Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘Thank you. Finally, we need more space. We need more beds. Hu here works on the Bund every day, bandaging the wounded. She says their numbers have fallen a bit since we started these hospitals, but we still have a long way to go. As you probably know there are seven or eight floating brothels moored on the Bund. Full of beds. We wondered whether the government, for fully patriotic reasons, might commandeer three or four of them. They would make excellent and well-ventilated quarters for the wounded, and they could be used for transporting the wounded upstream to the safety of Changsha or Chungking so they can rest and recuperate.’

  Madame Chiang laughed and clapped her hands. ‘What an excellent idea. I will see to it immediately.’

  Intelligent Whore smiled at Madame Chiang. Madame Chiang stared at Intelligent Whore. ‘What an extraordinary woman you are.’ She sighed. ‘If only we had people like you in our government.’

  She turned to go.

  ‘I will leave you with the really important thing in your life – your child.’

  They left. Intelligent Whore lay down with her son and re-entered his world of make-believe. She still had five minutes with him.

  *

  Once they were outside Hu and Madame Chiang walked for about a hundred yards and then stopped. Madame Chiang ordered one of her bodyguards to get her car. Within seconds a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost whispered up. Her two bodyguards got into the front. Madame Chiang got in the back.

  ‘Get in,’ she said to Hu.

  ‘But Madame,’ said Hu, ‘I have to attend my committee.’

  ‘I’ll deliver you there,’ said Madame Chiang.

  Hu got in.

  Once inside Madame Chiang drew all the curtains, including the ones across the glass partition, so neither the public nor her bodyguards or driver could see them. She then switched off the intercom system to the driver so no one could overhear them. She looked at Hu.

  ‘You are a good Christian.’

  ‘Well…’ said Hu.

  ‘You took the pledge?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Madame Chiang, and took out a hip flask. She took three deep hits from it. She turned to Hu.

  ‘I have never seen anyone so good as that woman. That whore. She was so in control, so powerful, yet never once did she show any anger or irritation. With her child, with me, with that madman, she was in perfect control, yet never once did she use her strength to manipulate, threaten, dominate. She must be like the saints of old.’

  ‘I think she probably has to deal with problems quite often in a brothel – especially with men like that,’ said Hu.

  ‘No,’ said Madame. ‘Her first priority, her absolute priority, was that child. That child’s being and peace of mind. At every single second she knew exactly what the child was thinking, where it was. Yet, simultaneously, she could mentally deal with all my questions and her complex, informed answers to them, and then with the violence and hysteria of that animal. How could she do it? It was a miracle. Her calmness, her control.

  As I said to her, she should be running China. I meant it. No one could run this shithole like she could.’

  Hu remembered the conversation she’d had with Agnes only two hours before.

  ‘What I want to know is,’ said Madame Chiang, lighting a new Gold Flake and taking another swig from her hip flask, ‘what is this connection between soldiers and whores? I do not understand it. I mean, with the brains that woman has and the self-control she has she could be a powerful woman, a rich woman, running all sorts of things. But instead she lives penniless and devotes herself to caring for soldiers. Half the nurses in that “hospital” were whores.’

  ‘Soldiers and whores have a lot in common, Madame,’ said Hu. ‘Whores are helpless. But not as helpless as soldiers. If whores are in brothels they’ll survive for several years, til their looks wear out. If they are on the street they’ll only live a few months. But soldiers only live for days, seconds, moments. Soldiers, with their lives, protect whores, protect all of us. So whores, who know death, admire them. They work for soldiers to bring them comfort, give them joy. And when the soldiers are happy, the whores are happy. Bringing joy to someone whose life is even shorter than yours brings you happiness. You talk about money, Madame Chiang, but which would you rather have – money or happiness?’

  Madame Chiang burst into tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Madame Chiang, I’m sorry that I upset you.’

  Madame touched her arm to show her it was not her fault.

