‘Carry on,’ prompted Agnes.
‘I was fixing a sliver elsewhere, so when one broke close to the strapping belt she had to crawl in. We’d already been working twelve hours that day. She must have been tired. The strapping belt had buckles on it, loops of leather. It flies round at an enormous rate, takes power from the main spindle up above us to drive all the machines below. The attached buckles fly all around and it must have been that Kaija, already tired, as she was trying to bind the sliver together, moved her arm too far to one side so that the buckle on the belt snatched hold of her and in a second she was whirled dangling upwards, screaming and shouting, and smashed against a beam in the ceiling and then crashed back down again and hit the floor and in a few short seconds, before the strap could be stopped, was pummeled and crashed to nothing, a pulp. Not a whole bone in her body. Blood. She was cut down, carried away. Work continued. That was the day I became a socialist.’
There was a pause. Hu giggled for having spoken so long and greedily.
‘But Hu,’ continued Agnes, ‘you can read and write. You are an educated person. How did that happen?’
‘There were good people about. Very good people. You’ve heard of the YWCA?’
‘The Young Women’s Christian Association? Sure. They’re good folk.’
‘In Shanghai they were set up about forty years ago. By American Christian women. Christian Socialists. They believed that Jesus Christ was a revolutionary. Their message was taken up eagerly by many eager young Chinese girls. Within a few years the Association in Shanghai was run by Chinese women. To bring on the revolution they provided health services and educational and technical classes for working people. Legal support for those with cases against the mill companies. They helped the workers form trade unions to fight for better wages and conditions.’
‘And they succeeded?’
‘Well, ten years ago they were doing well. But then came the repression. Socialists and communists being shot down, arrested, executed. Just like you in America.’
‘Yup.’
‘So that in the end the YWCA and the YMCA were really the only organizations left that could fight for working people in Shanghai. After all, Chiang Kai-shek is a Christian himself. So there’s a limit to how much he can stop the work of his fellow Christians. The YWCA educated me. Taught me to think for myself.’
They’d reached a part of the Bund which people tended to avoid, where the crowds thinned. It was heralded by the stink of dried blood, unwashed bodies, of gangrene and excrement. Everywhere there were swarms of flies, even in January, feasting on congealed blood, dirty bandages, near-naked bodies. There were groans and screams and curses of pain. Agnes and Hu had reached their destination. The section of the Bund where the authorities – overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of wounded, dying, and dead soldiers, delivered hourly by ferries, by railways, by the cartload, on foot – simply dumped them to die on the bare cobbles.
Hu smiled at Agnes without giggling. Agnes for once smiled back.
As they stepped delicately and carefully over and between the packed bodies, hands grabbed their skirts – ‘Water ladies, please. For God’s sake, water.’ They stepped over the dead, over men who lay dull-eyed with hands clutching their bellies where dried blood glued torn uniforms to wounds, over men from whose broken jaws came inhuman noises and gurglings. Everywhere flies crawled over faces. They reached the dressing station and relieved the dog-tired volunteers who had been working there continuously – cleaning wounds, disinfecting them, rebandaging them, resetting broken limbs – since they had relieved Hu and Agnes the previous night.
The next bloody body was hauled onto the table.
Hu smiled. Has the world always been this insane, she thought?
*
General Feng Yuxiang, forbidden by Chiang Kai-shek from fighting any battles, stood in front of a vast, very busy building site. On a great grass plain west of Wuhan row after row of cheap wooden homes and shacks were being constructed, all on a precise north–south axis so that the farming families and refugees, on entering them, would immediately feel reassuringly aligned with the gods and the heavens and their ancestors to the north.
It’s always so much more satisfying to build houses rather than destroy them, he reflected.
