Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘I will not be here, but my troops will. My old North-West Army which Chiang took from me in ’27, they’ll be here, won’t they?’

  General Li nodded. ‘Your old North-West Army, now the Second Army Group. I have ordered them here.’

  ‘And they’re still under Sun Lianzhong,’ Feng said, ‘my number two. I know he has kept them sharp in all these techniques.’

  He stopped again. Then resumed.

  ‘This is going to be bloody. Very bloody. As General Li just said, it could come down to the last five minutes, the last five men. My poor men.’

  Neither generals nor peasants are ever meant to weep. But General Feng Yuxiang did. But only for a moment.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m finished.’

  General Bai thanked them both for attending and stated that he felt this meeting had been extremely useful and had given them a lot to think about. Chairmen of meetings always say this sort of thing at the end of meetings.

  Then they walked over to where a table had been laid and where cooks had been preparing a suitably voluptuous banquet.

  Before he sat down General Bai laid down his prayer mat facing Mecca and conscientiously performed his midday prayers. He then repeated his personal jihad against the Japanese.

  ‘When the forbidden months are over, kill the polytheists wherever you find them: take them, surround them, and lie in wait everywhere for them. If they repent, perform the prayer, and pay the alms-tax, then let them go their way: for Allah is forgiving, merciful.

  ‘And strive for Allah as you ought to strive. He chose you and made no difficulties for you in religion, it being the religion of your father Abraham. He called you Muslims, both before and in this [book], so that the Messenger might be a witness for you, and so that you might be witnesses to mankind. So perform the prayer, pay the alms-tax, and hold fast to Allah. He is your master, an excellent master, an excellent helper.’

  His pieties complete, he and the other two sat down at the table and cheerfully feasted on a sumptuous banquet of pork with many bowls of wine.

  As it ended General Feng rose unsteadily to his feet and announced he must be on his way back to Wuhan. ‘I have a writer to meet.’

  4

  As my ferry crosses the river to unload us on the Bund, a cloud of corpses float downstream – there’s been a mass execution of pirates upriver. They cluster round our hull like goldfish being fed with bread. We edge through them, the corpses bobbing and rolling against our sides. Their trousers have shamefully been washed away. Bloated, their buttocks stick out from the water, their long hair swirls around them. The stink is awful. Black streams of excrement and corruption flow from both ends of them. We hold our noses as we disembark.

  Conditions do not improve!

  We’ve been landed on the section of the Bund which specializes in the coffin and burial trades. Business is booming!

  When I first arrived a few weeks ago only a few coffins sat here as their makers hawked for business, singing the praises of their products, banging their sides with their fists to emphasize their robustness and longevity when buried in the earth. But now ahead of us lies a positive mountain range of coffins. Piled ten or twelve high, they tower above us arriving passengers. Death is big business in Wuhan. The dead are laid out on mats before us – we step delicately over them – each one in turn being lifted onto a table to be ritually washed and then dried off and dressed in the garments – expensive or cheap depending on the income or generosity of their relatives – before being placed in their coffins and transported, with their mourners, on funeral barges to the large new cemeteries which have been hastily opened downstream from the city.

  Lots of people are making a lot of money out of all this death. Grave diggers, bargees, professional mourners, entertainers and dancing girls who perform in order to attract large crowds to the funerals, priests, monks, coffin bearers. Side stalls have opened up to sell paper money, funeral food, joss sticks and white banners and clothes for the mourners.

  But, of course, the vast majority of people dying in Wuhan do not have the money to afford any such luxuries. Every night the frozen corpses of thousands of nameless refugees and soldiers who died during the day are dragged to the quayside and dropped over the edge to mingle with the bodies of the pirates. May God be with the souls of all the dead.

