Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  He left without paying and disappeared through his office doors.

  In truth George didn’t actually have the least idea where he stood or what he thought. Born in Harpenden, the son of a successful Quaker businessman who had ambitions for him, he’d gone to the local school and then, miraculously, won a scholarship to Oxford. On leaving Oxford his father declared George was to become a banker but for once George put his foot down. Or rather, as a Quaker, the spirit moved him. ‘Before I do that, Father,’ he said, ‘I want to see the world. I want to work things out.’ Not only a banker, thought his father, but an international banker! He promptly funded George for a year’s trip round the world. For reasons unknown George had ended up in Wuhan.

  The rickshaw pulled up outside his office. George paid the boy and was about to walk into his office when the air-raid siren sounded for the second time that day. There were distant crumps and thumps. They were bombing Hanyang again.

  George’s spirit decided he must go. Much as he hated seeing the aftermath of a raid – the slaughter, the suffering – George always painstakingly reported it in detail. So his readers would know what war was really like. So that they would do everything they could to avoid it.

  *

  On the ferry from the Bund to Hanyang, George found himself on the same boat as Freda Utley and Agnes Smedley. He didn’t know Freda but recognized Agnes from the Last Ditch Club. They didn’t speak.

  They were met with a scene of utter devastation. They hurried in among the fires and ruins to get their stories, those images and phrases of war that would hopefully lodge themselves irremovably into their readers’ minds and memories.

  Freda suddenly became a different person. She ceased being an educated upper middle-class Englishwoman embroiled in emotional and neurotic passions and dilemmas. Suddenly she metamorphosed into a proper fit-for-purpose journalist. Calm. Icy almost. Concentrating hard on what she saw, calculating exactly how she would vividly capture that particular image or event in words, stepping amid the bodies and chaos as easily as she would have stepped among the guests at a picnic on Hampstead Heath. This is what she noted down:

  Acres smouldering ruins, wounded being stretchered off, burnt bodies amid debris, wounded being dressed by first-aid workers on the spot. 100s of artisan shacks destroyed. In ruins horribly mutilated bodies. Near waterfront mangled mess of human limbs and sand where bomb had exploded on a primitive hut. Wounded children screaming, frightened children crying, women distraught.

  Red column of flame rising to sky. Stumble over body of a man by waterside, entrails exposed. Still breathing. No one has time to attend him or he’s regarded as a hopeless case. Pr’aps he’s unconscious, can feel no pain. Pass gruesome sight after another. Wish above all things there was morphine for the wounded.

  A woman, dead husband at her feet, at her breast a baby with its face blackened by the blast, a child about two screaming beside her. Man trying to do something for his wife – obviously beyond help but still breathing. Mutilated children, mothers, men. Most pathetic of all, small boy crying beside mother’s horribly mangled body in remains of their one-roomed shack. ‘Where is your father?’ I ask through my companion. ‘Killed in another bombing,’ he cries. Nearby an old grandmother, her whole family killed, now herself doomed to die of starvation.

  Further on. Mother wails unceasingly over the dead body of her baby, a small boy howls beside her. Houses blazing like matchwood, the heat so great I can’t get close to them. Along the waterfront families with few pitiful possessions: mattresses, tables, wooden boxes, cooking vessels. Attempts being made to put out fire, men, women, and boys passing buckets and basins from hand to hand in long chain. When a primitive fire engine at last arrives can’t get its pump working. Frantic. At last a hose-pipe draws water from the river, it spouts onto blazing buildings and fire is under control. All started by direct hit on a small paper factory, the burning papers falling on surrounding thatched hovels. Hundreds have lost homes/livelihoods.

  Just the sort of reporting Agnes had been hoping would start to appear in the British News Chronicle when she’d invited Freda to Wuhan.

