The Years Between (1939-44)

by Cecil Beaton

  The colonies of rickety straw houses lean in every direction. One cannot believe they can survive a storm. Yet they are not built for permanence: the occupants know that if the Yangtze should rise to a height of thirty feet, then their home will be under water.

  The women are sturdy, stocky, the men have tremendous muscles. They eat their rice ravenously, gluttonously, scooping it into their mouths with the joss sticks used as shovels. The earth is valued so highly for food that there is no space made available for growing flowers: no nonsense here about the perfect peony. This part of China is as unlike the fragrant concubine, and those elegant fantasies of China that we see on porcelain plates and lanterns, as a mining town in the midlands.

  I wanted to remain here, watching the ant-like life, but a number of appointments had been set up at HQ to meet people who will figure largely in my life in the near future. Stanley Smith, the Australian head of the Ministry of Information, took charge of me and gave me words of comfort. ‘Anything you say of China is true — it is so huge.’ I was intrigued by the alert mind and distinguished leanness of aquiline Leo Handley-Derry who will come on the trip with us. With a long, bony finger he pointed to a map and showed me why it would take at least five weeks to reach the front lines. Then Gordon Grimsdale, in his office, did exactly the same thing.

  Kunming

  The jagged mountains of limestone, so weathered that the outline looks like the temperature chart of a consumptive invalid, are not only of great geological interest but prove that the backgrounds of Sung paintings are, in fact, true to nature.

  The town is laid out with streets running in the four cardinal directions and is renowned for its gates, carved pagodas, gilded arches and old city wall (now being pulled down). Today the Chinese consider walled cities as part of an ignoble past. Instead, modern buildings, of no particular architecture, are put up hurriedly. Thus, everywhere we see bogus Spanish palaces and imitation Corbusier banks and cinemas. No rich merchant would dream of building himself a Chinese house.

  The natives, until six years ago, had rarely seen a motor-car but now are accustomed to lorries and jeeps jamming the thoroughfares, and to the sound of aeroplanes, which day and night fill the air as they bring in supplies from the remote outside world. But after seven years of fighting, most people seem to have grown accustomed to war and have focussed their attention on rebuilding and the interests of their family. Only professional politicians are interested in politics.

  The air-raid siren sounded; the sky vibrated with the roar of aircraft; but the enemy machines were flying too high to be seen. The crowds trekked to the caves in the mountains. These warrens extend along the entire range and form an impregnable underground fortress; the whole town can shelter here. Nobody showed any signs of anxiety; in fact, the occasion was treated as a picnic; kitchens were set up outside the caves, and children played organized games.

  GENERAL CHENNAULT

  General Chennault, looking like a footballer somewhat battered after a victorious match, sat at a table behind a sign on which his name, perhaps rather unnecessarily, was printed in large letters. His room had a collegiate atmosphere, with flags and trophies. We were given cups of coffee — a great luxury.

  No other individual has done more for China in her fight against Japan. Before the attack on Pearl Harbour, Chennault’s group of American volunteer pilots, the Flying Tigers, had written a wonderful little page of history. Now he is chief of the US Army Air Force in China: without his contribution, events in the Eastern theatre might have taken a very different course. His task has never been easy; he is always short of aircraft, supplies and co-operation; yet the personal effect he produces is one of wealth and magnanimity. Come what may, he maintains an unruffled calm and creates confidence in others. Formerly a renowned fighter pilot, the inventor of tactics that revolutionized aerial warfare, he knows every aspect of flying from personal experience. After the last war he organized commercial air-circuses that toured America. For five years he was chief instructor of the Chinese air force cadet school. At his desk he now deals simultaneously with Washington and Chungking, as he directs the manifold policies and tendencies of his vast organization.

  With the passage of years, he has become a little deaf; his mouth is tight-bitten and turns down at the corners. His complexion, yellow, as if stained by walnut juice, is pitted with deep crevices, and the skin around the jaw and neck is as wrinkled as the leather of the poor quality windbreaker that he wears, with the Flying Tiger painted crudely on the pocket. His black shaggy hair is beginning to be peppered with grey. Yet there is much about him that refuses to grow up. His shyness and utter simplicity are boyish qualities; his Red Indian eyes have a schoolroom mischief in them; and it is only when members of his staff come in that one has a glimpse of the power that he wields so quietly.

