Preface

his book does not attempt an adequate analysis of China's social and political structure, nor does it give an account of her economic problems. My visit to China was too short, and the horrors of the war too close, for any cold appraisal of the ills of China. I have endeavoured to describe, as truthfully as possible, what I saw in China; and to make others see the tragedy now being enacted in the Far East.

That life in China in war-time was not all sadness and horror, but had its gay and pleasant side, these pages will show. Something of the serenity and good humour of the Chinese people, something of their friendliness, cheerfulness, and philosophical acceptance of the good and the ill which life brings, infected all the members of the 'Hankow gang' of war correspondents, among whom I lived for a few months, with whom I visited the Chinese fronts, and with whom I 'tired the sun with talking' through a long Chinese summer.

Intent on the troubles of Europe, fearful of the war which may engulf the western hemisphere, we hardly heed the rumble of the distant drums in the Far East, yet the fate of China's four hundred millions may well seem to the historian of the future the most important event of the early twentieth century. The city states of ancient Greece saw only the conflict of democratic Athens against that prototype of the Fascist State, Sparta. They were oblivious to the growing might of Rome and Carthage, whose eventual conflict was to decide the fate of the Mediterranean world. It may well be that the future of the world is now being decided on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, rather than on the Rhine or the Vistula, or in the conference halls of Europe.

The most ancient civilization in existence, and the most pacific of all civilizations, that of China, is struggling not to be overwhelmed by the 'dwarf robbers from the Eastern Isles', who have learnt from the West all the arts of modern war, but have rejected our political conceptions and the humanism which has slightly tempered the ferocity with which we have waged our wars.

Japan aims at world conquest, and her rulers have the singleness of purpose to accomplish it, but neither the requisite man power nor the material resources, unless they can incorporate China into their empire. If China's millions should ever be militarized, either by Japan or in a long struggle to resist her, the world would be faced by a military menace besides which the might of Germany would pale to insignificance. As General Smuts once said: 'It may well be that Western civilization will stand or fall in this matter of its contacts with the immense human masses of the East.'

Should the Chinese despair of the Western democracies who continue to supply Japan with the sinews of war, and should they decide to submit to the Japanese yoke, Japan might become the strongest power in the world.

For nearly two years now the Chinese people have continued to fight—ill-armed, often poorly led, handicapped not only by their primitive economy, but also by having as yet created only the embryo of a modern government and a modern social organization. No one who has seen China at war can doubt the reality of the Chinese renaissance, and, although it would be foolish to be optimistic, it is still possible to believe that Japan will not conquer in the end. But the sufferings of the Chinese people are beyond the capacity of our imagination to realize, and some little encouragement must be given to them, if they are to continue to bear them.

I have dared in this book to criticize China. In spite of my strong desire that she should win this war, I can see her faults and I have been horrified at the neglect of the common people, and especially of the wounded soldiers; and feel strongly that to hide China's weaknesses, or to be over-optimistic, is not to do her a service. China will survive, in spite of the superior armaments of Japan, if ancient injustices, ancient social and financial tyrannies, and ancient ways of thought and methods of administration give way to reforms consonant with the spirit of Young China.

Few people who have lived in China and have been received by the Chinese as friends fail to love them and to admire them. I learnt also in China that no criticism which a friendly foreigner could make equalled the criticisms of the best men and women in the country, who are giving all their strength, and many of whom have sacrificed their lives for the New China which they believe is being created in the agony of this war.

Any one who has read the details of America's War of Independence against England will remember how the incompetence of Congress, the greed of those who saw the war as an opportunity to make their fortune, and the failure adequately to arm and feed the soldiers and militia, nearly lost the war, and nearly gave back to England her dominion over her American colonies. The spirit of the men who fought overcame all these handicaps, and it may be that in China the same thing will happen.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is as great a man as General Washington, the Chinese guerrillas are not inferior to the militia of New England, and China is more united than was the American union of thirteen states in the eighteenth century.

My thanks are due to the many Chinese friends I made last year, who gave me some slight understanding of the problems of their country, as well as an appreciation of the devotion of those who are working and fighting to save it.

My thanks are also due to the 'bamboo' Americans mentioned in this book, who have lived for years in China, who speak her language, and have not feared to risk their lives at the front and in air-raided towns, nor to incur the enmity of the Japanese in their exposure of the Japanese terror in China to the all-too-indifferent public of the West.

From these men I, an amateur war correspondent, received help, friendship, and the courage to bear the sight of suffering.

Lastly, I would express my gratitude to Mr. Walter Boss-hard, Captain Evans Carlson of the U.S. Marines, Mr. A. T. Steele of the Chicago Daily News, and Mr. Leslie Smith of Reuter's, for permission to reproduce some of the photographs they took in China, while journeying with me to the front, or in Hankow.

Freda Utley

London, May 1939

Illustrations

The author beside the camouflaged car of Dr. Loo Chi-teh,

on the way to the front frontispiece

Child refugees in Hong Kong facing-page 16

A part of devastated Canton 17

Child air-raid victims in Canton 17

The author and Mrs. Selwyn Clark with Agnes Smedley
in Hankow 32

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Girl scouts holding back the crowd from an air-raid fire in

Hankow 32

Mother weeping over the dead body of her child.

Hanyang 33

Photograph by Capt. Evans Carlson
Dead baby after air-raid. Wuchang. 33

Family with its belongings rescued from burning house.

Hankow air-raid, July 19th 80

Houses set on fire by an incendiary bomb. Hankow,

July 19th 80

Dr. Robert Lim, M.B., D.Sc, F.R.S.E., chief of the

Chinese Red Cross Medical Commission 81

Photograph by Capt. Evans Carlson

Soldiers at the ferry 96

Receiving station for wounded soldiers at Wushemin,

south of Kiukiang 97

Heavily wounded men in a Red-Cross lorry near the

front 97

The author, with Japanese sword presented to her by Gen.
Li Han-yuan and Leslie Smith of Reuter's, at the
front south of Kiukiang facing page 128

General Li Han-yuan and captured Japanese arms 128

Operation at the 95th Base Hospital, Changsha 129

Dr. Loo Chi-teh, M.D., Surgeon-general of the Army

Medical Service 129

Model field hospital of the Army Medical Service at Tayeh,
bombed by Japanese two weeks after our visit 144

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.
Dr. Richard Brown on the march in Shansi 145

Transport of wounded by the Eighth Route Army 145

Having a wash outside a farmhouse on the way to the
front 160

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Dr. Moe of the Java unit tells me to come to breakfast 160
Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Lunch on the way to the front 161

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Dr. Loo Chi-teh and the author snatching a hasty meal en

route 161

Soldiers ill with malaria near the front 176

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Chinese Red Cross wayside dressing station near

Yangsin 176

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Soldiers and packhorses loaded with small guns near the

front line west of Juichang, September 1938 177

Soldier on hillside in the front line West of Juichang 177

General Tang En-po, commander of 200,000 troops 192

Children in a village a mile and a half from the front line 192

A. T. Steele, correspondent of the Chicago Daily News 193
Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Captain Evans Carlson, United States Marines 193
Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Mme Chiang visiting a Hankow military hospital on
September 18 th facing page 208

Photograph by Walter Bosshard, courtesy of Black Star Publishing Co.

Agnes Smedley in Hankow 208

Photograph by Capt. Evans Carlson

Waiting for an air-raid on the roof of the Lutheran Mis
sion tower. George Hogg (U.P.), Jack Belden
(U.P.), and the author 209

Agnes Smedley with Walter Bosshard and Capa (Hun
garian cameraman who helped to film Spanish Earth
before coming to China) 209

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek 240

Photograph by Capt. Evans Carlson

Autographed photo of Mme Chiang Kai-shek and the

Generalissimo 241

Map of China at the end of the book

Chapter I

PARADISE TO PURGATORY: HONG KONG AND CANTON

I. HONG KONG

arly in the morning of a July day I arrived in Hong Kong after three weeks' lazing and basking in the sun through the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. I had left England fearing that Hankow might fall before I got there, and this sense of urgency prevented my staying more than a few days in one of the lovely cities of the world to study the 'Hong Kong mind', if there is such a thing. Certainly even my brief stay convinced me that there is to-day more of the old 'Shanghai mind' to be found amongst the English in Hong Kong than in Shanghai itself. For although the very existence of Hong Kong, and the livelihood of its inhabitants, white or yellow, depended on a Chinese victory, many of the English still thought of China as the China of a decade ago, and were more afraid of Chinese nationalism than of Japanese imperialism. Even the wealthy Chinese British subjects of Hong Kong had been more generous in contributing to British war funds in 1914 than to the call of their own people to-day.

Hong Kong in the summer of 1938 was one of the most prosperous cities of the world. Since the loss of Shanghai to Japan in the autumn of 1937 it had become the main port for all trade with China, as distinct from trade with the Japanese

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

in China; it was also the magnet for all the liquid capital of China. Being a British Crown Colony, although a part of China, it was in and yet not in the war. Profiting enormously from the war, Hong Kong, unlike the Chinese cities, had neither Japanese bombers nor gunboats to fear. Obviously its very existence depended upon access to Canton and the Chinese hinterland; once cut off politically as well as geographically, it was doomed to become a kind of Eastern Vienna, an organism deprived of nourishment. Yet, unlike Shanghai, where the presence of Japanese troops and the arrogance and insolence of the Japanese were a perpetual reminder of what was in store for the ' white races' all over China should Japan win, Hong Kong remained curiously detached from the war. The English continued to lead the leisurely and pleasant lives which they have always lived in the East, whilst the wealthy Chinese flooded the restaurants and cafes and had no shame in flaunting their affluence. Hong Kong was even reluctant to set up refugee camps for the destitute who had fled from Canton, and it was easier to collect money for China from Chinese residents in Singapore or the Dutch East Indies than in Hong Kong.

There were many refugees of another kind in Hong Kong; not the starving, ragged, miserable hordes which trudge inland in hundreds of thousands along the roads of China, or crowd the streets of as yet unconquered Chinese cities; not again the hopeless men, women, and children who sleep in the streets of Shanghai and die off slowly in their daily hundreds. Hong Kong's refugees were for the most part well fed, well dressed, and well to do. Families which had left Canton to escape the constant bombings, or had left some other part of China with their capital—intending to remain wealthy whatever the outcome of the war—and the wives and children of officials in Canton or Hankow, placed here for safety. All in Canton who could afford it, except the most patriotic, fled to Hong Kong, or at least sent their families there. There was exchange control in China and it should theore-

HONG KONG AND CANTON

tically have been impossible for so much Chinese money to find its way to Hong Kong. But in addition to the fact that incorruptibility amongst officials is a new thing in China there was the difficulty inherent in the existence of foreign settlements on Chinese soil and the position of foreign banks in China. Real control of Chinese capital was impossible without the full co-operation of the foreign banks. It is true, also, that for the moment the fact that Hong Kong belonged to Britain, and was therefore outside the war zone, helped China; but its existence, like that of the Shanghai International Settlement, enabled the rich Chinese to escape taxation and transfer their wealth outside China.

Prices in Hong Kong were soaring and business booming. Every hotel was packed and had doubled its prices. The cafes, restaurants, and shops were full of people. As the cities of China bled in the devastation wrought by the war, Hong Kong waxed fat.

It was none the less an uneasy prosperity. At any moment the Japanese might launch an attack on Canton and cut Hong Kong off from the sources of its wealth. Might not the Japanese even attack Hong Kong itself, men asked? Would Britain defend it? In whichever way Japan chose to act, the writing on the wall was plain for all to read and the gaiety of Hong Kong was a little hectic.

No docks in the world can have been as busy as those of Kowloon in the summer of 1938. Kowloon is the 'leased territory' opposite Hong Kong on the Chinese mainland whence starts the 550-mile railway line to Hankow via Canton. The German boat on which I had come proceeded to unload, at top speed, its cargo of munitions for China, before proceeding to Kobe to unload a similar cargo for Japan. Next to it an Italian freighter discharged other war supplies. British, French, Russian, and American ships could all be found tied up in the docks. China was buying munitions wherever she could get them and rushing them up to Chang-sha and Hankow along the daily bombed railway which the

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

Japanese never succeeded in destroying. China was utilizing all the foreign currency and silver reserves she had deposited abroad before the war began, and exporting as much tea and tung oil, manganese, antimony, tungsten, and other merchandise as she could, to provide new means of payment. China knew that at any moment the Japanese might attack Canton, or at last succeed in taking Hankow, and she was feverishly laying in all the armaments she could for that day. When, in October, Hankow and Canton both fell to the invader, the Chinese Government said it had laid in supplies sufficient for a further nine months of war.

There was no particular secrecy about these shipments. There could not be, since Hong Kong was a free port and British. One could walk at will over the vast docks, see the coolies sweating under the heavy cases, or lying in exhausted sleep near the water-front, note whence came the freight. I met an Englishman who was first mate of a ship flying the British flag, owned by French nuns in Hong Kong, whose captain was an American and whose engineer and second mate were Japanese, and which had brought a cargo of munitions from Odessa in Soviet Russia. Such is the internationalism of the shipping trade, or for that matter, of the armaments business. It was said in Hong Kong that the only armament firm which did not sell to both sides was the Czech firm of Skoda. It was difficult to preserve any illusions about wars for democracy in Hong Kong. Rather did one remember the now extinct post-war literature warning us of the machinations of the world armament rings which foster war and rumours of war, whilst men fight in the names of ideals —or ideologies. Later I was to hear a cynical old French priest in China say that the war would go on until Britain, France, and the U.S.A. had made about all they could expect to make out of both sides.

The typical foreigner in Hong Kong had little thought for the miseries of China, nor could he readily admit that such a thing as Young China or a Chinese national renaissance

HONG KONG AND CANTON

existed at all. There was plenty of scandalmongering and mockery concerning the venality of the Chinese officials. Every one saw the results of the old Chinese individualism and nepotism and refused to see the New China being strengthened in the fires of war. China to-day is like an animal changing its skin. Plenty of the old hide remains, but beneath it appears the new coat, if one gets close enough to see.

Moreover, the Westerners—and particularly the English —forget that in war-time in all countries there are profiteers, and that more veiled and 'gentlemanly' forms of corruption exist even in Britain. Japan, as every one who has ever read the Japanese press knows, is riddled with corruption; and Japanese history shows that the corruption of high officials and generals was most naked in the great days of the Meiji era, when she first started to become a modern State.

The trouble in Hong Kong was that the bad side of China at war was the only side visible. It was here that the unpatriotic wealthy congregated and here that the munition buyers and sellers met. No one had seen the Chinese fighting, or felt the spirit of Young China. Or if they had, it meant to them only memories of 1924-7, when they had trembled for their profits, if not for their lives, before the anti-imperialist wave of those years. When I visited Shanghai three and a half months later I was struck by the contrast in the British attitude. For in Shanghai the new quality of China had been seen; in Shanghai British officers could wax lyrical over the galantry of the Lone Battalion and the courage of the Chinese soldiers who, ill-armed and fighting under every disadvantage, had held the Japanese back for nearly four months. In Shanghai, too, there were few who had preserved the illusion that Japan would let Britain or the United States do any more trade in China should she win the war.

There were a number of interesting people to meet in Hong Kong: Chih-Ling Soong, the widow of Sun Yat Sen and sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek; T. V. Soong, her

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

brother, ablest and most honest of Chinese banker-officials; Eugene Chen, just returned from years of exile in Paris, kept at arm's length by Chiang Kai-shek and attacking his policies in the Hong Kong and Shanghai papers, but expecting, or at least hoping, that in time he would be called back to office.

Eugene Chen's name had once been for the British the most feared and hated of Chinese names. That was in the days when he was Foreign Minister and negotiated the rendition of the British concession at Hankow to China—the famous Chen-O' Malley agreement of 1927. He now lived in a small house in Kowloon, ignored by the British and mistrusted by his own countrymen. In British eyes he represented the most uncompromising Chinese nationalism of the revolutionary Kuomintang period; his name recalled the days when it was China, not Japan, that was insulting the British and attacking their imperialist interests. In the Generalissimo's eyes he was the one important Chinese of any faction who had never bowed down before him or ceased from openly criticizing him. The Communists, for their part, mistrusted him as too much of an individualist, and although he is all for their policy of collaboration with the U.S.S.R., compromise with Western imperialism, and ' mobilization of the people', they also cold-shouldered him or ignored him. It may be, of course, that they are too nervous of the associations of his name for the British, or of Chiang Kai-shek's enmity towards the opponent of the 'Soong Dynasty'. In any case, for both the British and the Chinese governments, his name is too unwelcome a reminder of the days when China's struggle for independence was waged under anti-British slogans for it to be at all likely that he will be recalled to office. Nevertheless, there were recurring rumours that he was to be appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, and there is little doubt he would have made an astute and clever one. His vitriolic articles and downright criticisms are a healthy, even if a bitter, tonic for China, whose Government is a little too accustomed to face-saving eulogies, and a too complacent

HONG KONG AND CANTON

satisfaction with the way in which the war is being carried on.

One might perhaps describe Eugene Chen as a kind of Trotsky of the Kuomintang Party, who never ceases to remind it of its original aims, nor fears to tell Chiang Kai-shek that he is not a superman and should not try to run everything himself and keep all power in the hands of his family and personal friends. Eugene Chen, born abroad and resident abroad for the greater part of his life, sees political problems with a Western eye; Chiang Kai-shek, who knows no foreign country except Japan, and speaks only the Chinese of his native province, sees the problem of keeping China united and resisting Japan as problems to be solved in the Chinese way by Chinese methods. Their views are obviously irreconcilable.

I found Eugene Chen a most stimulating talker and an acute observer and thinker. Perhaps he is ambitious, but who amongst outstanding personalities is not? He certainly understands the Western world and its policies as few Chinese do. He is as keen as Madame Sun Yat Sen on closer collaboration with Russia, but he has no illusions about the U.S.S.R. He is prepared to 'go along with' Britain to-day and for so long as China's and Britain's interests are the same. He is a realist and not an idealist. Perhaps that is why he is disliked by so many people. The count against him is also that, born and reared in the West Indies, and unaccustomed even to speaking Chinese, he is a foreigner to China and Chinese ways of thought and does not understand his own people. His count against Chiang Kai-shek, on the other hand, is that the latter is too Chinese in his methods, too feudal-minded, and too little aware of the realities of the world outside.

I had two long interviews with Eugene Chen in his little house on the outskirts of Kowloon. Over and over again he emphasized the fact that China's lack of armament factories was the dominating factor in the situation.

'China,' he said, 'cannot win alone. She must have allies.

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

We ought to have a diplomatic front as well as a military front, but Chiang Kai-shek envisages the problem as purely a military one. Japan is waging a totalitarian war against us and our resistance should also be a totalitarian one. Chiang Kai-shek should have realized that the diplomatic front is of paramount importance, yet for him it hardly exists.

' In 1932 Japan had no modern air force. We have had the opportunity since then to create an air force. Yet, although millions have been raised in China to buy aeroplanes, we only had between 158 and 167 when the war began. They put Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the head of the air force. She had good intentions, but she was just a well-meaning girl who knew nothing about the subject. It was quite crazy and the Russians refused to send planes if she remained in charge.

'Then there is the question of the German advisers. They were sent out originally when the Germans had a theory that it was Chiang Kai-shek's historical mission to liquidate the war-lords and transform China into a vast market for German capital goods. After Hitler came to power, Chiang Kai-shek's "mission" was held to be that of an instrument against the U.S.S.R. Military aid, armaments, and advisers were supplied to China because Ribbentrop imagined it was possible to reconcile the victim and the aggressor by bringing them both into a bloc against the U.S.S.R. He failed to realize the contradiction inherent in such a policy. The war, as it progressed, made the realization inevitable, and so, following Hitler's speech in January 1938, the German advisers were withdrawn. Hitler had realized that he must choose between losing China as a market and losing Japan as a military ally. Germany's economic interest was sacrificed to her political interest.

