Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Vernon Bartlett lowered his head and muttered to himself. (Freda was happily ensconced in his hotel room taking a series of baths and typing an article for the New Statesman.)

  Rewi Alley, with blank, staring eyes, stamped his foot. All those comrades of his, lying beneath Flanders fields, soon to be joined by a new generation!

  Agnes Smedley went away into a corner and wept. For the first time in her life since she had been a tiny child, Agnes permitted herself the luxury of tears.

  Jack Belden alone forswore hard liquor. He wished to face this catastrophe (relatively) sober.

  They all knew that treachery was afoot. The distortions, the relentless lies pushed by the newspapers and broadcasting organizations that most of them worked for.

  Then, into the midst of this black gloom, hurried the bicycle courier from the airport, carrying the airmail edition of The Times. Of course this edition was now eight days old, but they fell on it like hungry dogs because they were seeking out treachery, treachery planned many days, many weeks, in advance. The government had been softening up the British and the Empire’s citizens to accept and shrug away this betrayal.

  Vernon Bartlett, so recently a member of the parliamentary lobby and thus an expert on which journalist rimmed which politician’s anus in Westminster, was given the document to decipher. Almost immediately he came across a passage which throbbed. He read from it.

  ‘If the Sudeten Germans now ask for more than the Czech Government are apparently ready to give in their latest set of proposals, it can only be inferred that the Sudetens are going beyond the mere removal of disabilities and do not find themselves at ease within the Czechoslovak Republic.’

  ‘At ease,’ murmured Jack Belden, ‘at ease.’

  ‘Shit and treachery,’ stated Rewi Alley.

  Bartlett continued.

  ‘In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race.’

  ‘The “sheep must apologize to the wolf for any unpleasantness” gambit,’ observed James Bertram.

  ‘Makes you bloody ashamed to be British,’ shouted out a voice.

  Peter Fleming, immaculately dressed, walked into the room, detached as the proverbial cucumber.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said. And then, noticing Agnes in the corner, ‘And ladies.’

  He walked to the bar and ordered his habitual iced martini with a twist of lemon.

  Suddenly James Bertram walked over to him.

  ‘Have you been reading the shit your paper’s been peddling about the Munich crisis?’

  ‘My paper does not write shit,’ replied Fleming curtly.

  ‘It writes shit and lies,’ said Bertram. ‘It disgraces the whole bloody English race.’

  Fleming raised his eyebrows and walked away just as George Hogg came in. George had already read the news about Munich on the wires and, after a day of futile frustration trying to find help for his orphans, was really cheered by the opportunities for peace Munich offered.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘so good to see you back.’

  ‘It’s really good to see you too, George,’ said Fleming, with more enthusiasm than was his wont.

  George noticed the rather hostile group of journalists staring at Fleming.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ responded Peter, and started to tell him of his adventures in London – with certain omissions, of course.

  Vernon Bartlett had been studying the editorial in some detail. He opined.

  ‘Reads like The Times’s usual well-oiled cant. I’d say it was written either by their deputy editor, Barrington-Ward, or Dawson himself. Dawson after all spends more time in Chamberlain’s office than he does in his own. He obviously knew that Chamberlain was going to sell the Czechs out eight days before he actually signed the agreement. And where The Times leads all the British and imperial press follow. This piece is deliberately smoothing the way for the treachery to come.’

  Agnes, standing in the corner, dried her eyes, blew her nose. She’d been listening intently to everything that was being said in the room. Suddenly, decisively, she walked over to Vernon Bartlett and took the paper from him.

  ‘Barrington-Ward, that creepy little cunt, didn’t write this editorial,’ she stated. ‘Neither did Geoffrey Dawson.’

  She read out a part of the article.

  ‘In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race.’

  Then she walked over to Fleming and George. She held the paper up to Fleming.

  ‘You wrote this editorial, didn’t you, Peter?’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ responded Fleming. ‘What are you blithering about, you stupid woman?’

