Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  By noting the position of the sun at dawn and evening and the flow of mountain streams, Jakob calculated that they were often wheeling and changing direction and even occasionally doubling back on their tracks. He never knew what to expect and he sensed that the Communist leaders of the march had no set plan themselves: it seemed obvious that the most difficult, inaccessible routes over mountainous terrain were being chosen to avoid all contact with Chiang Kai-shek’s superior divisions, which he knew were equipped with tanks and armored transport. The column had stayed well clear of the region’s few motor roads and Jakob guessed that radio and scouting reports on enemy positions must be responsible for the many abrupt changes of plan adopted by the Red Army leaders.

  All around him the Chinese prisoners shuffled forlornly onward, as bedraggled and exhausted as himself. Long files of Kuomintang soldiers, roped around the neck, were being dragged along behind Red Army officers mounted on bony horses. Larger numbers of Chinese civilians followed: terrified landowners, local Kuomintang party officials, the servants of the rich taken hostage for their absent masters, and many nondescript men, women, and boys accused of spying for the Nationalists — all stumbled forward in undisciplined groups, their hands bound, their heads bowed. The limbs of many were swollen and disfigured from the chains and bonds they wore, and because they were never allowed water with which to wash, many bore the bloody marks of past beatings by the guards. Some nursed wounds and injuries inflicted during their capture, a few ailing landlords were being borne on stretchers by their servants, and one litter contained a pregnant woman who moaned loudly at the jolting she received on the roughest parts of the tracks. All the prisoners obviously felt their humiliation at the hands of the peasant army keenly and their pale, haunted faces betrayed their fear of what lay ahead if the ransoms demanded for them were not delivered at the next stopping place.

  In front of Jakob a thin, round-shouldered Kiangsi boy in his late teens sobbed incessantly with pain as he dragged himself through the long valley. Taken captive a week earlier in a small town, he had been repeatedly accused of spying for the Nationalists; night after night Jakob had heard him protest his innocence to the guards and he had always ended by shrieking hysterically for his mother to come and confirm his story. But nobody had appeared to pay the small ransom that had been set for his release. Close to despair, the boy had tried two days before to escape down a steep cliff beside the trail but had badly sprained or perhaps even broken an ankle. The damaged joint had swelled to alarming proportions, and ever since he had been limping badly, often falling to his knees in agony at the side of the track. Each time he fell he slowed the progress of the marching group of prisoners, and his furious guards often struck him savagely about the head and shoulders with their rifle butts before hauling him to his feet.

  As the prisoners began to climb out of the valley, the Kiangsi boy slumped silently into the mud again at Jakob’s feet. Despite yet another beating from several young guards, he failed this time to rise. Jakob, seeing that the guards were preparing to go at him once more with their rifle butts, stepped quickly between them and the fallen boy.

  “Can’t you see he has no strength left?” The missionary spoke quietly, barring their way with his own body. “He must be carried or given the chance to ride on a horse.”

  The young guards shouldered Jakob contemptuously aside and began to belabor the fallen boy again, but at that moment the Hunanese guard commander arrived. Pushing through the crowd of soldiers and prisoners that had quickly formed, the Hunanese stared down coldly at the crumpled figure. The youth’s narrow chest heaved convulsively and his body was wracked continuously by a fit of silent sobbing. When the guard commander turned him over with his toe, he sprawled helplessly on his back with his eyes closed and the ring of onlookers saw that tears of pain were streaming down his cheeks.

  “Pa t’a pi Ia!”

  The guard commander spoke in a matter-of-fact voice as he moved away but his casual order — “Execute him!” — galvanized the guards and other soldiers standing close enough to hear. They crowded excitedly around the Hunanese, all shouting and calling at once.

  “Let me do it!” . . . “I’ll do it!” . . . “I want to do it, Comrade Commander!”

