by John Harris
‘You could say the war’s sapped the virtue of the regime,’ McAleavy observed in his solemn way. ‘And for your information, I’ve discovered that a growing number of people are looking longingly towards the north where Mao Tse-Tung’s running a much more efficient show. We all know the Communists are too rigid to go in for corruption, of course, but by contrast, the Nationalist areas are a morass and Chiang’s always threatening that China’s on the point of collapse, because the more he says it the more Washington gives him.’
‘Is he fighting the Communists?’ Willie asked.
‘Of course he is. The New Fourth Army attack was sheer treachery. They were set up.’
‘Set up?’
‘There was a hell of a lot of toing and froing going on and a lot of talk of the Communists joining Chiang’s people in a big attack on the Japs. They were actually coming out when they were trapped, and there were a lot of casualties. Whether Chiang knew or not I don’t know. You never do. But I heard some staff officer of his was behind it all. He was a Pole – or he said he was, but it turned out he was a Russian – and the Commies are furious because they know him from the past or something.’
‘Yes,’ Willie agreed. ‘They do. And this Russian? Where is he now?’
‘In the south, I heard.’
‘I guessed he might be.’
‘How did you guess?’
‘It’s a man I wanted to meet before, a man I’ve always wanted to meet.’
McAleavy’s eyes widened and he stared at Willie for a while, wondering what powerful hatred drove him on. He saw he wasn’t going to get an explanation and went on. ‘Chou En-Lai was actually here in Chungking at the time, trying to work out a solution to their differences. Whatever Washington might think of Chiang, the Americans here loathe him. But they’re building airstrips for his bombers. Whole villages are being torn down.’
‘Will they bomb Japan?’
McAleavy shrugged. ‘If the Japanese don’t mount a major campaign to overrun them first. They’re well aware of them.’
Willie considered. ‘This general in the south who does so little,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to go and see him, don’t you?’
McAleavy had obviously never expected to go far from his office. ‘Me too?’ he bleated.
Willie smiled. ‘At my age, Mr McAleavy, I need someone to pick me up if I fall down.’
The group to take a look at the southern front included, in addition to Willie and McAleavy, two American army officers, one of them Putnam, and a Chinese-American doctor who was going up to the front to make a report on the hospitals.
‘Dr Sim,’ Putnam said. ‘That’s the name I’ve got.’
It was necessary first to meet Chiang and be introduced as part of a British trade delegation. The Generalissimo was rigidly calm, his tunic spotless and bare of decorations, though he seemed to be having trouble with his false teeth. He greeted Willie in a high voice but without the slightest hint of recognition.
‘The Generalissimo speaks only Chinese,’ Putnam said, ‘and I guess he’s pretty silent in that. He doesn’t give much away.’
Not even the price of a launch, Willie thought, remembering Chiang’s entry into Shanghai.
Madame Chiang was small, beautifully dressed and spoke English with an accent acquired in America. McAleavy whispered in Willie’s ear. ‘Don’t be misled,’ he said. ‘The charm doesn’t stop her signing death warrants if necessary. She gives him all the support she can. It’s probably becoming necessary these days because a lot of his generals have gone over to the Japanese.’
The Generalissimo was surrounded by officials and a group of intellectuals whose attitude to the war was clear. ‘It’s a coolie’s war, of course,’ one of them told Willie. ‘If the Japanese kill a few there are plenty more and China can’t afford to lose her small educated class.’
The other American officer who was to join Willie on his visit to the front was a blond ex-fighter pilot who could get pleasure from anything so long as there were girls and drink available. Dr Sim was the surprise because she turned out to be a woman. Although of Chinese descent, she was pure American.
‘University of California,’ she said coolly. ‘My parents left China in 1900 and settled in San Francisco. I was actually christened Su-Lin – Sim Su-Lin, but that translates very well into American as Sue-Lynn Sim. It even sounds Scottish.’
