Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Suddenly Robert smiled.

  ‘When have they ever been anything else, comrade?’

  He stood up and held out his hand.

  ‘Jack, I’ve got to go. Catch the midday plane. I’m off to cover the last days of the Spanish Republic. Yet another fascist triumph to chalk up.’

  ‘Don’t get down, Robert,’ said Jack, shaking his hand and staring intently into his friend’s eyes. ‘When the fascists get to you, remember Taierzhuang. We annihilated the cunts.’

  Capa first bought two bottles of bourbon for Jack – it was club tradition that any journalist deserting Wuhan and the Last Ditch Club had to buy all present a round – then collected his photographic equipment and departed. Jack emptied all three bottles and fell into a deep, deep slumber.9

  *

  Here is no continuing city.

  It is a very strange thing to live in a city on the brink. In a place where you have experienced great joys, great comradeship, deep emotions, which you think of instinctively as home, and yet you know that very soon, almost immediately in fact, it will be brutally assaulted, sacked, brought to naught. That very soon it will lie cold, derelict, deserted as a bird’s nest in January.

  Following their defeat at Taierzhuang the Japanese have now, more cautiously than before, renewed their offensives. Up both banks of the Yangtze they are advancing slowly from Nanking west towards Wuhan. Their drive from the north has reached Zhengzhou, only 200 miles from Wuhan.

  Those who walk the streets of London at least enjoy the illusion that their city is eternal, as do or did the citizens of Paris, Shanghai, Babylon, Persepolis, Balkh or Xanadu. Some cities – Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, Meshed, Hatra, Xian – actually are eternal.

  But in Wuhan, before the barbarians arrive, we measure our city’s life in months, days even.

  Over the last few weeks I have become obsessed with one thing alone. Each day, as I wander along the Bund, I stare into the hideously mutilated face of the tiny beggar girl – the deep rips and gouges across her cheeks and mouth, the knife plunges into her eyes – who is coerced by the gangsters who mutilated her to cry ever more piteously to the crowds who pass her by: ‘Look at me! Look at what these Japanese barbarians have done! Alms, I beg alms!’

  How can anyone deliberately drag a knife across a tiny girl’s face? Stab her tiny trusting eyes?

  Of course, there is selfishness in my thoughts. She stands for what could have happened to my own tiny children. Cast out, abandoned by me. Defenceless in the world. My mother… My wife…

  I turn off from the Bund and start to walk down a side street. It is at this point that I am seized by the secret police. A large black limousine hisses to a halt beside me, two burly young men, dressed in trench coats and dipped down fedoras – no cliche is left unobserved – spring out, grab me by the arms and in one fluid movement hoick me into its rear seat, climb in themselves, slam the door, rap twice on the dividing screen so the driver accelerates quickly away, and then sit heavily on either side of me. I do not even have time to say ‘Oh.’

  Pretty soon, though, I am reflecting on my situation.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask.

  No response.

  ‘Are you police? Are you gangsters? Do you work for the government?’

  No response.

  The car melts through the streets – pedestrians, rickshaws, carts vanishing on either side of us – before we silkily draw to a halt beneath a vast building, oppressive and penitential in its appearance. I am bundled inside.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say, desperately trying to maintain a scintilla of self-respect – ‘but who are you, and what are you doing?’

  I am bundled upstairs and into a small room in which a well-dressed man stares at me critically.

  ‘He looks a total mess.’

  ‘He’s a writer, sir,’ his assistant purrs.

  ‘Haven’t we got a halfway decent suit we can stick him into?’

  A halfway decent suit is discovered and I am stuffed into it.

  ‘And give him a shave.’

  I am given a shave.

  Thus en-wardrobed, I am pushed towards a large and rather grand-looking door.

  ‘Look,’ I say, starting to get seriously upset, ‘will someone explain to me what the hell is going on?’

  Me and the very well- dressed man are standing with our noses to the door.

  ‘Just remember this,’ he hisses at me, ‘do not, do not in any way, not even remotely, do anything or say anything that might upset him. Do not upset him. Understood? Because if you do upset him, and he gets so upset he takes his false teeth out and throws them at you, then you are finished – understand me? – finished.’