Large army trucks roared continuously on and off site, hauling logs and roofing straw and door frames and stone and light machinery. Carts arrived piled high with iron cooking pots, large sacks of vegetables, wheat and rice. Some carried bricks so that kilns and baking ovens could be built, others firewood and poor- quality coal. Civilian handcarts were laden with yarn and looms for weaving, spades and hoes so that vegetables could be grown in the fields nearby. Endless streams of coolies carried anything and everything in their panniers. Cattle and sheep and geese and ducks were being herded on site by girls and children to be slaughtered and fill the cooking pots of the starving and hungry. A sawmill, powered by a diesel generator, was already at work, its great iron base holding the madly revolving blade steady as it screeched and bit and sliced its way into logs to make floorboards and planks for the floors and walls for the houses in the cold winter weather. The offcuts and sawdust were being distributed for firewood.
As they arrived on foot the country people were being divided into the different provinces they had come from and sent to individual streets, so that everyone in the same neighbourhood spoke the same dialect and felt at home with neighbours who knew the districts they were familiar with. Some happy reunions took place. Some reunions, when only one or two members of a family survived, were tragic. But all the citizens of these new communities had experienced similar grief, and support and comfort were immediately offered by their new neighbours.
Several plots of ground in each row of houses were left vacant for businesses and cooperatives to set themselves up. Some of the refugees who’d already been here several weeks, their homes built and families organized, had opened kitchens and dining rooms that specialized in the foods and dishes of their local areas – familiar tastes and smells again providing reassurance for those so far from home. Others immediately set up as builders and labourers and, paid by the government, started constructing the new homes for all the new refugees pouring in. Central government also provided loans for cooperatives so that the many skills that the refugees came with could be immediately turned to their use and profit. Skilled weavers were making cloth, and women sewed, knitted and made clothes which could be given to the families of their members, sold on to other refugees, or hawked on the markets of the Bund.
A large group of Chinese Christians who’d wished even in peacetime to set up a utopian community imitating the life of Jesus and his disciples had brought with them from Shanghai knitting and sewing machines and set themselves up in a street of their own. They were already exporting their clothes inland to Changsha and up the Yangtze to Chungking. Every third product they made was given away free to their fellow refugees. With great skill and delicacy they weaved in decorations and beautiful patterns because, as they said, they wished to bring colour and delight to all who had suffered so much.
In different streets cooperatives which specialized in skills and crafts native to a particular region in China were being set up. Printing shops from the big cities, paper makers, ink makers, carpenters and furniture makers from forest areas. Skinners stripped the hides of slaughtered cattle, tanners stank the place out as they cured the skins, leather-workers took the cured skins and cut and sewed clothes and bags and suitcases and shoes and a thousand other useful objects. Basket weavers wove (the banks of the Yangtze providing copious reeds and withies), skilled workers turned medicated cotton and gauze into bandages and slings both for the army and wounded civilians. Small foundries belched smoke, puffed rice specialists puffed rice, and workshops for brewing beer and canning food proliferated.
In each street a larger building was put up that it could be used simultaneously as a temple for prayer, a meeting house for the community to debate and decide
its future in, and a place where children and adults could be educated. A cacophony of prayers, heated arguments, and determined rote learning rang from the building.
All this might seem a bit impractical to a cynical Western reader, used to having their every need supplied by anonymous supranational corporations. All this getting together and producing things cooperatively is all very well in theory, but when you get down to practicalities a few people end up doing all the work while the rest lounge around and sponge off them.
This misunderstands profoundly the character of the Chinese people in the 1930s. A farming family was almost invariably large – having ten, twelve, or even more members. Unless every-one worked almost all the time they would starve. So from the age children could walk they were given tasks and jobs. Everyone worked for the good of everyone else – it’s how they kept alive. Jobs and duties were divided up. Men decided among themselves who was best at particular jobs and each did the one they were best at. The same with women. And when big tasks – constructing temples or dams, or fighting off floods or fires – had to be undertaken, the whole village, after discussion, would set themselves to it as one, united. They regarded their togetherness and industry with great pride.
So when these broken and torn apart families, their lives in pieces, came together – to work as one, to cooperate, to share – this renewed commingling and cooperation felt good, very good. It warmed them. It reassured them. It was a new family, a new community building itself together again, healing its wounds. Working amid people, giving of yourself for others, felt natural, gave you security, pointed a way towards a new life.