She was unmarried and in her middle thirties, tall, pale-skinned with high cheekbones that gave the impression that her eyes were more slanted than the actually were. Her chin was stubborn for all its roundness, her nose small and wide-nostrilled, and she wore her long hair in a soft curve round the top of her head, black as polished lacquer over a face that was a neat oval on a long slender neck. She had decided that, in her travail, China needed her more than the United States and had returned to work there, but there was still enough of America in her for her uniform to have been more neatly tailored than most so that it didn’t fail to show her figure.
She had a case full of supplies provided by the Americans, mostly things like iodine, aspirin and bandages, because her job was chiefly to report on what was needed.
She was well aware that there was far from enough. ‘China,’ she said sharply as if she had spent her time on the statistics, ‘has one doctor to every forty-five thousand people and some of them are really only pharmacists. The supplies come in the same ratio.’
It wasn’t hard to discover where the so-called Russian admiral advising Chiang’s general was, and this time Willie determined to do something about him, if only bribe someone to see he was captured by the Japanese. It was an easy solution that would remove him from the scene without Willie being involved. It was cowardly, but he knew he could never shoot Zychov himself or even pay someone else to shoot him. It must be that he was growing too bloody old, he thought, and the hot blood that would once have countenanced the act without a murmur had cooled.
They travelled south in a train packed with soldiers in a mixture of flat cars, box cars and old coaches, whose driver carried with him a bale of straw which, if he were attacked by Japanese aircraft, he laid under the engine then climbed on to it to read a book until the raid was over. The roofs were packed with more men, bracing themselves against the vibration and the curves. Occasionally by the track there were the bodies of those who had been unsuccessful, but nobody even looked at them because dead human beings were nothing new in China. At every station people tried to climb aboard, but were beaten off by the soldiers already in residence.
As they moved further south, they came across men wearing scraps of Japanese uniform performing curious exercises near the stations which seemed more allied to ballet than war.
‘New recruits,’ Willie explained to Dr Sim. ‘After the last war, Chiang hired Prussian officers to train his men. All they learned was the goose step–’
Every few hours the train stopped at a station, where peasants offered scraggy boiled chickens, waffles of bean flour, vermicelli, sugar cane and hard-boiled eggs. One had a green cart pulled by a green-painted horse. ‘Camouflage, Mastah,’ he explained. ‘Against Japanese aeroplanes. I also changed white shirt for black one, so they don’t see me either.’
Leaving the train north of Kweilin, they headed south on shaggy ponies whose trot was hard on the spine, and spent the night at a drab little town where the proprietor of the Flowering Peace Hotel wore a long gown, patent shoes and a European bowler hat. They were welcomed by a crowd of people with umbrellas and a lot of bleary-nosed children like dolls, dressed in padded jackets and holding a banner with one word, WELCOM, on it. Apparently they turned out whenever Europeans appeared. During the evening they drank Chinese gin with the mayor while the mahjongg players kept up a perpetual chatter and women wandered in and out selling bread and fruit. In the bedroom the mosquitoes almost drove them mad and they couldn’t put the light out until Willie unscrewed the bulb. Even then it was impossible to sleep for the noise outside.
The following day they managed
to find an old Dodge in which they were driven further south past troops moving up in a bitter wind, curling in long columns along every ditch and bank. There wasn’t a single vehicle among them and almost no pack animals, so that everything apart from light weapons was carried in the old way by coolies. There was no artillery and the rifles were old, the yellow-brown uniforms threadbare. The soldiers were small, wiry and thin, and wore old First World War German helmets. They all carried grenades and long cloth bags like socks full of their rations of dry rice. Their feet were swollen and broken and, as they trudged past in the rising grey dust, their faces were expressionless and blank.
A separate stream of humanity moved with the soldiers, peasants carrying their household goods – sometimes even aged relatives – on their shoulders. Among them were men and women hefting large pieces of metal.
‘Machinery,’ Putnam explained. ‘Everything’s being moved further inland. They did it from Nanking, from Shanghai, from Hankow. They once moved a whole power station piece by piece.’
