THE EQUIPMENT from the Fukien trip was at the lab, still packed in its baskets. A Ch’u was not there, and none of the lab workmen had seen him. He had left no message. He was not at the hospital. David went to his hovel of a home, off an alley in the Chinese city, and found him there, comatose on a brick k’ang.
David rushed frantically around town until he found Dr. Charles and the two men hurried to A Ch’u’s house. A Ch’u had recovered consciousness and was fairly lucid. The two men had just got his consent to their hospitalizing him when the Chinese doctor who had been treating him arrived, an old-style gentleman in slightly threadbare silks, with the black beard of fifty hairs of a wise man waving from his chin tip. Here was a sensitive moment of contesting authorities, in which A Ch’u’s devotion to the magician of Western science was put on the scales with his traditional Chinese pride, delicacy, and courtesy. A Ch’u said he had been having acupuncture treatments for four days; he would like one more. The Chinese doctor “took a needle several inches long from a case and stabbed it four times full length into A Ch’u’s abdomen.” Soon Dr. Charles said he could not stand by and watch any more of this. Unsterilized! He pointed out to Treadup the angry inflammation around the puncture holes of previous treatments. Peritonitis was certain. The Chinese doctor suffered a massive loss of face. The patient passed out. Dr. Charles hurried off to the hospital to set up an exploratory operation. Treadup went out for a conveyance; he thought a mule cart with a bedroll on it would be the quickest thing to find and get ready. He returned to A Ch’u’s in fifteen minutes and found him dead.
DAVID TREADUP’S mourning for his assistant grew in a complex way into something much bigger than itself. At first he was full of A Ch’u’s loyalty, alertness, ingenuity, and skill:
If in Shanghai we were out on a search for some hard-to-find piece of apparatus, he would look out to see that I was not run down by streetcars, automobiles, and the like. He was always thinking ahead and saying, “Now if we don’t look out it will be ‘lai pu chi’ (‘come not around’).”
Six months before, A Ch’u had “decided for the Christian life,” and two days after he died the Lecture Department staff and other friends gathered in the tiny house for a short Christian funeral service. David
helped carry the coffin across the fields to the Christian burying grounds on the outskirts of Shanghai. There, by an awful coincidence, I noticed that one of the gravediggers who helped let the coffin down was blind in one eye, the other fast losing its sight. We asked, and we learned that when he had had some disease in one eye, a Chinese doctor had punctured it and then, with the same needle, the other, causing it to become infected. The constant wholesale ruin of lives by ignorance and malpractice in China puts iron in one’s blood to be doing something about it.
For a long time there had been no anger in David, but in the next few days, he wrote, “I reached in my quiver of arrows and pulled out one with a poisoned tip that I could only call a shaft of resentment.” He testified that he felt the “bitter unfairness” of the red pimples of smallpox on the faces of the children in Fukien, the “appalling waste” of the cholera in Foochow. News had just come of a cruel outbreak of pneumonic plague in North China. David thought of the anguish of the teacher in Shaowu, understanding that the foreign condensed milk in which he had had such faith had killed his baby daughter. Suddenly David virtually collapsed; for two days, off and on, he sobbed in Emily’s patient arms. “I realized, with great shame, that I was crying out against Jehovah at last, at last, for taking away our little Nancy.”
Then one night he was jolted out of a deep sleep and sitting up in bed was terrified by the sight of a finger pointing at him. It seemed real—slightly gnarled by arthritis and stiff with rebuke. He could not sleep the rest of the night. In the morning, while he was shaving, he deciphered the vision—a memory, he realized, not a dream: Dr. Ezra Finn’s accusing finger looming in his face in the Shaowu street. Lectures on wireless telegraphy, when there is all this suffering around us?
DAVID rose at dawn, dressed in his rowing togs, and took a ricksha to the Rowing Club. He rowed hard on the river. Afterward he carried his shell back into the boathouse and set it up in its place on the layered racks. He was about to turn away to leave, when—as he reported for the first time many years later, in “Search”—he felt himself in the grip of an old familiar impulse. “I don’t think I knew what I was doing,” he wrote. He reached up and grasped the rigger of the singles shell just above Ecarg II on the racks and pulled, wrenching the craft off its supports and letting it crash sideways to the boathouse floor.
I did not even bother to check and see whether its landing on the end of its rigger damaged the scull. The worst of it was that I felt so happy as I did it. It was if I were setting myself free in some mysterious way. I still cannot understand it.
We have no way of knowing whether David ever acknowledged what he had done; whether he might have explained it away as an accident; or whether, if the shell was damaged, he made amends, either openly or anonymously. All we see in the diary at the time are these brief notes: “Feeling at sixes and sevens.” And, a few days later: “Turned things upside down at the lab.”
We can deduce from subsequent reports what the latter note meant. Some time in those next few days David apparently persuaded his colleagues to uproot all the work that was being done on his own most beloved subjects—“Wonders of Light,” “Marvels in Astronomy,” “High and Low Pressure Electrical Phenomena”—and to concentrate on developing lectures on public health. By this time Dr. Charles had completed his two years of language study, and he and David together now began to assemble the demonstration materials for several lectures: “Sanitation in a Chinese City,” “Prevention of TB,” “Flies Kill People,” “Cholera,” “Bubonic Plague,” “First Aid.” David seems to have thrown himself into this work with all his usual energy and outward enthusiasm, but we can tell from what surfaced in the next few weeks that he must have been struggling to keep his footing against a powerful psychic undertow.
• For the tuberculosis lecture Treadup and Charles designed, and the Chinese workmen built, a vivid exhibit of the death rate from the disease: a Chinese man walks out of his house and falls into his coffin—one every thirty-seven seconds.
• To dramatize the value of social cooperation in mass public-health campaigns, they constructed two panoramas, operated by electrical motors. On one, many men turn small wheels in different directions and at different speeds; on the other, their combined and coordinated efforts at small wheels make a huge central wheel go round.
• The laboratory workmen crafted with startling realism two large heads: the clear and benign face of a clean-living man, a paradigm of glowing health; and the ravaged, wrinkled, burnt-out, scabrous, soul-stung, and unrepentant face of a man who has ignored all the laws of hygiene.
• The hookworm exhibit had no mercy on the squeamish: a glass case containing arms and legs with sores; a life-sized boy showing the symptoms of an extreme case—sores, emaciation, pallor, a pot belly, the face of an old man.
WITHIN A FEW WEEKS J. R. Charles was on the road, in Hunan Province, and he began sending back ebullient messages:
The race is on, the horse’s tail is in the air, the driver’s hat is far behind in the dust—no time to mention details.
The crowds on the second night were so great the streets were blocked, the police helpless, and we finally had to shut down the lantern-slide lectures. We were not prepared for such crowds. We almost had a riot, the people were fighting to get in.
Here [in Changsha] 600 students, headed by two brass bands, bearing flags and banners with antituberculosis slogans (“Don’t spit on the floor!”), marched through the streets. As crowds emerged from side streets and alleys, the students handed out thousands of leaflets, giving simple facts in simple language. At the principal street corners, student speakers with charts addressed the gathered masses. Now! Note this! Immediately behind the antituberculosis parade came a procession of sixteen condemned criminals being marched to the execution grounds. Each had a long spear tied upright behind his back, marking him as a man about to have his head amputated. The contrast between the old and the new could not have been lost even on the poorest and least educated citizens.
We have established seven plague inoculation centers. The chief of police is raising a fund to help him buy dead rats and to give further inoculation to 10,000 people. We have already sent to India for $500-worth of serum to start with.
ONE DAY a party of students from the Institute for the Chinese Blind visited the Shanghai Lecture Bureau laboratory. Five of the staff each took a small group and guided their hands over the different pieces of apparatus. What David wrote of this experience reveals the unsteady movement of his state of mind during this period—in its swings from sensitivity and generosity to bleakness, self-doubt, and impatience:
How eagerly they felt things! How intent the expression of their faces, even the posture of their heads, as they took in the wonderful new conceptions!—the big alternating-current electromagnet: the flying machine: the gyroscope: the wireless telegraph. The flickering of amazements in their facial muscles as we began to get these different pieces into operation—with the big gyro sweeping around in a five-foot circle, to hold out their fingertips to feel it as it went by and to realize how it swung through space without any apparent means of support—and then the start of the aeroplane in a wide circle around the room, the group huddled in the center, swiveling their heads as they followed its path by the sound of the propeller—then the cocking of their ears to the buzzing messages of the wireless as we listened to the signals of the battleships up and down the ten miles of river between here and the sea! How open they were to new sensations and new ideas! They thrilled me and disturbed me. I shivered with envy. What was it that they were seeing behind those shut windows of theirs that I had never been able to see? Was it a dimension of time? The immanence of a deity within these wonders—no matter whether Christian or not—an ordering intelligence of some kind? Whatever it was, I felt dull to it. The hands I guided to feel the apparatus trembled; mine did not. Who in that room was truly blind—they or I?
THE OUTWARD MOTIONS of David’s normal life went on. He had been booked for another tour in northern and central China, with the three dependable mainstays: gyroscope, aeroplane, wireless—to Mukden, Tientsin, Paoting (under the Republic, the city’s name had been shortened), Peking, Wuchang, Changsha. David’s existence had been so headlong and so exciting that he had never felt the slightest need of vacations, and he and his family had not had a summer break in Kuling or Peitaiho for more than four years; this time, by way of compensation, Blackton approved his taking Emily and the children with him on tour. Their company made the trip seem—at least at first—festive, a vacation in itself even though he was lecturing. The start was impressive. In Mukden he gave an outdoor lecture on the wireless which was attended by the biggest single crowd he had ever had, ten thousand boys and men, standing on their feet to listen. “The police used a clever scheme,” he wrote, “to keep the crowd from surging too close to the apparatus: they got several rows of boys in front to sit down on the ground.”
In Peking, however, two things happened which were followed by a sharp downturn in Treadup’s spirits. While setting up the wireless apparatus before a lecture, his new assistant, a man named Ching, who had been showing promising aptitudes in the Shanghai laboratory, dropped the receiver to the floor; the glass tube of the coherer broke; Treadup had a spare, but the lecture was delayed nearly an hour, with a hall full of Peking luminaries—“the most important audience since the lecture before Sun Yat-sen in Nanking,” David bitterly commented. The diary: “What bothered me most was that I was so bothered. I imagined I saw the finger while I was lecturing.”
Two days later he heard the conservation demonstration by his friend Y. Y. Han, with material from the Fukien trip worked into it. He wrote in his diary that he did not like it. “Shallow.” In the next sentence he rushed in with Christian charity: “Not that Y. Y. was shallow. It struck me that the method is. The method is mine, not his.”
We gather from later correspondence that during the Paoting stopover Treadup had at least one long talk with Letitia Selden, in which he evidently poured out some of the doubts that had been building in his mind ever since the death of A Ch’u. On the surface, however, the Paoting visit was a most happy one, especially for Emily, seeing old friends and having them coo over her children. Even Miss Titty’s young yokefellow, Miss Demestrie, was less jealous and gloomy than usual. David and Emily took some of the familiar walks together. But underneath Treadup’s dogged cheerfulness, a gnawing was going on. “Prayed for the souls of the martyrs,” David wrote. Somewhere at the root of his unease the old romantic fantasy of Syracuse days—of selflessly giving much more than he had so far been able to give, giving one’s all, even one’s very life, as Jesus did, for love of others—must have been at work.
Changsha, November 5, 1914.
My beloved Miss Titty:
We approached Changsha from the river, rather dismal in the rain, the city straggling up over a hill to the left. The stone flagging of the streets is coated at this season with black mud. But they are broad streets, and the people in them seem to me better looking, healthier, and happier than those in the cities where more foreigners have penetrated. (I’ve seen Sage, by the way, of the Yale school here—friend from my Kuling language-school days.) There’s more self-respect and independence among the Chinese here, you find neither that groveling servility nor ill-concealed dislike that is so common in the “settlements.” Fewer beggars. The faces of some of the commonest laborers seem robust and luminous.
