Anthony Grey
Page 20
On arrival in Chentai they found that the fearful Chinese converts had dispersed to their own homes. The sacked mission house still stood in the same chaotic state in which the Red Army soldiers had left it and Barlow had been moved to make a special effort to comfort and reassure the little group because of their evident loyalty to Jakob. He had succeeded to such an extent that most of them, including Liang’s wife, had volunteered to accompany him to Paoshan. On finding there that Felicity’s body had been courageously recovered and preserved by one of Paoshan’s two Christian families, Barlow had decided to carry out burial immediately outside the town walls rather than risk sending her coffin back to Shanghai unaccompanied. Although the Chentai and Paoshan converts feared that Communist spies might still be mingling with the town’s population, or even that the Communist troops might return again in strength, Barlow’s presence obviously gave them new confidence, and Franklin was delighted to see that his superior was drawing inspiration from them in his turn.
“These terrible happenings will not frighten us nor deflect us from the purpose for which we came to China,” continued Barlow in a firmer voice, looking again toward the Chinese crowd. “News of these events has already spread around the world. Young people in many lands are learning with awe of the deeds of these two brave missionaries who in their different ways have suffered and sacrificed themselves in fellowship with Jesus Christ. The world will also learn afresh an important lesson — that our enemies are unable to prevent the triumph of truth, even though they try to drown it in blood. Suffering saints have always been living seeds of the truth. From this spot in recent days great reserves of divine power and love have been set free. Nobody can measure the force of this new power — but in time I’m certain we shall see a glorious harvest reaped from this tragic hillside. . . . And then we shall watch it with wonder and thankfulness.”
As Barlow finished speaking he closed his eyes and seemed to sway on his feet. Black clouds racing overhead had snuffed out the sunshine, blurring the light in the glade once more, and Laurence Franklin, seeing that the director-general’s face had turned pale, moved protectively to his side, ready to support him. But Barlow, opening his eyes, smiled and motioned him aside. In a quieter tone he read the remaining formal prayers of the burial ceremony, his gaze fixed on the book in his hands. Then with his head bowed, he stood and faced the grave mound in silence, lost in his own private prayers. At last he turned slowly away and led the mourners back down the hill.
The watching crowd retreated at first before Barlow’s little group of Christians; then its ranks opened to allow them passage along a path that led down to the east gate. As they approached the town wall, a ragged coolie wearing a blue Kwangsi turban around his head ran toward them, balancing a carrying pole on his left shoulder. In front of Barlow, the coolie stopped and lowered his baskets to the ground.
“Are you Director-General Matthew Barlow of the Anglo-Chinese Mission?”
A frown creased Barlow’s face: the directness of the question, asked without any sign of a coolie’s customary servility, surprised him. “Yes, I’m Matthew Barlow,” he replied, studying the Chinese carefully.
“I have been to the mission house at Chentai — but they told me I would find you here. I have a communication from an assistant magistrate of the Central Soviet Government who is marching with the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army!”
The coolie unfastened one of the panniers, drew out a manila envelope, and handed it to Barlow. When he opened the envelope, the mission director found inside a single sheet of paper bearing a badly scrawled message in English. Taking his spectacles from a pocket of his long-gown, Barlow read the message through — then drew in his breath sharply.
“It’s from Jakob,” he said, turning to Franklin. “They’re torturing him and he says they’re going to continue it every day until we pay the ransom!”
Barlow handed the letter to the younger missionary, who ran his eye quickly over the uneven scrawl. “They’re demanding medicines, radios, and anti-aircraft guns as part of the ransom,” said Franklin incredulously.
Barlow nodded grimly and turned back to the coolie, who was standing by his baskets, watching them. He was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, Barlow guessed, and he had the intelligent face of a student rather than the rough features of a peasant coolie.
“Can you guide us back to the magistrate who sent you?” asked Barlow.
The youth nodded.
“What are you going to do?” asked Franklin in a low voice.
