders, okay, take a thousand of our guys and go hold the pass. I'd give you more, but they're all on summer break this week, and calling them back to work would be bad for morale. Sorry.
The commanders are skeptical.
And yet, as soon as the Wei army shows up, it begins to downpour. And it keeps going. And going. The Wei soldiers are soaked, cold, and absolutely miserable during this time; they can't even keep a campfire going to cook their food, let alone think about attacking.
After a whole month of nonstop rain they decide, okay, this was stupid, let's just go home.
The book doesn't actually say when the rain lets up, but I imagine it going something like this:
Also it just now occurs to me that Zhuge Liang is basically a walking anti-climax. Any time there's a problem he just says "I already solved it with no effort" and that's pretty much that.