Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  This is from a Quaker memoir:

  The three teams formed under the scheme adopted by the Staff Meeting of May 1943 for work under the Chinese Red Cross, one with the help of the British Red Cross Unit, were to operate behind the Chinese forces in Yunnan that were facing the Japanese on the Salween front in readiness for the drive into Burma. In fact, the offensive did not begin until April 1944, and the three teams had some months of waiting, filled in with medical work before military activity began. M.T.3 was in Hsiakwan, already familiar to the Unit, M.T.4 towards Yenshan on the Indo-China border, and the mixed M.T.5 for a time in Tsiao Chien, which they reached on horseback after a grim ride in pouring rain along ravines, precipices and watercourses. Here the hospital consisted of three temples, ‘two used as wards and one as administrative centre – and all still used as temples. The wards have some very fearsome deities in them, and it has been found necessary to cover them up for the sake of the peace of mind of some of the patients.’

  A New Life Movement team, which handed the premises over to them, had set up a laboratory and diet kitchen and had maintained a high standard of cleanliness throughout the hospital. The work was mainly surgical; there was a predominance of ulcers due largely to the paucity of Army diet. In the medical ward were typhus, relapsing fever, malignant malaria, hookworm, dysentery and other diseases. A delousing plant which the team set up was in great demand by the troops. That was the beginning of M.T.5’s work.

  It was while working with this team in Tengch’uan that Dr. Donald Hankey, of the British Red Cross, died of typhus in January 1944. To the F.A.U. the losing of so close a friend was no less a blow than the loss of one of its own members.

  Apparently, with the rapid Japanese advance, typhus broke out in a Chinese unit facing the Japanese. Donald rushed to the front and somehow or other managed to inoculate the 10,000 soldiers in one day. He only forgot to inoculate one person: himself. He died a few days later and was buried beside a lake.

  His name is on the war memorial of his home village of Semley in Wiltshire. It is also on a plaque inside the church which lists those of the parish who died in the Second World War. I go there sometimes to commune with his soul. I’ve read him a couple of the chapters in which he appears. There’s a very nice pub across the green to which we afterwards repair.

  In his adventures in Yunnan, I do not know whether or not he was accompanied by a fictional Chinese housekeeper.

  This is a poem written by a member of the Quaker ambulance unit, Rita Dangerfield, while she was in Yunnan. It is not dedicated to Donald, but is relevant to the beauty of the place where he was buried.

  ‘To a Yunnan Waterfall’

  This offspring of the hills and rain,

  This shimmering cloud of billowy train

  Twisting, twirling, foam – unfurling

  Dancing, prancing, light enhancing

  Leaping, sweeping, ever seeking

  Further heights to torrent down

  O vision joyous and abandoned,

  O rhythmic harmony unbounded

  By man’s creative rules and standards,

  Go swiftly, charge your gleaming masses

  Onward, onward through the mountains

  Till your bright transcendent smile

  Greet some other land awhile.

  As the Chinese called him, Noble Soul.

  Lao She

  Lao She was never one of life’s lucky people. But it never stopped him trying.

  His wife Hu Jieqing and their three children made the perilous journey out of Japanese-occupied China and joined him in Chungking.

  Life in Chungking became increasingly repressive there under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek, especially for writers and left-wingers. While there Lao wrote his novel The Drum Singers on the life of a popular theatre troupe – based on his collaboration with Shanyaodan – and his real-life success in preventing the leading girl being sold into concubinage.

  After his wife joined him, he wrote his great novel Four Generations under One Roof, based on his wife’s experiences of living under Japanese occupation.

  With the end of the world war and the restart of the Chinese Civil War between Nationalists and Communists in 1946, Lao moved to the US, tired to death of war and its tyrannies and hoping to become a serious international writer. One of the many perils of being a writer during wartime (apart from political repression and bombs falling) is the repeated loss of completed manuscripts through bombing of publishers, collapse of postal services, etc. etc., all of which Lao She suffered.

  There he and his friend Ida Pruitt (daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries and born and raised in rural China) decided together to rewrite – from memory (I think) – Four Generations Under One Roof in English, renaming it The Yellow Storm. In doing so they produced a book which I consider to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

  It was published and received rave reviews in the New York Times etc. Bestseller, Hollywood films etc. etc. Then something catastrophic happened – as so often in Lao She’s life. The communists won the civil war. Lao She considered it is his duty, as a socialist, as a patriot, to return to the new China and do his bit. And did so.

  Overnight, thanks to the CIA etc., he became a ‘communist collaborator’ and non-person in the West. He was dropped tout court by anyone influential or ‘artistic’. The Yellow Storm disappeared from the shelves and became, almost overnight, impossible for freedom-loving Westerners to read. It is currently unavailable on Amazon. I managed three years ago to finally purchase a copy for £70, remaindered from Ilkley Public Library. (God bless independent-minded freedom-loving Yorkshiremen!)