  Hu looked at her face. Had she been in full chic with expensive make-up and mascara, her face would now be a mess. But because her face was entirely unmade-up, even with the tears flowing down it, she looked natural and beautiful.

  Madame Chiang stopped her crying, wiped her tears and blew her nose. Lighting another cigarette she pulled at it, took another swig, and stared grimly ahead of her. She made a decision. Still staring ahead she spoke.

  ‘Hu, I live in a world where I can trust no one. But I trust you. Should I trust you?’

  ‘Yes, Madame Chiang,’ said Hu, ‘you can trust me.’ And she meant it.

  ‘I am not going to complain about being a poor lonely girl all alone at the pinnacle of power. After all, I fought hard enough to get there. I want to tell you about my husband.’

  ‘Madame Chiang…!’ said Hu, but Chiang put a hand on her arm to shut her up. She still stared robotically ahead of her.

  ‘Those who work for him in the government, his generals – perhaps even the population at large – see him as a dogged, wooden, rather unimaginative politician. A man not responsible for our situation, the attack by Japan, but doing his best, in his cautious, shy manner, to right it.’

  He turned to Hu, her eyes flashing. Her voice was strangled, almost manic.

  ‘He is not like that at all. People have got him completely wrong. My husband is not normal. My husband is incredible. Incredibly uncommunicative, incredibly rude in the way he blanks people, arguments, ideas. He’s a blank. A blank so blank it screams. A vortex into which all things – ideas, people, projects, thoughts, enquiries, arguments, suggestions, recommendations, careers, real men and women, whole armies and cities and citizens – are sucked and disappear forever. People back him to the hilt and disappear. Warnings and pleadings are presented to him and he ignores them. He is a total nobody, a non-existence, a non-thing – and this perpetually shut, unopenable blank has absolute power, runs our country!’4

  She stopped.

  Hu didn’t know what to say or where to look.

  She started again.

  ‘It’s not just his teeth that are false. Every single part of him is false!’5

  Another pause.

  ‘And when it comes to it, he’ll surrender us to the Japanese. Just hand us over. There, I’ve said it. At last.’

  Madame Chiang continued staring stonily ahead, drawing heavily on her cigarette.

  ‘But he’s not going to. China’s not going to surrender. We Soong sisters will not allow that. You will not allow that. Above all, Intelligent Whore will not allow it.’

  Her Rolls-Royce had arrived outside the building where Hu’s committee met. Madame Chiang thanked Hu profusely for all that she’d shown her today and said she’d do her best to help organize those things they had discussed. She’d stay in touch with Hu and hoped Hu would act as her go-between with Intelligent Whore. Hu assented to this and left the car.

  Madame Chiang sighed, took out her make-up compact, evaluated her face in its mirror, and then set about repairing the damage.

  Five minutes later, crisp, confident, impeccably chic, she stepped down from her limousine to greet a delegation of Texas businessmen.

  *

  Hu did not go into the committee. Instead she went straight home.

  Back in the apartment she sat stunned. The most powerful woman in China had just confided to her facts about her husband, the President of China, which were shocking. Which were deeply dangerous to know. These facts – which anyone w
ho had suffered for years in Shanghai from the thuggery and intimidation of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police and associated gangsters, as Hu had – came as no surprise. But the fact that it was his wife who had confirmed his incompetence and malice could make Hu a marked woman.

  She sat there.

  All she could do was trust in God. And, if what was going on in Wuhan was any sign, God was definitely on the side of change!

  Spider Girl sat by her to keep her company, but she too was silent. She thought solely of her father. She had visited the temple on her way to the market this morning, lit candles, burnt incense, and prayed to her gods to protect him.

  13

  …bugles sounded and gongs clanged and the streets filled with people. I stood under the old town gate to watch long grey-blue columns of men and women march past. I have never been able to convey the impression they made upon me. They were grave, solemn. Not a breath of bravado was in them, yet they seemed dedicated to death – and to life. In them was a simple grandeur as fundamental and as undemonstrative as the earth.

