My uncle spoke. "The famed and feared Chinghiz Khan, grandfather of our Kubilai, conquered,most of the world in exactly that slow-marching manner. His armies and all their families had to,cross the entire vast extent of Asia, and they were far too numerous to have lived off the land,,whether by pillaging or scavenging. No, they carried seeds for planting, and animals fit for,breeding. Whenever they had marched to the limit of their rations, and beyond the reach of their,supply trains, they simply stopped and settled. They planted their grains and beans, bred their,horses and cattle, and waited for the harvest and the calving. Then, again well fed and well,provisioned, they moved on toward the next objective."

I said, "I heard that they ate every tenth man of their own men.","Nonsense!" said my uncle. "Would any commander decimate his fighting men? He might as,sensibly command them to eat their swords and spears. And the weapons would be about,equally edible. I doubt that even a Mongol has teeth capable of chewing another warrior,Mongol. No, they stopped and planted and harvested, and moved again, and stopped again.",

My father said, "They called that the three-bean march. And it inspired one of their war cries.,Whenever the Mongols fought their way into an enemy city, Chinghiz would shout, 'The hay is,cut! Give your horses fodder!' And that was the signal for the horde to go wild, to plunder and,rape and ravage and slaughter. Thus they laid waste Tashkent and Bukhara and Kiev and many,another great city. It is said that when the Mongols took Herat, in India Aryana, they butchered,every last one of its inhabitants, to the number of nearly two million. Ten times the population of,Venice! Of course, of Indians such a diminution is hardly worth remark.","The three-bean march sounds efficient enough," I conceded, "but intolerably slow."

"He who endures, wins," said my father. "That slow march took the Mongols all the way to the,borders of Poland and Romania."

Gary Jennings, The Journeyer