THE WALLS OF Nancheng were incredibly thick, and to go through the gate was to traverse a tunnel. At the end of this we were stopped by soldiers armed only with what seemed to be metal ram-rods. The Food Controller beamed with a paternal pride. This was part of his blockade; every sack of rice or anything else was probed with these stabbing ram-rods before it was allowed in or out of the city. Smugglers of ammunition to the Reds were thus apprehended.
As a matter of fact, the Food Controller was very nearly apprehended himself, for he was carrying a little portfolio, and his zealous minions (to whom, since they were illiterate, his name and rank, on even his visiting card, meant nothing at all) tried to impound it. When one is much in the company of the Chinese one becomes almost as sensitive to somebody else’s loss of face as to somebody else’s bereavement; but the scene, though painful, was short, for an officer arrived and all was well.
Among familiar smells, familiar stares, familiar noises, and familiar heat, we trudged through narrow stone-flagged streets. They were very ancient streets; down the centre of each the wheel-barrows of generations had worn a deep, smooth groove in the stone, as direct and unwavering as a tram-line. Presently we reached the yamen.
Here we were welcomed by the Special Commissioner, a fluttering ineffectual little man of considerable charm, who retailed to us opinions on the local situation which were too obviously fathered by his wishes. We listened politely, and then, since it was still early in the day, began to inquire about the possibility of getting farther down the road before nightfall. We hoped, we said, to pay a more protracted visit to Nancheng on our way back.
Ah, but we must wait for some refreshment, said the Commissioner; just a little refreshment, something to restore our energies after our tiring drive.
We beamed, groaning inwardly. We knew that we were in for a twenty-course meal in the middle of the afternoon.
I had sensed already, in Mr. Hsiao and especially in Mr. Chen, a reluctance to continue our journey further than Nancheng. I for my part was determined to reach Nanfeng which, you remember, was the most advanced post held by government troops and which had recently been besieged by the Red Armies. While we waited for lunch I began trying to secure our line of advance.
In this it looked at first as if I had an ally. He was a young officer who had been trained in Japan, a brusque, sardonic man with no nonsense about him. I questioned him in such a way that his answers must throw some light on our prospects of proceeding to Nanfeng, and at first that light was a reassuring one. Then I made the Westerner’s usual mistake of pressing my point too hard, of being too obvious and too specific, of trying to get them to commit themselves; and the tide turned against me.
Maps were produced – maps on which the southward road ran between two perilously converging seas of red, and around which was built up a very pessimistic estimate of our chances of reaching Nanfeng alive. The Japanese-trained officer, hitherto so seemingly impatient of civilian qualms, was rallied to his countrymen’s aid by the common horror of my forthright methods – methods which at a committee meeting in London would have seemed despicably circuitous; and he coined for the occasion rumours of an impending Red attack on Nanfeng. Even if we got there, he now said, we should never get out again.
Someone else weighed in with the all too plausible theory that we might get in and we might get out, but we should never get back; spies would report our arrival, and our car would be ambushed in the hills on our return journey. Foreign hostages would mean a great deal to the Communists.
We adjourned to the next room for lunch. The debate still raged, behind a screen of compliment and circumlocution. We were handicapped (for none of them knew English) by having to plead our cause through a hostile intermediary, Mr. Chen; but here Li came in useful, for Mr. Chen knew that, limited though our lingua franca was, we used Li as a check on his interpreting whenever we suspected distortion or suppression.
Responsibility: that was what they feared. No one would accept responsibility for holding us up; no one would accept responsibility for letting us go on. With bland, ingenuous faces they shuffled responsibility hastily from one to the other, like children playing Hunt the Slipper. It was impossible to corner them; we might as well have tried to pick up mercury with our chopsticks.
At the end of the meal, when the rice bowls had been emptied, the Special Commissioner suddenly got up and made a long, formal speech of welcome, in which of course there occurred no reference to the issue uppermost in everybody’s mind. Gerald replied with a speech of thanks (Gerald was far better than I was at the essential courtesies). I was then called upon, and made what in China passes for a fighting speech. I lavished praise on almost every aspect of life in China and, more specifically, in Kiangsi, and then passed on to an account of Japanese iniquities in Manchuria. The bandits there, I said, were a problem very similar in many respects to that presented by the Communists here; and, strongly though I (of course) disapproved of the Japanese, I had nothing but gratitude for the courtesy and efficiency with which they had facilitated my investigation of the bandit problem. They had acted as though they had nothing to hide, nothing which they were ashamed of my seeing; they had even allowed me to accompany an expedition into the heart of the bandit territory. But in this, I pointed out, they were wise; it was in their own interests. For it enabled me to send back to the great newspaper which I had the honour to represent not only a fuller and fairer, but a more readable account of the true situation. In the meantime, what a fine town Nancheng was … And so on.