The Chinese trudged past them, like a lot of ants, carrying boxes, girders, bricks, rolls of wire.
‘They’re doing it because of the last Japanese advance,’ Dr Sim said proudly.
‘Or because of the next one,’ Willie observed. ‘I reckon these people know something’s going to happen even if Chiang doesn’t.’
By the river, huge crates were being placed aboard a log raft for transport to safer areas – iron frames, coal, tables, chairs, sewing machines, an enormous steam roller, even cattle. More were moving along the bank on trains of mules, pack ponies and camels. The din was tremendous with shouting men, screaming women, wailing children, bleating goats, and always the clink-clank of metal.
At Jangjao there was a small hospital filled with exhausted Chinese boys in brown uniforms shivering against the cold. It was a one-storey building of stucco totally devoid of beds or mattresses but full of patients lying on straw, three to a blanket. Many of them were raving or in a coma and the smell of gas-gangrene made the stomach heave. None of them had been washed and there were no anaesthetics, while the instruments were so blunt as to be virtually unusable.
There were no bandages or lint and many of the men had treated their wounds themselves in the way they’d seen in their villages, stuffing them with straw, strips of uniform, leaves or the intestines of freshly killed chickens. They all seemed to be suffering from disease and to Willie it looked like typhus.
The general had made no arrangements whatsoever for their removal or even for their comfort, and the picture of Zychov, as he had imagined him at Port Arthur, rose again in Willie’s mind, with his feet up on the table and doubtless with a girl and a bottle nearby.
Dr Sim was furious and her eyes were bitter as she said goodbye. ‘This is where I leave you,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty for me to do here, and saving lives is more important than writing a report.’
They were all sorry to see her leave the party because she was graceful, attractive and intelligent, and possessed a plentiful supply of American generosity of spirit. Putnam and the other officer disappeared later in the day, heading eastwards on some mission of their own near the front. By this time it was becoming quite clear that the army in this sector was nothing but a skeleton outfit padded with the names of dead men for whom the general was still drawing wages which disappeared into his own pocket. They had his name by this time and the names of his staff, and Willie hadn’t the slightest doubt they were all busily filling their pockets, too. Certainly little had been done for the well-being of the Chinese soldiers and, what was worse, it was clear that the information being passed back to Chiang in Chungking was only what he wished to hear. Towns which had been reported captured were still firmly in the hands of the Japanese, while there was a big trade in the smuggling of Chinese goods across the lines. Willie hadn’t the slightest doubt that Zychov was among those who were running it.
The following day they ran into a car full of Chinese officers who greeted them with smiles and agreed to conduct them to headquarters.
‘The General will be pleased to answer all questions,’ the colonel in command said. ‘We will take you there tomorrow.’
To be on hand when Zychov appeared, Willie and McAleavy put up at an inn, where they were given a room with two cots and a charcoal brazier. It was cold and comfortless and McAleavy’s long face grew more gloomy. The further they moved from civilisation and the gloomier he became, the more exhilarated Willie began to feel. This, he felt, was what life – his life, anyway – had always been about.
There was a lot of coming and going at the inn, and a certain amount of irritation among the Chinese which Willie put down to the approaching cold weather. The wind had become bitter suddenly and people kept appearing in furs, while a few soldiers wore quilted coats, though their sandals were thin against the hard earth. When they woke the following morning, it was icy and there was a mist lying like a blanket over the river, where a ruined pagoda, its sides scarred by fire, stuck out above it like an immense phallic symbol floating above the vapour.
A column of Chinese troops went past, long files of small blank-faced men without discipline or fixed pace. Their shuffling feet lifted the cold dry earth in clouds of dust so that they looked like a serpentine of vapour, their officer riding ahead on a bony horse, their rear brought up by the usual coolies carrying ammunition boxes and a single soot-blackened cauldron which was the company kitchen. Finally came a few pack guns on mules and a cart carrying sacks of rice.
