THERE WERE, YOU remember, two roads running south from Nanchang. Of these we had now explored the more easterly. There remained the other, whose terminus – a village called Kian – was, like Nanfeng on the first road, the farthest stronghold of the government troops. We had been promised a visit to Kian.
But when we presented ourselves – this time at military headquarters – the authorities hedged. The road, they said, was not good; there were various difficulties. … Eventually it transpired that within the last few days the Communists had gained possession of a large section of the road and had burnt the bridges on it. Kian could be reached only, if it could be reached at all, by boat down the river: a journey of several days. By road we could go no farther south than a place called Hsinkan.
Very well, we said, we would go to Hsinkan. Headquarters kindly promised a car and a guide.
And what a car! Or rather, what a driver! We left Nanchang for the second time at dawn on the morning after we had returned to it. Myself, I can remember little of the journey to Hsinkan. Something in last night’s Chinese food had got under the guard of a normally ostrich-like digestion, and I would have welcomed death. The driver gave me every chance of doing so. The Hsinkan road ran through low-lying country on top of a narrow embankment. The Chinese peasant has about half as much traffic sense as a Buff Orpington, and peasants were for some reason plentiful that morning. Some of them had brought their water-buffalo with them, some a flock of geese.
This substantial proportion of the agrarian population the driver dismissed as figments of his imagination. There can be little doubt that, in some form or other, they appeared to him, for he acknowledged their existence by a savage increase of speed, whenever an increase of any kind was possible. He pressed his foot on the accelerator almost subconsciously, as he might have passed his hand across his brow, to banish what he took to be an hallucination. I think he was drunk.
We reached Hsinkan, by a miracle, with no blood on our hands, and still in possession of our lives. In this village, which had lately been recaptured from the Reds and was surrounded by a high stockade, we presented ourselves at the headquarters of the fire brigade. Why we took this course I never discovered; we were in the charge of a rather incalculable man, and it was he who decided on it.
His name was Colonel Fan. He was young for his rank, being only twenty-three, but his rise had been rapid; he had joined the army two years ago, and was now on the point of retiring. He spoke excellent English, wore a smart blue uniform, and was full of a negative charm. But there was about him a certain vagueness and inconsequence, a willingness to fall in with any idea coupled with a complete inability to carry it out, which prevented him from being an ideal guide. After a long and desultory conversation with the chief of the fire brigade (who, to my infinite regret, was in undress uniform) Colonel Fan was persuaded to conduct us to military headquarters.
The commander of the garrison was from Shantung. The men of that province might be called the Scots of China; not because they exemplify any of those characteristics which music hall tradition associates with the North British, but because they are to be found in the remotest parts of China, as Scots are to be found all over the world, displaying great enterprise and great industry. Li was from Shantung, and the number of his co-provincials whom he came across at every stage of our travels was astonishing.
I was by this time feeling very low indeed, and the kindly commandant lent me his wooden bed while he gave the rest of us lunch and the local news. After lunch we drove on (the driver had mercifully sobered down) to his outposts a few miles farther down the road. The country looked devastated. Houses were deserted, and some of them burnt to the ground: hardly any of the fields were tilled.
The headquarters of the outpost line were in a farm which stood in a grove of ancient trees and bristled with sentries who handled their Thompson sub-machine guns with a terrifying casualness. The officer in charge gave us what information he could and confirmed the current theory that the road beyond this point had been cut by the burning of all the bridges a few days ago. He also gave us some pineapple out of a tin. We said good-bye and started back.
It was the hottest day of the journey. As we sat in the car, waiting for Colonel Fan to come on board, a thing happened for which I still reproach myself. A little boy appeared at the window of the car. He was wearing military uniform, but he could not have been more than twelve. One arm was in a sling, and filthy bandages partially covered some very bad sores on his legs; he hopped along with the help of a crutch.
He held out his hand to us, and began to speak in a plaintive, urgent voice. His face was puckered in that disconcerting way which sometimes makes it hard to decide whether a child is going to laugh or cry. We asked Li what he was saying.
It seemed that he came from farther south. His family had been massacred by the Communists, and he had taken arms against them with a Nationalist division. But now his commander had been defeated and he himself was wounded. He wanted to get to Hankow, where his mother’s family lived. Would we give him a lift?
While this was being translated the driver had given the boy a dollar and was shooing him away. The child began to cry in an automatic, almost perfunctory way; it looked as if he had wept a good deal lately.