'The German advisers erred concerning fortifications and our air force. Their theory of a Hindenburg line of fortification which could not be broken was useless in so vast a country as China. They were good drill sergeants, but this is

HONG KONG AND CANTON

not what we wanted and their conceptions and tactics were unsuitable in China.'

I was to remember this part of my conversation months later when, on the night I left Hankow, I paced the air-field with Captain Stennes, captain of Chiang Kai-shek's bodyguard and his confidential adviser. Stennes is a German who was a Left-Wing National Socialist and a friend of General Schleicher. He had been enabled to escape from a German concentration camp by his wife and was now an exile in China. The perfect type of adventurer, absolutely fearless, intelligent, physically a splendid specimen, and with an attractive personality, he loathed Hitler and had a very real loyalty, affection, and admiration for the Generalissimo. In his view the German advisers had been invaluable to Chiang.

'The French,' he said, 'are too arrogant and impatient to be of any use as military advisers in China. They tell the Chinese command what it should do and then shrug their shoulders when it doesn't get done. The British are too lazy; only the Germans have the necessary patience. You should have seen the tact and patience with which Von Falkenhausen got his views adopted. He would never say, "I think this ought to be done." He would say, " I think the best strategy would be that plan you suggested a week or two ago," and then proceed to outline his own plan.'

'What about the Russians?' I asked.

'Not bad, but their psychology is too similar to that of the Chinese. Their nichevo ("can't be helped") and the Chinese mei yu fa-tze ("nothing to be done about it") are too similar. Besides, their military advisers are too specialized. Each knows just one thing and no more. For instance, their technical advisers just understand one particular make of gun, and that is hopeless in China, where we have armaments from all over the world.'

He went on to say how greatly he admired Chiang Kai-shek. 'He knew he must wait a few years if he were going to resist the Japanese successfully. That's why he gave way to

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

them time and again until he should have built up his military strength. But he was forced to fight in 1937 by the pressure of the Communists and the Left intellectuals.'

Yet, although Stennes might have been accused by Eugene Chen of thinking of warfare entirely in terms of the training and equipment of armies, he was well aware of the factor of morale. 'Give me five men who really believe in what they are fighting for,' he said, 'and I will lead them against a hundred.' It is also of interest that he told me that night on the air-field that my interview about the neglect of the Chinese wounded (see Chapter 6) had done good, and that Von Falkenhausen had pressed for years to get a proper army medical service organized and trained.

To return, however, to Eugene Chen. When I asked him whether it was true, as so many people said, that T. V. Soong was being prevented from exercising his great talents in China's interest by the jealousy of his sisters, who maintained Dr. Kung in office, Eugene Chen answered as follows:

'T. V. Soong is himself one of the architects of the counter-revolution which has been dominant in China since 1927. The Nanking Government is the creation of the counterrevolution. It has spent 3,000 million dollars on new roads and railways, which now only help the Japanese to advance the faster. The paradox of the situation is that, since the policy of the Government was objectively basically wrong, all its work of reconstruction to-day benefits only Japan. T. V. Soong represents the banker-comprador wing of the counter-revolution. They see only the financial side of reconstruction. Soong himself is a clever politician who sees the deluge coming and is concerned above all to save his reputation, which is so high amongst the foreigners. Since the financial headquarters of the bankers and compradors has been destroyed by the Japanese in Shanghai, Soong has tried to reestablish it in Hong Kong, whence he maintains financial control over the Chinese banks. He pretends that there is a feud between him and Kung, but in reality he, Soong, com-

HONG KONG AND CANTON

mands on the financial front. He could have any position in the Government which he desires, but he doesn't want to assume any responsibility unless he is sure of a British loan. He himself really put Kung in office and maintains him there as a useful scapegoat; for T. V. is despondent and pessimistic about the outcome of the war. He, like his sisters in Hankow and the Generalissimo, conceives of China as the property of one family.'

He went on to speak of the 'united front' in China, saying he had been in favour of it because it brought in the Communists, and because Chiang Kai-shek sees treachery everywhere.

'But the united front has now outlived its usefulness. What we now need is a national front, which is something quite different. When you get to Hankow and ask questions you will find that both a Kuomintang man and a Communist will ask himself before he answers you, " Is my answer consistent with my membership of my party ?'' Neither will think "Is it consistent with the national interest?" '

'We have a long tradition of secret societies in China and in some sense the Chinese Communist Party is one of those secret societies. Russia gives it a modern leaven; if fully independent the Chinese Communist Party would become as exploiting and parasitical as the Kuomintang. But its organizational link with the Comintern prevents its degenerating as the Kuomintang has done.'

Eugene Chen, as I have already remarked, is a realist, but it seemed to me that he nevertheless had too great faith in the possibility of China being able to obtain far greater assistance from Russia if only the latter did not still distrust Chiang Kai-shek. One could only agree with his argument that China must seek allies; but was it really possible for her to get them even if she paid more attention to the 'diplomatic front'?

Again, his insistence on the mistake Chiang Kai-shek makes in keeping all power in his own hands, and trying to do more himself than any mortal man could ever do, was all

PARADISE TO PURGATORY

very correct. But could Chiang admit others to equal power with himself, could group leadership be substituted in China for a one-man leadership, without renewed political disunity? Eugene Chen is clearly inclined to paint his political opponents blacker than they really are and to ignore their difficulties.

In a later interview, he made himself clearer on the political issue and the foreign policy which, in his view, China should pursue.

'The essential point is that we can't manufacture our own weapons. Our military leadership, experienced only in civil war, confuses the conditions of civil war with those of war against Japan. The plain fact is that we cannot win the war without the assistance of Britain and the United States. Only immediate assistance can be given us by the U.S.S.R. It cannot suffice us but it can help us to fight until Anglo-American assistance comes into play. It is clear that Russia will avoid being drawn into the war. I myself have never been, even in the old days, in favour of throwing Britain and America out of China, but I insist to-day, as in the past, that they must obey the laws of China, i.e. that extra-territoriality must go. This can be accomplished in an orderly way, by negotiation. If only our diplomacy were more intelligent and forceful we could get aid in so many respects, since we have so large a common interest with Britain and America against Japan. The basis of co-operation lies in the fact that we have millions of men to bear arms, but no arms factories.

' It is a miracle that we have survived so long. The war has gone on already for a whole year. It shows the inherent strength of the Chinese nation. It is only our leadership which is at fault. The Chinese people are fighting the Japanese people, a totalitarian war is being waged; so that the struggle is not purely a military one but also an economic and diplomatic one. We must have group leadership instead of the present one-man leadership. A suitable and able man should be in charge of each department with absolute authority. The heads of each department should constitute the

HONG KONG AND CANTON

war leadership. The full resources of the country must be mobilized if we are to resist Japan.'

Interviewing Ching-Ling Soong, widow of Sun Yat Sen, after Eugene Chen, meant passing from an atmosphere of pitiless realism, bitterness, and frustrated ambition into an atmosphere of sublime idealism and unselfishness. Madame Sun wanted much the same things to be done as Eugene Chen; she criticized the conduct of the war as openly as he did, but her ideas as to what should be done were far vaguer, and she, unlike him, obviously had no personal ambition. She wanted reform because, quite literally, her heart bled for her people. He wanted them because he felt he could run China much better than Chiang Kai-shek and was annoyed at what he considered the incompetence, the pretences, and the stupidities of the ruling Kuomintang group.

She opened the door to me herself when I called upon her by appointment in her small flat up on the Peak. A beautiful woman, the fairest of the Soong sisters, she is also the simplest and most modest. There is a dignity about her which is completely unconscious and unstudied, and a grace which is typical of Chinese women. She seems far less Americanized than her brother and her sisters, both in voice and manner and in thought. European influences have formed her mind and outlook, and even her accent is English, not American. Talking to her one felt, and it is an unusual feeling to have with the Chinese, that the sufferings of the people move her profoundly, and that it is their suffering, not the awareness of national humiliation or the desire for power, which is the mainspring of her actions. One almost felt that, Christ-like, her heart is pierced by the death, mutilation or starvation of her countrymen. It was the deep feeling behind her words and her obvious sincerity which redeemed her views from a certain narrow-mindedness or naivete. She sees the political world in black and white: wicked Kuomintang bureaucrats, good Communists, good National Salvationists. Her political views were uncritical and second-hand and unrealistic. Russia

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is helping China, therefore the Stalinists are good people, and purges and concentration camps and executions can be ignored; journalists who appear to favour Japan must have been bought by the Japanese, else why else should they favour Wrong against Right? Revolutionaries who do not approve of the Comintern line are 'those terrible Trotskyists'. Living in a world of ideas, she appeared to have little understanding of political realities, and to be too prone to uncritical acceptance of the professions of these who seemed to be working for the same ends as herself. One could love her and respect her, but one would be chary of trusting her judgements, and she could never play a leading political role.

For Madame Sun Yat Sen the third of her husband's Three Principles (the San Min Chu, which are supposed to be the creed of the Kuomintang Party), 'the livelihood of the people', is the most important of the three and the most neglected. Because she would never accept a government which neglected this principle she had torn herself away from her family and gone to Moscow in 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek started massacring the Communists and trade-unionists, and converting the National Revolutionary Government into his personal military dictatorship. Because of this she to-day ignores the darker side of Communism, since it is the Communists who appear to be most concerned with the sufferings of the mass of the Chinese people. Because of this she alone, amongst the members of her family, is poor, and lives with a single servant in a tiny flat. She is of the stuff of which martyrs are made, not political leaders or the unifiers of nations in the state of China. One understands easily the antipathy between her and her forceful, realistic, perhaps unscrupulous and certainly power-loving sister, Mei-Ling Soong, the wife of the Generalissimo; or the coldness between her and her worldly and materialistic elder sister Madame Kung.

She, like Eugene Chen, but from purer motives, will not pretend that all is well in China so long as the mass of the poor peasants are ignored and the soldiers neglected. Her

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views of the situation were, in fact, as gloomy as those of Eugene Chen. She has no patience with the pretences of the New Life Movement and wrote of it as follows before the war: 'When I consider the New Life Movement I think it unfortunate that, well meaning as the author doubtless meant to be, he has not yet realized that the most fundamental need of the Chinese masses is economic development. In other words, to improve the people's livelihood as Doctor Sun taught. In the New Life Movement there is nothing new to be found, it gives nothing to the people. Therefore I propose to replace this pedantic movement by another—that is a great campaign to improve the people's livelihood through improvements of methods of production, especially in agriculture. The aim of revolution is the material welfare of human beings or masses. If that is not reached then there has been no revolution.'

It was Madame Sun, first of any one, who tried to get help from abroad for the wounded soldiers. For this purpose she founded the China Defence League, of which she herself is chairman and T. V. Soong president. She works indefatig-ably, and has not even a secretary to assist her with her vast correspondence and the many articles she writes. She visited Canton frequently before it fell and was there received with the utmost enthusiasm. There is a particular feeling for her there, in the cradle of the National Revolutionary Movement, not only because she is the widow of the great leader, but because it is felt that she alone has remained true to the principles and beliefs of Sun Yat Sen. One of China's tragedies is that those principles were so vague. His widow, even if her political beliefs are even vaguer, has obviously preserved the spirit of the dead leader and will not be put off by pretences and shams, or lulled into acquiescence in social injustice by the fruits of office.

Madame Sun hardly ever meets her sister, Madame Chiang, and never her sister Madame Kung. She has never been invited by the Generalissimo to the capital to take a

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place in the Government. But she is on good terms with her brother, T. V. Soong, the President of the Bank of China.

Vincent Sheean, in his In Search of History, has painted a masterly picture of T. V. in 1927—the liberal minded middle-of-the-roader who could not make up his mind between the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and the slowly expiring 'legitimate' Left and majority Kuomintang government at Hankow, disliking and mistrusting both. T. V. is a modern-minded Chinese, without his youngest sister's idealism, or the energetic Y.M.C.A. spirit of his other sister, Madame Chiang, but very gifted and with an attractive, almost boyish, personality. He has a real desire to modernize China and would stick to the rules of sound finance, and thus secure foreign loans, to do it. He is very rich, but his fortune is largely a modern-made fortune, owing little to the devious ways of old China. He would modernize and enrich China and enrich himself with her, but this is a very different thing to enriching oneself at the expense of China, as so many officials and other bankers have done.

It was T. V. who was largely responsible for securing League of Nations experts to aid China, and for the Chinese currency reform of 1935. In fact, he is the outstanding representative of those capitalist interests in China which, whilst prepared to utilize the military to keep 'internal order', are opposed to any kind of 'national socialist' regime in China. They want to see China's productive forces developed on capitalist lines, and they want a moderately democratic political system. They would rely on foreign credits, the remittances of overseas Chinese, and the capital accumulation of the large Chinese banks. It is possible that China would find it somewhat easier to get credits abroad if T. V. were the Finance Minister, instead of Dr. Kung,who has been accused of venality, or of turning a blind eye to the venality of his close associates. Dr. Kung's methods of running the finances of the country are certainly more old-style Chinese than Western and are criticized by the foreigner, but they may be

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the only possible methods at present. T. V. Soong's present function, as President of the Bank of China, that of preventing the exchange value of the Chinese currency from sinking too low, is of equal importance to Dr. Kung's function of raising money internally to carry on the war, and it is perhaps more suited to his talents.

T. V. Soong is thought not to be fully trusted by Chiang Kai-shek, that essentially Chinese politician and leader who prefers to keep Dr. Kung as Finance Minister. For Dr. Kung is more amenable and less of a personality, besides being the husband of Madame Chiang's beloved elder sister. T. V. Soong's efficiency, his occidental manners and methods, and his insistence on an orderly financial system, eliminating all possibilities of 'squeeze', do not endear him to the old-style officials. Perhaps Chiang Kai-shek thinks he would Westernize China a bit too rapidly and alienate too many people who must be kept loyal at this critical time. For the secret of Chiang Kai-shek's strength and power is his skilful balancing between the forces of feudal and modern China.

II. THE MIRACLE RAILWAY

I left the safe haven of Hong Kong at seven in the evening to take the train to Canton, with the knowledge that the Japanese had been bombing the line daily, and frequently also by night, for months past. Those for whom safety was of greater importance than time or curiosity travelled by steamer, but there was actually little danger, since the Japanese had rarely succeeded in hitting a train. Although their bombs seldom found their mark, they sometimes swept low to use their machine-guns to riddle the train with bullets. But the risk was slight enough to add only a little excitement to the journey.

The third-class carriages were packed to the limit with a cheerful crowd, for even if a Chinese is leaving Paradise for Purgatory, he is not outwardly sad. The second-class cars

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were also almost fully occupied, by officials returning to their posts after a visit to their families, and by merchants. Smart Cantonese soldiers guarded each car with revolvers ready cocked; officers patrolled the length of the train lest any Japanese agent attempt to do damage to the line or the train.

The only other European on the train was an Italian correspondent of French newspapers in Indo-China. Speaking no English, he enlisted my aid to convince the Chinese frontier officials that he was an exile, not a Fascist. Not that the Chinese appeared particularly interested in him or his passport, or wanted to keep him out of China, but he was acutely sensitive about his Italian passport, although it was eight years old. When the officials had departed, he made me translate quite a long speech to the occupants of the car about liberty, equality, the brotherhood of man, and his hatred of Fascism. He was young, earnest, and excitable; and as a journalist he came nearer to the romantic cinema conception of a war correspondent than any one I have ever met. In three days in Hong Kong he had discovered more 'secrets' than I was ever to discover in China. He had encountered a Japanese spy in the docks; he knew exactly what munitions were being then unloaded in the docks; he knew how the Italians were selling dud ammunition to China. He knew what the Chinese thought, the British, the French. The way he learned about things was to visit Catholic priests and opium dens, both invaluable sources of information! Within half an hour he had 'discovered', and pointed out to me, which of the occupants of the car was a spy out to watch our movements. He certainly ' got a kick out of his profession and made me feel how unimaginative I must be.

My natural inclination in a train is to read rubbish or to doze. But sitting opposite the Italian, I was galvanized into activity. Like him, I craned my head out of the window; like him I exclaimed at every sign of past bombings and at every sight of the repair squads. He certainly had a lot of informa-

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tion, and told me how the munition wagons are protected first by layers of empty earthenware jars, then by a layer of empty baskets, covered over in their turn by earth and matting and bamboo; how when there is a raid the train stops to let the passengers take refuge in the rice fields and then dashes on to hide in the nearest tunnel. However, after we had noticed that there are no tunnels after leaving British territory, we had to discount this particular story. As I learned later, what actually happens is that the engine is uncoupled and also the carriages, so that a direct hit will not damage the whole train. All lights are turned out and even with a full moon the train is not easily visible. Later, also, I was told by the manager of the railway, whom I met at breakfast in Canton, that the story about the layers of protection for the freight cars wasn't true either. I had wondered myself how there could be any room for the munitions themselves.

'Le train des miracles,' the Italian called it, and his excitement at travelling on it communicated itself to me.

We passed out of British territory into the danger zone in the twilight, and as night fell we looked anxiously at the full moon. Luckily it was veiled in mist, and we ordered some dinner with minds fairly easy but with our eyes always fixed on the track, and on each station, for evidence of the damage done in past raids. At almost every station there were partially demolished houses or ruins, and occasionally the train rocked a little as we passed over part of the line which had been bombed and repaired. The two important bridges had never been hit and the small bridges which have been damaged had always been rapidly repaired. Is the Japanese marksmanship bad, or are the Chinese anti-aircraft gunners good, or is it really much harder to bomb a definite objective from the air than the layman imagines? The Chinese had few anti-aircraft guns to defend the people of Canton, but the two vital bridges were defended and the Japanese dared not swoop low. The Kan Sui Bridge, about fifty kilometres from Canton, showed a crack in its concrete support from con-

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cussion or a hit below the water some months earlier, but no real damage had been done and the bridge was as safe as ever.

The real miracle of the railway is the repair work. At the time of my journey there had been 163 raids on the Kow-loon-Canton railway since the previous October, and some 1,600 bombs had been dropped on the line. This meant ten bombs per kilometre and more than one 'visit' per kilometre; yet the trains had never stopped running for more than a few hours. Daily as well as nightly the munitions landed at Hong Kong had been rushed through to Canton, and thence along the even more frequently bombed railway to Hankow. The day I spent in Canton (11 July) there were three separate raids, over sixty bombs were dropped on the two vital railways, and the telephone and telegraph to Hong Kong were put out of action. Yet this was regarded as a more or less normal day, not worth cabling a special report about.

Repair gangs were stationed at every few kilometres along the line, and looking out of the window one could see, every now and then, dumps of repair materials, rails, and sleepers, and also pyramids of baskets. The repair squads quickly investigated the damage after each raid, telephoned through to Canton as to what materials were needed and where. These were rushed to the spot. Meanwhile the repair squads of skilled workers had been mobilized—labourers from the nearest villages. These peasants were paid sixty cents (about sixpence to-day) a day, and worked under the supervision of the repair squads. Within a few hours the line would be repaired and the trains running again. Similarly with regard to telephonic and telegraphic communication. The day I was in Canton the correspondents had only a few hours to wait before the lines had been repaired and they could send out news of the latest raid. The raids that day were at 9.30, 12.30, and 3.30. In the two later raids twenty-four bombs were dropped on Sheklung, near the second of the two bridges we had crossed the previous night, and had seen in the moonlight

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with its sentries at each end standing by their little straw shelters. Sixty-five houses were demolished or damaged and twenty or thirty persons killed or injured in the town; but the bridge stood as before. Next day the Japanese airmen resumed the bombing of Canton itself and dropped some sixty or seventy bombs in the different parts of the city.

The organization of the repair work, which would have done credit to any country, showed what the Chinese are capable of, and how they might have transformed their country now that it had achieved political unity, if Japan had not interfered.