Or do I imagine all that solidity and strength? I wish for it in myself. You were so good to let me unburden myself. I value the afterglow of the touch of your hand on my cheek! Will you bear with me if I tell you—it is easier to be truthful at this remove—that I don’t think I told you the half of my concern?
You see, I think I was trying to make myself seem worthy in your eyes. I am unworthy. I must stand naked before you. Where can I begin? My lectures? It is easy to dazzle, and I enjoy it too much. I am addicted to applause, to excited laughter, to the total silence of amazement followed by murmuring in the audience. I need more and more. I have begun to wonder about the real effect of the lectures. I told you about Han’s conservation lecture, my sense of the shallowness of what I had spawned. It is my shallowness. Han’s show depends on mechanical tricks I invented—the flood! Oh, things like that thrill the audience, but I’m afraid that in the end all we are left with is entertainment. The audience is more interested in the devices behind the magic—the tank from which the deluge pours and the collecting tank under the table that receives it—than they are in taking home a determination to reforest China. I fear for our holding power with the social message—is it really any better than that of street preaching or that of our old fanatical itinerators, with their message of salvation? What then of the gospel message that is supposed to lie behind my social message?
I told you of the amazing results Dr. Charles is having. They rankle with me. He is having a bigger success than mine. I think I am envious of Charles’s happiness and high spirits—isn’t that awful? I feel that my pocket has been picked. They are taking my idea away from me. (I realize that I freely gave it to them, yet I have this awful feeling of having been robbed.) I feel a petty anger at being copied and absorbed into the very Bureau I invented. I devised the whole enterprise, yet now I am just one of its lecturers.
Forgive my trying to be honest with you. You were always so understanding. Your loving hand calmed me. I am so ashamed. The worst of my shame lies in my secret feelings about my Chinese colleagues. Our whole purpose is to plant seed and then leave and let it grow in native soil. When Ching dropped the receiver and the coherer was broken I spoke to him in an undertone (lest others hear) as if he were an idiot. He was spoiling ‘my’ show. A Ch’u would never have dropped it, I might have, but the real point is that I know that I would never have spoken to an American, to Blackie or Bert Wood or anyone, no matter what clumsy thing they did, in the tone I used with Ching.
The hostility of Chinese toward me fills me with agony. There is a school principal in Shanghai with whom I have been trying to do personal work. But he finally asked me not to try to convert him. He said, “It is like asking me to identify with everything I hate, “and I realized that when you think about it, it is me he hates, not some faraway Jesus.
Help me, Miss Titty. Write to me. I don’t want to be a small person. My foot is slipping.
With needful love,
David
WE MAY wonder at David’s entrusting these deep misgivings to Letitia Selden. Was he unable, or unwilling, to discuss them with Emily?
Emily seems to have made her peace with her husband’s periodic absences; with being “alone.” Almost as remarkably—or improbably—as if she were a wife accepting a husband’s philanderings, she had accepted his wanderings. “His legs itch when he sits still,” she writes as if with a shrug in a letter to her family. In one diary entry David himself recalls the trip he took with Uncle Don Treadup’s circus when he was eleven: “From that time on I’ve needed the open road.” Emily’s remarkably serene nature has helped her adjust to this physical restlessness of David’s; she has kept active, apparently without the edge of anger, in good works in Shanghai, and the three children delight her, even though they cause anxieties. From Emily’s letters to her sisters, spanning several months:
The flies and mosquitoes are pestiferous, even as late as this. Paulie got so badly chewed last night that I could have spent today weeping over him and my own criminal qualities. I had seen that his net was tight when I tucked him in, but somehow the mattress got wriggled loose and the mosquitoes just flocked in. The swellings are down tonight, so the bites look more like measles than smallpox.
Paul has been gaining weight fast. He’s going to be big as his dad one day—healthily round and solid as a pumpkin. He’s the happiest one we’ve had, grins at anything or nothing. Maybe he’s an imbecile—but just try to prove it to us!
We had a scare about possible scarlet fever with Abbo last week, but his fever has gone down.
The best goat is sick with a goat disease that affects her hind legs with a sort of paralysis, and no one here knows how to cure her. The other gives only about a quart a day, and as soon as she is bred will dry up, I suppose, so we shall have to buy milk all winter. I’m about ready to adopt Klim and evaporated milk and let the goat business fade into oblivion.
But in the late fall, David hardly notices the children; at times he is brusquely impatient with them. He is suffering an emotional restlessness which cannot be relieved by mere motion, mere travel. So far as we can tell, however, this unease of his, while Emily notices its toll on the children, seems not to have harmed the life she shares with him, seems not to have shaken either the prevailing surface calm of the marriage or the underlying power of its carnal side. Among the rather somber notations in David’s diary, we still come across exclamations like these: “What a ruby I have!” “Em is my better self!” “Lucky husband!”
Yet there is something strange in his apparently not sharing his deep and painful soul-searching with Emily. On her part there seems to be more at work than Christian acceptance, or than a conditioned accommodation to “woman’s place,” in her unvarying quietude of spirit. Whatever it is, the serenity it produces is both wonderfully attractive and perhaps, to a restless man, both forbidding and confining. On his side, there is a powerful need to be calmed by his “better self,” as he calls Emily; and a powerful if puzzling need, too, to get away from it, or her, from time to time.
AT DAWN of the winter solstice, December 23, 1913, President Yuan Shih-k’ai had driven from his Peking palace in an armored car, over streets entirely covered with yellow sand and lined three-deep with soldiers who had been stationed along the route the night before, to the exquisite round Altar of Heaven, on the southern edge of the city. Each year, for centuries before the republican revolution, the Emperor had been the only human being privileged to pray to heaven in that magic circle. When the President’s cortege arrived at the gate south of the Altar, he transferred to a horse-drawn vermilion coach, which took him to the Altar. He rode in a sedan chair up into the temple. Two generals helped him change from his field marshal’s uniform into a robe of royal purple with twelve round dragon designs, and a headgear of ancient Imperial design. Then he prayed; “I, Yuan Shih-k’ai, representing the Republic of China…”
There had been many portents like this that Yuan aspired to be more than a mere President. He had outlawed the Kuomintang Party, dissolved the National Assembly, replaced the republican Provisional Constitution with a Constitutional Compact which gave him dictatorial powers. Obviously dreaming of paths of golden sand and the nine strings of beads on the hat of an emperor, he faced the realities of 1914, saw that the European powers were taken up with the war in Europe and that to be installed and secure as emperor he would need the support of Japan.
That country had rank ambitions of its own. After the outbreak of the war, it had seized the German protectorate in Shantung Province and during the fall began to enlarge it. On January 18, 1915, the Japanese Minister Hioki handed Yuan a paper watermarked with dreadnoughts and machine guns on which were written twenty-one demands on China. In effect, these would reduce China to a satellite of Japan; would put Shantung Province, southern Manchuria, and eastern Inner Mongolia under Japanese control, and would greatly encroach on British interests in the Yangtze Valley. Minister Hioki was remarkably frank with American Minister Paul S. Reinsch: “When there is a fire in a jeweler’s shop, the neighbors cannot be expected to refrain from helping themselves.”
Several months of what passed for negotiation followed. In May, Yuan accepted the substance and the humiliation of all but the most devastating handful of the Twenty-one Demands. The Chinese people reacted with an unprecedented fury. Mass rallies in the big cities called on the government to resist Japan. Ricksha pullers, coolies, students, small shopkeepers donated money to finance an army of resistance. Nineteen of Yuan’s own generals declared they were ready to fight to defend China. Instead of encouraging these signs of an awakening nationalism, Yuan suppressed them. And on December 12, 1915, he “accepted,” as if it had been thrust upon him, the throne of an emperor of China.
Many of Yuan’s most influential advisers and generals suddenly fell ill and found it necessary to retire from public life. A general named Ts’ai O, who was famously in love with a prostitute, persuaded Yuan that he had caught a venereal disease and got his permission to go to Japan for treatment. Instead he went secretly to Shanghai, where he consulted with others who opposed the monarchy, including Liang Ch’i-ch’ao—the onetime reformer and voice of The New Citizen, and Y.M.C.A. board member, whose hand Treadup had shaken during the Todd tour. Liang’s powerful pen helped to rally an army under Ts’ai O, and on March 22, 1916, Yuan Shih-k’ai, having lost decisive battles, abdicated the throne. On June 6 the overreaching “strong man” died, as the old stories would have it, of a broken heart.
All this left China’s government in disarray, and there followed a decade in which provincial warlords fought each other for national and local power.
In these events Treadup saw the crumbling of the wonderful high hopes for the missionary enterprise, and for his own role in the evangelization and modernization of China, that the 1912 revolution had brought. And with them, his personal misgivings were confirmed and deepened. But his was a remarkably vigorous temperament; his confessions to Letitia Selden had seemed to purge and refresh him; and soon he was entering in his diary blurted expressions of his will to carry on in the face of all his doubts.
A few months after Yuan’s death a warlord enticed him into an experience which started him thinking about his mission in an entirely new way.
EAST TIENTSIN railroad station platform, April 1917. Chaos. Some kind of troop movement is under way. The discipline of the uniformed men is unusually good, but the coolies who are loading equipment run here and there shouting at the tops of their lungs, trainmen are hysterical, and a bee swarm of ordinary passengers who have been put off the train to make way for the soldiers is buzzing its protests and trying to push its way back aboard.
Treadup, Ching, and three workmen from the Shanghai lab are trying to shepherd the lecture gear onto one of the third-class passenger carriages of the type that is simply a freight gondola car with slightly lowered side walls, open to the sky.
Treadup, on yet another swing north with his lectures, is distracted and tired. Among the parcels of apparatus, now, are outfits for “Wonders of Light” and “Marvels in Astronomy,” but even with these new topics he has been feeling the dead weight of repetition; the phrase “Treadup on a treadmill” has recently appeared in his diary for the first time. Besides, deeply unsettling word came a few days ago that on April 6 the United States entered the conflict in Europe, so that this bustling of soldiery reaches subliminally into some obscure region of patriotic outrage and anger in David; he blurts in his diary later this very day: “ ‘Thou shalt not kill’—but I don’t like being so safe when my brothers…” The sentence breaks off.
He hurries ahead to one of the open third-class gondola cars, and begins to dicker with an officer for space enough for the lecture goods. He senses that being a foreigner and being a huge man are, for once, of no help. The officer firmly denies him the space. He pulls his wallet from his pocket and slips some bills half out, but the officer shakes his head. Treadup is astonished—a Chinese soldier who won’t take a cash push! Ching has now joined him; other officers ring the man Treadup has been talking with. It is obvious that a high hand will not be effective. Ching politely asks who the officer’s commander is.
The officer says it is General Feng Yu-hsiang.
Treadup and Ching both shout with pleasure. They recognize this as the name of “the Christian General,” about whom they have heard so much. Ching hastily tells the officer that Treadup is with the Young Men’s Christian Association. The officer softens at once, bows, apologizes for his rudeness, and turns to command his men to make room in the car for the boxes of apparatus.
Treadup asks where the General can be found. The officer says that he is in his “private car.” It is four cars forward. Treadup looks for a velvet-curtained first-class carriage but finds instead that General Feng’s “private car” is just one more open gondola. And there—not having made the connection before—he sees the huge soldier who came forward at the Todd lecture in Peking four years ago. He is dressed in a plain cotton uniform like those of his common soldiers; he sits among piles of duffel with a group of enlisted men. He instantly recognizes Treadup, recalling the day of “Mr. Todd’s teachings,” and he invites Treadup to ride with him. He and his men are going to the military camp at Langfang, between Tientsin and Peking.
During their ride through the countryside, Feng asks Treadup about his work. As Treadup describes it, Feng in all his hugeness cuts at the air with his hands, stretches his face this way and that, groans with pleasure at what he is hearing. He insists that Treadup must come and lecture to his troops. They are mostly poor farmers, he says—but eager to learn about the world of machines. Treadup says he grew up on a farm. Feng roars, claps his hands, and asks his men if they heard what the ta mu-shih, this big missionary, has said. A farmer! Delighted laughter all around.
IT IS doubtful whether David Treadup had any sense yet of the real nature of the nascent warlord system of which General Feng was to be such a vivid and mercurial representative in the next decade. Treadup was naturally excited to encounter the already famous Christian General. “My thrill that day in the railroad car,” Treadup wrote from the safe distance of “Search,”
was, I guess, understandable, but it was also, in some unfortunate way, undiscriminating. I realize now how strongly attracted I was to any Chinese leader who was touched, no matter how lightly, with the Christian brush, and who gave hopes, no matter how real, of gaining power enough to change China.
So had it been, indeed, in Treadup’s almost fawning attitude, at first, toward Li Yuan-hung, who had favored religious freedom and had been so hospitable to the missionary Treadup; toward Sun Yat-sen, himself a Christian, converted in his youth; toward Yuan Shih-k’ai, who had early declared to the Christian community his support of freedom of religion, and who even earlier had directly helped Treadup; and now with this boomingly cordial man, the Christian General. And would be, one day, at least for a while, with Chiang Kai-shek, married to a Christian woman and himself eventually converted.
The warlord system, a product of the breakdown after Yuan’s death of any true national authority, was an almost animal arrangement of regional hegemonies. The warlords were like bull sea lions or great buffaloes or bighorn rams establishing and fighting to defend the territories where they would be supreme. They gave off heat waves of vigor, grandeur, and greed. Years later Pearl Buck would write:
Without exception the warlords I have known have been men of unusual native ability, gifted with peculiar personal charm, with imagination and strength, and often with a rude poetic quality. Above all, they carry about with them, in them, a sense of high drama. The warlord sees himself great—and great in the traditional manner of heroes of ancient fiction and history who are so inextricably mingled in the old Chinese novels. He is, in effect, an actor by nature, as Napoleon was. The warlord is a creature of emotion; cruel or merciful, as the whim is; dangerous and unstable as friend or enemy; licentious and usually fond of luxury.
Big warlords came to control areas as large as Germany or France; at the other extreme some petty warlords controlled no more than a few villages and might be pocketed within the territories of grander ones. The only difference between most warlords and bandits was that warlords controlled territory while bandits hit and ran. There was a circular logic in warlordism: A warlord needed an army to control a territory that would support an army. It was easy to recruit soldiers: poverty-ridden farmers, younger brothers, hungry jobless youths, glad to be clothed, fed, sometimes even paid, or at least given chances to loot. Since greed for power and money was the commanders’ driving motive, battles were often dances, or discreet surrenders, or “victories” in which the only bullets fired were silver. “We shall undoubtedly win,” said an officer of one conflict in which Feng was to be engaged. “It is simply a matter of waiting for treason.” “China’s wars,” a Chinese admiral said, “are always civil.”
Not always, in fact. Some, where relatively great power was at stake, were earnest and bloody, with bitter fighting and many casualties. The treachery was often cruel. One way of capturing an army was to invite its commander to a banquet, stuff him, seize him, and shoot him. Many units were superbly trained; Feng’s were. Most of the arms came from foreigners. This caused great resentment: In all the wars, one intellectual wrote,
the rifles and field guns come from abroad. The bullets and shells come from abroad. Bombs and powder and hardware all come from abroad. The money comes from abroad…. Only the blood and flesh of our dead countrymen who kill one another on the battlefields are Chinese.
A deep, voiceless, and futile resentment against the warlords would come eventually from the Chinese people, who were tragically oppressed by the greed that was built into the system. In the hands of the warlords, the land tax became a tool of frightful exploitation. Taxes were sometimes collected for years in advance. Ingenuity galloped on greed’s back, and here and there we find a pig-rearing tax, firecracker tax, opium-smoking lamp tax, marrying off one’s daughter tax, narcissus bulb tax, superstition tax (on candles, paper money for funerals, etc.), lower-class prostitute singing tax, and, terrible thought, night-soil tax, so that one couldn’t even defecate without paying. The people suffered horribly in other ways. Carts and donkeys and boats and wheelbarrows were seized; men were conscripted and torn from their homes as cartmen, porters, or boatmen. Disorderly troops robbed, looted, beat, raped, and burned. Masses of the population were in constant flight from place to place. During plague, flood, and famine, the warlords indifferently taxed and taxed. This next decade of their ravaging wars was to prepare the way, among the bitterly harassed common people, for China’s larger revolution to come.
BACK IN SHANGHAI, David wrote his brother Paul about the train ride with General Feng:
I have every intention of visiting his encampment and lecturing to his men. It will be a great challenge: to speak to Chinese farmers and working men who live in a Christian setting. I will have to remember that I am not addressing the literati; I must pitch my discourse to simple hearts. There will be a great tension in it, between clarity and God’s truth. By that I mean: To make the laws of physics that govern the gyroscope clear to raw, untutored minds, I must take shortcuts, simplify, use rather crude mind-pictures, and tell much less than the whole truth, which would only confuse. Yet what I want to teach the Chinese, above all, is a love of exactitude. I know that in the Christian General’s camp I will have to teach exactitude inexactly. That will be painful.
But necessary! This man may well come to power, and if he does, think what a boost it will be for our cause! In his way he is a missionary. He sat there in the train on a bedroll, with his legs crossed—he is huge—big gestures—elastic face—and he talked to me about the stages of his coming to Christ.
He said he was the son of a poor soldier, and he joined the army when he was a small boy. The first stage was rank superstition. Soon after his enlistment, an epidemic broke out in Paotingfu, where he was stationed—smallpox, probably, or plague—and his unit was ordered to go through the streets shooting rifles just to make a noise to put to flight the evil spirits that were thought to be causing the disease. He told me he vividly remembers having fired at a sign in front of a Christian church. Foreign devils!
Next stage, puckishness. He went to that same church out of idle curiosity, listened to some sermons. The preacher talked about turning the other cheek—“If someone takes your outer clothing, give him your inner clothing, too.” Feng and some friends carried a table out of the church rooms. The minister stopped them with roars of outrage. In mimicked pulpit tones they said he should be offering them the chairs that went with it! But Christ’s message apparently didn’t reach that far, and he made them return the table.
But next, gratitude. He was sick, and after failing to get help from Chinese doctors, he received it free on two occasions from missionary doctors, and when he tried to thank them they told him to thank God.
Then, he said, he became impressed by Chinese Christians, who never smoked opium, were industrious, always educated their children even if they were poor, and did not bind their daughters’ feet. He said he admired those simple things and thought that if all China could follow such rules, the nation might “find a way.”
And finally he began reading Christian literature and attending church. A particular sermon he heard in Manchuria moved him to the soles of his feet—and then James B. Todd in Peking! I wrote you about meeting him that day. Tears glistened in his eyes when he talked about Todd’s message.
He is such a feeling man. Emotions seem to rise from deep in him and burst on the surface, like big bubbles of air from the depths of a lake. While we were talking about recent events, he told me that when Yuan Shih-k’ai declared himself emperor, he wanted so badly to go and fight Yuan that he cried until his head ached—and even as he said this, he began to weep! He embraced me, Paul, when he detrained at Langfang, just as you, my dear brother, might have done….
There is a great deal of evidence, especially from Feng’s later history, that he was a shrewd and devious man, and many in China came to think that he may have cynically put Christianity on, as if it were a new fashion of clothing, in order to ingratiate himself with powerful foreigners, and in order to bewitch his troops with a ritualistic mystique like that of the Taipings. Years later, when his allegiances had begun to swerve with opportunity, he gave a mixed picture of his motives:
During the last years of the Manchu dynasty, revolutionaries were being arrested right and left. Therefore many of us became Christians in order to avoid difficulties. Moreover, that faith had its good points. It proposed universal love, sacrifice, no smoking or drinking, no gambling or chasing after women…
It is obvious from Treadup’s letters and diary that he had no inkling of Feng’s calculating side. The actor in Feng took him in. The ripples and bounces of strong emotion on the Christian General’s “elastic” face must especially have appealed to David in his time of misgivings; he needed the reassurance of the sincerity of salt tears brimming in eyes of power.
DURING HIS SUMMER in Shanghai, Treadup learned that a so-called Chinese Labor Corps had been formed and sent to France to dig trenches and offload ships and supply human backs, arms, and legs for the supply lines of the Allies; and that there was some talk on the British end of asking the Y.M.C.A. to furnish canteens and other services to help ease the growing unrest of the Chinese coolies, who had found their life in a hostile alien setting brutally harsh and dangerous. Treadup took note of this news briefly in his diary, without comment.
IT WAS mid-September before Treadup could travel north again. General Feng sent an “honor guard” to Tientsin to accompany him to Langfang. Its commanding officer told Treadup that this might not prove to be the best time for a visit, because there were said to be floods to the southwest of Tientsin; the waters were still rising, and General Feng might move his whole force out to give help to the refugees.
Treadup arrived at the camp of the 16th Mixed Brigade at suppertime. The General greeted him warmly: bear hugged bear. Feng said he would not be moving to the flood area for at least a few days. “No lamps,” David wrote in his diary. “A bugler put the troops to barracks not long after dark. Impressive discipline of silence thereafter.”
There was sufficient reason for early quiet: reveille came at four the next morning.
The day that then began in the darkness of the North China plain was “my most thrilling in China,” David wrote. There was so much to stir him—first of all, an air of male exuberance, men shouting and singing, always on the run, willing and cheerful under pressure of fierce and sometimes nasty competition: the Chinese gift for laughter given free play by high morale. All day, the movement of faith: prayer, hymn singing, Bible reading—images of the evangelization of the whole world in one generation! And a martial spirit with no signs of real blood. From the beginnings of David Treadup’s recruitment by the Student Volunteer Movement there had been the idea of evangelization as a struggle of Christian soldiers against heathenism. “It is war,” David had written on his first arrival in Tientsin, “and I as a general must be willing to face even death.” Now there was a subtle undercurrent of another attraction of militarism: David Treadup’s feelings of guilt toward his “brothers” under arms in France. David’s blood brothers, like himself, were by now too old to enlist as soldiers (David was thirty-nine); his guilt reached out to a larger and more figurative, but no less poignant, fraternity. It now extended to this “brother General in Christ,” Feng, and to these “brothers in the arms of God,” his officers and men—as the diary would have it after this ecstatic day. From a report to Todd in New York:
The first order of the day after dressing was a bit of spiritual drill. The brigade assembled by companies in the open air in the quiet of first light. They sang! Oh, the singing all day! At dawn; at noon; the last thing at night. Before meals, at meals, as they march. The faces of the men show the heartiness of the singing as unmistakably as the continuous full-voiced shout. (The power of the ‘pianissimo’ to move the listener has not been discovered as yet by the Christian soldiers of the Sixteenth.) Their favorite song, needless to say, is “Onward Christian Soldiers.” They roar out—in Chinese, of course—“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus! Ye Soldiers of the Cross,” “Room for Thee,” “All People that on Earth Do Dwell,” and “O Happy Day.” And the good General has written some words of his own to hymn music: There’s a patriotic song of his called “The Nation’s Shame,” and then there’s “We Must Not Gamble or Visit Whores.”
General Feng in person took Treadup around the encampment to show him “how to keep an army busy.” “He made it seem as if it were all being staged just for me.” During an inspection of one unit, David was impressed by the General’s courtesy to his men. He knew the names of an astonishing number of enlisted men. He pointed out to David a notice posted outside a headquarters tent: “Eight No-Hitting Rules,” placing strict restraints on officers’ rights to beat soldiers, the most important being that they must use bare hands, must never use sticks or rifles or shovels.
“Feng is like Coach Ten Eyck: ‘You can’t win if you aren’t strong.’ ” On the exercise ground some men were jumping, vaulting on a gym horse, and doing bar exercises “with quite an amount of freak displays.” David watched obstacle races: “a long jump over a ditch; a run along a narrow baulks bridge across a pit; the swarming of first a brick wall, then a higher wooden barrier, and ending in a final run up a steep mound.” Pairs of officers competed against pairs of men and nearly always defeated them, but “there was rarely more than a second or two between the first to reach the goal and the fourth.” One unit went off in the countryside on the double under full pack. “The General said they would run twenty-five li”—nearly ten miles.
