Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Liang got on well with Hua, but always quarreled with Chin. Chin was scared of the bigger Heng and used to descend into gibbering terror whenever Heng knocked roughly into him – which was often. But Heng, surprisingly, got on well with Bojing, the weakest of the group, whenever anyone tried to bully him. Bojing reminded Heng of his younger brother, who’d been killed outright before Heng’s eyes. Three of them – Cong, Xingfu and Wen – refused to speak to anyone else but were slowly learning to communicate with – George wouldn’t put it as high as talking to – each other. They watched each other all the time and went everywhere together.

  Strangely, the flames of anger and irritation which so often licked about him when he was in the Last Ditch Club didn’t trouble him in the least when he was in the midst of this bedlam. Indeed, their shouts and blows and tantrums were like balm to his soul.

  Anyhow, this afternoon George was taking them all for a walk along the Bund. He was able to do this by himself because he had promised them that if they behaved and stayed together, at the end of their walk they would visit a cinema. None of them had ever been to a cinema before. They were going to see a Walt Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No one had any idea who Walt Disney was or even what a film was, but it sounded great. They spoke to each other in hushed tones about it, and by and large they even stayed in line. The one exception was Guang, who rather fancied himself as a ladies’ man – even though he was only ten – and made various pert comments to passing ladies which led to quite a few ‘incidents’. But Heng kept Guang in some semblance of order with hard cuffs. Heng was anxious to see this ‘film’.

  They managed to get into the packed cinema, fifteen wedged into a row of five seats. It was here that George’s problems started. Problems not with the boys – because the entire audience was behaving as wildly – but with George himself.

  The difficulty for George was that before the Disney film started a newsreel was being played of various events, both inside China itself (with lots of footage of the war), and of the outside world. Although the event in question had taken place at the end of June, nearly two months previously, film of it had only finally arrived in Wuhan the day before.

  It was a newsreel of the momentous boxing match held on 22 June 1938 in Madison Square Garden, New York to decide the heavyweight championship of the world. It was fought between Max Schmeling, from Germany – Nazi Germany – and Joe Louis, the American champion, a negro. Max Schmeling had in fact already fought an off-form Joe Louis back in 1936 and beaten the previously unbeaten Louis in a surprise upset. Back in Germany, Hitler had gone wild. The Aryan Nazi superhero had knocked out the ‘champion’ of the decadent West – and a sub-human negro to boot! In fact, in real life Max Schmeling and Joe Louis were the best of friends – Max wasn’t a Nazi at all – and the two of them remained close up to their deaths, with Max helping out Joe when he ran into financial difficulties. But never allow truth – or subtlety – to get in the way of a fantastic story!

  Anyhow, Joe Louis, all-American hero – though I somehow doubt that he was the hero of ‘all’ of America – stepped out into a blaze of lights to fight the Nazi Beast and the whole of Madison Square Garden – which contained a large Jewish contingent – went berserk. The Chinese cinema audience – or perhaps mob would be a more exact word – likewise went berserk. They too had had more than enough of fascism and racial prejudice recently and saw the whole thing in black and white terms – so to speak.

  The fight itself turned out to be the shortest bout in world heavyweight boxing history – before or since. It lasted for all of two minutes and four seconds, including three floorings before the final knockout.

  George the Quaker, entirely opposed to violence in any form, just stared with his mouth open, while all around him the cinema went ape.

  Louis, the Brown Bomber, came out of his corner fast. Two lefts to Schmeling’s face and a crack to his left jaw. Schmeling feebly patted Joe’s grim face. Joe countered with a barrage of rights and lefts to the head which drove the German smack into the ropes where he could not raise his arms to defend himself against the ceaseless onslaught. The referee stepped between them and the fight resumed in the middle of the ring.

  Louis cracked a right into Schmeling’s jaw and Schmeling was down for a count of three. He raised himself on shaky feet to be pummeled non-stop in his gut and chest with crushing pile-drivers before Louis drove a sharp left hook into Schmeling’s jaw followed by a right to the chin which felled Schmeling to the floor again.