  Turning impatiently, the Hunanese pointed to a fresh-faced youngster of about the prisoner’s own age who had already drawn his broadsword and motioned him forward. He also singled out another soldier, who immediately plucked a short-handled hoe from one of the baskets of tools slung on his shoulder pole. Together the pair advanced on the prostrate boy and the soldier with the hoe bent down to drag him into a rough kneeling position. The weeping boy was so distracted with pain and exhaustion that he neither made any move to resist nor gave the faintest sign that he was aware of what was happening to him. His head, hanging low in dejection, presented an ideal target, and without ceremony the novice executioner swung his sword in a wide arc above his right shoulder.

  By chance he severed the young prisoner’s head with his first blow, and after wiping his sword on his victim’s clothing, as he had seen his elders do, the soldier swung around to smirk in the direction of his fellow guards. Then he turned back to help tip the corpse into the shallow depression his helper had scratched out of the mire at the side of the flag stoned trail. Within seconds, slimy clods of mud hid the dead prisoner from view and the guards immediately began shouting and lashing out at the rest of the prisoners, urging them quickly up the rising trail out of the valley.

  13

  Lying exhausted on a straw-strewn wooden floor with only bricks for a pillow, Jakob tried to close his ears to the cries of Chinese prisoners quartered in an adjoining room. The thud of bamboo staves striking flesh and bone mingled intermittently with shouts of pain and despairing pleas for mercy. The exasperated voices of the guards yelling commands rose above the din from time to time and once, through the open door of his room, he saw two soldiers with drawn swords drag one of the terrified landowners away across the muddy courtyard.

  They returned without him a minute or two later and from their uniformly blank expressions Jakob knew that the unfortunate prisoner had been put to death as casually as the Kiangsi boy a few hours earlier. On the march from Paoshan he had witnessed at least a dozen executions of both men and women. The younger guards clamoring eagerly to deal the fatal blow reminded him of excited lads killing rats in a stockyard and through the all-engulfing exhaustion which invaded every fiber of his body, he realized dully that he was becoming accustomed to the indifferent way in which his captors meted out death. This acceptance in its turn filled him with a sense of shame and unease and he dragged himself wearily to his knees to murmur a prayer for the departed souls of the murdered landlord and the lad from Kiangsi.

  To Jakob’s intense relief, that day’s march had ended before darkness fell and all prisoners had been ushered quickly into the yard of a landowner’s house in a small town of about a hundred families on the edge of a fertile rice plain. Half a dozen rooms opened off the yard house and, as was customary, the guards had segregated the prisoners for the night. Jakob, because he was the only foreigner, was quartered in strict isolation. The moment his wrists were untied and he was thrust into his room he sank to the floor and lay down. With its straw-covered wooden boards anti brick pillows, this “cell” was an improvement on the succession of drafty stables and granaries with floors of cold stone or beaten earth in which he had shivered through previous nights on the march. Outside the open door the youth who had executed the Kiangsi boy took up guard, seating himself on a long bench with his rifle and sword at his side. Every few moments he turned to stare balefully at Jakob but otherwise he sat with his back turned, watching the bustle of activity in the busy yard, where pigs and ducks seized from a nearby farm were being noisily slaughtered and prepared for roasting over several fires.

  The adjoining room housed what Jakob had heard the guards call “common criminals.” This group of prisoners appeared to include all those accused of spyin
g or informing for the Kuomintang. “Class enemies” — landlords, the wealthy, and local mandarins — he had noticed, were herded into separate rooms on the opposite side of the courtyard, and noncommissioned men and officers of the government forces were in their turn also allocated exclusive prisons. As he was hustled into his own quarters that evening, Jakob had been able to see through the open door into the adjoining room. The civilian prisoners inside filled all the available space, pressed close against one another in a dense mass on the floor. Their hands were manacled behind them and they were either lying motionless on their sides or sitting bolt upright. All were under strict orders not to talk or move. The brutal beatings which began later, he could tell from the guards’ shouts, were being administered to those who had broken these harsh rules or were protesting at the conditions that left them stewing night after night in their own bodily wastes.