III. CANTON

I was met at Canton by the Mayor's secretary and went off in his car, leaving the Italian to reach the hotel by rickshaw. But our car broke down half-way and he arrived long before me. The Oi-Kwan hotel at Canton was a sign and a symbol of modern China. Ten stories high, it towered above the city —almost a skyscraper. Comfortable, cheap, and well run, it had many advantages over the ancient expensive hotel in the British concession over in Shameen; the only disadvantage was that it might be bombed. But in fact, it never was hit. The Chinese must have felt that this vast concrete structure afforded some protection, for the pavements around were crowded with sleeping families. The lobby and lower corridors were full of trunks and cases, for bombs would be unlikely to penetrate lower than the top floors. I had a lovely room on the tenth floor, with a bathroom, and it only cost three shillings. My windows looked out over the Pearl River and I felt it was altogether better than my stuffy small room in Hong Kong, looking over a backyard, which had cost me ten shillings a day.

However, the Italian, who had secured a similar room, thought it too expensive and made me bargain for him for nearly an hour. He would be staying a month, and he, as he

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explained vehemently, was not an American or an Englishman, to pay fabulous sums for his articles. Afterwards, refusing his invitation to visit an opium den (since what would be the use without an interpreter ?), we walked together in the city. The streets were full of houseless people and dozens of rickshaw-men pestered us. Forgetting the brotherhood of man, the Italian swore at them and shouted at them and told me he would kick them if he were in Indo-China. I told him I couldn't see why he should be so angry because hungry men tried to earn a few cents, but, like so many other idealists, he loved humanity only in the abstract.

That walk in the moonlight in the streets of the doomed city of Canton gave me my first sight of the misery and poverty of China. Women with emaciated babies, young children starved and ragged. The homeless in their thousands who from day to day die of want or fall victims to the death which rains from the skies.

Next morning the first air-raid alarm went at 9.15. It was the first time I had heard the ominous screeching of the sirens and my heart beat faster. I descended from my tenth-floor room and went out into the streets. The people seemed to be paying little attention. Indeed, of what use was it to rush to another place when one place was as likely to be bombed as another? For Canton appeared to have no air-raid shelters for the population, although Government offices all had their dug-outs and important officials also had them in their homes. There are so many people in the cities; impossible to build shelters for them all, so of what use to build a few? Or that, at least I suppose, is how the argument went. I was in time to get accustomed to official callousness or negligence of the mass of the people. In fact one cannot really blame China, for first things come first, I suppose, and the maintenance of transport to supply arms for the troops must be the first consideration.

Under an archway outside the hotel a doctor and two nurses were inoculating the passers-by against cholera. Un-

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perturbed, the smiling young man appealed continuously to the people passing by to stop and have an injection. The two nurses stuck the needle into one arm after another, at the rate of at least two a minute—men, women, children, babies. Probably it was a method which would have horrified a Western doctor, for the needle was not sterilized between each inoculation, but it was better than nothing, and it was hard to see how those teeming crowds could all have been attended to otherwise.

The second raid was announced two hours later at about 12.30 whilst I was interviewing the Governor of Kwangtung. He took no notice at all, but went on telling me about his rural reconstruction programme, a work which was clearly his main interest in life and which the war had interrupted. Kwangtung, he said, was a commercialized province which had for long suffered from the draining away of capital to Canton. The Cantonese were a mercantile and adventurous people whose energies had been employed in trade; it was necessary to bring back capital and enterprise to the land so that Kwangtung should no longer have to import large quantities of rice. He told me of the plans for the irrigation and drainage of unused land in Kwangtung, for rural education and a public health service. It had been hoped that after three or four years of rural reconstruction each 'honest' farmer would be able to free himself from the clutches of the usurers by being able to borrow at 7 or 8 per cent interest from cooperative societies backed financially by the provincial government. They would also then be able to get credit for the purchase of implements, seeds, and chemical fertilizers from Government factories.

This General Wu Te-chen was an old associate of Sun Yat Sen, and had been in prison under the Manchus. He had gained an enviable reputation for honesty and competence as Mayor of Greater Shanghai before being sent to Canton by Chiang Kai-shek, following the submission of Kwangtung and Kwangsi to the Nanking Government in 1936. Quiet,

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courteous, slim, and benevolent, and dressed in dark silk robes, he offered a striking contrast to the confident, 'live wire', burly Mayor of Canton, who, jovial, dressed in a Western suit and speaking with a strong American accent, might have been a party boss in the United States. Neither of them was of the type to prepare Canton to hold out against Japan's coming attack, but poor Governor Wu, who was removed after the loss of the town, must have been an able peace-time administrator.

Returning to my hotel with the Governor's secretary, I climbed up the ten flights to my room, because the electric current was switched off during raids and the lift was not working. The Italian, whom we met in the passage, wasn't satisfied with the tenth floor, however, and dragged me up on to the roof for a better view. We looked over the roofs of the city in the direction of Formosa for a sight of the dreaded planes, but could see nothing. Returning to my room, I found the Governor's secretary at the telephone. He appeared to act as a kind of information bureau or press service, for as he received the news of the raid he passed it on by phone to the foreign correspondents waiting in the comparative safety of the British concession.

'Twenty-eight planes', he reported, 'have just passed over in two groups. The first squadron of nineteen has already skirted the city and gone to bomb the Canton-Hankow railway. The other nine are at the Bocca Tigris forts, heading for Canton.'

A few minutes later:

'The nineteen planes are returning and are approaching the city, while the nine are bombing Sheklung' (the town on the line to Kowloon where one of the two vital bridges is situated).

Ten minutes later:

'The nineteen planes are now bombing the Canton-Hankow line at Pa Kong, close to Canton.'

Five minutes later:

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'The nineteen are bombing the Shuk Wan railway junction on the line to Hankow, while the nine are bombing another section of the Kowloon line.'

Concluding that the planes must by now have dropped all their bombs and were not making for the city this time, we went out to lunch, but the all-clear was not sounded for another hour. The one English and one American news-agency correspondents then in Canton had been asked to meet me. The American had his wife with him, an exceptional thing in China, where the English and the Americans, diplomats or newspapermen, usually send their wives away from the war zones.

These two men, reporting the Canton air-raids to the world, both living in the hotel in Shameen and inevitably thrown together in the tiny foreign community in Canton, were the strangest contrast. One conservative, the other extreme Left in politics; one a blond army-type Englishman, the other a Jew born in Poland; they spent their evenings arguing the same points over and over again, and agreeing on nothing. Yet the conservative Englishman was as sympathetic towards China as the socialist American, and it was he who confessed to me later, over a drink that same evening, that the sights he had seen had so unnerved him that he could not, when he first came to Canton, get to the telegraph office to send his dispatches until he had rushed home and fortified himself with whisky. He further remarked that he always had to restrain himself from telling the full story of the raids, as other wise he was accused of becoming hysterical and too 'pro-Chinese'. The bare narrative of what one sees in China during this war is too terrible for the English or American reader to hear; it must be toned down if a correspondent is to keep his job.

I also met Mr. Lockwood, the Y.M.C.A. organizer in Canton, who told me that 50,000 people had passed through the Y.M.C.A. shelters, all but 2,000 of whom had now found shelter in the villages.

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In the afternoon, while making a tour of the bombed areas, we heard the siren announcing the third raid that day. By that time I was almost as hardened and took little more notice of the alarm than the Cantonese. Since the city itself had been little bombed since the middle of June, and since the morning raiders had concentrated on the railways, one had begun to take it for granted that it was again only the railways which would be attacked now. Some of the people I spoke to in Canton thought the three or four weeks' respite from daily— and nightly—bombing of the civil population was due to the protest meetings in England and the United States at the time of the terrible raids of May and early June, coupled with the blunder made by Ambassador Yoshida in London, who had admitted publicly that the raids were for the purpose of demoralizing the civilian population. Others thought it was only the rains which had kept off the Japanese raiders, and that the systematic bombing of the people of Canton would start again soon. The latter were soon proved right, for the very day I left Canton eighteen Japanese planes came over and dropped sixty or seventy bombs in ten different parts of the city, killing or maiming nearly a hundred people.

Standing in the Wongsha district with the Chinese doctor who had organized the air-raid rescue work, in the midst of acres of ruins with not a single house left standing, I heard about the terrible raids of six or seven weeks before. This doctor, Henry A. Jee, told me how he himself had been machine-gunned by the Japanese, and thirty-five of his helpers killed, whilst trying to give first-aid to the wounded and carry them out of the devastated area.

On a wall at the outskirts of the stricken area were pasted up photographs and descriptions of lost children, and children found whose parents were unknown. After a raid families often do not know for a long time whether their children are dead, or in hospitals, or lost somewhere in the city. I stopped to lean over the waters of a creek, standing on the historic Liapo bridge. On one side of me was devastation, on

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the other old China—ancient, picturesque houses hanging over the water and the beautiful old bridge. Next day the bridge and the old houses were no more; the Japanese had created the same havoc here as elsewhere.

Dr. Jee remarked once that he sometimes felt it would be worth suggesting to the people in America and England, who had so generously raised funds for the relief of the airraid victims in China, that they should offer this money instead to the oil companies, asking them to take it instead of the Japanese money for which they sold the oil without which the Japanese bombers could not come over and devastate the Chinese cities.

We walked on to another bombed area, and then another. Here had been a school where seventy-five children had perished; here sixty persons had been blown to pieces or buried beneath the fall of masonry; here ten houses had been demolished, there twenty. In the area a mile away from the station, which was completely deserted and nothing but a mass of rubble and stone, five hundred houses had been demolished. And so on from place to place. A map with red points marking where bombs have fallen showed hardly a single area, except the British concession, untouched. Occasionally one saw a poor family still living in a room with three, or even only two, walls left. One place was as safe as another.

The destruction of Canton was all the more tragic since it was the most modern Chinese city in China. In fact Canton was the one modernized city in China which was neither foreign nor founded by foreigners. With its many wide streets and large concrete buildings, Canton was the concrete symbol of the New China which Japan is determined to destroy.

We visited the Red Cross stations and inspected the volunteer first-aid squads standing at attention. These volunteers seemed to be almost children, girls and boys from the high school and the university. Serious children who have per-

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formed heroic work and looked on terrible sights day after day. Unlike most Chinese, they do not smile.

Canton was estimated then to have lost two-thirds of its population. All who could leave the city had left. The officials remained and the patriotic students, volunteers, and the workers and middle classes who had no relatives in the country and no means.

Many shops not yet destroyed were shut and barred, but in the poorest quarters life seemed to be going on much as usual. There were some refugee centres for the homeless where the city administration supplied food until they could get away to relatives in the country, or be settled on new land in northern Kwangtung, or drafted into the army, if able-bodied men. I visited one such refugee centre. It had seven hundred people, all in one four-storied house. Men, women, children, and small babies were sitting patiently on mats on the floor. An old man with a long white beard like a patriarch, erect and motionless, with an emaciated and almost naked body, sat next to a tiny baby being looked after by a girl of five; on other mats were families of five or six people. The place was terribly crowded, dark and hot, but clean and orderly. It seemed surprising there was so little cholera in Canton. The Chinese doctors and their helpers must have worked hard.

I was in general struck in Canton by the resourcefulness and good organization of the Cantonese. Elsewhere in China, with less terrible problems to face, the air-raid victims and the sick were worse cared for. The Cantonese were proud of the large number of volunteers they had sent monthly to the front on the Yangtze five hundred miles away. They should be equally proud of the fortitude of the civilian population. There were few anti-aircraft guns to defend the city and insufficient shells for them to fire, and there were no planes at all. In Barcelona there was always hope that Government planes might chase away the bombers. But in Canton there was nowhere to hide and no hope that even a single plane

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would rise to challenge the invaders. Each family knew that to-day or to-morrow it might be their turn to be killed or maimed, yet although thousands had perished the city remained calm and the artisans continued to ply their trades and the sampans and junks to carry their freight.

My last visits that day were to the training-ground where the young men came for drill and rifle practice in the evening after their work, and to the women's battalion in training outside the city. Here I saw more of the attractive young men and women of China, the sons and daughters of the middle and lower middle classes, whose stake is in the country, and who do not remove themselves to the foreign concessions or to Hong Kong. These boys and girls, like the students in the rescue squads, the doctors, and the slender khaki-green clad soldiers, are the salt of the country. There are still many corrupt officials, and merchants and bankers out only for their profits, but this is true of any country at war as in peace. I saw in Canton the bravery and determination of the people. The city was to fall in October, mainly because of the inefficient manner in which its defence was conducted, but also because its best sons were away in Central China defending the Wuhan cities. When the Cantonese evacuated the city they blew up or burnt the great buildings and the factories and left to Japan an empty shell. As I write now in the spring of 1939, General Pai Chung-hsi, the famous Kwangsi leader and reputedly the best strategist in China, is launching a counter-attack on the Japanese forces in Kwangtung. The Japanese, who took Canton in October 1938, now, seven months later, hold only a small strip of land around it. The young militiamen and the women volunteers I saw on that July evening are somewhere in Kwangtung harassing the Japanese army.

I have often since wished that I had stayed longer in Canton, but I felt I must hurry to Hankow, and I had already booked my seat on the plane for Hong Kong.

Next morning at six I waited on the Bund with a crowd of

Chapter 2
THE WUHAN CITIES

oreigners speak of Hankow when referring to the three large cities of Central China situated at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers, three hundred miles above Shanghai. The Chinese refer to them collectively as the Wuhan cities: Hankow on the north bank of the Yangtze; Wuchang on the south bank at the terminus of the Canton-Hankow railway line; Hanyang, the oldest of the three, facing Hankow across the muddy waters of the narrower Han river. Here in July 1938 was the de facto capital of China. Chungking, in far-off Szechuan, had been proclaimed the temporary capital when Nanking fell but most Government departments were still in Wuhan when I arrived.

The Wuhan cities together had a population of a million, and now, in the summer of 1938, they were the last important industrial centre of China being defended against the Japanese invaders. Northwards the railway line to Peiping was still in Chinese hands as far as its junction with the Lunghai railway. Munitions came in by railway, not only from Canton in the south, but from Russia via Sian. Communications with the Chinese forces fighting the Japanese in Shansi were still open. Here in Wuhan was the ancient centre of the tea trade, one of the exports which could pay for imported arms. A few miles eastward, the large Tayeh iron mines were still in Chinese hands. Wuchang's iron works, the first to be set up

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in China, the Hanyang arsenal, the busy textile mills, the thousands of workshops, made of the Wuhan cities an industrial and trading centre second only to Shanghai and Canton. The loss of Nanking had meant only the loss of fine Government buildings, for Nanking had been a kind of Washington. The loss of Wuhan would mean the loss of the last good base from which a counter-offensive could be launched by China. Nanking had been given up without a struggle, but Wuhan was to be defended for many months and taken only at great cost to Japan in blood and treasure. It was not abandoned until the loss of Canton had deprived it of its strategical advantages.

Hankow is largely a foreign creation; one of those trading stations where concession areas similar to Shanghai and Tientsin were obtained by the powers in the nineteenth century; foreign towns on Chinese soil administered by foreigners in the interest of foreigners. Of the five original concessions only; the French, remains. Germany lost hers in the World War. Soviet Russia gave hers up as part of her general voluntary abandonment of imperialist rights and privileges in China. Britain surrendered hers early in 1927, when the victorious armies of the Kuomintang had swept up from Canton to the Yangtze, and Britain was powerless to defend it against the workers of the Wuhan cities who had torn down its barricades. The Japanese concession had been taken over by the Chinese at the beginning of this war, when all the Japanese left Central China.

Nevertheless, Hankow remained largely a foreign city with its colonnaded banks and tall offices, apartment houses and godowns, still owned mainly by foreigners. British, American, French and Italian gunboats were anchored in the river close beside the Bund to protect foreign property, and to be prepared to evacuate the foreigners. The old concessions were -now 'Special Administrative Districts' 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the ex-British Concession was administered by a council half British and half Chinese. Britain had not surrendered all her

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rights in 1927, but had in effect called in the forces of the new Nationalist Government of China to protect it from the insurgent workers of Hankow. The privileges and rights of the British and the French, which the forces of the nationalist revolution in China had tried to wrest from them in 1927, were now the only guarantee of a safety area in Wuhan. Four Hundred Annamite soldiers guarded the French Concession, but Chinese soldiers stood guard in the adjoining ex-Russian and ex-British concessions. Would the Japanese, if they came, occupy all the Special Districts as if they were Chinese territory? Was the French Concession the only ultimately safe area in Hankow? No one could tell, but it was at least obvious that the Japanese were carefully refraining from bombing the foreign quarter. The Americans had no concession, but American property and interests in Hankow were considerable and the Japanese dared not risk another Panay incident. They knew they might arouse American public opinion to the point of stopping the sale of war materials to Japan. Many Chinese officials, generals, and high-ranking officers kept their wives and families in the safety of the 'Special Districts'. A few Chinese ministers lived there themselves, and some ministries and army headquarters were in the ex-Japanese concession, which it was considered Japan would not bomb since it contained so much Japanese property. But most of the Government departments were over in Wuchang, where the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang remained till the end, in spite of the incessant air-raids.

The western section of Hankow, the original Chinese city, began with broad modern streets, large shops, and handsome buildings, and ended in the wooden shacks, mud houses, and tiny workshops in the narrow alleys which led down to the Han river. Hanyang could only be reached by sampan, but a steam ferry-boat ran every half-hour from Hankow across the Yangtze to Wuchang. We had a strenuous time after airraids getting backwards and forwards to see the damage, first in Hankow itself, then over in Hanyang and then across on

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the ferry to Wuchang. It would take hours to get from place to place in rickshaws and sampans and on foot. In Hanyang, clustered along the waterfront and back towards the ancient arsenal, the bombs fell almost as frequently as in Wuchang, and the poorest section of Hankow opposite was hit over and over again. Wuchang, built around Serpent Hill, and surrounded by a seven-mile wall which had been partially demolished in 1926, had 500,000 inhabitants before the airraids began, and was the largest of the Wuhan cities. Beyond Wuchang in the open country was the fine modern University of Central China, and beyond that again the lovely East Lake, where one could go and bathe if one risked being caught in an air-raid on the way back to Hankow.

Wuchang was an historic city, and a city full of memories of revolution. In 1911 the revolution which overthrew the Manchu dynasty and turned China into a republic had begun with the revolt of the Wuchang garrison. From January to July 1927 the Wuhan cities had been the Kuomintang capital of China. Here had been played out the last act of the tragic drama which had ended in the slaughter of thousands of workers and peasants and the flower of the student youth, and had delivered all power in China to Chiang Kai-shek and his backers amongst the wealthy bankers and brokers of Shanghai. In 1926-7 the trade unions of the Wuhan cities had counted 300,000 members, and in the villages of Hunan province to the south the peasants had risen in their thousands, believing that the Kuomintang Revolution meant their emancipation. From the Pearl River to the Yangtze the Kuomintang had utilized the mass movement of the peasants and the workers to sweep away the war-lord armies almost without battles, but as soon as social revolution threatened, first the Right Wing of the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek, and a few months later even the Left-Wing intellectuals and politicians who composed the Government at Wuhan, broke with the Communists and turned upon the mass movement to destroy it. The period during which the

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working class and the peasants of China saw power within their grasp, and a new life beginning, had lasted only a few months and ended in bloodshed and terror. The Wuhan Government had been more frightened of the workers, who were striking in their thousands, and of the peasants, who were seizing the land, than of Chiang Kai-shek. It had tried for a few months, in alliance with the Communists, to preserve the civil power at Wuhan against the military power at Nanking. Reliance on the mass movement could alone have given it the power to defend the majority Kuomintang Government against the powerful minority government behind which stood Chiang Kai-shek and his armies, backed by Britain and the bankers of Shanghai; but this movement was as dangerous to the classes which the Left Wing of the Kuomintang represented as to Chiang Kai-shek.

The Communists had continued, even after Chiang Kai-shek had broken with them and crushed the trade unions of Shanghai, to think that 'a bloc of workers, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie' could be established strong enough to resist Chiang Kai-shek, and powerful enough, in Stalin's words 'to carry out the agrarian revolution, expel the imperialists, abolish feudalism, destroy the militarists, and ensure the non-capitalist road of development for the Chinese revolution'. Pursuing the fantastic hope that the small capitalists would help them to destroy the big capitalists and the landowners, and hoping to allay the fears of the liberal intellectuals and the small industrialists and traders, the Comintern had even discouraged strikes and refused to let Soviets be established. They had left the workers and peasants defenceless before the forces of reaction massing against them, whilst endeavouring to pump courage into the panic-stricken leaders of the Wuhan Government. By the summer of 1927 Communists, trade-unionists, and peasants were being massacred in thousands, and Borodin was fleeing across Mongolia to Moscow.

