Anthony Grey

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

  “Chiu ming! chiu ming!” he choked as the waves swirled over his head. “Help me! Please help me!”

  Jakob watched the river sweep the young guard away for only a second or two before he flung himself into the water in a headlong dive. Because the current was strong it took him several minutes to reach the guard and drag him back to the bridge. The troops and coolies stampeding toward the far bank ignored his shouts for assistance as he clung to the side of a pontoon and Jakob had to struggle alone to haul himself out of the river, holding the collar of the now- unconscious guard. When he bent to lift him, Jakob was surprised at how little the scrawny youngster weighed; carrying him easily in both arms, he ran to the western shore among the panicking throng and started up the long, steep path that led to the top of the cliff.

  Two companies of Kuomintang troops making a determined assault on the defended corridor halfway up the hill had partially overrun the outer Red Army defense trenches, and Jakob saw stick grenades wheeling end over end to explode among the marchers on the track above him. To his dismay the soldier carrying the canvas- covered Red Army standard went down suddenly in the middle of a group of guards and the flag fell to the ground. It slithered down the hillside until it came to rest against an outcrop of rock, and as he climbed, Jakob saw one of the Kuomintang soldiers detach himself from his unit and begin crawling down toward the fallen flag, intent on capturing it.

  Hobbling faster, bent almost double under the growing weight of the unconscious guard, Jakob left the narrow track and struck out across the hillside toward the rocky outcrop. He reached it first, and hoisting the limp guard onto one shoulder, he bent to snatch up the Communist standard. As he straightened up with the furled flag in his left hand, Jakob saw the lone Kuomintang soldier slithering down the stony slope with his rifle held in front of him. For a moment they faced one another across twenty or thirty yards of barren hillside and the Kuomintang soldier’s narrow eyes opened wide in an expression of amazement as he caught sight of Jakob’s blond beard and white skin. Neither man moved but the soldier recovered quickly and, raising his rifle to his shoulder, fired three shots in quick succession at the young missionary.

  In turning away, Jakob stumbled against a jagged stone and fell to his knees; the rifle shots passed over him and he managed to scramble behind a boulder, dragging the guard after him. The next instant a Red Army platoon advancing up the winding track came into view. Seeing the enemy soldier close before them, they opened fire at once with their own carbines. The Kuomintang soldier, hit low in the body, dropped his weapon and doubled over, grunting in pain. Without looking round he began dragging himself back across the hillside toward the safety of his unit and the Red Army platoon, ignoring him, ran on up the track.

  Jakob remained crouching behind the rock long enough to catch his breath. At the top of the ridge troops of the First Special Course Battalion were dug in along a deep fortified trench they had captured in the middle of the night. Their field of fire gave them command of the last stretch of the track as well as the far side of the bill, and bending low once more, Jakob scrambled fast across the open hillside, climbing diagonally toward them. He reached the crest of the ridge a minute or two later, carrying the young Communist guard in a fireman’s lift on his right shoulder. Without breaking his stride he plunged gratefully downhill under protection of the Special Course Battalion’s guns, still clutching in his left hand the flag which bore the potent, ambivalent symbols of both Communism and Christianity.

  PART THREE

  The Marchers Change Step

  1935

  The five-day battle at the Hsiang River proved to be the biggest and bloodiest military confrontation of the entire Long March. The Communists, by their own admission, lost 50,000 men half their strength. This near-disaster, however, became a turning point in the fortunes of the Red Army. After abandoning the encircled Central Soviet Area in Kiangsi, the Communists had marched about eight hundred miles in six weeks, but they were fleeing without a clearly defined political purpose, having no greater ambition than to link up with another Communist force of 30,000 troops, the Second Front Army, at the smaller soviet of Sangchih, in northwest Hunan. Chiang Kai-shek, however, deployed 200,000 men astride the northward route to the Hunan soviet, preventing the Central Red Army from attaining even that limited objective. The Moscow-oriented Communist leadership, known collectively as the Twenty-eight Bolsheviks, having brought the march to the brink of a debacle, was therefore compelled to admit its failures and bow to the more flexible military philosophies and guerrilla tactics of Mao Tse-tung.