  Suddenly I understand who I am about to meet. I’d never given much credence to the rumours before, always dismissed them as too bizarre, but suddenly I realize they are true. I am about to be ushered into the presence of none other than the Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces of the Republic of China, the Generalissimo lui-même, Mr Chiang Kai-shek!

  Someone propels me from behind and we are suddenly in his presence.

  ‘Good morning,’ he says.

  ‘Good morning,’ I say.

  ‘You are Mr Lao She,’ he says.

  ‘I am Mr Lao She,’ I say.

  There is a long silence.

  ‘I don’t know anything about plays,’ he informs me, ‘but my wife tells me that you are the best playwright in China.’

  Now is not the time to quibble about being a novelist rather than a playwright. Besides, it’s one in the eye for Gou Morou.

  ‘I am a playwright,’ I admit.

  ‘Good,’ he says.

  Another long silence.

  ‘The thing is, my wife, whose advice I greatly admire, has decided that it would be a good thing that a grand celebration and pageant sort of thing with speaking words and drama and lots of people marching around waving flags and shouting and singing with very moving and patriotic speeches and some dancing and laughter – a sort of entertainment thing but also a deadly serious piece entitled Defend Wuhan!, written by you – should be put on in front of thousands of citizens to improve the morale of the Chinese peoples. All right?’

  I stare at him. I have literally been struck dumb.

  ‘I said, is that all right?’

  His face starts to discombobulate. His teeth work around inside his cheeks in a strangely sinister fashion. I suddenly remember the warning about his false teeth, their habit of escaping from his mouth, being violently propelled towards any object of his displeasure.

  ‘Of course,’ I almost shout. ‘It is a brilliant, a wonderful idea. I will do it. I will immediately do it. I cannot wait to start doing it!’

  Another long silence.

  I clamp down on my own teeth, desperately hoping that their immobility will somehow placate his.

  ‘Good,’ he finally says, turning to his next business.

  I disappear from the room.

  Outside, excreted from the building and once more walking down the street as an average citizen (my halfway decent suit removed and my usual shabby attire restored), I ritually, methodically curse the name of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. I mean, I’m sure that in Britain, if Mr Neville Chamberlain the prime minister wishes to see Mrs Virginia Woolf to enquire of her if she would care to compose some popular all-singing all-dancing entertainment to bolster the morale of London’s plucky East End cockneys, then he will not employ rough, surly men to snatch her off the pavements of Bloomsbury and bundle her post-haste into a back room in Downing Street.

  But I live in China.

  *

  At the crowded bar of the Last Ditch Club the only topic of discussion was still Hitler’s invasion of Austria. And where he was going to invade next.

  First, to anchor themselves, they went through the long list of his and his fellow dictators’ previous crimes.

  ‘Manchuria in 1931, the Japanese invasion. Tha
t set the whole ball rolling.’

  ‘Then there was Abyssinia in ’35. That Italian bastard went and invaded.’

  ‘Used mustard gas on the natives.’

  ‘In ’36 Adolf marches into the Rhineland. Do Britain, France, the League of Nations do anything?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And in the same year Franco invades Spain, overthrows the democratically elected government.’

  ‘Britain and France look in the other direction.’

  ‘And last year the fucking Japs go full banzai here in China. Twenty million dead.’

  ‘Twenty million.’

  The voices cataloguing this inventory of atrocities were not angry – despite the alcohol drunk – but rather weary and in despair.

  Their anger only started to flicker when they started to read the Times’s apologia for Hitler’s flattening of Austria.

  Rewi Alley, the New Zealander, spoke first.

  ‘The journalist who wrote this a disgrace. He leads with Hitler’s triumphant arrival in Linz at the head of all his storm troopers. It’s almost as though he’s in love with all those blond, blue-eyed boys.’

  ‘Flatulent bumboy!’

  ‘No attempt to distance himself from them, objectify, give his readers some suggestion of what these thugs are getting up to in the backstreets – massacring socialists, gypsies, Jews.’

  ‘It’s not journalism, its propaganda.’