In 1927 the last hope, or fear, of world revolution had

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been buried in Wuhan; never again would the Comintern seriously endeavour to lead the 'oppressed colonial peoples' against the forces of Western imperialism. Nor would the Communists in China ever in the following decade be able to re-establish their influence over the Chinese workers who lost faith in Communist leadership after the blunders of 1927. With their trade unions suppressed and their leaders dead in the streets of a score of Chinese cities, the organized workers of China vanished from the political scene. Apathy and hopelessness took the place of enthusiasm and wild hope in the hearts of the most exploited working class in the world, whilst Communism in China for years became more and more identified with an agrarian jacquerie, and the Chinese Soviet Republic a federation of scattered areas of peasant revolt sustained by guerrilla forces.

For years to come Stalinists and Trotskyists would fling invectives at one another, and the Comintern would endeavour to lay the blame for the disaster of 1927 on the Chinese leaders. But was there in fact ever any possibility for the Communists in China to have carried through a social revolution against the allied forces of Chinese capitalists and landowners and Western imperialism? Even had 'the line' of the Comintern been more intelligent, bolder, and less ambiguous, even if Soviets of workers, peasants, and soldiers had been set up when the march north began, as Trotsky advocated, would there have been any possibility of victory for the revolutionary forces? In the summer of 1938, with their interests in China being destroyed by Japan, Britain, France and the United States had only some half-dozen gunboats anchored off the Bund in Hankow, and no one imagine they would ever fire a shot at the Japanese. But in the spring of 1927 forty-five foreign gunboats had menaced the Wuhan cities, prepared as every one knew to destroy the Wuhan Government and its revolutionary supporters should Chiang Kai-shek fail to do so.

Memories of those days of civil strife were hard to recap-

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ture in the Wuhan of 1938. The Chinese may have been chastised with whips by the Western Powers and the native capitalists, but the Japanese were now chastising them with scorpions. The menace of Japanese conquest was showing itself more potent to hold China united than the desire for complete national liberation a decade ago. Japanese imperialism unlike British imperialism, was an enemy with whom no compromise was possible. There could be no split in the united front against an enemy who demanded, not merely privileges and security for its capital in China, but absolute domination. Whereas it is to the interest of the United States and Britain to lend money to China for her modernization, which opens a huge market for British and American capital goods, Japan entered on this war to prevent the industrialization of China. Japan's heavy industry is too weak to supply capital goods for export, so that, in order to profit, she must convert China into a colony and close the door on the trade of the rest of the world. With British and American imperialism the Chinese bankers, merchants, and industrialists can compromise to their mutual advantage, as they have done since 1927. With Japan there is no possibility of compromise. The possessing classes in China that could come to terms with Britain, France, and the U.S.A., and yet preserve and increase their wealth, know that only armed resistance and national unity can save them from Japan. The mutilation and death, the raping and the robbing which the Chinese people are suffering at the hands of the Japanese, are rallying even the poorest and most exploited of her people against the invader.

Communists who for years had been hounded by the Kuo-mintang Government could now walk freely in the streets of the capital, and could criticize the Government in their own daily newspaper. The workers of Wuhan, who a decade ago had demonstrated against British imperialism, now sent their families over to Hankow to shelter in the Special Districts when the bombs fell. Railway workers, who could have

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paralysed the Government and the army by striking, instead contributed half their miserable wages to national defence. Demonstrations were now demonstrations of national solidarity and loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek, not precursors of social revolution.

Yet one wondered sometimes in Hankow what the workers really felt, and whether they accepted the demands made upon them by the united front as willingly as their erstwhile leaders. Did they remember the trade-union movement which had won them increased wages and shorter hours for a spell, and was now as dead as the workers who in 1927 had sacrificed their lives for a dream of better days? Did the sweating coolies working on the Bund, or dragging the rickshaws on hot summer days, no longer hate their exploiters, foreign or Chinese? Could China unaided really stand indefinitely against Japan, unless the mighty social forces liberated for a short while in 1926, were again released to make China as irresistible as the Kuomintang armies twelve years ago? Could China's national revolution triumph without a social revolution ?

Certainly the Generalissimo and Madame lived as if they had complete confidence in the loyalty of the Chinese people. I was astonished to find when I went over to Wuchang for my first interview with Madame, and again later for an interview with the Generalissimo, how slightly guarded they were. A couple of sentries at the gate, another sentry or two in the courtyard—that was all. No waiting at the entrance, no long and careful scrutiny of documents; the Generalissimo and his wife lived with no more pomp and, outwardly at least, hardly more precautions for their safety than the Prime Minister of England or the President of the United States. The contrast with the many guards and infinite precautions which surround Stalin, immured in the Kremlin and hardly ever seen, or Hitler, with his doubles and his Storm Troopers, or the Mikado, who dare not drive along the streets of his capital without thousands of policemen to line the route, was very

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striking. Madame Chiang would think nothing of stepping out of her car in the public street to talk to some one she had chanced to see in the road. The Generalissimo would appear in public without any fuss and almost unguarded. Their behaviour bespoke not only personal courage but the reality of popular loyalty, and impressed me immensely in contrast to what I had seen in Russia and Japan.

In spite of the safety of the Special Districts, few foreign women had remained in Hankow. Only one newspaper man, the Associated Press correspondent MacDaniel, had his wife in Hankow, and not a single British or American embassy or consular official had his wife living with him. The French, the Belgians, the Italians, and the Germans, kept their wives with them; but it seems to be a fixed Anglo-Saxon prejudice that men should at once get rid of their wives if the remotest danger offers sufficient excuse. A young Englishman working with the" British and American Tobacco Company remarked to me later, on the boat returning to England, 'Wasn't Hankow last summer a jolly place with all the Mem-Sahibs away?' Was this the true explanation of the anxiety of the English and Americans to send their wives away to Hong Kong, Peiping, or Shanghai, or was it Western chivalry? The missionaries, for the most part, remained, husbands and wives, even a few children.

Madame Georges Picot, wife of the French Chargé d'Affaires, when I asked her why she remained in Hankow, replied, 'But how could my husband be properly fed if I left him?'

Her table was the best in Hankow, since she personally bought the food in the Chinese market, and herself supervised the cooking. She was actually a Russian, not a Frenchwoman, and her parties were the jolliest in Hankow. Here one met every one: French, Germans, Italians, Americans, English. Madame Picot was a very attractive and fascinating person, and when, early in August, she and her husband moved up to Chungking, she left several of the younger

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consular and diplomatic officials of the various Powers quite heart-broken. She spoke Chinese and it was she who first took me around the narrow streets of the Chinese cities, talking to every one and as thoroughly at home as in the French Embassy. She also told me that there were a number of Russians amongst the peasants in the surrounding villages—Russians who had been settled there for generations, since Hankow had been for centuries the tea centre of China to which Russian merchants had come. When I asked her if these peasants maintained a higher standard of life than the Chinese she said, 'What difference is there in standard of life between the Russian and the Chinese peasant?' I had to confess there is not much.

Rents and hotel prices within the French Concession, and only to a slightly smaller degree within the Special Districts, naturally soared. When I arrived it was almost as difficult to secure accommodation as it is in Moscow.

I came to Hankow by air from Hong Kong, a lovely flight first over high hills and then over the vast and intensively cultivated plains of Hunan province. With me came Mrs. Sel-wyn Clark, wife of the Director of Medical Services of the Colony of Hong Kong, and secretary of Madame Sun Yat Sen's China Defence League. She had come to Inspect mili-tary hospitals and to see the work of the Chinese Red Cross Medical Commission, and went on to Changsha after a few days. It was lucky for me that we were together, for otherwise I should have had nowhere to sleep during my first days in Hankow. Agnes Smedley, who met Mrs. Selwyn Clark, had secured a room for her at the hotel in the French Concession in which she lived, and I shared her bed. Agnes Smedley had been in Hankow since the beginning of the year, but had been unable to secure accommodation in the Lutheran Mission, where most journalists, and other foreigners who could not afford the luxury of the Hotel Terminus des Wagons Lits, were living. Although some of the missionaries had the highest opinion of Agnes Smedley, and although the tolerant

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Norwegian who ran the place had nothing against her, elderly ladies whose writ ran at the Lutheran Mission con sidered her to be either too dangerous a Red, or too scarlet a woman, we never quite knew which; in their eyes she was apparently a cross between Robespierre and the woman of Babylon. Our room was dark, stuffy, and dirty, its small window opening on to a narrow courtyard facing the congested living-quarters of several Chinese families a few feet away. I found the heat of a Chinese summer difficult to bear at first, and in that room it was almost intolerable. At night, naked under the mosquito net, one panted for air and lay bathed in perspiration.

Not that one spent much time trying to sleep those days. There was too much to be seen, too many people to talk to, too much to learn, and too many parties, official banquets, private dinners. Agnes Smedley, in the midst of all her manifold activities, found time to introduce us to every one and to go with us to visit the military hospitals.

In spite of the heat I lived on a high plane those days, for I was seeing China for the first time, and meeting the Chinese leaders was tremendously interesting and exciting. The newspaper correspondents and military observers, with that wide American hospitality which I first experienced in China, entertained both of us night after night. I myself was soon involved in a whole series of receptions given in my honour by practically every Chinese organization in Hankow: the International Peace Campaign, the League of Nations Union, the Women's Organizations, the National Association of Chinese Writers—even the Eighth Route Army headquarters invited me to a modest entertainment. The Rotary Club asked me to make a speech, to a mixed crowd composed of the foreign business community and a few Chinese, and I was invited to dinners, lunches, teas by many Chinese officials. In addition to this I was interviewed by every newspaper and kept busy receiving a stream of callers—the penalty of being, out of my own country, a famous author. I had the

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great advantage of being persona grata to Chinese of all shades of political opinion on account of Japan's Feet of Clay, which, translated into Chinese, has circulated in tens of thousands of copies. But this advantage was offset at the beginning by the calls made upon my time by all these receptions and visitors. The receptions were often instructive and they put me in touch with a number of interesting people, whom I got to know better afterwards, but I had a bit too much of making speeches, and hearing speeches, and felt that not thus would I ever learn anything about China.

All the time I was busy trying to grasp the military situation and follow the course of the war, interviewing various Ministers and other prominent people, rushing over to the Lutheran Mission and climbing to its roof to watch, whenever the air-raid alarms sounded, and composing the first news cables I had ever written. Looking back on those July days I am amazed at the energy with which I managed to keep going in the terrific heat, from early morning till midnight or later, without even a siesta in the afternoon.

Hollington Tong, the genial chief of the Central Publicity Board, arranged interviews for me with every one I wished to meet, and during the first two weeks I met all the following and a good many more: the Generalissimo and Madame; Dr. Kung, Minister of Finance; Wang Ching-wei, Vice-President of the Kuomintang and Chairman of the Central Political Council; Chou En-lai, representative of the Communists in the Government as Vice-Director of the Political Department of the Military Council; Kuo Mei-ro, exile returned from Japan, a Left-Wing leader, now head of the military propaganda department; several generals; Mr. Donald; the New Life Movement leaders; the Ministers of Education, Economics, Foreign Affairs—well, by that time I knew pretty well what was the official view on most questions and what all these important people looked like. I felt I needed a holiday, so I went on my first visit to the front. My first night in Hankow, having gone to bed at 1 a.m.,

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and not yet having managed to get any real sleep, we were roused at 3.30 a.m. by the air-raid sirens.

I dressed hurriedly and went out on to the Bund. I watched the solitary light of one Chinese observation plane sweep back and forth across the starry sky. The Bund was crowded with Chinese families who had come here for safety. Fathers held sleeping infants in their arms and sleepy children sat upon the grass. For an hour or more we waited, and then, as the faint light of dawn revealed the faces of the waiting crowds, the all-clear sounded, and we went back to bed. My second night in Hankow all the newspaper correspondents were at a dinner given to Mr. Chancellor, Far Eastern Manager of Reuter's, and myself, by the Central Publicity Board, and presided over by General Chen Cheng, Commander of the Wuhan Defence Forces. The Japanese allowed us to get through with the speech-making, but then there came the alarm. We were in the Chinese city and all started to rush back to the concession areas. The streets were packed with a hurrying mass of people on foot, in rickshaws, and a few in motor-cars. Complete darkness enveloped us and there seemed as much danger of being crushed to death, or run over, as of being bombed.

We climbed at last to the roof of the Lutheran Mission, favourite observation-post for journalists in air-raids. For an hour we watched the empty skies and talked softly in the darkness. Then the all-clear sounded. There was no raid that night. The first air-raid I witnessed occurred six days after my arrival in Hankow. By that time I was installed in a pleasant room in the flat of the Chaplain to the British Navy, Mr. Simms Lee, and his American wife, with whom I had been put in touch by Mr. Chen, Secretary of the Chinese League of Nations Union. This flat was in S.A.D. 3, not far from the Chinese city. It had no roof from which to watch the airraids, and I usually ran over to the Lutheran Mission when the alarm sounded. That morning, having not yet breakfasted, and having so often dashed over on false alarms, I

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stayed where I was. Later on it became a kind of superstition amongst the correspondents that if I was up on the Lutheran Mission tower the Japanese would not raid the city, but only the air-field. For it so happened that the worst raids occurred always when, for some reason or other, I could not get over. When in September I secured a room at the Lutheran Mission my constant presence on the tower ceased to protect the citizens of Hankow. That first morning I stood upon the balcony watching the raiders pass over. The sound of the falling bombs came from not far away to the south-west, and soon a thick column of smoke began to rise from the direction of Hanyang. As soon as the all-clear sounded, and one was allowed to move in the streets, I hurried over to the offices of the Central Publicity Board three blocks away, and from there set out with other correspondents and camera-men in rickshaws. We got down to the waterfront and crossed over in a sampan to Hanyang. Acres of smouldering ruins, wounded being carried away on stretchers, petrified bodies in the debris, people slightly wounded being dressed by first-aid workers on the spot. Neither the arsenal nor the ironworks had been hit, but hundreds of shacks of artisans had been destroyed. Dead bodies in the ruins horribly mutilated. Near the waterfront a mangled mess of human limbs and sand where a primitive dug-out had received a direct hit. Wounded children screaming, frightened children crying, women distraught.

Opposite in Hankow, a whole quarter of the city was on fire, and a red column of flame was rising to the sky. We re-crossed the Han river. Stepping off the sampan I almost stumbled over the body of a man lying by the waterside, his entrails exposed. He was still breathing. No one had time to attend to him, apparently, or he was regarded as a hopeless case. Perhaps he was unconscious and could feel no pain, as my companions assured me, but as we passed one gruesome sight after another, I wished above all things that there had been morphia for the wounded.

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A little farther on a mother wailed unceasingly over the dead body of her baby, while a small boy howled beside her. Houses were blazing like matchwood, the heat so great one could not go close to them. Along the waterfront were families beside their few pitiful possessions: mattresses, tables, wooden boxes, cooking vessels. Attempts were being made to put out the fire, men, women, and boys passing buckets and basins from hand to hand in a long chain. When the primitive fire engine arrived it could not at first get its pump to work. But at last a hose-pipe was pouring water from the river on to the blazing buildings and the fire was under control. It had been started by a direct hit on a small paper factory and had spread to all the surrounding houses and hovels. Hundreds of people had lost their homes.

Wuchang remained to be seen, so we made our way back to the ferry and on the other side were lucky enough to secure an ancient automobile. More of the same terrible sights in many parts of the city. Coolies bringing wooden coffins along the dusty road. Women wailing; the wounded already carried away but the dead bodies still lying in the glare of the noonday sun, or covered over with sacking or rags. More than five hundred people had been killed that day and nearly a thousand wounded.

In July there were not so many air-raids as in August, for the Japanese were busy taking Kiukiang, 130 miles down the Yangtze. After that their advance was held up for weeks and a series of devastating raids began, not only on the Wuhan cities and Canton, but on Nanchang, 170 miles south-east of Hankow, on Changsha to the south, and on a score of small towns of no military or strategic importance whatsoever, and where no kind of medical service or first aid was available. It seemed that whenever the military situation was unfavourable to Japan she launched her raids on the towns. When she found she could not break through the Chinese defences, she tried to break the morale of the civilian population. Whilst I was at the front south of Kiukiang in

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early August and was witnessing some small Chinese victories on the hills, the Japanese carried out the fiercest air-raids the Wuhan cities had yet experienced, and these raids continued throughout August until Wuchang was almost a ruin and most of its population had fled. On August 13th there were two thousand casualties in one raid, mainly in Wuchang. After that the city remained almost uninhabited until it fell to Japan.

Hankow was full of marching troops when I arrived. The second day I watched a division of Szechuanese pass along the Bund, men who had been on the road for months and were soon to lose their lives on the battle-fields still 150 miles away to the east. Young men and boys, not too well armed, coolies carrying officers' baggage and cooking cauldrons, junior officers, little to be distinguished from the rank and file. No one in the streets paid any attention to them as they marched past. These soldiers had no bands or drums to cheer them, no girls to throw them flowers or give them cigarettes. All the pageantry of war familiar in the West was absent in China. At night the Bund was crowded with the soldiers sleeping side by side sprawled out upon the scanty grass or the hard pavement, their rifles stacked at intervals and watched over by a sentry. The gay life of the city to defend which they were going to give their lives was unknown to these peasant boys, or to the junior officers who slept alongside them. One of the United Press men was good enough to interpret for me, and I had some conversation with these Szechuanese soldiers. It was pathetic to hear them say that since such powerful states as Britain and the U.S.A. were helping China, how could China fail to win ? Others held the equally fantastic belief that Russian armies were fighting on China's side. The political officers had done their work well, but was it fair to have deceived these simple peasants ? Some of their officers revealed misgivings; they would fight for China, but was it not possible that the Central Government was sending them to fight the Japanese in the hope they

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would be exterminated? For were they not troops from a province the rulers of which were semi-independent and in no wise trusted by the Generalissimo? They had seen how inferior were their own arms and equipment to those of Chiang Kai-shek's own divisions, and they feared that they were being sent thus ill armed to defend the Wuhan cities, in order that they might be killed off, and the forces of Szechuanese separatism crushed. Nevertheless, they all thought of Japan as the national and racial enemy, and were prepared to give their lives to prevent a Japanese conquest in spite of these misgivings.

Other days in Hankow, the Bund and the streets leading off from it would be crowded with refugees who had fled before the Japanese occupation of their villages, or had been rendered homeless by the bombing of their towns. Many had been on the march for weeks, some for months. Families which had set out with five or six children had reached Hankow 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 smaller children are too exhausted to move another step, some have to be left on the road to die. Missionaries told me of hearing young children on the road pleading with their parents not to be left behind, saying:

'Don't leave me, I will not cry any more.'

With what agony of mind must some children be abandoned so that the rest 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 ?

Over in Wuchang I visited a Methodist school which had been turned into a refugee camp. Here old men and women and young mothers sat upon straw mats with babies and young children, thin, sad, hopeless in their misery, and many of them sick. I questioned one young woman who lay, very ill, upon a mat with a tiny baby beside her.

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'Where is your husband?'

'He has joined the guerrillas in Anhwei.'

'Are you all alone, or have you a family here.'

'Alone, all my family has been killed.'

'How old is your child?'

' Two weeks old; he was born on the road and I managed to walk on and get as far as this.'

I asked the English missionary who cared for these people whether she would live. 'Probably not,' he replied. 'She is very ill and has been through too much; the baby too is sick and very feeble.'

