The Mercenaries

by John Harris

  The Fokker began to climb swiftly towards the Farman and in no time had passed it and climbed above as the old machine groped its way upwards towards the west. Ahead of him, Ira could see the broad expanse of China with its tiny squares of lukewarm water intersected by dykes where women in blue cotton splashed to transplant the tender rice shoots.

  The Bessoneaux were collapsing now into red ruin that sent up flying scraps of charred canvas, and the flames were roaring through the barrack huts. Outside the burning hangars, he could see the pall of smoke where they had pushed the three cannibalised machines together, and even as he watched, one of them blew up and he saw scraps of burning wood and fabric whirl upwards.

  To the east, beyond Hwai-Yang, smoke was rising in long drifting spires against the flat blue of the sky, above a column of marching men. Kwei’s troops would be in Hwai-Yang in an hour and at the airfield an hour later.

  Sitting in his little wickerwork seat, exposed to the wind, with the wires singing and the fabric ballooning on the wide spars, Ira could see the Albatros rising and falling just beside the wing-tip and, beyond it, the Fokker with Fagan clearly irritated at having to provide an escort. The crowd had surged across the field now and was milling in a large crescent-shaped mass in front of the burning huts. Every now and then he saw a figure dart towards the flames and run back again, as though they were trying to salvage what they could.

  The lorry and the Crossley and the two overburdened cars were moving steadily to safety beyond the field, and beyond them there was a little cluster of pupils on their shaggy ponies, one or two of them already turning into the fields as though they had long since given up hope of ever reaching Tsosiehn.

  There was a bewildered feeling in Ira’s mind as he stared down. It had been a short campaign, so swift they’d not seen a single sign of it at Kailin, and so far they’d achieved nothing. They’d got only one of General Tsu’s decrepit machines into the air and not one of his pupil-pilots.

  As he turned west, with the wind in his face, the old Farman rising and falling in the eddies that rose over the river, Ira wondered ruefully what would happen next.

  Part Three

  1

  Sammy Shapiro had not failed them and when, after half an hour’s flying that was an exasperating chore in the frail underpowered Farman, the field at Yaochow came into view, there was a landing strip already marked off and a wood-fire smoking at one end to indicate the direction of the wind. Beneath a little clump of trees on the fringe several carts were parked near the Avro, and Ira could see a group of people standing alongside a small farm building with a curved roof from which patches of tiling were missing.

  Fagan dropped like a stone as soon as the field came into view, but Ellie carefully maintained her position, giving Ira a thumbs-up sign occasionally and smiling under her goggles, then she too banked away and sank below him towards the ground, and he saw her machine moving over the huts amid the bamboo clumps of the swampy delta where thousands of white birds circled, the star-shaped shadow racing across the ground until she turned over the north end of the field to land.

  Close by. where the water of the paddies reflected the sky and the threading irrigation canals stood out like veins, Tsosiehn hugged a curving loop of the river, surrounded by a brown mat of junks. It contained the usual group of dominant buildings round the centre of the town, the usual feathery willows, and alongside the water, near the huddle of coolie huts that crouched lopsidedly against the walls of the city, the Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda, a huge building with a multitude of curving roofs, rising like a tower to throw its shadow across the water.

  The engine throttled back, the guy wires humming, Ira banked over a village where old men and ducks pottered by a pond fringed with drooping willows. Nearby on the road, by a grove of mulberry trees, small yellow children were driving water buffaloes to the stream, and chasing ducks and chickens with scraps of rag, and they stopped as he swooped over them and gaped upwards, crouching beside the buffaloes, their eyes wide, their mouths open at the great white buzzing box kite coming in to land.

  As the machine settled and began to roll to a stop with sagging wings, Ira saw Sammy running towards him across the stubbly grass, and he knew at once that something was wrong. His features were sharp-edged with anger and his eyes were glittering with suppressed bitterness.

  ‘Ira,’ he yelled over the chittering engine, his face furious. ‘Them bloody spares aren’t here at all! Only the petrol! This here store-owner, De Sa, says there’s only a few things like paint and dope and we can’t keep aeroplanes flying on that! We need valves and spark plugs and con rods and bearings.’

