The Challenging Heights

by Max Hennessy

  The RAF were operating from the racecourse, flying DH4s, and the CO turned out to be Cuthbert Orr. Large in stature, tough, indifferent to authority, he considered his rank gave him the right to run his command the way he felt fit. ‘I’m not a bloody clerk answering messages from the brass at the top,’ he pointed out. ‘And this place’s a shambles, with the Chinese internal politics getting rougher by the day. Friendly Chinese warned us long since that an army was being assembled in Canton to capture the place and for once somebody took some notice and there are now about 25,000 troops entrenched round the boundaries. If anybody draws a deep breath, some poor bugger falls into the river.’

  He wasn’t happy at the situation. There were plots, bombs and arms smuggling, wheelbarrow riots, rickshaw strikes, and regular stoppages in one or other of the local services – taxis, water, electricity, tramway.

  ‘All stirred up by political factions for their own ends,’ he said. ‘The foreign-educated students have noticed Western methods of getting your own way and they’ve adopted them. They want independence and I can’t honestly say I blame them. After all, the English run their Customs, the French run their postal services, and all foreigners are exempt from Chinese law, while some of the bastards operating out here would be in clink if they tried the same thing back home. It doesn’t make it easy for the Chinese to take into account the benefits they receive from European know-how, while the Russian Communist Party, of course, is fishing in troubled waters for its own benefit.’

  He paused and gave a wry smile. ‘Half the Chinese generals on both sides are crooks, of course. They’re mostly ex-warlords who terrorised the countryside until Chiang’s Kuomintang party got going; then, according to their whims, they joined one side or the other. They’re still corrupt and still bloody cruel, and the Europeans don’t help. During the war, people in other places served in uniform; this lot merely enjoyed themselves, making fortunes and building damn great houses for themselves. The admiral who’s running the show hates the buggers and I don’t blame him.’

  The Nationalist army was expected any day and the troops were lining up for the confrontation that was bound to come. The Peking Government’s army was little more than a rabble, but the Cantonese had been drilled by roofless German ex-officers and had some semblance of military appearance. British and American warships were gathering in the river among the swarming junks and sampans, and Western arrogance was tempered by apprehension.

  The Chinese had already tried their hands at Hankow and other places up the Yangtze and had found that what they’d been told about there being enough of them to beat the foreigners was right. There just weren’t sufficient Europeans to stand against the Chinese mobs and the first refugees were already heading downriver to the safety of Shanghai, their possessions gone, their faces grey with strain, their children wailing with terror.

  Life in Shanghai hadn’t altered much, however. The navy was being reinforced and a fresh Punjabi battalion had just arrived. By this time, there were eight British battalions, and more were expected, but unfortunately there was no common command and every contingent had different orders.

  The British Consulate knew nothing of the Aubrey family. ‘They were here,’ Dicken was told, ‘but that was two years ago.’

  Dicken shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. He was chasing a ghost, he knew, and it looked as though he’d never catch up with it. It was better to let the whole thing drop. For a moment, he had entertained a hope that he might pick up where he had left off, but it was nine years since. Nicola might have married or, because of her religion, even gone into a convent, and if neither of these things, she would be different – nine years different. With her gentleness and naivety she had been little more than a schoolgirl. Now she would be a woman of twenty-seven, surely worldly-wise, tougher, more knowledgeable and less sentimental. The Nicola he had known was gone for ever.

  There was only one chance left – Father O’Buhilly. His mission rooms were bare-walled and devoid of ornament beyond a few potted plants.

  ‘It is enough to breathe and live – and sometimes to die,’ he explained. ‘And sure, that’s all we need.’

  He had won a medal for bravery with the American army in the Argonne in 1918 and seemed to regard China as just another campaign. Nothing put him off what he was doing, neither the disapproval of the British matrons nor the hatred of the Communists who liked to suggest he was a spy for the foreign armed forces. He had no knowledge of the Aubreys.

  ‘I remember them,’ he said, offering cigarettes. ‘He arrived here four years ago with his family – and what a splendid family they were, every one of them a beauty, male an’ female alike. He was disappointed, I guess, because he was still in a junior position and in the end they all went back to London, and the next I heard they’d gone to Baghdad in Iraq.’

  ‘I’ve just come from Iraq,’ Dicken said.

  ‘The Almighty never intended the Via Crucis to be strewn with roses, me boy. ’Tis the way life treats us.’

  Despite the tension, the Shanghailanders seemed to have no intention of giving up their pleasures and continued as before, eating, drinking, going to the cinema or the races, and carrying on affairs with each other’s wives. Among them were girls who had come out to join relatives on the hunt for husbands and were finding it hard to compete with the Chinese, French, American and Russians who usually had more character and invariably more vitality in the humid heat. The British wives attacked the morals of the Russian women but the Russians, toughened by their wanderings since the Revolution, were quite indifferent. They regarded the British women as ‘flat-chested, flat-footed, and worn out by hunting, hockey and golf’. The clash of tempers and the never-ending hostilities they provoked between themselves and their admirers resulted in the area where they lived and plied their profession becoming known as The Trenches.