This speech dragged in the element of face and had some effect. But not enough. The best we could get was a compromise. There was a small fortified post forty li down the road to Nanfeng (three li go to a mile) and our hosts would find out by telephone from the commander of it whether we could go there without danger. We could then return before nightfall and sleep in Nancheng. We accepted this proposal as a pis aller and the meeting broke up.
Poor Mr. Chen! I doubt if he ever travelled forty li in greater discomfort in his life. In the first place, he was suffering from acute physical fear, and incessantly searched the excellent cover along the roadside with apprehensive eyes. In the second place, I behaved diabolically towards him. I adopted an air of whimsical resignation, as if I had made up my mind that we should never see Nanfeng. ‘Well, well, what can one expect in China?’ was the line I took. But as I prattled innocently away I levelled against the unhappy Mr. Chen indirect and roundabout charges of cowardice, inconsistency, breach of faith, and mendacity – failings, which, I implied, bade fair to bring disgrace, not only on himself, but on his province and indeed on all China. The whole English-speaking world was waiting on tenterhooks for The Times to reveal the truth about Communism in China. How could the truth be told if I was prevented from going to Nanfeng? And what would the English-speaking world think of Mr. Chen, who was instructed to take me there and didn’t?
Poor Mr. Chen, threatened with the world-wide exposure of his native and quite pardonable ineffectiveness as the motive power behind large-scale anti-foreign machinations, became perturbed as well as embarrassed. My absurd accusations were all implied and could not be specifically refuted; Mr. Chen’s attempts to clear himself got him into ever deeper waters. At last he lost his nerve altogether and spontaneously volunteered to go behind the civil authorities and appeal to military headquarters for a pass to Nanfeng. I knew that he would of course arrange for an unfavourable answer to be returned; but I felt that we had scored a moral victory on a difficult and unfamiliar wicket.
By now we had reached the post which was our destination – a small village lying on both banks of a river, which was crossed by the usual bridge of boats. Beyond the village on the eastern bank a ridge was crowned with a bright new fort, and when we had routed out the commander in the village we walked up to inspect it. At least we walked and the commander, rather surreptitiously, ran. Ours had been a surprise visit, and it was necessary to wake up the garrison.
It was a nice, sturdily-built little fort, of a medieval pattern: the sort of fort which has been erected in China for many centuries. By the time we arrived its battlements were duly decorated with a sentry, bare-legged, juvenile, and self-conscious, who stood gazing eastward with rapt eyes towards the marches of Fukien. We were told that a Communist attack was expected at any moment from that quarter. The fort was garrisoned by about a dozen men, and stocked with provisions for five days in case of siege; the water-supply did not look to me as if it would last that long. Though it was less than a year old, the fort had already changed hands twice. The Reds had captured it in the preceding spring, the defenders, for lack of promised reinforcements, being driven back into the river, where most of them were drowned.
At this place we got a side-light on the intelligence methods practised by the government forces. In the anti-Communist, as in the anti-bandit campaigns, intelligence is an all-important factor. The trouble is that peasants within the Red Areas are too effectively terrorized to give away useful information, while dislike of the Nationalist troops makes peasants on the fringes equally uncommunicative. Spies have to be bought, and for a stiff price. That price had just gone up. Two members of a small civilian patrol, sent out from this post three days ago, had been captured by the Reds and beheaded; the survivors were now demanding six dollars a day instead of four. Four dollars a day is fantastically high pay in that part of the world.
We drove back to Nancheng in an atmosphere of some constraint. Mr. Chen brooded over his wrongs, we over what we conceived to be our rights. We arrived only just in time to get inside the walls before they shut the gates for the night; our luggage was still in quarantine outside.
In the city we parted. Mr. Chen departed to the yamen with a last half-hearted promise to interview military headquarters about a pass before he went to bed. We made for the Catholic Mission, where we hoped to sleep.