as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.
O God, when thou goest forth before thy people,
when thou didst march through the wilderness; Selah:
The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God,
The chariots of God are twenty thousand,
even thousands of angels:
the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place.
The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan,
I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea.
That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies,
and the tongue of thy dogs in the same.6
Just as three centuries gone by Oliver’s troops thundered out this psalm as they charged down upon and annihilated the royalist poraille at Naseby and Marston Moor, so China’s troops thundered it out as they passed beneath the Moloch-like jaws of Taierzhuang’s south-east gate and entered Armageddon.
Wei did not need to sing any Christian hymn – he just thought of his family and his farm. He thought of defending the life of his beloved Spider Girl.
*
The southern part of the city which the regiment entered, with its dark buildings and narrow streets, was still surprisingly full of life. Fresh patriotic posters plastered the walls. A cinema was showing Shanghai Love Story. Newsboys called out newspaper headlines, men with sandwich boards advertised concerts and haberdashers, students performed patriotic plays. They marched on. A fat soldier beside Wei, called, unsurprisingly, Grand Arse, scratched his arse. Huang, a soldier in the rank behind, observed, ‘When the shells start to fly, even Grand Arse will forget his fleas.’ They all laughed, even Grand Arse. He laughed loudest of all.
The city became darker and darker. The streets closer and closer. All the soldiers were peering hard ahead of them, trying to assess the situation, take in as much information as they could.
Civilians passed, distressed, fleeing. Some clutching belongings, others too bewildered to carry anything. A woman somehow carried three young children.
Soldiers passed. One cradled a shattered arm, talking to himself, trying to brace himself as blood poured down his hands. Men on stretchers were carried by coolies. Wei’s company asked for information from those who were wounded and still conscious. The wounded replied variously:
‘Hard fighting.’
‘Watch out for snipers.’
‘Japs don’t like steel. Get in close to ’em.’
One wounded man spoke especially to Wei. ‘Don’t throw away your life. Take your time. Think. The longer you live the more Japanese you can kill.’
Wei’s company digested these words. Exchanged opinions, guesses, fears, all the time craning their necks ahead. Grand Arse even ceased scratching.
They were being fed into the north-eastern corner of the city where the fighting, the devastation, was at its most brutal. As they advanced different detachments of them branched off, taking different routes and alleys towards the fighting. They no longer advanced at the march but slowly, carefully, picking their way from building to building, ruin to ruin. Heavy firing came from just ahead, great clouds of heavy oily smoke swirled around them, they choked, cursed. Dead and blown apart abandoned bodies – Chinese and Japanese – became common. In a narrow alley their platoon came to a halt. Between bursts of fire a young officer ran back down the alley to them, conferred with their officer, ran back up the alley. One by one they ducked along the alley, bullets spraying the wall to their right, then tumbled down into the cellar of a semi-destroyed building to their left. They were entering the Taierzhuang Underground.
They followed a maze of tunnels – some dug underneath the ground, others trenches covered with wooden doors or slats. Above them muffled explosions, cries. Sweat was on all their faces, their breathing became harder, sometimes choking on the dust, the smoke-laden air. Gripped their rifles even harder, checked their swords and grenades. Speech evaded them, they grunted at each other. In the darkness, lit only by a single candle, they saw a ladder. Their guide signalled they must be very quiet. With difficulty they quietened their breathing. One by one they climbed up into a lower room in a house. Four Chinese soldiers held it, they all looked to a wall to their right – the wall shared with the house next up the alleyway. Into the wall a cavity had been partly excavated. The guide signalled that four of their detail should relieve the soldiers in this room, the other five should follow him up to the next floor. Wei, three others, and their officer climbed ghostlike up the rungs of the ladder.