  In contrast, the British-organised affairs were formal enough to be dull, with everyone eyeing their neighbours, weighing up their chances and considering whether they had been put in the right pecking order. Among them, to his surprise, Dicken bumped into Annys Diplock, recently arrived with her husband from Hong Kong. She was still attractive but she had put on weight and she eyed Dicken warily.

  Diplock, it seemed, had been appointed personal assistant to the new Air Officer Commanding – who else but Air Commodore St Aubyn, who had newly arrived from England? It was amazing, Dicken reflected, how people like St Aubyn and Diplock managed to take care of themselves. Every reversal of fortune that sprang from their narrow-mindedness and their concern for their own affairs was turned to advantage. The last Dicken had heard of St Aubyn was when, as a group captain, he had been sent back to England with a flea in his ear for failing to protect Tafas Hashim Fitna and his tribe in the north of Iraq, but here he was, turning up again like a bad penny, with increased rank and doubtless increased power, to sweep Diplock back into his sphere of influence.

  Carefully, he avoided asking how the two of them were and kept the conversation to safer subjects.

  ‘How’s Zoë?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Annys admitted. ‘I haven’t heard from her for over a month.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Dicken said. ‘I haven’t heard from her for two. Got the family with you?’

  ‘Just my small daughter. We left my son at school in England. It’s better for him.’

  The party was all small talk and he wondered what he had ever seen in her. She had always been the placid one of the family, formal, orthodox, lacking Zoë’s vitality. Perhaps he should have married her instead. At least he would have known what his wife was up to.

  She introduced him to a girl standing alongside her. ‘This is Joyce Mahaffy,’ she said. ‘She’s the sister of Arthur’s deputy, James Mahaffy. She’s come out here to stay for a while.’

  Joyce Mahaffy had good features, a good figure and a lively eye, and she manag
ed to get Dicken to one side.

  ‘Are you as bored as I am?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know how bored you are,’ he replied cautiously.

  ‘Very bored.’

  ‘That’s about as bored as I am. Shall we sneak out?’

  Dicken had already been invited to the Long Bar of the Shanghai Club, without which no man could say he had ‘arrived’, and eaten at the RAF Club, founded by ex-RFC men. This time it was the Country Club, its name somewhat of a misnomer because, despite its squash courts, tennis courts and swimming pool, the fields which had once surrounded it were beginning to vanish beneath the tide of skyscrapers which had engulfed the city. Drinking the China-sides summer drink of gin, lime and ice with a touch of bitters, they studied each other.

  ‘You’ve got rather a lot of gongs,’ Joyce said.

  ‘Comes of not having enough sense to keep my head down,’ Dicken said. ‘You married?’

  ‘Would it matter if I were?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. How about you?’

  ‘Yes. But that doesn’t matter much either. I haven’t seen my wife for ages. She’s in the States. She likes to think herself a liberated woman.’

  ‘Is she attractive?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Do you trust her on her own?’

  ‘No.’ Dicken answered with a wry smile. ‘I never have.’

  ‘So what’s the situation?’

  ‘She seems to go her way and I go mine.’

  ‘Leaves you both pretty free. Do you take advantage of the fact?’

  ‘I haven’t yet.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘I suspect so. How about you?’

  ‘My brother has a flat here but at the moment he’s in Hong Kong, which leaves the flat empty except for me. How about coming for dinner tonight? I’m a pretty good cook.’

  He knew at once what she was seeking. He’d heard the expression, ‘The Fornicating Latitudes’, and suspected she was not only bored, but also eager for an affair.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ he said.

  Two

  Within a week, Dicken was deep in an affair which looked as though it might take some throwing off. Joyce Mahaffy was twenty-nine and was after a man, and it didn’t matter whose. Her brother seemed to be on permanent detachment to Hong Kong and she was more often than not alone, which suited her down to the ground. She had an attachment to China and, to the disgust of the Service wives, wore cheongsams slit almost to the hip to show a length of splendid white thigh, and went in for chopsticks, bird’s-nest soup, shark fins, boiled sea slugs, Peking duck, fillet of snake, and hot rice wine served in tiny china cups.

  ‘Why be in China and try to live as if you were in London?’ she said with some truth.

  Fortunately the situation surrounding the city meant that Dicken wasn’t always free when she expected him to be and that left him relatively safe because when he wasn’t about he suspected she turned her attention to other men. There had been trouble upriver at Wahnsien, Kiukiang and Wuhan, and while trying to be conciliatory, the British Government as usual was expecting its underpaid, neglected men in uniform to protect British lives and property. Unfortunately, they numbered only several thousand while the Chinese numbered millions, and more and more British residents were being evacuated downstream and the daily strikes in the city produced banners, parades, chanted slogans and smashed windows. They were well organised and the city was never able to function properly because when one public service was functioning another was not, while threatening crowds waited on street corners to spit at the troops who were trying to get them going again.

  There were riots in the Nanking Road and extra companies of the Shanghai Volunteers were raised, even among the White Russians. There were also still pirates to be put down in the China Sea and along the length of the Yangtze, and aircraft took off regularly armed with bombs and machine guns while, outside the International Settlement, the city seemed to be run by a group of ex-warlords who had held control since 1925. Having got rid of all their opponents, they had left one of their number, General Sun Chuan-Fang, to look after their interests and, while everyone waited to see what would happen when he and Chiang Kai-Shek found themselves face to face, the Shanghai Municipal Council simply tried to avoid trouble.

