AT MILITARY HEADQUARTERS we drank tea, in the cool, pillared hall of what had once been a temple, with the officer in charge. As we were talking, the telephone rang. My instinct, which is sometimes oddly infallible, told me that the message concerned us.
It did. As Mr. Chen listened to the conversation, there spread slowly over his face that greenish tinge which it had worn in the car; I could guess the nature of the message.
At last the officer put down the receiver and spoke in grave tones to Mr. Chen. Mr. Chen, still more sepulchrally, passed the information on to us.
It did not, as a matter of fact, amount to much. A military post half way between us and Nancheng reported that firing had broken out along the road. It was thought that a Communist attack was developing. The road might be cut at any moment.
It sounded to me like a vague, panicky rumour, probably released only to ensure that we did not loiter in Nanfeng, where real danger was expected to threaten soon. I said that we would stick to our plan of going back to Nancheng that evening unless any more specific warning were received. Mr. Chen licked his lips and fanned himself with that emblem of the West, a boater. We set out to inspect the defences.
From the turreted walls we looked south-west towards the high and densely-wooded mountains which will, I think, for many years prove an impregnable bulwark to the main Communist area. In those hills campaigning is about as difficult as it could be. The only communications are narrow stone-flagged paths along which troops must march in single file. Little of the land is cultivated, and such food supplies as do exist can be stripped by the Communists in retreat. An invading army must carry its own victuals with it and – since animal transport is out of the question – on its own backs. All movement is perforce slow and, in the inevitable absence of good information about a highly mobile enemy, usually ineffective. I do not think that there is in China to-day even the nucleus of an army capable of clearing the Red Areas in southern Kiangsi.
We examined the defences which had withstood so well the siege of last spring, and heard from the officer of the Communists’ tactics in the field. What had impressed him most was the dash with which they charged – sometimes, admittedly, behind a screen of boys armed with spears on whom the defenders emptied their magazines unprofitably. They had had, he thought, about one hundred rounds a man; their machine guns had been well used, though they were obviously short of ammunition. They had treated prisoners well.
The Nanfeng garrison I took to be better than most. It was found by the 8th Division, and quartered mostly in forts outside the town; this obviated that relaxation of discipline in billets to which I have referred elsewhere. Moreover, the 8th Division had been there, on and off, for four years; the inhabitants were used to them, liked them, and in some cases had even married them.
The Catholic Fathers had told us the night before that one of their number was still on outpost duty in Nanfeng, and our tour of the walls brought us near a Christian church. So we said good-bye to the officer, arranged to meet Mr. Chen at the car in an hour’s time, and called on Father Duffy.
Father Duffy was a giant of a young man with red hair and a disarming brogue. On seeing us, his first action was to send a boy to haul up several bottles of beer from the bottom of the well, which is the only refrigerator in the interior of China. We talked and drank. Father Duffy, apparently unconscious of the fact that he already qualified as a hero and was in a fair way to qualify as a martyr, treated his precarious situation in Nanfeng as a source of comedy only. The Reds, during their occupation of the town, had desecrated his church and damaged the mission; and those of their troops who were quartered in it could clearly never have passed even the most elementary examination in sanitation and hygiene. Broken windows, splintered doors, and a thick layer of red paint over the outside of the buildings testified to anti-Christian sentiments which may have had their origin in Moscow but were more likely to be merely a symptom of anti-foreignism.
One thing that Father Duffy told us threw light on a puzzling question. Were there any foreigners working in the Red Areas? The best information – and it was very good information – available in Shanghai indicated that there were. But hitherto the most diligent inquiries in Kiangsi had failed to produce confirmation for this theory. Almost everyone we spoke to – civil and military authorities, renegades and refugees – had heard of the foreigners: had met those who had seen them: could specify their number (which was generally two) and their nationality (which was either German or Russian, more usually the latter): but had not, unfortunately, actually come across them themselves. From the evidence we had collected I felt convinced that there had been foreigners – probably two Russians – acting as advisers to the Communists, but that they had either left the Red Areas or else no longer occupied positions of importance in them.
What Father Duffy said confirmed the first of these conclusions – that there had once been foreigners with the Reds, and that they had held sufficient power to be widely known and feared. When things were quiet in the Nanfeng district Father Duffy had gone out on a round of visits (‘itinerating’, the Panters called it in Jehol) to converts in outlying villages on the fringe of the Communist area. No one would accompany him, so he travelled alone. More than once his appearance was the signal for the evacuation of the village; the people recognized him afar off as a foreigner and at once associated him with the Communists; which seemed to show that Shanghai’s information had once been accurate and was not wildly out of date.
Father Duffy’s company was so congenial, and his beer so cool, that we were late for our appointment with Mr. Chen. He was awaiting us in a state of profound and growing agitation, and we were bustled into the car without delay. More firing had been heard on the Nancheng road, and Mr. Chen disliked the prospect of the drive only less than he feared the possibility of being marooned in Nanfeng by a Communist advance. As we drove off, there was a strong suggestion of the tumbril about our car. Mr. Chen was a Sydney Carton without the comfort of a Sydney Carton’s convictions.
It was a beautiful evening, and the chance of an ambush lent the peaceful landscape a dramatic quality which it had lacked that morning. The military posts along the road had been instructed to redouble their precautions on our behalf; from points of vantage round the isolated little forts sentries waved a conjectural All Clear with flags. On the long stretches between the forts our driver approached the corners with unwonted caution. Even Li seemed subdued.
But of course nothing happened. We got through without so much as a false alarm. If there had been fighting near the road, nobody seemed any the worse for it. Mr, Chen’s complexion reverted slowly to its normal hue, and we reached Nancheng in such good time that we were able to push straight on to Fuchow, where Gerald and I spent the night with the American Catholics.
Next day, in spite of a slight contretemps when our bus was driven too impetuously on board a ferry, we were back at the Grand Hotel de Kiangsi.