Barlow’s features composed themselves into a more resolute expression than Franklin had seen for some years. “We’ve got no choice,” he said slowly. “We’ve got to go and parley with the Red Army ourselves.”
17
Running through a misty forest of thick-trunked trees, Liang could scarcely hear his own footfalls in the deep carpet of rotting leaf mold. The trees, which cloaked a long mountain ridge, grew so close together that sunlight rarely penetrated to the rank-smelling earth, and the half-light beneath their branches had a ghostly quality. Occasionally the sudden crash of a frightened animal fleeing from his path startled the cook boy and he caught a brief glimpse of a wild ox or a mountain boar dashing away into the gloom. Now and again Liang shouted loudly over his shoulder to encourage his two flagging, foot- sore sons; whenever he did so, his voice bounced and echoed back and forth so eerily among the great trunks of the ancient trees that they immediately spurted to catch up.
Far ahead of them the low grumble of artillery fire was faintly audible. Sometimes Liang stopped to cock his head and listen, trying to gauge their distance from the fighting, but the density of the trees always muffled the sound. However, he was in no doubt now that he was moving in the right direction: numerous paths tramped over only recently by many thousands of men, mules, and horses snaked through the previously virgin forest. In the clearings he could see traces of fires and the whiteness of the ashes gave him fresh heart. After pressing westward toward the Kwangsi border for two weeks, at long last he was really catching up with the marching columns of Communist soldiers!
The rumble of gunfire had begun in the distance early that morning and on hearing it for the first time, Liang had halted uneasily in his tracks. Then after a moment’s thought he realized that he had no choice but to continue. If he was to carry out the wishes of Pastor Ke and return his infant daughter to him, the surest way to find the Red Army was to head toward the sound of fighting. Still clutching his carrying pole, he had run on faster than before, taking his bearings at every turn in the track from the sounds of firing.
Nestled into the bed of clean straw, which Liang renewed each morning in the rear pannier, his tiny human passenger remained obliviously asleep as he padded on silently through the mist-shrouded forest. On the remote tracks he always removed the false lid of the basket to leave it open to the fresh air, and to his immense relief as he jogged rapidly onward each day, the infant had fallen into the habit of sleeping most of the time, lulled seemingly by the rhythmic swaying and jigging of its makeshift cradle at the end of the bamboo yoke. Before passing through villages Liang disguised his burden with the false tray of unhusked rice that fitted into the basket top. Whimpers of distress from the baby had begun to greet this action after the first day or two, so to alleviate the darkness inside the basket Liang had cut slits in its sides beneath the tray. This allowed some light to filter in and gave the infant a limited view of her passing surroundings without betraying her presence to casual passersby.
Whenever the child awoke on the march, Little Liang and his brother were at hand to entertain her. Trotting close behind, they waved leaves and grasses plucked from the wayside, imitated bird- calls, pulled faces, cavorted, skipped and danced around the moving basket, competing to bring a smile to the baby’s face, At night, wherever they bedded down, after Liang had washed and fed her, the two boys took it upon themselves to amuse and occupy her until she slept. So far Liang had managed to keep the child’s pr
esence in his pannier a complete secret, and although the hundred thousand marchers moving ahead of him were depleting the region’s already meager food supplies like a great swarm of human locusts, he had nearly always been able to buy enough rice and vegetables from wayside peasant farms to feed himself arid his sons. He had also eked out the soybean milk sufficiently to continue nourishing the baby.
“Look, Papa! Is that where-the Red Bandits are fighting?”
The trail emerged abruptly from the trees beside a big spur of rock where the ground fell away precipitously, and at once the boom of the distant guns became louder in their ears. In front of them, stretching into the far distance, lay an unending chain of lower hills, crisscrossed with flag stoned trails, and following the direction of Big Liang’s excitedly pointing finger, the cook boy saw gray-white puffs of smoke blossoming in clusters all along a dark ridge near the horizon. In the haze it was impossible to make out any detail but it was clear that a continuous artillery barrage was being laid down ten miles or so ahead.
