Later, after the war when they learned of the deliberate atrocity, the Japanese people were appalled at the deeds of their sons, fathers, and husbands. And other peoples still cared. The relative innocence of mankind in 1937 was demonstrated by world-wide revulsion against the Rape of Nanking. In later years, the “Nanking Incident” was to appear no more than simple barbarism—after the Germans’ methodical extermination of more than ten million Europeans, after the American nuclear holocausts consumed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in 1937 the horrors of Nanking shocked the world and hardened the Chinese will to fight. Peace was no longer possible on any terms.
Although the Generalissimo shifted his capital to Chungking, he himself remained in Wuhan, the strategic and industrial plexus of Central China, to direct the continuing resistance. Chiang Kai-shek encouraged the Chinese people to migrate en masse to the security of the Szechwan Basin in the far southwest behind jagged mountain ranges pierced only by precipitous passes and the gorges of the Yangtze. Tens of millions responded. Entire schools, universities, factories, and even towns trekked thousands of miles into the interior by foot, bicycle, ox cart, ramshackle bus or truck, and man-hauled junk. Half China was on the move, and all China would fight.
Determined to occupy all Eastern China, the Japanese pressed on. From Nanking to the south and Peking to the north their columns converged on Hsüchow, three hundred and twenty miles northwest of Shanghai, and the Chinese held heroically as they had held at Shanghai. In early April 1938 Nationalist troops routed 30,000 Japanese near Hsüchow, and all China rejoiced. The victory was far greater than Lin Piao’s triumph at Pinghsing Pass, but it was a fleeting victory. In mid-May the Chinese evacuated Hsüchow. The Generalissimo had chosen to preserve his strength rather than sacrifice tens of thousands of his best troops in a hopeless fight. Finally in early June 1938 the dikes restraining the rising Yellow River were breached.
Harry Sekloong was drawn irresistibly to the deluge. Secure in an army motorboat, he felt himself a despicable voyeur as the swirling waters, heavy with yellow silt, surged over the millet sprouts. The soldiers of his crew pulled thirty-eight men and women into the small boat. Many peasants had refused to believe the authorities’ hasty warning, and many more had received no warning. Drowned pigs and dogs were swept under the boat’s blunt bows, and eight bullocks thrashed past, their pleading eyes rolling in round, red-rimmed sockets. The bullocks’ pitiful lowing receded, then ceased when a new surge of flood-waters overwhelmed them. Thatched roofs smashed against the boat’s planks, and the craft rocked violently, almost overturning. Wooden houses drifted past with families clinging to their sides. A screaming youth desperately struck out for the boat, and the coxswain altered course to avoid him. One more body would swamp the craft. Not only more intelligent but tougher than their animals, the farmers were the last to perish. When the boat finally turned toward the distant land, its diesel engine sputtering black smoke, some twenty corpses were already bobbing in its wake.
Harry Sekloong suspected the bitter truth when he flew into Hong Kong in late June 1938: The mortal sacrifice was to delay the Japanese for no more than a few months. At first, the self-satisfaction of the placid Crown Colony was, therefore, violently abhorrent to him. After a few days, he sank into the cushioned comfort of Sekloong Manor, gratefully accepting the assiduous attention of the servants. When he could, he refused to think about his sons. He had learned circuitously that James was a Communist underground agent in the Japanese-occupied areas, while twenty-six-year-old Jason, a captain in the Nationalist artillery, was stationed at Wuhan, the strategic heart of Central China that was obviously the next Japanese objective. His wife Mayling had established herself in the safety of the French Concession of Shanghai, where she occupied herself with gossip and self-adornment.
Harry Sekloong attended the banquets and receptions attendant upon his father’s retirement with no more zest than an automaton. He could muster little interest in discussions of the future of the Sekloong empire at a moment when China was in mortal peril. His chief interest was in collecting funds for the war effort. But even that activity was semi-automatic, for he had lost almost all confidence in China’s ability to withstand the Japanese onslaught. At fifty-eight, Harry had spent more than half his life in the arduous service of the Chinese revolution. He had wheedled and schemed and killed, hoping always that the next year would see the fruition of his dreams. Instead he had witnessed internal strife and mass suffering greater than any inflicted by the Manchus. He was reluctantly becoming convinced that the revolution would never be completed. Having lost his own resilience, Harry felt that China had lost hers.
