There was still one problem, though. The matter of Wei’s uniform. He was dressed in the traditional garb of a Shaanxi farmer. The lieutenant commanding Wei’s platoon did not approve of it. He also did not approve of the semi-rags the rest of his platoon wore, but there was nothing he could do about that – they had not been issued with modern combat uniforms. But he wanted at least one member of his platoon to look smart and modern. So he ordered two members of his platoon – brothers named Dirty Rat and Fat Rat – to march with Wei to a high-class tailoring shop and there get him properly fitted out in a smartly tailored military uniform.
Dirty and Fat Rat licked their lips and marched into the crowds with Wei trying to keep step between them. Down a street they found a likely clothing emporium selling European-style outfits. Dirty and Fat Rat were both on the large size so they had no trouble with the guard standing at the doorway. They went into the hushed and tasteful interior. The proprietor was standing behind a long table covered in expensive and respectable looking fabrics and silks. He looked up and saw them approaching, then he looked behind them to see what the guard was doing. The guard didn’t seem to be anywhere about. He looked at the three rough men beadily and drew himself up.
‘What do you want?’
‘We want a properly tailored soldier’s uniform for our friend here from Shaanxi.’
The proprietor had obviously never had a peasant in his shop before. And the only soldiers he’d ever entertained here had been of the higher ranks.
‘Get out of my shop,’ he said, ‘I don’t serve ruffians.’
‘Ruffians?’ said Dirty Rat, placing his hands on the table and staring deep into the eyes of the now twitching proprietor. ‘He’s just called us ruffians.’
‘I heard,’ said Fat Rat, sitting down on one of the most expensive silks and blowing his nose on it.
‘You call us ruffians? A civilian like you calls us soldiers, who are about to go out and die so that you might live, so that you can continue to make your sweet little profits and screw the whores down the road, you call us ruffians? We are patriots.’
Wei, the most law-abiding of men, had never found himself in a situation like this before.
‘This man,’ continued Dirty Rat, indicating Wei, ‘he has lost almost every member of his family to the murdering Japanese dogs, and now, after all that, he is volunteering, he has sworn an oath to lay down his life, to die on the field of battle so that slugs and cozening worms such as yourself can continue to suck the life blood out of common people and ooze out your profits.’
Fat Rat had now set light to one of the proprietor’s subtler textiles and was lighting his cigarette with it.
The proprietor stared desperately over Dirty Rat’s shoulder. The guard was obviously long gone.
‘All right,’ said the shop owner, breathing out, ‘what do you want?’
‘As I’ve already told you,’ said Dirty Rat, indicating Wei, ‘I want a private’s uniform for this northerner here, measured and fitted exactly to his body, made from the highest quality cloth, so that when he wears it he will bring splendour to our regiment and when he dies in it and passes into the afterlife it will be an honourable and fine shroud for him when he lies in the ground.’
‘Do it now,’ said Fat Rat, holding his burning rag close to a high pile of silks.
‘If you come back this afternoon…’ said the proprietor.
‘Do it now,’ said Dirty Rat, ‘in twenty minutes, or we set fire to your shop.’
‘Come in here,’ shrieked the proprietor to his assistants, ‘at once!’
The shop suddenly filled with fitters with measuring tapes and cutters with scissors and seamstresses with needles and pins and thread. The fitters ripped off Wei’s farmer’s clothes and started measuring him and screaming out numbers, the cutters measured out the olive brown cloth and sliced their scissors through it, throwing it to the seamstresses who with lightning fingers sewed and shaped the jacket and breeches and cap as all the while the proprietor screamed at all of them.
It had hardly started before it was finished. Wei stood before them in a full and magnificent private’s uniform, tailored exactly to his body. The proprietor was on hands and knees before him fitting some smart black boots on him and winding puttees round his legs.
The proprietor arose and walked slowly around his employees’ handiwork. He noticed some irregular stitching on the left shoulder of Wei’s jacket.
‘Nuan, you slut,’ he hissed at a girl, ‘look at this stitching.’ He turned to Dirty Rat. ‘Do you want it corrected?’
‘Of course,’ said Dirty Rat, who was scoffing some rather delicious sugared almonds laid out for customers on a side table, ‘get on with it.’
Nuan scurried forwards, corrected her loose sewing and, with a cuff from her boss, scurried back to her position.
The proprietor bowed to the soldiers. Not returning his gesture, Dirty and Fat Rat started towards the door.
Wei had a dilemma. ‘Thank you,’ he muttered, half-bowing to the owner and then hurrying after the other two. The three of them marched out through the door. At least Dirty Rat and Fat Rat marched; Wei did his best to imitate them.
From then on, within the Deplorables, Wei, because of his uniform, was known affectionately as ‘Posh Northerner’.
*
The 22nd set off on its march to Tengxian. They would march north-east through the mountains to Xuzhou then on to Taierzhuang – a distance of some three hundred miles – before turning north for a further fifty miles to Tengxian. At Tengxian they would face the full onslaught of the 10th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army under Rensuke Isogai. They would not retreat. They would fight until the last man.
