Red Star over China (29 page)

The Bridge Fixed by Liu was built centuries ago, and in the manner of all bridges of the deep rivers of western China. Sixteen heavy iron chains, with a span of some 100 yards or more, were stretched across the river, their ends imbedded on each side under great piles of cemented rock, beneath the stone bridgeheads. Thick boards lashed over the chains made the road of the bridge, but upon their arrival the Reds found that half this wooden flooring had been removed, and before them only the bare iron chains swung to a point midway in the stream. At the northern bridgehead an enemy machine-gun nest faced them, and behind it were positions held by a regiment of White troops. The bridge should, of course, have been destroyed, but the Szechuanese were sentimental about their few bridges; it was not easy to rebuild them, and they were costly. Of Liu Ting it was said that “the wealth of the eighteen provinces contributed to build it.” And who would have thought the Reds would insanely try to cross on the chains alone? But that was what they did.

No time was to be lost. The bridge must be captured before enemy reinforcements arrived. Once more volunteers were called for. One by one Red soldiers stepped forward to risk their lives, and, of those who offered themselves, thirty were chosen. Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling river, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. Red machine guns barked at enemy redoubts and spattered the bridgehead with bullets. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly toward them. The first warrior was hit, and dropped into the current below; a second fell, and then a third. But as others drew nearer the center, the bridge flooring somewhat protected these dare-to-dies, and most of the enemy bullets glanced off, or ended in the cliffs on the opposite bank.

Probably never before had the Szechuanese seen fighters like these—men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings or madmen or gods? Was their own morale affected? Did they perhaps not shoot to kill? Did
some of them secretly pray that these men would succeed in their attempt? At last one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade, and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late. More Reds were crawling into sight. Paraffin was thrown on the planking, and it began to burn. By then about twenty Reds were moving forward on their hands and knees, tossing grenade after grenade into the enemy machine-gun nest.

Suddenly, on the southern shore, their comrades began to shout with joy. “Long live the Red Army! Long live the Revolution! Long live the heroes of Tatu Ho!” For the enemy was withdrawing in pell-mell flight. Running full speed over the remaining planks of the bridge, through the flames licking toward them, the assailants nimbly hopped into the enemy's redoubt and turned the abandoned machine gun against the shore.

More Reds now swarmed over the chains, and arrived to help put out the fire and replace the boards. And soon afterwards the Red division that had crossed at An Jen Ch'ang came into sight, opening a flank attack on the remaining enemy positions, so that in a little while the White troops were wholly in flight—either in flight, that is, or with the Reds, for about a hundred Szechuan soldiers here threw down their rifles and turned to join their pursuers. In an hour or two the whole army was joyously tramping and singing its way across the River Tatu into Szechuan. Far overhead angrily and impotently roared the planes of Chiang Kai-shek, and the Reds cried out in delirious challenge to them.

For their distinguished bravery the heroes of An Jen Ch'ang and Liu Ting Chiao were awarded the Gold Star, highest decoration in the Red Army of China.

Safely across the Tatu, the Reds struck off into the comparative freedom of western Szechuan, where the blockhouse system had not been completed, and where the initiative rested largely in their own hands. But hardships between battles were not over. Another 2,000 miles of marching, studded by seven great mountain ranges, still lay ahead of them.

North of the Tatu River the Reds climbed 16,000 feet over the Great Snowy Mountain, and in the rarefied air of its crest looked to the west and saw a sea of snow peaks—Tibet. It was already June, and in the lowlands very warm, but as they crossed the Ta Hsueh Shan many of those poorly clad, thin-blooded southerners, unused to the high altitudes, perished from exposure. Harder yet to ascend was the desolate Paotung Kang Mountain, up which they literally built their own road, felling long bamboos and laying them down for a track through a tortuous treacle of waist-deep mud. “On this peak,” Mao Tse-tung told me, “one army corps lost two-thirds of its transport animals. Hundreds fell down and never got up.”