He saw little point in disputing Mary’s unfounded optimism and none in imposing his forebodings on Sir Jonathan. Totally confident, his father had unhesitatingly contributed an additional £1 million to the Nationalist war chest. The Old Gentleman’s inability to despair had sustained his progress from a twelve-year-old runner for a Macao coolie barracoon to the absolute ruler of a vast commercial empire. The disillusioned Harry attributed his own exhaustion to the nation, while his indomitable father could no more conceive of China’s falling to her enemies than he himself could give in to fate.
But the Old Gentleman was still capable of scorn and anger. Sir Jonathan raged contemptuously when in August 1938 Reuter reported that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had “attained peace with honor” by agreeing to the Nazis’ occupation of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland. Still reposing great faith in Britain, he had believed that Chamberlain would either face Adolf Hitler down or go to war. Either action would have helped China—the one by cutting Japan’s European ally down to size, the other by bringing on a general war in which Britain and France were compelled to ally themselves with China. Despite that disappointment, Sir Jonathan’s confidence in England was still strong when, on September 18, 1938, he embarked on Charles’s yacht, Regina Pacis, for a long cruise through the Pacific Islands to celebrate his reluctant retirement from Derwent, Hayes and Company.
“It’s my last chance, boys!” He addressed his middle-aged sons as if they were still youths. “Within a year, at most two, all Asia will be in flames. A total war is coming, a world-wide war. It will make the Great War seem like a skirmish between two bands of brigands, but it will save China.”
“The old man’s getting senile,” Harry told Charles and Mary while, with Jonnie and his wife Sarah, they watched the Regina Pacis spread her white sails after chugging away from Blake Pier. “The British, the Americans, the Germans—they’re all helping the Japs one way or another. Fat chance of their coming to China’s assistance.”
“I’ve known the old man to be wrong,” Charles replied. “But never that far wrong. Just wait and see.”
“Of course there’ll be war, Uncle Harry.” Jonnie, just commissioned a lieutenant in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Force, offered an incisive refutation. “War in Europe, as well as Asia. The European powers and America can’t let the Japanese use China as a base to conquer the raw materials and markets of Southeast Asia. Besides, Hitler’s sure to go too far.”
“Out of the mouths of babes.” Harry mocked his thirty-six-year-old nephew’s upper-class accent and British certainty. “Didn’t they teach you logic at Stonyhurst? No nation will help China unless it’s forced to—and the Japanese are too clever to force them.”
“Were they too clever to bomb Shanghai and rape Nanking?” Sarah Haleevie Sekloong asked quietly. “Was Hitler too clever to alert the world by his persecution of the Jews? They all make mistakes. All tyrants do—and then …”
Harry’s despair was too deep to be ameliorated by either generation’s optimism. Neither his father’s instinctive confidence nor his nephew and niece’s cogent reasoning could move him. Although he was bringing back almost £5 million for the Nationalists’ war chest, his mood was somber on October 5, 1938, when he boarded a DC-2 of the China National Aircraft Corporation at Kaitak for the long hedge-hopping flight to Chungking, eight
hundred miles distant over mountain ranges and river gorges. Nor did the atmosphere of the wartime capital in the early winter of 1938–1939 allay his settled depression. The vastly overcrowded, squalid city hung from cliffs above the confluence of the Yangtze and the Chialing Rivers. The perpetual fog seeped into his bones and chilled his spirit. Mildly annoyed at his wife’s refusal to join him, he was deeply distressed by the virtual powerlessness of his leader. Wang Ching-wei, trusted by neither side, had been shelved with a ceremonial title by the new Nationalist–Communist alliance. His remaining influence was largely moral, but the Communists were winning over the intellectuals who had followed Wang Ching-wei as the legitimate political heir of Sun Yat-sen.