“It looks like a big battle, doesn’t it?” said Little Liang eagerly, shading his eyes with his hand.
“Come on!” demanded Liang. “Don’t waste time. We must keep on until we find Pastor Ke.”
He led his sons impatiently onto the steep path flanking the rocky spur and immediately found himself confronted by a hideously disfigured Kuomintang soldier hanging head downward above the trail. The soldier was already dead and his bloodied face, which had been partly shot away, was contorted in a soundless scream. One of the soldier’s feet was trapped in a tangle of creepers growing across the face of a rock which overhung the track, and this accident had suspended him upside down with his arms hanging loose, as though he had been frozen in the moment of diving headlong down the mountain. Recoiling in horror, Liang looked around and saw the khaki- uniformed bodies of several other dead Kuomintang soldiers, some of them headless, tumbled in limp heaps where they had fallen on either side of the track.
“Keep moving!”
Turning back, Liang tried to use his own body to shield the hanging corpse from his sons’ sight as he ushered them past. With only part of his mind he noticed that the white baby was lying silently awake in the uncovered rear pannier: her eyes were wide open and she was gazing up without curiosity at the dead soldier suspended above her. Twenty yards farther on, two or three more muddied corpses lay crumpled in death beside the track. The color of their uniforms was difficult to distinguish beneath the grime of many hundreds of miles’ marching, and only the red stars on their caps marked them as Red Army troops.
Liang urged his sons onward with sharp, repeated cries, scarcely glancing at the bodies. During the long, wearying journey from Paoshan he had become accustomed to finding mutilated corpses lying beside the paved trails. Whether they were civilian prisoners, town militia, provincial troops, government soldiers, or Communists, it was often hard to tell — victims of skirmishes, bombing raids, executions, had all begun to seem the same to Liang. Most of the dead were so splashed and coated with mud and slime that from a distance they looked like life-size clay figurines that had been dumped haphazardly in the open fields or on the twisting mountain paths. All shared a chilling common identity, a cold, rigid stillness, and such gruesome sights never failed to spur the tiring cook boy forward with renewed vigor.
As usual, no weapons had been left lying around the dead troops. Ammunition pouches and cartridge bandoliers had also been wrenched from the lifeless bodies of both sides, almost certainly by the desperate Red Army men, and without looking, Liang knew that each man’s ration bag would already have been emptied or removed. On one or two occasions when his sons had been weeping with hunger, he had steeled himself to search among fallen troops, but he had soon found that the marchers, despite their extreme haste, always scavenged every scrap of food and ammunition from dead comrades and enemies alike before moving on after an engagement.
Liang had tried to encourage his sons into the habit of ignoring any bodies they might encounter and to keep moving briskly, but to little avail. Both boys still became apprehensive at the sight of death and shied away from passing close to a corpse. He had to push them physically step by step down the steep, twisting track because they were fearful of what they might find around each turn; only when the ground began to level out did they fall into a rhythmic trot again.
At the foot of the ridge Liang saw that the rough-paved tracks through the foothills were coming alive with jogging files of straw- hatted peasants, all of them hurrying eastward away from the noise of battle. The cook boy stopped at once and covered the baby’s basket with the tray of unhusked rice, warning the two boys, as always, to follow him closely at a fast pace. If necessary, he told them, they were to make enough noise to cover up the sound of the baby’s crying. Many of the scurrying peasants were pushing handcarts or humping blackened cooking pots and other household belongings on their carrying poles. Their faces were taut with anxiety and as they ran they turned frequently to cast fearful glances over their shoulders.