  James Bertram, a young stringer for the Telegraph, took over the indictment.

  ‘Then Hitler climbs out onto the balcony of some hotel in the marketplace and starts ranting on about blood and destiny and Aryan master races and the need to exterminate lesser races and beings – the full eugenics copy book – and the Times hack just scribbles it all down verbatim…’

  ‘All the time creaming his pants.’

  ‘…and the worst thing is The Times in London publishes it – verbatim. Not a single word of caution, reprimand, decency.’

  ‘Hitler’s just going to go on and on, isn’t he,’ stated Rewi Alley, ‘and our leaders – Chamberlain, Daladier – aren’t going to do a thing to stop him.’

  ‘So where’s the bastard going to invade next?’

  ‘Czechoslovakia!’ came the unanimous cry.

  Only three people in the room – apart from the gloomy White Russian bartender – were uninvolved in this tribal denunciation. One was Jack Belden, who was still sleeping off his three bottles of bourbon. The second was the immaculately attired Old Etonian Peter Fleming, who sat in an armchair seemingly indifferent to it all. Surreptitiously, however, as the abuse of The Times (for which he wrote) heightened, he quietly folded away its airmail edition that he’d been reading and started perusing a dog-eared old copy of Country Life. The third silent individual was a rather nervous young English Quaker, fresh off the boat, named George Hogg. George had picked up a job as a ‘stringer’ with Reuters. He obviously had feelings about the discussion but did not dare enter it. Why, he wondered as a pacifist, were all his fellow journalists so keen on stopping this war in China, but couldn’t wait to start a new one in Europe?

  2

  A prominent bow tie walked into the room followed by a man in a tweed suit. A very tall man with round tortoiseshell glasses. ‘Gosh,’ he said. He was carrying a shopping bag and was accompanied by Agnes Smedley, Wuhan’s Patron Saint of Lost Causes. His shopping bag was filled with bicycle parts and he had a cheap Kodak camera slung round his neck. ‘Gosh,’ he said again, and took a quick snap of the table.

  ‘I’d like you to meet Donald Hankey,’ said Agnes, introducing him to the room, ‘I found him wandering around on the Bund. He appeared to be lost.’

  Spider Girl thought she had never seen anything so extraordinary in her life. She was particularly obsessed with his bow tie.

  ‘Hello, Donald,’ said Hu. ‘Sit down.’

  Donald sat his large frame down. Spider Girl continued to stare. She cuffed The Drab to keep her cutting the vegetables.

  ‘And what are you doing in Wuhan?’ asked the naturally polite Hu.

  ‘Thought I ought to do my bit. See the enemy at close quarters, so to speak. So I came.’

  ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a surgeon.’

  ‘A surgeon? What made you want to come here?’

  ‘Gosh. Rather a long story,’ said the naturally reticent Donald.

  ‘Then tell us,’ said Hu, smiling. ‘In Wuhan conversation is our only enjoyment.’

  Spider Girl brought him a bowl of tea and stayed by the table to hear his tale.

  ‘Well, I’d just passed my finals at Barts and was tootling about London. I’d been thinking about coming out here to China – see the enemy at close quarters, so to speak – when who should I run into at some party at the Ritz but Bonkers Binkie, so I told him about my plan and he said “What a co-inky-dence! Pop’s just given me this super aerothingy and I was thinking of flying it to China.” So a couple of days later we took off to China – him in the front, me in the back – but we crashed just outside Paris. “Whoops,” said Binkie, “pater’s going to pop a piston.” So that was air travel ruled out, so instead I hitched. Got to the Mediterranean, signed on as a stoker on some steamer. Lots of Chinese chaps shovelling with me so I soon picked up the lingo.’

  ‘Your Chinese is very good,’ said Hu, even though it was excruciating. Agnes had meanwhile drifted off to finish an article for the Manchester Guardian.

