Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘You are a good woman. Thank you.’

  Some of them were obviously criminals.

  ‘Where is Wang?’

  ‘Wang? There are many Wangs here.’

  ‘He told me to come over here. He said many of his mates were here.’

  ‘Did he say where they were staying?’

  ‘He said the street where they lived was filled with people from Jilin Province who couldn’t understand what they were saying so no one could snoop on them.’

  Hu made a prearranged signal to the soldiers behind her.

  ‘The street for people from Jilin is up that road and seventh on the right.’

  The obviously criminal man walked off. He was followed by a soldier in plain clothes. If the house he went to on Jilin Street was full of thieves – which Hu suspected – they would all be arrested and taken to the military barracks.

  And then there were the comic.

  ‘I am drunk.’

  ‘Yes, you are drunk.’

  ‘I hadn’t drunk anything on the march for five days, my whole throat was parched, and when we got here someone gave me a drink of wine. I was so thirsty I drank the whole bottle.’

  ‘Why don’t you lie down over there. And when you wake up I’ll tell you where to go.’

  ‘You’ll make someone a good wife.’

  *

  The elections have been held. Various parties have been elected. The assembly in which they sit will not have any real powers – the government retains those – but they will be allowed to ‘advise’ the government. They will even be allowed to criticize the government. Free speech in China?! I have spent short bits of my life in prison and long bits of it in internal exile because of my enthusiasm for democracy, free speech, the right to say what you bloody well want to say. And now the day has at last arrived!

  I hurry down to the large hall where the assembly – it is called the People’s Political Council – is to be held.

  The elected politicians are all sitting up on the stage. Some look like normal human beings, but most look distinctly grand. That’s what being elected does for you. And there are actually ten elected women on the stage.

  I find a seat towards the back of the hall. I sit down beside a stout young country girl who I partly recognize. We smile at each other in a half-knowing way and then set ourselves to listen to the debate.

  We have to wait quite some time. First we have to wade through rather a lot of pleasantries and self-congratulations and general bloviations before they start. Then various votes and points of order and jockeying for position have to take place.

  This goes on for about an hour. The audience grow a bit restless and start talking among themselves.

  The girl next to me and I fall into conversation.

  We agree that we’ve met before, on the Bund, by the dressing station for wounded soldiers.

  ‘I was with Feng Yuxiang and his wife Li Dequan. They were helping Agnes Smedley, the American journalist, and her young Chinese friend, to bind the soldiers’ wounds.’

  ‘Yes. I work for Miss Smedley. I’m her cook.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘A writer? You write books?’

  ‘Yes. Do you read books?’

  ‘Yes. I read Shanghai detective books. I like stories with lots of blood and violence in them. And love.’

  ‘Oh. Do you read any other sorts of books?’

  ‘I once read part of a book by someone called Lao She. My friend Hu said I should read it. But I found it very boring.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘indeed, Lao She can be very boring.’

  ‘It was just this man pulling this rickshaw, going on and on about how bored and fed up he was with everything and how he didn’t see the point of anything. As if anyone pulling around a rickshaw would have time to think about stuff like that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like books, proper books, but mainly I read newspapers.’

  ‘Newspapers? So you must be interested in politics.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am too poor to think about that. Most people don’t have time to worry about what the world could be, they’re too busy trying to survive in the world as it is.’

  ‘You have a very novel way of looking at the world.’

  ‘I have a very sensible way of looking at the world.’

  ‘Then if you don’t read the papers to follow politics, why do you read them?’

  ‘I want to follow the war. What is happening in it. For example, have you heard, with the barbarians in retreat, our 85th and 52nd Corps have linked up at Taodan – well to the north of Taierzhuang – and 10th and 5th Japanese Divisions are in full retreat back up the railway line to Jinan?’

  Suddenly I understand why she is so interested in the newspapers.

  ‘Do you have a member of your family in the war?’

  For the first time in our conversation she hesitates.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she says. ‘Do you have a member of your family in the war?’

  For the first time in our conversation I hesitate.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do.’

  The tone of our conversation changes after this. We are both gentler, more relaxed with each other.

  Finally, after two hours of showboating, the politicians on the stage grace us with a debate. What we’ve all been waiting for. People in the audience stop talking and begin listening. Matters get lively. Politicians start shouting at each other. Members of the audience start shouting at each other. Fisticuffs break out.

  ‘Ah,’ says the girl, ‘this is the sort of politics I like.’

  I note she has some rather large eggs in her basket. Doubtless she will deploy them if things get boring again.

  *

  It is well past midnight.

  Gou Liqun, the young bride, is all alone in the world again. Her husband, the wildly in demand orator and pamphleteer and litterateur and intellectual Guo Morou, is out once more away on vital government work – making speeches, holding debates, reading from his books. Next week he will leave by himself on a tour of China’s southern and western cities to speak to and raise the morale of the whole Chinese nation.