  The long-simmering antagonism between Mao and the “Bolsheviks,” headed by the youthful Party general secretary, Po Ku, and the German Comintern adviser, Otto Braun, had been shaped by the Chinese Communist Party’s history. Mao, with many others, had thrown himself eagerly into organizational work in the 1920s after helping to found the Party, but when Chiang Kai-shek began to massacre his Communist partners in the revolution in 1927, Mao followed the example of leaders of peasant rebellions throughout China’s history and retreated alone to the mountainous countryside of eastern Hunan. The central Party leadership, guided by a Stalinist Comintern adviser on the spot, continued to operate from a secret headquarters in the French concession of Shanghai. Po Ku, like the other Bolsheviks, had gone to study in Moscow in his teens, before returning home to become general secretary in 1931 at the age of twenty-four, and while he and his young fellow leaders planned an orthodox proletarian revolution centered on cities and urban workers, an isolated Mao fought on in the rural wilderness, building and politicizing an army of peasant rebels. Chu Teh, an inspirational military leader, joined Mao, and together they created a fighting force that later founded the Central Soviet in Kiangsi, an area the size of France embracing a population of nine million peasants. By adopting a guerrilla strategy epitomized in the slogan “When the enemy advances, we retreat. . . . When the enemy retreats, we pursue Mao and Chu Teh successfully preserved the Central Soviet against Chiang Kai-shek’s first three encirclement and annihilation campaigns, in 1930-31.

  But when the Communist Party moved its headquarters to the Kiangsi soviet in 1932, its Moscow-educated leaders were still obsessed with Russian orthodoxy, which demanded seizure of cities and urban uprisings. When Chiang launched his fifth encirclement campaign against the Central Soviet, the Bolsheviks, in line with this ideology, insisted on employing positional warfare strategies, building earthen walls to make the region “a bastion of iron” against the blockhouse siege methods of the Kuomintang. Mao, accused of betraying vital Communist principles by indulging in “timid guerrilaism,” was removed from his post of chairman of the soviet government and took no direct part in the decision to abandon and dismantle the Central Soviet. Although nominally a member of the Military Commission, Mao remained outside the top leadership circle until the marchers reached the Hsiang River. By that time all direct contact with the Comintern and Stalin had been lost, and although he was suffering one of his periodic bouts of malaria, Mao succeeded in unseating the Bolsheviks by enlisting the support of dissatisfied Red Army generals to outvote them. He thus broke Moscow’s stranglehold on the Chinese revolution, and the marching column was radically reorganized almost as soon as it had crossed the Hsiang River. Archive documents carried at the Bolsheviks’ insistence were burned, cumbersome machinery and surplus weapons were hidden in remote mountain caves, and other unnecessary equipment was dropped into ravines. The surviving troops were transformed into a faster, more flexible force able to wheel, feint, and create diversions, and they pushed on rapidly across the craggy Yueh-cheng Mountains on the Kwangsi border and entered Kweichow’s rugged Wumeng range. There they encountered the armies of the Kweichow warlords as well as the provincial government forces. Troops of the Central Government’s army also continued in pursuit - but the Communists, by employing their new tactics, eluded them all.

  Chiang, outwitted and outmaneuvered, temporarily abandoned the chase, allowing the Communists tw
elve days’ respite in early January after they captured Tsunyi, Kweichow’s northernmost town. It was at meetings in Tsunyi that the crucial leadership changes were formally confirmed: Mao Tse-tung became chairman of the Revolutionary Military Commission of the Party Central Committee, thereby wresting day-to-day control of the march from its previous chairman, Chou En-lai, and the German Comintern adviser. The young Po Ku, still only twenty-seven, was removed from office, and Mao from that time onward presided over meetings of the Party Politburo. Chou En-lai, who had long before espoused the Bolsheviks’ cause, did a remarkable about-face and switched his support to Mao at Tsunyi, endorsing his new plan to swing northwest in a wide arc through lightly defended territory in an effort to link up with another small soviet set up on the Szechuan-Shensi border by the Communist Fourth Front Army. A vague, long-term aim to “go north to fight the Japanese invader” was also enunciated at Tsunyi by Mao to provide the toiling troops with a distant patriotic ideal, and all these complex factors of history and temperament played their part in defining the route the march was to take over the succeeding ten months. But as they pressed on through the mountains of Kweichow in the cold of late January 1935, none of the marchers could have suspected just how harsh an ordeal they would have to face on the trek that would take them even deeper than they suspected into China’s wild heartlands.

