Itihāsa / Mahābhārata chronicle / Bhīṣma · 29 of 50
29. Bhīṣma takes command
Bhīṣma (भीष्म)
The field has its conches, its banners, its two ends. Arjuna's refusal and Kṛṣṇa's answer come first, and the next sitting keeps that hour. After the Gītā, Yudhiṣṭhira walks across, before a blow, and asks Bhīṣma's leave to fight him, and Droṇa's, and his uncles'. The poem loves this walk. A war that begins with the junior taking the elder's blessing is a war that knows it is a family. Bhīṣma blesses him and tells him, already, that he cannot be won in the ordinary way. The conversation of the tenth day is being prepared on the first morning.
Then the armies move. Bhīṣma is as good as his reputation, and the reputation was not a boast. The Pāṇḍava host is cut through. Their sons fight. Their allies, the Pāñcālas, the Matsyas, the Vṛṣṇis who came, fight. The poem's numbers of the dead are a scale of grief, not a census a reader is asked to audit. This page does not list the days' kills. Under Bhīṣma the war has a shape: the grandfather cannot be stopped, and he will not do the one thing Duryodhana wants, which is to kill the five.
At night the camps are almost a second city. Brothers look across a small distance at brothers. The rules hold, badly, and then they hold less. A reader who wants the teaching of these days will not find it in the fighting. He will find it in the hour before the first blow, when Arjuna sits down.
नेपालीमा
गीता पहिले आउँछ, अर्को बैठकमा। गीतापछि युधिष्ठिर भीष्म, द्रोण, र काकाहरूको आशीर्वाद लिन मैदान पार गरे। भीष्मले आशीर्वाद दिए, र भने, साधारण तरिकाले म हारिन्नँ। अनि सेना चले। भीष्मको कीर्ति ढाँट होइन। पाण्डव पक्ष काटियो। मरेकाको सङ्ख्या शोकको मापन हो, जनगणना होइन। यो पृष्ठले दिनदिनको मारिएको सूची बनाउँदैन। रातमा शिविर अर्को सहरजस्तो हुन्थ्यो। लडाइँमा शिक्षा छैन। शिक्षा पहिलो प्रहारअघिको त्यो घडीमा छ जब अर्जुन बस्छन्।