  There was a core of perhaps two hundred prisoners in all, but at each stopping place the numbers rose and fell. Each night new victims were flung white-faced into the captive throngs at the same time that coolies hauling cash in pannier baskets hobbled into the camp after pursuing the column frantically from its previous resting place. From the loud arguments that often ensued Jakob had learned that as little as thirty Chinese dollars could secure the freedom of an unimportant prisoner, while the release of a landowner required anything up to three thousand dollars. The clink of money being counted at a trestle table set up outside the prison quarters had become a familiar nightly sound and on hearing the first torrent of coins spill out of a basket, Jakob dragged his aching body to a new position so that he could see the table through the open door.

  A Communist civilian official who called himself the assistant magistrate was accepting and checking the cash delivered by the coolies. A tall, gaunt Cantonese with iron gray hair and hard eyes, he had come to Jakob’s quarters a few nights before and introduced himself abruptly as Judge Yang. The legal system of the Central Soviet Base Area, he had declared in an officious tone, now extended to whatever territory came under the control of the Central Red Army, and it was his duty to see that it was administered correctly! Yang had made no reference to the public trial or Felicity’s execution and Jakob guessed the magistrate had been given responsibility for the case after these events. For a long tune Yang had merely stood glaring at him in silence. Then in a threatening tone he had said, “No reply has so far been received to the letter you sent to Shanghai.” Jakob attempted to point out that the Anglo-Chinese Mission did not pay ransom, as a matter of policy, but Yang, becoming incensed, had cut him short. In an enraged voice he had ordered Jakob in future to refer only to “fines” which had been “legitimately imposed for flagrant crimes committed by the prisoners against soviet law!” and without a further word, the official had spun on his heel and stamped from the room.

  As he watched the line of coolies dwindle before the magistrate’s table, Jakob harbored no new expectation that any ransom payment would arrive from the Anglo-Chinese Mission. He remembered how Matthew Barlow had been at pains to spell out the mission’s policy on ransom demands during his designation meeting and he could think of no reason why that policy should be changed on his account. As much as anything, he ran his gaze repeatedly up and down the waiting line of coolies in the hope that he might see Liang among them. Although it seemed unlikely that the cook boy would announce his arrival openly to the “magistrate,” eyes that spent so much of each day desperately searching the landscape for a sign of Liang could not easily tear themselves away. It was while watching the coolies trot from the courtyard, followed dazedly by those prisoners whose release they had secured, that Jakob became aware just how regularly the daily patterns and routines of the march were now recurring.

  By making lightning dashes again and again over long distances, the Red Army had obviously astonished the garrisons of many defended towns, arriving beneath their walls before it seemed humanly possible; the uniforms of the prisoners taken indicated that militia units and even Kuomintang detachments were repeatedly capitulating or fleeing in disarray. Despite their fatigue on arrival, the Communist propaganda squads quickly covered each successive town with revolutionary slogans, as they had done in Chentai. The homes of the wealthy were systematically looted for food, cash, and goods. Landlords judged “despotic” were executed at once and their lands allocated to the peasants who tilled them. Prisoners were taken; a ransom, or “fines,” were levied; and the livestock of the rich was slaughtered for food. By observing exceptional discipline and driving itself hard day after day, the Red Army, Jakob realized, was cutting a rapid swath of change across southern China: feeding, clothing, and financing itself with ruthless efficiency as it went, this crusading force was also fomenting a social revolution all along its route. The terrorized faces of the new prisoners Jakob saw being dragged into the yard that night and those stumbling through the gates to freedom were those of men and women living through a waking nightmare, but as he watched them come and go, through the dark veil of all his grief and anxiety Jakob sensed for the first time the true extent of the determination and dedication of his Communist captors.

  14

  Sit up and eat, foreign spy!”