Besides, the news was bad. The Generalissimo was determined to hold Wuhan, since loss of that industrial center would deliver all Central and Eastern China to the Japanese. But twelve Japanese divisions were closing in. Though the Chinese fought well, they were inexorably pushed back—and Harry’s son Jason commanded a field-artillery battery athwart the approaches to Wuhan. The only consolation for patriots was the slow pace of the Japanese advance, despite their overwhelming air superiority. The Nationalists finally possessed the nucleus of the air force Harry had envisioned decades earlier, but their few planes were too old and their few pilots too ill-trained to oppose fleets of Japanese bombers.
Harry Sekloong was cast into the furthest depths of despair, the nadir of his life, on December 3, 1938. A formal note from the National Defense Mobilization Board coldly expressed official regrets at the “death in action of Captain Shih Chieh-hsiang.” Harry wept in his bedroom, wept as he had not wept since fleeing from the rape of Nanking. Undemanding Jason had never possessed the spirit of James, the son his father could never claim. But his younger son had been amiable, loving, and obedient—perhaps too obedient. He had amiably agreed that he would, as his father desired, serve the revolution by becoming a professional soldier. Jason’s own inclination, Harry suspected, was toward literary scholarship, but he had never questioned his father’s wishes. Harry’s grief was intensified by merciless self-reproach. He had, he realized, contrived his son Jason’s death.
Harry Sekloong could speak of his sorrows only with Wang Ching-wei. But his leader was unable to offer him consolation. Instead, Wang reluctantly dealt Harry another paralyzing blow. Jason, he had learned, had not been killed in action, but had been executed by the Generalissimo’s direct order. He was charged with abandoning his guns under Japanese attack, Wang said, though he had actually received orders to evacuate his position.
“Chiang Kai-shek had to save the face of his general, the man who gave the order,” Harry’s mentor explained. “Your son was the sacrificial goat—largely, I fear, because he was your son.”
Harry was stunned by the callous, self-serving brutality of the faithless Generalissimo. He instinctively grasped the enormity Wang Ching-wei hesitated to put into words. Jason’s selection for execution over many other officers was undoubtedly due to his parentage. By executing Harry Sekloong’s son, the court-martial had struck not only at his father, but at his father’s leader, Wang Ching-wei, who was the Generalissimo’s chief rival. Harry Sekloong’s own actions, his lifelong dedication to China, had truly killed his son.
“Do you want to talk now?” Wang Ching-wei asked. “He was a good boy.”
“Brooding won’t bring him back,” Harry answered with deliberate calm. “What business do we have?”
“Prince Konoye’s Six Principles of November third,” Wang said. “I’ve been thinking about them. I believe they could be a basis for peace.”
“I’m ready for anything that’ll bring peace,” Harry replied. “I’m tired … bone-weary of killing. It’s been going on forever, it seems. Why should men die for the tyrant Chiang? Chinese must stop dying for nothing!”
Harry Sekloong knew as well as Wang Ching-wei the Japanese Prime Minister’s proposals for a “New Order for East Asia” that would create an “Asia for the Asiatics.” The concept was attractive, and he himself could give greater faith to Premier Konoye, who had a personal interest in ending the fighting and the drain upon Japan’s resources, than he could to Generalissimo Chiang, who had a personal interest in prolonging the war in order to enhance his personal power. Konoye had suggested that China and Japan end their war: for the purposes of jointly seeking peace and amity throughout Asia; defending themselves against Communism; and initiating close economic cooperation. The Japanese foresaw not only stability and a renaissance of Asiatic culture, but the eventual expulsion of foreign influences from Asia.
“You remember,” Wang Ching-wei persisted, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen said in 1924 that peace in Asia must be based upon Sino-Japanese cooperation, that Japan’s new strength gave hope to all Asiatics for freedom from Western domination. I’d like to test Konoye’s new proposal, but I find little support here. Nonetheless, I’d like to test it.”
“Nothing could be worse than our present situation.” Harry shrugged. “Why not?”
