by Philip Short
In the process, they would perform feats of courage and endurance of which epics are made, weaving a dense myth of invincibility and heroism that their nationalist opponents would try in vain to unravel.
After leaving Huili in mid-May, Mao's forces climbed from the lush subtropical plains of the south into broken, high plateau country, never lower than 6,000 feet, where the hillsides were ablaze with Tibetan roses, pink and yellow oleander, azaleas, rhododendrons, and all the other exotic plants which nineteenth-century botanists had brought back from the Himalayas to grace English country gardens. This was the land of the Yi, a fierce Sino-Burmese hill tribe who waged an endless war against encroachments by Han settlers from the plains. The Red Army's Chief of Staff, Liu Bocheng, known as the One-Eyed Dragon, having lost the sight of the other in battle, had grown up in the region, and won safe passage by swearing an oath of brotherhood with the Yi paramount chief, sealed by a libation of chicken's blood. Even with this protection, Yi tribesmen picked off Red Army stragglers, taking their weapons and clothes, and leaving them to starve.23
Once that gauntlet had been run, they made for the Dadu River, sixty miles further north. There, seventy years earlier, Shi Dakai, the last of the Taiping princes, had been trapped by the armies of the Qing Viceroy and surrendered. Prince Shi was executed by slicing. His 40,000 troops were slaughtered. For days after, the waters ran crimson with their blood. Chiang Kai-shek, like Mao, knew his history: he ordered his commanders in Sichuan to race to secure the crossing points, so that the communist forces could be hemmed in on the right bank.
By then the Red Army had reached Anshunchang, where there was a ferry. But the river was in spate and there were only three small boats, barely enough to get the vanguard across. Mao ordered Yang Chengwu, a regimental political commissar, to make for Luding, a hundred miles upstream, where an ancient chain bridge spanned the river.24
The town lay on the old imperial tribute route from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, to Beijing. But from Anshunchang there was no road, not even a track. Yang's men went by narrow cliff-paths, which, he wrote later, ‘twisted like a sheep's gut around the mountains’, while the river seethed menacingly hundreds of feet below. It was slow going, and they had to stop to fight an enemy battalion which was defending a high pass. When it rained, the paths were ‘slippery as oil,’ Yang remembered, and for much of the time there was thick fog. After they broke camp, at 5 a.m. next day, a courier arrived from the Military Commission. Nationalist troops had been reported on the opposite bank, hurrying northward. They would have to reach Luding, still eighty miles away across trackless mountain ranges, within twenty-four hours.
The stupendous forced march that took them there, and the battle that followed, forged a legend which seared itself into the consciousness of a generation of Chinese. Later it would justly be called ‘the most critical single incident of the Long March’.25 Failure would have meant the Red Army's annihilation.
Yang Chengwu's regiment reached Luding at dawn the following day.
The bridge, a single span of thirteen iron chains, with open sides and a floor of irregularly laid planking, a ‘tenuous cobweb of man's ingenuity’ linking China to High Asia, as one early traveller called it,26 was 120 yards long. On the western side, the nationalist commander had ordered the wooden floor-planks removed, leaving only the bare chains swinging free. At the eastern end stood the town gate, set in a 20-foot-high stone wall on which machine-guns had been mounted, commanding the approaches. In Yang's own understated words, ‘we were taken aback by the difficulties to be overcome.’27
Twenty-two men volunteered for the assault. Edgar Snow, a year later, based his classic account of what followed on the stories of the survivors.