  The Lao family set up home in their birthplace, Beijing. Lao’s first act on moving in to their new home was to plant a red persimmon tree in their courtyard. He was invited to write articles and plays, and he wrote Teahouse, his gentle comedy about censorship in China from the time of the last Qing emperor all the way through to the last days of Chiang Kai-shek. When first produced in 1957 it was a great success, but its popularity slowly waned and under the youthful Red Guards it became one of the symbols of ‘reaction’. Lao was targeted by the Red Guards, beaten up, imprisoned, and then released. This happened several times. His death remains mysterious. He either was killed by drowning or deliberately committed suicide as a protest.

  His play Teahouse is now considered a classic of Chinese theatre and is performed widely and regularly throughout China to great acclaim.

  What a great man!

  His wife Hu Jieqing went on to become a famous contemporary artist in China. She died aged ninety-six.

  Peter Fleming

  Peter Fleming, though he wrote pro-appeasement editorials for The Times, probably did not write the notorious 7 September 1938 one quoted in this novel. According to Richard Cockett,26 that editorial was most likely written by the paper’s chief editorial writer on foreign affairs, Aubrey Leo Kennedy, with Dawson adding the fatal passages quoted in this novel.

  During the war, like many other young appeasers including Quintin Hogg and Patrick Heathcoat-Amory, loser of the Bridgwater by-election, he joined the armed forces. He was involved in a commando group in the Norway campaign, then he organized small groups of commandos in Kent who would fight behind the German lines after an invasion. He then joined Special Operations Executive (SOE) – which is generally now regarded as having been more leftish and effective than MI6 – and went to India and the Far East to organize disinformation campaigns against the Japanese.

  MI6 continued with its anti-communist obsessions throughout the war (while blindly allowing itself to be infiltrated by communists like Philby and Burgess because they went to the right schools). This meant that it frequently fell prey to right-wing anti-communists (who also happened to be Nazi double agents). Writers like Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene served in MI6 and later mocked its incompetence.

  After the war Peter Fleming left SOE, returned to his banker’s mansion at Nettlebed and played the country squire, with l
ots of hunting and shooting, but still spent most of his time in London contributing to The Spectator. He died in 1971.

  He was partly the inspiration for his brother Ian’s James Bond.

  Celia Johnson

  Peter Fleming’s wife (best known for her performance in Brief Encounter) continued her acting career until her death in 1982.

  It is one of my great regrets that I never saw her as Elizabeth Bennet (though I’m a proud owner of her reading of Pride and Prejudice). She gives intelligence and reflection and suffering to the role, unlike modern dramatizations, where it’s all about female wit and superiority to all the troglodytic males.

  Freda Utley

  In the interests of writing entertaining fiction, I have probably been cruelest to Freda Utley. She was an extraordinary woman and I apologize to her and her spirit.

  As far as I’m aware she did not have an affair with Vernon Bartlett. Paul French’s Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao gives a portrait of her in Wuhan, her writing and the Last Ditch Club.

  Freda went on to have a fascinating odyssey of a career after China. She never lost her horror of war and her opposition to it after her spell in China. This should be remembered.

  After her experiences in China she settled in the United States, where she moved strongly to ‘the right’ – and by ‘right’ I mean McCarthyism. After the end of the Chinese Civil War and the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek and the triumph of communism, with her experiences in Wuhan she became an ‘expert’ at naming the Americans in China responsible for ‘the loss of China’.

  It should be remembered that although McCarthyism is now portrayed as a far-right-wing wave of deliberately induced hysteria and repression (like the recent anti-Corbyn and American Russiagate hysterias), many of its roots were in the pre-war isolationist movement. McCarthyites were the Americans who wanted no war with the rest of the world and no interventions or foreign military adventures. McCarthyism was in many ways their revenge on the leftist and liberal East Coast internationalists and interventionists, who they saw as being responsible for dragging an unwilling America into the war and the subsequent growth of the worldwide American ‘empire’ post 1945 and its endless interventions and wars.

  The right wing in America has always had anti-war and isolationist elements in it. Today they are represented by such individuals as Ron Paul and his son Rand and to an extent figures like Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard.

  Freda Utley and, after her death, her son Jon Basil Utley, have been central to continuing to support anti-war causes. Jon Basil was a founder of the strongly anti-war American Conservative magazine, a tireless journalist, and was central to the setting up of the website antiwar.com with its extraordinary editor Justin Raimondo who, until his recent death, analyzed with uncanny precision every lying word and shameful military and political aggression of the Western War Party – neo-conservatives, Israel Firsters, and members of the Military Industrial Complex. Years before I knew anything about the Utley family, antiwar.com, with its digest of news reports and articles on wars all around the world, was and is the first thing I read in the morning when I blurrily go online.

