To the average Chinese peasant, foreigners were always 'devils'- potentially dangerous outsiders who arrived on Chinese soil with dubious motives and nefarious intent. That was especially true of the Japanese soldiers who invaded China in the 1930s, occupying large tracts of the mainland. In 1944, Ma Dasan and his neighbors in Rack-Armour Terrace, a desolate mountain town, resented giving a percentage of their grain harvest to the Japanese 'devils', but otherwise co-existed with them quite peacefully. Things began to change the night when two prisoners of the anti-Japanese resistance were dumped on Ma Dasan's doorstep. Ma was told to keep them hidden for a few days. But the days stretched into months. Unwilling to keep the prisoners any longer, Ma Dasan came up with the idea of returning them to the Japanese army in exchange for two carts of grain. The outcome of this scheme taught him the hard way that 'devils' are not necessarily foreign and that war can turn the best of men into the worst.