The refugees here were all from Anhwei, most of them from the village where the 'Christian General' Feng Yu-hsiang was born. The missionaries told me that when the bombers came over Wuchang these people were in terror, thinking that the Japanese were seeking specially to destroy them because they were General Feng's people. These two young Englishmen had stuck to their posts through all the bombing, together with most of the other missionaries in Wuchang.

The refugees along the Bund hope for transport by water to the west. They have erected sacking shelters from the sun and rain. Some women are washing clothes in tin basins. Cooked rice is distributed by Chinese relief organizations. These people do not beg. The beggars of Hankow are professionals and one soon learns to recognize them. 'Missy, missy,' whine the professionals as they follow you in the streets. The refugees do not know even that one English word and sit mute, uncomplaining, terribly pathetic, even the children silent, too tired to cry any more. Some will get transport westwards, but boats are scarce and tens of thousands will have to trek inland on foot, the weaker dying by the wayside, the stronger surviving until they reach the western provinces, where the Government will settle them on reclaimed lands, or find them work in the new industrial co-operatives, or the new factories.

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Madame Chiang had launched a movement to save the children of China. Her orphanages have saved thousands. If one found a homeless, starving child in the streets and took it to one of the refugee collecting centres it was sure of admission. Here the orphans, the abandoned children, the lost children, were fed and clothed and later sent to homes farther westward. At the headquarters of the Women's Section of the New Life Movement Mrs. Wang and Miss Chen Yi-yu gave me details of the organization of refugee relief. There were then 50,000 people crowded into the Wuhan refugee camps, but new ones were arriving in such enormous numbers that all could not be accommodated and many had to be left in the streets. The Government was endeavouring to shift them out and distribute them over the different western provinces. Seven million Chinese dollars had been spent in the previous two months on feeding, caring for, and transporting the flood of war victims. The International Red Cross had subsidized refugee camps in all provinces, but the million Chinese dollars of money contributed from abroad for refugee relief could only touch the fringe of the problem. The Chinese Government had provided a very much larger sum, but could not provide enough to save the thirty million refugees which was the lowest estimate of the total number of the homeless and destitute. The stream of refugees is endless. Each airraid, each new Japanese advance, renders hundreds, sometimes thousands, homeless. The ocean of misery is so vast that one despairs. One might walk along the Bund and salve one's conscience by the gift of a few dollars. But the problem was too big for either private charity or State action in a country so poor as China. It is a strange reflection on human nature that at the time of the great Japanese earthquake in 1923, a catastrophe of nature not to be compared to the catastrophe the Japanese are responsible for in China, the American Red Cross raised thirty million dollars in four weeks, whereas for China it has failed to raise even a million dollars.

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ne could not live in China without, as it were, growing a new skin of mental protection against the overwhelming misery of the Chinese people. But no one who has been in China during this war can ever forget, or ever quite understand the attitude of Europeans and Americans whose sympathies are so violently aroused by the sufferings of a few hundred thousand Jews persecuted by Hitler, and who are for the most part indifferent to the sufferings of millions of Chinese. When Hitler absorbs six million Czechs into his empire the whole world is horror-struck and the United States promptly clamps a 25 per cent penalty duty on German goods. There are 450,000,000 people in China and the Japanese have for nearly two years been slaughtering them from the air, massacring them in cold blood when they have taken cities and villages; raping their women; robbing them of all their possessions down to the quilts with which they had hoped to save themselves from death from cold and exposure; driving literally millions to become refugees. And we are so little moved that we continue as before to buy Japanese silk and manufactures, knowing that by doing so we are enabling her to buy from us the oil and iron and steel with which she is making a desert of China. Ambassadors are recalled from Germany to show our horror and disapproval of what is, by comparison, a minor act of aggression, and one carried out without the massacre of hundreds of thousands of women and children. When Japan's ex-ambassador, Mr. Saito, dies in Washington, an American gunboat carries his ashes back to Japan to do him honour, and the Japanese press is able to tell the Japanese people that this proves that the United States does not disapprove of what Japan is doing in China.

Yet British and American missionaries, newspaper correspondents, even diplomatic and consular officials, are with rare exceptions completely in sympathy with China and overwhelmed with pity and indignation at the sufferings Japan is inflicting on the Chinese people.

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Japan is so weak, financially, and also economically on account of her small iron and steel and machinery production, and on account of the concentration of her trade in British and American markets, that we could, if we wished, easily stop her aggression by economic pressure alone. Yet we do nothing, although the severance of trade relations with Japan could not possibly involve us in war. How could Japanese planes and ships move without oil; how could her armaments be made without metals; how could her troops be moved without American lorries, seeing that she produces hardly any automobiles herself; how could she even make her armaments without the machinery we supply? Where else would she find a market for her silk, if not in the United States ? Where else could she sell her textiles and other cheap manufactures if not in the great colonial markets of Asia and Africa which are British, French, or Dutch? If we did not buy from her she could not get the cash to buy war materials from any one else; and neither Germany nor Italy could give her credits with which to buy war materials.

Germany, whose actions in Europe are not even comparable, in the evil they cause, to those of Japan in Asia, and who, in any case, cannot be stopped without a war, in view of her mighty heavy industry (her great production of coal, iron, and machinery), and because her trade is not, like Japan's, mainly with the British Empire and the United States—Germany is the focus of all our condemnation, anger, and bellicosity. Is it because the Chinese are a yellow-skinned race that Japan's actions appear so little reprehensible to the West as com-pared with Germany's? Or is it rather because so many people in the British Empire and the United States are making fortunes supplying her with oil, scrap iron, steel, non-ferrous metals, automobiles, and machinery, that we do not sever trade relations with her? Since Germany has the greatest iron, steel, machinery, and armaments industry in Europe, no important business interests in Britain or the U.S.A. get a profit from her aggression. But since Japan's own production

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of iron, steel, machinery, and lorries is so small we get a profit from her aggression and so are not interested in stopping it.

My Japan's Feet of Clay was written before this war to explode the myth of Japan's invincibility and to expose the weakness of the economic, social, and political foundations of the Japanese State. I had hoped to convince the British and American people that further acts of aggression by Japan in Asia could be stopped by economic pressure alone, and I had wanted to show the real structure of Japan behind the facade she has erected towards the West. I found in China that I had convinced the Chinese instead of my own compatriots. I was astounded at the number of people who had read my book; not only civilians but generals, officers, every one.

I had never meant to imply that China could easily withstand Japan, although I believe that she can, if she keeps united, and if Britain and the U.S.A. do not betray her by coming to terms with Japan, and accepting 'the new situation in Asia', as the Japanese hope. I felt honoured when the Japanese exaggerated the importance of my books and articles to the point of calling me the originator of the boycott movement, but it was somewhat embarrassing to be received in China as a great English writer, and a 'great friend of China'. I felt almost ashamed that I should be received with such friendliness and gratitude on account of a book which merely expressed my opinion of Japan after long residence there and serious study of her economic and social structure, and my hatred of the manner in which her political system and military ideals crush decent human feelings amongst the Japanese people and turn them into an undernourished nation of robots, making of Japan the greatest menace to civilization of any nation on earth.

My approach to the Far Eastern problem had accordingly been through dislike of Japan rather than love of China, but in China last year I came to feel a real affection for the Chinese people, who, for all their shortcomings, are in many

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ways the most civilized people on earth. Their civilization is the only one without a background of military conquest and glorification of war and armies, and there is an atmosphere of good temper, serenity, and cheerfulness in China which I have found in no other country. The Japanese are dead serious about themselves and are consequently more devoid of a sense of humour than almost any other people. Their belief in their divine descent and ' destiny' gives to the Japanese a kind of dignity and courage. No such fanatical and superstitious belief gives courage to the Chinese; theirs is the dignity and courage of human beings facing terrible calamities with the utmost fortitude, knowing that no divine purpose rules the universe. They have, perhaps, more than any other people, resolved ' the unresolvable discord between the purposeless world in which we live and our desire that it should be ruled according to a moral purpose'. Their quiet acceptance of good and evil, suffering and joy, their animal tenacity in keeping the family alive even though they perish, gives them a strength to survive and a way of looking upon life which robs it of much of its pain. The Japanese intellectuals frequently commit suicide, for once deprived of their fanatical beliefs they have no inner strength. The Chinese can face disaster with a cold fortitude, and suicide is rare among them.

It is, of course, foolish to maintain that the Chinese philosophy of life is consciously in the minds of the poverty-stricken millions who live and give birth and die in such sordid misery that life is no more than a perpetual struggle not to starve to death. Nevertheless, the good humour of even the poorest and most overworked Chinese is a marvellous thing which can only come from an attitude towards life which enables them to get the utmost pleasure out of the simplest joys—a full rice bowl, their children, the sunlight and the breezes and the beauty of the earth. As one Chinese philosopher has said, 'All else besides a well-filled stomach is luxury of life.' The tragedy is that a people who can be

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happy with so little are most of them unable to obtain even that little; that the majority never have enough to eat. I also realize that this contentment of the Chinese is a dangerous thing; their rulers are far too apt to be complacent about the sufferings of the masses, and well-meaning foreigners are too ready to be sentimental about this Chinese contentment.

One of the most striking contrasts between China and Japan is the social position and demeanour of women, at least amongst the middle and upper classes. I had been outraged in Japan by the treatment of my sex, by the ugly superiority of the male and the inhuman patience of the women. Whereas Chinese women often have the look of open-faced and happy children, or a sweet serenity, Japanese women have the faces of dolls, or their faces are like masks. In both countries the old social code and Confucian ethic prescribed that women should be the chattels of men, but this does not appear ever to have been applied in China in the same thorough and fanatical spirit as in Japan. To-day in Japan the whole weight of Government authority reinforces the ancient social code, and the aim is to preserve ' the spirit of old Japan' and the 'beautiful customs of old Japan', of which the subjection of women is the outstanding feature. In China the laws of the Kuomintang Government prescribe the judicial equality of the sexes, and amongst the educated class social intercourse between the sexes on terms of equality is already the rule rather than the exception. In China young women speak to men as equals and have a charming dignity and frankness which contrasts strikingly with the stilted politeness, the bowing and scraping, the expressionless faces and terrible slave-like demeanour of Japanese women. Young women reporters and social workers in Hankow would come and interview me together with their male colleagues, and we would all sit together and talk as naturally and unconcernedly as in the West. In Japan such social intercourse between the sexes is frowned upon by the authorities and causes the police

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immediately to suspect that young men and women thus seen together are revolutionaries, or 'dangerous thinkers'. The awareness of both sexes that such conduct is taboo and that they are mobos and mogas (modern girls and modern boys) violating the social code, makes them giggle nervously to hide their shyness.

Of course, amongst the Chinese people as a whole the old status of women has remained unchanged, and in both countries parents sell their girl children when in dire poverty. But in the farmhouses I stayed at going to the front the subservience of women to men was at any rate far less conspicuous than it is in Japan, even in middle-class families.

The essential difference between the two countries is that China has experienced at least the beginnings of a social revolution, and the Chinese Government, in so far as it has power to do so, wishes to modernize China. In Japan the outworn feudal code of social behaviour is reinforced and maintained by the ruling class as part and parcel of the same superstitious and ancient way of life which enable the 'divine' Mikado to preserve autocratic power, and so to stand as a bulwark against democracy. Behind this bulwark the feudal landowners and their sons the officers, together with the monopoly family business houses, maintain their economic and political power and crush all reform movements in the name of the Emperor.

Many young men and women in China have been educated in America or in the American and British mission schools and colleges. Together with Western political theory they have taken over the West's freer social code and conception of equality between the sexes. The Japanese Government has endeavoured to acquire the benefits of Western science whilst shutting out Western political theories, and Western conceptions of social and political liberty, by threats and drastic punishment of all students who think ' dangerous thoughts'.

It is quite impossible to imagine any woman in Japan occupying the position which Madame Chiang does in China.

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The fact that so essentially modern and Western a woman should be the 'First Lady' has done much to further the destruction of the old social code in China. I met Madame a week or so after my arrival in Hankow, but since my later interviews with her were the ones in which I really talked to her, and since my conversations with her referred mainly to the problem of the wounded soldiers, I have written of her in a later chapter. To my interview with the Generalissimo I refer in my analysis of the political situation in China (Chapter 7). Of the other interviews I had in Hankow the most embarrassing was that with Dr. H. H. Kung. For in the middle of the lunch to which he had invited me he started to tell me of an article which had just appeared in the Financial News in London referring to the corruption in the Finance Ministry, of which he is the head.

A little time afterwards, when I met Mr. Donald, Chiang Kai-shek's trusted Australian adviser, he was at pains to convince me that there was no truth in the accusations flying about concerning Dr. Kung. Donald was ill and just leaving for a holiday in the hills, so I did not meet him a second time. He is a pleasant, hearty person, frank in his speech and without pomposity. I liked him, but I don't know whether he really expected me to believe that the British predilection for T. V. Soong was due to the latter's greater amenability to their influence. The germ of truth in this no doubt lies in the fact that Kung's old-style Chinese methods of running the finances of China keep the Finance Ministry more completely under the control of the Generalissimo than would be the case if T. V. Soong's Western methods were put into practice. Kung manages to finance the war by seeing to it that the squeezers are squeezed; whereas Soong might upset the whole apple-cart by attempting to clean up the Finance Ministry in the middle of the war. Donald is obviously genuinely devoted to the Chiangs, and is not, like some of their other advisers, grinding some axe of his own.

I interviewed Dr. Wang Chung-huei, the Minister of

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Foreign Affairs, just before he moved to Chungking. A cultured gentleman with the simple unaffected manners of the best type of English diplomat, he was easy to talk to, dignified, and yet friendly. Reading between the lines of his statements I suspected that he must be one of those who envisaged a compromise peace with Japan as the best that China can hope for. His appeal to the British people to do justice to China, to stop Japan's invasion, or at least to help China to resist by 'mobilizing international opinion', his hope for 'joint action by the Powers to stop the war and seek an equitable solution to bring permanent peace'; his suggestion that the Powers with interests in China should issue a 'strong statement' defending their position in the Far East, and proclaiming that they would uphold the treaties and 'refuse to recognize any situation brought about by force'—all betrayed the outlook of the international lawyer, and of one who could not bring himself to believe that Britain and the U.S.A. would refuse to honour their pledges or betray China to Japan. Until recently Mr. Wang Chung-huei was President of the World Court at The Hague. He belongs in thought to the post-War decade when mankind believed for a brief spell that international law and order were henceforth to be observed. He went on to say that ' much would depend upon the "wording" of such a joint declaration to Japan by Britain, France, and the United States'. He made an appeal to Britain and the United States to stop supplying Japan with arms, and said that 'they might at least stop murdering us'. He then reverted once more to his idea that the Powers should 'bring both sides together for a discussion'. He obviously hoped that Britain and the U.S.A. would eventually step in to settle the war. He thought that Germany was neutral and wanted to keep on friendly terms with China. The Foreign Minister of China is more than anything a 'man of Geneva' who cannot bring himself to believe that the solemn treaties Britain and the U.S.A. have signed concerning the integrity of China would be as much scraps of paper to them as to the

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Japanese, provided they could save their own interests in the Far East by throwing these treaties into the wastepaper basket. The present Foreign Minister of China has no trace of that inferiority complex towards Europeans which made of Eugene Chen so bitter and caustic a negotiator. Wang Chung-huei is himself essentially a Western lawyer and diplomat, used to mixing with the representatives of the Powers on terms of social equality.

I went to interview Chen Li-fu, the Minister of Education and chief of the 'C.C. clique', with considerable interest. I was now to meet a hidebound reactionary, the bitter enemy of Communists and Liberals, the defender of Confucianism. I don't know quite what I expected, but I found a tall, slim, astonishingly handsome man with the face of an ascetic and the eyes of a dreamer, dressed in a long Chinese robe of spotless white linen, which enhanced the spirituality of his finely moulded features. Here was a personality, even if one dislikes what he stands for in China, a representative of the Confucian traditions with the suavity and charm, and probably the ruth-lessness, of a prince of the medieval Church.

Knowing that it is he who is mainly responsible for the policy of keeping the educated youth out of the war, and of curbing the eager patriotism of the youth organizations, I asked him leading questions on the Government's educational policy.

He gave me an account of the steps taken to re-establish in the western provinces the Chinese universities destroyed by the Japanese; of the number of students who had trekked west and were now studying there; of the conversion of provincial universities like that of Yünnan into Central Government universities, and of the raising of the standard of education in the remoter provinces. When I asked him whether the students would not now be given military training and encouraged to join the army, he said that they now received two to three months' military training in the summer vacation, and that some were selected to go to the military academies

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and aviation schools to be trained as officers. But only fifty were selected out of every thousand volunteers, and none were apparently encouraged to go as privates.

Fifty thousand officers had already been killed or wounded and there was accordingly a tremendous shortage and urgent need for the rapid training of new ones. The new officers would be better educated men than the old, and herecognized that modern armaments required educated officers. But he did not seem to see that educated youths might also be required in the ranks of a modern army.

I asked whether it was now the Government's policy to train more students as engineers and scientists and fewer in the arts and law. For the past three years, he said, more students were being taught in the engineering faculty than in others. It had been the avowed policy of the Government since 1933 to reduce the number of law schools and schools of the liberal arts and limit the number of students following such courses. Students in physics and mathematics received most scholarships and students were being trained with the industrialization of the country as the primary objective.

Early in 1938 restrictions were placed on students going to study abroad and the stipends of those in China were now less than thirty dollars a year, a cut of 30 per cent below the pre-war rate.

When I left, Chen Li-fu presented me with his autographed photo and his pamphlet on ' Ideals of Character Education'.

My attempts to draw Wang Ching-wei, leader of the 'peace group' in the Government, into a statement of his real views, failed. From his answers to my questions he might have been as uncompromising in his determination to continue resisting Japan as Chiang Kai-shek himself. This hated enemy of the Left bloc in China was suspected of carrying on secret negotiations with Japan, and he had, as I knew, openly advocated a reorientation of China's policy towards friendship with Germany and Italy. His statement on the subject of Germany is worth reproducing:

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'Our policy is focused on Japan and we are trying to isolate her. So we try to make as many countries as possible friendly to us. Thus if Germany does not encroach upon our rights we can be friendly with her. Germany has withdrawn her military advisers and recognized Manchuria, but the reason she gives is that she is trying to maintain a neutral position. We realize that Germany's and Japan's aims are different; if Japan controls the Far East Germany will lose her trade. We don't believe she has any real intention of helping Japan, but, of course, we don't know. We do not expect that Germany will help us, although we expect her to diminish her assistance to Japan.'

Beyond this he was not to be drawn, and he said he would never be in favour of peace until the Japanese armies withdrew from China. A tall man, well on in his fifties, who looks no more than thirty, he spoke with serious intentness through his own interpreter, and never smiled once. He seemed to be really keen on his plans and charts for village and district councils, and apparently still thinks of himself as a liberal, although he has allied himself to the most reactionary elements in the Kuomintang. Was it sincere conviction that China could not hope to resist Japan alone, and that Britain and the U.S.A. would never help her, which made him advocate going over to the anti-Comintern bloc? Or was it personal ambition, the hope of supplanting Chiang Kai-shek as leader of the Chinese Government? Wang Ching-wei's whole career shows him to be an opportunist who has always yielded to force and gone over to the strongest, whilst yet continuing to nurse the ambition to lead. His ambition has led him into opposition to Chiang Kai-shek, but he has never had the courage to lead a revolution. This handsome, tall, pale-faced man had been Sun Yat Sen's favourite disciple and thought of himself always as his successor. Prior to Chiang Kai-shek's coup d'etat in Canton in 1926 he had been head of the Kuomintang Party and of the Military Council, with Chiang Kai-shek subordinate to him as commander of the

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Canton Army. During the following five years he had again and again tried to oust Chiang Kai-shek. He had been the leading figure in the Wuhan Government of 1927, but when it became obvious that only reliance on the mass movement could give him and his government the power to resist Chiang Kai-shek and his rival government at Nanking, Wang Ching-wei balked and eventually broke with the Communists. When the workers of the Wuhan cities went on strike in their thousands, and the peasants of Hupeh and Hunan began to seize the land, the Wuhan Government started to suppress them, thinking for a few weeks that it could stand out both against the people and against Chiang's armies and his powerful backers in Shanghai. It was on men as weak and as inextricably bound up with the small capitalists and landowners as Wang Ching-wei that the Comintern in 1927 had staked its hopes of victory over the 'counter-revolution'.