  With the city wilting under a massive crime wave, Sun decided to put an end to it by a series of public executions to knock the ambition out of every would-be gangster within miles, and the authorities nervously allowed him to have his head with a couple of dozen condemned men from the city jail. As burly and as brave as Cuthbert Orr, Father O’Buhilly promptly issued his protests.

  ‘I am objecting, me boy,’ he pointed out vigorously, ‘because, Heaven preserve us, you don’t trade men’s lives even criminal men’s lives just to keep a bully boy like Sun from disturbing the even tenor o’ life.’

  His protests came to nothing and Sun was allowed to organise a parade through the main streets of the city, including those of the International Settlement and the French Concession, while the Municipal Council shrugged its shoulders.

  ‘At least they’ve drawn the line at having a brass band to head the procession,’ Father O’Buhilly spluttered. ‘’Twould inevitably have played ‘Dixie’, ‘Tipperary’ and ‘There’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight’. They’re favourites at all Chinese funerals.’

  Twenty-five thousand bug-eyed spectators lined the streets, and cars, carriages, carts and bicycles followed the procession. The condemned men had been crammed into open-sided buses, hired for the occasion and still carrying the advertisements of the Grand Garage Français, the Oriental Luggage Factory and a few others. Guarded back and front by Sun soldiers armed to the teeth, they turned out of the Nanking Road to the execution ground where two film units had their cameras already set up on top of grave mounds and a battalion of Sun soldiers was keeping the crowd back with jabbing rifle butts.

  A cheer went up as the trucks containing the prisoners and the Ford flivvers containing the guards and executioners arrived. Every prisoner was chained by the wrists and ankles and behind his back, secured to his arms, was a stick carrying a sign proclaiming his misdeeds. Forced to kneel six at a time, they were shot at point-blank range with rifles. Their heads were blown to bits and fragments of skull and warm brains were flung everywhere. As the gravediggers watched indifferently, a great shout of exultation went up from the crowd.

  ‘It was enough for the city authorities,’ Father O’Buhilly said later. ‘They’ve begged off from all further public exhibitions.’

  Fanned by professional agitators, the strikes began to grow worse and when the agitators were arrested and appeared before the court, it started a riot which brought out every idle Chinese in the city. With twenty Indian policemen to defend the building where they were held, the inspector in charge was obliged to fire on the crowd.

  ‘Part of the Communist plot,’ Father O’Buhilly decided. ‘They want to force Chiang Kai-Shek to come here and try to take over the city. The idea’s to get him entangled with the International Defence Force. He’ll come, all right, but he won’t do that. ’Tis too clever by half he is.’

  The Canton army had been fighting its way north against the warlords and the remnants of the Peking Government’s army for some time, the Communists always moving ahead of them, fomenting disturbances at Hankow and Nanking and in Shanghai itself. In the International Settlement, the hope was that the Cantonese would be defeated, simply because they presented a greater danger to the comfort, luxury and ease of the Europeans than the Peking forces. But the Canton column, preceded by political agents who destroyed old loyalties and beliefs ahead of them, toppled one warlord after another and captured city after city. According to reports, for Chinese troops they were frighteningly efficient with smart uniforms and well-cared-for weapons, and had orders
not to murder or rape. Their discipline alone appealed to the harassed peasantry and their foreign policy appealed to the jingoistic students. There was a feeling in the air that it wouldn’t be long before all the hated warlords were finally removed from the scene, and that alone was enough to recommend them to the Chinese, because no woman had ever been safe and there were always wailing girls, and the headless bodies of anyone who protested on the garbage heaps along the river bank waiting for the spring tides to wash them away. But – and this was the point – when the last of the warlords had gone, everybody knew it would be the turn of the foreigners.

  The Peking army was now retreating past the foreign concessions and it was clear their cause was lost. The soldiers were shabby little men in grey cotton uniforms, ragged, out of step, exhausted and often shoeless. They wore everything from spats to boaters, and flat tweed caps to furs, and their horses were skinny shadows of what horses should be. Their guns were battered and marked with rust, and their officers, as shabby and exhausted as their men, rode on coolie-pulled wheelbarrows or in litters, carrying umbrellas against the sunshine. As they disappeared, the first of the Canton army appeared.

  Dicken was the first man to see them. He was piloting an old DH9a powered with a Liberty engine, which had been built to do a hundred hours flying but had already completed four times that amount and was still going strong. The British admiral in command had begun to send aircraft up to the fortified areas where the fighting was taking place to find out what was going on and, climbing from the airfield, Dicken found himself crossing a level plain of white cloud, sparkling in the sunshine like new snow, all ivory towers and empurpled valleys crossed by rainbows, with here and there gaps through which he could see the darker tints of the earth. The light was dazzling and for the hundredth time he marvelled that he was held there in space, lifted into the bright blue bowl of the sky merely by the wood and canvas of the wings and the power of the engine.