THAT DAY WE did another long march, eating our midday meal in a farm through which some of the bandits had passed only three hours before us. After that we never picked up their trail again, and indeed in these labyrinthine hills it would have been surprising if we had.
In the late afternoon we joined forces with the other two contingents where two valleys forked and camped there in a little village. The mayor of this place made a speech of welcome in the course of which he was sick twice; done in the off-hand, matter-of-fact way in which he did it, this struck me as rather an effective oratorical trick.
The other contingents had been no luckier than we. The Manchukuo troops had (so they said) fired at long range on a party of bandits as they disappeared into a wood; the volley, it was claimed, had wrought great havoc, but unfortunately there had been no time to verify any casualties. They had, on the other hand, captured a man who was carrying a written warning of our approach to the bandits, and also some of the charms which guarantee invulnerability.
These were thin, yellowish strips of paper on which was washily portrayed in red the face of a man (or demon) in the grip of some powerful but not easily definable emotion. I have heard various accounts of the ways in which these charms are used. The fanatical, politico-religious bandits – the Red Spears, the Big Swords, and such like – are the most addicted to them. Sometimes the charms are merely pinned to the breast, or fastened to the rifle, sword, or spear. More often they are taken internally – either chewed and swallowed, or burnt and their ashes dissolved in water, which is drunk. As a form of Dutch courage they can be extraordinarily effective. I know of cases where bandits, naked to the waist, have faced the machine guns of an armoured train and suffered annihilation sooner than repulse. The regular, dyed-in-the-wool fanatics are dominated by priests of a Rasputinian denomination, and it is these priests who issue the charms. Superstition alone can hardly account for the stimulus which they lend to the tactics of a race given neither to doing nor dying; there is a theory, which seems to me plausible, that these little slips of paper contain some kind of drug. I verified the case of a Polish schoolboy from Harbin, who was held for ransom by a gang of Red Spears. In the course of his captivity he noticed that the bandits always ate these charms before going into action, and was amazed by the uncharacteristic daring which they then displayed. One day he stole and ate a charm. Its effect, he said, was to make him feel ‘like a king’ for half an hour: after which he became dizzy, lost consciousness, and went into a deep and lengthy sleep.
I must admit, however, that in the charms I saw there appeared to be no traces of narcotics; not that I should have been able to recognize them if they had been there.
We marched for three more days after we had missed the bandits. They were uneventful but not uninteresting. In the village where two valleys forked and the mayor was queasy we left behind us a hundred men to clear up – ‘(sic)’ notes my uncharitable diary – the gang which we had failed so signally to exterminate.
I should have mentioned before now the propaganda unit which was attached to the column. Its personnel consisted of a Japanese, a Chinese, and a Korean – all young men – and its equipment of a gramophone, an unlimited quantity of pamphlets, and a lot of medical supplies. When the column halted for the night the propagandists set about getting an audience. This was where the gramophone came in, for the peasants had never seen its like before. The children were usually the first in whom curiosity conquered their instinctive distrust of this new magic; they were easily entranced, and would cluster round, sucking their fingers and mechanically scratching, while the plangent Chinese music repeated itself in the dusk. After a bit they would be sent to fetch their elders, and the concert continued until a decent audience had been collected.
There followed a brief medical interlude. Purges were administered, cuts bandaged, and the sores which at least half the children had on their eyelids treated with ointment. This won the audience over decisively and the time was ripe for speech-making. The burden of this was usually borne by the young Chinese, a university graduate from Peking. In what seemed to me a very impressive way he explained to the gaping villagers that they now belonged to a new and independent state (this was news to most of them) to which the Japanese were lending a helping hand. He outlined the principles on which the state was founded, and the benefits they would derive from its existence if they pulled themselves together and took a strong line with the bandits. He ended with the inevitable little piece about Wangtao.