  They belonged to China, they were China. As I watched them, my own life seemed but chaos.

  Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China

  General Li Zongren, commander in chief of China’s Fifth War Zone, wrote to Chi Fengcheng, commander of the 2nd Army Group:

  ‘It is your duty to repulse the Isogai Division. I have heard the Japs are nervous of broad-bladed sabres. Whether or not we can encircle and crush our enemy outside entirely depends on your ability to pin down our enemy inside the City of Taierzhuang. I expect, as you have said, your soldiers will be bold in slaying him to comfort our elders and brothers throughout the nation.’

  Chi Fengcheng Commander of the Second Army Group addressed his troops:

  ‘Let Taierzhuang be our grave. There is no retreat.’

  On 25 March at 4 p.m. the Japanese opened a heavy bombardment on the northern wall of the city. The Battle of Taierzhuang had started. They bombarded especially the north and north-west gates. The Chinese defenders sustained a large number of casualties, and many were killed. The shells blew holes and breaches in the walls. Seven hundred Japanese infantry then charged the north gate and broke into the city. The Chinese surrounded them and drove them into the Chenghuang Mosque. Throwing incendiary bombs into the mosque they set fire to the interior. Only four Japanese soldiers survived. The Chinese regained control of the north gate.

  The next day, angered by this display of defiance, Rensuke Isogai, commander of the Japanese 10th Division, ordered the whole of his 63rd Regiment to assault the north gate. Once more the Chinese drove them into the mosque, but this time, with nothing to burn, the Japanese survived. The mosque became their command post. The Chinese attacked it ferociously and, with hundreds of casualties on both sides, retook it but then in a counter-attack, with hundreds more dead on each side, the Japanese retook it. This back-and-forth warfare continued for several days. Thousands of dead and dying lay in mounds all around the building.

  Eventually the Japanese managed to gain a foothold in the streets and alleyways in the north of the city. They made a considerable advance into the eastern city.

  The Chinese battalion commander Zhang Jingbo was wounded and retreated from the fighting. He was immediately executed by his commanding officer Mie Zibin.

  *

  Wei lay sleeping amid his platoon. Around midnight, his face pressed hard into the soil, he awoke. There was a smell in the earth. It was not the nullness of winter, of frost, when the soil is dead and it has no smell. Tonight it held the scent of wetness and growth; he felt the earth stirring, roiling underground, roots and unformed plants rutting, twining in the earth, striking for the surface. As though a gigantic dragon rolled and shook beneath the earth.

  In a second the whole lethargy and death of winter fell off him. He sat up, filled his lungs with the air – not dead and stale like winter air, but rank with dampness and life. It reminded him of the scents of his marriage bed on their wedding night. Spring had come once more to the earth. Winter was dead. He leapt up and danced the joyous dance his village always danced on the night of the vernal equinox.

  The next morning his regiment, on its journey to Taierzhuang, marched through unending fields of fresh green wheat, waving and rippling in the wind like an unending ocean, the clouds in the sky shadowing alternative waves of light and dark across its surface. They passed four peasants, stood on a platform, working with their feet a treadmill to raise the water from a canal into their fields. As their legs pumped unendingly beneath them, above they leant languidly over a wooden bar and disputed learnedly among each other. Naked children rode on the backs of water buffalo as they ambled gently down to wallow in their pools.

  Wei looked at it. It was beautiful to see. Buds on the trees starting to green the branches, birds in full song defending their nests, the crops breaking through the earth. But it was also terrible. Wei thought of his family’s fields at home. The immaculate rows of burdock, gaoliang, cabbage planted out by him, his wife, Eldest Son, with Second Son helping and Cherry Blossom creating a scene and stamping her feet. The earth cultivated, nursed, tendered for a thousand years by his family, his ancestors. Now deserted, withering, rank with weed and thorn. The family pig that he’d slaughtered just before they left so that it would not starve. Would not be feasted on by the Japanese. Young saplings rooting, starting to build their kingdoms in the air. He felt outrage.

