What had happened here was remarkable to contemplate. A single company of surrounded men, outnumbered ten to one, had held on in arctic weather for five days and five nights. And not only held on: They had slaughtered their foe. The magnitude of the carnage filled the Ridgerunners with awe as they marched down through it. The field was littered with hundreds and hundreds of Chinese corpses. “I swear to God,” said Owen, “you could have walked without touching the ground, using those bodies as a carpet.” The faces on many of the Chinese dead, he said, “were frozen in spasms of pain.”