Hand grenades and Mausers were strapped to their backs, and soon they were swinging out above the boiling water, moving hand over hand, clinging to the iron chains. Red machine-guns barked at enemy redoubts and spattered the bridgehead with bullets. The enemy replied with machine-gunning of his own, and snipers shot at the Reds tossing high above the water, working slowly towards them. The first warrior was hit, and dropped into the current below; a second fell, and then a third … Probably never before had the Sichuanese seen fighters like these – men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win. Were they human beings, or madmen or gods? …
At last, one Red crawled up over the bridge flooring, uncapped a grenade, and tossed it with perfect aim into the enemy redoubt. Nationalist officers ordered the rest of the planking torn up. It was already too late … Paraffin was thrown on to the planking, and it began to burn … But more Reds now swarmed over the chains, and arrived to help put out the fire and replace the boards … Far overhead angrily and impotently roared the planes of Chiang Kai-shek …28
The reality was slightly more prosaic than the myth which Snow created. The assault force did not ‘swing out … hand over hand’; they crept crabwise along the chains at each side of the bridge, while a second group laid an improvised floor of planks and branches behind them.29
But by whatever means, the miracle was that they crossed. History did not repeat itself. Where the Taipings had perished, the communists broke free. By the beginning of June, the whole army was safely on the eastern bank. Chiang Kai-shek's efforts to bottle them up in the mountains had been foiled.I
The leadership then met to discuss where to make for next.30
Luding lies at the eastern edge of the Himalayas, in the vast icy shadow of Gongga Shan, which soars up 25,000 feet, thirty miles to the south. The easiest route, eastward towards the plains, was ruled out because it lay too close to Guomindang troop concentrations. Another possibility was to follow the Dadu River to the north-west, which would eventually lead them to the Qinghai–Gansu border region. The problem there was that it lay through hostile country, thickly populated by Tibetans who bore no love for Chinese soldiers.
Mao chose the third way, which led across a series of 14,000-foot passes in the Jiajinshan, the Great Snowy Mountains, to the north-east.
It started badly. In the foothills, Guomindang aircraft spotted the column with which Mao and other Politburo members were travelling, and strafed and bombed it. None of the leaders was hurt, but one of Mao's bodyguards was killed.31 From then on, it got worse. Otto Braun remembered:
We went up over the mountain ridge, separating the Tibetan highland from China proper, on steep, narrow paths. Rivers in full spate had to be forded, dense virgin forests and treacherous moors crossed … Although summer had already begun, the temperature seldom rose above 50 F. At night it sank almost to freezing. The sparse population was made up of … national minorities of Tibetan extraction, traditionally called manzi (savages) by the Chinese, [ruled by] … Lama princes … They lay in wait to ambush small groups and stragglers. More and more, our route was lined with the bodies of the slain … All of us were unbelievably lice-ridden. Bleeding dysentery was rampant; the first cases of typhus appeared.32
For the rank and file, the crossing of the snow-bound peaks was the hardest part of the whole march. They wore only straw sandals and the thin summer clothing they had brought from the south. Mao remembered one unit losing two-thirds of its baggage animals. They fell, and could not get up.33 Dong Biwu, the Hubei Party leader, who climbed the mountains in the same group as Mao, remembered that men, too, fell and were unable to get up:
Heavy fog swirled about us, there was a high wind and half-way up it began to rain. As we climbed higher and higher, we were caught in a terrible hailstorm and the air became so thin that we could hardly breathe at all. Speech was completely impossible, and the cold so dreadful that our breath froze and our hands and lips turned blue … Those who sat down to rest or to relieve themselves froze to death on the spot. Exhausted political workers encouraged men by sign and touch to continue moving … At midnight [we] began climbing the next peak. It rained, then snowed, and the fierce wind whipped our bodies … Hundreds of our men died there … All along the route we kept
reaching down to pull men to their feet only to find that they were already dead.34
On the worst stretches the going was too rough even for stretcher-bearers, and the wounded had to be carried on men's backs. Among them was He Zizhen. Two months after her baby was born, she had been with the nurses’ unit, escorting wounded men, when three Guomindang planes appeared. As they began strafing, she ran to help an injured officer to take cover. She was hit in fourteen places. Mao was told that she would probably die. Tenaciously, He Zizhen survived. But several pieces of shrapnel, including one in her head, were too dangerous to remove, and for weeks she was on the brink of death, drifting in and out of a coma.35
