Travels with Myself and Another (6 page)

We landed at nine-thirty in the morning rain, twenty-four hours after leaving the luxurious Light of Shaokwan. We didn’t land anywhere special. We slithered up a mud bank like all the mud banks along the river. A platoon of soldiers in soaked cotton uniforms and eight stable coolies with eight diminutive horses stood at attention to receive us. Men and beasts shook with cold. U.C. took the platoon’s salute in fine style and remarked that his horse was lucky as he could ride and walk at the same time so the horse would really have six legs. I went to get on my horse which kicked ferociously; Mr Ma, beating a retreat, slipped and fell flat in the thick mud. We set off in a downpour, all members of the party past speech.

The gait of the awful little horses was unlike any known horse movement; there was no way you could ride them painlessly. When two got close to each other, they kicked and bit; the stable coolies screamed at them and beat them on the nose with long sticks. We proceeded through waterlogged country in the unremitting downpour along a creek rushing with dirty grey water, as from a gigantic sudsy washtub. After plenty of this, we arrived at a Cadet Training School where we were to inspect two new buildings. The sentries screeched
Attention!,
the horses kicked, bit and trumpeted and we dripped into the premises. We were treated to tea, grapefruit, and compliments.

No memory of those buildings remains except for the photographs that decorated the walls of the officers’ mess: Hitler, Mussolini, Daladier, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Stalin, Goering, Chiang. “Great statesmen of the world, more or less,” Mr Ma said. We made farewell compliments and rode five miles farther in the downpour to Division Headquarters. The triumphal arches started to appear now. I have never since seen or heard of triumphal arches for the Press. Our rarity value probably explained them and the Political Department, whose work they were, had little else to occupy it. The arches were of paper, hand-printed, smearing in the rain, and rigged up on poles across the track. “Welcome to the Representatives of Righteousness and Peace.” “Welcome to our International Friends.” “Consolidate all Democracy Nations.” “We will resist Untill Finall Victory [
sic
].” Similar messages greeted us everywhere on that long trek. Once a man ran alongside our cavalcade to ask where we were going next so the Political Department could put up an arch. My favourite was mysterious: “Democracy only Survives Civilization.” U.C. and I brooded on that one but could reach no conclusion.

“Mr Ma, what trees are those?”

“Ordinary trees.”

U.C. laughed and disguised it as a belch. I already knew that Mr Ma was useless as a fount of knowledge but couldn’t stop myself. Mr Ma, with his frail grasp of language, was our only link to people and places. On the river, I had pointed to one of the barges being hauled upstream by chanting men and asked, “What do those boats carry, Mr Ma?”

“Cargo, more or less.” “Watchumacallit” served as Mr Ma’s all-purpose word.

Gay chatter did not enliven any day but that first sodden day was also blind. If there was anything to see we couldn’t see it through the lashing rain. We tried to wring water from our trouser legs before meeting the General (Lin, Liu, Chen, Chang, what does it matter?) who had an unhoped-for coal brazier to sit by while we imbibed technical information about his Division. Chiang’s armies were divided into nine war zones; we were visiting a sector of the Seventh War Zone. The area was about the size of Belgium with a population of 30 million civilians and 150,000 soldiers. There were no roads and obviously no motorized transport. I never saw so much as a two-wheeled cart. The population of Belgium is 10 million and it seems a tightly packed little country.

Only narrow footpaths crossed this vast stretch of land, leading to and from countless villages, each village more pathetic and graceless than the next, rural slums of mud brick. Headquarters were sometimes a new wood house, sometimes a house made of lashed mats on stilts above the duck pond. The pond water was rotting garbage and mud rather than water, pigs rooted in the muck, flies swarmed, and over all villages hung the smell of China: night-soil, the deadly national manure.

I noted much now meaningless detail about the formation, training, weaponry, and actions of the Twelfth Army Group which held this sector of the front. The revealing note is: “Soldiers always look like sad orphanage children.” They were to weep over, those unfortunate boys, usually barefooted with puttees on their bare legs, dressed in cotton uniforms. They were paid a token wage, something like $2.80 U.S. a month, and an even smaller rice allowance. With this money they had to buy their own food. Rice was plentiful but they could not afford to buy what they needed; the soldiers, not the generals, were very thin. Punishment and discipline were Prussian. Though we inspected everything in sight, we never saw a military hospital, not even a medical aid station. I alternated between pitying the soldiers most and pitying the peasants most.

