AT DAWN WE were awakened. An extra plane had been put on the Jehol service; there would be room for us in it. We breakfasted lightly off seaweed and hurried out to the air-field.
Here there was a slight hitch. My luggage was overweight. It consisted of a light suitcase, a dispatch case, and a typewriter.
My experience as a traveller has been of a kind to give me a curiously keen nose for delay. I find that I can very often foresee, if not the nature of a setback, at any rate its result; this, in nine cases out of ten, is a period of enforced idleness under aggravating conditions. I felt in my bones that something of the kind was in store for us in Jehol. So I stuck to my papers and the typewriter and left the suitcase. It is better to have nothing to wear than nothing to do.
We roared up into the hot blue sky and flew west into the mountains. There was no longer below us a curious pattern stamped by men upon the earth. Sprawling, rearing, falling away, the hills ruled turbulently. There seemed no end to them, no boundary to their kingdom. Wave upon wave of reinforcements marched up over the horizon to meet us. Our shadow, which had glided so serenely with us on the plains, now had to scramble wildly, racing up screes to meet us as we skirted a cliff face, then plunging down the shoulder of a mountain to switchback, diminished, across the gullies at the bottom of a valley. The plane, which before had lorded it unchallenged in the void, now seemed a puny, vulgar intruder, a little quivering minnow among immobile Tritons.
We flew mostly at 3000 feet. But when we crossed a range the pilot was tempted by the passes as a diver is tempted by a penny at the bottom of the bath. They were a challenge to his skill, and we would swoop roaring through the steep defiles while herds of small black cattle went streaming fanwise down the nearer slopes, stricken with panic. Once a little fighting plane overhauled us; she seemed unaccountably suspended in mid air, for the noise of her engines was drowned by ours. Once we passed a convoy of military lorries, crawling like beetles out to Jehol along the bottom of a valley, where ran the dirt road which – unless clogged by the rains or cut by the bandits – links Jehol to railhead at Peipiao. We landed once, at Chaoyang, to deliver mails. The ground was ominously soft. If any more rain fell, the airfield at Jehol would be out of commission and I should be exiled indefinitely.
We flew on through the sharp fantastic mountains, ancient, ribbed, and horny, like folded dragons’ wings. At last, ahead of us, we saw a cliff crowned with an unnatural club-shaped rock, far bigger at the top than at the base. The finger of the altimeter began to fall. We dipped steeply through a pass and discovered the City of Jehol.
It lay beside a river, a teeming undecipherable pattern in grey. Temples stood outpost to it in the encircling foothills, and round each temple ran a sinuous embattled wall, climbing the steep slopes gracefully. They looked like great coloured citadels. They had rose-red walls, and the blue and green and yellow tiles of their roofs flashed in the sunlight. Their courtyards were crowded with the dark meditative heads of trees. We circled over them, leaning sharply at an angle, and the valley, thus set spinning beneath us, seemed like a place of magic in a book.
We landed in the river bed, under a black cliff. The silver plane, toy-like and anomalous, glittered with a certain effrontery in the sudden silence. We stood on the caked mud, stretching our limbs. The two Japanese officers who had flown with us were being greeted by a group of their colleagues; all clicked and bowed and smiled, impervious to magic. Everyone began to walk – slowly, on account of the heat – up the river bed towards the city, which had rather unfairly receded to a surprising distance.
It was very hot. Mr. H seemed in low spirits. ‘Very amusing’, was his only comment on the temples. In this strange valley under the blazing sun he trod suspiciously. He was on the defensive.
The river (which is called Lwan) was in flood and had swept away the bridge. It was nevertheless quite shallow, and while we waited for a ferry we watched naked Chinese fording it with bundles on their heads, some dragging donkeys behind them, and all behaving with that disproportionate animation – those bursts of ephemeral rage, those murderous gestures, and those sudden fits of laughter – which make the Chinese scene at once so absorbing and so tiring to behold. At last a cumbrous hulk was poled across to fetch us. The Japanese, their Wellington boots projecting comically, their swords held carefully out of the water, were carried out to it on the backs of coolies. I had no hat, and when I came on board an octogenarian Chinese unfurled with infinite courtesy his umbrella and held it over my head against the sun. We were poled back slowly athwart the current. From the huddled houses on the bank a powerful smell drifted out across the tumbling yellow waters. The peacock temples could not be seen from here.