  1

  The stony track leading north through the Taloushan Mountains toward the border of Szechuan was hard with frost beneath Jakob’s callused feet, but as he climbed in the gathering dusk at the end of the line of prisoners, the faint, sweet fragrance of winter plum blossom unexpectedly teased his nostrils. In the gloom he could just see the outline of a grove of trees whose bare branches were speckled with the early blossom, and the perfume of the white flowers lifted his flagging spirits. Ahead of him the troops were lighting torches made from bunches of mountain bracken lashed to staves: they flared brightly in the half-darkness, casting a warm glow over the long, winding column of marching men, and spontaneously the soldiers began to sing as they climbed.

  A silver crescent moon already lifting into sight above the peak of a distant mountain was spilling cold, pale light on its highest crags and in the dome of the darkening sky a few faint stars were beginning to twinkle. Against Jakob’s cheeks the chill night air of the mountains was sharp but there was not a breath of wind and his body was warm inside the quilted long-gown his guards had given him at Tsunyi. He climbed more easily, since the foot lacerations he had suffered at the Hsiang crossing had been given a chance to heal during the twelve-day rest in the old walled city. The constant marching had also at last begun to toughen his feet, making the soles coarse and leathery. The grooves worn in his insteps by the bindings of plaited straw sandals had also ceased to chafe as calluses hardened to form a horny, protective hide inside the flimsy footwear.

  As they marched in the stillness of the approaching night, the rough voices of the peasant troops raised in unison carried clearly along the winding tracks, echoing from the funneled walls of ravines and flowing invisibly up and down the bare hillsides of the Taloushan. The singing, Jakob could sense, was binding the column together, fusing the thousands of marchers into one serpentine body, imbuing each man with renewed vigor from a common well of energy. Although he did not join in and the sentiments bellowed into the night were crudely exhortatory, in the deep silence of the mountains the songs in their essence took on the emotional force of hymns and Jakob felt himself strangely stirred by them.

  Not for the first time, the cadences of the youthful voices inspired in him an illogical feeling of community with the multitude of troops marching all around him. He felt keenly the power of the common loyalty which bound them together; he felt the intense shared excitement of the challenge they faced, fleeing from a superior enemy into an unknown future, every man equal and carrying only the barest essentials for survival on his back — chopsticks, a rice bowl, a quilted blanket, an umbrella of oiled paper, a rifle. Jakob sensed that having survived the fiery slaughter of the Hsiang River, each man felt himself chosen to fight on for his fallen comrades as well as himself and faith in their cause seemed to ring from the soul of every man when they sang on the march. On such occasions the atmosphere of the column was that of a great spiritual crusade in which every individual gloried in the dangers and hardships still to be met. Jakob never forgot for an instant the deep hostility to his own faith that the Communists harbored and he still prayed fiercely each day for help to show them forgiveness for having so callously taken Felicity’s life and robbed him of his daughter — but despite all these things, the strange sense of kinship with the soldiers constantly reasserted itself.

  On other fine nights since leaving Tsunyi, when enemy regiments were known to be far off, the troops had also lit torches and sung as they marched beneath the starlit heavens. Often snow had dusted the Taloushan, etching its peaks on the sky in bold strokes of light and shadow, and the calm, silent beauty of these night landscapes had then, as now, induced a tangible sense of awe in the marching men. Their moving presence enhanced the scene when the torches they carried spread a rose-colored glow above their bobbing heads and from the heights, the entire column often became visible winding across the darkened highlands like the coils of along, crimson dragon.