  From another area of the carnage George Hogg was also reporting. He’d never seen anything this bad before. It should never have been allowed to happen. This was war. What war really was. He must report exactly what he saw so his readers would know and would never allow another war in Europe. He noted:

  Men cry and scream digging frantically into disintegrating earth while fearful they might strike some dead or halfdead thing. Old woman silently from body to body, peering intently at each. Puts out a hand to touch one, that she may see more clearly the disfigured face, suddenly throws herself to ground beside it, kissing it in an abandonment of grief. ‘That’s enough now, old lady, that’s enough,’ says man in uniform, trying to pull her gently to feet; but she cleaves to her daughter so he leaves her to turn to other victims. Old man who’s been digging half an hour discovers his wife was one of the first to be dug out dead and too mutilated for him to recognize. ‘Aiya. What an affair. my old woman dead.’ He throws down spade and runs up to me crazed. I sympathize and he hurries on. ‘My old woman’s dead,’ he calls to the next man. Scurries on, white-faced, stopping everyone he meets. ‘My old woman’s dead.’12

  Hogg scribbled faster and faster.

  Huge conflagration, dense smoke, bursting flames, shrieks and children wailing, cries of wounded buried in rubble. Also kind voices, movement. Calm courageous people move beneath flames, extinguish fires, throw sand on incendiary bombs, rescue aged from ruins. Men/women soldiers/civilians in smouldering clothes, faces grim and black, fight for the city, its life. Miraculously they appear, walking out of the flames and inferno, beat out the live sparks and flames sprouting on their clothing, walk back in.

  Chains of humans pass buckets hand to hand. Lines of people carry the wounded on stretchers, in their arms, drag them along. Stranger saving stranger. Chinaman saving Chinaman. Dead camel lying by side of street, horse screaming with broken legs. Mother runs screaming with body of dead child in arms, old men and women sit patiently on bundles surrounded by rescued household goods, poultry, favourite gods, flowerpots. The sun shines deadly and pale amid dust/smoke/crashing walls. Dogs and rats gnaw the dead. Quivering wounded people sob, pinned beneath fallen beams.

  God, thought George, the next time we discuss war at the Last Ditch, if I do one thing in my life, I will speak out against this insanity, this foulness. Speak out for peace and reconciliation. Speak out for appeasement.

  And all the time, amid the dead, moved the quick, the coolies. Deftly portering pans and brooms and cushions and piled cartons of matchboxes from the factories and huge machines and engineering equipment – components and segments from the dismantled steel mills and factories – stepping carefully amid the slaughter and the pity. Making their careful way down towards the dockside, piling what they carried into junks or steamers or carts or onto the backs of yet more coolies – so that all might be transported safe up the Yangtze to distant Sichuan, Yunnan.

  7

  I receive a letter. Not through the usual channels – a postman or academic dropping it into my pigeonhole in the college office. This message is slipped under my door. Late at night. I pick it up, open the door to see who left it, but the person has gone.

  I open it. It is not addressed to me, it is unsigned. I take it to my desk and start to read it. It informs me that my friend and pupil Tian Boqi has been arrested while travelling in the countryside and brought to Wuhan. He is incarcerated in the police barracks, in the section of it occupied by the State Security Force – our secret police. The branch of our (very large) secret police that deals with internal subversion and counter-terrorism.

  If they have him, he will be being tortured and all sorts of other things I do not wish to think about.

  At first I am unsure whether this letter is true or not. It could be a deliberate provocation, to watch me, see what my reaction is, whether I contact anyone else
they might consider disloyal. But then I see a familiar tic in certain characters in the letter. They belong to Tian’s fellow student in our class, the revolutionary poetess Shan Shuang. I judge her to be a person of integrity. (albeit a terrible poet, but dead straight in her morality and integrity). I believe what she has written in the letter. Tian Boqi is in prison.

  The letter continues. Shan Shuang (and probably others) beg me to intervene with the authorities. I am an influential novelist and writer. A public figure of standing and respect. If I were to intervene it might influence the authorities to release him – or at least not torture him. The letter implores me to do this and then ends.

  I burn the letter so Shan Shuang cannot be traced. Then I think.