They climbed on. The Chung Lai range next, and more lost men and animals. Then they straddled the lovely Dream Pen Mountain, and after it the Big Drum, and these also took their toll of life. Finally, on July 20, 1935, they entered the rich Moukung area, in northwest Szechuan, and connected with the Fourth Front Army and the soviet regions of the Sung-pan. Here they paused for a long rest, took assessment of their losses, and re-formed their ranks.

The First, Third, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Army corps, which had
begun the journey in Kiangsi nine months earlier with about 90,000 armed men, could now muster beneath their hammer-and-sickle banners about 45,000. Not all had been lost, strayed, or captured. Behind the line of march in Hunan, Kweichow, and Yunnan the Red Army had, as part of its tactics of defense, left small cadres of regular troops to organize partisan groups among the peasantry, and create disturbances and diversionist activity on the enemy's flanks. Hundreds of captured rifles had been distributed along the route, and stretching clear from Kiangsi to Szechuan were new zones of trouble for the Kuomintang forces. Ho Lung still held his little soviet area, in northern Hunan, and had been joined there by the army of Hsiao K'eh. The numerous newly created partisan detachments began working slowly toward that region. Nanking was not to dislodge Ho Lung for a whole year, and then only after he had been ordered by Red Army headquarters to move into Szechuan, an operation which he would complete—via Tibet—against amazing obstacles.

The journey of the Kiangsi Reds thus far had provided them with much food for reflection. They had won many new friends and made many bitter enemies. Along their route they had provisioned themselves by “confiscating” the supplies of the rich—the landlords, officials, bureaucrats, and big gentry. Finance Commissioner Lin Tsu-han told me that such seizures were systematically carried out according to soviet laws, and that only the confiscation department of the finance commission was empowered to distribute the goods that were taken. It husbanded the army's resources, was informed by radio of all confiscations made, and assigned quantities of provisions for each section of the marchers, who often made a solid serpentine of fifty miles or more curling over the hills.

There were big “surpluses”—more than the Reds could carry—and these were distributed among the local poor. In Yunnan the Reds seized thousands of hams from rich packers there, and peasants came from miles around to receive their free portions—a new incident in the history of the ham industry, said Mao Tse-tung. Tons of salt were likewise distributed. In Kweichow many duck farms were seized from the landlords and officials and the Reds ate duck until, in the words of Wu Liang-p'ing, they were “simply disgusted with duck.” From Kiangsi they had carried Nanking notes, and silver dollars and bullion from their state bank, and in poor districts in their path they used this money to pay for their needs. Land deeds were destroyed, taxes abolished, and the poor peasantry armed.

Except for their experiences in western Szechuan, the Reds told me they were welcomed everywhere by the mass of the peasantry. Their Robin Hood policies were noised ahead of them, and often the “oppressed peasantry” sent groups to urge them to detour and “liberate” their districts. They had little conception of the Red Army's political program, of course;
they only knew that it was “a poor man's army,” said Wu Liang-p'ing. That was enough. Mao Tse-tung told me laughingly of one such delegation which arrived to welcome “Su Wei-ai Hsien-sheng”—Mr. Soviet!
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These rustics were no more ignorant, however, than the Fukien militarist Lu Hsing-pang, who once posted a notice throughout his fiefdom offering a reward for the “capture, dead or alive, of Su Wei-ai.” Lu announced that this fellow had been doing a lot of damage everywhere, and must be exterminated.

In Maoerhkai and Moukung the southern armies rested for three weeks, while the revolutionary military council, and representatives of the Party and the Soviet Government, discussed plans for the future. It may be recalled that the Fourth Front Red Army, which had made its base in Szechuan as early as 1933, had originally been formed in the Honan-Hupeh-Anhui soviet districts. Its march across Honan to Szechuan had been led by Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien and Chang Kuo-t'ao, two veteran Reds, of whom something more is said later on. Remarkable successes—and tragic excesses—had marked their campaigns in Szechuan, the whole northern half of which had once been under their sway. At the time of its junction in Moukung with the southern Bolsheviks, Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien's army numbered about 50,000 men, so that the combined Red force concentrated in western Szechuan in July, 1935, was nearly 100,000.