Soldiers like marching. They comment on everything they pass. Pretty girls, ugly girls, self-important men, un-self-important men, swineherds, the swineherd’s pigs, passing coolies and porters and carts and carriages. Children love to follow them, shouting out, waving, begging from them. The soldiers love answering back, laughing, giving as good as they get.
But above all they love singing.
Back in Wuhan a keen young student had been teaching the 22nd some gung-ho patriotic songs to proudly sing on the march. But, with his high Mandarin accent, they hadn’t understood a word he’d said and he couldn’t understand a word they said. Indeed, many of them hadn’t even realized he was teaching them songs. So they didn’t sing any of his songs. Instead as they marched they cheerfully sang songs about girls of low morals and what the whole regiment had done to them, popular drinking songs, a favourite song about a famous victory they’d won when they’d routed the army of a rival warlord who’d invaded Sichuan from the neighbouring state of Yunnan. But above all they sang children’s songs, because everyone knew them and everyone liked them. Silly, nonsensical, fantastical doggerel.
At each halt Wei was given instruction by a sergeant – on cleanliness, orderliness, obedience, a list of punishments for major and minor crimes and misdemeanours, the chain of command, the orders expected on the battlefield and how they should be obeyed, how to avoid venereal diseases, and above all how to operate his rifle and the supreme importance of keeping it clean and ready for use at all times.
Wei was issued with a highly unusual rifle by the regiment’s armourer. By now the armourer had run out of the rifles ‘liberated’ from the Chinese warehouse near Xian, and he was handing out weapons from the original Sichuan armoury which he had wisely kept in the back of his cart. So Wei was given a short Lee Enfield Mark 4 rifle. Instead of a normal bayonet it had a formidable nine-inch spike known as a pig-sticker. The weapon held ten rounds in its magazine with another up the spout and, with its superbly rifled barrel of finely forged steel, was extremely accurate and had a range of up to a mile. Because it was cased in wood from butt to barrel, it meant that rapid fire could be continued almost indefinitely without burning the soldiers’ hands. It was extremely reliable if kept clean and oiled and fired .303 ammunition. Wei, who liked all well-made tools, admir
ed it as it lay in his hand. On its casing it had stamped ‘Made in the County of Middlesex’.
How had it suddenly turned up in remote Sichuan?
The Lee Enfield had been the standard issue rifle of the British Army for fifty years. Five years ago, a platoon of British soldiers had been ambushed in a remote mountain pass in Afghanistan by Pathan tribesmen and killed to a man. The Pathan stripped their bodies and took their rifles. Since .303 ammunition was scarce they sold them on across the Himalayas and this particular one had ended up in Sichuan. The armourer – who had a taste for fine weapons – brought it there at an arms bazaar but still had no ammunition for it. This problem was solved when, in Wuhan, he had visited the government arsenal and found a whole wooden box full of .303 ammunition. It had fallen off the back of a British Army lorry on the Bund.2
The armourer, during pauses on the march, because he admired this beautiful weapon, spent a great deal of time instructing Wei on how to fire it and how to clean and oil it. He emphasized again and again how clean it must be kept and how well oiled. Wei, the skilled farmer, knew all about maintaining fine tools and complex machinery.
The Deplorables marched on for Tengxian.
9
I have read my class’s plays. They are awful. Totally unsuited to the job they are meant to do. Tian Boqi’s is especially awful. One long Marxist rant with the chief character, an idealistic young student, screaming incessantly at a whole herd of peasants.
I decide the way to get them to understand what is needed, rather than holding long sterile debates in a classroom, is by letting them see first-hand some of the superb and wildly popular drama and drum singing which is performed each day on our streets. Let them see how ordinary Chinese flock to it, become enthralled in the story. How skilled writers and actors can bewitch and entrance their audiences – their techniques and tricks and artifices. How they can learn from this and serve their country.
So my class and I catch a morning ferry across the Yangtze to the Bund, where such a rich variety of drama is daily performed.
In fact, I’m not being exactly accurate when I describe all their scripts as worthless. There is one which is in fact quite useable, written, amazingly, by the perpetually smiling, perpetually childlike Chang Lee – he who was raised in rather sheltered circumstances by a rather over-controlling mother. His play is about a mischievous monkey who makes friends with a lonely child called Lian and comes to live with him in his house. This upsets Lian’s mother because the monkey is often naughty and leaves terrible messes behind him. His mother tells Lian that the monkey must go. Lian is terribly upset. He talks with the monkey. The monkey is very sorry and explains he behaves this way because the Japanese came and set fire to the tree where he and his whole family lived and chased them all away so the monkey became lost and didn’t know where to go. The monkey promises not to make any more messes. Lian and the monkey tell all this to Lian’s mother and Lian’s mother takes pity on the monkey, who stays and becomes a valued and beloved member of their household.
I can’t see this story persuading many peasants to take up arms against the Japanese, but it will work beautifully with children. Especially children who have been scared witless by all the mayhem and fear they sense around them but don’t understand why. This, in a gentle way, explains what is happening, gives reassurance.