  He reads their suggestions. ‘No — that leaves a loophole — phrase that sentence differently, more emphatically. No, you didn’t quite get my thought there.’ He starts to write. Much of his work is now largely a matter of literary composition. The free and easy side of American army life is here exemplified. Perhaps Americans take all generals as a sort of joke — a joke particularly enjoyed by generals — and doubtless are right in doing so. ‘Hey, General,’ says his secretary. ‘Hadn’t you better put your blouse on?’

  ‘Where’s your General’s blouse?’ inquires some other member of his staff. The cry is taken up — ‘Where’s the General’s blouse? Anyone seen a general’s blouse? The General’s lost his blouse!’ At last someone stretches out an arm.

  ‘Here y’are, General!’ And with a wry smile and a shake of his head, the General changes his tunic.

  A CANTONESE PLAY

  April 15th, Kweilin

  Rickshaw coolies ran through mud and rain in large Ascot hats. With their wide-shouldered capes made of bark, which looks like monkey fur, they suggest smart women arrayed in the height of fashion.

  At first it gave me a shock to see one human being being carried by another. But is riding in a rickshaw any worse than being rowed in a boat?

  Through the ram in rickshaws to the theatre. A busy audience sits in the palely lit wooden auditorium or swarms on to the sides of the stage. Russian audiences smell of baked apples, English of mutton; the Chinese do not emanate body-odour, unlike the Indians, the negroes or the French. It is a remarkably youthful gathering. Everyone appears gay and pleased with life; all are busy fanning themselves, eating, talking; all seem amused by the play and even more amused by life in general.

  The play, given in Cantonese, with women playing the female roles generally allotted to young men, is traditional, but modernized with the help of elaborate changes of scenery and the inclusion of a saxophone in the orchestra. Although I understand little of what is happening on stage, I enjoy the stylized movements of the actors and the cold precision of their performance, and the noise of gongs and cymbals, punctuating the actors’ bons mots. Extraordinarily beautiful in colour and design, the details of embroidery on the elaborate costumes can be admired even by those sitting in the farthest seats. Female characters are resplendent in filigrees of gold and silver thread and different coloured sequins — the young men in scarlet and yellow and pale pistachio green.

  The coulisses always possess a mystery for me. Here they are particularly surprising.

  A sheet of paper, with rough design of each setting, is the only guide for the scene shifters when they change the acts. The orchestra is placed in a wooden pen on the stage. The quality of stage lighting used is of the minimum, yet the effects are inspired. Here is theatre reduced to its essentials, independent of all the drawbacks of 1944. In a communal dressing-room the cast repair their mask-like maquillage, eat dinner or polish up their parts from the script. Ornate headdresses hang next to a large piece of dried fish; bowls of make-up paint stand on the same table as the actress’s meal of eggs and onion shoots; someone is washing his hair in the basin next to the rice bowls. Unlike the reverential treatment accorded Europ
ean stars, these actors have to fight their way through a stubborn dense throng each time they make an entrance on stage.

  The Americans have a particular knack of making themselves at home wherever they may be. This is not just a question of money. Here, you would think it difficult for them to find anything they could enjoy, for few of the customary amusements are available. Nevertheless they chum up with all and sundry — thereby sometimes losing face — pick up local slang and yell from their jeeps in reply to the welcoming village children. They drink the local rice wine; they organize rickshaw races; for once they are carriers, not carried. Down the centre of the main street comes a stampede: terrified coolies sit back in the place of honour, until the climax is reached with a general upheaval of rickshaws. Dollar notes are brought out in thousands, to pay for the fun and damage.

  The English are less adaptable. They maintain, in the face of all obstacles, a complete British atmosphere in whatever remote part of China they may happen to make their headquarters. At all costs their food must be cooked in the English style. Cooking at home is not always of a high standard: Chinese imitation English cooking is appalling. Most Englishmen in China today live contentedly in the acme of unnecessary discomfort. Field-Marshal Sir Henry Maitland-Wilson is said to have remarked, ‘Any fool can make himself uncomfortable.’