  George was fervently hoping that Snow White would start soon. Very soon.

  Glassy-eyed and rubber-legged, the stupefied non-Nazi Schmeling arose and tried in vain to hold off his on-fire opponent, but his torso and gut were again pummeled with Louis’s Götterdämmerung blows before a sharp left hook to his jaw followed by a missile of a punch dead on the end of his chin felled Schmeling yet again onto his back. Somehow or other he managed to roll over onto all fours but then could not move and stayed there motionless, panting, head down like a poleaxed ox.

  On the count of three Schmeling’s frantic trainer threw his towel into the ring, but this token of surrender was then unrecognized in American boxing codes and the referee turned away from the trainer, scrutinized the German, and on the count of five signalled the fight was over. In less than a single round. Two minutes and four seconds.

  The problem was that such was the Chinese audience’s reaction to this newsreel that the manager decided it would be a popular move to repeat it – to wild approbation from the packed cinema – and then repeat it again. And then twice more. And this became a real problem for George. The problem for George the Quaker was not that this atrocious act was being shown again and again before all these people. Or even that it was being rerun again and again before the eyes of his traumatized boys (all of whom were shrieking louder than anyone else for it to be reshown. They’d all decided they really liked ‘films’.) No, the real problem was in George himself. Somewhere deep and horrifying within himself. To his eternal shame, in a part of himself he hadn’t even known existed before, George Hogg was starting to enjoy, deeply enjoy, exult in this barbarism. Each bone-crunching blood-spurting hammer and blow.

  George Hogg, Quaker, pacificist, stood there, baying like a wild animal. Partly it was because George was a decent middle-class liberal and the sight of a poor negro, the descendant of slaves, now battering nine bells out of a racist white supremacist was deeply, if shamefully, satisfying to him. But it went deeper than that. In the shadows, the deep shadows Joe Louis was smashing through, lurked the faces of all those damned warmongers at the Last Ditch Club who were continually humiliating him and shouting him down, perpetually demanding the whole world lay down and be slaughtered by unending war and suffering. Next time he was going to stand up and start smashing…

  George suddenly sat down. Overcome with shame. Remorse. Where on earth had that animal leapt from? Where was his reason, his civilization, his pacifism? Fortunately everyone else in the cinema was in an even worse state than him so no one noticed his fall, his expulsion from Eden.

  Eventually everyone calmed down. The bloodcurdling newsreel was followed by the anodyne waffles and cutesiness of Snow White. The audience thought it pretty poor fare after the wonders of Joe Louis.

  George sat demanding of himself what that beast was? Where it had come from? And worrying above all about when it might return?

  11

  As the Japanese imperial armies drew closer and closer to Wuhan their bombing raids became more and more frequent. Raids would take place at all times of the day and night, and a single day could see several raids.

  This raid started early one afternoon and was heralded by the heavy throb of bombers approaching from a distance, then their appearance high in the clear sky, the sun glinting menacingly off their wings and fuselages. Their fighter escorts flew above them in flawless, invincible formations. On the ground the bark of anti-aircraft guns opened up followed by the explosions of sma
ll white smoke balls in the skies far above. On this occasion the Chinese and Allied air forces actually succeeded in scrambling in time. Russian fighters and their pilots – ‘volunteers’ from the Soviet Union – and hired American mercenaries in obsolete British fighters, plus two or three actual Chinese planes, managed to wobble erratically into the skies like fragile gnats to combat the solid steel phalanxes of the Japanese armada. In attempting to climb above the Japanese bombers they were swooped down on by an angry swarm of Japanese fighters. Dog fights broke out all over. Furious as wasps, fighters circled, fired, wheeled and manoeuvred. Anti-aircraft shells burst indiscriminately among friend and foe, seldom hitting either. Strings of bombs were starting to explode across Hanyang and the government and university offices south of the river in Wuchang, slicing through the air like screaming knives. Three Soviet fighters, dancing and swerving, managed to find a path between the Japanese fighters and fell upon the large cumbersome bombers. Sounds of screaming engines trying desperately to gain height, the deep groan of the fighters diving for a kill, a Japanese bomber exploding in a great flash – triggered frenzied applause from the crowds of Chinese civilians spectating from the streets below as the bomber’s wings disintegrated and the tail section fell in lazy cartwheels and loops down towards the city. Another bomber, its engines afire and out of control, trailing a tail of black smoke, streaked earthward in a long slanting death dive, finally blowing up in a shattering burst of flame and smoke. Two fighters collided in midair in a great splash of fire.