Another room, the top floor, with four soldiers lying flat on the floor, two of them with their ears jammed to the wall to their left, listening intently. They signalled for absolute silence, for them to remove their boots. Suddenly there was a hammering from next door, into their wall. One soldier signalled an exact spot. He and his mate took up positions on either side. One took out two grenades, checked them, while the other placed a wooden spigot on the floor and picked up a sledgehammer. They signalled for Wei’s squad to move to either side of the room. They silently did so. Suddenly a crack, a crash, a hole appeared in the wall, and through it almost immediately was thrust a rifle barrel which, before it could be fired, the waiting soldier smashed with his sledgehammer, the barrel crumpled, the gun backfired, there was a scream of pain from the other side of the wall, the Chinese soldier dropped his sledgehammer and grabbed the flattened barrel, pulling it through. In the same moment the other soldier popped two primed grenades into the hole, then the spigot, and banged the spigot with the sledgehammer. Two quick muffled explosions were followed by some screams – the two soldiers pulled out the spigot and inserted a crowbar which they jerked up and down, pulling out masonry that was thrown behind for the rest to pile up. Another grenade followed the first two. The first stuck his head through the hole and looked around, signalled two dead Japanese to those behind him in the room, then withdrew his head. Wei wondered why he did not go through. The soldier signalled to Wei and another member of his section to pass him some pieces of the masonry. These he cast on the wooden floor next door. Immediately the whole floor exploded in sub-machine gun fire, fired from below and splintering and shattering the wood. The soldier grinned at his mate. His mate passed him a primed grenade. Taking careful aim he carefully threw it through a hole in the floor next door. Sounds of mass consternation, panic, a large bang. The soldier signalled to a comrade squatting by the ladder, who signalled downwards. This was followed by an outbreak of frantic hammering and crashing from the room below them as their comrades smashed through the rest of the cavity in their wall followed by two sharp cracks as their grenades exploded then lots of shouting and screaming as they rushed through the breached wall. Simultaneously all those upstairs wriggled through their hole, drew their broad sabres for battle, but there was no one still alive up there. Just the two already dead Japanese. The soldier shouted down a short sentence. A voice below answered in a broad Shanxi dialect. Cheering and shouting. The house was theirs. Those on the ground floor repaired the hole in the further wall through which the surviving Japanese had fled.
The four Chinese wished their successors, Wei and his detail, good luck and disappeared down the ladder. Downstairs they congratulated their fellow soldiers and all disappeared down the ladder into the tunnel. When it becomes time for them to run down sniper alley, there was noticeably less fire onto the right-hand side of the wall than when Wei’s platoon detail had run up it.
Upstairs Wei’s officer looked gingerly out through the window and up the alley. Not gingerly enough. He was shot through the throat and fell backwards. His detail watched him shake and bubble and convulse on the floor. He drowned in a welter of blood, slowly relaxing, prostrating, bleeding out.
The four soldiers in the room looked at each other. They whispered to those downstairs what had happened. Then carefully took a position out of line with the window. Wei and Grand Arse passed into the room just captured from the Japanese and took up
positions on the new right-hand wall, listening for Japanese in the next house. After a while two coolies arrived with food, water and cigarettes and took away the officer’s body to give him a respectful burial. The two coolies were cheerful because they’d haggled triple time. To show their gratitude and respect for the soldiers they left them an extra pack of cigarettes.
After they’d left Grand Arse remarked, ‘Bet they nicked a whole lot more packs from which they gave us just one.’ They all laughed. Except for Huang who, Wei was told, always fell asleep after intense combat. He snored peacefully.
The Japanese of course did not take this lying down. Their house and several more on the left-hand side of the alley had been taken by the Chinese. They called in an immediate airstrike. What’s the point of having high-technology weapons if you don’t use them? Unfortunately for them, just a few seconds before it was due to release its bombs the Japanese bomber called in was hit by a sudden gust of wind and was blown several yards off its course so that its bombs, targeted on the Chinese-held houses to the left of the alley, instead landed on the Japanese-held houses on the right of the alley. These houses collapsed into a slaughterhouse of tangled rubble, smashed bodies and smouldering wooden beams. A blinding tornado of yellow dust hurtled in through the window of Wei’s room, choking them, followed by the sound of frantic whistles. Grand Arse grabbed Wei by his arms and stuffed him down the ladder while handing him his Lee Enfield (an officer had decided Wei should keep it as it could be useful for sniping). Wei slid down, followed by Grand Arse. The one following them down, Huang, just woken from profound sleep, was less lucky. He missed a rung, fell and sprained his ankle. All around there were frantic cries of ‘fix bayonets’, ‘swords at the ready’ as everyone bundled out of the houses on the left-hand side of the alley. Huang hobbled frantically behind them. His life depended on keeping up with everyone. The purpose of this panic was to seize control of the vantage points on the newly created rubble mounds on the right-hand side of the alley before the inevitable Japanese counter-attack.
