Who Can Replace a Brother in Arms?

Chapters 15-16

This week's theme of brotherhood over family jumped out at me. Chapter 15 began with Liu Bei telling his "brothers" from the Peach Garden Oath an old saying: "Brothers are like arms and legs; wives and children are merely garments that can always be mended. But who can mend a broken limb?" (p. 243) The context is that Liu Bei needed to leave his family behind in Xuzhou to the mercy of Lu Bu. Liu Bei is saying that Zhang Fei and Lord Guan are more important to him than his family. I would have thought family was more important than brothers! But Liu Bei seems to disagree. To his credit, he is not a monster about it; after he leaves them behind, he "cried bitterly" and the two brothers "wept with him."

The theme returned at the end of Chapter 16. Cao Cao suffers a big defeat. In the defeat, he loses his eldest son, his "dear nephew", and one of his greatest warriors, the big guy Dian Wei (p. 282) who first showed off his impressive strength in Chapter 10. For Cao Cao as for Liu Bei, the warrior takes precedence. "The loss of Dian Wei hurts most," he says, when considering all he lost that day.

There is a whole separate story in Chapter 15 that I enjoyed, where we see Sun Ce fight and then recruit Taishi Ci. They're another good crew. We also meet two more of the characters from the Magic set: Zhou Yu and Hua Tuo. The latter is a famous physician. To answer Liu Bei's question about "who can mend a broken limb," Sun Ce seems to have found both a literal and ironic answer to the question.