General Feng, in his usual peasant dress, stood at the entrance to the site through which all the lorries and carts and refugees came pouring in. Having fought in China’s civil wars in almost every northern province, he was fluent in most of their dialects. Smiling broadly, he spoke to every refugee who arrived.
‘My back is aching. So are my legs.’
‘Don’t worry, grandma, there is a warm bed where you are going to.’
‘I have lost three of my children. Three.’
‘That is a great sorrow, mother. A great sorrow. But here your remaining children will be safe.’
‘I have no money to provide for my family. They have had no food or drink.’
‘Don’t worry, husband. There is work here and you will be paid fairly and your family will eat.’
Feng squatted down.
‘Why are you so silent, little one? No need for you to worry. There will be lots of children here for you to play with.’
‘We are from Jinzhou in Liaoning Province. We do not know where to go.’
‘You’ve come a long way. You go right here, along to the eighth row of houses. You will find plenty of people from Liaoning there.’
All the time he watched them. He listened to everyone. To refugees who had just arrived and residents who’d been here for several weeks. Listened intently to their comments, complaints, suggestions, his sharp mind cataloguing and analyzing what they said. He would do what he could to ease their problems, but mainly he knew it would be the people themselves who would together deliberate and debate and solve their own problems. As they had always done. Every so often he turned to his aide to note a particular difficulty or to order a soldier to go to a specific street to settle a dispute or affray.
A large column of refugees contains more than its fair share of ne’er-do-wells and bandits, some of them lifelong criminals, others simply adapting to the desperate needs of a death march. Feng had a shrewd eye and winnowed out the likely suspects. After a sufficient number had been collected he gave them a brief talk on what would happen if they broke the laws of the camp. Those he judged harmless he allocated a dwelling, warning them that one of his soldiers would visit them and their neighbours every day to see if there were any problems. If there were, that person would be removed to a row of dwellings next to the military barracks, where those he adjudged serious criminals were already being sent. Anyone breaking the law, depending on the severity of the crime, would either be expelled from the camp or hung.
As he spoke to a group of refugees from Hebei a woman in a peasant smock walked up and smiled at the general.
‘Husband.’
‘Wife. What have you been up to?’
‘A meeting of teachers.’
‘Hope you learnt something.’
As Feng had educated himself as he rose through the ranks of the army so had his wife. While Feng learnt and experimented within soldiering and social engineering, Li Dequan specialized in education and children.
‘We’ve got teachers for almost every school except the Shanxi one. We can’t find anyone who can speak Shanxi dialect.’
Feng clicked his fingers, thinking for a moment. He summoned his adjutant.
‘Who speaks Shanxi in the regiment? There’s someone.’
The adjutant thought for a moment. ‘That private in the catering corps.’
‘Right,’ said Feng. ‘Cuts up the vegetables. Why isn’t he a cook by now? Bright enough. I think he can read.’
‘His family’s from Jincheng.’
Feng turned to his wife.
‘If you send a teacher to the Shanxi school this cook can translate for them until they pick up the dialect. Never know – that private’s clever enough to become a teacher himself.’
He indicated the adjutant should arrange this.
Li Dequan looked at her husband. ‘We should both be in Wuhan.’
‘Indeed. You have that meeting about orphans, I’m meant to be getting on that train to Taierzhuang.’
They hitched a ride on a passing lorry. It was packed with camp carpenters going down to the ferry to work on a similar refugee camp starting on the other side of the river.
Feng hung on one side of the cab, Li on the other.
His adjutant took over his role of welcoming the new arrivals.
3
Standing alone in his private railway carriage General Bai Chongxi, newly appointed Deputy Chief of the Chinese General Staff, ritually washed his hands, his arms, his feet, his legs. A tall, thin man with a clean-shaven head, he had a high-bridged, strong nose and a prominent chin.
