Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘…from the far north-west, the Nankou Pass…’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘It is, as you’d know, a vital pass which we cannot allow the Japanese to seize. General Tang Enbo with his Second Army Corps had the pass well guarded and there was no possibility of the Japanese breaking through it. They attacked and they attacked. It was one of the bloodiest battles yet. But General Tang held on. But then suddenly his underling, the cowardly General Liu, chose to withdraw his troops with the result that General Tang could be attacked from the rear by the Japanese, and he was forced to retreat immediately thus giving up possession of the pass. I read a report of the battle in the Dagong Bao. It was written by Fan Changjiang, in my opinion the finest war correspondent we have, so I trust it.’

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘At the end of his article Fan demanded the execution of General Liu for cowardice.’ The waiter looks straight at me. ‘Do you think he should be executed?’

  There is something not quite right about the waiter’s story. The battle had indeed been a terrible disaster. And General Liu thoroughly deserved to be shot – though, of course, he wasn’t. But I’d asked the waiter for any news of recent events in the war and he’d answered me by describing a battle which took place over three months ago. Then I understand why. I’m obviously talking to a far more intelligent man than I realized. He’s not talking about events in the far north-west three months ago, he’s subtly alluding to an event we’d all just witnessed in Jinan. The flight of General Han Fuju. Waiters must be careful what they say – especially in wartime.

  I look him back straight in his face. ‘Yes, I agree, General Liu should have been executed immediately for cowardice.’

  ‘He dishonours the name of Liu.’

  I offer him a cigarette. He accepts and goes and gets me another tea – this time piping hot and sweetly fragrant, for which he charges me not a penny.

  ‘What is the recent war news?’ I ask.

  ‘They’ve finally withdrawn from Shanghai.’

  ‘Sad but inevitable.’

  ‘At least we stood face to face with them at Sihang Warehouse and fought them back time after time. Showed them what Chinese men can do.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I find out his name is Chao. Chao walks over and liberates a nearly full bottle of French wine from the table of a snoring European – he’s already had two bottles so is unlikely to remember this one – and fills two immaculately polished glasses. Our conversation broadens. As the train hobbles through the night – the tracks are terrible – we discuss the various fronts in the war, the terrifying speed of the Japanese advance. Chao is an aficionado of newspapers, knowing which are pro or anti the war, which editors and journalists receive bribes and from whom, which reporters actually report from the front as opposed to writing what some general or politician tells them to write a hundred miles behind the lines. He trusts only Dagong Bao. I agree with him.

  We discuss the qualities needed to make a proper war correspondent – courage, some military training so he can analyze what is happening, the ability to write vivid, exact prose and pick small details to illustrate wider, more general truths. Above all, he must avoid the slop and emotional mendacity of propaganda. When things go badly he must have the integrity to let his readers know, however indirectly. All the time he talks I make mental notes. This man should be teaching my students in Wuhan.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘but you are a waiter on a train. How on earth are you so well informed?’

  He looks at me. He starts to crumble.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologize hurriedly, ‘I do not wish in any way to offend you. I have been so rude…’

  He looks at me. He decides something.