The villagers listened with a sheepish but respectful air. It was sufficiently clear that the new government of Manchukuo was an institution almost as remote from their comprehension as the London County Council; they were not interested in Wangtao. But they were unmistakably glad to see the Japanese, not because they stood for autonomy or any other abstraction, but because they had rifles and plenty of ammunition and when they came the bandits, if only for a time, departed. The vast bulk of the thirty odd million inhabitants of Manchukuo are not, and do not want to be, politically conscious; and it is worth bearing in mind the fact that a very large proportion of them have never seen a Japanese out of khaki, for there are few parts of Manchuria where a Japanese civilian can travel without military protection.
I remember one incident which I think gives a fair idea of what Manchukuo means to its subjects in the interior. I went with the propaganda men (all of whom seemed to me to be both able and sincere, and to have more elasticity of mind than the regular soldiers) to a school where they were to give a lecture. The children, solemn and scrofulous, sang the national anthem of Manchukuo at a funereal pace. The lecture was delivered. Then the chief pupil, a boy of about eighteen, made a speech of thanks. He had obviously been coached by the master, and everyone obviously thought that he was saying the right things. But he never mentioned Wangtao, or autonomy, or any of the other high-sounding things on which the lecturer had concentrated. He talked about the Japanese soldiers, and nothing else: what fine fellows they were, how good it was of them to come and clean up the bandits, how glad the village was to see them. The Chinese are realists.
And there could be no doubt that we were welcome. Chinese discretion and Chinese hospitality would of course have combined to prevent the display of any marked coldness; but there were incidents – the gift of three puny but precious chickens, the women’s readiness to let their children fraternize – which substantiated external impressions. Of these last the most memorable was our reception at Sinpin.
Sinpin, you will remember, was our first objective, the place where the column would go into garrison for a time. We had been marching since dawn up a valley on which a thin but none the less depressing veneer of civilization had been laid; for Sinpin is a place of some local importance, where the agricultural produce of a big district is marketed. A road was being constructed, and the sudden appearance of a patrolling lorry full of soldiers sent my pony scrambling like a lizard up the rocky face of a bluff. My sympathy with her reactionary attitude to the march of progress had almost evaporated by the time I got her down.
Just before noon we realized that our destination was at hand. A cloud of dust on the road before us resolved itself into a detachment of Manchukuo cavalry. This was headed by a civil official, a tall, sad young man uneasily astride a pony which bore a startling resemblance to a tapir; he was dressed in a black coat, white flannel trousers, and a straw hat. Courtesies were exchanged, the cavalry fell in behind Headquarters, and the march continued.
A mile further on we came to a bend in the track. Here were symmetrically arranged in order of height the entire student body from the various schools in Sinpin. They awaited our approach in silent immobility, expressing (I imagined) a tacit sympathy with our failure in the field. But I was wrong. That prelude of silence was a carefully rehearsed stage effect. As we drew level with the line some well-intentioned cheer-leader uttered a low, urgent cry. It was answered by a deafening ovation. Hats were waved wildly in the air; flags, hitherto concealed, were agitated to and fro; cheer upon cheer crashed upon our unsuspecting ears at point-blank range.
The effects were immediate and far-reaching. The Major’s pony bolted. The Adjutant’s stallion bounded sideways into a ditch. An orderly was bucked off into the dust. The head of the column was thrown into complete confusion.
The student body, going slowly black in the face, continued to bellow its loyalty and to wave its banners.
When Headquarters had passed, it grew quiet again, waiting for the next detachment. These were infantrymen, who bore the disconcerting outburst with a solemn composure. But soon, I knew, the transport must arrive; so I stayed behind to watch its advent from a distance.
The trick worked better than ever. Mute and motionless, the carefully tapered rank of boys and girls gave the drivers no indication of what was in store for them. Not until the leading teams were well abreast did they release their pent-up gratitude. Then, with shattering effect, they once more blasted the column sideways with a salvo of cheers, frantically flapping their banners to complete the mules’ alarm. The animals jibbed and shied; some bolted. The drivers leapt from their seat on the shafts to the heads of their teams, with piercing cries of irritation and dismay. A great cloud of dust rolled up above the stamping and confusion. The student body went on cheering.