The late afternoon of March 7, 1939, was cold and rainy in Japanese-occupied Nanking, the seat of the newly established Provisional Government of the Republic of China. The gray weather intensified the bleak joylessness of the man who occupied the ornate office of Prime Minister of that powerless government. Nonetheless, Harry Sekloong, having made his choice, was laboring to close the breach between Japanese and Chinese. While his chief Wang Ching-wei, President-designate of the formal regime still in the egg of time, negotiated with the Japanese and spoke to public meetings, Harry struggled with the administrative tasks of creating an effective government. He was not happy, but he was busy, and his wife Mayling, temporarily wrenched from her self-absorption by Jason’s death, had joined him in the mansion overlooking the Yangtze in Nanking’s fashionable Northwest District near the I Chiang Gate, Harry found the Japanese often overbearing and frequently intractable, but he bridled his resentment in order to preserve outward amity. His internal fire was, in any event, permanently banked.
The goal of peace for China and unity for Asia seemed to Harry a scant few inches closer to attainment—if that. Despite his skepticism, he still felt strongly that any course that offered China even a remote chance of peace was preferable to war. Though he knew his father would disapprove of his actions, he was, nonetheless, disturbed at having had no word from the family in Hong Kong since December 18, 1937, when he and Wang Ching-wei boarded an airplane in Chungking. Their announced destination was Kumming, capital of Yunnan Province in the deep southwest, but their pilot pointed the Fokker Trimotor’s nose toward Hanoi, the capital of French Indo-China, which was dominated by Tokyo. As Wang Ching-wei wished, they had set out to test Japanese intentions.
Four days later, Prime Minister Prince Konoye announced in Tokyo that Japan would destroy the “usurper” Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek and “adjust Sino-Japanese relations” in cooperation with the “legitimate, new regime” of Wang Ching-wei, the rightful heir of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Japan “demonstrated her sincerity” by renouncing all territorial claims on China and promising to return to Chinese rule all her concessions and leased territories, as well as relinquishing all extraterritorial privileges for Japanese citizens. The Nanking Provisional Government in turn supported the united front against Communism, exemplified by the Anti-Comintern Pact that linked Tokyo, Berlin, and Rome. True economic cooperation between China and Japan as “equal partners” was guaranteed by Japan’s promise not to seek monopoly rights in China. The words of the program rang splendidly.
By March, Harry saw that, as he had feared, drafting a great design was far easier than implementing it. But he persisted after the Generalissimo flatly rejected peace talks and expelled both Wang Ching-wei and himself from the Kuomintang. He had no choice but to initial agreements that recognized Japan’s puppet state of Manchukuo under the last Manchu Emperor Hsüan Tung; allowed Japan to station troops in China to oppose Communism; granted Japan broad privileges to exploit China’s raw materials; and appointed Jap
anese “advisers” to China educational institutions. The reality contradicted Prince Konoye’s promises in virtually every respect. At least, Harry felt, he could negotiate, giving much and gaining a little, rather than fighting unwinnable battles at an enormous cost in Chinese lives.
If not content, he was resigned as he signed the last of the documents his secretary had laid on his desk. For the first time, he was actually exercising power. The silence from Hong Kong demonstrated his father’s disapproval of his collaborating with the Japanese. But Harry was following the fatal advice Sir Jonathan had tendered on that bright morning in the South China Sea twenty-nine years earlier just after the hijacking of the opium-smuggling paddle-steamer Taishan. Politics was not for the finicky or the faint-hearted, as the Old Gentleman had said. Harry accepted opprobrium among the Chinese and insolence from the Japanese to strive for peace.
“Call my wife,” he told his male secretary, “and remind her we’re having General Katsuki Kiyochi to dinner tonight. I’m leaving now.”
Four policemen saluted as he left the monumental Government Building.
His black Packard limousine waited at the foot of the stone steps. An open truck carrying a half-dozen workmen in paint-stained blue clothing rattled across the forecourt. Harry noted and dismissed its noisy progress, recalling that the Provisional Government’s offices were still being renovated.
His driver opened the door, and Harry paused to look back at the building where the blue-and-white Chinese flag flew beside Japan’s red-and-white rising sun. His wry contemplation of those two symbols of flawed sovereignty was interrupted by a metallic clash. The workmen’s truck had inexplicably swerved and grazed the limousine’s fender. The truck driver threw up his hands in dismay and descended to offer his formal apologies. He was followed by the six workmen.
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