EARLY THE NEXT day (this was in the last week of August) we started for the front. From Nanchang two roads run – one slightly east, the other slightly west, of south – towards the borders of the Communist territory. We went first down the eastern road, which was held, more or less continuously, by Nationalist troops as far as a small town called Nanfeng, about a hundred miles from Nanchang. We hoped to reach Nanfeng.
I have spoken already, and I shall probably speak again, of the anti-Communist ‘front’. Actually there was no front in the accepted sense of the word – no continuous line, that is, held by the government troops. The south of the province is mountainous, and the mountains are the Communists’ strength. A low but thickly-wooded spur of these hills runs northwards towards Nanchang into the V formed by the two roads which I have mentioned, and from this spur attacks may be launched at any moment upon the military posts along either road. The villages on each of them have changed hands repeatedly, and a situation has often been created in which Communist forces were threatening Nanchang while the advanced Nationalist posts farther south had not even been molested.
While we were in Kiangsi things were fairly quiet. The main, organized Red Armies were marauding to the eastward, in Fukien, from which province, laden with booty, they were with difficulty driven out by the Nineteenth Route Army, the quondam heroes of the Shanghai fighting against the Japanese, and afterwards the mainstay of the short-lived separatist movement in Fukien. Such trouble as arose while we were with the troops was created by gangs of men whose attachment to the Communist cause had exalted their status from that of bandits to irregular detachments of the Red Armies.
We set off early in the morning in a car, which was followed by a bus containing Li, our luggage, and two guards of a cheerfully horrific aspect, armed with Mauser automatics. We had with us in the car two representatives of the provincial government; the intelligent, willowy, and (as we were to discover) rather vague Mr. Hsiao, and a Mr. Chen, a twenty-six-year-old graduate from Harvard, who held a potentially important post on one of the numerous Bureaus of Reconstruction which were waiting for a military victory to give them something to reconstruct.
Mr. Chen’s was an unhappy case. He was a lugubrious young man, with a large, sour face and a loud, harsh voice. He had been educated at Harvard, a process which he had taken very seriously. ‘I never went to a picture, I never looked at a girl, I never played cards, I never had any fun at all. I just worked and worked and worked’, he told me once in a pathetic burst of self-revelation. But the West, though he had lived there ascetically, had made him fastidious; it was typical of him that he inhabited the Chinese Y.M.C.A. at Nanchang, for the sake of the bathroom and the foreign cooking. Much worse, he was at heart out of sympathy with his country. For a Chinese he had singularly little tolerance and less humour. His constructive zeal clashed with his critical faculties. America (this happens very rarely) had destroyed his faith in the ancient, indigenous set of values on which the progressive Chinese can fall back in moments of despair; there were no compensations for him. His country seemed to him to be in a hopeless state; but his affection for it had withered in the West, and the impulse to regenerate was more or less academic. The desire to do something was cancelled out by the desire to point out the futility of doing anything. Mr. Chen was in truth disgusted with China; it made him very unhappy.
I realized quite soon that we were suffering from the same handicap that I had suffered from with Mr. H in Jehol – that we were, in other words, visiting a military area under civilian auspices. As we left Nanchang, we overhauled column after column of reinforcements on their way up to the front; but neither Mr. Hsiao nor Mr. Chen were able to tell us where they were going, or why, or to what division they belonged, or why they had no rifles. There lingered in them something of the Chinese gentleman’s disdain for the soldier, and they were not pleased when we asked them those questions on military subjects which were all important to our investigations. They sought to divert our attention to admirable but irrelevant amenities of a civilian nature, and we dutifully inspected the headquarters of the bus service, and a war memorial put up to a general who had fallen fighting for Chiang Kai-shek in the Northern Expedition of 1926, and a charming Taoist monastery whose walls had been decorated by troops lately billeted there with vivid anti-Communist posters.
We were also taken over an agricultural school, which stood a little way back from the road about twenty miles from Nanchang. Here, at any rate, was a project which was no longer on paper. Founded by the provincial government, the school was now said to be self-supporting. It was run by a cheerful, modest young man – the very best type of young Chinese. I have said before that the curse of China is ineffectiveness. As you travel through the country you find a continuous pleasure in the charm, the humour, the courtesy, the industry, and the fundamentally reasonable outlook of the inhabitants; but all the time you are missing something, and you are hardly conscious of what it is until you meet somebody – like this boy – who is effective: who really means to do what he says he is going to do: who can resist the fatal lure of compromise: who can rise superior to his enervating and obstructionist surroundings: who gets things done. Such a man puts your respect for the Chinese on a less academic plane.