  At last I arrive in the land of the living – I push through solid masses thronging the market stalls: child beggars, some of them hideously mutilated, singing their anthems, hawkers pattering song sheets, newsletters and saucy stories. Witches sell spells – for good or ill – astrologers eternal symmetries amid the material chaos. There are street entertainers and jugglers. But I am looking for one thing in particular. After much searching I finally locate an outdoor puppet show. I cannot resist. My soul needs soothing, just as it needed soothing all those years ago when I was a hungry urchin on the streets of Beijing. I draw close, join the crowd standing silent and rapt in the performance. The final part of China’s great legendary epic – the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

  The heroic Zhuge Liang, though old and wracked with consumption, is still China’s greatest soldier. Passionate about defending civilians from harm and always concerned with the prosperity of his people, he has gradually beaten back his enemy Cao Pi, son of the evil Cao Cao, to the gates of Cao Pi’s capital Luoyang. The two armies are drawn up. A desperate Cao Pi has appointed Young Sima as his general. Sima had previously been banished from the kingdom for speaking out against the cruelties of Cao Cao.

  Suddenly Zhuge Liang, an old man, spitting blood but still dressed as a dandy, a flamboyant red feather waving from his hat, hobbles forwards and stands alone between the two armies. The audience’s breath draws in as one. Then Young Sima picks up a chair and, carrying it, comes forwards alone and offers it to the ancient Zhuge. An adjutant brings forwards a chair for Sima and then returns to the ranks. Between the two armies the two generals sit down on their chairs.

  I must admit by this time tears are rolling down my face.

  Sima speaks. ‘Honoured Zhuge Liang, since I was a boy I have studied all your battles. I know you as a son knows his father. If I were ever to rule a kingdom I would adopt the constitution you wrote for the Kingdom of Chengdu. You are my hero.’

  Staunching the blood flowing from his mouth, Zhuge looks full at Sima. ‘I serve my emperor. The great emperor of Han. The emperor that your employer Cao Pi overthrew.’

  Sima looks at him fully. ‘I too serve my emperor,’ he replies. ‘Cao Pi has inherited the Mandate of Heaven. But before I serve any emperor I serve the people.’

  It is of course at this moment, as the two generals stare at each other across the battlefield-to-be, the moment of maximum emotion in the drama, that the puppeteer’s children thrust their collection boxes into my face and those of all the rest of the rapt audience. We all swiftly and generously contribute so we can continue with the play.

  Zhuge Liang announces the battle will be fought the next day. ‘It will be the Battle of Heaven.’

  That night, as was his wont, Zhuge Liang stares up at the heavens, trying to discern in their movement what the future holds. Suddenly he realizes that in his passion to guard the Mandate of Heaven, to preserve the Han Dynasty and its justice and prosperity and peacefulness, through his wars he has brought his people to penury and suffering and discord. And at this very second in the heavens he discerns the slightest movement, one tiny star moves one tiny fraction, and in that moment, in that movement, all the alignments of heaven alter, all turns on its head, all is changed.

  I suddenly realize I am standing beside a rock. And the rock is speaking. Softly repeating with the puppeteer the tragic lines which Zhuge Liang now speaks.

  ‘I’ve spent too long studying Heaven. I should have studied the people. I have lost the Mandate of Heaven.’

  ‘Feng,’ I say.

  The general wipes tears from his eyes. ‘I love that bit. I’ve always loved it. Since I was a kid standing before t
he stage in our village.’

  Zhuge, in excruciating agony, leads his troops into battle the next morning. So great is his brilliance that Young Sima, his opponent, is easily defeated. But at the very moment of his victory Zhuge Liang dies. All the combatants on either side immediately stop fighting in honour of him, China’s greatest warrior. The battle is over. But it is the victors, now without their great leader, who withdraw, who disappear from the pages of history. It is the loser, Young Sima, who inherits the earth, the Mandate of Heaven.

  As we walk away through the dense crowds we reminisce on our childhood love of street theatre, drum singers – myself on the streets of Beijing, Feng in the fields of Anhui.

  ‘That is what you have to achieve, Lao. That is what you have to get your clever young men from the east producing. Drama and song and propaganda that nails the audience to the floor as they watch it – overwhelms their emotions, sends their minds flying open, rallies them to the cause of China.’

  I look at him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  I look at him some more, then confess my doubts about trying to teach people better educated than myself, more lucid, youngsters who are fluent in the complexities and mazes of Marxism.

  ‘Bugger Marxism. You and I have read the Gospels. We know what socialism is about. Keep it simple.’

  He pauses.