In the capital of Jehol (which, strictly speaking, ought to be called Cheng-teh) Mr. H and I had planned to stay for one day. We were marooned there for three.
Thrice we prepared for departure (an almost purely psychological process in my case, since I had no luggage). Thrice we were turned back. Either there were wounded, who had prior claims to the accommodation in the plane; or else no plane could land, because the rains had made the ground too soft; or else it landed but could not take off again for the same reason. In Jehol Romance, though over-poweringly present, brings up no 9.15.
But delay was easily bearable in Jehol. The place had the double interest of the topical and the historical; it was like staying in Windsor in 1919, supposing that the Germans had won the War.
It was a garrison town. Divisional Headquarters were in the palace of the late Governor, which had once been the hunting box of Emperors from Peking. The late Governor’s name was Tang Yu Lin. He was a man – to judge by his record – of exquisite iniquity: though I have little doubt that if you or I had met him we should have found him charming. A former bandit, he oppressed his people vilely. When the Japanese threatened his province, he announced to the world his unquenchable determination to resist them to the last man and the last round. For perhaps a week the telegrams of the news agencies portrayed him in the sympathetic posture of a patriot fighting for his home against odds; he looked, at a distance, like the King Albert of the Far East.
But he never fought. His armies melted from their impregnable positions in the north-eastern passes; the confidence of his men in their commander may be gauged by the fact that they did not even go through the formality of digging themselves in. Tang Yu Lin, poorly attended, rode out of Jehol in flight a few hours before the triumphal entry of the Japanese; the townspeople welcomed the invaders unreservedly. A few months later Tang Yu Lin was in Japanese pay. I should say that that man might have acquired, and did in fact lose, more sympathy and prestige for China than any other living Chinese.
His palace stood on the outskirts of the city, in a magnificent park. A wall ran round it, enclosing – with that careless, thorough ostentation which is typical of China – several fairly considerable hills. Hawks and pigeons and magpies flitted or circled round the splendid trees, shrewd though unconscious observers of history in the making. A herd of spotted deer, incuriously aloof, nibbled sweet grass on which was stamped the faint oval of a race-track where Tang Yu Lin’s wives, eight in number, had been capriciously obliged to take equestrian exercise every morning. (They were also required to learn to read.) A long low building in a corner of the wall now housed a Japanese sanitary squad; formerly it had been the place where Tang Yu Lin manufactured morphine, for sale to his army and his subjects. Japanese soldiers, their short legs dangling from the formal lovely bridges, fished unfruitfully in the lily ponds.
One day manœuvres were staged for my benefit in the park. The unit engaged corresponded to a half company in the British Army. Their objective was a pagoda on the top of a steep knoll; it contained a hypothetical machine gun and would in practice have been impregnable. The attack was launched from under cover, and from a distance of about half a mile. Between their jumping-off point and the pagoda the ground was broken by four sharp banks, two of them separated by a shallow canal. Dominating though the position of the machine gun was, the attackers had plenty of dead ground of which to take advantage.
They did not, however, take advantage of it. Instead of leaving their Lewis Gun1 sections in position on the nearest bank, to cover the advance of the riflemen, they launched the attack pell mell. Attempts to correlate fire and movement were unscientific to a degree. But their dash was terrifyingly impressive. The men, though acting under perfect discipline, uttered blood-curdling yells as they advanced. The canal, waist-deep, was forded as though it had been the final obstacle in a cross-country race. And the ultimate assault on the pagoda was carried out with a deadly seriousness which was as far removed as possible from the spirit of strenuous burlesque which distinguishes the climax of mock warfare in this country. Where the British private, coming at last to close quarters, goes all out to make his opponent laugh, the Japanese does his best to freeze the other’s blood.
It was a most instructive demonstration.
1 I do not know the name of the Japanese Army’s equivalent to a Lewis Gun.