“They're prepared!"
“Stop! Fall back!"
The Tokugawa commanders yelled orders to fall back, but their charging soldiers not be so easily stopped.
Kyutaro saw that the moment had come and shouted to the troops to counterattack. The victory was now clear, both psychologically and physically, without anyone having to wait for the actual result. The corps of warriors that had been so brilliantly victorious now received themselves what they had given to Hidetsugu only moments before.
Throughout Hideyoshi's army Hori Kyutaro's spear corps was famed for its great efficiency. The corpses of men who had been pierced by the points of those spears now deterred the horses carrying the commanders who were trying to flee. The Tokugawa generals escaped, swinging their long swords behind them as they fled the pursuing points of the spears.
The plain of Nagakute was covered with a thin veil of gunpowder smoke and filled with the stink of corpses and blood. With the morning sun, it smoldered with all the colors of the rainbow.
Peace had already returned there, but the soldiers who had brought carnage with them were now heading for Yazako, like the clouds of an evening shower. Flight simply provoked more flight, endless flight and destruction.
Kyutaro did not lose his head as he pursued the Tokugawa troops. "The rear guard should not follow us. Take the roundabout way toward Inokoishi and pursue them along two roads."
One unit broke away and followed a different road, while Kyutaro led six hundred men against the retreating enemy. The dead and wounded abandoned along the road by the Tokugawa could not have numbered less than five hundred men, but Kyutaro's soldiers also grew fewer and fewer as they continued.
Although the main corps had advanced far ahead, two men still breathing among the corpses now crossed spears, then abandoned them as too cumbersome and drew their swords. Grappling, then breaking loose, they fell down, stood up again, and fought interminably in their own private battle. Finally one took the other's head. Yelling almost insanely, the victor chased after his companions in the main corps, disappeared once again into the miasma of smoke and blood, and, struck by a stray bullet, fell dead before he catch up with his comrades.
Kyutaro was yelling himself hoarse. "It's useless to chase after them for too long. Genza! Momoemon! Stop the troops! Tell them to fall back!"
Several of his retainers rode forward and, with difficulty, restrained their troops.
“Fall back!"
"Draw up beneath the commander's standard!"
Hori Kyutaro dismounted and walked from the road onto the promontory of a bluff. From where he stood, his field of vision was unobstructed. He stared steadily out into the distance.
"Ah, he has come so quickly," he muttered.
The expression on his face showed that he had become completely sobered. Turning to his attendants, he invited them to take a look.
In the west, in an elevated area just opposite the morning sun, something was glittering on Mount Fujigane.
Was it not Ieyasu's emblem—the commander's standard with the golden fan? Kyutaro raised his voice in grief. "It's a sad thing to say, but we have no strategy for dealing with such a great foe. Our work here is finished."
Collecting his troops, Kyutaro quickly began to retreat. But at that point, four messengers from the First and Second Corps came together from the direction of Nagakute looking for him.
"The order is for you to turn back and join forces with the vanguard. This comes directly from Lord Shonyu."
Kyutaro flatly refused. "Absolutely not. We're retreating."
The messengers could hardly believe their ears. "The battle is starting now! Please turn back and join our lords' forces immediately!" they repeated, raising their voices.
Kyutaro raised his voice as well. "If I said I'm retreating, I'm retreating! We have to make sure that Lord Hidetsugu is safe. Besides, more than half of this section of the army has sustained wounds, and if our men come up against a fresh enemy, it will be a disaster. I, for one, am not going to fight a battle that I know I'll lose. You can tell that to Lore Shonyu and to Lord Nagayoshi as well!"
With those parting words, he rode off at a gallop.
Hori Kyutaro's corps ran into Hidetsugu and his surviving troops in the vicinity of Inaba. Then, setting fire to the farmhouses along the way, they defended themselves time and again from the pursuing Tokugawa troops and finally returned to Hideyoshi's main camp at Gakuden before sunset.
The messengers who had come seeking Kyutaro's aid were outraged.
"What kind of cowardice is it to run away to the main camp without even looking back at your allies' desperate situation?"
"He's clearly lost his nerve."
"Today Hori Kyutaro showed us his true character. We'll despise him if we return alive."
They now turned toward their own isolated corps, led by Shonyu, and whipped their horses' flanks in fits of rage.
Indeed, the two corps under the command of Shonyu and Nagayoshi were now only fodder for Ieyasu. The two men were as different as their abilities. The battle between Hideyoshi and Ieyasu at this time was like a grand championship match in sumo, and each man understood his opponent well. Both Hideyoshi and Ieyasu had realized early on that the situation would reach the present pass, and each knew through his own circumspection that his enemy was not a man who could be brought down by a cheap trick orshowmanship. But pity the brave and ferocious soldier who acts with a warrior's pride alone. Burning with nothing but his own will, he knows neither the enemy nor his own capacities.
Having had his camp stool set up on Mount Rokubo, Shonyu inspected the more than two hundred enemy heads that had been taken at Iwasaki Castle.
It was morning, just about the first half of the Hour of the Dragon. Shonyu still had not the slightest idea of the disaster that had occurred at his rear. Looking only at the smoking ruins of the enemy castle in front of him, he was drunk on the small pleasure that the warrior falls into so easily.
After the inspection of the heads and the recording of the meritorious deeds of the troops, breakfast was eaten. As the soldiers chewed their food, they occasionally looked toward the northwest. Suddenly something in that direction caught Shonyu's attention as well.
“Tango, what's that in the sky over there?" Shonyu asked.
The generals around Shonyu all turned to the northwest.
“Could it be an insurrection?" one suggested.
But as they continued to eat what was left of their rations, they suddenly heard some confused shouting at the foot of the hill.
As hey were wondering what it was about, a messenger from Nagayoshi ran up to them. "We've been taken off guard! They've come up behind us!" the man shouted as he prostrated himself in front of Shonyu's camp stool.
The generals felt as if a chill wind had blown clear through their armor.
“What do you mean, they've come up behind us?" Shonyu asked.
“An enemy force followed Lord Hidetsugu's rear guard."
“The rear guard?"
“They made a sudden attack from both flanks."
Shonyu stood up abruptly, just as a second messenger arrived from Nagayoshi.
“There's no time to lose, my lord. Lord Hidetsugu's rear guard has been completely routed."
There was a sudden stir of motion on the hill, and following that, the noise of short tempered commands and the sounds of soldiers flowing down the road to the bottom of the hill.
From the shady side of Mount Fujigane, the commander's standard of the golden fan shone brilliantly above the Tokugawa army. There was something almost bewitching about the symbol, and it sent a shiver through the soul of every warrior of the western army on the plain.