  The regiment marched on.

  Suddenly, from above, snowed a thousand sheets of white paper. Japanese propaganda pamphlets dropped by a passing aircraft floating down. A soldier who could read picked one up and read it aloud:

  ‘Greetings, Chinese soldiers. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of the Empire of Japan brings unlimited joy and bounty to all the people of China. We, the Imperial Japanese Army, have always been invincible. Your resistance is stupid. The Empire of Japan is as eternal and mighty as the sun. To oppose the Imperial Japanese Army is stupid. Surrender at once!’

  The Chinese ground their teeth and spat. But much as they hated these pamphlets they gathered them up. They could use them to light fires and wipe arses.

  They marched over the brow of a hill. There before them lay the city of Taierzhuang. Built of black stone, ominous. A haze of smoke lay over the city and its surrounding plains were lit continuously by flashing explosions and burning fires. There was the distant rumble of artillery and exploding shells and bombs. The regiment cheered.

  Between them and Taierzhuang were laid out a series of orchards. So the soldiers marched beneath boughs hung with spring blossom. Sweet-smelling petals of plum and orange and cherry and pear snowed on them, mantling their shoulders and heads with fragrance. They felt joyful. Marching beneath bright red pomegranate blossoms caused especial mirth because eating pomegranates was held to be the surest way of fathering innumerable children!

  The mood became more serious. They were passing beneath the boughs of a giant peach orchard. Above myriads of bees and insects feasted on its sweet blossoms and flowers, their humming and buzzing turning the orchard into a great solemn cathedral of sound. Everyone understood the symbolism of the peach orchard. It had been in such a place, beneath its pink, fragrant blossoms, that the three great heroes of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms had first met and there sworn their immortal oath to always fight together to defend the Han emperor, to preserve the unity of China. One of the soldiers, who knew the passage by heart, recited it aloud:

  ‘“When saying the names Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei,

  although the surnames are different,

  yet we have come together as brothers.

  From this day forward, we shall join forces for a common purpose: to save the troubled and to aid the endangered.

  We shall avenge the nation above, and pacify the citizenry below. We seek not to be born on the same day, in the same month and in the same year.

  We merely hope to die on the same day, in the same month and in the same yea
r.

  May the Gods of Heaven and Earth attest to what is in our hearts. If we should ever do anything to betray our friendship,

  may heaven and the people of the earth both strike us dead.”

  Blossom fell like soft snow on them.

  Then they marched like happy brides to their death.’

  Wei’s regiment marched on in silence.

  The sound of battle grew.

  They passed a dead farmer with a dead goose he had been taking to market. A woman, blood dripping from her arm, her face white. Refugees leaving the city.

  They marched past the railway station. Middle-class families patiently waited for their train with their baggage. Soldiers frenziedly unloaded a freight train and a long line of coolies ported its contents – ammunition, food, supplies – straight into the city. On the ground by the train lay lines of wounded soldiers, ready to be loaded onto the train when it had been emptied.

  They passed a boy with a wheelbarrow full of matchboxes to be sold in the city.

  The regiment Wei was marching with were not like the raggle-taggle band of soldiers he’d first served with. These troops had smart uniforms and were extremely experienced and disciplined in fighting war. They’d first fought as members of General Feng Yuxiang’s North-West Army. He had trained them especially in the techniques of broadsword and night fighting. Being a good Christian, Feng had also baptized them wholesale by directing fire hoses on them as they stood on parade in the open fields. When Feng was sent into internal exile in Jinan after he criticized Chiang Kai-shek’s appeasement of Japan, the regiment was taken over by other generals, but they maintained the core skills that Feng had taught them.

  As they marched across the pontoon bridge over the Grand Canal and entered Taierzhuang by its south-east gate they broke into spontaneous song. Being good Christians they chose for their bloodcurdling battle anthem Psalm 68:

  Let God arise,

  let his enemies be scattered:

  let them also that hate him flee before him.

  As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: