Jack Belden was a large, gruff man. He’d been brought up in New York, went to college, but unable to find any work with the Wall Street Crash and America’s descent into the Great Depression, he’d jumped on a steamer and worked his passage to China.
For several years he worked as a docker in Shanghai, tough manual labour, where he became a socialist and an alcoholic. A fully functioning alcoholic. He took up writing one-off articles for the thriving Shanghai press and by 1937 had worked his way up to being United Press International’s chief correspondent in Wuhan.
Jack had worked in the docks. He’d worked in the streets and fields. He liked ordinary Chinese people. So when war broke out he was most comfortable as a correspondent reporting directly from the front line, living and talking with the soldiers in the trenches, the terrified civilians in the nearby villages. He shared this trait with Agnes Smedley. He lived and slept and marched with the troops.
He’d just returned from Taierzhuang, where he’d reported first-hand from the trenches. The man sat beside him in the Last Ditch Club had not only accompanied him all through the fighting, but had put himself in even greater danger than had Jack. While Jack sensibly kept his head down in the trenches, this man had leapt about, clambering onto vantage points and entering wrecked buildings visible to enemy snipers. This man, Jack’s friend, was the Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa.
Robert was in tears.
‘Here, Robert, have some of this tea, these sweet dumplings. They’re very good. Have some of my bourbon if you want.’
Jack had an open bottle of bourbon, already half-empty, on the table before him.
‘Anschluss is the death of my family.’
‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Jack gently.
‘Fascism is winning everywhere.’
Robert had a copy of the airmail edition of The Times newspaper open on the table before him. The two of them had received no news of the outside world while in Taierzhuang and this newspaper report was the first Capa had heard of Hitler’s invasion of Austria.
‘Most of my family fled to Vienna to escape the Jewish pogroms in Hungary. Except for me. I argued with them. I told them that the Austrians would start their own pogroms. Persecutions, confiscations, executions. But they would not listen, they would not follow me to Paris. And now Hitler has invaded Austria. His storm troopers will be going berserk, smashing windows, beating up women, shooting…’
‘You can’t be certain that they’ve been arrested, Robert, they might have escaped.’
‘My family are eternal Panglossians, Jack, eternal optimists. “This cannot happen to us! The apfelstrudels in Vienna are wonderful to taste! When are you coming to visit us?”’
Jack growled in sympathy.
The two of them had travelled back from Taierzhuang by overnight train and arrived in Wuhan very early in the morning. The club was empty except for the gloomy White Russian serving behind the bar. Robert returned to reading the article.
Jack felt deep pity for the man. Only months ago Robert had lost his young wife, Gerda. She, like him, was a war photographer and the couple had gone out to Spain to cover the war that had followed Franco’s fascist invasion of the country. Robert’s pictures of the fighting had made him famous around the world. His wife Gerda had gone to photograph the Battle of Brunete on the Madrid front. In the chaotic retreat afterwards she’d hitched a ride on the running board of a general’s staff car. While they were at speed a Republican tank, amid the chaos, backed into the side of the roadster. Gerda was killed instantly.
Robert and Gerda regarded themselves as soldiers in the worldwide battle against fascism. Robert took her death as a soldier would, manfully. All through the fighting in Taierzhuang Jack had not discerned any grieving or lassitude in Robert. What mourning he did must have been done privately, in the rare moments he found himself alone.
Robert’s pain as he imagined his family’s fate in Austria turned almost immediately to anger.
‘Look at this, look at this filthy piece of journalism,’ he cried, pointing to the main leader in The Times. ‘It makes me so angry.’ He passed Jack the newspaper. ‘Read this filth! Just read it aloud!’
Jack did so.
‘“Herr Hitler enjoyed two days of triumphal progress from the Austrian Frontier. Our correspondent leaves no room for doubt about the public jubilation with which he and his army were greeted everywhere.”’
‘You see, Jack? Those words could have been written by Goebbels himself.’
‘Knowing The Times, they probably were,’ commented Jack.
‘The Western press is so corrupt, so dishonest. Where’s any mention of the trade unionists, socialists, Jews who’ll all be being rounded up, kicked in the teeth, shot in the head?’
‘All Times journalists are appeasement whores,’ said Jack. ‘And most of the British press too. Their proprietors spend half their time oiling up to the dictators, visiting the Berlin Olympics, hobnobbing with Himmler and Goering and the Führer. They’ve brainwashed the British people. Times are bad.’
Suddenly Robert smiled.
‘When have they ever been anything else, comrade?’
He stood up and held out his hand.
‘Jack, I’ve got to go. Catch the midday plane. I’m off to cover the last days of the Spanish Republic. Yet another fascist triumph to chalk up.’