About a hundred troops scrambled up the sides of the rubble – still enshrouded in dust and smoke rising from the burning timbers below – seized the natural vantage points on the mounds and, lying full length, started frantically re-piling masonry and furniture and bodies and body parts as parapets for cover and protection.
The Japanese counter-attack was delayed because they had expected to come from the west, attacking the demolished houses on the left-hand side of the alley. Instead they had to redeploy to the north to attack the whole wall of rubble their inaccurate bombing of the right-hand side of the alley had caused.
The dust was clearing, though the smoke was increasing, and before them the Chinese saw quite a lot of open ground before the next line of rubble and demolished homes held by the Japanese. In the middle sat a two-year-old child, bewildered by what had happened, paddling her arms desperately in the air and screaming her lungs out. The Chinese tried to ignore her. If they listened to her cries their emotions would get entangled, someone might rush out to try and save her and get cut down by machine gun fire. Instead, from some sort of cover to the east, her mother rushed out, shouting to her. A Japanese machine gun cut her down. A sniper took out the baby.
There was a roar from across the open space. Three Japanese tanks appeared and started waddling towards them, belching clouds of diesel, machine guns chattering. All the Chinese started cursing. Japanese infantry clustered behind the tanks. Wei didn’t know how to deal with tanks – everyone was urging everyone else to keep lying low, to wait until the tanks reached the rubble – so instead, with his Lee Enfield, he concentrated on picking off the sheltering infantry. The more you concentrated in war, Wei was learning, the less you feared. Two he probably hit before the tanks reached their line of rubble. Their steel wheels and tracks screeched as they bit into the heaped rubble, their noses reared up, and suddenly their machine guns, pointing skyward, could no longer fire accurately. Two things happened simultaneously. Three Chinese soldiers wearing harnesses stuffed with grenades rose up screaming hideously ‘Fuck your mums’ and raced down the slope to throw themselves under the rearing snouts of the tanks, simultaneously detonating their grenades. Two of the tanks exploded, the third continued to grind up the slope because the suicide bomber had detonated his harness prematurely.
At the same time the rest of the Chinese rose from the rubble mountain screaming their terrifying battle cry ‘Hit the Hard’ and descended on the Japanese infantry waving their broad-bladed sabres above their heads. Wei, untrained in sword work, snapped his nine-inch spike bayonet into place. A wild melee enveloped the Japanese and Chinese – screams, thrusts, flashing bayonets, slashing swords severing arteries – kicking, bleeding, eye sockets gouged, even brawls with fists. Wei discovered at first hand why his spike bayonet was called a ‘pig-sticker’ and just how superior it was to the common broad-bladed bayonet. In a melee a Japanese had just bayoneted a Chinese through the ribs and, seeing Wei charging him, was frantically trying to dislodge its wide blade stuck between his ribs to parry Wei. Not in time. Wei punched his pig-sticker through his throat and slipped it out a second later. Meanwhile the surviving Japanese were starting to waver; the Chinese holding the high ground were still able to crash down on them with their swords while Wei and others went in under their raised arms with their bayonets. Just as the tank seemed to be regaining its equilibrium another Chinese suicide bomber threw himself successfully under it. Both violently exploded. This did it. The Japanese started to turn back, flee back across the open ground. Rather than follow them the Chinese turned and raced back to the shelter of their rubble. As soon as the Japanese regained their lines their machine guns would open up. Wei managed a shot or two at them but couldn’t tell if any of them were hit before he turned and raced up the rubble himself, helping the limping Huang. Dying Chinese and Japanese lay indiscriminately among each other on the brief battlefield, their groans and screams mixing with the cries of crows and ravens and kites that wheeled and circled excitedly all over the battlefield of Taierzhuang.