  For a moment Ira sat motionless, consumed by fury against Fagan, feeling the blood pulse in his temples, then he began to calm down. Fury would get them nowhere and would only lead to another monumental quarrel that would stop everything dead in its tracks.

  He climbed to the ground slowly. ‘At least we’ve got petrol,’ he said. ‘Can we keep going a bit longer without the spares?’

  Sammy seemed to subside a little. ‘A bit,’ he said. ‘Not long. Ira, you’ve got to go down to Shanghai yourself. We can’t rely on anybody else.’

  As they talked, Fagan appeared with Ellie. She was still wearing her helmet and leather coat in spite of the sun, and she looked furious.

  ‘It’s all taken care of,’ Fagan said quickly before she could burst out in accusation. ‘I’ll go down to Tsosiehn for the petrol as soon as the lorry arrives.’

  Ira patience snapped. ‘Never mind the bloody lorry,’ he said. ‘It might not arrive if the chain breaks. Take one of the ox-carts and go down now.’

  ‘On an ox-cart?’ Fagan looked indignant at once. ‘I can’t ride on a bloody ox-cart! ‘

  ‘Goddam it, then,’ Ellie snapped, peeling off her helmet and shaking out her hair, ‘walk if it suits you better, but stop whining and go get the goddam gas.’

  By the following morning, though they had neither sheds nor hangars, they were ready to start flying again.

  The cars with the pupil-pilots arrived soon after daylight with the news that the lorry and the tender were on the way, then Lawn and Cheng came clattering up in the thirty-hundredweight and there was a delighted and noisy reunion between Sammy and Mei-Mei.

  “The Crossley’s twelve miles back,’ Lawn said, his boozy red face puffed with pride. ‘We made it as far as that, then she seized up. We can unload the thirty-hundredweight, though, and go back for the load and tow her in. We left the Wangs guarding her till tomorrow.’

  They were full of information. They had run into Tsu’s retreating troops en route and one of the pupils. Lieutenant Tsai, had discovered from the gay gossipy Kee that Tsu was arranging a hurried alliance with the warlord across the river and had established his line along the hills twenty miles to the east at Wukang, where he intended to make a stand. It was important that he should not lose contact with the river along which all his supplies were smuggled and he was prepared to fight to keep his grip on it. The Warlord of the South-West was worried, however, Tsai added gloomily in an aside, because it seemed that Kwei had sent an aircraft along the ridge firing at his men.

  ‘An aircraft?’ Ira, who had been listening with only half his attention as other things of greater urgency than Tsu’s strategy occupied his mind, swung round at once, immediately concerned, and angry that this important item of news should, typically enough in this half-baked war, be left to the last. If Kwei had got hold of an aeroplane that made his own ageing contraptions out of date, he might just as well pack up and go home at once. One new fighter in the hands of a competent pilot could destroy everything on the field in ten minutes.

  Tsai was nodding excitedly, his eyes full of alarm now as he saw Ira’s anger. Kwei’s aeroplane, he said, had appeared so unexpectedly it had sent Tsu’s men pouring back out of their positions and they had had to be flogged back into line by their officers’ riding whips and the flat of their swords.

  ‘Never mind that!’ Ira snorted. ‘What sor
t of aircraft? How big? How fast? Did you see it? Did you find out?’

  Tsai gestured, startled by his interest in something that seemed quite unimportant, and searched desperately for words. ‘No, Mastah Ai-Lah,’ he said. ‘But much old. Plopeller --here.’ He pointed to his seat and made shoving gestures. ‘Push.’

  Ira grinned with relief. An aged birdcage of the same obsolete pusher design as the Farman, with its propeller set inside a trellis of wooden struts. Even if it were recent enough to have a great Beardmore engine to drive it along, it was still out of date and even the old Albatros had the edge on it.

  As Lawn disappeared again for the Crossley, they heard an odd clanking noise along the road and swung round to see an ancient steam-driven traction engine dragging a trailer full of petrol drums. Fagan waved from the driving seat in the cabin behind the huge flywheel and pulled a cord that sent up a shrill whistle of steam.