On another field Feng’s elite company, the Ta-tao-tui, the Big Sword Unit, in which each man carried a pistol, a rifle, and a large curving sword, was running through a dazzling series of dancelike exercises, their blades flashing in the sunlight. General Feng called one of the men over and showed Treadup the patch on his uniform that read:
When we fight, we first use bullets; when the bullets are gone, we use bayonets; when the bayonets are dull, we use the rifle barrel; when this is broken, we use our fists; when our fists are broken, we bite.
“But what moved me most, almost to tears like those that actually stood in the General’s eyes when we entered the building and saw the men bending over their work,” David wrote, “was the school!” The General wanted his men to learn a trade while they were in his army, so they would have a means of support when they went home. “As you pass through one room after another you see the young men busily engaged in making shoes and clothes, knitting stockings, weaving rugs, boiling soap, and making chairs and other articles of furniture.” But the reading classes! The General himself had written a lesson book of eight hundred basic characters, and “here were illiterate farm and coolie youths chanting their excitement at their march into the sacred ancient region of literacy. What optimism! What a dream for all of China!” And: “He told me missionaries had inspired much of this. He has a school for the children of his officers in the Methodist mission in Peking.”
At twelve o’clock a gun was fired. Ten minutes later the men gathered by companies outside their quarters for half an hour of Bible reading and prayer. They formed circles of about ten each. First they sang a hymn, then officers or noncoms would read a chapter in the New Testament “verse about, often with brief explanations, followed by a number of earnest petitions from the men.”
THE AFTERNOON was set aside for the ta mu-shih. At the edge of the parade ground was an earthen platform about six feet high from which Feng’s speeches and foreign missionaries’ and Chinese ministers’ sermons were customarily delivered. Treadup told the General that he needed more space for the apparatus of his gyroscope demonstration than that platform gave. Fine! They would enlarge the platform. They would make a game of it. The General ordered two companies to compete in digging and carrying earth to add two wings to the existing mound, widening it until it would be large enough; the companies would race to see which could complete its side first. “How zestful the men were! They dug earth from an area where a road is being widened, outside the camp, and carried it in baskets to the mound—running, shouting, laughing. If only human beings could be like that all the time!”
By about two o’clock, the stage was all made, the earth tamped down hard. With the help of Ching and the lab men, Treadup set up his gear. Feng assembled the troops. “My heart was pounding. Could I rouse in these uneducated men anything like the life force I had seen on their faces when they were running obstacle races or building my stage—or singing to the glory of God?”
Treadup got his answer with the very first demonstration: the chain loop that could run and climb a ladder. “There was a kind of rumble,” he wrote,
as if intelligence could cause earthquakes, and then an explosion of violent laughter—a laughter, it seemed, of utter relief, as if a great danger had passed, a danger that they might never have had a chance to see such a magical event. Their response was so much more visceral than that of the literati, intense as that had been in its way. There was an earth-moving energy in it of groundlings catching just a glimpse of the possibility of a better life. I felt relief, too, but I was shaken. I felt that I was losing my grip on an idea that I had clung to ever since my talk with Joshua Bagnall—that my duty as a missionary was to teach from the top down. Here was a hunger as sharp as that of the famine victims at Yang Ts’un. It shook me, in much the way those famished faces there at Yang Ts’un had shaken me.
General Feng was declared to be the strongest man in the army, and it was he whom the men chose to pit against the Wrestling Gyroscope. And then that the great and beloved hero of the brigade should be defeated and rendered impotent by the physical laws of God—after all the time in which his prayers for victory in the field had brought victory, and all the time in which his wishes had been the wishes of his lowliest private!
There was complete silence. I could hear crows cawing in the distance. An eerie, eerie, eerie moment. I believe that that long hush has transformed me. I have a different sort of work to do than I had thought.
A CHANCE EXPERIENCE of the next two weeks hastened the outcome of what Treadup had thought of as his transformation.
He wanted to see his dear friend Lin Fu-chen in Tientsin, and he asked the Tientsin Association secretary, Roscoe Hersey, if he could stop over with him for two nights. The Herseys, with three children, nine, seven, and three years old, now lived in one of a pair of handsome brick-and-stucco houses the Association had built, on Recreation Road in the British Concession. While the family was at supper with their guest on the first evening of his visit, a messenger came to tell them that the floods to the southwest of the city were spreading, and that the river that ran through Tientsin, the Pei Ho, was dangerously high; it was expected to crest and overflow its banks the next day.
The Hersey house was surrounded by a brick wall, which would dam out floodwaters, but it had two wooden gates, which would not. Hersey fetched some burlap bags from the attic of the house and had the three servants dig up earth from the yard to fill the bags, which Hersey and Treadup then set firmly in the gateways. Everyone went to bed feeling secure. “We promptly got a demonstration,” David wrote,
of the not-to-be-denied power of “China’s sorrow.” I was sleeping on the Herseys’ sleeping porch, and just as it was getting light I was awakened by a weird swishing and bubbling sound. I got up and looked out. There was water in the street. The walls and gates had held, all right, but now the water was simply bubbling up from beneath, all through the yard.
By ten o’clock the water was hip deep in the street and slightly shallower in the yard. Hersey, learning that trains were still running, decided to send his family off without delay, before it would be too late, to the hills of Peitaiho by the sea. A sampan picked them up shortly after noon.
TREADUP was caught. Every hand would now be needed. The city authorities, knowing from experience that the flood of water would be followed at once by a human flood, a cresting wave of homeless, penniless, sick, and starving refugees, quickly organized a relief committee, of which it was to be Hersey’s lot, this time, to be chairman. Within a week the peaked waters had slowly drained off toward the sea. In order to make a reconnaissance of the worst-flooded area, the committee chartered a large native houseboat and stocked it with emergency supplies, food, money, and medicines. Because of Treadup’s intimidating build—there would be great danger from bandits—Hersey asked him to go along. Hersey, three doctors, four armed and uniformed British volunteers, and Treadup made up the foreign party; several Chinese were also aboard. Treadup sent a wireless message to his new friend General Feng, telling him of the rescue vessel’s first destination, a stop on the Grand Canal, and asking for a guard unit from the 16th Mixed Brigade.
From a letter to Emily, in which David seemed to be groping toward telling her that some great change, which he himself could not yet clearly picture, was impending in their lives:
We spent the day ashore. The high water simply dissolved many of these houses made of mud and straw. Much of the population has fled, but some, loath to leave their few belongings, stayed. How many were cut off and drowned, refusing to be taken away from all they had in the world? We entered standing houses—wretchedness everywhere, a muddy ‘k’ang,’ two or three poor pieces of furniture, huddled people sick from the dampness breathed forth from walls and floors, others out begging. We went from place to place, handing out chits for ten, fifteen, twenty-five, and fifty cents (gold), which the people could take to the houseboat and exchange for food or Chinese money.
We returned to our boat about sundown. Feng’s guard had not showed up. All day I had been thinking that these ruins were what was left of the hovels and families of men just like those to whom I’d lectured a few days ago: Think of the absurdity, here, of that essence of the whirling weighted wheel that I’d rhapsodized about, God’s stabilizing force in nature! The boat was too packed for us to eat inside, so we had the table placed out on deck. There we pretended to partake of our dinner, but we had no appetite for it. As soon as possible we stretched ourselves out on the roof of the deckhouse, among long oars and boat hooks.
Small junks and sampans were crowding around us. We were soon surrounded by them and found it useless to ask them to move farther on. We had treasures aboard—survival stuffs. In greater and greater numbers they came, until the anchorage was choked with them. There was sullen self-constraint in the air, and a change was feared. I knew there was no use going below, so for some hours I lay under the stars and tried to keep calm.
A boat carrying Chinese musicians was moving about. One player beat rhythmically on a resonant strip of bamboo, another sawed on a one-stringed violin, a third sang shrilly in a high falsetto. Another boat moved about with refreshments—imagine it, profiteers in this zone of empty guts!—cold jelly, peanuts, and—no foreigner would want to think what else.
The vendor calls out his wares in a monotone or hits a little bell at regular intervals. A watchman ashore moves from one quarter to another, sounding his conch shell from unexpected directions. There is a quarrel among some of the boatmen. Every man in any way interested joins in and they all shout and curse at once. Are they arguing about boarding us? No one can hear what anyone else is saying, and the trouble comes to a natural ending, with exhaustion. I know it is after midnight. I lie sleeplessly. Low voices sounding here and there across the still water prove that mine is not the only wakeful mind.
Suddenly there is a noise, so loud, so startling, that I spring up. It is a hoarse yell from many throats. “Thief! Thief!” It seems that the boatmen are always ready for this threat, and when a tiny sampan stealthily sculls alongside, or a suspicious figure creeps along the shore, one sailor cries out, and the cry instantly travels up and down all the boats.
The cry subsides. I am left in a turmoil of bleak thoughts. I realize what a shock I received in General Feng’s camp—a shock of the discovery, after all these years of misdirected labor, of the audience I now think I should have been trying to reach. An audience far too large for one man, or one Association, to reach—the audience of “the poor and needy” whose “year of Jubilee,” in Joshua Bagnall’s phrase, was so long overdue. “Don’t ever forget that, Mr. Treadup.” But Bagnall was wrong: Knowledge did not run downhill with the natural ease of gravity from the literati to poor people like Feng’s soldiers and the victims of this flood.
And then, to confuse me, this: This fear of thievery. I lay on the roof of the deckhouse afraid that the mob of boatmen in the anchorage would swarm onto our privileged vessel to ransack it; while on each boat the water people lay in fear that the starving victims of the flood would steal from them; and on shore the poor villagers had risked life, and lost it, some of them, rather than lose what paltry nothings they owned.
Ignorance, poverty, suspicion, envy, brigandage—yet the soldiers at Langfang, sons of these boatmen and these villagers, were so cheerful, so exuberant! Something in the heritage of having lived crowded and suffering lives for 3000 years had given the Chinese this mysterious range of responses to life. Could my sharing my knowledge of God’s laws of the forces of rotating bodies ever touch and change those versatile ancient responses? I have to believe that it will. It is my life’s work. I have nothing left otherwise.
It was quiet again. Then new sounds stirred. On every boat there was scurrying, for rain was coming. Sails were covered, doors were closed, hatch boards were slid into place. We crowded into the deckhouse. We were shut in without a breath of air. The rain drummed—rain on top of flood rain on top of the flat land—China’s deep and seemingly endless grief. I wondered, Emily: Would my life be long enough?
AT THE END of the second week it was Lin Fu-chen—a member of Hersey’s relief committee—who took Treadup to see one of the consequences of the flood. For it was in the Peikai district on the north rim of Tientsin, near Lin’s new university, that the huddled masses of flood victims had set up their terrifying encampment: thousands of improvised huts, some made of straw matting, others of the ubiquitous rectangular Standard Oil petroleum tins, cut open and beaten flat and hung like fish scales to make crude shelters, their cheerfully flashing reflections of the sun blinding one to the squalor beneath. The thousands driven here by water had had no water to drink. They had scooped it from drainage ditches and from shallow holes dug near their huts; and now the camp raged with dysentery. Lin had loaned the committee rooms at the college for a Camp Office, a dispensary, a clothing depot.
Standing with Treadup at the heart of the camp, surrounded by supplicating faceless crowds, Lin asked with an irony that, though it was almost drowned in the sadness of his Christian eyes, hit with startling accuracy the bull’s-eye of David’s discomfort at that very moment: “Would you like to give these people one of your lectures? Perhaps you have worked up a lecture on The Wonders of Hydraulic Power’?”
“Felt so angry,” David wrote in his diary.
Angry that I did not know what to be angry at? At—can I write it?—at the riddle in God’s plan? Could not shake from my mind a bewildering connection between the picture of these hollow-eyed ghost-faces and the memory of the faces of Feng’s soldiers (sons of these people?) building my stage, running, shouting—such high spirits!
