NEXT DAY, VERY early, we left Fuchow for Nancheng, the next place of importance along the road south. (I must apologize for these Chinese names. Nanchang is the capital of Kiangsi: Nancheng is the second, and penultimate, stop on the road thence to the borders of the Red Area: and Nanfeng, beyond it, is the most advanced post held by government troops in that sector.) We made the usual stops for tea and cakes at the bus stations in the villages, passed the usual aimless columns of troops, each with a long tail of limping stragglers, and once were held up at the point of a temperamental-looking musket by the Food Controller’s economic cordon. The countryside was getting hillier. In that part of the province it has a curiously English look. Villages cluster in the shade of great trees, among which you do not at first discern the curling and outlandish eaves which brand as Oriental the quiet grey walls and roofs. But the strongest suggestion of your own country comes from the magpie houses – black beams on white plaster – which abound in Kiangsi but which I never saw elsewhere.
We reached Nancheng in time for lunch. It is a small, compact, walled city, dominated by an inordinately romantic white fort perched on a hill outside the north gate. As a rule (to which Fuchow was an exception) roads in the interior skirt the towns, whose streets are too narrow to admit traffic, and we found that we must leave our luggage at the bus station outside the walls, for lack of a military permit to bring it in. Another reminder that we were under the wrong auspices.
Nancheng was full of soldiers – poor quality troops, like all the permanent garrisons on the outskirts of the Red Areas, and far below the standard of Nanking’s best divisions. Here you must forgive a brief digression on the subject of the Chinese soldier.
The Chinese soldier is commonly regarded as a joke by foreigners, and as a pest by compatriots. He is mercenary. He often is, and always looks, absurdly young. His military record shows, on paper, far more of cowardice than of courage, and too frequently it is cowardice in a particularly disgraceful context. In billets he very seldom pays for what he eats, and the division to which he belongs was almost certainly created by diverting some part of the national or provincial revenue from more legitimate and needful expenditure. Should his general meet with a reverse, whether military or financial, he will be turned loose on a district which is probably far from his home with a rifle, a few rounds of ammunition, and a grievance against society. It is ten to one that his next appearance will be as a bandit.
As things stand, he is a nuisance, unmitigated by his usefulness in a time of national emergency; his only redeeming feature is his cheerfulness, and even that is too often soured by shortage of pay and rations. Small wonder that the people hate him. Take, for instance, the case of a town like Nancheng. Apart from the periodic incursion, during major but invariably unsuccessful campaigns, of better-class troops from Nanking, the town had been garrisoned for the past three years by the nth division. The nth division came from the North. They were strangers, with a different language and a different diet from the people on whom they were quartered. Their discipline had never been good, and it must have been hard to maintain even at its normal low level in that labyrinthine town, where billets were inevitably scattered and where there was no place inside the walls which could be used as a parade ground. Once you marched your men in you virtually lost control of them.
Most of the time there was nothing for the troops to do. Their vile marksmanship could not be improved, for lack of ammunition to practise with. Their equipment was ridiculous. In a file of four men you would often see three different makes of rifle (the commonest was Japanese). The homemade stick-bombs which dangled by lengths of old string from their belts looked (fortunately for the passer-by’s peace of mind) about as likely to explode as the dumb-bells which they resembled. Only a crack division can afford leather equipment; these men carried their cartridge clips in cotton bandoliers, and one day I saw half a dozen of these spread out in the sun to dry after being washed with the ammunition inside them. The nth division were, at best, caterpillars of the commonwealth. Those romantically situated forts were prosaically evacuated at the first serious threat of danger, and expeditions which marched out against the Reds returned minus their rifles and their officers.
There you have a picture of the Chinese soldier at his worst. It is an accurate picture, but it is also unjust. For the curious thing is that the Chinese soldier has it in him to be a very good soldier. He inherits all the advantages of the Japanese soldier except his military traditions. Though you might not think it to look at him, he has great strength and endurance. He can live on next to nothing. He is often a man of courage and resource, and he will be loyal to a good master. On regular pay and a full stomach his high spirits combine with his fatalism to keep his morale high, even when things are going badly. Add to this that every Chinese is some sort of a craftsman by nature; so that there is no reason why, if he could be shown some good cause to take this particular craft seriously, he should not become as adept at drill and musketry as he is at other more difficult and even less indigenous trades.
Why, then, is he in practice such a contemptible failure? Why is he a liability all round – a liability to the foreign bond-holder, whose railway dividends are diverted into a pay-chest with which the soldier’s general eventually absconds, a bitter liability to the peasant who is taxed to maintain him, forced to house him free, press-ganged into building his roads, and whose life he does no more to protect than a scarecrow would?
Why? Because of his leaders. His leaders have almost never given him a chance. For every one Chinese battle that is won by strategy and tactics, nine are won by a particularly unscrupulous form of commercial diplomacy. Though there have been exceptions, the average Chinese general fights only as a last resort; he makes war by secret negotiation, under cover of a cloud of bombastic and defiant telegrams. Most battles are lost and won before a shot is fired. While the leading troops are coming to grips an armoured train containing the less powerful general slips out of the station at his base, away from the fighting, while the telegraph office discharges a last shameless feu de joie of heroics. For a time the general will live, on the bribe which bought his departure, in one of the foreign settlements, till crisis again coincides with opportunity. Then once more he will take the field: if that is the right expression.
And even if the general is loyal to his own cause, it will be strange indeed if all his divisional commanders are. If the big man cannot be bought, or is too expensive, some of the little men may well be content with a safe return – in both senses of the phrase – before the bottom drops out of the market.
So the Chinese soldier goes into battle in the expectation of what would be, for anyone else, the bitterest disillusionment. Is it to be wondered that his name as a fighter is mud? The anti-climax of the Jehol campaign in the spring of 1933 is typical of the conditions under which he is expected to show his mettle. The Japanese columns, mechanized but numerically weak, were advancing on the Great Wall, whose passes offered the Chinese a series of positions which must have been temporarily impregnable if held with any degree of resolution. But scarcely any preparations were made to receive the enemy. No adequate entrenchments were dug in the frozen ground. Anti-tank defences were not erected till the Japanese were almost in sight. For all this, and for the hopeless confusion prevailing on the short Chinese lines of communication, there was no excuse at all, for the Chinese had been amply forewarned.
In most of the passes only the most pitiable show of resistance was put up. They were held by the Young Marshal’s troops, and rumours were current at the front that Chiang Kai-shek had quarrelled with the Young Marshal and meant to sacrifice his men by sandwiching them between the Japanese and his crack Nationalist troops from the south. These rumours were typical of many, and it is not in the least important whether they were true; the point is that, even in this national emergency, they sounded so highly probable that the soldiers threw away on the strength of them a splendid chance of winning the world’s sympathy, if nothing else. The Japanese forced the Wall without difficulty, and then, when it was too late, some of the Nanking regiments fought gallantly for a cause already lost. Also, incidentally, young men and girls of the Chinese Red Cross worked in the front line with conspicuous bravery and resource; but then they had no leaders to let them down.
The Chinese is an individualist with a shrewd commercial instinct. To profit and advantage himself and his family, he will show immense industry, skill, and courage; for decent pay and a good master he will do all that is required of him and more. That this is true of the Chinese in war as well as in peace was shown by Gordon’s levies against the T’aipings, and, more conclusively, by the British-officered Wei Hai Wei Regiment, which was disbanded after an honourable career just before the Great War.
But under bad conditions – the sort of conditions under which ninety per cent of China’s three million armed men are serving to-day – the soldier would be a fool by his own standards if he fought well. And there are not many fools in the nth or any other division.