  ‘Good God Almighty! ‘

  Fagan rattled across the field towards them, his disastrous trip to Shanghai forgotten, and hugely delighted with himself. ‘Petrol,’ he said as he puffed to a stop. ‘Name of Heloïse,’ he introduced. ‘Pulls ten tons. Skittish as a harlot and faster than an ox-cart. Belongs to the chi-chi who runs the store. He said we could keep it.’

  Ira stared at the huge hissing machine with its enormous smoke stack, firebox and steel-straked wheels, and the brass plate on the boiler--BURREL’S, THETFORD, ENGLAND.

  ‘What the hell do we want with that?’ he asked.

  Fagan laughed and gestured at the pupil-pilots capering with excitement. He seemed to consider this joke he had pulled off more than made up for all his past mistakes.

  ‘We can always use her to brew up tea,’ he said. ‘Or for heatin’ the bath water.’

  They refuelled the machines with a big tin funnel and a chamois leather Fagan had brought with him, then while Sammy changed the plugs and the oil and checked the tappets, Peter Cheng and the pupils rounded up a gang of coolies from Yaochow and set them hacking at the willows by the river to make wicker frames to support tarpaulins. Two or three tents had already been erected and, with the canned food they’d brought with them, they were ready to begin work.

  In the afternoon, three more pupils straggled in, one on a pony and two on bicycles, but of the rest there was no sign.

  ‘Well, that seems to be that,’ Ira said, not without relief. If nothing else, Tsu’s training programme had dwindled to manageable proportions.

  In the evening, he went into Tsosiehn with Sammy and Peter Cheng to see what could be done about supplies and houses for them to live in, because Yaochow was only a straggling village of huts made of mud that could keep out neither the rains nor the rats and was no place to set up home.

  Nearly a hundred miles further along the river’s winding length from Shanghai and the coast, however, Tsosiehn was that hundred miles nearer to the Middle Ages, twice as feudal and a dozen times more primitive. A thousand alleyways, cut with dark slantwise shadows, darted off down the slopes from the main streets, twisting and tumbling over slime-encrusted steps polished smooth by centuries of straw-sandalled feet.

  Sewage and garbage were emptied into the stream from which the coolies drew their water and only oil lamps and candles burned in the homes at night. The curving old byways were full of the ancient noises of livestock, babies, gossiping women and yelling coolies, and the inevitable melody of the street vendors with their clacking blocks of wood, gongs, bells and twanging strings. The same drifting odours as Hwai-Yang, both nauseous and fragrant, assailed their nostrils, and the same overpowering stench of human filth mixed with the intoxicating aroma of spiced Chinese food.

  Although it was higher up the Yangtze, the curve of the river had brought them further south, where the distant Hwo-Shan range towered snow-capped in view, and they were not surprised to find there were already a few of the new red, blue and white flags about that seemed to have preceded them from Hwai-Yang. There was also a new Chinese symbol daubed on the walls with paint and tar and whitewash that Cheng said meant Kuomintang, the new party.

  The Chang-an-Chieh Pagoda dominated the city, its roofs rising tier on curving tier from the plum trees and peonies. It had been built as a tribute to Chienchiang Wang Te, the god of the river, to which it was anchored by vast rusty chains attached to buoys in midstream in case the demons should try to take it away, and it had fallen into vast and mouldering decay. Tiles were missing and the gilt was dimmed with dust, and it was cracked and overgrown, with its Buddhas toppled from their plinths. Creepers were twining over the roofs and Tsu troops were camped outside the shabby entrance, their ponies tethered to the trees, their rusty rifles stacked among the marble dragons, their fires in the gaps where the stone paving blocks had been removed.

  In the streets around, the air was electric after Tsu’s retreat, like the sultry atmosphere before a thunderstorm. The crowd seemed to have the Kuomintang’s anti-European feeling well into their system here and the rickshaw coolies were already demanding twice as much for their rickshaws as they’d asked in Hwai-Yang. Along the bund, the students were holding a parade--and not for General Tsu--with a forest of flags and new placards that demanded the end of foreign concessions and foreign intervention in Chinese politics, and though they made no attempt to stop the car, there were shaken fists and shouts and thrown mud.

  ‘You’d hardly say Tsu was in control, would you?’ Sammy said dryly.