A FEW DAYS after Treadup arrived back in Shanghai, we know from a spare note in his diary, a general call went out from the National Committee of the Y.M.C.A. for secretaries—American and Chinese—to volunteer to go to France to work with the Chinese Labor Corps there. For one who was so prone to set down on paper the struggles of his heart, David was remarkably silent about what followed. We have almost no clues to the discussions of great consequence he must have had with Emily. Only such notes as: “Tuckered out from talking all night.” “She is granite.” What did he mean by “granite”? That she was dependable, or immovable? Perhaps his conflicts were such that he could not, just then, face their implications. The decision he reached in a very few days, to go to France, certainly did not resolve them. It evidently stemmed from the “transformation” he felt had taken place in him on his last trip north; but it must have seemed an expensive choice, for it would mean being separated from his family for an indefinite period, and it would mean breaking away from his beloved lecture program and leaving in midair the question of what the proper audience for it really should be; leaving in midair, therefore, the much larger question of how his mission in China, to which he had given so much of himself, should really be defined.
There was a disturbing note of haste, almost of flight—flight perhaps from just those awful questions. David volunteered; Blackton approved. The Treadups decided it would be best for Emily and the children to travel home to America with David, who would go on from there to the war. The Treadups boarded a Butterfield & Swire steamer on November 3, 1917, and sailed north along the China coast for Tsingtao, the port of embarkation in Shantung Province for the Chinese Labor Corps.
EXACTLY THREE WEEKS later, near the head of a procession consisting of a British commanding officer, two missionary doctors, eight British and American officers, eight Chinese interpreters, and four thousand deloused Chinese coolies chattering with excitement and bewilderment in their strange new gray Western coats and trousers, Mr. and Mrs. Treadup and their three children filed through a gauntlet of hundreds of pitiably whining flood-refugee beggars in the Tsingtao streets to the waterfront, where they climbed the gangplank of a British transport, H.M.T. Tyndareus.
In earlier phases of the transfer to France of the Chinese Labor Corps, ships had sailed to Marseilles by way of the Suez Canal, but recent German depredations in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean had made the trip by way of Canada and two oceans seem safer. Indeed, this very transport, the Tyndareus, had just come back into service after repair of damage caused by a mine off Africa. Before the war she had been a freighter of eleven thousand tons; now she had in her holds wooden bunks in high tiers with only enough inches between layers to allow men barely to turn over, and with the narrowest of aisles between the stacks of bodies.
For their first ten days at sea, the Pacific was not pacific. The coolies were too sick and terrified to venture on deck. David was not as seasick as he had been on his first voyage across this ocean, but to hold his own he had to stay in the open air. Emily and all three children, on the other hand, flourished wherever they were.
MRS. TREADUP was the only woman on a ship with more than four thousand men. She mothered them all. She spent much of the day in the stinking holds, putting her cool hand on the foreheads of poor ignorant adult males who thought they were about to die, mopping up vomit that the crewmen would not go near, fetching a doctor for men who were feverish, and, most preciously healing of all, explaining to the coolies in her fairly good Mandarin some things no one had bothered to be precise about before: exactly where they were going and how long it might take to get there, and about the nature of the vast war in France, and about the kinds of work they would be doing, and even about wind and waves on a wide water—for they were North Chinese, men bound to the soil who had never seen the sea, and who in the dark holds with no portholes had no conception whatever of the reason why they had dizzying sensations of falling and why they had to hold the stanchions of their bunks to keep from rolling out; all they could guess was that evil fox spirits had taken over this huge iron prison and that nothing was being done by the foreign devils to exorcise them. When some of the Chinese began to get their sea legs, she served four hours each day behind the counter of a canteen, selling peanuts, rock candy, and, among other things, for any who might have forty coppers, one-stringed Chinese fiddles, which a few men bought and took below to console themselves and their fellows with haunting melodic reminders of the greatness of the folk. David in his diary resorted to the exclamation points of a renewed closeness to Emily as the sea grew calmer: “I first saw her behind a counter like that in the Y.W. shop in the Hall of Languages! Angel! Even more beautiful than she was then!” She was now a woman of thirty-four, her brown eyes more knowing, more canny than they had been back then, the look deepened and darkened by the death of her Nancy, delicate lines incised beside her mouth by the always active scalpel of concern about the restlessness of her husband; a beauty above all of a serenity that included but transcended Christian acceptance of a woman’s lot. Her sexual success with David, her “naturalness,” which, judging by clues in the diaries of both partners, seemed to weather whatever pain and loneliness she suffered at his hand, must have suffused her body with a sweet and subtle scent of wisdom. We get the impression that in her mid-thirties she had a beauty of bearing that could satisfy the dreams of four thousand men on a ship: of a mysteriously integrated mix of submissiveness with a self-confident energy which was matriarchal in its distant promise. At meals at the captain’s table, light-years away from the vomit of the holds, British laughter swirled around her, until one could wonder who really was in command of His Majesty’s Transport Tyndareus.
PHILIP, Absolom, and Paul had the run of the ship. They were given, by everyone aboard, the impression that their little triangular constellation was at the exact center of the universe. That place seemed to them to define heaven. Their laughter was music of fifes and flutes. The ship’s officers rigged a deck tennis net for them. One day all three took turns steering the ship. They were given a table alone in the officers’ mess, where they were waited on by lascars as if they were admirals. At table serious Philip, eight and a half, wiped the chin of four-year-old Paul and whispered instructions on how to behave like a man. They sang adorably faulty rounds, “Three Blind Mice” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” to entertain the Chinese in one hold after another, and the devotion and courtesy of Chinese toward children formed shields around them, seeming to ward off from them the below-decks stink. Philip, his shoulders squared to bear the weight of his seniority, took it as a matter of course that he should be his mother’s helper in mopping up Chinese puke. Absolom, who was five, the mischief maker and clown of the family, tagged around after the Labor Corps officers, tugging at their coattails, putting salt in their coffee, untying their shoelaces. Paul, the youngest, who had inherited his father’s big build and was already taller than older Absolom, had to be advised by Philip not to swagger so much. All three were innocent. They did not share in imperialist guilt over the use of Chinese slave labor in a war in which China had no real stake. No, this was the world, and everything was quite natural in the world. Anyway, it was time for elevenses!—beef broth and salt crackers!—hurry!
ON DECEMBER 13, the Chinese laborers and their escorting officers were offloaded at Vancouver Island, where they would camp for some weeks before being sent on by train to the Atlantic. Here the Treadups left them. They traveled east by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. To the children, habituated to the flat parts of China, the Canadian Rockies loomed like fables, and four-year-old Paul asked, “Why are there so many foreigners in Canada?”—a foreigner, of course, being anyone who was not Chinese. In a week they were in New York. The International Committee assigned Mrs. Treadup and the children to a small and rather bleak rented house in Montclair, New Jersey. With orders to rejoin the labor contingent at their port of embarkation, Halifax, in mid-January, David Treadup said good-bye to his wife and children on the front porch of the Montclair house. His diary: “Heavy parting. Going to a war is different from going on a lecture tour.”
IN HALIFAX HARBOR David found a convoy of camouflaged ships riding at anchor. He was now in an officer’s uniform, sans insignia: high-collared tunic, riding breeches, leather puttees. With his oarsman’s frame and his piratical mustaches he cut a fine false figure of the romance of war. His orders took him by lighter to a troopship, F-8261, the Justicia, a magnificent four-funneled vessel of 32,000 tons, intended when it was built to be a luxury liner. Already aboard was the Chinese labor contingent he had left at Vancouver; the coolies had camped three weeks on Vancouver Island and then taken twelve days in primitive Canadian Pacific coaches to span the continent.
The Atlantic crossing was fairly calm and, apart from one torpedo alarm and the unsolved disappearance of 350 of the ship’s soup spoons, uneventful. The coolies drilled on deck each day. Many complained of terrible headaches—migraines of the unknown. A Scottish ship’s doctor, running low on aspirin, tried something new: A coolie came into ship’s bay with one of these splitting headaches. The doctor applied a small square of adhesive tape, a substance no Chinese coolie had ever seen, to the temple on the side that hurt most. Within minutes the patient felt no more pain. Others stormed the dispensary for the treatment. It worked nearly every time.
The laborers landed at Liverpool and traveled by train to Folkestone, and by ferry to Boulogne, and then, “packed like tinned meat,” as David wrote, in cattle cars, to the central control camp of the Chinese Labor Corps at Noyelles.
THE LABOR CORPS had been formed, after China had entered the war, at the instigation of the British and French, who by shipping coolies from China would be able to free able-bodied white men from work behind the lines to go to the trenches, to replace the dead and be slaughtered themselves. In February 1917 the British had opened collection camps at Weihaiwei and Tsingtao, and by the time Treadup arrived in France, some 140,000 Chinese coolies had been imported. Ninety thousand were working in the British zone, unloading ships in the base area from Le Havre to Dunkirk, building and repairing roads and railways on the approaches to the front, and handling ammunition and digging trenches on the battlefields from Cambrai to Ypres. The French had 40,000, doing the same sorts of work as those for the British, in ports from Brest to Marseilles, inland from Rouen to Creusot, and on the front from Arras to Verdun; the French also had some working in munitions factories. The Americans had about 10,000, borrowed from the French. Noyelles was the nerve center. New recruits arrived there, to be assigned in time to one work center or another. It was a vast camp; it had, to give its measure, the largest hospital exclusively for Chinese patients anywhere in the world.
IT IS not surprising that historians of the Allied cause in the First World War have played down, to the point of disappearance, the suggestion that the Allies used slave labor to relieve the manpower shortage which followed the gruesome carnage of young men in the first years of that conflict.
The phrase “slave labor” is, of course, not strictly accurate. The Chinese coolies were paid for their work. In the British zone they were paid one franc for each ten-hour day, or at a rate of two American cents an hour; the French paid all of five cents an hour. In most cases these rates of pay were probably as high as, or higher than, what the coolies could have earned in cruel China.
But in a deeper sense, theirs was slave labor. The Chinese government’s motive for entering the European conflict was to ensure that the flow of loans to China from the British and French would not be cut off. China was not threatened in any direct way. Germany had taken its bite from the China coast, but so had other nations. Most Chinese citizens hadn’t the faintest idea who the Kaiser was, or even what or where Germany and France and England were. Nothing but memories of endless suffering—hunger pains, animal squalor, the rhythmic and murderous wash of swollen rivers—could have persuaded coolies to offer their bodies for a voyage into the zone of the unknown, where their work would be to help strangers kill each other.
AT NOYELLES, it took a whole week of importunity before Treadup could even get his orders cut.
At last they were: Given the assimilated rank of first lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Forces, he was ordered to report to the C.O., Chinese Labor Corps, British Area, Le Havre.
Within a few days he had amended all that, in his diary, to: “Commanding Hornet, Chinese Hornet Corps, British Hornets’ Nest, Le Hornet, France.”
Items from those first few days, from various letters and diary entries:
• “Reported on arrival to H.Q. Boss is Colonel Urquhelmsy, which as nearly as I can tell is pronounced whimsy. Retired from Indian service. Nose seems to wobble from side to side, as though a pint of what?—port wine?—is sloshing around in it. Eyebrows and mustaches could be traded without slightest change in appearance. Never been near China. Calls the laborers ‘these blaahsted Chinks.’ First words to me: ‘Name of Christ, sir, who sent humph you here? Enough trouble keeping humph discipline, now they send me bleeding Young Men’s Christian Association.’ He does everything he can to keep me away from the laborers.”
• “Uproar in the barracks this morning. The Colonel called me in and said: ‘Raddup’—never gets my name right—‘you talky-talk their bally palaver, don’t you? Go in there and humph find out what the bloody fuss is.’ So I went in one of the huts. Bedlam. When they found out I could speak Mandarin—these are Northerners, you know—they gradually quieted and let a noncom explain things. One of the Brit officers here was a Leftenant Brend, who’d once done a tour in Peking, spoke a few words of Chinese, and was very considerate, and the Chinese adored him. He was shipped out by the C.O., who probably thought he was soft at the core. He was to leave this morning. The Chinese decided they’d all muster out at dawn and give him an honor march—all of them!—to La Gare Centrale. So they got themselves up an hour before reveille and formed ranks on the parade ground. Someone reported their being out there to Whimsy. He flew into a rage and without any idea what it was about, • he ordered them to quarters. They deeply resented the rudeness with which the order was given, and they sent word to the C.O. that they were going on strike. Enter yours truly. I suggested they should stay in the barracks all day, take their mess as usual in the evening, go to bed as usual, get up in the morning as usual, and go to work as usual. I assured them if they would do this, I would explain to the C.O. their good intentions and they could know that nothing more would be said. The old boy, it turned out, was relieved to have things come out that way.”