  The farther men are situated from any big town, the higher seems morale. Officers, living together in the mountains, who have not seen electric light or tasted liquor for two years, and who know that it may be many years before they see their homes again, are as free of rivalry, petty jealousy or personal ambition as sailors on a great ship at sea. The utmost magnanimity, tact and patience is shown under exasperating circumstances. Similarly, isolation and the sharing of difficulties have brought about harmonious and deeply sympathetic relationships between the English and Americans, whose lot has been cast in such a foreign and distant theatre of war.

  Monday, April 17th

  I was busy scraping the mud off my tripod with a nail file when, after a four-day delay, we were told that the weather was improving enough for us to leave by air tomorrow morning early, a 4.30 call...

  Tuesday, April 18th

  It was dark outside when the watchman tapped, but we could hear the rain still falling. It seemed to gather in momentum for our take-off, and there were bad-tempered flashes of lightning. Yet, in spite of mountain-tops boring through the clouds, the American pilot guided us safely to Kanhsien, where thousands of coolies in blue were making an air-station. From my position in the aircraft I could not see why it was we swooped so low over the grass and then shot up again to circle the fields, but I was informed this was the only means of clearing the runway of personnel. But the coolies rushed out again, the moment of landing, to release the wheels of our aircraft from becoming embedded in the soft mud.

  From this point, there are no flying strips, and the journey is to be continued by truck. A young officer, George Dawson, welcomed us. He had been waiting for a week.

  TOUR TO THE FORWARD AREAS

  We have started off on our trip! We are a company of about a dozen, including drivers. I am coupled with quiet-voiced Leo Handley-Derry. We had hardly started when the first delay took place. A Chinese lorry in difficulties on the opposite side of a river burst into flames, and several hours passed before we could be ferried by eight coolies straining rhythmically against long bamboo sweeps. Arriving at the wartime capital of Kiangsi province, Grimsdale proceeded to call upon Chiang Ching Kuo, the son of the Generalissimo, the ruler of this town and of four other States. Learning that the great man was away, we set off again, but at the next ferry we waited another hour and a half while the coolies and a mixed crowd struggled unsuccessfully to push a heavy bus, filled with people, that was stuck between a ramp and an incline. The people inside the bus refused to help. They would wait days on end while someone else did the job, rather than leave their places. We decided to return to Kanhsien, but the hotel was full. However, the magistrate invited us to occupy the guest house of Chiang Ching Kuo, and it was a relief to find a clean lodging, even though the dwelling was built without benefit of bathroom or lavatory.

  During a visit to some American Fathers in a former French mission, we listened to the radio news from Burma which has lately been disturbing. The bulletin, though very crackly, was more hopeful — the Japs driven from the Imphal plain and from Kohima... It was strange to hear a priest saying ‘What a boy!’ and using Broadway slang. One, half-shaven, resembled an oversize pugilist and was a native of Pittsburgh; another, dark and bright, came from Boston.

  Dinner with a Chinese General (all smiles) and an ex-minister (rather gruff) was staged in one of the best and oldest restaurants in the most ancient and dirtiest part of the town. In a room which presented an appearance of tragic poverty, with rickety stairs, peeling walls, old newspapers pasted to the ceiling to prevent the dust falling through the cracks, threadbare red cloth on the table and old faded paper flowers, we had a banquet of exquisite subtlety and refinement. Of the dozen different courses, every dish was an event. It did not signify that conversation was difficult. We ate. Particularly delicious was a fish junket (hot) with two heads and tails offish to ornament the dish; lotus seeds hot and sweet; liver cut to look like under-the-sea plants; bean shoots, crisp and resilient; a big fleshy fish, unskinned, seasoned with fragrant herbs; and duck soup. Such a feast must have cost at least 30,000 dollars.

  As we emerged, the night air was full of every sort of whiff, including opium; and a woman was buying one of the long straw tapers to light her way home into the country.