In the early morning light he started to recite his prayers. Standing on his prayer mat facing Mecca, he stated Allahu Akbar (‘God is great’), and then proceeded with his Rak’ha. Having finished he robustly declared his personal Jihad against all Japanese soldiers who had invaded his country. As did all China’s Muslims. He then dressed himself, ate his breakfast, washed his mouth and hands, and stepped down from the special train which had brought him to Taierzhuang overnight from Wuhan.
Generals Li Zongren and Feng Yuxiang awaited him on the platform. He grinned at them. Li Zongren was a small, wiry individual with sharp deep-set eyes and an emotional temperament. As soon as Bai was appointed Deputy Chief of the General Staff he put Li in charge of the Chinese Army’s Fifth Battle Zone, an area covering much of Central China and the stretch of its East Coast not yet seized by the Japanese. Li now commanded the very areas, centred on Wuhan, which Japan was intent on seizing.
Beside him stood General Feng, fat and muscular with, as always, a beatific smile on his face and dressed in peasant clothes. As he put it – ‘I was born a peasant. I will die a peasant.’ Bai noted Feng had wet mud on his knees and concluded he’d been praying to his Christian god. The railway station was outside the city of Taierzhuang so the three men climbed into the back of a large open-topped Mercedes sedan, their adjutants and aides piling into a couple of following vehicles and they set off towards the city.
A branch of the Grand Canal runs along the southern edge of Taierzhuang. It is fifty yards wide and unfordable, pinioning the town as a line of defence. Long a strategic fortress, Taierzhuang’s wide walls had been rebuilt in the 1860s with a robust outer casing of fired brick and an inner core of mudbricks to absorb the impact of high-explosive shells. Within the walls the town is oblong-shaped and measures rough
ly a mile north to south and half a mile east to west. The waters of the Grand Canal feed a moat outside the walls which runs all the way around the city.
The convoy carrying the generals approached from the south. They bumped over a pontoon bridge and entered the city by its south-eastern gate. Inside it was immediately dark and shaded, a dense labyrinth of tiny streets and alleyways, the dwellings crowding together and overhanging every street. An excellent location for a defensive, attritional battle. The enemy would have to fight for every house, house by house, room by room. But it was not this that made Bai and Feng smile at Li’s cleverness in choosing Taierzhuang for his battlefield. It was the nature of the dark blackish stone from which these buildings had been constructed.
The convoy passed through the city’s narrow streets and emerged through the two large guard towers at its north gate. They motored on, passing farms and outbuildings all made from the same dark stone. After about a mile natural outcrops of this same rock, from which the city had been built, shot up on either side of them. Feng Yuxiang laughed, the convoy stopped, Feng jumped out and bounded over to one of the outcrops. This bull of a man drove his shoulder hard into the rock, grabbed the rock, pulled the rock, kicked it, did everything in his power to shift it short of biting it. Then he bit it. It did not yield an inch.
‘Congratulations, Li, you old fox,’ chortled Feng. ‘Black granite. The hardest rock on earth. Each building, each natural outcrop like this makes a perfect fortress. Bullets, bombs, artillery shells will all bounce off it without harming it a speck. Build a maze of tunnels and trenches between them and under them, then draw in their tanks and infantry and…’
The three men stood beneath the rock, Feng contemplating the beauty of the idea, then Bai Chongxi, the senior officer, coughed and brought the meeting to order.
‘Gentlemen, thank you for attending today. I will first lay out for you how I interpret the current world situation – nations’ relationships with each other, who might fight who, our own position within this framework – then I’ll suggest how this situation might evolve in the future. This will give us some idea of what we can hope to achieve in this war and how we might fight it. General Li will then describe to us his proposed strategy for halting the Japanese advance here at Taierzhuang and thus stopping their advance on Wuhan – a city it is vital we hold for at least six months. Finally I hope that General Feng, irritating socialist and unshaven peasant that he might be, will educate us on the tactics of close-quarter and night fighting, techniques it is vital our soldiers adopt in these surroundings to defeat the Japanese.’
Wuhan Page 25