Our first night in the peaceful combat zone was like the others; we shivered in our wet clothes on our board beds, dozed, waked to shiver some more and at six in the morning we were called. U.C. mounted his miniature horse at seven and rode five miles back to the Training Camp to deliver a rousing speech to graduating cadets. I am more and more amazed that he didn’t strangle me. When he returned, I asked what he had said to the boys. He glared at me. “Just don’t be funny about it, M. I may have had to do worse things but I doubt it.”

We set off at ten and rode and walked in clear cold weather until late afternoon, twenty-five miles with occasional refreshing draughts of boiled hot water from our thermoses but no food. It was hill country, like an endless rollercoaster. In the valleys, peasants ploughed the fields behind water buffaloes, peasants and buffaloes struggling along up to their middles in grey mud. We passed through slatternly villages, each adorned with a triumphal arch for us and a duck pond with malaria for them. No one had ever seen any white foreign devils before. The children either screamed in excitement or sobbed in fear. The adults were stony-faced, exhausted by life, and also marred and scarred by unimaginable diseases. “If only our noses don’t drop off,” U.C. murmured, after seeing one more peasant with a little red hole in a ravaged face.

“It looked so beautiful from the air,” I told U.C. wistfully. “The mountains and the fields. And now it looks like nothing.”

“It looks big,” U.C. said.

We rested beside the track under a spreading nameless tree. Trees were rare, being a luxury. The land was used to produce food. The steep hills grew bushes and tall grass; perhaps all serviceable trees had been cut down for building timber. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, there was passing traffic. A merchant with a string of sandals around his neck, a merchant carrying a carton of toothpicks, a man bearing a coffin on his back. “That one’s got good steady work, plenty of customers,” U.C. said.

I noticed that some of the unending hills were black stubble and asked Mr Ma, probably testing whether I could still speak, “Why do they burn off the hills, Mr Ma?”

“To get rid of the tigers.”

“
Tigers,
Mr Ma?”

“Yes, many, more or less. You see, tigers eat some kind of tender little roots and sweet grasses, and when it is all burned, they get hungry and go away.”

U.C. lay back on the stony ground and raised his face to heaven with the radiant smile of one who has heard angels singing. Mr Ma’s vegetarian tigers have taken on a complex and changing symbolism over the years, and always rejoin me in the blackest hours of other horror journeys.

Before the day was over, my notes state: “U.C.’s horse fell on him.” U.C. stretched his arm over the saddle and under the horse’s belly and picked it up, muttering about cruelty to animals, and started to walk with it. I said sharply, “Put that horse down.”

He said, “I will not, poor bloody horse.”

I said, “You’re insulting the Chinese. Put it down!”

He said, “My first loyalty is to this horse.”

I said,
“You must drop that horse! Please!”

“Okay, poor old horse, walk by yourself if you can.” All afternoon the stable coolie behind me held his stomach and groaned.

That night we were spared generals. U.C. could not have coped with compliments. We shivered and slept in some sort of shed with a mat as partial wall between us and our military men. Or U.C. slept. I listened, discovering that when they began the hawking with a long phlegmy cough it was even worse.

The morning ride was a mere four miles in rain before our breakfast of tea and rice. The General, named Wong, looked like a Chinese Kewpie doll, very sweet. We did solemn map work with him. He showed us how the Japanese had driven up from Canton in a three-pronged attack, almost reaching Shaokwan in 1939 and again in May 1940. General Wong explained the order of battle in case of future Japanese attack: the forward machine-gun posts on the hills would delay the enemy, the reserves would come up, and the Japanese would be pulverized by artillery and mortar fire.

This sounded improbable due to the Japanese having planes and the Chinese not. Anyway I believed that the only reason the Japanese didn’t take Shaokwan or anywhere else they chose was because China was roadless and immense and the Japanese, as insanely cruel as the Nazis, had taught the Chinese peasants to hate in the same way that their Nazi allies taught the Russian peasantry. Scorched earth is the peasants’ weapon. Twice the peasants hereabouts burned their crops and their stored rice, killed what animals they couldn’t lead away, and left emptiness for the Japanese. Chinese soldiers were sons of peasants. Though they were offered $1,000 U.S. for any Japanese prisoner taken alive, there were no living prisoners. Like Russia, China is not a sensible country to invade.