Mao's decision to take the back route, the deserted trail across the high peaks, proved well-founded. On June 12, when the First Front Army's vanguard reached the valley beyond, it encountered, near the village of Dawei, in Maogong county, an advance unit of Zhang Guotao's Fourth Army. Initially they took each other for warlord troops and shots were exchanged before they recognised each other's bugle calls. Neither army had had any reliable information about the position of the other.36
Mao, Zhu De and the headquarters staff arrived five days later, and a great torchlit rally was held to celebrate the two armies’ union. There were folk-dancing and theatricals, and Li Bozhao, the pretty, 24-year-old wife of Yang Shangkun, then a regimental political commissar, later to become China's President, entranced everyone with the Russian sailors’ dance, the yablochka, which she had learned as a student in Moscow. Mao made a speech and the troops feasted on provisions the Fourth Army had expropriated from local landlords. Over the next few days, other Fourth Army commanders gathered, followed, on June 24, by Zhang Guotao himself. A powerfully built, stately man, four years Mao's junior, he rode in with a large cavalry escort in the middle of a rainstorm to find Mao and the rest of the Politburo waiting by the roadside to greet him. Another welcoming rally was held, and that night, in Lianghekou, an opium-sodden hill village, even smaller and poorer than Dawei, the leaders held a banquet to mark the joyful occasion.37
After eight months of continuous fighting, the exhausted soldiers of the First Front Army were ecstatic over the junction with Zhang Guotao's forces. At last they would be able to rest, and rebuild their depleted strength.
Mao and Zhang were not so sure.
The problem was not ideological or political. It was not that they had different visions of the Chinese revolution, or that they favoured different methods for carrying it out. It was a matter of raw power.
Of the 86,000 men who had set out with Mao the previous October, fewer than 15,000 now remained. Zhang Guotao had four times more.38 Mao's men were in summer rags. Zhang's were warmly clothed. Mao's men were combat-weary southerners, unused to the cold mountain climate, underfed and, even when they could get food, unable to digest the local Tibetan tsampa, made from barley flour. Zhang's troops were Sichuanese, fighting on their home terrain, well-provisioned, rested and fit.
This might not have mattered if the Party had had a properly constituted leadership, with a clear chain of command. But in 1935 it did not.
The decisions taken at Zunyi were all open to challenge because only six of the twelve full Politburo members had been present. Zhang Wentian, who had become the provisional Party leader, had never been formally elected to the Central Committee, any more than had his predecessor, Bo Gu: both had originally been co-opted by an emergency procedure in Shanghai, in defiance of normal Party rules. In practice, moreover, since the Huili meeting in May, Mao, not Zhang Wentian, had been the dominant Politburo figure.
Zhang Guotao was Mao's equal in seniority. He too was a founder member of the Party. He, too, had been in and out of the top leadership since 1923. If Mao could achieve de facto primacy, what was to stop Zhang Guotao, a no less ambitious man, from trying to do the same?
In the past, the ultimate arbiter of such matters had always been the Comintern. But for most of the last eight months, the Comintern had been silent. A few days before the evacuation of Ruijin, police in the French concession in Shanghai had raided a CCP safe house and seized the Party's one short-wave radio transmitter. Direct contact with Moscow would not be re-established until the summer of 1936.39
The two men began manoeuvring, very cautiously, from the moment they learned that their forces had made contact on June 12. Zhang made discreet overtures to Mao's military commanders. Mao, with breathtaking cynicism, played up the role of Otto Braun as proof of Comintern support.40 In the ten days before they met at Lianghekou, there was a long exchange of probing telegrams, in which the Politburo, at Mao's urging, proposed setting up a base area in the Sichuan–Gansu–Shaanxi border region, between the Min and Jialing rivers. When Zhang begged to disagree, Mao politely rejoined: ‘Please think it over again.’41 Face to face, each man invariably referred to the other by the honorific, ‘elder brother’. But behind the façade of courtesies, the calculus was brutally simple. Zhang was determined to parlay his overwhelming military strength into political power. Mao had a majority in the Politburo, which meant he could block him. But at what cost?
