in October 1935 along with only about 8,000 survivors. Along the route, some communists had left the march to mobilize the peasantry, but most of the missing had been eliminated by fighting, disease, and starvation. Among the missing were Mao’s two small children and his younger brother, Mao Zetan, who, although he had not been on the Long March, had been a guerrilla fighter in Jiangxi before dying in April 1935.