  ‘You’ve just flown back from London. This paper was in the aircraft’s hold. You’d have read the editorial before you even left London.’

  ‘So?’ asked Fleming.

  This so far quiet confrontation was causing interest in the rest of the room. The other journalists moved towards Agnes and Fleming. George instinctively moved to block them off.

  Remember you’re a Quaker, he thought to himself, remember you’re a Quaker.

  ‘Educated upper-class people like you like to use long, little-known words in order to impress the rest of us with just how clever and superior you are. You don’t use language to communicate, like ordinary people do, you use it to block off and distance yourself from the rest of us. This editorial uses the word “contiguous”.’

  ‘So,’ said Fleming, dancing on his toes slightly.

  ‘You’ve used the word “contiguous” at least twice in my presence here in Wuhan. It was such a rare word that I had to look it up in a dictionary. The full Oxford English twelve-volume dictionary at the British Embassy, because no other dictionary mentioned it. The OED stated that the word had last been used in 1856. “Contiguous” is your word, Peter. You must have stumbled across it in some dusty Oxford library and used it and treasured it ever since to show how much more educated and superior you are to the rest of us.’

  There was a pause. Agnes, speaking for the world, continued.

  ‘What your superior education failed to teach you, Peter, is that just because someone has not received an education does not mean they’re not intelligent.’

  Fleming’s upper lip was squirming with a life all of its own. The other journalists were moving quite steadily in on him. George Hogg had forgotten all about being a Quaker as the flames of war – in the cause of peace – licked all around him.

  Jack Belden, an ex-docker, muscular and heavy, spoke very softly.

  ‘Just before this all descends into fisticuffs, Fleming,’ he said, ‘and by the way, that editorial was written in the most excruciating English – I’d like to ask you something – we all being in China as we are? I’d like to ask you, as someone who’s obviously just been talking intimately with the most powerful men in Britain, what – if the policies of the British and French governments towards Europe are ones of wholesale abandonment of defenceless peoples to barbarism – what precisely are the policies of the British and French governments towards the peoples of China? You know, all these folk who are so generously allowing us to live among them? Are they to be allowed to be butchered wholesale by the barbarous Japanese?’

  ‘China,’ expostulated Fleming, ‘what the hell does China have to do with anything?’

  ‘Answer the fucking question! What is Britain and France’s position on the Japanese–Chinese War?’

  Fleming, faced by this mountain of muscle,
with only George between him and Belden, could not control his face, his patrician contempt for the leftist poraille all around him. Could not control his Etonian instinct to show himself the intellectual superior of all other men. Besides, George would bear the brunt of the assault, and the door was nearby.

  ‘What is China to us?’ he laughed. ‘You really want to know? Though you won’t have the intellectual capacity to understand it. I asked when I was in London.’

  ‘Well?’ asked Agnes.

  ‘It is blindingly obvious. Let the dogs fight – in Europe, in Asia. Chamberlain backs Japan. Why? Because, if Japan beats China – which it will – then Japan will be free to attack Russia – just as it’s tried to do twice in the last two years – and with German troops pouring from the west (all fear of English or French opposition now removed) – the Soviet Union will be completely smashed between the two. The Bolshevik virus will be exterminated – forever. And the war over, all the peace treaties signed, an exhausted Japan will be permitted to keep China as a reward.’

  There was a silence. This statement required quite a lot of digesting. Especially by George, who stood as Peter’s line of defence against the ring of journalists.

  So Britain is going to allow Japan to seize control of China, thought George, butcher its inhabitants, including my orphans, all so Britain and France can utterly destroy the Soviet Union? All this for that, thought George? And in Eastern Europe too, he thought, slightly guiltily.

  He half-looked back at Peter. Peter gave him a swift reassuring smirk, that swift reassuring old Etonian smirk which says, ‘Don’t worry, old chap, I know exactly what I’m doing and if you ordinary folk do exactly what I tell you then everything will turn out just tickety-boo!’

