NEXT MORNING WE were off soon after three. We followed the winding course of a little river. The track was deep in white dust, and the column moved in it so quietly that while it was still dark we could hear, far up above our heads, the wing-beats of wild duck on the dawn flight to their feeding grounds.
The track was always narrow, and we moved without a screen of scouts, the throwing out of which would have cut our speed in half, for they would have had to scramble through dense scrub on slopes which were often semi-precipitous. I had often heard the Japanese anti-bandit operations compared by foreigners to our own campaigns against the Boers; but I reflected, as the column plunged blindly into steep defiles from the lip of which a handful of reasonably armed men could have cut it to pieces with impunity, that the analogy was only partially applicable. The bandits were vermin who in nine cases out of ten would show no fight unless they were cornered. They had neither the wit, the courage, nor the weapons to put up that formidable resistance for which the terrain offered golden opportunities. Against an organized force they embarked on guerrilla warfare only at the last moment and from necessity; though there have been cases – mostly hushed up – of Japanese expeditions meeting with complete disaster, these have been exceptions due to the presence in the bandits’ ranks of someone with the gift of leadership. So we marched without qualms through a series of death-traps which no one had taken the trouble to set.
Davidoff was an admirable man, and very good with his horses. He was one of eight brothers. Seven of them had been killed in the Revolution, and Davidoff, who was then a young officer with Tsarist sympathies, thought it prudent to visit China. Here he joined the armies of the Old Marshal, Chang Tso-lin, and rose to the rank of major. When Chang Tso-lin was blown up by the Japanese, Davidoff drifted desultorily into civilian life and married a Chinese woman. Now he kept a stable in Fushun. He had a small, handsome head, a charming smile, unlimited powers of endurance, and a philosophical outlook.
The most entertaining figure in the rather stolid atmosphere at Headquarters was Kaku. He was a diminutive Korean boy of fifteen. His home was in the district towards which we were marching, but his family had been dispossessed and some of them murdered by the bandits. Kaku had made a hit with a punitive expedition as an interpreter, and since then had lost no opportunity of seeing active service, for he held strong views on the subject of bandits.
His first appearance was unforgettable. As we passed through the outskirts of Fushun we had been hailed by a loud, facetious cry. A tiny figure bursting out of a still tinier military uniform was seen pricking towards us along the top of a bank separating two paddy fields. His pony was the smallest imaginable, and bore every appearance of being a rodent. As he came up Kaku gave an exaggerated parody of a military salute, and instantly disappeared from sight, pony and all, into an unforeseen ditch. He emerged quite unruffled, and from then onwards kept up a running fire of badinage, mostly directed against the Adjutant, whose large chestnut stallion was a perpetual menace to march discipline.
When we halted in a village the Japanese would subside limply in the nearest patch of shade while the officers retired to the magistrate’s house for tea and a rest. But Kaku was indefatigable. He would scamper off up the street on his farcical pony, fling himself into a house, and start cross-questioning the inhabitants for news of the bandits. I can see him now, his small aggressive head thrust forward, his switch imperiously tapping his absurd Wellington boots, bullying some respectable citizen old enough to be his grandfather with a series of shrill domineering yaps. Kaku and I got on very well together. He always saw to it that I had a leafy branch to keep the horse-flies from my pony’s belly, and sometimes he gave me eggs, for whose whereabouts in professedly foodless households he had an uncanny flair.
In the middle of the morning we debouched into a biggish valley, and found ourselves looking across rice-fields to a village on the further side. The track split up into a number of narrow paths running along the tops of the dykes, so the transport had to make a detour round the bottom of the valley. The troops also divided, each unit taking a different path through the paddy.
We made a splendid sight, in the early D. W. Griffiths manner. The detachments marched in single file along the high banks, paced by their reflections in the water of the paddy fields. At the head of the advance-guard fluttered the banner of the Rising Sun. Behind us, grey and compact, the Manchukuo contingent was just entering the valley, led by a standard bearer with a yellow flag. The transport, making its way along the shale of a river bed far out on our left flank, moved slowly in a cloud of bright dust under the shadow of steep cliffs; each wagon had its little banner – yellow, or red and white – and the whole equipage wore a markedly romantic air.
The transport was a wonderful thing of its kind. The little stocky wagons with two enormous iron-studded wheels, often spokeless, were drawn by mixed teams of two ponies and a mule, or two mules and a pony. They looked impossibly clumsy, but they were up to anything. We had before us some steep passes, climbed by a track often indistinguishable from the dried up bed of a stream. The wagons took them in their stride. Yelling like demons and using their long whips with refined cruelty, the Chinese drivers kept their teams scrambling like cats at the rough, brittle surface. They were always up with us a few minutes after we had halted; they were never a drag on the column.
We were due for a rest in the village on the other side of the valley. We had been going for a long time and it was very hot. The men took off their packs and sprawled in the shade. The Chinese inhabitants, pathetically anxious to please, trotted to and fro among them, bringing well-water in the inevitable kerosene tins. Scrofulous dogs cringed in the offing, torn between greed and fear. Naked children wondered. From behind the tattered paper windows of mean houses very old men and very old women looked out on these alien campaigners with only bemusement in their eyes. Like all the villages we passed through, it was a place of almost inconceivable poverty.