It was in the hope of retaining the alliance with such vacillating liberal intellectuals as Wang Ching-wei that the Comintern had refused to organize Soviets till it was too late, and stood aside when the Wuhan Government started to repress the mass movement.

Wang Ching-wei had always been an opportunist. He had never been a revolutionary; he had merely tried to supplant Chiang Kai-shek. When in the summer of 1928 he realized that, in his own words, ' Chiang Kai-shek was maintaining himself quite strongly without the masses' he decided to ' go together with the army without the masses'. After breaking with the Communists in July 1927 he had staked his hope on one dissident general after another. When he finally realized at the end of 1931 that Chiang Kai-shek was the strongest of them all he went over to him completely.

Wang Ching-wei's defeatism vis-à-vis Japan in 1938 is in character with his whole opportunist past. It was to be expected that in face of the superior force of Japan he would wish to capitulate, as formerly he had capitulated to Chiang. Resistance to Chiang Kai-shek a decade ago meant 'mobiliz-

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ing the people' and all the hazards this entails. Resistance to Japan to-day similarly requires such a release of the mass movement, and Wang must recoil before the prospect now, even as then. Apparently also he has never properly understood Japan's ambitions, nor realized that with Japan no such compromise is possible as that which Chiang Kai-shek made with Britain in 1927. He may have thought in 1938 that he could split the Kuomintang and ride to power with Japan's aid, and the aid of the reactionary and vacillating forces in China, as Chiang Kai-shek had split the party and come to power with Britain's aid and the aid of the wealthy Chinese of Shanghai. It is worth while remembering that in 1927 the Wuhan Government at one moment tentatively appealed to Japan 'tocombine with China to oppose British imperialism'.

Wong Wen-hao, the Minister of Economics, is a very different type to Wang the Foreign Minister, and Wang the ex-chairman of the Central Political Council. The Minister of Economics is a small, vivacious, smiling, enthusiastic, alert, and birdlike figure. An eminent geologist, he has the reputation of being one of the most unself-seeking, patriotic, and energetic of the ministers of China. We barely needed to put our questions when F. M. Fisher of the United Press and I interviewed him together; he was so full of his subject that his words flowed, and since he spoke excellent English there was no wearisome interpreting.

He told us that the main energies of his department were then concentrated upon transporting to the west the mechanized equipment of the modern factories of Wuhan and of Amoy and Hopei province, and that which had been saved from Shanghai and Shantung. At that time (early July) 20,000 tons of machinery had already been moved to the interior, but 60,000 tons remained in the Wuhan cities or near by, and it would take another six months to move it with the limited transport available. Many steamers had been sunk to make booms across the Yangtze, and the total shipping capacity was now very small. A hundred and fifty plants

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had been saved and moved into Yunnan province out of Shanghai, Shantung, Hopei, and Amoy.

Money was being lent to the owners to pay for transport, to buy land in the west, and to set up new factory buildings. The creation of new industrial centres in the undeveloped interior provinces required the construction of electric power-generating plants. Fifteen had already been set up, worked on coal. The ancient coal-mines of the interior were being modernized with machinery transported from the eastern and central provinces, and with new machinery imported. New raw material resources were beginning to be exploited in the west and could be made available more rapidly if foreign capital were forthcoming. Tung oil, an important export, had always been produced mainly in Szechuan; production and export would now be increased. It was hoped to develop tin mining in Yunnan and Kwangsi. In Kwangsi a new bureau had been established to operate a coal-mine and an electrical plant for smelting tin. The capital of five million Chinese dollars was being provided in part by the Central Government and in part by the provincial government.

China had until recently imported copper, but she had her own deposits and a new smelting plant in Hunan province, almost ready to start working, would produce 500,000 tons a year. Western Szechuan and Yunnan are rich in copper deposits, which were now to be exploited. China had already some arsenals in the west producing small arms and ammunition, and new arsenals were being set up. Mr. Wong also spoke of the new railway construction planned, and of the Agricultural Foundation Bureau, founded two years ago, which is endeavouring to get waste lands developed in the west and better cultivation of existing farms by loaning money to the peasants at 8 to 10 per cent interest, which is a very low rate for China.

China's exports are principally tungsten, antimony, tin, tung oil, silk, tea, and bristles, and these are produced mainly in the unoccupied provinces. Mr. Wong considered that the economic situation in China was changed for good by the

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war. The previous dependence on Shanghai was gone for ever. The stimulus given to development of the interior provinces would be permanent in it effects, and new ports and new communications would diminish the importance of the eastern seaboard of China.

He stressed the urgent need for foreign capital to develop the unexploited resources of the west. China was prepared to make agreements stipulating the exact use to which the loans would be put. Lorries were most urgently needed. A hundred thousand troops had marched for three months from Yünnan to Changsha.

He told us much more than this, but he spoke so fast and was so full of enthusiasm that it was rather the confidence he inspired than the details of what he told us which impressed us. Here was a real enthusiast, a scientist and an administrator, not a politician; the best type of Western educated Chinese who will transform their country if Japan can be resisted.

Nearly 70 per cent of the modern industry of China was destroyed or immobilized when Japan took Shanghai. Japan's reasons for controlling the whole coastline of China are obviously economic rather than military. She thus hopes to prevent all foreign trade with China and monopolize it entirely for herself, and thereby force China into submission by economic pressure. Last year in Hankow the more far-sighted realized that China might soon be almost entirely cut off from the West, and that even if Canton remained in Chinese hands the Chinese people would eventually be forced to trade with Japan, unless they could make for themselves goods previously imported.

China's hope of survival clearly depends as much on whether she can rebuild her industrial bases in the west, and start local production of necessities, not only in the interior provinces, but also in the vast areas around the Japanese points of advance, as it depends on the mobilization and training of troops and the import of armaments. The success of

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guerrilla warfare in the so-called occupied territories will depend largely on whether the local population can supply its own needs (and the needs of the guerrillas) and not be forced to trade with the enemy. China's limited facilities for importing goods over the Burma road, and through Chinese Tur-kistan from Russia, and by small craft into the minor coastal ports still not in Japanese hands, must be utilized entirely for the import of armaments or machinery. Hence she must begin to make for herself all those consumption goods which she has formerly imported, but for the manufacture of which raw materials are available in China. The Chinese standard of life is so low that this is not an impossible task; textiles, candles, soap, pottery, and a few other necessities are all that is required to be manufactured for the mass of the people. The old handicraft industries, though for long expiring, are still in existence and being revived, but these alone cannot save China. Can she hope to build up a factory industry in the neglected western provinces rapidly enough to balk Japan's armies? Obviously, even if she had the capital to do so, this would not solve the problem, on account of lack of communications. Moreover, the constant air-raids, which spread devastation even in the cities of the west, discourage large-scale capital investment. The system most suited to China's war-time needs and capacities is clearly the rapid creation of small production units all over the country, making use of power-driven machinery when machinery and power are available together, and elsewhere producing with the most efficient type of hand tools which can be secured or improvised. To endeavour to set up such productive units under centralized control would obviously be impossible. Hence the idea of industrial co-operative units: groups of workers financed at low rates of interest and producing on a co-operative basis. The Chinese Industrial Co-operatives (C.I.C.) Movement was launched in the spring of 1938. It plans to establish 30,000 industrial co-operatives, and already in the summer of 1938 had succeeded in establishing a large

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number. In July 1938 a C.I.C. commission was set up by the Chinese Government under the control of the Executive Yuan and sponsored by Dr. H. H. Kung, the Minister of Finance, and by Madame Chiang Kai-shek. The capital allocated was five million Chinese dollars, and a further half-million was allowed for administrative expenses, including the removal of workers and publicity as well as the salaries of the technical staff.

The regulations for the lending of money by the Chinese Industrial Co-operatives Association provide for the payment of 6 to 8 per cent interest per annum, instead of the 4 to 9 per cent per month which is charged by private capital. The money is lent to small groups of workers to buy tools, machines, and raw materials, and to maintain those who are destitute refugees, until production is under way. Accounts of the co-operatives are audited every three months, and, according to the nature of the work, the members of each unit receive living expenses and/or wages. Profits are divided amongst the members according to rules laid down beforehand.

C.I.C. units are already producing textiles, knitted goods, drugs, flour, footwear, and other consumption goods. Leather tanneries, small printing works, paper-making, coal and iron mining, the making of looms and other simple machines and tools, automobile repair works, small-boat building, all these forms of industrial activity are spreading as the C.I.C. advances small loans to set them going, and hunts out the ex-factory workers from Shanghai and elsewhere from amongst the refugees, the unemployed, and the coolies. Of course, not nearly enough capital is available to do anything approaching what could be done along these lines, but it is one of the most hopeful developments in China at war.

The war is releasing immense new social energy in China. Such a movement as the C.I.C. would be a most beneficial movement in peace-time to raise the standard of life of the whole people. But if there were no war capital would remain

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concentrated in the coastal provinces in large-scale enterprises under the employers' control. If sufficient capital can be made available by overseas Chinese, by sympathizers abroad, by the bankers of Hong Kong, by the patriotic and wealthy Chinese in the International Settlement of Shanghai, the C.I.C. can give new hope of life to millions of refugees, raise the standard of living in China, and prevent Japan's economic and military conquest of China. If even a part of China's millions of refugees—estimates of the number vary from thirty to sixty million—can be organized into industrial co-operatives, these people, whilst saving themselves and their families from destitution, or relieving the Chinese Government and foreign relief agencies of the burden of feeding them, can rebuild China's industrial structure. China had three million factory workers when the war began. Except for about a quarter of a million working in British or American or Japanese enterprises in Shanghai and a few other places, these people are all unemployed. They are dying of starvation in the streets, or kept alive in the refugee camps maintained by foreign relief agencies, or they have trekked inland with the other fugitives. The C.I.C. is attempting to provide these ex-factory workers with employment, so that their skill shall not be wasted and China's desperate need of manufactured goods shall be supplied. As an example of what a tiny sum can do in China to-day, there is the case of fifty U.S. dollars given by an American woman, with which seventeen Chinese-made looms were bought in Hankow and now give employment to sixty persons in Paochi (Shensi).

It was a young New Zealand engineer, Rewi Alley, one of the founders of the C.I.C, who last summer in Hankow told me about its work. He shared Edgar Snow's quarters in Hankow when he was not away in the interior or dashing around in an old car, or on foot, or in a sampan, investigating conditions for setting up some new enterprise, or routing out ex-factory workers from among the coolies working on roads and military fortifications, or in the hospitals finding hidden

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talents or skill amongst the disabled. He had lived fifteen years in China, spoke several Chinese dialects, had in the past worked on flood relief, and now, in 1938, had given up a good job in the Industrial Section of the Shanghai Municipal Council to help launch the C.I.C. The other pioneer organizer of C.I.C. was Mr. Liu Kuang-pei, an American-trained engineer, who had been Commissioner of Finance in Kansu province. Soon a number of other Chinese engineers, technical experts, organizers, bankers, were working in C.I.C. or giving it their assistance. Mr. Chang Nai-chi, former manager of the Chekiang Industrial Bank, well known for his progressive economic work in China, became the Secretary-General at the C.I.C. headquarters in Chungking. Two of the best engineers in China, Mr. S. Y. Lem and Mr. C. F. Wu, gave up their highly paid posts as electrical engineers of the Shanghai Power Company to become chief and vice-chief of the technical section of C.I.C.

All these men are working on salaries of 200 Chinese dollars a month, which is the maximum paid by C.I.C. The movement is giving scope to some of the best of the Chinese youth and foreign-trained specialists to utilize their knowledge, experience, and eager desire to serve their country in deeds, not words. They are men who are prepared to suffer hardships and discomforts in this pioneering work, which calls not only for technical knowledge but also for men with organizing ability and educational experience. But it is about the most satisfying work a man can do, since the results are so plain to be seen and the need for their services so urgent. It is work also that calls for initiative and inventiveness, the adaptation of modern industry to new conditions, the invention of simply constructed machines that can be made locally, and the try-out of substitute materials, such for instance as the successful production of a new cloth, which I saw being made in Kiangsi province, of cotton mixed with local ramie fibre prepared by locally made chemicals.

Rewi Alley and his Chinese colleagues were men of the

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stuff of which pioneers and inventors have always been made, men who got a greater satisfaction from creating than from the satisfaction of their own wants or any material comforts. Whenever Rewi Alley turned up in Hankow he brought with him a breath of hope, for the work he was doing put him in touch with the best and most progressive elements in China, the educated and the skilled who were not talking in Hankow, but doing a great work in remote villages and distant provinces. Rewi Alley himself is one of those patient, persistent, even-tempered men whom the greatest difficulties cannot discourage, and who, because they so firmly believe that their aims can be achieved, are able to surmount one obstacle after another. It was no easy task to get effective government support for the work of the C.I.C., to force factory-owners making large profits in the Wuhan cities to remove their plant and their workers to the interior, to get funds for the C.I.C. to lend to destitute and unemployed workers and craftsmen, to make the authorities realize that the work of the C.I.C. was vitally important in maintaining resistance to Japan. In the summer of 1938 Alley was pressing, persuading, urging, insisting, not only on the removal of machinery from Hankow, but also on efforts being made to find the ex-factory workers amongst the hordes of refugees and amongst the coolies working on the roads or military works. He was so tactful and so quietly confident that he succeeded in getting on with every one and enlisting the aid of Chinese bankers,Hong Kong merchants, the New Life Movement, Dr. Kung, Madame Chiang, and the Generalissimo himself. He would suddenly turn up in Hankow for a few days, and as suddenly disappear again into the interior, or to south Kiangsi, to investigate conditions, supplies, possibilities, or to Hong Kong to try and raise money or to negotiate a purchase of machinery, or to consult with some research worker as to how to utilize a raw material available in China, in place of another normally used which had to be imported. There was no place so remote or inaccessible that he would not manage to get there some-

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how or other. He was always urging me to visit his beloved Paochi in southern Shensi, the C.I.C. centre for north-west China, where it had created an entirely new industrial centre: machine shops, iron foundries, printing works, workshops where the Russian lorries plying the long road to the Russian border could be repaired, instead of being left useless by the roadside, as so many had been up to now. Here in Paochi co-operative units had started also to make textiles, soap, candles, and other daily necessities. The original 40,000 dollars with which the north-western branch of the C.I.C. had started had first been supplemented by local contributions, and then increased by an extra 200,000 sent by the Chinese Central Government. A federation of co-operatives now buys raw materials and sells the finished product and arranges transport by mule carts.

It would be wearisome to tell of all the many receptions held for me in the early days of my stay in Hankow. Everywhere there was the same friendliness and courtesy, the same speechmaking, weak tea, strong oratory, and Russian pastries. The Chinese are physically a most attractive people, and the youth of China, with its earnestness, candour, and patriotic enthusiasm moves one to an equal candour and friendliness, which is not lessened by one's realization that they are perhaps talking a little too much and doing-Father too little. This is not so much their fault as the fault of the authorities, who hesitate to allow scope to the eager, educated youth except within the narrow bounds of the Kuomintang Party organizations and the New Life Movement. Fearing the strength of 'Left' influences amongst the students and intellectuals, they curb or repress the youth organizations outside the Kuomintang that might otherwise be doing such effective work against Japan.

These receptions certainly showed the reality of the united front; one met there, mixing together in a friendly way, representatives of all parties and factions, reactionaries, reformers, revolutionaries.

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I was exceedingly moved by the warmth of my reception at all these gatherings, and felt that the only way I could show my real goodwill to China was by speaking-frankly, not by flattery. And I found that criticism, if made in a friendly spirit and with some understanding of China's difficulties, in no way lessened my popularity. The Chinese are genuine enough and intelligent enough to take it, and to realize that one is trying to help. If I had ever dared to do the same thing at a public reception in Japan I should probably have been expelled from the country. No Japanese newspaper would have dared to publish remarks as critical of Japan as the criticism I made of China in interviews published in all the Chinese newspapers.

The educated Japanese, except the few who are revolutionary, cannot stand criticism, for they want to keep their country as it is; they glory in its backwardness, its superstitions, its ancient political and social conceptions. The Chinese know their own shortcomings and are most anxious to change their outworn social and economic structure, anxious to discuss new ideas, full of a reforming spirit. Even the reactionaries pay lip-service to modernity. Conversation with the Japanese on serious topics is almost an impossibility, not only on account of the language difficulty (the Japanese are very poor linguists, the Chinese exceptionally good ones), but because their minds and ours run along such different lines that exchange of ideas is difficult and wearisome. China, on the other hand, is one of the easiest places in the world for social intercourse and serious discussion; the Chinese intellectuals understand our way of thinking as well as their own, and are exceedingly quick-witted. I had heard a lot about 'face' in China, but it seemed to me that nowhere in the world can one behave and speak more naturally and sincerely. The reception I enjoyed best was the one given me by the National Association of Chinese Writers. The refreshment was as moderate as it should be in war-time—tea and biscuits. The members were nearly all young, except for Mr.

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Shao Litze (which translated means 'Old Door'), a very distinguished-looking old gentleman with white hair and beautiful hands, dressed in a blue silk robe, whom a Chinese friend in England had described to me as 'Chiang Kai-shek's pen'. He had, that is to say, been the composer of many of the Generalissimo's announcements, reports, and so forth. For the rest there were young men dressed in dungarees like workmen, men in plain black or brown cotton gowns, a few in European dress, a few women in their graceful Chinese gowns. Some were famous writers, others poets, a few engaged in cinema production. All were very animated and talkative and unconstrained. We might have been in a Paris cafe, especially when a young man got up and started reciting a poem in French of his own composition. He fixed his burning eyes on me with such intensity that I felt I must preserve an expression of extreme seriousness and return his look, but I managed to note down a few lines.

La souffrance engendra l' espoir

La mort créera la vie

La foi à travers la souffrance

La paix c'est la profondeur de l'âme chinois

La mort est la moitié invisible de la vie

La souffrance est la moitié invisible de l'espoir

La souffrance propre au monde entier.

The name of this young mystic, whose volume of French poems he subsequently presented to me, was Sheng Cheng. After this a young Japanese girl made a speech in Esperanto, for she could not, she said, speak to them in her native tongue, which was the language of the aggressor. Tsao, a debonair, elegant, and accomplished young man, who later on, when the Japanese got near Hankow, ran away to Hong Kong, translated the speech into English and Chinese. Then a young woman poetess from Kwangsi province spoke. She was in Hankow for a few days on her way to the North Yangtze front, where she led a 'comfort corps' which sang and

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recited to the troops. She had a beautiful, intensely serious face and a lovely voice, and I wished very much I could understand what she was saying. Unlike most of the other writers and poets present, she spoke no foreign language. In her province there is little contact with Europeans and Americans and the national renaissance there is pure Chinese.

French, I found, in general was almost as useful as English amongst these literary people.

No time was wasted in speech-making at the Eighth Route Army Headquarters, where I went early one morning by invitation, escorted by Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow, famous author of Red Star Over China. At least we started out early, but were held up for more than an hour on the way by an air-raid, during which we perched ourselves precariously on the tiled and sloping roof of a small Italian hotel in the Japanese Concession, where most of the staff of the Communist newspaper were living. When we eventually arrived at the Eighth Route Headquarters I was introduced to the dozen or so people present, and then we all sat around the table drinking tea, smoking, and talking informally. The headquarters was in the ex-Japanese Concession, in a tumbledown old house barely furnished with the minimum requirements, a few tables and hard chairs. Nearly every man present was dressed in a cotton uniform of khaki, grey, or blue.

Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow were old friends of the Chinese Communists, although not themselves members of the party, but I was a little surprised to find myself also received as a comrade, although I had left the Communist Party years ago. Unlike the English and American Communists, these Chinese Communists were not apparently nar-row-minded doctrinaire theorists to whom it mattered much whether I was 'on the line' of the Party or not. These were men with their own revolutionary background and history, men who had fought too hard and suffered too much in the cause of the emancipation of the Chinese people, and were now too intent on the national salvation of China, to be mere

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minions of the Comintern blindly carrying out its orders and accepting its verdicts. They were apparently concerned whether I was a friend of China, not whether or not I was a friend of the U.S.S.R. I was very moved and pleased when, months afterwards, on the day I left Hankow, General Yeh Cheen-ying, the Eighth Route Army Chief of Staff, thanked me for my efforts on behalf of the Chinese wounded soldiers.

At this first meeting with me at the Eighth Route Army headquarters I probably owed more to Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley than to Japan's Feet of Clay. These two apparently trusted me, and their word counted for much with the Chinese Communists. When we went in Wang Ming and Chou En-lai clapped Edgar Snow on the shoulder and said to me,' To us Snow is the greatest of foreign authors and our best friend abroad.' This remark was made with a smile and without offence, and I certainly felt he was a far more important foreigner than myself, but I considered it as an ironical comment on the American Communists, who had banned Red Star Over China simply because Snow had not completely hidden the mistakes made by the Comintern in 1926-7 which had led to such terrible disasters for the Chinese Communists.

General Yeh, whom I met for the first time that morning and talked to at length about the present agrarian policy in the north-west, is a quiet-spoken man with the head of an intellectual and the broad shoulders and sturdy frame of a soldier inured to hardship.

Wang Ming, the cheerful little secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who sat opposite, is a very different type. He was in Moscow during the revolutionary years and had become secretary when the old leadership of the party was removed by the Comintern in 1931, and he seemed more of the party bureaucrat, intent on saying the correct thing, and less of a real leader than the other Chinese Communists I met.

The tall, bearded Chou En-lai was also there, that scion of an old Mandarin family who had been one of the founders of

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the Chinese Communist Party, who had organized and led the Shanghai workers in 1926-7, and had narrowly escaped death when Chiang Kai-shek massacred the Shanghai pickets in April 1927. It was Chou En-lai who, nearly ten years later at Sian, had been instrumental in saving the Generalissimo's life when the radical young officers of the exiled Man-churian army had taken him prisoner and were threatening to put him to death (see Chapter 6): Chou En-lai who had persuaded Chiang Kai-shek that the men he had fought against for a decade, the Communists whom he had mercilessly shot whenever they fell into his hands, were sincerely prepared to abandon the class war and the agrarian revolution, and place themselves and their army under his command if he would adopt a policy of armed resistance to Japan. Chou En-lai, now in Hankow, stood high in the Generalissimo's counsels, and held the post of vice-chairman of the Political Department of the Military Council.

Then there was the elderly, gentle, and frail-looking Wu Yu-chang, another veteran of the party, with the traces of severe suffering on his thin, lined face and his emaciated body, for he had spent years in prison.

Po-ku, now Communist Party delegate in the Kuomintang Government, and formerly a kind of Chinese Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was an alert young man with vivacious black eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, and had a shock of black hair rising stiffly above his high forehead. He was the only man present dressed in European civilian clothes. I had seen him several times at the Navy Y.M.C.A. dining-room with Edgar Snow, and knew that it was he who had carried through at Nanking in the winter of 1937 the negotiations for the formation of the Fourth Route Army out of the scattered units of the Red Army in Kiangsi province. When in 1934 the main Chinese Red army had broken through the Kuomintang cordon of troops and blockhouses, and started on its thousand-mile trek to the west, some regular troops, 7,000 Red Guards (local militia) and 20,000

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partisans, had stayed behind to cover the retreat. These 30,000 men had only 10,000 rifles among them, and many of them had fought with only hand-grenades, bayonets, or ancient swords and spears. The remnant of this force, after holding back the Chinese Government forces for a month, had retreated to the mountains in eastern Kiangsi and western Fukien province. There some 10,000 men, completely cut off from the rest of the Chinese Red armies a thousand miles to the west, and blockaded by Chiang Kai-shek's forces, had somehow maintained themselves until the war with Japan began in 1937. The 5,000 survivors of this 'Lost Red Army' had now become the nucleus of a strong mobile force operating behind the Japanese lines from a base south of Nanking. This 'Fourth Route Army', younger brother of the Eighth, was now a part of China's national forces commanded by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but, like the Eighth Route Army, it was led by men with years of experience in guerrilla warfare against Chiang Kai-shek's own armies. The skill and hardihood they had learnt in outmanœuvring and outwitting the superior forces of the Kuo-mintang were being successfully utilized against the far better-armed and better-equipped Japanese forces in the Yangtze valley.

That morning at the Eighth Route Army headquarters, which in effect meant much the same thing as the Chinese Communist Party headquarters, I heard of the new Fourth Route Army for the first time. Later, in Changsha, I saw the small bundles of medical supplies which the Chinese Red Cross Medical Commission had made up specially for the Fourth Route Army, so that they could easily be carried by convoys of mules or men going through the Japanese lines.

I was told of the present land policy of the Chinese Communists carried out in the 'Border Region Government' of Shensi, Kansu, and Ninghsia, which was once ' Soviet China'. Rents and interest rates have been reduced but the landowners' land is no longer confiscated. Magistrates and village

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heads are elected and receive salaries hardly higher than a worker's. The Eighth Route Army commanders receive the same payment as the soldiers, five dollars a month, whereas the commanders of other armies receive 1,000 dollars. An elected committee of auditors examines the accounts of the various departments of this special Border Region Government, and receipts and expenditures have to be published. Democratic control of public finance has, the Chinese Communists claim, eliminated corruption, waste, and dishonesty. Democratic reforms have produced that 'mobilization of the people' which leads them to help the army fighting the Japanese in every way within their power. Whereas soldiers are conscripted in other provinces, the Eighth Route Army relies entirely on volunteers. General Yeh was very-insistent on the better fighting qualities of volunteer soldiers, and condemned the Kuomintang method of securing new recruits by requiring so many men from a given district, and letting the local authorities conscript the poor and allow the well to do to buy themselves off. Of course the central and provincial government armies also get volunteers, but the Chinese Communists think that agrarian and administrative reforms and political propaganda would enable them to rely entirely on volunteers.

So many books have been written of late giving first-hand reports of the Eighth Route Army and the ex-Soviet regions of China that there is no point in repeating here the details given me in Hankow last summer.

Some of the statements made to me by Chou En-lai, in a long interview which I had with him later, are, however, of interest. Chou En-lai seemed to me one of the most objective and fair-minded men I met in China. One felt that he fully appreciated Chiang Kai-shek's difficulties and that, although he criticized the manner in which the war was being carried on, he realized to the full that many shortcomings were due to lack of power, rather than lack of will, to remedy them. He spoke of the multiplicity and complexity of the political

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and administrative machinery; of the duplication and reduplication of functions between departments, commissions, committees under the Executive Yuan, leading to muddle, waste, and loss of time. Orders often never reached the local organizations. Telegrams from the front might wait four months for an answer; failure to reply sometimes led to disastrous military failures. He gave examples of waste of time and money due to lack of cohesion. The old apparatus of government was unsuitable in war-time. There were often two organizations with the power to do a thing, but no one could say who was responsible for arriving at a decision. The Communist Party advocate a simple and rational administrative organization in place of the present 'mandarin' one. The military organization, he said, was better, and it would be an advantage when the civil government departments moved out of Hankow to Chungking, and left the military without interference in defending Wuhan.

Chou En-lai then gave me the Communist idea of the type of manoeuvring warfare called for. It was not enough to have merely the Eighth and Fourth Route armies. Strong mobile forces should be operating in many places behind the Japanese lines. There should be organizing centres and commanders for such warfare in each area. But 'the front' was still the main concern of the Central Military Headquarters and it neglected developing warfare in the rear of the Japanese front. Other 'fronts' ought to be established behind the enemy. The failure to do this was due to lack of confidence in the provincial troops, and to Chiang Kai-shek's desire to keep his own divisions with him. Chiang Kai-shek feared to lose control of his forces if they operated semi-independently in the Japanese rear. The forces which were already operating behind the Japanese front were not properly supplied, so that they could not fight effectively. Yet militarily they could be kept in touch with the central command and under its orders by means of the radio. Chou En-lai considered that the Wuhan cities could be held for a very long time, perhaps

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permanently, if a strategy of luring and outflanking the Japanese forces were adopted, and advantage taken of the hills, defiles, and lakes.

At the end of 1938, after the fall of Hankow and Canton, the Generalissimo announced that a third of China's national army would henceforth be utilized in mobile warfare behind the Japanese points of advance. This means, in effect, the adoption of the strategy and tactics long advocated by the Chinese Communists and adopted by the Eighth Route Army in the north-west. In a later chapter I have attempted to estimate whether, in fact, Chiang Kai-shek has now determined upon that ' mobilization of the people' without which the new methods of warfare in the 'second stage of resistance' cannot successfully be adopted.

Chou En-lai thought the war would last at least three years more and was confident that the Generalissimo would continue fighting even if the compromising elements went over to the Japanese.

One heard little from the Communists or from any one else of the workers in Hankow. No one seemed to be pressing any demands on their behalf. Occasionally one heard of strikes in foreign-owned enterprises, such as the British and American Tobacco Company's factories, when the Kuomin-tang authorities would obligingly force the strikers to go back to work by threatening to enlist them as soldiers. When I asked Madame Chiang what wages the factory girls received in the textile mills whose owners, she told me herself, were making such enormous profits, she replied, ' They are quite well paid.' But she gave me no details. The New Life women's organizations went to the factories to do social work and patriotic propaganda, and employers would be told to behave considerately to their workers, but the 'united front' of 1937 evidently did not include any concessions to the workers, or give them the right to organize and to strike for higher wages. In December 1937 the Kuomintang Government had issued a decree fixing the death penalty for

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workers who went on strike or agitated for strikes during the war. There was to be no revival of the power of organized labour such as China had seen from 1924 to 1927.

The only occasion in Hankow on which I got an inkling of the sentiments of the workers themselves was one evening when I met three representatives of the railway workers on the Pinghan (Peiping-Hankow) line. An old worn man and two younger men, all three members of the Communist Party, working in the railway machine repair shops, sat with me and some others and guardedly answered our questions. The wages of skilled railway workers like themselves, they said, were now only twenty Chinese dollars a month, whereas before the war they had received thirty. From this small sum they had to make many patriotic contributions. In the course of four months such contributions had amounted to thirty-six days' wages: twenty-four days' for buying liberty bonds; seven days' for patriotic contributions; four days' for comforts for the troops, one day's wage for a special 'Wuhan defence' contribution.

The workers were discontented, not so much at the fact that they had to make such heavy sacrifices, but because they did not trust those who collected the contributions, and very much doubted whether the money went for the purpose for which it was collected.

In addition to all these levies, there was an income-tax of ten cents a month on their wages, a further four-cent stamp tax each month when they drew their wages, a ' give gold to the State' contribution of ten cents monthly, a 'thrift movement' levy of ten cents monthly.

Their twenty dollars wages amounted to little more than ten dollars after all contributions and taxes had been paid. The cost of living had risen sharply. Although the price of rice had remained the same as a year ago, viz. ten dollars per picul best quality and eight dollars for the worst kind, the prices of fuel, salt and bean oil had doubled. The elderly worker, who gave us this information, was 200 dollars in

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debt, and nearly all the workers were in debt, as they could not live on their wages if they had families. He used to pay 3 per cent interest per month. He wasn't paying any interest at present, but he didn't explain how this was possible or why. His family consisted of seven persons and the rice needed to feed them cost three to four dollars a month per adult.

What these men felt most bitter about, and the main thing they were struggling for, was compensation for the workers and their families killed or wounded in the air-raids. The families of the men on the Canton-Hankow line received 100 dollars when a man was killed and half his wages for fifteen years. Thirty dollars was paid for any member of his family killed. The workers on the Pinghan line, where bombing had not been so continuous, as yet received nothing at all when killed or injured. Yet a few days before, on August 12th, seventy railway workers had been killed, and in other raids there had been many casualties. They were demanding through the Kuomintang trade unions that they should receive the same treatment as the men on the Canton-Hankow line. Before the recent bad air-raids their demands had been for the restoration of the 30 per cent wage-cut; for the abolition of the fines, which were so drastic that five days' pay was deducted if a man came five minutes late to work; for the railway administration to evacuate their families to the villages or give them a sum equivalent to three months' wages to pay the cost of moving their families to safety; for the workers to be organized and trained for self-defence.

It was obvious that the labour of these skilled railway workers was of such vital importance to the Government that if they had struck for higher wages to get their grievances remedied they could not have been shot down. But they told us they refrained from pushing their demands more vigorously ' because of the united front'. One could not help seeing that the united front in the China of 1938 meant all giving and no receiving in so far as the workers were concerned, and

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one suspected that the Chinese Communists were too timid, and perhaps too opportunist, in not daring to press the demands of the workers. Will the Chinese workers continue to make such great sacrifices in the national cause, contributing so much out of such tiny wages, when they see the wealthy living still in comparative luxury, and the employers coining money?

These railway workers told us that evening of a mill in Wuchang employing 2,000 workers and making a profit of 700,000 dollars a month. This meant 200 dollars profit per worker; yet these textile workers received only fifteen or sixteen dollars a month on an average. The B.A.T. factories owned by one of the richest foreign enterprises in China paid wages of seventeen or eighteen dollars a month, and had not to fear strikes, as in 1927.

The Communist workers we spoke to that night admitted they were only a small minority amongst the railway men, and it was difficult to see how they could ever be anything else so long as Communist policy precluded any real struggle to improve the conditions of the wretchedly paid Chinese working class. These men were obviously nervous of having even met us and aired their grievances, nervous not only of the Kuomintang Government but afraid they were going against 'the party line'.

The same timidity and fear of splitting the 'united front' was evidenced by the youth organizations. The young men and women I talked to were the leaders of the semi-Communist 'Vanguards', A.N.T.S., and Youth Corps, which had just been suppressed (mid-August) but were carrying on in spite of the suppression in the hope that they would in time 'win the confidence' of the Government. The Government, they said, has suppressed them on account of a 'misunderstanding'. They believed, or professed to believe, that the Government 'wants a mass movement to defend Wuhan'. The Vanguards claimed a membership of 20,000, and its members were eager to work among the peasants, the rick-

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shaw coolies, and the refugees, to organize them, train them in self-defence, awaken their national consciousness. Similarly also the Youth Corps and the National Salvation Students' Association, the largest student organization in China, with its many thousands of members. But the Government wanted to see all the youth in its own Kuomintang organizations and was nervous of the influence the Left organizations might acquire if allowed to do the work they were so eager to undertake: mobilizing and arming the peasants and the workers and preparing them for partisan warfare against the Japanese. The army accepted a small percentage of the thousands of political workers offered them by the Youth Corps. But in the occupied areas students and others whose ' divine discontent' and 'uneasy hearts' did not permit them to take refuge in the safe west had joined the partisans and were 'mobilizing the people'.

One afternoon a young leader of partisans in north China called on me, bringing with him Madame Chao, ' Mother of the Guerrillas'. This young man, who had been a student when the war began, had been publishing illegal news-sheets in North China under the very eyes of the Japanese. He had been doing the most difficult and dangerous work in the occupied northern provinces, and was in Hankow to collect funds before returning there. Madame Chao, a frail old lady dressed in black and carrying an umbrella, sat on my veranda and told me, through an interpreter, of the years during which she had led the peasants of the Liaotung district of Manchuria against the Japanese. Finally, she had been caught by the Japanese, but they had eventually let her go. I questioned her over and over again as to why the Japanese had released her. She told me what she had said to the young Japanese officer, how she had upbraided him for the evil doings of the Japanese against her people, asked him if he was not ashamed of what he was doing to an old woman, quoted old Confucian ethics to him. How this illiterate peasant woman had shamed the Japanese officer into releasing her I never

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properly understood. But she herself seemed to think it quite natural that after she had demonstrated to him how wickedly he and the Japanese army were behaving, he should have released her. Madame Chao's son, Chao Tung, had organized an army of twenty thousand men in north China soon after the war began, and is now the most famous partisan leader there. Fisher of the U.P. had visited him at his headquarters near Peiping and told me he was one of the most impressive personalities he had met in China. Madame Chao left Hankow for the south soon after I met her, and by her speeches collected thousands of dollars for the support of the northern guerrillas. Yet to look at her you might have thought she was a prim Victorian lady quite incapable of fiery speeches which could rouse Manchurian peasants to follow her against the Japanese, and rich Canton merchants to give money to support northern patriots.

The visit of a woman like Madame Chao and of the young man who accompanied her were full compensation for other visitors who had come only to make polite speeches and thought one had all the day for conversation.

It was strange to meet, sometimes on the same day, a high Kuomintang official, or a savant of the Academia Sinica, or a Western educated young man who had never 'eaten bitterness', and a leader of partisans or a revolutionary whose face bore for all time the marks of the severest sufferings and privation, or a man whose body had once been tortured in the prison of the Government he was now loyally serving. There was, for instance, Dung, who had suffered long years of imprisonment, and whom Agnes Smedley had once given her all to save from torture in a Shanghai prison. Meeting him by accident in my room Agnes Smedley at first did not recognize him, and she only learnt then, years afterwards, that the 200 gold dollars she had given to his jailors had not saved him from the torture which had made of him a man old before his time, and one so ill that his friends doubted if he would live long.

etting to the front from Hankow last summer was no simple matter. For days one of the United Press correspondents and I tried to arrange to get transport on a lorry going from Wuchang. Later I was to achieve this, but in early August the main fighting was south of Kiukiang, on the right wing of the Chinese defences north of Nanchang, and there was no direct road there. Since the peasants in most of the villages were reported to have fled, the only possibility would have been to walk for several days, carrying one's own food. The weather was so hot that one perspired continually even sitting still; neither of us spoke Chinese and no interpreter would have accompanied us on such a trek as guide. So we accepted our fate and decided to go the long way round, following the regular line of communication via Changsha to Nanchang. This meant traversing roughly two and a half sides of a square and passing through three provinces. From Hankow in Hunan Province to Changsha in Hupeh Province by train, then by motor-bus across Kiangsi to Nanchang, and thence due north. Getting to the front in this way was something like reaching Yorkshire from Manchester by way of London.

In the end, Murphy, the United Press man, left ahead of me because an interview with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had been arranged for me and I stayed on in Hankow three days longer. However, I was to catch him up at the

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front, as I was luckier than he in getting transport from Nanchang.

I left Hankow on the night of August 4th in the Canton train, which normally takes six or seven hours to reach Chang-sha. It took us twenty-two, and that was a quick journey in war-time. The line is a single track and the train waited interminable periods in sidetracks for the ammunition wagons coming up from Canton to pass by.

At the last moment another American, J., had decided to accompany me. Although at the moment 'unemployed' he had seen more of the actual war than all the rest of the foreign correspondents put together, and was happier living with the Chinese army than in Hankow. A queer man, who had once been a sailor but had jumped his ship in Shanghai some years ago, lived there in tenements with coolies almost destitute, and later begun to earn a living as a journalist; he was the only correspondent, British or American, who not only spoke Chinese fluently and could both read and write it, but who seemed to have an understanding of the minds and feelings of the soldiers. He no longer felt himself an American, mixed easily with Chinese of all classes, and had a pitying contempt for most of their generals, all loud-mouthed patriots, politicians and political theorists. When in Hankow, over dinner at the Navy Y.M.C.A., or under the hospitable roof of the American Vice-Consul, John Davies, the rest of us argued out the good old political issues—socialism and how to get it, could one achieve it without a soul-destroying dictatorship, was Fascism coming everywhere, were the Chinese Communists still Communists or mere social reformers— J. would listen with a smile. Mankind, in his view, was bound to be wretched and unhappy in any society. A man with the most pessimistic philosophy I have ever heard, subject to fits of profound dejection during which he was a complete misanthrope, disapproving of women war correspondents, but helpful to me as to all the rest of his colleagues, he could, when in the mood, be the most charming, interest-

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ing, and entertaining of companions. He had spent almost the whole war at the front, not merely talking to generals and staff officers or visiting the line, but living for weeks on end amongst the rank and file. When others spoke of patriotism he would insist that it was the professional 'old soldier' who fought best. When one asked him what made the Chinese soldiers go on fighting in the terrible conditions in which they were so often placed, he would speak of the desire to 'get at the other fellow' who was making things so nasty for you. J. was, in fact, the supreme debunker; yet he had a real respect for idealists like Agnes Smedley and for men like Dr. Robert Lim of the Chinese Red Cross; a wide knowledge and love of poetry; and an understanding of human nature good and bad. Lonely, sad, and cynical he had not acquired the contentment of the Chinese, but he seemed in many ways more Chinese than American in his mental processes, in his mockery at human endeavour, his disbelief in idealism, his scepticism concerning progress, and his kindness and unspoken loyalty to his friends.