  George was not the quickest of thinkers, but on this occasion he did himself credit. Into his mind came the image of a cold winter’s night in Oxford when he had been making his way back from a meeting to help Ethiopian refugees after Mussolini’s invasion of their country. In a backstreet he had suddenly run into a pack of Bullingdon boys, all in white tie and tails, surrounding an aged and defenceless tramp lying in the gutter. And they were kicking and punching him and laughing hysterically. And then they stopped. It was what happened next that really sickened him. The leader of the feral pack leant down and, with an immaculate drawl, offered the old tramp a five-pound note. And the tramp took the note gratefully and in the most fawning tones thanked the Bullingdon boys most profusely and assured them that they were gents and if they ever wanted to beat him up again he would be most eternally grateful. Both sides then went their separate ways.

  In one second George transmuted. In an instant the flames which had been licking greedily within him to lay into these warmongering journalists switched 180 degrees and now, engulfed in blood-red fire, George the Quaker turned and smote Fleming the old Etonian a dolorous blow upon his nose.

  Peter Fleming fell to the ground. Then stared upwards.

  He had never been punched by a Quaker before. In fact he had rarely been punched by anyone before. There were strict rules within the Bullingdon Club about who smote whom. A non-Etonian was not allowed to punch an Etonian. Only Etonians were allowed to punch fellow Etonians. And then only if they had been a member of the club longer than their opponent. So this blow by a mere Quaker from some place called Harpenden came as a profound shock to him. His sangfroid positively bled.

  Everyone stared at George.

  George, smote with shame, immediately apologized to the surrounding journalists.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that!’

  ‘You should, you should,’ they all assured him.

  Jack Belden and Agnes patted George on his back.

  ‘That was a great punch,’ Agnes whispered to him.

  Lots of his fellow journalists wanted to buy him drinks, then remembered he was a Quaker.

  Fleming crept from the room.

  As he left the room a bicycle courier came in with a telegram from the central post office for Vernon Bartlett. It was from Somerset in England.19

  *

  That same evening Spider Girl was alone with her father in the apartment – except for The Drab, who was crooning to herself somewhere. Donald and Hu were working at the hospital. Agnes, having left the Last Ditch Club and all its excitements, had gone on to a meeting with a communist friend and Freda was lying in bed in Vernon’s hotel room smothered in ‘Irresistible’ perfume awaiting his return.

  Spider Girl’s father had greatly improved since she had related those various comic events which had become part of village lore. In fact they talked mainly of their life on the farm – incidents and happenings which had made them merry.

  It lightened his heart.

  But Spider Girl wanted to say something. Her father was a modest man. He would not approve of her saying it. He could even be offended. But such was the strength of her emotion, her need to express it, that even Spider Girl’s legendary quantities of common sense and realism were thrown to the winds.

  ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I just want to say how grateful I am, how proud I am of you, that when you could have turned your back and fled, instead you volunteered for the army, gloriously stood upon the battlefield, and fought so heroically, so courageously for us our family, for your country. I am so proud of you. Thank you for your valour.’

  There, she’d said it.

  Wei stared at her.

  He spoke icily in reply.

  ‘There is no valour in war. You become a bandit. You think like a bandit, you fight like a bandit, you die like a bandit. There is no valour. War is a slurry pit.’

  He thought. Then coldly continued.

  ‘Everything you know, everything you love in people, is destroyed in war. All those things that have brought you together in this world – raising families, working with your fellow men, working as one in the fields, at our precious ceremonies and festivals – if you fight, if you go to war you take knives and bullets and slice and rip all those good things apart. The precious tendons and hands and fingers and sinews of people, of communities which draw us all together – which drew together our Japanese foes in their communities just as much…’

  He paused.