• “Another frightful ruckus. A real riot mob was marching from the waterfront to attack headquarters. They were armed with nasty staves and box hooks and poles, and I tell you, they had murder on the agenda. Raddup into the breach! I met them in the camp street. Got them to stop shouting and explain. It was so simple. These men belonged to three new Labor Corps companies that had just come in. They had finished unloading one ship and were to march to another. Apparently there was some delay, and the British noncom in charge, I finally figured out, shouted impatiently, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ He gave the word go an exasperated dipping inflection that made it precisely the word meaning ‘dog’ in Chinese. No possible greater insult. I said to them, ‘This is not the way we do in China when we have important matters to discuss. We do not settle them by shouting in the middle of the road. We do it with more dignity by taking a cup of tea together.’ They liked my saying that. They calmed down.”
• “Supreme habit of Chinese life: frequent sipping of tea or hot water. No one had taken the trouble to learn this. Terrible gastric consequences. Rage. I persuaded Whimsy that a ten-minute recess for tea in midafternoon would increase late-in-the-day productivity by 20 percent. Grumbling in his whiskers he allowed it. I was proved wrong. The improvement was 100 percent.”
• “Boche air raid. We ran for our dugout. Found that a coolie had hanged himself in the entrance. I learned he had done this to show his countrymen’s displeasure at the unbearableness of this life and at Whimsy’s bad manners. At next morning’s muster on the parade ground, Whimsy said to the interpreter: ‘Tell the blighters that if any more of them must hang themselves by the neck, be so good as to humph do it in their own dugouts. We don’t like such a mess in ours.’ ”
• “Two plagues, spread by boredom: gambling, opium. It seems that within a couple of days of each payday, most of the money in the camp of three thousand men winds up in the hands of five or six sharks. Enough left over, however, for many to buy a pipe’s worth of the poppy from despicable French parasites—one-legged or one-armed army dischargees—who skulk about.”
• “They flock to me with their woes. Misunderstandings about hours and wages. A Paris bank has undertaken to deliver money to families in China, and many coolies, never having heard from home about what had been sent, are wildly suspicious of French swindles. Befuddled interpreters. Constant loss of face because of haughty manner of British and French and American officers. Innocent, accidental, or purposeful violations of incomprehensible Western military regulations, resulting in rude reprimands, fines, extra hours of labor, and even imprisonment in stockade. Untreated diseases—especially trachoma, every other pair of eyes, it seems. Chinese army officers who have been shipped to France against their will. Petty thievery. Two murders; firing-squad executions of the killers. Desertions. For the Chinese, in this ambience of peculiar customs and bone-grinding work, everything is topsy-turvy.”
• “The first question every coolie asks me: ‘When do we go back to China?’ ”
“I NOW SEE,” Treadup wrote in “Search,” many years later,
that my real function, the real reason why scores of Y secretaries like me had been recruited for France, was to keep the Chinese slave laborers docile and hardworking. We were gangers, whip men, in benign disguise. At the time all I understood was that these were miserable human creatures wrenched from their habitat and desperately in need of the warmth of Christian love.
But even then, he added, he dimly perceived “something having to do with the colonial system”—namely, that the coolies in the Le Havre camp needed a more comprehensible love than that of Britons whose experience in dealing with “natives” had been acquired in nineteenth-century Poona and Hong Kong. In 1917, before the American entry into the war, the British Y.M.C.A., with the reluctant permission of the British military authorities, had begun establishing “red-triangle huts” at the Labor Corps camps; and there was one such at Le Havre. The hut had a “tuck shop,” where coolies could buy Huntley and Palmer biscuits, Players “smokes,” and hard candies and caramels. There were pictures on the walls of King George, of Crystal Palace, and of a race horse named Baracloo. Four soccer balls were available for sign-out, but they seemed not to have been used for a long time and were partially deflated. Classes in English were offered, but there were no takers, and Treadup learned that a rumor had run around the camp that any coolies who learned English would have to stay five or six more years. A British noncom was assigned to the hut to lead dawn calisthenics—“nip-ups,” he called them—for men exhausted by an endless succession of ten-hour days of physical labor. In Treadup’s first week a stereopticon lecture, “Western Civilization and Its Christian Safeguards,” was offered to a hutful of dispirited men who came to see the funny pictures.
COLONEL URQUHELMSY, for all his opacity, quickly saw Treadup’s “way with the Chinks” and its sudden effect on camp morale, and he began to give him tether to do pretty much what he wanted with the hut. Treadup went to work with his oarsman’s energy and with a craft which, he wrote Emily, he had “learned from Chinese tradesmen.”
His first huge success was that he “chivvied from a Brit officers’ club two idle badminton sets.” He did not string up the nets and he never took the racquets out of their cases. What he did do was to take out the shuttlecocks and announce a Chinese battledore contest on the camp parade ground. Nearly two thousand coolies showed up. They already knew which dozen men were most expert in the graceful, dancelike game of bouncing a shuttlecock off one foot, with dazzling moves, knee bent, foot swung backward, pock!, then left, pock!, then right, pock!, back proudly arched and head canted to watch the flying feathers, then hunched over and, having instinctively judged the arch of the bird, taking the next bounce blind!—beautiful!—then a fast series of little six-inch bounces, then whoosh! into the sky—always the flying foot right there, perfectly in balance, never touching the ground, ever ready to receive the shuttlecock, each movement of the whole body smooth as a poem, now chatter-rapid, then suddenly with a brief slow flowing motion as if doing t’ai ch’i. What roars from the crowd! What a stir in the camp that night! They had had something of home!
Soon, other Chinese pastimes appeared. Treadup set up a woodworking and mechanics shop in a corner of the hut, and artisans among the coolies built elaborate Chinese-style kites: flying insects, birds, and even fabled tigers and dragons, all of which soon rode the evening skies. Others made singing diabolo tops, which could be kept spinning on a loop of string attached to the ends of a pair of batons. One man built “stone locks”—round stones with metal handles affixed to them, for a game of strength and grace in which the locks were thrown from man to man with elegant formal fluid swinging gestures that made great strains appear to be delicate handling of featherweights.
But David Treadup knew the ultimate secret: The Chinese temperament, even that of the most abject coolie, preferred mental diversion to games. A stereopticon with slides of no matter what subject drew evening crowds. The men flocked to brief reports he gave on news from China and news of the war. Somehow he wangled a movie projector and a half dozen Charlie Chaplin shorts, and the laborers fought for seats for the privilege of grasping, with laughter and tears, the international language of those who are put upon.
All the time he was doing mysterious work in the hut shop. He was taking a bicycle apart, doing strange things with the wheels; making a kind of cover for one of them; building a queer, derricklike frame; attaching a crank to a kind of flywheel which held a circular chain…. And then one day he announced at morning muster that he would entertain anyone who was interested that evening with a talk on “The Magic of Whirling Wheels.”
It was, of course, the dear old gyroscope lecture, couched in the simple language he had used at Langfang with the Christian General’s soldiers. Nearly six hundred men showed up. Treadup basked in the heat of their appreciation. When the lecture was over, the men just sat there. “Wan-lao,” he said. “It’s finished.” They did not move. Finally he asked, “What are you waiting for?” One of the men stood and asked him to start again at the beginning. He was obliged to repeat the whole lecture then and there.
NEWS of Treadup’s successes spread, and in the summer of 1918 he was put in charge of all the Y.M.C.A. huts for the entire Chinese Labor Corps throughout France. This meant moving to Paris. “I am amazed,” he wrote Emily,
at discovering how ‘European’ our Chinese treaty-port cities really are. Here in Passy where we have our little office I could be in the French Concession in Tientsin or in the International Settlement in Shanghai—except that Passy’s a bit hilly.
In his new responsibilities, in honor of which he was promoted to the assimilated rank of major, he was technically in command of about thirty British and American Y.M.C.A. secretaries, many of whom had served in China, and about the same number of educated young Chinese men, most of whom had come to France straight from American universities, where they had been preparing themselves for leadership in China. This latter constituted a brilliant cadre, which included such men as T. F. Tsiang, who many years later would be Nationalist China’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and representative at the United Nations; and Franklin Ho, who would become a distinguished economist, eventually a professor at Columbia University. At the same time, another stunning group of Chinese youths—beyond Treadup’s reach—had come to study in Paris during wartime and were taking a more radical direction. Among them were Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who would found the Chinese Communist Party; Chou En-lai (Zhou Enlai), who would be second only to Mao in the Communist revolution; and Teng Hsiao-p’ing (Deng Xiaoping), who would be the country’s most powerful leader after Mao’s death.
Treadup’s first task was to tour the huts in all the camps and make the acquaintance of “his” men. One visit on this tour was to have a decisive effect on the rest of his life.
AUGUST 1918; the Boulogne encampment. Treadup had just sat down to chat with a recent Yale graduate, Wu Ch’u-sun, who quickly let it be known that he was called “Johnny” Wu. There was a sudden burst of what sounded like angry shouting inside a nearby barracks.
TREADUP “What’s all that noise?”
WU “That’s not ‘noise.’ That’s my evening class, studying Chinese. Come and see.”
They entered the hut. There Treadup saw about forty coolies, seated on benches. A teacher—another recent graduate from America, named Ma Kuo-fan, called Peter Ma—was writing characters on a blackboard, and the pupils, grown men, were shouting just like upper-class Chinese schoolboys, potential literati, in an old-fashioned Chinese primary school. Except, as Treadup could see at once, the words were not from The Three-Character Classic or The Sacred Edict, but were simple sentences of the sort that belonged in letters home to China. Treadup couldn’t believe his eyes and ears. He interrupted the recital and asked one pupil after another to go to the blackboard and write a character or two. Seeing the alacrity and élan with which they showed off, he suddenly burst into tears.
“I wept,” he wrote Emily,
to see these lowly men writing the sacred characters! Think of it! For three thousand years the Chinese intelligentsia had taken it for granted that the Chinese peasant could never learn to read and write: he was stupid, lazy, his value was locked into his arms and back. But look! One man wrote the characters from which “coolie” comes: ‘k’u Ii.’ “Bitter strength.” 0 Emily, I still get shivers up my back remembering his hand holding the chalk—decisive strokes!
JOHNNY WU had grown up in Szechuan, in the heart of China. His father, a classical scholar, having taught Chinese to some missionaries, thought his son should get a taste of Western learning and sent him off at the age of seven to a missionary boarding school. Eventually, impressed by the boy’s gifts, the head of the school, a man named John Winthrop, said young Wu should not let himself be buried in provincial China, and he himself took the boy, when he was fifteen, to Hong Kong—a forty-day trip overland—and got him admitted to St. Stephen’s College, which could prepare him for Oxford or Cambridge. After one year, Wu took the university matriculation exams and placed first in the Colony. But he and two Chinese friends decided to go not to England but to the United States. They chose a college of which they had heard vague good things, Oberlin. On the ship Wu met an American graduate of Yale who was returning to the States after having taught for two years at Yale-in-China, and Wu liked the sound of Yale. So he presented himself at New Haven, and was accepted. He waited on table in Commons and was thrilled to study under William Howard Taft, an ex-President of the United States. Out of gratitude to John Winthrop, he took the name John for his own. He made Phi Beta Kappa. In the spring of his senior year he was recruited, along with other Chinese Christians studying in America, to go to France to work with the Y.M.C.A. in support of the Chinese Labor Corps, and he sailed a week after he graduated.