  ‘I will tell you my story. My downfall is gambling.’ He looks at me some more. ‘Since I was a boy I’ve bet on things – which fly will crawl up the wall fastest, will a fat man or a thin man come through that gate next? It was only tiny sums but it caused my mother deep grief. My father was a gambler and ran away after he’d ruined us. But I took no notice of her. I got a job on this train. Suddenly I was serving all these important, beautifully dressed men. Rich men. And I noticed they all read newspapers. And that almost all of them read only two things in the newspapers: horse racing – at Shanghai, at Wuhan, at Hong Kong – and stock exchange prices. So that was two types of gambling right there – and they’d all obviously done really well out of it. So I thought, I can do this. But I couldn’t read. So on these long nights on the train I got the guard to teach me. I started to read their newspapers. Well, I couldn’t make head nor tail of all that stock market stuff. Far too difficult for my head. But horse racing? Love at first sight. When the train was in Shanghai or Wuhan I’d go to the races – all the colours of the jockey’s Shandong shirts and the ladies’ dresses and the shouting and screaming and gambling. I thought I was in heaven. And I spent all my money. Then I got into debt, deep debt, gangster debt. So I couldn’t eat. My mother couldn’t eat. For a week we couldn’t eat. I was so ashamed. Then I got enough money to bring her home some food. She wouldn’t touch it. “Mother, dear Mother, you’ll starve to death, please eat. I’ve brought you nice food. Good food. I’ve still got my job on the railways.” She was dying but she wouldn’t eat a crumb til I swore, hand on the stone tablets of my ancestors, that I would never ever gamble again. Which I haven’t. But now I can read and I am stuck with all these newspapers every night. So I started to read other things. In a newspaper you can travel to foreign countries. Through the pictures and photographs in newspapers I have travelled to Chicago, the home of Al Capone, to Paris, to exotic islands like Tahiti and the Bahamas, I have seen the strange rituals of Buckingham Palace. And then I started to read the news. Not only here but in the rest of the world. Should Mr Chamberlain appease Herr Hitler? What is the effect of Mr Roosevelt’s economic policies on America and on Japan and on us in China? Is Moscow a good or a bad thing? And all the time the Japanese are threatening. Then suddenly they invade us, full tilt. I feel all sorts of emotions. Most Chinese people do not feel any emotions because they do not know who the Japanese are. They do not know what China is. But I do, because I have read my newspapers and taught myself to think, so I have very definite ideas on why the Japanese have invaded and whether we can fight back or not…’

  Suddenly three rich families invade the dining car. They’ve got on at an intermediate station and are famished and shouting for food.

  ‘I must go, Mr Lao,’ says Chao getting up and hiding the wine bottle. ‘I look forward to reading your article in Dagong Bao.’

  ‘How do you know my name, that I have written for them?’

  ‘There are no secrets on a train, Mr Lao. I hope we can talk again before the end of our journey?’

  I make my way back down the train, saying my prayers, asking God to protect my sweet family and country, delicately treading amid snoring bodies and tangled limbs and drooling babies and stacked packing cases. As I do so first light seeps through the windows. The young boy who’d been kicking me now lies arms flung out across my smidgeon of space. I softly move them before assuming once more my fetal curl. I fall asleep to the sweet sound of birds singing as every caged bird in the carriage greets the dawn.

  *

  I awake to great excitement. We are arriving at a station. Only a small rural station but suddenly whole bookfuls of things are happening. Even before the train stops it’s assaulted by solid waves of desperate would-be passengers from the platform, trying to propel large bundles through the windows and doors followed by their desperate selves. Most are repelled by the stalwarts already in the train with shouts and punches and curses. Eventually, some are allowed in sans baggage, but the rest have to clamber up the ladder at the end of each carriage onto the roof, already covered by passengers stewing in the fierce midday sun and frying on the red-hot metal. Lots of muffled stamping and shuffling and shouts above us.

  Simultaneously on the side aw
ay from the platform local farmers have already arrived with a whole lot of succulent and less succulent-looking produce and set up their stalls and cooking pots in order to make a killing. As the water tower’s hose is manhandled into the locomotive’s tank, water gushes everywhere, causing canny parents to dangle their infants out of the windows to encourage them to gush in sympathy. Young children demanding the full works are lowered on ropes tied round their waists and squat by the side of the track. Food is passed up from the track to us inside – I have a very nice rice congee. Strings and ropes from the roof are lowered with money and containers tied to them and rise up with food and water attached. Much shouting and haggling takes place.

  Just beyond the spontaneous market something quite surreal is happening. The village where we have stopped is some sort of administrative centre for the area, so it has a courthouse. The courthouse has presumably just condemned several bandits to death, as a gallows has been erected just beyond the market. Since the whole point of official justice is to impress upon the rest of us the importance of not being lured into a life of crime, murder and mayhem, and justice must be seen to be done, it is obviously most efficacious to carry out its sentences in front of as many citizens as possible, and the court official in charge has held back til the market is in full swing and the train has arrived.