  Long red banners of fire and crimson smoke furled up into the sky amid the confused sounds of ambulance and fire engine bells. Lorries tore up and down streets carrying volunteers and first aid workers to help dig out the victims. They were helped by troops of Boy Scouts. Even George Hogg’s orphans were there with George, digging away. The dead lay on the ground, their skins tattooed with gravel and sand and shrapnel.

  There was method in this murder. By the evening, knowing that all the casualties and wounded from their earlier raids over Hanyang and Wuchang would by now have been transported to Wuhan’s only hospital in Hankou, knowing that the hospital itself would be crammed with desperately wounded patients, that night they deliberately switched their targeting precisely to the hospital and its immediate area. The same hospital where Donald and Hu and the Canadian and Indian surgeons now worked with such ferocity and exhaustion.

  One of those clever little Social Darwinist, eugenicist tricks the Japanese had learnt from Britain and Europe and America. Lesser races beneath the bombs.

  Various unforeseen problems had resulted from the decision by Dr Bob McClure, chief surgeon of Wuhan’s hospital, to abandon his previous policy of amputating the limbs of wounded servicemen and adopting Donald Hankey’s novel technique of using bicycle spokes to knit together broken bones and then place the patients in traction. You cannot really move patients in traction. Or you can, but only very slowly and with great care. This meant that the hospital itself, as well as all those patients recovering from other surgery, was now silting up with hundreds of tractioned soldiers unable to be moved far. Indeed, so many of them were there and so successful had Donald’s surgical innovations proved, that the two wards allocated to them were already brimming and the patients and their beds and traction equipment had spilled out into the hospital’s gardens and lawns. Thanks to the warm weather they were quite comfortable through the days and nights. And thanks to Hu’s connections with Intelligent Whore and Madame Chiang, many more girls had been successfully recruited from the brothels to nurse the extra patients.

  Up until now, with all this extra help, it had been possible to carefully and painstakingly manoeuvre the tractioned patients back into the hospital during air raids aimed at other parts of Wuhan. The corridors were crammed, and in the two specialist wards it was almost impossible to move, but it just about worked.

  But tonight was going to be different. Very different.

  Twenty minutes before the raid started, Japanese aircraft dropped flares to designate the exact location of the hospital so that their bombers, following behind, would know precisely where to drop their bombs. The Japanese had already used this flare technique in other parts of the city, so the inhabitants of both the hospital and the surrounding area knew exactly what was in store for them as the flares floated down among them.

  Pandemonium broke out, but within the hospital was quickly suppressed. The staff were by and large dedicated and disciplined people. They were used to emergencies and panic and pain. All the patients were successfully and swiftly transported back into the hospital. The place was jam-packed. And then they started to hear the thrum-thrum of the bombers’ engines as they approached. Now came the difficult part. It was hospital policy, and a very wise if cold-blooded policy, for the staff at this time in a raid to abandon their patients to fortune and, along with those patients who were capable of moving, leave the hospital for the nearby shelters. If these abandoned patients did not survive then they did not survive. If the doctors and staff did not survive, however, then no future patients, thousands and thousands of them, could survive either. The roar of the bombers’ engines was almost overhead. So the staff, including all the doctors and nurses and assistants and orderlies and Hu, rushed to the safety of the shelters.

  But at this moment, in the darkness of the blackout, with patients moaning and stirring around him, Donald decided he could not leave.