‘Don’t get down, Robert,’ said Jack, shaking his hand and staring intently into his friend’s eyes. ‘When the fascists get to you, remember Taierzhuang. We annihilated the cunts.’
Capa first bought two bottles of bourbon for Jack – it was club tradition that any journalist deserting Wuhan and the Last Ditch Club had to buy all present a round – then collected his photographic equipment and departed. Jack emptied all three bottles and fell into a deep, deep slumber.9
*
Here is no continuing city.
It is a very strange thing to live in a city on the brink. In a place where you have experienced great joys, great comradeship, deep emotions, which you think of instinctively as home, and yet you know that very soon, almost immediately in fact, it will be brutally assaulted, sacked, brought to naught. That very soon it will lie cold, derelict, deserted as a bird’s nest in January.
Following their defeat at Taierzhuang the Japanese have now, more cautiously than before, renewed their offensives. Up both banks of the Yangtze they are advancing slowly from Nanking west towards Wuhan. Their drive from the north has reached Zhengzhou, only 200 miles from Wuhan.
Those who walk the streets of London at least enjoy the illusion that their city is eternal, as do or did the citizens of Paris, Shanghai, Babylon, Persepolis, Balkh or Xanadu. Some cities – Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, Meshed, Hatra, Xian – actually are eternal.
But in Wuhan, before the barbarians arrive, we measure our city’s life in months, days even.
Over the last few weeks I have become obsessed with one thing alone. Each day, as I wander along the Bund, I stare into the hideously mutilated face of the tiny beggar girl – the deep rips and gouges across her cheeks and mouth, the knife plunges into her eyes – who is coerced by the gangsters who mutilated her to cry ever more piteously to the crowds who pass her by: ‘Look at me! Look at what these Japanese barbarians have done! Alms, I beg alms!’
How can anyone deliberately drag a knife across a tiny girl’s face? Stab her tiny trusting eyes?
Of course, there is selfishness in my thoughts. She stands for what could have happened to my own tiny children. Cast out, abandoned by me. Defenceless in the world. My mother… My wife…
I turn off from the Bund and start to walk down a side street. It is at this point that I am seized by the secret police. A large black limousine hisses to a halt beside me, two burly young men, dressed in trench coats and dipped down fedoras – no cliche is left unobserved – spring out, grab me by the arms and in one fluid movement hoick me into its rear seat, climb in themselves, slam the door, rap twice on the dividing screen so the driver accelerates quickly away, and then sit heavily on either side of me. I do not even have time to say ‘Oh.’
Pretty soon, though, I am reflecting on my situation.
‘Who are you?’ I ask.
No response.
‘Are you police? Are you gangsters? Do you work for the government?’
No response.
The car melts through the streets – pedestrians, rickshaws, carts vanishing on either side of us – before we silkily draw to a halt beneath a vast building, oppressive and penitential in its appearance. I am bundled inside.
‘Excuse me,’ I say, desperately trying to maintain a scintilla of self-respect – ‘but who are you, and what are you doing?’
I am bundled upstairs and into a small room in which a well-dressed man stares at me critically.
‘He looks a total mess.’
‘He’s a writer, sir,’ his assistant purrs.
‘Haven’t we got a halfway decent suit we can stick him into?’
A halfway decent suit is discovered and I am stuffed into it.
‘And give him a shave.’
I am given a shave.
Thus en-wardrobed, I am pushed towards a large and rather grand-looking door.
‘Look,’ I say, starting to get seriously upset, ‘will someone explain to me what the hell is going on?’
Me and the very well- dressed man are standing with our noses to the door.
‘Just remember this,’ he hisses at me, ‘do not, do not in any way, not even remotely, do anything or say anything that might upset him. Do not upset him. Understood? Because if you do upset him, and he gets so upset he takes his false teeth out and throws them at you, then you are finished – understand me? – finished.’
Suddenly I understand who I am about to meet. I’d never given much credence to the rumours before, always dismissed them as too bizarre, but suddenly I realize they are true. I am about to be ushered into the presence of none other than the Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of the Republic of China, the Generalissimo lui-même, Mr Chiang Kai-shek!
Someone propels me from behind and we are suddenly in his presence.
‘Good morning,’ he says.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
‘You are Mr Lao She,’ he says.
‘I am Mr Lao She,’ I say.
There is a long silence.
‘I don’t know anything about plays,’ he informs me, ‘but my wife tells me that you are the best playwright in China.’
Now is not the time to quibble about being a novelist rather than a playwright. Besides, it’s one in the eye for Gou Morou.