I take the script down the corridor to my friend Lao Xiang – he who is so brusque and aggressive in his adult writing but maintains a soft spot for children and writes gentle truths for them in his poems and playlets. I explain to him some of Lee’s more bizarre upper-class characteristics before suggesting the two of them might make a good children’s writing team. Lao looks wolfish and licks his lips.
As our ferry departs from Wuchang I’m cheered to see large numbers of junks being loaded with the light industrial machinery and equipment of the worker cooperatives General Feng Yuxiang has been setting up in the refugee camps. The members of these co-ops carefully supervise the loading of their machinery while their families, laden with children and possessions, board the same junks for their long journey upstream to Chungking. We Chinese are starting to do that most un-Chinese thing – organize ourselves.
Our ferry is out on the waters. A dull throb starts to permeate the air. We look up. A large fleet of Japanese bombers are flying slowly, menacingly over Wuhan. This is the first time I have seen a large raid. The passengers chatter nervously among themselves. The planes are flying west over the Bund, crossing the Han River just before it joins the Yangtze, and are now starting to drop bombs over Hanyang, Wuhan’s industrial area. It is packed with foundries and steel mills and armouries and factories and textile mills. Around them are packed the hovels of all the workers. The fattest and easiest of targets. The bombs rip into it – there are explosions, smoke, fires – our passengers gasp and cry out. My students shout angry slogans at the bombers. There is no anti-aircraft fire and the bombers fly slowly off, unharmed, towards the north.
Fires break out all over Hanyang. Much of our country’s remaining industrial production is centred in that small area. The smoke from the fires combines with the smoke from Hanyang’s factories and steel mills so that the whole area disappears beneath a pall of smog From within it issues a confused cacophony of ambulance sirens and fire engine bells. Finally, the Japanese bombers long since departed, three of our antiquated biplane fighters manage to rise into the air to fight them.
One thing cheers me, though. Down by the Hanyang riverside, despite the terror and chaos of the air raid, work continues uninterrupted around the docks and quays. Unflinchingly, coolies and dockers and cranes continue to load the freighters and junks tied up there with vital steel and machinery and lathes and generators and lorries to be transported upstream through the Three Gorges to the safety of South-West China where factories are even now being built to continue, indeed to increase our production. Whole foundries and factories are being systematically dismantled in Hanyang to be transported, piece by piece, upstream to their new sites. And all through the bombs and destruction the steamers and junks with their precious cargo keep backing out from the docks and steaming and sailing steadily upstream while other vessels nose in to take their places.
Quite sobered, we land on the Bund. The Bund is of course continuing in its usual frenzied manner, totally unaffected by life, death and Japanese bombers. We land amid the coffins and are met with a very stirring sight. A crocodile of very young children, orphans – heads shaven, uniforms neat and clean – make their way, hand in hand, down the gangplank onto a waiting steamer which will evacuate them upstream to Chungking and a new life. In the waters below churn the usual corpses (there has been a battle to the north and the bodies have floated down the Han River), so some kind soul has thoughtfully provided lots of kites streaming colourfully above the steamer – kites shaped like bright butterflies or castles or beautiful angelfish with streamers floating down from them – so the little children naturally stare upwards at them rather than down at the carnage below. They cheerfully pipe a popular children’s song written by my friend Lao Xiang:
Fly away, fly away,
Fly away, birds.
Winter comes with frost and snow,
The cold chill comes, there is no food,
Fly away, fly away.
Fly back, fly back,
Fly back, birds.
Spring comes, the air is warm,
The trees are full of flowers and scent,
Fly back, fly back.
Let’s hope when they get upstream they’ll be able to watch a fine play by Chang Lee.
We pass from the world of coffins into the world of food and clothes markets. Then something unpleasant happens.
There is a part of the Bund where many beggars gather. Quite a few of them are children, because children attract the greatest pity and largest contributions from the public. The men – demons, more like – who run these children deliberately starve them so they look gaunt and pathetic. Some go even further. They
deliberately and cruelly mutilate their limbs and faces – legs are removed, eyes are pulled out and faces cut about – ‘This is what the barbarian Japanese have done to our poor children’ shout their masters, ‘come and see the horror’ – so that, filled with pity, the crowds contribute even more. There is one tiny girl there with gouged-out eyes and a scar all across her face – those fiendish Japanese! She so upsets me – she reminds me of my own daughter who I deserted. She could herself now be living in such awful circumstances! I turn my head away. But one person in our company does not pass by on the other side.
Tian Boqi catches one sight of this girl and stops dead. His face turns white. Muscles swell and work up and down all through his throat and face. He is furious. Fists clenched he moves, staring towards the atrocity. I get between him and her.
‘Tian Boqi There is nothing we can do for her.’
‘Get out of my way, you cowardly Manchu worm,’ he snarls, brushing me aside, and pushing his way towards a guard who leans against a wall nonchalantly smoking a cigarette.
Wuhan Page 33