THE COOLIES at the huge Boulogne camp were heartbreakingly homesick. Wu reverberated to their pain, for he would never forget having had to stifle his sobs in his pillow as a seven-year-old at the missionary boarding school. One night soon after his arrival at Boulogne, four coolies came to the hut and asked him to write letters home for them. He did. The next night thirty men appeared, wanting letters home. Soon, night after night, as many as two hundred would come and stand in line. Not many nights had passed before Wu had had enough.
At morning muster, with five thousand coolies assembled in open air, Wu called out, “I have been writing letters home for many of you. Beginning today, no more.” Laughter in the Chinese style of disbelief. “I mean it. Those of you who want to learn to do it for yourselves, raise your hands.” No hands, louder laughter. This was shockingly “foreign,” alien to the ancient proprieties. Farmers daring wholesale to be scholars? “I mean it.” Very loud laughter. Wu simply waited, silent, for a long time. Then: “How many?” Forty bold souls put hands up. “You are my students. At night you come to my hut.”
So far (Wu told Treadup) the “school” had been a harrowing, pathetic, thrilling experience. Wu and Ma were teaching the men just enough characters to be able to write letters home and to read rudimentary news bulletins. Some evenings men would arrive late, out of breath; their work squad had returned to camp late, they had been afraid they would miss the class, they had skipped supper to get there. Wu had begun posting a daily news sheet on the outside of the hut. His students would read them in loud, authoritative criers’ voices to crowds of envious coolies.
Wu invited Treadup to come back to Boulogne for the “graduation” of the first class in about a month.
WHAT JOHNNY WU was doing at Boulogne was to become, in its distant consequences, a significant offshoot of the movement known as the Chinese Renaissance—a movement in which we see a dramatic intersection of the lines of history of the missionary movement and of the Chinese Communist revolution.
On the first day of the year 1917, a brilliant student at Cornell named Hu Shih—who had come to the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship—had published simultaneously in the Quarterly, a magazine of the Chinese students in America, in English, and in New Youth, a magazine edited in Peking by Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who was later to be a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, in Chinese, an article entitled, “Some Tentative Suggestions for the Reform of Chinese Literature.” Hu argued that the classical language so long revered by Chinese scholars, the wen-li, was long dead. “No dead language,” he wrote, “can produce a living literature.”
“The only possible medium of the future literature of China,” Hu later wrote, summarizing that first call for reform,
was the ‘pai-hua,’ the vulgar tongue of the vast majority of the population, the language which, in the last 500 years, had produced the numerous novels read and loved by the people, though despised by men of letters. I wanted this much-despised vulgar tongue of the people and the novels to be elevated to the position of the national language of China, to the position enjoyed by all the modern national languages of Europe.
Ch’en then published other essays by Hu arguing for “a constructive revolution in Chinese literature.” The essays stirred up a great deal of discussion, and by the summer of 1917, when Hu returned to China (and when Wu and others went to France), the swing toward a Chinese literature based on common speech was well under way, and before long the New Literature, as some called it, had become a powerful instrument in social reform. Peking University, where Ch’en was dean of the College of Letters, became the center of the movement, and for a time the streams of Christian reformism and Chinese radicalism converged. Ch’en himself was to write in New Youth in 1920, the year before he founded the Chinese Communist Party, that students should study Christianity seriously and “knock at [Jesus’s] door and ask that his lofty and magnificent character and his warm sympathetic spirit be united with us.” The scholar Wu Lei-ch’uan pictured Christ as a social reformer, just as K’ang Yu-wei had earlier pictured Confucius. In the fiercely felt need to revivify the culture, every force for change, including the social gospel spread by the foreign missionaries, was enlisted—for a time.
The Christian Johnny Wu’s search at Boulogne for a frugal vocabulary to serve the needs of previously uneducated peasants and laborers was a humble by-product of this literary renaissance. It was destined to feed back significantly into China’s drive for change, for it would bear fruit several years later in an inventory of basic characters, chosen by Wu and others, which would be used in a mass-education movement, led by Wu himself. And this movement would have an enormous influence on all subsequent education in China—including, in particular, Communist mass education.
FROM A LETTER to Emily:
General Burton-Kemp, the C. O. of the entire Labor Corps, was on hand. We stood behind some tables on the parade ground. You’d have thought Colonel James Fort, the Boulogne camp commandant, had thought the whole thing up. He pranced around as if we were handing out the King’s Honors List. All 5,000 coolies were in ranks. Johnny Wu had given his forty scholars two tests: of the ability to write a simple letter home and to read a simple news sheet. Thirty-five had passed. Wu called these forward one by one, and the General handed each a diploma which “Professor” Wu had written with a scholar’s calligraphy on the red paper of joy, and which had then been framed so as to hang proudly on hut walls. Each one said:
SO-AND-SO
IS HEREBY CERTIFIED AS A LITERATE CITIZEN OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA
The 5,000 coolies had learned well the Western custom of clapping, and they roared, too, for each “graduate.” I tell you, Em, that ceremony stirred up the whole crowd, and now Johnny has more than two thousand applicants on his hands for the second “term”!
IN NOVEMBER came the Armistice. For the Chinese Labor Corps this was the end of nothing but actual physical danger, for those who had been in the way of it, from shelling or aerial bombardments. Their boon of victory was more and worse work. Their greatest and most depressing task remained: cleaning up the battlefields; filling trenches; deconstructing dugouts; clearing away barbed wire; filling shell holes—cosmetic cover-up of the gruesome absurdity of the Western nations’ ritual of trench slaughter. The coolies loaded British soldiers onto ships for home; saw the French walk out into mufti. But they could find no hope of their own release from bondage. Morale dived.
Practically the only bright spot was Boulogne, where the spreading epidemic of literacy gave the coolies a dim hope of a future in China that might be different from their past, and where the constant posting of news sheets had seemed to the men to have brought them already into a relatively lighted space. David Treadup could not help seeing this, and he summoned Johnny Wu to Paris and told him he wanted to appoint him head of education for the entire Labor Corps, which now numbered more than two hundred thousand. Wu declined; it was too tall an order for him, he said. Treadup said, “Let me remind you of something. You’re a lieutenant, I’m a major.” “You mean it’s an order, tall or not?” “Exactly.” Wu said he would accept on one condition—that Treadup would have all the Chinese student volunteers (from Harvard and Yale and Cornell and elsewhere; there were now sixty-seven of them with the Labor Corps) go to Boulogne for ten days to watch what was going on: Chinese coolies teaching Chinese coolies to read and write. For Wu had divided his mass of pupils into squads of ten and had trained some of his brightest “graduates” to instruct the squads part of the time.
DAVID TREADUP itched. The war was won. Brightened Paris was bewildering. Emily was far away. “I was not cut out for administration, I am building another bureau, I am a ‘crat,’ ” he wrote in his diary. It did not ease his restlessness to drive in a towering Citroën from camp to camp, on his supervisory tours. “Once in a while I give the gyro lecture to blow off steam.” But he wrote that the lecture “is just a substitute for Charlie Chaplin as The Waiter. It’s an evening’s amusement, but it isn’t real teaching—Wu’s the one who is doing the real teaching.” As he had once been haunted by the faces of the men, women, and children holding shovels and baskets in the famine district at Yang Ts’un, he was now haunted by the faces of the men coming forward at Boulogne to receive their “degrees” as LITERATE CITIZENS OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA. His diary:
An irony in my life: The notion we got at Student Volunteer Movement meetings was that we as social-gospel missionaries would show the Chinese a new way to live and love, but now, for me, the reverse has come about. A Chinese person has turned me right around. True, Wu gives credit to the missionaries who got him started—told me one night about one of those nineteenth-century English eccentrics, William Aldis, who went into the wilderness of Szechuan, wore Chinese clothes, shaved the front of his head, grew a pigtail behind, and taught a homesick seven-year-old boy, by example, some aspects of Christian love that the grown-up man will never forget. But that same night Wu taught me lines from the classics that he had learned from his father when he was five:
‘Min hui pang pen.
Pen ku pang min.’’
[“People are the foundation of the nation.
Strong foundation—tranquil nation.”]
People—these coolies—a chance to be able to read and write—a strong foundation. I have a great deal to think about.
AS A RAW, incipient literacy spread from camp to camp, the newly created need for reading matter became pressing, and in the spring of 1919 Treadup moved Wu to Paris to edit a newspaper, Chinese Laborers’ Weekly. There was no Chinese movable type in Paris. Wu acquired large sheets of cardboard, marked them off in rectangles, and with his own hand wrote in news from China, European news, and even editorials; then he had the paper printed, in editions of scores of thousands, by lithography.
Treadup took Wu into his modest apartment. “I’ve lost my privacy,” he wrote Emily,
but I’ve gained a companion who is the strangest combination: he is a brother and a teacher. I am learning lessons of courtesy and civility such as I’ve never known. I don’t suppose there is any such thing as a typical Chinese—certainly Johnny must be a-typical in his enthusiasm, which is excessive and would be too much in a citizen of any country—it is exhausting—I have rowed four miles after every conversation with him—but his in-built kindness (civility is the only word for it) is something we’ve seen in almost all our Chinese friends. I think of Chuan, David Liu—so many with this wonderful insistence on consideration for others. Some of it is ceremonial, a matter of manners: the hot cup of tea set out for a visitor, no matter how hot the day. But opaque manners—those you can’t easily see through—are formal exercises of the self-control without which there could be no such thing as love in an overpopulated country. Such sweet forms relieve crowdedness; Johnny makes my tiny apartment seem roomy. And that’s what makes the company of my new brother so unstrained.
CROWDEDNESS soon became a lively actuality in Paris. On December 13, Woodrow Wilson arrived for the peace conference with a delegation of thirteen hundred Americans. Within a few days ten thousand delegates of assorted nations and five hundred journalists of the tongues of Babel had poured into the capital. Among the invaders was a small delegation from China, led by Wu T’ing-hsiang, determined to make one point, above all: that the contributions to the Allies of a Labor Corps of 240,000 men—equivalent in manpower to five American divisions—entitled China to be relieved of the burdens of concessions and trade disadvantages in the treaty ports, imposed under the “unequal treaties” of the mid-nineteenth century.
The frustrations of the Chinese mission in the next few weeks led to consequences for David Treadup that he never lived down in his own mind. When it began to be obvious that in the great squabbles over European settlements and in the drama of the losing battle of Wilson’s idealistic Fourteen Points against the hard-nosed territorial demands of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, China was going to be ignored, Johnny Wu reported it with some bitterness in the Laborers’ Weekly.
When much worse news leaked out—that Britain, France, Russia, Italy, and Japan had entered into secret treaties in 1915, long before the United States had joined the Allies, and that under them Japan was to be awarded virtual hegemony over Shantung Province—Johnny Wu reported it with even greater bitterness. This was the same old imperialist carving up of China. He wrote sharp editorials about the unequal treaties. He brought home to those who had been given the job of cleaning up the leavings of the greed of the major powers the true meaning of k’u li: they were indeed slave laborers.
One day in late February 1919, Treadup was called in by General Burton-Kemp, the British commander of the Labor Corps. The General had translations of the Laborers’ Weekly spread out on his desk, and he was in a rage. He ordered Treadup to shut down the paper and sack its editor—“send the bugger back to China.”
There must have been a sudden struggle of contradictory forces in Treadup’s heart: Christian acceptance, respect for the canons of military discipline, good sportsmanship and good form, loyalty to a dear friend, an understanding of Chinese sensibilities, an athlete’s combative spirit, and the smarting of a slapped cheek. “With as much courtesy as I could summon up on short notice,” he wrote his brother Paul,
I reminded His Nibs of the graduation ceremony at Boulogne. And of the fact that Johnny’s news sheets were just about the only thing that kept the coolies slogging along. He finally swallowed the idea of getting Johnny to tone things down.
That, in the end, was what Treadup could never square with himself. “I had compromised,” he wrote in “Search,”
and I had to go back to Johnny Wu and censor him. How angry he was—and how helpless! What a humiliating lesson for me, in how one could let himself go along with the workings of the colonial system! And yet it’s strange: My greatest anger at the time was at Woodrow Wilson, for having raised my hopes—Johnny’s hopes—China’s hopes—with high-sounding principles which then, in the outcome, he was allowing to be blown away like feathery dandelion seeds to broadcast the weeds of “reality.”
