The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  There was no use talking to generals about such matters, I decided. I turned to Pai Chung-hsi and asked if he had ever been to America. There was a small stir around the garden; the others accepted my diversionary gambit with obvious disgust, but Pai Chung-hsi was willing to go along with me. After all, he is a relatively cosmopolitan fellow, and he had things to talk about. What, he asked me, is the Church of England? Isn’t it the same as the Catholic Church? For the rest of the evening, I told General Pai Chung-hsi about Henry VIII. He seemed interested.

  · · ·

  One of the oldest of China’s famous wise men, who has been a general, a governor twice over, and, in his time, an enemy of Chiang Kai-shek, is Marshal Yen Hsi-shan. He is now in Taiwan with the rest of the old boys. In addition to his other distinctions, he has also been a war lord, and there aren’t many of those still around. The term “war lord” is often employed much too loosely by Westerners. For example, Chiang Kai-shek has been called a war lord, but he isn’t one and never has been. A war lord has a private army, which he pays and manages entirely, and uses to maintain his position as dictator of his region. Until Chiang rounded them up, a lot of provincial governors in China, especially in the west, were war lords. They collected the local taxes, dispensed justice according to their lights, and defied any higher authority. When Chiang conquered or otherwise won over a war lord, the private troops were either disbanded or incorporated into the national Army. Some of the war lords were good governors and some were not. Everyone agrees that Yen Hsi-shan was an excellent one. He took over Shansi Province in 1911, and ran it on patriarchal lines. During his tenure, Shansi was one of the most prosperous, peaceful provinces China has ever known. There were not only farms but factories, cottage industries, and mines, and the province was practically self-sufficient. The Governor experimented constantly with social welfare, and while his methods of applying it were unusual, they seemed to work out well.

  Marshal Yen is four years older than the Generalissimo. They met in 1928, when Chiang was conducting his great northern drive to unify China under the Nationalists, but they didn’t become friends until the Japanese attacked Shansi, in 1937, and no real alliance was formed until the Communists rose up and threatened the entire country. At that time, Shansi occupied a key position between the Communist and the Nationalist spheres of influence, and that made Yen an important ally for either. Unlike Chiang, he sometimes dallied with the Reds and believed their promises; their Socialistic teachings attracted him. That is all over now. He is bitter about the loss of his beloved Shansi, with its mountains and caves. Until he was forced out, he almost never left it, and here in Taiwan he has taken up his abode in an aerie as much like his old home as possible.

  The road that wriggles up the mountainside to Marshal Yen’s retreat is terrible. The jeep that took me there struggled up bedrock ridges in the middle of the road, and plunged into deep holes on the other side, jangling tinnily. Here and there, it clattered past caves in the cliff where sulphur workers had once dug, and frequently it was brushed by bamboo leaning in from the roadside. Finally, it crawled around a rocky spur and past the rim of a deep gorge, and came out on a flat stretch almost at the top of the mountain. There, just beneath the crest and saved from falling into space by a smooth curve of stone wall, the Marshal’s house is perched. The land beneath it swoops westward into a faraway valley and carries on its back a neat hamlet, which is connected to the Marshal’s eminence by several hundred stone steps. Between the village and the crest is a farm, which supplies him with vegetables and meat. I looked down on it and saw tiny pigs and people moving among the outbuildings. Beyond, the rocky slope was softened with a green fur of bamboo.

  Marshal Yen’s home is a Japanese building, made of wood. A typhoon recently took hold of it and gave it several hard shakes, but Yen Hsi-shan was not worried, because he was snug and safe in a sort of storm cellar built for him lower down on the cliff. Whenever the wind gets high, he and his household hurry to this place and wait for it to quiet down. If they are bored, they can while away the time reading a stone tablet, cemented into the wall, that is engraved with a short account, written by Yen, of the Shansi cave dwellings and a discussion of the reasons the Taiwanese never adopted such sensible homes. Yen is fond of writing, and sets down on paper (or, as in this case, on stone) the thoughts that pop into his head.

  The day I visited him, there was no typhoon, and I found the Marshal sitting beside a window overlooking the valley. He was reading and fanning himself gently. As I was being led into his presence by his secretary, an intense young woman, I asked her if he had attended Chiang’s most recent conference, and she looked depressed. “He couldn’t get there,” she said. “His motorcar is broken. He doesn’t go into Taipei very much, and it’s a pity. There isn’t even a telephone connection here. Fortunately, he is well looked after and doesn’t have to go out for anything. He is a wonderful man for his age. So strong! Like a man of fifty.”