  Amid the rough talk of the soldiers Jakob heard no direct reference to the awe inspiring splendor of their surroundings. Something in their subdued demeanor, however, betrayed an instinctive respect. Whenever Jakob sensed that these unspoken feelings were becoming intense, the men around him invariably burst into their noisy, raucous propaganda songs, as though to prevent their minds from dwelling too deeply on the eerie majesty of the towering crags and black ravines which seemed to dwarf them into insignificance.

  “Come, My Friend, We Must Avenge Our Parents’ Deaths,” they would roar into the darkness, or they would bellow “Let No Chinese Fight Chinese!” . . “The Red Army Will Surely Be Victorious” Someday We Will Fight Our Way Back to Our Native Villages” ... In one song after another of a repertoire that was becoming familiar to Jakob, accents of all the southern provinces — Kiangsi, Kwangtung, Fukien, Hunan, Kwangsi, Kweichow — blended in ragged chorus. But again and again the marching troops returned to one song above all others, “Till the Last Man,” and as they climbed they brandished their torches above their heads both to rekindle the flames and to lend added emphasis to their strident rendering of the words:

  “The sacred earth and freedom

  Who dares to seize them from us?

  Our red political power,

  Who dares stand in our way?

  Our iron fists are ready

  To strike down the Kuomintang.”

  Many of the troops wounded at the Hsiang River still wore bandages on their heads and limbs: some had lost fingers, hands, or an eye, some had a bandaged cauterized stump in place of an arm, others limped and dragged a shattered leg or foot. Many heads had been shaved to the scalp to rid them of lice, many still suffered from boils and malaria, and dysentery had wasted other bodies and faces. But the wounded, diseased, and healthy alike shouted the songs with equal gusto, buoyed and supported by the intense camaraderie produced by shared suffering and survival against the odds. One company or battalion would take up a song, another would answer with its own version, yelled louder or more lustily, and the valleys and crags echoed and re-echoed with the choruses offered in fierce, friendly competition.

  Now that most superfluous equipment had been dumped, the transport column marched separately, mainly at night. Even the heavy artillery weapons had been abandoned for lack of ammunition, and sometimes Jakob and the other prisoners walked in the wake of the less encumbered baggage mules, while sometimes they moved more quickly with the fighting columns. Under the new rules of march which had made wheeling and feinting commonplace, Jakob became used to seeing companies, battalions, and whole regiments overtaking the prisoners and their guards one day, then the next day countermarching rapidly in the opposite
direction.

  By watching and listening to the calls and banter that passed between the units, Jakob had come to realize that the vast majority of the troops who had survived the Hsiang River battle were young peasants, many of them in their late teens or early twenties. Most of them, he guessed, were illiterate, but from their visible self- confidence and their familiarity with their weapons it was obvious that a great number were experienced fighting men of several years’ standing. To replenish the depleted ranks, new peasant volunteers were being recruited from the villages through which the column passed and Jakob also noticed that volunteers from among the captured Kuomintang prisoners of war were being readily welcomed into the fighting units. Apprehensive at first, these recruited prisoners, he saw, were quick to absorb the new ethos of the Red Army, which taught them to pay wayside peasants for any food they provided and to loot only from rich landlords and Kuomintang officials under the strict supervision of their officers.

  Although no visible badges of rank were worn on their uniforms, the Red Army officers were readily identifiable: battalion commanders and above rode stocky horses while platoon and company commanders, often fresh-faced youths in their early twenties, were recognizable by their confident manner arid the respect accorded them by the ordinary infantrymen. In conversations that Jakob overheard, the troops invariably referred to themselves and others as chan shih, a term meaning “fighter” or “warrior,” and he noticed that they never used the expression ping, the faintly contemptuous Chinese word for the ill-famed looting, raping soldier of the warlord armies. As they marched and countermarched, they brandished gleaming, newly captured carbines, automatic rifles, and machine guns at one another, drawing attention to the visible British, German, and American markings on them. They laughed like children and called out- gleefully: “Look, comrades, Mr. Chiang, the Red Army’s faithful arms supplier, has made another fine delivery.”