Here the two armies divided, part of the southerners continuing northward while the rest remained with the Fourth Front Army in Szechuan. There was disagreement abut the correct course to pursue. Chang Kuo-t'ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien favored remaining in Szechuan and attempting to reassert Communist influence south of the Yangtze. Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, and the majority of the Politburo were determined to continue into the Northwest. The period of indecision was ended by two factors. First was an enveloping movement by Chiang Kai-shek's troops, moving into Szechuan from the east and from the north, which succeeded in driving a wedge between two sections of the Red Army. Second was the rapid rise of one of the hurried rivers of Szechuan, which then physically divided the forces, and which suddenly became impassable. There were other factors of intraparty struggle involved which need not be discussed here.
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In August, with the First Army Corps as vanguard, the main forces from Kiangsi continued the northward march, leaving Chu Teh and Li Hsien-nient
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with Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien and Chang Kuo-t'ao. The Fourth Front Army was to remain here and in Tibet for another year, and be
joined by Ho Lung's Second Front Army,
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before making a sensational march into Kansu. Leading the Red cavalcade that in August, 1935, moved toward the Great Grasslands, on the border of Szechuan and Tibet, were Commanders Lin Piao, P'eng Teh-huai, Tso Ch'uan,
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Ch'en Keng,† Chou En-lai, and Mao Tse-tung, most of the officials from the Kiangsi Central Government, and a majority of the members of the Central Committee of the Party. They began this last phase of the march with about 30,000 men.

The most dangerous and exciting travel lay before them, for the route they chose led through wild country inhabited by the independent Mantzu tribesmen and the nomadic Hsifan, a warring people of eastern Tibet. Passing into the Mantzu and Tibetan territories, the Reds for the first time faced a populace united in its hostility to them, and their sufferings on this part of the trek exceeded anything of the past. They had money but could buy no food. They had guns but their enemies were invisible. As they marched into the thick forests and jungles and across the headwaters of a dozen great rivers, the tribesmen withdrew from the vicinity of the march. They stripped their houses bare, carried off all edibles, drove their cattle and fowl to the plateaus, and simply disinhabited the whole area.

A few hundred yards on either side of the road, however, it was quite unsafe. Many a Red who ventured to forage for a sheep never returned. The mountaineers hid in the thick bush and sniped at the marching “invaders.” They climbed the mountains, and when the Reds filed through the deep, narrow, rock passes, where sometimes only one or two could move abreast, the Mantzu rolled huge boulders down to crush them and their animals. Here were no chances to explain “Red policy toward national minorities,” no opportunities for friendly alliance. The Mantzu Queen had an implacable traditional hatred for Chinese of any variety, and recognized no distinctions between Red and White. She threatened to boil alive anyone who helped the travelers.

Unable to get food except by capturing it, the Reds were obliged to make war for a few cattle. Mao told me that they had a saying then, “To buy one sheep costs the life of one man.” From the Mantzu fields they harvested green Tibetan wheat, and vegetables such as beets and turnips—the latter of an enormous size that would “feed fifteen men,” according to Mao Tse-tung.
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On such meager supplies they equipped themselves to cross the Great Grasslands. “This is our only foreign debt,”
Mao said to me humorously, “and some day we must pay the Mantzu and the Tibetans for the provisions we were obliged to take from them.” Only by capturing tribesmen could they find guides through the country. But of these guides they made friends, and after the Mantzu frontier was crossed many continued the journey. Some of them were now students in the Communist Party school in Shensi, and might one day return to their land to tell the people the difference between “Red” and “White” Chinese.

In the Grasslands there was no human habitation for ten days. Almost perpetual rain falls over this swampland, and it was possible to cross its center only by a maze of narrow footholds known to the native mountaineers who led the Reds. More animals were lost, and more men. Many foundered in the weird sea of wet grass and dropped from sight into the depth of the swamp, beyond reach of their comrades. There was no firewood; they were obliged to eat their wheat green and vegetables raw. There were no trees for shelter, and the lightly equipped Reds carried no tents. At night they huddled under bushes tied together, which gave but scant protection against the rain. But from this trial, too, they emerged triumphant—more so, at least, than the White troops, who pursued them, lost their way, and turned back with only a fraction of their number intact.