  ‘Don’t let them intimidate you, Lao. Listen, why is our country in this mess? Why have our armies collapsed? Why have we abandoned 90 million of our fellow Chinese north of the Yellow River? Why the callous attitudes of the intellectuals, the wealthy and the middle classes to the deaths of millions and millions of ordinary Chinese yeomen and soldiers? Because of our Confucian culture of class, hierarchy, of deference, of always reaching settlements through discussion, compromise. Talking, talking, talking. Talking ourselves to death – whether it’s Marxism or Confucianism – while the wolves surround us and rip our people to shreds. I mean, most Chinese don’t even know what China is. They have no sense of us as a country. No patriotism. As you define so concisely in your novels, a Chinaman’s only loyalty is to his family.’

  ‘It’s not even to that,’ I correct him. ‘It’s to himself. Himself alone.’

  ‘There you are,’ responds Feng. ‘That is the problem. You must alter that attitude. You must persuade intellectuals and playwrights, journalists and artists, to forget all their fey East Coast theories and pretensions, teach them to know their audiences so they can dig into them, seize them as that puppeteer used a 2,000-year-old story to seize us. Use the plays you and your writers produce to irupt peoples’ emotions, wrestle their minds. Show them they actually have minds. Portray for them the future of China and set their souls on fire to reach it.’

  I am still looking somewhat sceptical.

  ‘Lao, do not be awed by these upper-class halfwits. It is because of our betters we are in this mess. It is because of their plumb ignorance and arrogance that China is now falling to pieces. I chose you because of your humility, your self-criticism, your humour, your love of simple things and simple people. Your thirst for the truth. You are worth ten of any of them. You have the guile and the patience and the knowledge to wheedle worthwhile things out of them, to lead them, unsuspecting as they might be, to starting to see the world as we see it. To respect and learn from ordinary folk.

  ‘For all your weakness you are a strong man, Lao She. For all their bullshit, they are men of straw.’

  A ‘strong man’ who leaves his family to the mercies of the Japanese? We push on through the crowds.

  ‘I’m meeting a staff officer of mine further up the Bund,’ says Feng. ‘He’s got the list of the names of those East Coasters you are going to teach.’

  I fervently pray that a certain Guo Morou is not among their number.

  *

  Hu Lan-shih, Agnes and a few other volunteers were all working at the dressing station on the Bund. Li Dequan, General Feng’s wife, had gone off to get more clean bandages from a warehouse. One soldier after another was lifted onto the tables, treated as best they could, then helped or lifted off.

  A fresh one was lifted onto Hu and Agnes’s table.

  ‘My name is Chu,’ said the soldier. He said it over and over again as he lay on the rough wooden table. ‘My name is Chu, my name is Chu.’ He’d withdrawn within himself and would not come out. While Agnes disinfected the deep wound in his thigh caused by a shell fragment, the ever-positive Hu tried to divert him with banter – chirruping like a bird, enquiring about his girl, his favourite drink, his home? But even questions about his mother got no response.

  ‘My name is Chu.’

  There was nothing they could do for him. Gangrene had set into his wound and his leg. It stank. A thick layer of flies poulticed the wound. Agnes slipped him some spirits to douse the pain and they lifted him gently onto the ground in a space reserved for the dying. He would be dead by nightfall and his body rolled into the Yangtze.

  Next on the table was a young soldier with superficial body wounds and a fractured upper arm. Bits of splintered bone stuck out from his arm’s punctured flesh. While Hu dressed his body wounds Agnes carefully disinfected the bone punctures in his arm and gently withdrew detached slivers of the bone.

  ‘So who’s your girl?’ asked Hu.

  ‘How about you?’ said the soldier.

  ‘That’s my father over there,’ said Hu, indicating a large policeman strolling past. ‘He wouldn’t like you asking questions like that.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘I got a girl in Kaifeng,’ said the soldier. ‘But she’s probably forgotten me by now.’

  ‘Easy come, easy go.’

  ‘She had a lovely voice,’ said the soldier. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Careful,’ said Hu merrily, ‘or I’ll start singing.’ They laughed.

  Agnes looked up.