  I too have been under arrest, for my writings which were – and doubtless still are – considered subversive. Three or four years ago I was interrogated and thrown into prison. I was not tortured or put on trial, I was beaten up a couple of times. I fared far better than some of my fellow writers who were tortured and two or three of them shot in some dark cell in the early hours of the morning.

  Should I do what the letter asks me?

  I think first of my family. If I have a family. If they are still alive. And if they are still alive, maybe they are at this very moment in the act of escaping from the Japanese-held north, trying to make their way south so they can join up with me here in Wuhan. If they arrive to find me in prison – or worse, purged, disappeared, dead – who will support them? They will be all alone in chaos. Then I think more rationally. If I were dead, my wife would support them, as she is doing now (if they are still alive). And what is more, if I had failed to support my fellow writers, she would have some rather stern words for me.

  So should I stick my neck out, intervene?

  Government repression has been getting worse over the last few weeks. Ever since the victory of Taierzhuang the authorities have been feeling more confident. Police and some of their gangster friends have been raiding leftist booksellers in Wuhan and Chungking, confiscating pamphlets and books, beating up anyone who objects.

  But the thing is I hate politics. I despise it. The sort of people who get involved in politics are, by and large, the lowest forms of human life. I always felt the British cockneys had it about right. Insult politicians year in and year out and then, when at last it comes to an election, go out still insulting them and vote for them. In huge numbers.

  I belong to no political party, but I am a socialist. And a Christian. (And these days even a bit of a Confucian!) I am not particularly fond of the communists, but then they’re not as bad as the nationalists. By and large they are not corrupt, they are patriotic, they ban foot binding and give women the freedom to choose who they marry. They’d end debt slavery and curb our accursed landlords. But I still don’t trust them. That’s the Manchu in me. All those braying upper-class Han accents. But then the Nationalists are even more upper-class Han!

  I feel my emotions are taking over control of my reason. Which is not a bad thing.

  I mean, who needs the bloody secret police? They are of no use to anyone in China except the powerful. And the people of China are quite happily getting on with fighting and resisting the Japanese whether our leaders like it or not. (And quite a few of our milquetoast leaders don’t like it. Our heroic leader Chiang Kai-shek himself had to be bullied into entering the war – even after the Japanese invasion.)

  So somehow or other it would appear I’ve manoeuvred myself into a position where I’ve got to speak out, intervene, protest even, at the arrest of my friend and comrade Tian Boqi.

  Who do I know who I can approach who is influential and powerful enough to help me in my intervention? In fact, virtually no one. One person, in effect – General Feng Yuxiang. And not only is he not here, but hundreds of miles upstream in Chungking – organizing its new heavy industries and factories and cooperatives – but in addition, since the victory at Taierzhuang, he and his fellow generals Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren have been demoted and despatched to unimportant posts far from the fighting.

  It is something I will have to do by myself.

  Being a writer, I decide to write a letter.

  8

  Red is, of course, the colour of luck. It’s also the colour of blood. But if you display enough red on your clothing and in your home, then with any luck your luck will extend to you not having to shed any of your own actual blood. Your life will be prosperous and long and totally unbloody. Even if you lived in Wuhan in the late August of 1938.

  Everyone was wearing red. If they were Chinese all their clothing, visible and invisible, was totally red. If they were English they were more surreptitious and wore only red undergarments. But they all wore at least some red. And they were all in a state of near frenzy.

  The cause of this impaction of thousands of beetroot and scarlet-clad Westerners and Chinese in a state of near hysteria was the occasion of the last ever horse race to be held at Wuhan’s rather grand Union Jack Racing Club. Wuhan had traditionally possessed two racetracks – one for the Chinese, the Big Win Happy Day Race Track, and the more sedate Union Jack Club for the English and Europeans. But the exigencies of war had caused the shutting down of the Chinese club several months previously and was now bringing about the closure of the English one. The English committee had sagely discerned that unlike the English and Chinese – who were both passionate about horses and betting – the Japanese held little interest in either. So this was the final meet. And in a noble gesture of solidarity – and a regard for the gate receipts – the English stewards had invited the Chinese for the first (and last) time ever to attend their meet. The race for the Wuhan Oaks Cup was always the climax to every season’s racing.