  There have been couplings between husband and wife. But brief and inconsequential. Instead of feasting his impassioned eyes upon Guo Liqun’s naked and exquisitely toned body as they lie in bed it is obvious that his mind, his whole being, is elsewhere. He even mutters and rehearses bits of speeches and turns of phrase to himself while they intertwine. Sometimes he just stops dead and stares at the bedclothes. Then he laughs suddenly.

  Guo Liqun is not the sort of girl to be beaten by such behaviour. She is still her own mistress.

  In the darkness she dances. Naked. Moving, winding, twisting, revolving like machinery. Implacable machinery. She is the future. Resolute as steel.

  Across the river in his university room Lao She lies in his bed in the darkness. From his pajama pocket he gently removes his wife’s Indian silk scarf, given to her by their friend, Rabindranath Tagore, the revolutionary Indian poet. Lao smells it. Drinks in the scent of his wife. Remembers when they received the gift, when they were first married, before even the fruitfulness of their children. He weeps.

  Spider Girl stands alone in her dark kitchen, thinking fiercely of her father. She always stands when she thinks of her father, ready and waiting to serve him. Against her heart she clutches the small stone bottle containing the last remnants of her family’s wild pear juice. She will not allow darkness and bleakness to enter her soul.

  1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

  2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned:

  3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

  4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and h
ill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

  5 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together:

  Isaiah 40:1–5

  BOOK THREE

  THE ROAD FROM WUHAN

  To Ruth, Ray, Stan, Freda and Margaret.

  PRELUDE

  A clear, hot day in late May, 1938. Brilliant Blue skies all across Hubei Province. Except over its capital city, Wuhan. Here smoke and dust from repeated air raids rose heavy above the tri-city, especially over the industrial city of Hanyang. Fires raged amid the closely packed hovels and shacks of the workers and throughout the docks. Two of its four great steel mills, despite the damage, continued proudly belching smoke and forging steel. No smoke arose from the other two – not from the first because it had been razed to the ground in a previous Japanese raid; not from the second because, in order to dismantle it and for all its many and often colossal sections to be transported up the Yangtze to build the new steel mills being constructed in Chongqing and Sichuan province, it had been deliberately shut down. Now vast armies of coolies and chargehands and engineers and labourers crawled all over its huge corpse, disincorporating and disembowelling it component by component, stripping out and bearing away small single and labelled components to be packed onto horse or mule or ox-drawn carts or placed on the backs of coolies for the long trek westward. Simultaneously, huge, supervised gangs worked incessantly to break apart its gargantuan machinery and furnaces and then heaved and shifted and hauled each mammoth part down to the river.

  Among the largest and heaviest sections of a steel mill were its gigantic forging rolls – huge steel rolling pins – over which hissed molten strips of iron and steel gouting direct from the roaring furnace. There were hundreds of these spinning forging rolls, each weighing fifteen tons, which delivered the molten steel to the presses where the flaming steel was crunched and hammered and forged and squeezed into all the necessary shapes and thicknesses and qualities that customers required. And the huge forging rolls were only one part of this rolling mill, every component of which – work rolls, back-up rolls, the mill housing and the presses – had to be each individually extracted and one by one hauled down to the docks, hoisted aboard and then towed upstream. And that was only the rolling mill. The blast furnace, even when it was disassembled all to pieces, would be still more massive.

  Each fifteen-ton forging roll had to be individually raised from its resting sockets, hurdled and hunted through the remnants of the mill, and then guided and braked down a steep cinder track to the dockside below. The only suitable and flexible enough source of energy and power to lift and shift these behemoths through and over such a twisted and uneven course were human beings. Great teams of experienced, specialist coolies, squads versed in levering up massive weights, propelling them forwards with sudden brute force, slewing and braking them expertly with immaculately timed counter-force. Each member of these expert teams moved as one, ‘Hey Yah, Hai-yah,’ synchronized to the split second by their rhythmic chants and cries and shanties, each moving simultaneously and in unison, flexible and experienced in changing their balance and throwing their body weight for or against a motion, using their muscles only when especial effort was needed, using great crowbars to lift out each huge forging roll from its cradle, large sledges and massive straw ropes to pull it forwards, increase its momentum, at crucial moments employing countersways, bunts and dunts to propel it precisely and blithely in another direction through the mill. They then used the ropes to brake it back when it moved too fast down the cinder slope, and bringing it exactly and gently to rest in the precise location on the dock where two great cranes, synchronized like twin flamingoes, swooped in and lifted each end simultaneously up and across and down into a waiting barge which suddenly floundered and lurched, its timbers squealing and protesting at the brute weight, before it regained its poise and was floated out obediently to join a string of other barges which then, hauled by a tug, were towed stately up the Yangtze to Chungking.