Descending through the foothills, Liang and his Sons passed many terraced fields in which the rice plants had long been cut. From the sparseness of the stubble Liang could tell the harvest had been poor. The sudden arrival of the voracious Red Army and its enemies in their midst must have alarmed the hungry people of the region greatly and the sudden boom of the guns early that morning had obviously triggered the panicky stampede eastward. Although they were the only travelers heading toward the roar of the artillery bombardment, few of the growing tide of people flowing in the opposite direction spared Liang and the two boys a second glance. The unseen baby girl in his rear pannier made no audible sound and Liang began to breathe more easily when he realized that the frightened peasant families jog-trotting all around them would have been far too distracted to notice, even if she had begun to wail.
As he ran on, Liang constantly scanned the trail in front of him, and whenever he saw what he thought might be a uniformed soldier he turned aside into the terraced rice fields or made a wide detour. In little more than an hour he covered five miles and was cantering through a deserted village of mud-walled houses, followed at a distance by his sons, when without warning, three armed Kuomintang infantrymen with bayonets fixed to their rifles stumbled out of a house a few yards in front of him. They were dragging a gray-haired peasant woman between them, tussling furiously with her over a small sack of rice which she was refusing to give up. The woman, tottering on bound feet, was shrieking defiance at the top of her voice while continuing to cling grimly to her rice sack.
The soldiers cursed the old woman loudly and kicked and struck her repeatedly with the stocks of their rifles, but Liang saw at once that they were clumsy in their movements and speech and he guessed they must be opium smokers who had deserted their units. Suddenly the sack at which they were all tugging split and its contents cascaded into the mud of the village street. The old woman unloosed a hysterical stream of abuse at the troops as they flung her roughly to the ground beside her puddle of spilled rice - then they forgot her the moment they looked up to find Liang with his two panniers turning to head back the way he had come.
“Stop — or we fire!” yelled one of the soldiers.
Liang increased his pace, bending low under the weight of his pole, straining to put distance between himself and the troops. But a ragged volley of shots kicked up spurts of mud around his feet, and fearing that his sons, who were just entering the village, might be hit, Liang slowed reluctantly and waited for the Kuomintang soldiers to approach.
“What have you got in the baskets?”
The first soldier’s eyes were blurred and bloodshot and when he came close, pushing the tip of his bayonet against Liang’s chest, the cook boy could smell the stale, sickly odor of the opium on his clothes.
“Just rice, as you see,” said Liang, gesturing hesitantly to the rear pannier. “And some personal belongings in the other basket.”
“Hand over the rice!”
“No! Please don’t touch my rice!”
The other two soldiers pressed forward, pointing their rifles at Liang and eyeing the basket. They too reeked of opium.
“What’s so special about unhusked rice?” muttered the stockiest of the three thickly.
He raised his rifle and thrust the bayonet tip into the shallow tray that formed the false top of the rear basket. A mystified expression immediately spread across his face. When he lifted the rifle tip, the tray of unhusked rice came away impaled on the bayonet. Craning forward, the three soldiers peered into the basket and saw the white baby. A streak of blood lay across one cheek where the point of the bayonet had nicked her and in that instant the child began shrieking with fright.
“Why are you hiding a foreign baby?” The first Kuomintang soldier rounded furiously on Liang, jabbing his bayonet repeatedly against the cook boy’s chest. “Are you a foreign spy?”
Liang stared back, white-faced, at the soldier, saying nothing. He looked desperately around at his sons, who stood a few yards away:
their faces too were pale with fright.
“Answer me!” The soldier jabbed his bayonet harder against Liang’s chest but still the cook boy stared dumbly back at him.
“There’s only one way to deal with this,” muttered the second soldier; moving close to the basket, he lifted his rifle butt toward the sky, pointing the bayonet tip downward at the wailing baby’s chest.
“No! No!” screamed Little Liang, darting forward.
In the same moment Big Liang threw himself bodily at the soldier, sending him sprawling in the mud. The rifle flew from his grasp and fell at Liang’s feet. Snatching it up, Liang pointed the muzzle at the two soldiers who remained standing.