‘I am a playwright,’ I admit.
‘Good,’ he says.
Another long silence.
‘The thing is, my wife, whose advice I greatly admire, has decided that it would be a good thing that a grand celebration and pageant sort of thing with speaking words and drama and lots of people marching around waving flags and shouting and singing with very moving and patriotic speeches and some dancing and laughter – a sort of entertainment thing but also a deadly serious piece entitled Defend Wuhan!, written by you – should be put on in front of thousands of citizens to improve the morale of the Chinese peoples. All right?’
I stare at him. I have literally been struck dumb.
‘I said, is that all right?’
His face starts to discombobulate. His teeth work around inside his cheeks in a strangely sinister fashion. I suddenly remember the warning about his false teeth, their habit of escaping from his mouth, being violently propelled towards any object of his displeasure.
‘Of course,’ I almost shout. ‘It is a brilliant, a wonderful idea. I will do it. I will immediately do it. I cannot wait to start doing it!’
Another long silence.
I clamp down on my own teeth, desperately hoping that their immobility will somehow placate his.
‘Good,’ he finally says, turning to his next business.
I disappear from the room.
Outside, excreted from the building and once more walking down the street as an average citizen (my halfway decent suit removed and my usual shabby attire restored), I ritually, methodically curse the name of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. I mean, I’m sure that in Britain, if Mr Neville Chamberlain the prime minister wishes to see Mrs Virginia Woolf to enquire of her if she would care to compose some popular all-singing all-dancing entertainment to bolster the morale of London’s plucky East End cockneys, then he will not employ rough, surly men to snatch her off the pavements of Bloomsbury and bundle her post-haste into a back room in Downing Street.
But I live in China.
*
At the crowded bar of the Last Ditch Club the only topic of discussion was still Hitler’s invasion of Austria. And where he was going to invade next.
First, to anchor themselves, they went through the long list of his and his fellow dictators’ previous crimes.
‘Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese invasion. That set the whole ball rolling.’
‘Then there was Abyssinia in ’35. That Italian bastard went and invaded.’
‘Used mustard gas on the natives.’
‘In ’36 Adolf marches into the Rhineland. Do Britain, France, the League of Nations do anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And in the same year Franco invades Spain, overthrows the democratically elected government.’
‘Britain and France look in the other direction.’
‘And last year the fucking Japs go full banzai here in China. Twenty million dead.’
‘Twenty million.’
The voices cataloguing this inventory of atrocities were not angry – despite the alcohol drunk – but rather weary and in despair.
Their anger only started to flicker when they started to read the Times’s apologia for Hitler’s flattening of Austria.
Rewi Alley, the New Zealander, spoke first.
‘The journalist who wrote this a disgrace. He leads with Hitler’s triumphant arrival in Linz at the head of all his storm troopers. It’s almost as though he’s in love with all those blond, blue-eyed boys.’
‘Flatulent bumboy!’
‘No attempt to distance himself from them, objectify, give his readers some suggestion of what these thugs are getting up to in the backstreets – massacring socialists, gypsies, Jews.’
‘It’s not journalism, its propaganda.’
James Bertram, a young stringer for the Telegraph, took over the indictment.
‘Then Hitler climbs out onto the balcony of some hotel in the marketplace and starts ranting on about blood and destiny and Aryan master races and the need to exterminate lesser races and beings – the full eugenics copy book – and the Times hack just scribbles it all down verbatim…’
‘All the time creaming his pants.’
‘…and the worst thing is The Times in London publishes it – verbatim. Not a single word of caution, reprimand, decency.’
‘Hitler’s just going to go on and on, isn’t he,’ stated Rewi Alley, ‘and our leaders – Chamberlain, Daladier – aren’t going to do a thing to stop him.’
‘So where’s the bastard going to invade next?’
‘Czechoslovakia!’ came the unanimous cry.
Only three people in the room – apart from the gloomy White Russian bartender – were uninvolved in this tribal denunciation. One was Jack Belden, who was still sleeping off his three bottles of bourbon. The second was the immaculately attired Old Etonian Peter Fleming, who sat in an armchair seemingly indifferent to it all. Surreptitiously, however, as the abuse of The Times (for which he wrote) heightened, he quietly folded away its airmail edition that he’d been reading and started perusing a dog-eared old copy of Country Life. The third silent individual was a rather nervous young English Quaker, fresh off the boat, named George Hogg. George had picked up a job as a ‘stringer’ with Reuters. He obviously had feelings about the discussion but did not dare enter it. Why, he wondered as a pacifist, were all his fellow journalists so keen on stopping this war in China, but couldn’t wait to start a new one in Europe?