The school was on holiday. As we were conducted round the dormitories it was strange to see, pinned to the wall above a bed, one of those preternaturally shiny and romantic postcards which are sold by small newsagents in English seaside resorts. It was a typical specimen; a glossy young man in a high stiff collar was engaged in the dual task of gnawing a girl’s left ear while forcing her to eat an unusually large rose. By another bed there was a photograph of a Japanese geisha girl; when I called Mr. Hsiao’s attention to it he seemed embarrassed and said it was a joke.
We drove on along a fairly good road. The country was down-like and not very thickly cultivated. There were many deserted fields, but the bus service (‘Business as Usual’) was running regularly, though the company’s receipts showed that seventy-five per cent of their passengers were military, and soldiers travel free or know the reason why. In most of the little villages we stopped and drank tea with the bus company’s local representative, for Mr. Hsiao, in addition to his post as Food Controller, had something to do with transport and was making a tour of inspection. In this way we picked up a lot of miscellaneous local information.
Late in the afternoon we reached Fuchow, where we were to stay the night. It was a small town, dominated by a rather unfortunate Roman Catholic cathedral. After a good meal at an inn, we trooped off to the yamen to pay our respects. Here we were received with great courtesy and some delicious sweet cakes by the local magistrate, a fat man with a benign and babyish face, and the Special Commissioner, a charming dotard with the distrait inconsequence of a P. G. Wodehouse peer. He fairly poured forth information on every conceivable subject, all of it having a markedly Utopian flavour. He was, by virtue of his office, in charge of the local militia or defence corps, a somewhat imponderable force armed with spears. He had some photographs of this well-intentioned rabble. They were huge photographs, neatly rolled up in pretty little cardboard boxes decorated with a coloured design, and he took a touching pride in them; they were his pièce de résistance. I can see him now, playing Santa Claus to us, deliberately tantalizing us (as he thought) by the slowness with which he undid the boxes, unrolling each photograph inch by inch with hands that trembled with excitement.
But his charm could not blind us to the fact that we were barking up the wrong, the civilian tree. We began to make tentative, circuitous inquiries about military headquarters. Was it true that they had some Communist prisoners in Fuchow? At last, without, I think, offending our civilian hosts, we engineered a call on the military.
From headquarters an officer took us to what he called the Reform House. This was a place where captured or repentant Communists were turned into better men. In a small, hot, overcrowded room (our retinue was by this time greatly swollen) we interviewed the chief prisoner, who appeared, as far as I could judge, to be in supreme command of the establishment.
The head prisoner was a remarkable young man. He had spent six years in the ranks of the Third Red Army Corps; then, sickening not so much of the theory of Communism as of its bloody practice, he had with difficulty escaped and surrendered to the government forces. He was a small, daemonic-looking man, with a face like a weasel; his hair stood up like a palisade above it. He spoke with great rapidity and vehemence, and my interpreter – Mr. Chen from Harvard – professed himself amazed at his fluency and command of rhetoric. I questioned him for an hour, at the end of which the atmosphere in that tiny room was like a Turkish bath.
When I had finished we all trooped out into the now twilit courtyard, where the inmates of the Reform House were drawn up on parade, two hundred strong. Some of them could not have been more than ten years old, but they all wore military uniform (though they carried no arms), and the little ex-Communist put them through drill which was as good as any that I saw in China. We were impressed, and, through Chen, asked the weasel-faced leader to say so. He made a short, barking speech and dismissed the parade. He was an unusually effective man, and as we walked back to the yamen I wondered whether there were many more like him within the Red Areas. At a guess I should say that there are, for it has always seemed to me that the degree of success attained by the Communist movement in China must be largely due to its power of attracting, and exploiting to the full, young men of exceptional ability. Some of the ablest work being done in China to-day is being done by young men (a minority of them Russian-trained) holding subordinate administrative positions in the Red Areas. If this was not so, the movement would have been broken before now.
Before dinner we called, in a state of considerable exhaustion, on the Catholic Mission, where three delightful American Fathers gave us beer to drink and with it a new lease of life. They confirmed much of our information about the iniquities of the Reds, but pointed out (what we had already begun to suspect) that from the point of view of the peasants the government troops were just as bad. A long day ended with dinner at the yamen, outside which there was a venerable cannon cast by a British firm in the eighteenth century.