  ‘I mean – you remember that barn that Fang the Builder made for us…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘…and how we, the whole family, went inside it when he had finally finished it (he always took so long finishing things) – and we looked around and saw what he had created – his beautiful stonework, his wooden beams and posts so beautifully carved. When I went in I just stood and stared, ran my hands and fingers over his joinery and beams so smoothly and beautifully crafted by him – and all that work, all that incredible skill which he had shown in creating that barn, in one moment, in one moment of war, was ripped part, destroyed in a frenzy of madness… There is no valour in war.’

  He looked away from her. Her heart sank. Then he looked back. He addressed her.

  ‘Daughter, as you and I both know, I will soon die.’

  Spider Girl hung her head.

  ‘But until then let us remain friends. And no mention of valour.’

  17

  Wuhan was in a state of evacuation. Mass evacuation. The evacuation was being organized by the military.

  First to go, by river, were the large majority of wounded soldiers. All those at the hospital and in the surrounding grounds had been transported by stretcher or by cart or in buses if they could walk to the docksides on the Bund or to the railway station across the river in Wuchang where special trains awaited them. Every floating brothel had been commandeered and many of the whores – male and female – had been re-employed as nurses and orderlies. They gently helped the stricken soldiers up the gangways and then tended to them once they were in their bunks. Those with broken limbs who were suspended in the bicycle tractions were smoothly lifted and carried with great care by coolies who specialized in moving delicate porcelain and intricate pieces of machinery and art.

&nbs
p; This proved a disaster for the wealthy, who were in the midst of evacuating themselves and all their extremely rare and valuable works of art and antique porcelain. They needed precisely the same highly skilled coolies. They offered them stupendous sums to work for them. Army officers stepped in.

  Whole universities and factories sailed upstream – pupils, workers, machinery and equipment – often as one.

  The famous Hing Fu-tsai restaurant, which claims an unbroken history from the Ming Dynasty and was patronized by fifteenth-century emperors, having been first removed from Nanking, was now removed again – chefs, waiters, kitchen boys, pots and pans, maître d’s and sauciers and sommeliers and the entire contents of its legendary wine cellar – all the way upstream to Chungking.

  The indefatigable Madame Chiang saved hundreds of cases of art treasures and priceless manuscripts from the golden ages of Chinese culture and had them shipped upstream.

  Those whores who did not go upstream as nurses were left with a dilemma. Unlike in Nanking, the population of Wuhan was well aware of what the Japanese probably intended for them, with the result that the majority of whores – who in Nanking had so heroically and patriotically offered themselves for rape (and worse) at the hands of Japanese soldiers to sate them and save the purity and virtue of upper-class ladies (a gruesome and heroic sacrifice for which they were never thanked or received any compensation) – in Wuhan instead clambered aboard the steamers and junks side by side with the fine ladies and sailed away together into the western sunset. This left just a few of the whores, who calculated that with so few remaining for their enemies to choose from, the Japanese would be forced to pay them extra-high rates and treat them with less ferocity.

  It was early autumn. White mists settled on the river and over its ever quieter streets as a majority of Wuhan’s inhabitants bled away.

  As Hu walked to the hospital she was preoccupied and just a little worried.

  Ever since Spider Girl had rescued Hu from the collapsed air-raid shelter, Hu had watched Spider Girl very closely. As a friend monitors a friend. She was aware that every so often Spider Girl quietly suffered black moments, dark moments of despair – a most un-Spider Girl-like condition. She also understood that Spider Girl was faced with a terrible dilemma, the dilemma so many had faced in this war. In the face of the murderous Japanese advance – did you stay with your infirm relatives who could not be moved, or did you abandon them? Of course, Hu understood that Spider Girl would never abandon her father. Under any circumstances. But if she had some contingency plan to move her father, Spider Girl had not confided in Hu about it, despite attempts by Hu to raise the subject. There was also the question of what would happen to The Drab. Hu watched Spider Girl as she stoically hobbled around the apartment and then off down the street to do her shopping. Pain was written across her face as she waddled on her rickets-crippled joints. How could she help?