  Wednesday, April 19th

  Leaving Kanhsien we were thrown into the vast outdoors of China. Perched high on the truck, open to the air, sun, and the varying elements, we had a ringside view of how the peasant lives in the heart of this unspoilt country. It is springtime; and the scenery looks unbelievably fresh, of an infinite variety of greens, from the pale pristine shoots of the ricefields, banked up in a succession of swirling curves, to the dark viridian squares of the rice nurseries. From the air this neighbourhood reminded me of an abstract painting by Frances Hodgkins — cocoa colour, rose-pink and pea soup green. On the ground it seems entirely green — lucid and touching greens — except for the blue distances of mountains and blue-clad peasants.

  The day produced a variety of impressions: of large mountains covered with acacias, and trees with aromatic perfumes; of forests that smelt of sperm, of the very juice of spring; of peasants ploughing with buffalo the waterlogged fields of rice, the mud stretching up to the calves of their muscular legs, their thighs powdery with dry flaky mud. Occasionally we saw an old man being carried under the canopy of a sedan chair. The villages were of smoked wood and dark matting. The farmhouses, with dragon roofs curving at the eave-ends, were built simply and with beautiful proportions. Bowls of rice were eaten under the shade of a straw-plaited awning; the children had exposed behinds, and their parents, as if emptying a pot, often turned them upside down.

  After a picnic lunch of the usual bully beef, eaten on the outskirts of a small town, the others foraged for some oil for the truck while I went to sleep in the sun, a handkerchief over my already burnt face. But the search for oil was in vain. We turned back to a hostel to drink tea. Grimsdale suggested staying the night here, but Leo Handley-Derry warned us that all our plans would be upset if we did not reach Kanchen tonight. So we proceeded. As it turned out, the distance was too far for arrival before dark; and no one in their right senses would choose to drive by night in modern China. Bridges are broken, pot-holes become craters, and there is often the risk of bandits.

  Rain clouds appeared, soon to deluge us, and we had to cower under the canvas coverings of the truck. The light went. We drove on in pitch darkness. Eventually we arrived at a hostel filled with a roaring mass of throat-clearing Chinese humanity. At dinner, our waiter with gusto spat out of the window — another spat heartily in the passage outside my room. All night long babies cried, the bar
e boards creaked under heavy footsteps, and throats were cleared with deep guttural rasps.

  Thursday, April 20th

  After the usual ritual of packing bed rolls and loading truck, we went off to the mission for a wonderful breakfast, with Irish Catholic priests, of home-cured bacon.

  The Bishop, with amethyst ring, in purple and black, seemed pleased to see us. He described the months when the Japanese, who had taken this town, were installed in the mission compound:

  ‘A number of people had come to me for safety,’ he said. ‘We were quite a large party for supper. Suddenly a little fellow with knife and gun, eyes blazing, rushed in and snatched the cloth off the table, with all the supper things on it! Heavens above! The clatter and crashing were enough to waken the dead! We all got a shock, for we hadn’t been expecting the Japs just yet. We thought they would come in at the main entrance; but no, they came in by the back. Well, we didn’t know if it was our turn next.’ The Bishop laughed, and as he did so, his denture slipped. ‘Oh, there’s a holy uncertainty about my teeth,’ he remarked in an aside before continuing his story. ‘The little Jap fellow began to pick up every plate, cup and glass that wasn’t broken, and proceeded to make amends. Some of the children started to cry. Just as suddenly as he had come in, the little creature rushed out. Later, when the Japanese field commander arrived, it was difficult to make him understand that I was Irish; but he must have given orders to leave us alone. But all the time the Japs were here we didn’t know how they’d behave next. Some midget would point a gun at your chest, and you never knew whether it would go off — if it had, it wouldn’t have cost him a thought. But they were so mean! They’d do such mean things! Anything valuable they’d destroy. One man came in with a hatchet and with three strokes wrecked my typewriter. Another came in with a gun, looked around, and shot the clock. They’d search you and take anything they had a fancy for. They lifted my watch, my fountain pen, and then before leaving the room, kicked me in the stomach. They’re little men too, and they know it. We got on to some of their ways. They won’t humiliate themselves in front of foreigners by standing on chairs or a table; so if you want to hide anything you put it on top of a cupboard.’ The Bishop shook his head wisely, and then nodded as a grave afterthought. ‘But I’m glad I could help by being here — worse things might have happened, I declare.’