Of such poverty that in the chief house they could offer us (this was often, indeed almost always the case) only boiling water to drink. They had no tea, and the lovely ice cold water from the wells was considered, except by me, unsafe for anyone above the rank of private to drink. But Headquarters, when I reached it, had forgotten its thirst. The Major, cross-legged and impassive as ever, sat in a low room full of the buzzing of innumerable flies. His staff were standing to attention in front of the k’ang. There was a certain tension in the atmosphere. In whispers I got Takani to diagnose it.
We were on the bandits’ trail, and the scent was breast high. A small detachment of the gang we were after had visited this village the night before, departing into the hills with sixteen captives, for whose ransom they demanded half the season’s crop of opium and a quantity of miscellaneous provisions. Their retreat, the headquarters of the main body, was known; we should find them in a valley fifteen miles away. This sounded promising. I prepared to cancel my precautions against disillusionment.
When he had fully questioned the elders of the village the Major began to issue his orders. His level voice droned on, drowning the importunate flies. The senior non-commissioned officers took down notes of what he said and afterwards – parrot-like but extremely accurate – repeated their instructions. The meeting broke up, and everyone gave their attention to the (in this temperature) difficult problem of consuming enough boiling water to see them through to the next halt, which was now potentially remote.
The plan of campaign was roughly as follows: The Manchukuo contingent, and more than half the Japanese force, were to march by separate routes and take up positions covering the passes on the far side of the valley. The small remainder of the Japanese was to carry on by the shortest route and deliver a frontal attack on the bandits’ headquarters at dawn, thus driving such as they failed to annihilate into one of two ambushes. Headquarters would ride with the smallest contingent. M. and I were pleased, for it sounded as if these were the people who would see most of the fun.
We set out almost immediately. The dusty little street was a cacophonous tangle of wagons and unwilling mules and soldiers struggling hastily into their kit; the simultaneous departure of three units in three different directions had tied the column temporarily into a knot. But at last we were free, and I found myself with a little force of fifty men pushing slowly up a valley which seemed to have risen to the occasion and appeared more savage and picturesque than any we had passed as yet. The track was certainly worse.
That was the hardest day we had. At the end of the valley, in the heat of noon, we climbed a pass so steep that it was a miracle the wagons managed it. Two men fell out with heat-stroke. (They were all young soldiers. That is inevitable in a conscript army with a two-year term of service. But on the whole they stood the heat less well than I had expected.) At last we reached the top and found a breeze and a little broken shrine to rest by. We looked down in luxurious self-esteem on the track we had so lately left, writhing ignominiously along the floor of the valley.
The descent on the further side was almost equally hard work. But at the bottom there was a poor house by a stream, and everyone cheered up at the thought of lunch and began to unbuckle their equipment. A family of peasants welcomed us unreservedly. The officers were ushered in to their miserable dwelling and encouraged to make themselves at home on the filthy fly-blown k’ang. Everyone sprawled about and waited for water to be boiled.
But from a rafter in the middle of the room hung a little hammock covered with a cloth on which the flies crawled two deep. Presently something stirred beneath it; the flies rose with a buzz, then settled again. But now there was a child’s hand sticking out, a small, hot, wretched hand, of which the wrist was pitted deeply. Everybody was asleep, or nearly asleep, except the Adjutant. I called his attention to the hand, and we pulled back the cloth. In the hammock lay a child dying of the small-pox.
Five minutes later we were on the march again.
A mile further on we found another house where we had some food and such rest as the flies would allow us. In the afternoon it grew uncomfortably hot, and two more men fell out. We struggled up another pass, the highest yet, and dropped down into a valley, in one corner of which there was a cluster of decrepit houses. It was getting late, and we stopped here for a meal and a few hours’ sleep.
I bathed, upstream of the mules, in four inches of running water and came back to find that beer had been issued with the rations. Davidoff and Takani and M. and I had two bottles between us. It was heavenly. The worst of travel in the interior of China during the hot weather is that you can seldom (and never with complete safety) get anything cold to drink. It is only a minor hardship, but it has a disproportionate effect on anyone who, like myself, has a freakish but violent aversion from tea. The European is so used to quenching his thirst with cold liquid that his system does not at first recognize the advantages of the opposite method which is, I believe, theoretically superior.
As we sat on the grass in front of the principal compound, drinking the excellent beer, there suddenly appeared on the sky-line across the valley the figure of a man. When he came in sight of us he stopped dead in his tracks, then went quickly back over the ridge. He may, or he may not, have been responsible for what happened next day.
The flues of the cooking-fire ran under the k’ang in the farmhouse where Headquarters were billeted; the small and very dirty room was unbearably hot, so I took my blanket and spread it on a low mound of turf in the compound. When M. joined me I told him, I don’t know why, that we were sleeping over a sealed up cess-pit. He prepared immediately to decamp.
‘It’s all right, M.,’ I said (in vain). ‘It was only a joke. It’s not true.’
Later, however, I discovered that it was.