  The sun beat down. Low-flying aircraft stooged overhead on final approach to Wuhan’s brand-new airport. The stands were packed. Almost everyone was drunk. The betting was insane.

  The horses were, at best, nags. Fodder and grain being in such short supply and thus very expensive, many were indeed on their last legs. And their pragmatic owners, keen to get the last drop of profit out of their ailing nags, had arranged for butchers to attend the race so that as soon as it was over and money had been exchanged the horses could be slaughtered and cut up and their flesh sold to meat-starved citizens on the Bund.

  ‘How very French,’ observed a well-dressed lady.

  Unsurprisingly a fair number of journalists were present. British and Chinese of course, but also an enthusiastic sprinkling of Australians and Yanks and the odd Frenchman and Indian.

  Jack Belden was already seven sheets to the wind but perfectly lucid. He was observing the preliminaries through a large pair of binoculars borrowed from a naval captain.

  ‘Jeez,’ he said, ‘most of these runners aren’t going to make it to the starting line, let alone the finishing line.’

  ‘Let me have a look, Jack. Let me have a look.’

  The small Izzy Epstein was unsuccessfully wrestling the enormous Jack for his binoculars.

  ‘Who’re you backing?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Everyday Lettuce,’ said Izzy.

  Chinese racehorses have unusual names.

  ‘Who are you on?’

  ‘Print Bank Notes,’ replied Jack. ‘I know the trainer. And I got a side bet on Pineapple Bun With Butter.’

  ‘Gimme a look, Jack, gimme a look.’

  ‘Go on, call me an anti-Semite.’

  ‘Anti-Semitic bastard.’

  ‘You got money on that too?’

  This being a horse race it meant for betting purposes, with eager punters all over the Far East hanging on the result of the race, that a telegraph had been installed so that the good or bad news could be instantly flashed around the world. But equally, being a telegraph, it also meant that news could as easily be signalled inwards. George Wang of Reuters was in control of it.

  There were thirteen starters for the Wuhan Oaks Cup. The last Wuhan Oaks Cup ever. The last horse race ever. The jockeys were all imported from Mongoli
a. Their resplendent tops were woven from Shantung silk. The firm favourite in the race was Exotic Panda, the horse with the number ‘8’ on its saddle cloth. But then all Number 8s are always firm favourites in China. Eight is the luckiest number in China.

  The Sikh military band struck up a somewhat ragged version of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, a pistol exploded, and the horses, no spring chickens, leapt into a trot, then a canter, and finally – at least for some of them – the ghost of a gallop. All except unlucky Number 8, who promptly expired on the starting line to a universal Chinese groan. Immediate fighting broke out between bookies and punters, punters arguing, with some justice, that since it had never crossed the line it had in fact scratched.

  The race continued oblivious.

  ‘Come on Happy Dragon Go Go!’ cried Vernon Bartlett.

  He was sporting a splendid white lily in his buttonhole and drawing on an expensive-looking cigar. Bookies were doing a roaring trade.

  ‘Get moving, you lazy bitch,’ screamed Ralph Shaw at his punt Wine, Women, Poems and Perfume, who was still teetering on the starting line. Ralph was accompanied by his White Russian floozy Big Wanda.

  As the horses began to lumber off round the circuit all their hooves started to stir up the dust. A whole lot of it. Pretty soon horses and riders were engulfed in clouds of the stuff, every so often emerging into the open and then disappearing inside again.

  Through his binoculars Jack Belden caught sight of his side bet Pineapple Bun With Butter in a very favourable position before it again vanished into the cloud

  ‘Come on,’ roared Jack, ‘come on you beauty.’

  Izzy’s Everyday Lettuce was visibly wilting. He was dancing in frustration.

  It was in the midst of this insanity that the telegraph started to chatter. George Wang bent down to read it.

  ‘Hey, guys, there’s something about Czechoslovakia on the wires. President Beneš.’