  We turned and looked admiringly at the Marshal, who nodded agreement and said that he was indeed very strong. He was dressed in a Chinese gown and ceremonial jacket, a costume that usually emphasizes the fragility of the wearer but had no such effect on Yen’s sturdy build. He has thick, dark eyebrows and a mobile face, with a high-bridged nose.

  “I spend much of my time discussing world affairs with my friends,” he told me. “Nearly every day some of them come to see me, and we talk. We talk for hours. At night and in the morning, when they are not with me, I write.”

  “He writes until one or two in the morning, sometimes,” said the secretary. “He doesn’t sleep very much.”

  The Marshal said he had written a number of pamphlets. He called in a manservant and sent him to an inner room to get some of them. The man’s face wore a look of devotion, like the secretary’s. The Marshal gave me some of the pamphlets, most of which were in English. There was a blue-covered one entitled “How to Prevent Warfare and Establish Foundation of World Unity.” A yellow one bore the title “The Impending World Crisis.”

  “More are being printed,” said the Marshal.

  There was a brief pause, and I read a few words. “I have read many books, newspaper and magazine articles,” Yen Hsi-shan had written. “Summing up what I have learned, there seem to be three main reasons for opposition [to Communism]:

  “1. That the Communistic countries are undemocratic, not free.

  “2. That the Communist countries are deceitful.

  “3. That the Communist countries are cruel and ruthless.”

  I put the pamphlets aside and said, “That is one thing, at least, that you leaders on Taiwan all have in common; you’ve always known what the Communists wanted, haven’t you?”

  “Certainly not,” said Yen cheerfully. “They fooled me many times.” Then his cheerful look faded. For seventeen years, he said, he has been fighting Communists, and he has lost fifty thousand comrades in the struggle. He said that when the Chinese Reds made their famous Long March, with the Nationalists pursuing them through the mountains toward Shansi, they had thought of settling in his province, where the fields were fertile and they would find life pleasant. But he succeeded in heading them off. That is why they took refuge at last in the neighboring province, Shensi, and lived in the caves of Yenan.

  “Marshal Yen, was Soviet Russia slipping secret aid to them all those years they waited in Yenan?” I asked.

  Yen shook his head. “They weren’t worth helping in those days, so the Russians let them alone,” he said. “They couldn’t have taken on the Kuomintang troops, and any material given to them would have been wasted.”

  “But wouldn’t Stalin have helped them out of friendship, if nothing else? For the cause?”

  The Marshal smiled politely, pitying my ignorance. He explained that friendship played no part in Communist strategy, and that Mao hadn’t expected it to. “Then, after the end of the Second World War, everything changed for the Reds,” he said. “Mao wielded influence at that time, and Russia began
to supply him with arms. What you must not forget—but you do forget it—is that the Communists have not stopped cheating you. They never stop cheating.” He fanned himself vigorously.

  The sun was now lower than the level of the window. I said goodbye, and walked to the door, my arms full of pamphlets. The Marshal and the girl walked with me. “We must go on struggling, no matter how deceptively peaceful things may look from time to time,” he was saying.

  When I reached the doorway, I bowed, went down the steps, and started toward the jeep. The granite of the cliff sparkled in the late sunbeams. I turned and waved to the gowned figure in the doorway. “Don’t forget!” he called. “They always cheat!”

  FROM

  Janet Flanner

  JUNE 9, 1956 (ON THE ALGERIAN WAR)

  LEVEN FRENCHMEN AND one Frenchwoman had their throats slit last Friday by Algerian rebels a few kilometres south of Biskra, in the Sahara, the desert once featured in The Garden of Allah, that ancient best-seller that touched on tender relations between natives and whites. Earlier in the week, outside Philippeville, two Moslem families—among them seven women and seven children, one three months old—suspected of loyalty to the French also had their throats cut by rebels, who, furthermore, decapitated their victims’ chickens. Most of the Moslem students at the University of Algiers have abandoned their classes, well before their June exams, in response to a rebel slogan declaring, “Examinations make no sense today! Join the Maquis against the French!” Ten days ago, in the gorges near Palestro, seventeen out of twenty-two green French soldiers, in their third week of war, were ambushed and massacred by the rebels they were hunting. After certain Paris newspapers printed not only the names of the boys—eleven came from small towns near Paris—but the horrifying particulars of the mutilations and tortures that killed them, a wartime censorship was set up, forbidding the publication of “morbid details.” Premier Guy Mollet is awaiting the results of a three-day Parliamentary debate about the Algerian situation. Grave as that situation is, he is not expected to fall, for though his Rightist political enemies think the war is going badly, no opposition party wants to be nationally responsible, as the Socialists are now, for trying to make it go better—even if any opposition party were sure it knew how. Finance Minister Paul Ramadier has just warned the public that the Algerian campaign will necessitate immediate new temporary taxes, the last adjective being the only part of the statement that sounds optimistic.

  This is a cruel, fanatical, démodé Arab holy war, an intimate, hand-to-hand war of native knives and barbaric tortures, in which French helicopters supply the outstanding modern touch, a war of petits paquets, with the communiqués mentioning such small parcels of men as to sound ludicrous—except that they are descriptive of the endless, frittering kind of hide-and-seek, hill-and-desert war it really is. One day’s communiqué last week featured engagements at Lourmel (rebel band surrounded, fourteen prisoners), Gambetta (three rebels killed), El-Kseur (nineteen rebels killed), and Aurès-Nemencha (skirmish with rebel bands, eleven wounded, two French military killed)—a total of twenty-two dead Algerians and two dead Frenchmen, at a cost of millions of francs, for that day.

  The Communists’ propaganda here against what they call la sale guerre consists of ordering Party members all over France to engage in short protest strikes, which are reported each day in the Communist Humanité under headlines demanding a cease-fire, negotiations, and peace in Algeria. There are such items as “Rouen dockers strike, refuse to load war matériel,” “Workers in three Marseille factories struck Thursday and paraded to the war monument for the dead,” “Tilemakers at Limoux, in the Aude, struck for an hour to protest against the military call-up of three comrades,” and “At the Pathé-Marconi works outside Paris, five hundred mechanics struck because four comrades had been called up for Algeria.” For weeks now, Huma has openly encouraged mass protests against the entraining of conscripts for the war, which is indubitably unpopular with the French working class generally, regardless of political affiliations, and especially with the conscripts’ mothers and fiancées, who have been an important propaganda element in such agitated crowds. Huma has printed notes like “A thousand citizens at Le Mans protested the departure of the troop convoy” and “Convoy trains were stopped at Nice and Antibes, where the police brutally attacked the crowd.” The first ugly riot took place at Grenoble, where troops were being shifted from one train to another. Many militant workmen were injured, and mothers and fiancées threw themselves on the railroad tracks and delayed the train’s departure for hours (and upset train schedules on the main line; they are now often being upset in this fashion all over France). On Monday of this week, an outbreak occurred at Saint-Nazaire, where, according to Huma, eight thousand métallos and others from the naval shipyards and machine shops, plus local women who lay down on the railroad tracks, staged such a furious protest against the entraining of a batch of conscripts that only two soldiers remained on the train when it finally steamed off toward the war. Patriotic Figaro, which cut the number of rioters to three thousand, and some of the other Right Wing papers were forced to mention further painful Monday incidents: a convoy was stopped two hours at Vendôme; the Quimper–Paris express was stopped three hours; the Lyon–Bordeaux express was stopped seventeen times by mutinous soldiers, who pulled the alarm signal. Within the past month, two issues of Humanité have been seized by the government and suppressed; after each occasion, Huma, parading its martyrdom, burst into print again against “the dirty war.” There is no legal method by which a French government can continuously suppress the party organ of 25 percent of the voters, the Republic’s biggest solid voting slice, and if a government dared to try it, so many strikes would doubtless break out, from one end of France to the other, that no newspaper could report them all—not even Humanité.