The night was far too hot and stuffy for sleep in the narrow compartment. We talked and for an hour or two J. taught me Chinese ideograms and explained their meanings. Curious that this ex-sailor knew so much about China's early history and could, in abrupt staccato sentences, give one a vision of the first Chinese coming into China from the west and seeing the great forests which then covered the hills. The sign of a sun behind a tree means 'the east', and the ideogram for the Japanese is literally, 'the people whose origin is in the east'. On the wall of the compartment was an appeal to the Chinese people to resist these 'people whose origin is in the east, who are violating our women, killing our people, destroying our homes, desecrating the tombs of our ancestors'. A Chinese officer came in and asked for our passes. I had one, but J. had not had time to procure one, so we both showed visiting-cards. A visiting-card, I was to discover, was the talisman to get one through all difficulties in China. One

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could, at least at that time, go right up to the front with nothing more to show than a bit of pasteboard. In this the Chinese military commander's attitude is in extreme contrast to that of the Japanese, who will allow no foreign correspondents to accompany their army.

Towards dawn I fell asleep, to wake in the morning covered with grime and running with perspiration. The day got hotter and hotter. When the train stopped we gazed out of the window at the village people or the soldiers sitting patiently waiting at small stations, on whose walls slogans were chalked: 'Death to the dwarf robbers'; 'All should sacrifice themselves for the leader in defending the country'. Pedlars offered us fruit or other food. Women sold boiling water to drink.

On one occasion J. heard himself called by name by a soldier sitting on a lorry loaded on to a goods wagon alongside. The man, it appeared, had been a ticket collector on the Peiping—Hankow railway when the war began, but had always longed to be a mechanic. J. had helped him to get the training, and he was full of smiles and gratitude, for he now drove an army lorry. The war had made at least one Chinese happy.

As the day drew on we thanked our stars that no Japanese planes were out raiding. It was insufferably hot and dusty, but on this occasion there was no danger, only boredom. But for me at least China was still too novel and interesting for boredom.

At last we got to Changsha, where we were met by a representative of the ever-useful and always-on-the-spot Central News Agency. He had booked a room for me in a Chinese hotel and we drove there in rickshaws through the narrow cobbled streets of this old town. J. went off to stay with one of the American military attachés at Yale-in-China, that extraordinary American university set down in the heart of China. That night we dined with the Central News men, Dr. Yen, Chinese Minister of Health, and Dr. Robert Lim

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and others of the Chinese Red Cross Medical Commission. Dr. Talbot, an English doctor from Hong Kong, who had left his practice for a year to work for the Chinese wounded, also came along. Knowing him to be a wonderful singer Dr. Lim and I warmed him with the strong white wine of China—a drink about as potent as vodka—and had him singing songs in five languages: English, Welsh, French, Italian, and Russian.

Even after a Chinese banquet and Chinese wine I could not sleep much in my hotel room. It opened on a courtyard around which were other rooms and it had no window. The mosquitoes bit viciously, the bed was little more than a board and a mat and there were noises all night.

Dr. Lim the previous night had offered to take us with him by car to Nanchang, so we had decided to waste our bus tickets and stay a day in Changsha to see the work of the Chinese Red Cross. I transferred myself to Yale-in-China next day. Here I had a whole house in the compound given to me, for the place was deserted except for a few missionaries. Mr. Hutchins, the principal (brother of the famous President of Chicago University), was at his post and dispensed hospitality to all foreigners passing through Changsha. We dined that evening in American style.

I spent an energetic day seeing the cholera hospital, the air-raid victims' hospital, which had been hastily improvised after the appalling raid of July 20th, and the training school for Red Cross Volunteers. Many of the Chinese doctors working with Dr. Lim spoke English, and in the afternoon I met Dr. Loo Chi-teh, the newly appointed Surgeon-General of the Army Medical Corps, with whom a month later I was to travel part of the way towards another front.

Early next morning we started for Nanchang, and drove for hours on a Red Cross ambulance through a lovely, well-cultivated country. Peasants clad in brilliant blue were harvesting an abundant crop. Lim pointed out blockhouses, on several hills, dating from the time of Chiang Kai-shek's wars

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on the Red Army in Kiangsi. Only some four or five years ago this province had been devastated and the population halved in the fiercest of all the struggles between the Kuomin-tang and the Chinese Communists.

Riding on a hard seat for many hours over a rutted and shell-scarred road is a wearisome occupation, but the journey by rail from Changsha to Nanchang would have taken very much longer and been far more dangerous. The ambulance we rode in was the gift of a Singapore Chinese millionaire. It was painted grey and gaily decorated with a large yellow leopard and panther on each side. It was too conspicuous to be of any use at the front, where no soldier would have dared to be carried in so easy a target for the Japanese. But since we were going to visit the collecting stations by night it could be used.

We ate our first meal about three o'clock in a tiny wayside inn. The food was good, as it is every where in China, but we carefully washed our chopsticks in hot tea, having seen the filthy rags used for 'washing up'. A few Chinese officers were eating at near-by tables and came over to talk to us and to admire our gaudy ambulance. Life in this small village was going on much as usual, artisans plying their crafts, children playing. A few deformed beggars timidly approached us while we ate, and fruit pedlars sold us pomegranates and tiny oranges.

As we drew nearer to Nanchang towards evening we met more and more stretcher-bearers carrying wounded men. They must have been walking for days with their motionless burdens, for the front was still at least sixty miles across country. How many of such wounded men survive the long trek?

At last we arrived in Nanchang, the town where the first Chinese Soviet was proclaimed in 1927 and where Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, feeling the need of a ' counter-ideology' to Communism, launched the 'New Life Movement' in 1934 under the inspiration of a Christian missionary.

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Nanchang boasts one of the best hotels in China outside the Treaty Ports. Like the one at Canton, it is modern, clean, and cheap. The town was continually being bombed, but inside the hotel one would never have known it. Good food, comfortable beds, good service, all for a few shillings. Journalists accustomed to the poor fare at Hankow, for all but those who could afford to live in the expensive Hotel Ter-minus des Wagons Lits, revelled in the luxury of Nanchang, although this town was so much nearer to the front and had no safe concession area. At the desk I found a note from Murphy of the U.P. saying he had tried in vain for three days at Nanchang to get transport to the front, and had that evening gone up to the road with Smith of Reuter's to start walking and to try their luck in getting on some supply lorry. He left me careful instructions as to how this could best be accomplished and hoped I would be able to follow on. Next day, at about 9 a.m., the air-raid alarm signal blew, and a few minutes later Doctors Lim and Jung rushed in to take me and J. out of the town. For the hotel at Nanchang is pleasantly situated near most of the military objectives the Japanese might be expected to aim at; the power station, the great bridge which spans the Kan River, and one of the two railway stations. We dragged J. out of his bed, dashed over the bridge in Lim's car, and got half a mile or so beyond the North Railway Station before the Japanese planes came over. Together with some Cantonese soldiers we sat in the fields by a pond and watched the silver planes fly directly over us, drop their bombs on or near the station, circle round, and do it again. The noise of the anti-aircraft guns was terrific, and little puffs of smoke were all around the planes. We waited breathlessly, hoping to see a plane brought down. Thick smoke began to rise from the railway station. I had never before been so close in a raid and my first impulse in the shattering noise was to bury my face in the ground. Ever since I was a child my first impulse in danger has been to save my glasses from being broken, and the reaction to pro-

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tect them is now instinctive. The planes above us seemed very cIose and splinters of the shells which never quite hit them might easily have fallen on us. Dr. Lim tried to make me take his steel helmet but it seemed to me that his life was one of the most precious in China, and I resisted. Dr. Jung, affectionately called Fatty, as ever had his camera out, and was photographing the planes, the smoke rising in the distance, and us. The Cantonese soldiers were laughing and joking. J. was sitting in gloomy dejection, either on account of one of his periodic fits of misanthropy or because he had missed his breakfast.

The raid over, we made our way back into the town, seeing more and more dead bodies and wounded people as we neared the railway. Something was exploding in the station with staccato cracks and a great column of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air. For once the Japanese had scored a hit on some ammunition supplies, but in order to do so they had thrown a hundred bombs within a radius of a mile and a half. The shacks and huts of the workers across the creek from the railway line were a shambles. Everywhere the dead, the maimed, and the dying. Three hours later all the wounded had not yet been removed, for Nanchang, half of whose population had fled, had no well-organized first-aid service like Canton and the Wuhan cities. Memories of that Sunday morning come back to me. A woman with her dead husband at her feet, at her breast a baby with its face blackened by the explosion, a child of about two screaming beside her. A man trying to do something for his wife, who was obviously beyond human aid, but still breathing. Mutilated children, mothers, men. Most pathetic of all, a small boy crying beside his mother's horribly mangled body, in all that remained of their one-roomed shack. 'Where is your father?' I asked. 'Killed in a previous air-raid,' he said. Near by an old grandmother with her whole family killed, now herself doomed to die of want.

The scene in the railway station, when one was allowed to

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approach it hours later, was not so terrible. Wrecked cars, debris, cartridges strewn about, blood, and charred bodies. But these victims were already dead and had clearly been killed outright. The line was undamaged and the mess was being cleared away. By evening the trains would be running again. The Japanese had destroyed a few hundred pounds worth of munitions. In order to do this they had killed or mutilated six hundred civilians and made hundreds more homeless.

Along the riverside the Buddhist Red Swastika Society distributed coffins and money. The dead person's name was being written for his relatives on each coffin whilst they waited. A shilling or two of relief money was given to widows, orphans, or old parents. For nearly all the victims were workers or their families in this, as in most air-raids I saw in China. The well to do can go to safer places, but the poor must stay and work, however close they are to danger. Sickened by the heat, the smell, and the sight of the wounded, I trudged back over the long bridge to my hotel.

I was the only foreign reporter in Nanchang at that time and I sent a cable home that afternoon. But air-raids in China were already ceasing to be 'news', and it was never published. Or perhaps it never got through the censor because I had said the railway station had been hit. I shall never know, but can still remember typing out that cable in the Nanchang post office, surrounded by interested Chinese operators, boys, and what not. A foreign correspondent was not an ordinary sight in Nanchang; most of the raids on the city were never reported. Also, I was a 'female foreign person', and as such a rarer novelty.

I was travelling light, as I knew that I should have to walk if I were to get to the actual front, so I had no typewriter with me. Since I am one of those people who never had a proper education, my typing is of the two-finger variety, and being watched covers me with shame and confusion. Feebly I excused my slowness by pointing out that the machine in

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the post office was an unfamiliar German make, and with burning face got through the ordeal.

Dashing back to the hotel on foot—rickshaws were few and far between in that constantly bombed town—I found the others sitting on the steps ready to start out. My clothing was soaked with perspiration from hurrying in the heat, but there was no time for a bath. So I hastily rubbed myself over with a towel and changed into the still damp clothes which the hotel boy had washed for me that morning. Then I bundled my things together, bought some tins of cigarettes, wrapped a precious bottle of whisky in my spare pair of trousers, and shouldering my bundle, joined the others. We were all supperless, and by the end of that night were to regret not having stopped to collect some food.

We were quite a large company now, as a group of Army Medical Service men went with us. J. and Dr. Lim and I sat in the luxury of a cushioned car with some of them, and the rest travelled in our lorry with medical supplies.

The road in the dusk was full of marching men, lorries, long files of baggage horses and mules, and coolies carrying heavy loads. The safe night was falling, when the Japanese cannot bomb or machine-gun from the air. After some hours of slow driving along the crowded and rutted road we halted at a broad river. There was only a narrow bridge of boats on which to cross over, so all wheeled traffic, and even the baggage animals, had to wait their turn to cross on a primitive wooden ferry-boat propelled by oars. We left the car in the queue and sat down on the sandy shore to wait. A young moon shed a little radiance through light clouds, and all around us were the dim shapes of soldiers, sitting or lying on the sand, and of mules standing patiently waiting under their loads. As I sat there watching the baggage animals being urged on to the ferry-boat with shouts and cries, and thinking that in some such fashion must Xenophon's Ten Thousand have crossed the rivers of Asia Minor, I was startled to hear some one speaking to me in perfect French. A young

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and exceptionally handsome Chinese officer, dressed as smartly as officers in our war, stood beside me and introduced himself as Colonel Mok, Political Officer of the 64th (Cantonese) Division. He said he had read in the Nanchang paper that morning that I was going to visit the front, and knew when he saw a European woman sitting in that remote spot that I must be I. He then suggested that I might like to come and visit the Cantonese troops with whom he served. This was just the chance I was looking for. Could I walk ten miles, he asked; he would get a coolie to carry my pack. I felt then that I could march twenty, if necessary. We arranged that he should wait for us later that night at Teian, whence he would be marching with his men to the front. J., whose movements were always incalculable, suddenly decided that after all he would come on to the front. We all sat and talked, sitting on the sands. J. was soon in animated talk with Colonel Mok's colleagues, who spoke only Chinese. Dr. Lim could talk French almost as well as English, and I fetched the bottle of whisky. None of the Chinese officers would drink, but Lim, having studied at a Scotch university, had no difficulty in keeping up with J. The latter's spirits had been steadily rising since we set out, as they do when he gets amongst the soldiers and near the front. We talked politics, as one always did in China; would Chiang Kai-shek allow the people to be 'mobilized', would Britain and the U.S.A. exert economic pressure on Japan. Mok had spent five years in Paris at the Institute of International Affairs and had come back to join the army. He had a French wife and children in Hong Kong and his people had a factory there. He was one of those rather rare specimens in China, a well to do young man who could have been living in safety at Hong Kong as a British subject but preferred to fight for China.

J. meanwhile talked the old talk of military men in China; why is Chinese staff work poor, why don't the generals cooperate better—but China will win, her soldiers are superb. Japanese morale is fading.

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At last it was our turn to cross the river. On the other side was a village and peasants sleeping through the hot night on bamboo beds outside their houses. Two of them wakened and asked us to sit down whilst we waited for Lim and the others who had stayed to cross with the lorry. The peasants apologized for having no hot tea, but gave us boiled water to drink and spoke of the good harvest, and their hope that the Japanese would not come before they could reap it. I wondered whether anywhere else in the world one could find peasants so well-mannered and hospitable, so calm and cheerful in the face of danger, and so friendly to strangers. A Japanese would have been equally well-mannered but would have displayed a prying curiosity, and the Japanese are neither calm nor philosophical. J!, often so boorish and tongue-tied with his own people, always seemed to settle down to talk to Chinese with the utmost ease. Something I said to him as we sat there in the darkness spurred him to explain: 'Don't you understand that these people are my people? There are no other people like them. I don't feel myself an American.'

With bows and smiles we left our hosts and followed Lim to the first—or last—receiving station for the wounded. It was difficult to find. A cluster of ancient, dirty, low-ceilinged houses. In the dim light of our electric torches we crept through these hovels over the bodies on the floor. The wounded lay in their filthy blood-soaked clothing, their wounds roughly bandaged, but with no one there to attend to their wants—no one even to give them a drink in the hot August night. Few groaned or spoke, although most of them lay sleepless, their pain-drawn faces coming for a moment into our sight as the torch passed over them. As Dr. Lim or Dr. Jung bent over them to examine their wounds or feel their pulses, some would murmur: ' There is no hope for me; my wound is too bad and I must die.' One knew that those with bad abdominal or head wounds would surely die before they could get transport to a hospital, and that even the more lightly wounded had no great chance of survival.

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Their unattended injuries would go gangrenous if they could not soon be attended to—and the Nanchang hospitals were forty miles away.

It was as grim a sight as I saw during my stay in China: half-naked bodies torn and mutilated, one man with a blood-soaked bandage over his sightless eyes sitting upright amongst the recumbent forms. It was like some picture of Hell painted in sombre colours, yet somehow redeemed by the stoical courage and patience of these men. I was new to war, in spite of the air-raids I had seen, and anxious not to let the horror overwhelm me so that I should rush away into the beautiful night outside and never be able to face suffering or describe it to others. I wished one could paint the scene for people in England and America. What a difference a few lorries would make, a few surgeons and nurses, a little morphia to dull all the pain.

J., for all his pose of being the most hard-boiled and unfeeling of veteran war correspondents, was as shaken and white as I. In the months that followed he was to render a great deal of aid to the Chinese Red Cross, carrying medical supplies through the Japanese lines to the guerrilla forces south of Nanking, risking his life and undergoing hardships and privation which reduced his tall muscular frame into as emaciated a leanness as that of any Chinese soldier.

Back in the car we were all silent till Lim began to tell us more of his plans and difficulties. The first squads of his volunteers would be coming up to these places in a few days' time. They would at least put clean dressings on the wounds, clean up the hovels, cook meals, and in general nurse the wounded. But the problem of accommodation was wellnigh insoluble. There were no suitable buildings to house the wounded, and the places in which they lay could not be made clean and sanitary. Tents, even if they could be procured, were no solution, for they would constitute special targets for the Japanese planes and no wounded man would dare to enter them. Rightly or wrongly, the Chinese soldier believes

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that the Japanese bomb hospitals deliberately, and he wants, when wounded, to be in a building which looks like an ordinary house or farm. But Lim realizes that as long as the wounded are housed in village streets or towns you cannot be sure whether they are being deliberately bombed or not. He would like to try some tents of British Army Medical Service pattern, and even had some idea of asking the Powers, including Germany and Italy, to appeal to Japan to respect the Red Cross sign.

We stopped at four more collecting stations. Some were mere bamboo shelters without walls, others rabbit warrens in mean streets, like the first we had visited. We forgot that we were hungry and tired. Lim and Jung worked indefatigably. Some men at least that night got relief from pain by an injection of morphia; some lives were saved by the cleansing and dressing of a wound.

The courage of the Chinese soldier is a marvel and a mystery. Is it the hardship of his life from childhood which gives him that uncomplaining patience? Is it the fatalism of an ancient civilization ? Some Westernersharden themselves to the sight of misery in China by inventing a theory that the Chinese nervous system is not the same as ours, that they don't feel the same. I cannot believe this. Look at the sensitive Chinese hand, the mobile face, the intelligent eyes, the finely made bodies. One thing at least is sure: to conquer such a people is wellnigh impossible, however badly they are officered and led, and however great the enemy's superiority in arms. These soldiers, with their slight frames and frequently emaciated limbs, often do live to fight another day. Wounded men walk for days half-starved and somehow go on living. Is it the life-giving sunlight or hereditary selection or a calm spirit which has survived floods, famines, and every disaster through the centuries ? The Chinese do not fret and fume; they are silent and endure. I remember the words of Captain Carlson, of the United States Marines, who has been with the Chinese armies since the beginning of the war:

1.	Paradise to Purgatory: Hong Kong and Canton	page 1
	I. Hong Kong	1
	ii. The Miracle Railway	17
	III. Canton	21
2.	The Wuhan Cities	31
3.	First Visit to the Front from Hankow	86
4.	The Chinese Red Cross and Army Medical Service	119
5.	Second Visit to the Yangtze Front	154
6.	Hankow before the Fall	187
7.	The Political Situation in China	229
8.	Can China Survive?	258
9.	Japan's War Aims	281
	Index	297