After three days of talks, culminating in a formal meeting on June 28, chaired by Zhou Enlai in the lamasery of Lianghekou, its walls black with the smoke of yak's butter from Buddhist votive lamps, a compromise was patched together to which Zhang reluctantly assented. The main forces would head north to set up a base area in southern Gansu, as Mao had proposed, and they would wage an offensive campaign of mobile warfare so as not to become ‘turtles in an urn’, victims once again of the blockhouse strategy that the nationalists had used to such devastating effect in Jiangxi. Zhang was appointed Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission, under Zhu De. But the crucial issue of unifying the command of the two armies, to which all agreed in principle, was left in practice for another day.42
On paper, Mao seemed to have the advantage. Zhang had accepted his plan.
However, the agreement quickly proved hollow. When the First Front Army set out for Maoergai, a small settlement a hundred miles to the north, to prepare for an attack on Songpan, the garrison town which controlled the main pass to Gansu, Zhang's Fourth Army dragged its feet. On July 18, another Politburo meeting was held. Zhou Enlai, now seriously ill with hepatitis, resigned his post as General Political Commissar, which Zhang agreed to take over. Yet still the Fourth Army held back. The attack on Songpan failed. As the communist forces crawled northward, more crisis meetings were held and more concessions offered. But never quite enough.
On both sides, suspicion and resentment thickened. The nub of their disagreements was over where the Red Army should go next (and, by inference, who had the power to make that decision). Mao continued to advocate going north. Zhang wanted to go west, or south.
To prevent an open split, the Politburo agreed, at a series of meetings in the Tibetan village of Shawo at the beginning of August, that Zhang's powers should be further enhanced. He and Zhu De would take overall command of the entire Red Army, which would be divided into two columns. They would travel, with the GHQ staff, in the left column, comprising mainly Fourth Army troops. Mao and the rest of the Politburo would move with the much smaller right column, of mixed First and Fourth Army units, led by Zhang's deputy, Xu Xiangqian. In return, Zhang agreed that the army should continue to head northward, across the grasslands, a treacherous expanse of marsh and bog, which, after the failure at Songpan, was now the only route open to them if they wished to reach Gansu.43
These arrangements were less of a gamble on Mao's part than they might appear. Ultimate control still rested with the Politburo, in which he had the dominant voice. In any case, they were not intended as a permanent solution, but merely to stave off for a time the showdown which they all knew was coming.
Ten days later, at a meeting at Maoergai held in Zhang's absence, the Politburo Standing Committee gave instructions to begin secretly collecting evidence for the eventual case against him, and approved (but did not circulate) a Central Committee resolution, describing
Zhang's proposal to move west, into the isolated high plateau of Qinghai and southern Ningxia, as ‘dangerous and flightist’. It added menacingly: ‘This policy stems from fear, exaggeration of the enemy's strength and loss of confidence in our own forces and our victory. It is right opportunism.’44
For a while, it seemed the new arrangements would pay off. Despite the Centre's harsh language, and Zhang's continuing reservations, the two columns began moving north along separate routes about fifty miles apart. The stage was being set for what Mao would call, years later, ‘the darkest moment of my life.’45
*
The grasslands lie at 11,000 feet in an immense basin, ‘an inland Sargasso Sea’, as one writer has called it,46 spreading for 5,000 square miles along a vast horseshoe bend in the Yellow River, as it descends from the Himalayas in the west to turn north towards Inner Mongolia. Otto Braun remembered:
A deceptive green cover hid a black viscous swamp, which sucked in anyone who broke through the thin crust or strayed from the narrow path … We drove native cattle or horses before us, which instinctively found the least dangerous way … Cold rain fell several times a day, and at night turned to wet snow or sleet. There was not a dwelling, tree or shrub as far as the eye could see. We slept in squatting positions … Some did not awaken in the morning, victims of cold and exhaustion. And this was August! Our sole nourishment came from the grain kernels we had hoarded or, as a rare and special treat, a morsel of stone-hard dried meat. The swamp water was not fit to drink. But it was drunk, because there was no wood to purify it by boiling. Outbreaks of bloody dysentery and typhus … again won the upper hand.47