  And Freda, however bad her actions in the McCarthy hearings were against certain China hands with communist sympathies, never lost her love nor profound respect for the leading communist there, Agnes Smedley. In 1970 she was fair-minded enough to write:

  Agnes was one of the few people of whom one can truly say that her character had given beauty to her face, which was both boyish and feminine, rugged and yet attractive. She was one of the few spiritually great people I have ever met, with that burning sympathy for the misery and wrongs of mankind which some of the saints and some of the revolutionaries have possessed. For her the wounded soldiers of China, the starving peasants and the overworked coolies, were brothers in a real sense. She was acutely, vividly aware of their misery and could not rest for trying to alleviate it. Unlike those doctrinaire revolutionaries who love the masses in the abstract but are cold to the sufferings of individuals, Agnes Smedley spent much of her time, energy, and scant earnings in helping a multitude of individuals. My first sight of her had been on the Bund of Hankou, where she was putting into rickshaws and transporting to the hospital, at her own expense, some of those wretched wounded soldiers, the sight of whom was so common in Hankou, but whom others never thought of helping. Such was her influence over ‘simple’ men as well as over intellectuals that she soon had a group of rickshaw coolies who would perform this service for the wounded without payment.

  To add further praise to a woman I have not treated well in my fiction, I would say that this short description she gave of refugees arriving on the Bund in 1938 became my central inspiration for this novel – or at least book one:

  Many families had been on the march for weeks, some for months. Families which had set out with five or six children had reached Hankou with only one or two. Small girl children were scarce; when the mother and father have no more strength to carry the little children, and when the small children are too exhausted to move another step, some have to be left on the road to die. With what agony of mind must some children have been abandoned so others can be saved! Who can even imagine the infinite number of small individual tragedies amongst the millions who have been driven from their homes by the Japanese?a

  Although I cannot remember now definitely, I am almost certain I read this passage first in Stephen MacKinnon’s magnificent Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China.

  Hu Lan-shih

  There is only one reference I have come across to Hu Lan-shih. It is in a particularly vivid and intelligent interview she gave to the American communist writer and journalist Anna Louise Strong on the Bund when she arrived after her trek from Shanghai with the cotton mill girls and the army. She probably wasn’t an actual mill worker but a writer who had worked closely with the workers for years. Strong describes her as ‘a well-poised young woman, with a vivid sense of humor and superlatively straightforward and honest.’ I have found no trace of her apart from this one interview:

  A group of Shanghai textile workers, among those present, had just arrived in Hankow, coming on foot by a thousand-mile zigzag course, helping wounded soldiers and doing propaganda work in villages along the way.

  They told me the highest wages ever known in the textile industry had been ten to fifteen dollars (American money) a month in 1926–27, when the trade-unions were strong. The biggest drop in wages came in 1932 after the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, especially through the uncontrolled wage-cutting in Japanese-owned factories. When the war broke (out), most of the girls had been getting only three to six dollars (American) monthly, and had been without trade-union protection.

  But they were not illiterate or ignorant of world affairs. During the years when trade-union activities were not permitted, the Y.W.C.A.’s industrial courses had provided extensive education for Shanghai’s working-class girls. The girls said, ‘The freeing of workers and of women must be worked out in connection with the freeing of the Chinese people as a whole. Workers and women suffer the most from Japanese oppression. The Japanese mills are the worst; they often made us work sixteen to eighteen hours, and until noon on Sunday without extra pay. Now the Japanese have destroyed all our homes and factories. So the working women are strongest to help the army. We go in the very front lines.’

  The most amazing account of the work of women behind the lines was given by Hu Lan-shih, (a well-known woman writer who organized a group of Shanghai working girls in the earliest days of the war). Most of the girls came originally from farming families; Miss Hu herself had an almost uncannily shrewd knowledge of the Chinese farmer mind. A quiet, well-poised young woman, with a vivid sense of humor and superlatively straightforward and honest, she went with her uniformed but unarmed group among the soldiers and villagers of the Yangtze delta. Though the spectacle of women organizing a war startled the Chinese villagers, the women oft
en got better results than either army officers or college students. They induced Chinese farmers to harvest at night between battle lines, reclaimed dozens of ‘child-traitors’ and halted demoralized, retreating soldiers. Lived on red pepper, tou-fu, and turnips dug from fields.

  ‘In August at the beginning of the war,’ related Miss Hu, ‘we offered our services to the commander to whom we were sent. He told us that his first difficulty was lack of food for the soldiers since the nearby farmers had all fled, leaving their crops unharvested. We followed the farmers to the places to which they had fled and urged them to return, at least as long as the soldiers were there. We said, ‘A new day has come to China. The army no longer exploits the people but wants to be their friend. They will help you harvest, and you must give them hot water and help the wounded/ At first they would not believe us, but we gave them our word and we also held the general to his promise. Thus a large section of territory behind Shanghai was repopulated; the people gave housing and food to the soldiers, and the soldiers helped get in the crops.’

  Later, the harvest on one of the fronts was dangerously located in a zone of fire and no one had succeeded in persuading the farmers to harvest it. By visiting the families and promising to go with them, the girls got 130 volunteers who harvested all one night and got eighty loads of crops. With keen intuition the girls worked with soldiers who had violated the ‘new spirit’ by paying too little for farm products. ‘Suppose a farmer complains that a soldier took a pig that was worth ten dollars and gave only four dollars. We would not humiliate the soldier by reproving him. We would rather congratulate him because he did not take pigs for nothing, but believed in the new spirit between people and army.’b