Within a week David had written New York for permission to return to China—by way, of course, of Montclair, New Jersey. On March 10, 1919, he started on his way.
HE WENT straight to Montclair. Emily shocked him. She was thin. Her eyes seemed to look out at him from dark woods. Her three middle fingers drummed a message of nerves on the table as he and she talked. He thought of her wild whisper when she had delivered herself of her first child: “Don’t leave me alone!”
That first child, Philip, she said, who had always been so self-contained, had, at ten, in his father’s absence, appointed himself head of the family and had begun to expect Emily to love, honor, and obey him. “I can’t do anything with him,” she said. He had picked up curses at school that would scald your soul, and he wouldn’t keep the Sabbath because “they” all played baseball on Sunday, and gambled with marbles.
Absolom’s mischievousness had taken an ugly turn: His teachers said he was constantly involved in pranks on his classmates, some of them cruel. There seemed to be something wrong with his hearing.
Paul was an outsized angel most of the time, but he was not doing well in his studies.
“They were better in China,” Emily said. “All the children here are so…so immigrant! Every day is a game they have to win.”
She had had a fearfully close time with money. Shame on the Y’s allowances! There had been periods when she had thought the children were seriously undernourished. They had all had measles at once. “Acres of rash,” she said.
She was able at last to smile. The tight muscles of her face and neck gave way. “Ah, David,” she said. “You’re back with us.”
BUT HE WAS NOT. Within three days he had slipped off to New York, to report to James B. Todd—and that, as it turned out, was the beginning of new wanderings.
The interview with the great Todd was exceedingly painful. Gone was the easy familiarity David had won as Todd’s shill on the evangelical tour. Todd seemed distracted; seemed scarcely to know at first who Treadup was.
“Tried to present him,” David wrote in his diary,
my excitement about Johnny Wu’s methods with the coolies, and about Johnny’s dreams for a new kind of education in China. The Y should be in its vanguard! James B. was very stern with me. “Stick to your last, cobbler,” says he. “You have drawn us very heavily into your famous lecture program. Blackton and others endorse it. I myself have seen its pulling power. You owe it to us to keep it vital.” When James B. uses words like “power” and “vital,” his eyebrows shoot up and his eyes snap. It is as if he hugs you with the enthusiasm of his disagreement, and you are smothered into acceptance. So: I’m off on a cultivation tour for the good old lectures!
Much of what Treadup had been mulling over with growing eagerness since he had left France was, in that hour, rudely rebuffed, but even in troubled times his own temperament had so much stubborn enthusiasm in it that after a few nights in Montclair he seems to have swallowed his disappointment and recovered his bounce. Being with Emily obviously helped; perhaps prayer did, too. At any rate, he soon went out on the road “newly inspired,” as he wrote, to drum up support for the Lecture Department of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of China.
HE STARTED in New York City. With some businessmen he had met on his previous fund-raising furlough, he set up a series of meetings at which he could not help proposing the lectures in China as a model for a new sort of education in the United States.
Treadup made haste then to visit once again his “old friend” E. A. Sperry, the inventor of the gyrocompass, in Brooklyn—“a man of strong Christian character whose Sperry Gyroscope Company and whose interest in the Lecture Bureau have both grown in a pleasing way since last we met.” Treadup’s infectious enthusiasm reached right into Mr. Sperry’s pocketbook, and the inventor donated $5,000 gold, for the equipping of a special building in Shanghai for the Bureau, and $5,000 in cash for general uses. Not only that; he also gave Treadup “a remarkable and unique set of gyroscopic equipment, including a gyroscope that Mr. Sperry has been using for his own lecturing purposes, the only one of its design in existence.”
The next thing we know, Treadup has dashed off to Syracuse, then to the Middle West. His Syracuse contingency says it will “do its best to raise five thousand dollars a year.” In Dayton, Ohio, we get a glimpse of him, in the company of “such men as C. F. Kettering and A. E. Deeds,” lecturing on lecturing to the Dayton Engineers’ Club. Together these men pledge $10,000 a year for five years for Treadup’s work. In Chicago, he collides again with the munificent Madam Miller, and presto!—the National Reaper and Binder Company donates “thirty lecture outfits, consisting of large charts, exhibit stands, lantern slides, and films,” as well as money to ship them to Shanghai. Another wealthy lady whom Treadup cultivated on his previous furlough, a Mrs. Percival B. Campbell, pledges $5,000 a year for “as long as she can afford it.” He also visits, in Chicago, the Academy of Science, the University of Chicago, the University Extension Association, and the Y.M.C.A., and, he reports,
a good deal of fine lecture work of a popular sort is being done here, but in comparison with the methods and plans that we have in China, a very great advance is still possible for the city of Chicago.
Treadup next reports that “the Ford Motor Company has donated $2,480 in apparatus for demonstrations,” and that “Dr. E. Howitt and Mr. R. Q. Malt of the Western Electric Company are designing and assembling for us a wireless outfit which involves a number of the latest inventions and discoveries and is much in advance of the material that can now be purchased on the market.”
WHEN TREADUP finally impressed on the New York office that upon his return from France he had found Mrs. Treadup in some danger of a nervous collapse, a medical examination was arranged; the doctor ordered “a complete rest in a quiet country setting.” So it was that David Treadup went home to Salt Branch, with his family of four in tow.
Home? What had happened to his little principality of memories? Where had his childhood gone? He had known that the farm had been sold, but he had hardly taken in that his parents—tremor of the hands, milky films forming on the irises—should be living with sister Grace in a miserable block of “railroad flats” over a Woolworth’s five-and-ten, in the village. Automobiles everywhere; dust, fumes, explosions of motors. The old farm, sold as a ruination for a mere half pint of dollars, was now fat land in other hands, with a tobacco cash crop! Vast enterprises wherever you turned: Grange Silo and the Mott Lumber Company both building silos for the relatively new green storage of crops. A huge apple evaporator near the pond, where dried apples were processed. The creamery, where he had used to deliver the milk, now a big cheese factory, with a sideline of casein, which was sent off in multitudes of identical bags to a button factory in Rochester.
And his childhood friends! Renny Paxon—Renny of the watery dreams of the back-lot lumber pile!—had turned out to be a vulgar, profane, ill-educated, and prosperous dealer in auto tires. Cassie Berns—Cassie of the church-picnic ecstasies!—was a paunchy slattern who had survived two husbands and was well on her noisy way to wearing out a third, an alcoholic surveyor.
But it was the lot of dear little sister Grace, the bouncy, playful Ecarg, that brought home to David an America he had not dreamed of—an America of thin times and mean work. Now a dry spinster in her early forties, a bit hunched, wearing glasses, Grace had lost both her sense of humor and her job in the Cato Public Library. She was working at the Salt Branch Canning Company. He went one day to see what she did there. “It might have been in Shanghai!” he wrote in his diary. Long tables with sixteen or twenty women on each side of a broad moving belt, along which apples came to them from paring and coring machines; they would trim off remaining peel and quarter the apples and put them in large buckets. Men collected the buckets as they were filled and punched tally tickets on the backs of the women’s chairs. Grace earned ten cents for each bucket she filled, and if there were not too many spoiled apples, she could eke out altogether ninety cents or a dollar in a ten-hour day.
DEAR BROTHER PAUL came to Salt Branch for a few days to be with David, and this gave David a chance to talk to a pair of hearing ears about what was so much on his mind: the exact nature and purpose of his sacred calling. Paul had grown up to be a mild and shy man, who knew his modest worth as a teacher of small children; he was the perfect listener for David, for he loved and idolized his younger and much bigger brother, and he himself was fairly at peace with life.
David was distinctly not. “Talked to bro P this eve,” he wrote,
about the wakening giant that is China. So much to be done! Confessed to him that the approach to the literati, about which I used to write to him with such high hopes, was way off the mark. It is the common people who need lifting up. Johnny Wu may have the key to the lock. But the task is so overwhelmingly vast. Paul has eighteen children in his classroom. There must be three hundred million illiterate Chinese!
The next day’s entry:
Paul gave me a hard turn. Asked me: “Do you still believe that Jesus Christ is the answer for the Chinese people?” I said very sharply: “Of course I do.” “But for two days,” he said, “you have been talking about illiteracy, flood control, cholera and the pox, gunboats, bad treaties, and what did you call those English business sheds? Godowns? Not a word about the Sermon on the Mount. Any loaves and fishes out in the field? And by the way”—his face grew dark—“you were complaining about the wringer they’re putting sister Grace through down there at the cannery. Is that the Golden West you want the wakening giant to copy?” I very much regret my response. I was angry at my dear brother. I quite shouted, “I believe in what I am doing!” Paul calls himself “a shallow Christian,” but in his charity he put me to shame. “Davy! Davy!” he very softly said. “Of course you do.”
A few days later, after Paul had left:
I am past forty. Dr. Prinfell fitted me for my first glasses yesterday. I can see everything more clearly with them on—everything but the future. Em seems herself again. She is the most remarkably realistic person I know on this earth. She is my gyro-stabilizer. She says I look more like a real missionary with my glasses on: I remember I used to wear clear-glass pince-nez for my early lectures, thinking, I suppose, that they did make me look “real.” It was so good to talk with my beloved Paulie. My mind is unsettled about what a “real” missionary, specs or no specs, should best do for great China, but I feel able now to face going back, even into the thicket of my uncertainties. I will go on with the lectures; I will keep my eyes, behind their glasses, alertly open. I will keep in touch with Johnny. And pray for understanding, and for proportions.
BACK IN MONTCLAIR, Treadup learned that Johnny Wu had decided to go for a doctorate at Princeton. Whatever might come of keeping in touch with him would have to wait, perhaps for two or three years.
JUST BEFORE the Treadup family was to leave for Vancouver and thence for China, David pulled off a little coup, of which he was to be very proud. He persuaded the New York City committee in charge of Victory Day, the city’s celebration of the successful end of the war, to donate to the Lecture Bureau the up-to-the-minute vacuum-tube radio transmitter and receiver that was used to send congratulatory messages all over the world on that day. He shot off a triumphant note to Todd about this acquisition:
James, this will be the first radio-telephone station in history to be mounted on a Chinese wheelbarrow! It has power, sending, receiving, and amplifying units. I will pack them all in a strong trunk to go on the road pick-a-back on a wheelbarrow, ready to travel into the deepest reaches of Chinese understanding!
ON MAY 10, 1919, the family left for the Far East—which was far, far to the west of Montclair, New Jersey.
On the train station platform Emily, now a handsome woman of thirty-six, wearing a pink veil touched with black polka dots tied back over her velvet-trimmed hat, fluttered over her brood, wildly happy to be leaving the scene of her gruesome ordeal of loneliness. Philip, ten, who had been sulking at his displacement as head of the family, petulantly brushed aside her hand when she tried, with a saliva-moistened handkerchief, to wipe away a dirty spot on his cheek. (The lost child Nancy, always in moments of emotion present in Emily’s mind, was a sprightly ghost of eight, dressed on this hot day in a pretty pinafore.) Absolom, six, was pale, bewildered, passive. Big little Paul, at five taller than Absolom, kept a firm grip on a handful of cloth—his father’s trouser leg. The father stood huge and hale against the sky, flipping through tickets tucked into a fat billfold. He would have his forty-first birthday in two months. His face was slightly flushed. Emily, recording the scene in a letter to David’s father and mother, wrote:
I could tell from the way his big hands moved—I can see the jump in the muscles of his thumbs when he’s excited!—that he is thrilled—as if he were about to row again for the Orange!—to be going back to his dear China. But it is not easy for him. This is a new beginning—the outset of a new career, almost. I think starting out this time is harder than it was the first time. How blithe he could be in his ignorance that other time! Now he has begun to know the immensity, the sadness, the difficulties. One of the vivid phrases the Chinese have is ‘chih k’u’—“eat bitterness.” David knows now that he will have to eat bitterness, in the sense that—well, the job is too big. He has talked with me and prayed with me about this. I think he is very brave.