  The storekeeper, De Sa, a Goanese, was more than willing to help but things were already difficult and likely to remain so until Tsu had properly established himself in the area. He was a swarthy little man with a precise manner and a beaming apologetic smile.

  ‘You like my Heloïse?’ he asked gaily. ‘My fine Burrel’s of Thetford? I buy her ten years ago. From an English engineer who builds the railway. I buy her to haul goods for my store. But the coolies begin to say she takes away their work. She breaks their rice bowls, and they form unions to stop it. They say now that we must all do as we are told, you understand. You may keep her until I need her. She works well.’

  He gave them all the news, in neat precise sentences that came out almost as though they were parcelled up, wrapped and tied with pink string.

  ‘The river is still firmly held by General Tsu,’ he said. ‘He will keep it that way, you understand. He needs it.’

  There had been a few executions and several heads were attached to poles along the bund, guarded by soldiers with ancient yellow Japanese rifles. Several of the shops were also already being ‘protected’, and De Sa said that Tsu’s alliance with General Choy across the river had given him sufficient confidence to apply squeeze and, following his usual procedure, to distract attention from his own failures by encouraging anti-Japanese demonstrations. Unfortunately the plan didn’t appear to be working as well as usual and the students seemed to prefer to include all foreign devils in their dislike.

  He gave them a drink and showed them round the store. It seemed to be packed with small items they could use and he said he had another store further down-river they could draw on if they wished. Then he led them to a comer beyond his desk and indicated a few boxes of assorted screws and tins of dope.

  ‘It comes up on the railway with the petrol,’ he said with a shrug. The name on the invoice is Fagan.’

  Sammy and Ira exchanged disgusted glances, but De Sa had no time for their troubles. He was already preparing for departure to Nanking himself, and his office was full of luggage and personal belongings and burnt papers, and there was a camp bed beside the door and a razor on a suitcase.

  ‘Keep a way clear to the river,’ he advised them. The students all belong to the Kuomintang and Kwei’s people have cut the railroad south.’

  He promised to find a house for them, and offered to keep them supplied so long as the river trade was secure, but he freeely admitted that he intended to bolt if the trouble grew too big.

  ‘I have a wife and three children in Shanghai, you understand,’ he said. ‘I can
not afford to stay too long.’

  They were still plagued by the problem of transport, as one of the ancient Peugeots Tsu had provided in Hwai-Yang had finally given up the ghost, and he agreed to rent them a Citroen with its tonneau rebuilt into an open truck. It was as old--probably even older--as the defunct Peugeot but the engine still worked and the wheels still went round, and De Sa said that if he had to leave they were welcome to keep it and anything else they could find in his store.

  ‘If you don’t have it, the students will,’ he pointed out.

  They arranged for the rest of the petrol and oil to be delivered and took with them a few maps of the area, two or three old army-issue tents dating from the Boxer Rising and several heavy wire-spoked wheels which Sammy thought might be of use in an emergency.

  Outside they found a group of students with the Peugeot’s bonnet open, trying to start it, and they had to throw them out before they could drive away. As they rattled on to the field at Yaochow, they saw that Lawn had returned once more and that the engine of the Crossley was already emitting clouds of blue smoke to the delight of the watching coolies and Wang’s shrieking children.

  ‘Lawn’s made it,’ Sammy crowed as they stopped.

  Lawn waved and Ira’s heart went out to him. He’d been a nuisance from the day they’d first met him and had never been very reliable, but for once he’d done all they’d asked of him and more.

  He grinned at Sammy. Neither of them had ever regarded Tsu’s war with Kwei as any of their concern, but since they were being paid to do a job, they were both trying to do it conscientiously, and he was delighted to realise that, despite the suddeness of the move from Hwai-Yang, they had hardly lost a thing worth keeping.

  ‘Apart from spares, Sammy,’ he said. ‘We’ve got more than when we left.’

  2

  Within a week the airfield at Yaochow was in complete working order, with even the dilapidated farm building clear of rubbish and Wang on the roof replacing the scattered tiles. One half had been arranged as an office and the other contained a camp bed and a coloured Peking rug, for whoever stayed on duty overnight.