  He made a medical, a surgical decision. The fact was that with bombs likely falling all around and indiscriminately, his patients in traction would almost certainly panic, start writhing and moving and twisting about in their terror, rupturing their traction, breaking open their wounds and shattering their mending bones and flesh, destroying their chances of once again living a normal, proper, human life. He must stay. He must, somehow, calm them.

  Donald didn’t know anything about how to calm people, how to adopt a strong, gentle, reassuring voice. Besides, he hardly spoke any Chinese. He was a lousy singer. He stood alone in the midst of two darkened wards, the corridors crammed fast with patients.

  ‘Crikey,’ thought Donald. ‘What can I do?’

  He carried a single candle. The bombs started to scream and plummet down all around the hospital. Into the gardens, the surrounding buildings.

  ‘I must be able to do something!’

  He felt in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He found a piece of paper.

  When Donald had so suddenly made his surprise decision to come to China after meeting with his long-term chum Bonkers Binkie at the Ritz, he had telegraphed his parents in Wiltshire to tell them he was leaving for China the next day and could they please send up some of his clothes and necessities to London post-haste. His mother, being a farmer’s wife, did not immediately panic, but instead stoically started packing a suitcase. Since she did not have any tissue paper to stuff Donald’s pockets with – as was the custom in those days – and it was three days before she was due to catch the bus into Wincanton to do her weekly shop, she instead took an old copy of The West Wilts and Trowbridge Advertiser off a pile of them in the kitchen, cut it up into strips and lined his suitcase and stuffed his pockets with them. She then cycled to the station with the suitcase on her handlebars and sent it up to London. Donald picked it up the next morning at the left luggage office at Waterloo Station.

  So it was a strip of paper from The West Wilts and Trowbridge Advertiser that Donald now found in his hand in the darkened hospital in Wuhan. It turned out to be a long list of the market prices fetched for sheep at the previous week’s livestock auction in Westbury. All around the hospital the bombs were falling, the ground shaking, Donald’s patients were starting to moan and shriek and writhe in their beds. All their wounds and healing would be soon torn apart. Donald’s mind remained a complete blank. He could remember not a single poem or prayer. And, as already noted, he was a lousy singer. All he could think to do was read aloud from this months-old report of the prices sheep were fetching at Westbury market.
/>   He started nervously.

  ‘Sheep and lamb and hogge prices. Fifteen sheep heavy. One shilling two pence per pound. Thirty-eight hoggets light. Ten pence per pound. Twenty-eight lambs standard, one shilling and six pence per pound.’

  At least the patients were quietening a bit. What on earth was this crazy Englishman doing?

  His voice was deepening. There started to be an element of empathy, concern in his tone.

  ‘Forty-two hoggets medium. One shilling and four and a half pence per pound. Twenty-four lambs heavy, one shilling eight pence per pound.’

  His voice was starting to croon, to sing almost. Donald in his tweed jacket with his spectacles glinting in the candlelight slowly picked his way amid their beds and traction equipment, through the wards, down corridors, piece of paper in hand, candle before him, thunderous explosions, bomb concussions just outside, Donald’s voice carrying through, working over, calming, creating softness and gentleness and peace amid bedlam. Maybe his voice might keep everyone safe?

  ‘Unweaned lambs, eight pence per pound. Old rams, four pence per pound. Ewes medium, one shilling one pence per pound.’

  As Donald gained confidence, slowly his repertoire started to widen. Suddenly he remembered the words to his favourite hunting song, and the runes of ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ started to sound out in Wuhan.

  D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so

  gay,

  D’ye ken John Peel at the break of

  day,

  D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far away,

  With his hounds and his horn in the

  morning.

  Donald remembered the days when he had been happiest. When he’d been a boy on his pony, streaming in the early morning winter sunshine across the great green open downs of Salisbury Plain, with the hounds of the South and West Wilts Hunt in full cry before him, the sound of the horn, the whole field in a flat-out gallop around him, scarlet-coated and black-coated hunters and boys and girls and farmers in tweeds all in full halloo, the vicar on his grey, the red, red coat of Reynard far, far ahead. Oh those skies full of blue. Those days! Those glory days! The days before he’d been sent off to that awful public school!