  As I eat my rice congee I watch the condemned as they’re led to the scaffold, climb it, and have the ropes tied around their necks. They chat philosophically, resignedly among each other as though nothing unusual is about to occur. One even makes jokes. The others smile – sadly. But the whole frenzy of activity onboard the train and in the market carries on, everyone completely indifferent to what is happening behind them. People are too busy surviving and eating and making a profit to even glance at the prisoners. I alone, it seems, stare at their melancholy prospect. They are launched into eternity as strings and ropes continued to pass up and down laden with goods and children and money. The bandits struggle and choke.

  The train, having taken on sufficient water and coal, suddenly jerks and starts off without warning. Infants are hastily roped in through windows, relieved or unrelieved, last-minute food purchases are hurled through the windows and onto the roof. We steam off round a corner with one bandit still forlornly dancing. Within our carriage the frenzy slowly subsides. Hot food is digested, drinks drunk, experiences related.

  The train steams on.

  By afternoon it is hot and close. Despite the windows being open the smells penetrate everywhere – viscous and foul. I start to recognize everyone by their distinctive stink. I finger the red persimmon fruit in my pocket. Already, like a prune, it is drying out in the heat. But I keep it close to me, as I do my wife’s scarf. They are my sacred lifelines back to my family. Around me families play rock, paper, scissors, groups of men play cards, several women sew. Vicious family quarrels ignite spontaneously. Birds and children sing.

  I practise to be a grandfather by telling the children near me traditional tales from the shadow puppet shows I saw on the streets of Beijing when I was a child. Noble princes, beautiful princesses, avaricious merchants, friendly dragons, horrible demons. They love it all. Then I decide to get epic. To tell the wonderful story of Zhuge Liang at the start of the Battle of Red Cliffs – oh that we had Zhuge Liang leading our armies now! – who, being short of arrows, craftily managed to steal all his enemy Cao Cao’s arrows and then fire them back at him. How he adapted all of his boats to carry straw decks and superstructures, which he then sailed at Cao Cao’s great fleet, so Cao Cao fired all of his arrows at them and all the arrows stuck in the tightly packed straw which Zhuge Liang’s soldiers hid behind so, when Cao Cao had fired all his arrows, Zhuge Liang simply turned his boats around and returned to his base with a huge number of brand new arrows. Zhuge Liang then used all these arrows to fight the great Battle of Red Cliffs, which sent the evil Cao Cao reeling far back into Northern China. When I saw it as a child in the puppet theatre I thought it was a huge battle. All those straw ships, all the horses and soldiers fighting by the Red Cliffs. Hundreds of puppets and backdrops. I remember it as an enormous spine-tingling spectacle. There’s only one problem with retelling this epic story on this train. I am crouched on the floor jammed between two packing cases so that all I have to tell it with are my two hands, which I can scarcely move, and my face. So I use powerful, vivid words, fierce emotions and expressions on my face, a few sharp gestures from my hands, to paint within their minds the same scenes which I had once seen on such a huge scale. An excellent rehearsal for what I must teach my students in Wuhan. That they must do almost everything with virtually nothing.

  My audience cry out for joy when Zhuge Liang does his acts of derring-do, hiss lustily when Cao Cao appears. And the adults start to join in too, correcting me when my version of the Battle of Red Cliffs differs from theirs – every Chinaman possessing his own unique version of the battle. At some point in my performance, I must confess, almost subconsciously, I start to substitute the name Cao Cao with that of the evil Emperor Hirohito, his evil troops for the evil Japanese troops, the wise leader Zhuge Liang becomes our wise leader Chiang Kai-shek and Zhuge Laing’s heroic soldiers become our own heroic troops.