  ‘This lad needs the hospital. So they can set his arm properly and ensure infection doesn’t get into the wound.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Hu, feeling in her pocket. ‘I haven’t enough for a rickshaw.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Agnes. ‘Where’s Li Dequan?’

  ‘She went off to pick up some sterilized bandages.’

  Agnes looked around and saw a rickshaw man resting between rides. She approached him.

  ‘This soldier needs a ride to the hospital.’

  ‘Three coins,’ said the man.

  ‘We don’t have any money,’ said Agnes.

  The rickshaw man shrugged. ‘No money, no ride.’

  ‘He is a brave soldier,’ said Agnes. ‘He has been defending all of us, he has been defending you against the Japanese devils.’

  The man shrugged again.

  Agnes Smedley was a short stuggy American. A childhood spent in poverty in the copper mines of Colorado and a lifetime spent fighting for the underdog had prematurely aged her. Deep lines of fatigue ran across her face but tenacity glowed in her eyes. She believed all poor people were of necessity good people, so, blood all up her arms, bandages in her hand, she set to work on the luckless rickshaw driver. He lasted three minutes. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right. I have a few minutes off so I’ll take the poor fellow to the hospital. Oh, and by the way, I’ll tell my friends about this. If they have a few minutes off they’ll probably do the same. Must help our great Chinese heroes!’

  Meanwhile Feng’s wife Li Dequan had arrived back, put the disinfected bandages on a side table and, fag in mouth, threw a bucket of disinfectant over the bloody table. Hu scrubbed it down. The next patient lifted himself on. While treating the soldier’s affliction – venereal disease – Li and Hu started chatting, and Li asked Hu about how she’d got to Wuhan. Hu explained she’d worked in the Shen Xin Number 9 Cotton Mill in Shanghai until the Japanese bombed it. This was at the time of the famous Defence of the Sihang Warehouse in Shanghai, where a few heroic Chinese soldiers had held off the all-conquering Japanese for several weeks. A lone Girl Guide, Yang Huimin, by her own initiative, had smug
gled food and ammunition in to them. Patriotic feelings were running high in Shanghai. So, as their mill blazed behind them, the surviving girls held a meeting in the street. This, explained Hu, was the first time she had ever been part of an open democratic meeting. There they were, standing in the middle of the street, talking about whatever they wanted to talk about, with no fear of the secret police, gangsters, or the company’s goons. It was so enjoyable. Released such powerful feelings within her. The girls decided it was their patriotic duty to do all they could to help the retreating soldiers.

  Different groups of girls attached themselves to different regiments. They cooked for them, they learnt first aid to treat the wounded – the Chinese Army provided no medical facilities for their troops – and in the evenings they sang and danced to cheer the men up. Often, when disputes broke out between soldiers and civilians over the army requisitioning food and supplies, the girls intervened and would act as conciliators so that a deal could be arrived at before violence became necessary. They became robust and jolly and their pale skin blossomed.

  Li Dequan became fascinated by Hu as they worked on their patients. Her spirit, her enthusiasm. How the girls worked with each other and with the soldiers. She heard Hu’s awed descriptions of the beauty of the countryside (which she had not seen since she was a little girl), the solemn wonder of the guardian mountains they marched amid, all the different peoples and cultures they’d met – things she, working in her mill fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, had never known even existed.

  ‘It was as though,’ said Hu, ‘I suddenly understood what my country was.’

  Li Dequan was about to respond when Agnes returned triumphant from the converted rickshaw driver and General Feng and Lao She arrived. Feng gently carried the soldier with the shattered arm to the rickshaw, clapped the rickshaw driver on the back in a comradely fashion, and, with Lao She’s struggling help, lifted the next patient, a huge sergeant with a badly burnt leg, onto the table.

  Meanwhile Li Dequan had drawn Agnes to one side and was talking in an animated fashion to her. As they talked they frequently looked over their shoulders at young Hu, who was busy examining the sergeant’s painful burns. Seeing his wife and Agnes might be some time, Feng joined Hu at the table to examine the patient. Feng, from his years on the battlefield, knew a lot about tending and binding wounds. They decided to smear the sergeant’s burns with ointment, then apply a poultice held firmly in place with bandages.