  These teams of exquisitely skilled coolies shifted six such loads a day. There were twelve such teams working in Hanyang, amid the bombs and fires and slaughter and smoke and the ever-continuing industrial production. All the time, as they moved their great loads, amid and between them other lines of coolies wove in and out carrying panniers of coal to keep the remaining blast furnaces blazing, sacks of copper coins and lumps of scrap metal to be purified into industrial ingots, food and drink to fuel the workers and coolies, small children in carts, caged birds, family possessions, aeroplane parts, tank hulls and gun barrels, religious objects and statues, milking equipment for cows goats and sheep – everything nurtured and manufactured in Hanyang. All amid continual air raids.

  1

  Jack Belden was a large, gruff man. He’d been brought up in New York, went to college, but unable to find any work with the Wall Street Crash and America’s descent into the Great Depression, he’d jumped on a steamer and worked his passage to China.

  For several years he worked as a docker in Shanghai, tough manual labour, where he became a socialist and an alcoholic. A fully functioning alcoholic. He took up writing one-off articles for the thriving Shanghai press and by 1937 had worked his way up to being United Press International’s chief correspondent in Wuhan.

  Jack had worked in the docks. He’d worked in the streets and fields. He liked ordinary Chinese people. So when war broke out he was most comfortable as a correspondent reporting directly from the front line, living and talking with the soldiers in the trenches, the terrified civilians in the nearby villages. He shared this trait with Agnes Smedley. He lived and slept and marched with the troops.

  He’d just returned from Taierzhuang, where he’d reported first-hand from the trenches. The man sat beside him in the Last Ditch Club had not only accompanied him all through the fighting, but had put himself in even greater danger than had Jack. While Jack sensibly kept his head down in the trenches, this man had leapt about, clambering onto vantage points and entering wrecked buildings visible to enemy snipers. This man, Jack’s friend, was the Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa.

  Robert was in tears.

  ‘Here, Robert, have some of this tea, these sweet dumplings. They’re very good. Have some of my bourbon if you want.’

  Jack had an open bottle of bourbon, already half-empty, on the table before him.

  ‘Anschluss is the death of my family.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Jack gently.

  ‘Fascism is winning everywhere.’

  Robert had a copy of the airmail edition of The Times newspaper open on the table before him. The two of them had received no news of the outside world while in Taierzhuang and this newspaper report was the first Capa had heard of Hitler’s invasion of Austria.

  ‘Most of my family fled to Vienna to escape the Jewish pogroms in Hungary. Except for me. I argued with them. I told them that the Austrians would start their own pogroms. Persecutions, confiscations, executions. But they would not listen, they would not follow me to Paris. And now Hitler has invaded Austria. His storm troopers will be going berserk, smashing windows, beating up women, shooting…’

  ‘You can’t be certain that they’ve been arrested, Robert, they might have escaped.’

  ‘My family are eternal Panglossians, Jack, eternal optimists. “This cannot happen to us! The apfelstrudels in Vienna are wonderful to taste! When are you coming to visit us?”’

  Jack growled in sympathy.

  The two of them had travelled back from Taierzhuang by overnight train and arrived in Wuhan very early in the morning. The club was empty except for the gloomy White Russian serving behind the bar. Robert returned to reading the article.

  Jack felt deep pity for the man. Only months ago Robert had lost his young wife, Gerda. She, like him, was a war photographer and the couple had gone out to Spain to cover the war that had followed Franco’s fascist invasion of the country. Robert’s picture
s of the fighting had made him famous around the world. His wife Gerda had gone to photograph the Battle of Brunete on the Madrid front. In the chaotic retreat afterwards she’d hitched a ride on the running board of a general’s staff car. While they were at speed a Republican tank, amid the chaos, backed into the side of the roadster. Gerda was killed instantly.

  Robert and Gerda regarded themselves as soldiers in the worldwide battle against fascism. Robert took her death as a soldier would, manfully. All through the fighting in Taierzhuang Jack had not discerned any grieving or lassitude in Robert. What mourning he did must have been done privately, in the rare moments he found himself alone.

  Robert’s pain as he imagined his family’s fate in Austria turned almost immediately to anger.

  ‘Look at this, look at this filthy piece of journalism,’ he cried, pointing to the main leader in The Times. ‘It makes me so angry.’ He passed Jack the newspaper. ‘Read this filth! Just read it aloud!’

  Jack did so.

  ‘“Herr Hitler enjoyed two days of triumphal progress from the Austrian Frontier. Our correspondent leaves no room for doubt about the public jubilation with which he and his army were greeted everywhere.”’

  ‘You see, Jack? Those words could have been written by Goebbels himself.’

  ‘Knowing The Times, they probably were,’ commented Jack.

  ‘The Western press is so corrupt, so dishonest. Where’s any mention of the trade unionists, socialists, Jews who’ll all be being rounded up, kicked in the teeth, shot in the head?’

  ‘All Times journalists are appeasement whores,’ said Jack. ‘And most of the British press too. Their proprietors spend half their time oiling up to the dictators, visiting the Berlin Olympics, hobnobbing with Himmler and Goering and the Führer. They’ve brainwashed the British people. Times are bad.’