  I must say, in all modesty, that I do a particularly fine Emperor Hirohito, basing him largely on the Fu Manchu films I used to watch in London. So popular is my cramped, crouching thespianism that I am asked to do another performance about every three hours, with the result that I have to wrack my brains for epic events in Chinese history which can star the Emperor Hirohito and General Chiang Kai-shek.

  When I am not doing this historical propaganda I twist myself round to catch a glimpse out of the window of contemporary China. It is terrifying. Beside the railway runs a highway. Men and women and children walk along it in rags, their hair matted and coloured white by the dust, the children’s stalk legs attached to stalk bodies. Families shelter from the sun and wind by digging holes and crouching in them, covering themselves with canvas or straw. Other families sit by the side of the road at the end of their wits, too weary to move another foot. A wounded soldier, like a frog run over by an ox cart, pulls himself along. Half of his left thigh has been blown away by a shell. Another, his left hand severed, huddles like a hedgehog. Dead humans, horses and other animals litter the road. It was probably the same in Zhuge Liang’s time. I turn away in despair.

  *

  Three days into our journey our train approaches a line of mountains which we will have to cross if we are to join the river valley which run down to Wuhan. At the final halt before the climb starts several open wagons are attached to our rear. As they are shunted past us we see them packed with wounded soldiers, groaning and crying in pain, some of their wounds bandaged, many not. There are no medical staff attending them. The stink from their wounds is foul.

  As we start from the halt our ancient locomotive appears to have gained a new lease of life. Perhaps a higher quality of coal is mined in this area, but the chimney blasts out sharp stentorian blasts of energy and the boiler, built in 1871 by the Dübs & Co. works of Polmadie, Glasgow (I checked at the halt), must be at full pressure as we hurtle along.

  As evening closes in we start to climb into the foothills of the mountains, the wheels hammering on the track.

  Each night I have had my learned conversation in the dining car with my waiter friend Chao, freshly briefed from the day’s papers. Each night more and more join our discussion, eager to discuss the war. They in turn have told their friends, with the result we’ve almost become a debating society, everyone giving their opinion at three o’clock in the morning. On this final night Chao draws me aside. He has a rather anxious look on his face.

  He sucks sharply on his cigarette.

  ‘Forgive me for this, and for not telling you earlier,’ he says.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The fact is, I did not tell you the truth when I said I left my mother in Jinan. The fact is I could not bring myself to abandon her, so I smuggled
her aboard this train. It is illegal for railway staff to give relatives free journeys on company trains so I hid her on the roof. She is a very hardy lady and I gave her plenty of blankets. When business is slow in the dining car a colleague covers for me and I smuggle her up food. The thing is, she is a very intelligent woman and wants to know from me everything that is happening in the world, so I’ve been having similar discussions with her on the roof as we’ve been having down here. And she’s been telling everyone on the roof what I’ve been telling her and they’ve all become very interested in the war and being informed about it. The people on the roof are far poorer than the people here in the train, but from my conversations with them it seems to me they ask far more intelligent questions than the people below.

  ‘Anyhow, the thing is, I have agreed tonight to give the people on the roof a talk on the war, on how I believe it will turn out, and the military means by which China will defeat Japan.’

  This I must hear!

  ‘The reason I’m being so secretive,’ he whispers, ‘is because, of course, organizing meetings on trains and addressing them is illegal for members of staff. I will be sacked if I am found out. And if, by some bad luck, a member of the secret police should happen to be on this train and hears of this talk, attends it and then reports me because I have not spoken particularly highly of General Chiang Kai-shek’s military abilities…’

  ‘I understand,’ I say. ‘Secrecy is vital.’

  ‘The meeting will be on the train roof at one o’clock tonight.’ He looks at me directly. ‘I have one more favour to ask of you,’ he says. ‘I would like you to address it.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I will give the main talk, of course. But I, we, would be highly honoured if you perhaps would give an introductory talk, perhaps making the points you made in your Dagong Bao article?’