  The resignation of Pierre Mendès-France from Mollet’s Cabinet—where, unfortunately, he had been doing nothing anyhow—brought to light again his “seven significant measures,” which he announced in April, and which he still thinks can alone “save the French presence in Algeria.” Practically all the French colonials there, and many Frenchmen here, think that if these measures were applied, there would be nearly no Algeria worth saving, as far as French interests go, so why shed blood for such remnants? (An increased war effort is part of the Mendès-France program.) As an economic expert, Mendès proposed the expropriation of all sizable agricultural properties, in order to turn them into small family holdings, and a fundamental reform of agricultural credit that would “extract it from the selfish hands of big owners, who have always profited at the expense of little producers.” He wants raised wages, recognition of Moslem labor unions, freedom of opinion for native Arabic newspapers, and the removal of those anti-native French functionaries who from the start have kept everything in their own white hands and out of Arab reach—all this to “promote native confidence and hope in France, without which, sooner or later, we French will be evicted from Algeria and from all of North Africa.” Most scandalized French politicians look upon this as a program so bold that only the daring Mendès would risk trying it out, if he should become Premier—an event they are determined not to let happen to France.

  Apropos of Mendès’ resignation, Le Monde dryly remarked that he “is not an accommodating man or at his best except as first fiddle.” For the nine years between 1945 and 1954, he played no solo part in Parliament except as a constant, ruthless—and by the outside world unknown—critic of all the French governments. Upon his sudden emergence, two years ago, as France’s strong man, he roused the greatest hopes and the greatest devotion—and also the greatest personal hatred on the part of many—of any new French leader of modern times. Now both the former strong men who rose to save France after the war are off the stage—de Gaulle and Mendès-France, two most complex characters, and two incalculable losses for France in her present troubled hour.

  A. J. Liebling

  MARCH 16, 1957 (ON REFUGEES IN THE STRIP)

 
; HE LARGE TOWN or small city of Gaza sits athwart what the late Earl Wavell, in his book on the Palestine campaigns of the First World War, called “one of the world’s oldest and greatest highways, the main route between the earliest known cradles of civilization, the valleys of the Euphrates and of the Nile.” From Egypt, he wrote, “its course keeps close to the sea while passing over the inhospitable desert of Sinai; thence it runs up the fertile plains of Philistia and Sharon, leaving the high, rocky fortress of Judaea to the east.” The road, in fact, comes straight up from the desert’s edge to Gaza through the thin leg of coastal land now known to the world at large as the Gaza Strip. The area was Turkish until 1918, and then part of the British mandate of Palestine until 1948; on the day Israel became free, it was invaded by the Egyptians. Wavell was concerned with Gaza because the British fought three great battles against the Turks there, in March, April, and November, 1917, to force a gateway to Palestine. On the third try, they succeeded. Since early 1949, however, the intercradle road has ended at a checkpoint a couple of miles north of Gaza, which has become a gateway to nowhere for three hundred thousand people. The presence of two-thirds of them was originally caused by a military accident. When the cease-fire came in the 1949 Israeli-Egyptian war, the Egyptian lines extruded from Sinai, which has been officially Egyptian since 1906, into the southwest corner of Palestine. Trapped behind these lines were an estimated quarter-million Arab-speaking refugees from the whole coastal region of Palestine; in their flight, they had followed the historic highway from north to south, and had stopped where they were because they had arrived at a desert. It is unlikely that they would have wished to cross it in any event, since they were Palestinians, not Egyptians, and the breeds are as incompatible as the regions are different. Their exodus, like that of the French civilians in 1940, had been hasty and ill-advised. Many of the last fugitives came from villages a few miles north of what was to become their prison wall. Had peace ensued, or had the Israelis won the Strip before the armistice, the refugees would have been reabsorbed into Israel, returning to their homes within weeks or months. But no treaty followed the armistice, which was never more than an imperfect cease-fire. The state of belligerency between Israel and her opponents continued, and the Gaza refugees, who were belligerent against nobody at all, remained where they are today, as if the French refugees backed up against the Spanish frontier in 1940 had been held ever since within a coastal enclave extending from St.-Jean-de-Luz to Bayonne. During all this time, Egypt has stopped the southern exit from the Strip, never proposing to annex it and never offering the Gazans Egyptian citizenship and freedom to remove to the Nile. Few Gazans might have accepted this option if it had been offered, but none were given a chance to decline. The refugees and the older residents have consequently lived together for eight years like people trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea, with an uncertain air supply and no means of egress. When dramatists treat of such situations, they supply lots of dialogue, and they are right; people who can do nothing effectual about their circumstances talk, and that is what the captives of the Gaza Strip have been doing almost incessantly since 1949.