  Jakob awoke with a start from the exhausted doze into which he had fallen to find the young guard standing over him. On the floor by his head was a small basket of moldy rice and a washbasin filled with cabbage leaves which the guard was prodding contemptuously with his toe. He did not move away when Jakob dragged his aching body into a sitting position but stood looking down at him, his expression cold and hostile for no reason. Darkness had fallen outside and the only light came from the courtyard fires. The tantalizing aromas of roasting pig and duck drifted into the room but there was no sign of cooked meat in the basin of leaves. Nevertheless, Jakob knelt beside the meager meal and bent his head over his joined palms for a moment to murmur a short prayer of thanksgiving.

  “What devil words are you speaking, foreign spy?” The guard kicked him roughly to interrupt the prayer and Jakob had to put his hands to the floor to stop himself from falling over sideways.

  “I’m giving thanks to God for a meal tonight,” replied Jakob quietly in Chinese, raising his head to look steadily at the youth.

  “He can’t be much of a ‘God’ if this is all he gets for you!” The guard laughed tauntingly and kicked the basket of rice so that some of the grains spilled onto the dusty boards.

  Jakob sat quite still, fighting against a sudden anger that threatened to rise in him. Then very deliberately he pushed the spilled grains together with the sides of his hands and lifted them back into the basket. The guard’s mud-spattered puttees were only an inch or two in front of his face and for a fleeting instant the image of him beheading the sobbing Kiangsi youth flashed once more into Jakob’s mind. With a great effort of will he dismissed it and, closing his eyes, repeated to himself a formula which he had devised a few days before to help him come to terms with the horrors happening all around him. “Christ loved all men and died for them all,” he told himself fiercely. “He loved this man beside me as much as myself. So I must try to love him too.” At once he felt the anger inside him begin to evaporate and he looked up into the guard’s sneering face.

  “Someday all men will have to account to the Lord for the evil things they do,” he said quietly. “Unless they seek to repent.”

  “Enough devil words! Eat now.”

  The guard kicked the rice basket and basin roughly toward Jakob but despite the fierce pangs of hunger gnawing at his innards, the missionary continued to ignore the food.

  “Perhaps you can help me understand your cause,” said Jakob softly. “Why did you join the Red Army?”

  “I was starving!” The youth spat out his reply with great vehemence, his eyes glittering in his dark face. “My father had only ten hou of rice fields — but the landowner demanded his taxes for thirty years ahead. At every harvest he confiscated all our crops and left us nothing to feed ourselves with. He cu
t off my brother’s head for stealing a few pomelos from his orchard when he was only ten! My mother had to sell my sisters to him to serve as concubines. He made my cousins drag his produce carts like beasts of burden instead of the mules . . . in the end my father committed suicide out of shame.”

  Jakob, moved by the youth’s indignation, looked away. “You’ve obviously suffered greatly. But does that give you the right to kill and rob anyone you choose?”

  “Everyone in the Red Army has suffered in this way. It’s the same all over China. Now we kill the oppressors!”

  “How do you decide who is an oppressor in towns and villages where you are strangers?”

  “If a man tills the soil himself he is safe. We take revenge only on those who get others to work their land for them. We take goods only from those who grow rich on the sweat of others. And those who help the oppressors by spying for them!” The guard aimed another angry kick at Jakob’s basin of cabbage, overturning it, then turned and walked slowly back to his seat outside the door.

  Jakob ate the sour rice and the uncooked cabbage slowly, squatting on the floor of the empty room. His diet until then had consisted largely of moldy rice captured from the Kuomintang and cold bean curd, although once when a cow had been killed he had been given a few slivers of stewed meat. The Chinese prisoners were being fed only rice gruel from big communal urns that he had seen guards carrying into their quarters morning and night, and even in the short time he had been marching with the column he had noticed that they were becoming thinner and more emaciated. The weather had been getting colder as November advanced and, because the room remained open to the night, Jakob rose to wrap a padded quilt around his shoulders. But before he could seat himself again beside the remains of the food, he heard the sound of rapid footsteps approaching.