I was at the time, what with one thing and another, not much more than semi-conscious. Before I was really alive to the situation Colonel Fan had returned, jumped into the car, and given the driver an order which crystallized his determination to have nothing to do with the boy. The small desperate hand was dislodged from the coachwork, and the car shot forward. We left him, crying, in the middle of the hot and empty road.
In spite of our tardy protests, Colonel Fan refused to turn back. Our relations with him were thereafter somewhat strained, and in Hsinkan he refused to let us photograph a prehistoric armoured car on the enigmatic but sufficient grounds that ‘it would not be nice’.
On the way back we stopped at a place called Changshu. Our objective was the Catholic Mission. But the Chinese, poor pagan souls, had not yet learnt to differentiate between the various brands of Christianity, and the ‘Jesus-men’ to whom we were directed turned out to be two elderly Protestant ladies from Bavaria. They were charming; they gave us cold water to drink, which sounds a small favour but which in the interior of China you appreciate very much. Yes, they had heard of the Catholics; they could even direct us to their Mission (it was within a bow-shot of their own). But they had never met the Fathers.
They had never met the Fathers. It was less of an admission than a boast; it was made with a self-righteous sniff. When they made it, I could not help thinking that there was a lot to be said for Lord Melbourne’s verdict on religion; it was all right as long as you didn’t let it interfere with your private life. For here were two gallant ladies in exile relentlessly ignoring the only other white people they had a chance of seeing from one year’s end to the next. For a long time they had been neighbours; often they had shared a common peril, always they had shared the same discomforts and the same difficulties. Yet they had never allowed themselves to meet. What, I wonder, may have been the effect on the observant Chinese, to whom the West is for ever counselling the virtues of unity and co-operation?
When we did at last find the Catholics, we were received with great kindness by Father Breuker, a nervous, bearded Dutchman. His hospitable impulses, for ever unexpectedly recurring, threw him into a state of extreme agitation. His conversation, rapid rather than fluent, was conducted impartially in four languages – English, French, German, and Chinese; just as we had unravelled the thread of his discourse, he would bound to his feet with a reproachful exclamation and from a cupboard produce a bottle of homebrewed beer, or a corkscrew, or another box of matches, or a twist of tobacco, at the same time apologizing with tears in his eyes because he had not produced them earlier. His embarrassment and mortification were painful to see.
Difficult though he was to understand, he gave us some useful information. He had once spent three weeks hiding in the hills from the Reds, and was able to confirm at first hand what we had heard of their anti-matrimonial campaign, which had had some success with the younger generation.
It was late when we left him, and Nanchang was still far away. It was not very much nearer when we had a puncture. For some reason we found it impossible to get the spare wheel on, so the puncture was mended; but as soon as the wheel was in position the tyre went flat again. It looked as if we should have to spend the night where we were, in the middle of a desolate expanse of pea-nut fields.
Leaving Li and the driver to make a last assault on the spare wheel, Gerald and I walked on with Colonel Fan. I had been restored, by somewhat drastic means, to health, and was ready for some food, my first for twenty-four hours. We walked for a long way in the twilight, under a cool grey sky, and eventually got some tea at the hut of a man who appeared to be a gooseherd on a considerable scale.
The prospect of sleeping by the car meant cleaner lying and better ventilation than the Grand Hotel de Kiangsi could offer, and was not unwelcome. The prospect of sleeping on an empty stomach was another matter. Colonel Fan was not much help. Reluctant to admit a state of emergency which would demand the use of his own initiative, he smiled politely and pretended that nothing had happened. Occasionally he said, in a very cheerful voice, ‘The gates of Nanchang will be shut by now,’ or ‘It is going to rain, I think’.
So we were relieved when a sudden blaze of light down the road showed that the headlights had been turned on. This meant that the car was in running order again; our proximity to the Communists had made it unsafe to use the lights while she was out of action. In due time the car appeared, and we headed once more for Nanchang; superhuman exertions had managed to affix the spare wheel, and the driver hoped that good luck would keep it in position.
It did. The driver was infected with something of his pristine verve, and we reached Nanchang in record time, annihilating in our progress only one very large dog. After some delay the huge gates were opened to admit us, and by midnight Gerald and I were asleep. Not all the noise in the world – and most of it seemed to be temporarily concentrated in the Grand Hotel de Kiangsi – could have kept us awake.