As they ate a breakfast of chicken and warm beer, Willie, more attuned to China than McAleavy, noticed an atmosphere or excitement and apprehension and began to grow suspicious. It didn’t take him long to find out what it was all about. Everybody from the proprietor of the hotel downwards knew what was happening and were preparing to disappear. Aware all the time of the airfields that were being built, the Japanese had struck. Their attack had been aimed at the worst defended sector and round them Chiang’s army was already in retreat. Its defences had consisted only of a few old French 75s with no more than two hundred shells between them, a few light mortars with only a handful of bombs each, and only two thousand rifles between fourteen thousand men.
They waited all morning for the General’s aides to appear until, about midday, a car arrived in the village at full speed, carrying what appeared to be several high-ranking officers. One of them was Zychov. He was wearing the green uniform of a Kuomintang officer and there were red tabs at his throat. He looked clean and well fed and it was as much the thought of the suffering, neglected and sacrificed young Chinese boys as his own hatred for him that drove Willie into the road. But the car didn’t stop and, in a fury, Willie dragged at the old Russian revolver he always carried. Quite forgetting his qualms about removing Zychov in cold blood, he fired several shots after the speeding vehicle. None of them hit anything and McAleavy came up behind him as he stood panting and red-faced with rage.
‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ he was repeating in a low voice.
McAleavy looked shocked. ‘You can’t do that sort of thing, Mr Sarth,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be His Majesty’s official representatives. You’ll have us chucked out.’ He made a weak attempt at a joke. ‘Perhaps even shot. You might have hit one of them.’
Willie turned and glared at him. ‘I wish to Christ I had,’ he snarled.
McAleavy’s long face looked startled. ‘Someone in there you don’t like or something?’
‘By God, there is! I ought to have shot him years ago.’
McAleavy didn’t ask any more questions, but it was obvious he considered Willie a very odd type to send on a diplomatic mission. McAleavy was the sort of man who, properly brought up and involved for years in the cool corridors of foreign diplomacy, had probably never lost his temper in his life. But he was astute enough to realise that Willie had, and kept out of his way.
An hour later, another car which they recognised as the one they were waiting for came into sight. Running i
nto the road again, Willie refused to budge until it stopped. The Chinese, their faces devoid this time of smiles, made no attempt to climb out and one of the colonels spoke from his seat.
‘The General has already appeared in the village,’ he said. ‘He was just ahead of us.’
‘He wasn’t intending to talk to us,’ Willie snapped. ‘He was bolting. With his bloody adviser.’
‘The General would not bolt. Neither the General nor any of his staff would bolt. We fight with spirit.’
‘It seems to be all you’ve got. Where are you going?’
‘We are going to bring up reinforcements.’
‘All of you?’
The colonel gave Willie a cold look and waved a hand, and the car started with a jerk and spinning wheels that threw grit in his face. Making no attempt to halt the passing troops, the officers shot away at full speed, heading northeast.
‘You ask me,’ Willie said to McAleavy, ‘that’s the last we’ll see of the General or his staff.’
McAleavy looked shocked. ‘You mean they’ve abandoned their army?’
‘It’s not a new thing with Chiang generals.’
By the afternoon, as more Chinese troops came through, they were able to discover what had happened. The Japanese offensive, made up of troops which had been moved south from Manchuria, had burst against the front like a thunderclap and was roaring across South China at full speed. Already one airfield had fallen and another was about to. The Japanese had started with probing attacks and the Chinese, suddenly bereft of senior officers, were struggling at regimental level to strengthen their positions near the Yangtze, mere clusters of frightened youths facing artillery with rusting machine guns and old rifles.
Back at the village where they had spent the night, they found soldiers pulling down doors to make fires and seizing what animals, chickens and vegetables they could. A man who protested as his pig was driven away was shot without argument and left sprawled in the roadway, his wife weeping over his body. At the inn, their luggage had been rifled and an exhausted officer was asleep in their room so that they had to spend the night in an attic papered with sheets from the Illustrated London News, showing pictures of the British Grand Fleet in 1909 and portraits of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.