  ‘Anyhow, it was very hot being a stoker in the Red Sea. And then we ran into a monsoon. But I was mainly worried that someone might steal my portmanteau, with all my surgical instruments in it. Vital for my work. But during the monsoon we ran into some rather rough weather and the captain’s son was hit by some loose cargo in the hold. And it could have been serious for him, but I performed some emergency surgery and he was all right. The captain was very grateful to me and put my portmanteau and clothes chest in his own cabin, so that when we got to Shanghai he took me along to a junk captain he knew and in a rather rough manner told him to take me upriver to Wuhan and if he heard I’d been ill-treated in any way or had anything stolen he’d deal personally with the captain next time he saw him. So that’s how I got here. A coolie’s bringing my baggage up from the docks.’

  He seemed relieved that his story was over and he could relapse into silence.

  ‘Why is your shopping bag filled with bicycle parts and old bits of machinery?’ demanded Spider Girl, still standing beside him.

  ‘Oh,’ said Donald, ‘needs must, you know. When in Rome…’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ asked Spider Girl.

  ‘Well, in my training, I was always advised, if in foreign parts, to modify my surgery according to the technology of the country I was in. Well, since I got to China, I’ve seen an awful lot of bicycles.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ ordered Agnes from next door, ‘and make up a bed for him.’ So Donald sipped his tea and ate some rice Spider Girl had prepared for him.

  ‘You know,’ he said to her, ‘you have a bad condition of rickets – caused specifically by lack of vitamins and insufficient sunlight.’ Unfortunately he didn’t know the Chinese word for rickets and Spider Girl didn’t know what ‘rickets’ was. So they just stared at each other. Spider Girl stared especially at his bow tie. What could it be? A religious object? A self-suicide mechanism? If you wound it up did the head fall off?

  *

  The next day, on her way to her own job, Hu showed Donald the way to the nearby hospital where he was to work. As he walked through the streets with his shopping bag, Donald continued to take random photos of random objects with his Kodak – holes in the ground, people with planks on their head, piles of abandoned ironmongery, the odd telegraph pole. Everything he saw fascinated him. ‘Gosh,’ he’d say, and snap away.

  The hospital was a dingy building in an undistinguished street. Hu led him up its steps and into its main corridor. The first doorway on the right, without any discreet preliminaries, opened straight on
to the main operating theatre. The floor was pitched in blood. Piles of assorted limbs lay stacked in every corner of the room. The wooden operating table at its centre was likewise covered in blood and had two young, wildly competitive Canadian doctors playing ping pong across it. The ball was stained bright red.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  ‘You ain’t. At you!’

  ‘Easy-peasy!’

  ‘That? Huh! Result!’

  ‘Jeez,’ muttered the outwitted first doctor. ‘We need more sawdust down.’

  ‘Bad workmen…’

  Suddenly Doctors Bob McClure, lead surgeon, and Dick Brown, second surgeon, became aware of Donald and Hu.

  ‘Gee willikers,’ said Bob.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Dick.

  ‘Name’s Hankey, Donald Hankey,’ said Donald, lumbering forwards and holding out a very large hand.

  ‘A limey!’ said Bob as they shook hands.

  ‘Got any ping pong balls on you?’ asked Dick.

  ‘No, not actually.’

  ‘Well, keep an eye out for ’em. They keep us sane.’

  ‘And this is Hu,’ added Donald.

  ‘Hello,’ said Hu.

  She should have been getting on to her work but tarried because she found the place so fascinating.

  ‘And what’s your game, Donald?’ asked Bob, who was agile and restless as a ferret.

  ‘Rugby, I suppose,’ replied Donald.

  ‘No, I mean your trade?’

  ‘Oh, er,’ said the shy Hankey, ‘I’m a surgeon, actually.’

  ‘A surgeon!’ said Bob.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Dick.

  ‘Where did you graduate?’

  ‘Barts, in fact.’

  ‘Barts, indeed? Hey, fellas, we got a real live Barts guy here.’

  He was addressing two young Indian trainee doctors sitting at a table by the far wall who were busy squabbling over some paperwork.

  ‘Come over and meet Donald.’

  The two Indians came over.

  As they shook his hand the Indians did not look directly at him. There was a distinct chill to their greeting.

  ‘This is Ahsan Bhattacharyya…’

  ‘How do you do?’

  ‘And Maninda Atwal.’