In the afternoon we attended a meeting on the parade ground, the regiment in serried ranks, soldiers trembling with cold and a hundred village elders huddled and shivering. It wasn’t so bad because U.C. didn’t have to make a speech; we listened to Mr Ma’s translation of speeches rendered impenetrable now by “whatchumacallit.” Mr Ma was falling apart from so much translating. “They say if the U.S. whatchumacallit, we will do the rest . . . They say greetings to the American whatchumacallit, hope very happy with whatchumacallit army.” Speeches were redundant since the area was festooned with signs, giving us the word for the day. “Down with the Nipponese. The World will be Lighter.” “Support to President Roosevelt Speech.” “Help to Democracy Nation.” “International Help and Sympathy Always Appreciated.”

Mr Ma said this large village was a thousand years old, and it might well have been. They built their villages like rabbit warrens, house stuck to house, on aimless, narrow mud lanes. No gardens, no open ground except around the duck pond. Perhaps the need for rice paddies forced them to live in a tight huddle, always too many people in too little space; or perhaps they liked it that way because the enormity of their land chilled them.

We were quartered in a stone house in a stone room on a stone floor. It was very cold. The door opened on to the street and the smell thereof. The mosquitoes were competing with the flies and losing. The whisky, our only source of warmth, had run out owing to Generals’ enthusiasm for it. I lay on my boards, a foot off the floor, and said in the darkness, “I wish to die.”

“Too late,” answered U.C. from across the room. “Who wanted to come to China?”

Why this village presented a particular problem I no longer know. In the cold grey morning I was faced with the unfair fact that a female cannot modestly relieve herself, and no place to retire in a landscape of bare rice paddies, a sea of mud. The village latrine was a public monument, a bamboo tower, reached by a fragile bamboo ladder, the top screened in mats. Beneath, a five-foot-tall Ali Baba jar stood on the ground to collect valuable human manure.

“I can’t do it,” I said, staring at the tower.

“Nobody asks you to,” said U.C. “You haven’t seen any Chinese women fooling around with modesty, have you? I recommend the duck pond, it’s the popular spot here.”

“No.”

“Put up or shut up, M., we have to start for the next speeches.”

Cautiously, I climbed the ladder, nervous about the bamboo structure but comforted by the mat screens. At this moment, someone hammered on the nose cap from a Japanese bomb, which served in these villages as air raid siren. I looked down to see the peasants evaporating; the village was empty, even the pigs had departed. Far below, in the street, U.C. grinned up at me.

“What now, M.? What now?”

“Nothing!” I shouted, enraged by my ridiculous situation. “Here I am and here I stay!”

“The best of Chinese luck to you,” U.C. called and withdrew to a doorway. A squadron of Japanese planes passed, very high and very fast. It must have been the regular run to Kunming. I had an excellent view. I picked my way carefully down the ladder where U.C. met me, laughing heartily.

“Oh poor M., what an inglorious death it would have been. M., the intrepid war correspondent, knocked off in the line of duty. But where? But how? the press of the world inquires.”

I had no time to nurse my self-pity because we were jolting off again, under a lowering sky, on the interminable track. Mr Ma promised great excitements for the day. The army was going to put on manoeuvres for us. “Ground strafing,” U.C. said to himself. “What sort of Japanese planes have you seen, Mr Ma?”

Mr Ma became Clausewitz. “They throw a bomb,” he explained carefully, “when they want to knock down a house. If they see many people on a road more or less they come down and machine-gunning them.”

We reached a barracks and one more General. We rode another hour to the area where the Chinese Army was to show us how it operated in combat. This was the real front, to the extent that the Chinese had their machine-guns on these hills and, three kilometres away, the Japanese had the same. We stationed ourselves with binoculars to watch our boys simulate an attack on Japanese fortified mountain positions. They did well too, it looked a most competent and intelligent manoeuvre. Under the grey sky, among the humping mountains, the mortars made a loud jolly noise, like all the firecrackers in China united. Echoes of explosions racketed between the hills. We enjoyed the bangs, the sprightliest event so far. U.C., much invigorated, said, “The Japs think it’s mutiny in the Chinese army! They’re signalling Tokyo for orders to advance! They expect to take Shaokwan day after tomorrow! In two weeks they’ll be at the gates of Chungking! Excitement has spread to Canton! The city is a veritable hotbed of rumours!”