Already their ridge of rubble was growing hot from the timbers burning beneath it. Several areas became impossible to stay on. While others kept watch above Wei and Grand Arse slipped down close to the alleyway. ‘Well,’ said Grand Arse, waving away the smoke, ‘why don’t you brew some tea and I’ll bake some dumplings. No need to light a fire.’ Everyone laughed except Huang, who had already fallen asleep. ‘The longer you sleep,’ he claimed continuously, ‘the longer you live.’
*
Several more attacks happened that day and were beaten back.
After one Wei fell asleep. As he slept he did not dream of the terrifying flight from his home and the death of his family on their forced march, he did not see pictures of the mad slaughter he had just participated in. Instead he was back home on his farm. It was harvest and he was worrying deeply about a broken sickle which the blacksmith had not repaired yet. If it was not repaired by dawn only four men would be able to harvest his crop and he badly needed five. Everything would go wrong if…
He awoke in a sweat as Grand Arse shook him harshly.
‘Hurry up – they’re coming back.’
‘How long did I sleep?’
‘About a quarter of an hour. They’re getting ready to charge again.’
14
My students, even Tian Boqi, are now happily writing, organizing, producing and acting in their own plays. Even better, they are cooperating with each other. Working as a team. When they have a production that is ready to go on the road out into the far-flung villages and towns of China, first they take it down to the village where Tian Boqi’s original play had its disastrous premiere, and there play it in front of that village’s hyper-critical audience. There are debates, discussions, suggestions – all of which they listen to and mostly incorporate. With suitable alterations made, the plays then go on the road. Several of the villagers from the original village have become so involved in the process the
y are starting to write their own plays or become actors themselves.
Feng Yuxiang has just handed me the list of my next batch of students. We’re due to have our first meeting tomorrow. Mercifully my arch-nemesis, Guo Morou, is still not on the list. This is a bit of a mystery. Literary gossip has it that he has left Hong Kong where he was living and has reputedly arrived here in Wuhan – but no one seems to have seen anything of him. Perhaps, as ‘China’s Greatest Writer’, he is refusing to be taught anything, especially by me.
Outside my window, and this is glorious, the red persimmon tree has burst into full flower. Vulvous scarlet blossoms race along the boughs like flames. Rich, gorgeous. My wife and my favourite blossom. We feel so close when…
I turn back to my desk. Empty my piled-high ashtray into the wastepaper basket. Up to three last night writing another bloody agitprop play – The Daring River Pirates’ Patriotic Victory. It’s actually quite good, despite its title. I’ve even managed to slip in some sly bits of humour and gentleness, though my popular writing still lacks the flow and naturalness of everyday street theatre. Someday I shall learn!
Also on my desk lies a rather cryptic piece of paper. A brief note from Feng Yuxiang informing me that a rickshaw will be calling for me at ten this morning and I am to go ‘where the rickshaw driver takes me’. That’s all. Having written a (rather successful) novel on rickshaw drivers, I consider myself a bit of an expert on them and usually like to choose my own, but Feng’s note leaves me no choice. Knowing neither the address nor the person I’m meant to visit, I have to sit and await his arrival.
The man who arrives is young, straight-backed and brusque – I prefer them old, round-shouldered and loquacious – but he’s a competent enough runner and avoids the potholes. It’s a lovely morning. The first warmth of spring, with all its accompaniments of blossom, sweet scents, and animated birdsong. We are passing through some of Wuchang’s most prosperous suburbs, gardeners out early cutting back the Westernized lawns, a few walls enclosing more traditional courtyards. Rickshaws bearing civil servants and merchants pass in the opposite direction, all off to their days work in the tri-city. But where am I going? The size of the houses is decreasing, the road is getting rougher. Finally the rickshaw man draws up outside a modest and secluded bungalow. I reach into my purse to pay him. The man grunts.
Wuhan Page 41