Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  “They’ve removed the floor planks,” said Chiao in a tense voice as he surveyed the bridge through binoculars. “That means we’ve got to fight our way across the gorge on the bare chains!”

  4

  Liang stared apprehensively into the reddish brown waters of the Tatu. Fingers of white spume flung high by jagged reefs groped toward the chain bridge as though trying to rip it from its pillars, and the river’s roar drowned even the whine of mortar shells being fired from concealed Kuomintang batteries sited on the eastern bank.

  “Never look down, comrades, once you get on the chains,” shouted Chiao. “Keep your eyes on the opposite bank that’s the most important thing to remember.”

  Lying spread-eagled behind a low stone parapet on the hillside overlooking the western end of the bridge, Chiao and twenty-two volunteers had a bird’s-eye view of their objective and the walled town of Luting nestling against the yellow mountainside beyond it. Thirteen chains in all swayed in the windy void above the river, each link as thick as a man’s arm; embedded in the rock and stonework of the fortified towers at either end, nine of the chains formed the floor of the bridge while two identical chains at either side provided hand supports. A distance of about a hundred and twenty yards separated the two towers and from where they lay, the volunteers could see that the planks that normally served as footboards had been torn up across more than two thirds of its width. Only a few boards remained in place at the far side, approaching the tower which was one of the town’s main gates.

  “Machine guns have been set up in the bridge house at the eastern end,” shouted Chiao, inspecting the ornate towers through his binoculars: the upswept eaves of the vermilion-tiled roof, the red- lacquered wooden pillars, and the enamel frieze decorations provided an incongruous imperial setting for the ugly muzzles of the Kuomintang weapons he could see poking out through sandbagged embrasures. “Your first task, comrades, will be to silence those machine guns. Nobody else will be able to cross until that job is done.”

  Liang waited until the dust thrown up by an exploding mortar shell settled in front of the parapet, then raised his head to look over it. Never in his life had he seen such a structure — swaying and clanking in the rising wind, the black iron chains were suspended in a shallow curve between the towers, a precarious passage over the river even in normal times. Through slits in the ocher walls of the stone tower, Liang imagined he could see the heads of Kuomintang gunners moving as they oiled, loaded, and sighted along the chains in readiness to repel the Red Army assault. Suddenly the hundred- and-twenty-yard stretch the shock force would have to cover crawling on the chains seemed more like twenty Ii!

  Liang’s body, like those of his twenty-one comrades, bristled with weapons: twelve stick grenades hung at his waist, a gleaming, long- handled broadsword was thrust through his belt; and a captured Thompson submachine gun with a circular magazine was strapped tight to his shoulder. Some of the men carried a Mauser machine pistol and others had long knives thrust into their puttees for close fighting. Half an hour earlier in a forest hollow, Liang and the other members of the group had ravenously consumed a catty of fat pork and a basin of boiled rice and cabbage. After choosing them from among two hundred volunteers, Chiao had told the little force that he believed men fought better on a full stomach; soon afterward the well-stocked larders of a landlord’s house in the foothills had been gleefully broken open on his orders by the men who had run hungrily through the night to Luting. While Chiao and a group of battalion and company officers reconnoitered and planned the assault, Liang and the other shock troops had snatched a few hours’ sleep, stretched out like dead men on the ground in the same wooded hollow where they had eaten. It was afternoon before they were roused, and by then a strong wind was gusting through the gorge.

  “We estimate the enemy has two regiments inside the town,” shouted Chiao, pointing across the river toward the sprawl of houses built within the protection of the twenty-foot wall. “We’ve sent a battalion down our side of the river to prevent enemy reinforcements moving on the eastern bank. The path we can see along the river is the only one they could use. Our First Division, which crossed at Anshunchang, is marching up that bank too, but they’ve been delayed by heavy fighting . .

  Glancing around over his shoulder, Liang saw squads of engineers dragging logs down the hillside from the forest. The few deserted stone cottages clustered around the western end of the bridge had already been ransacked for doors and floorboards and the logs were being added to the stacks of timber piled up behind them. In the shadow of these buildings two other platoons of volunteers were standing by, ready to advance behind the first assault group and lay down planks and timbers that would make the crossing easier for the rest of the army. Along the length of a ridge higher up the hillside, half a dozen heavy machine-gun companies and several hundred riflemen, handpicked for their sharpshooting skills, had already been deployed to provide covering fire when the attack began. Liang had watched them creeping out of the forest earlier to take up their positions, hidden from the enemy by the contours of the hillside; they remained invisible now, waiting for the order to fire, and Liang also knew that all the other units which had dashed north from Anshunchang were bivouacked out of sight behind the crag above them. He imagined the thousands of tense Red Army men waiting there, watching and listening to discover whether the way beyond Luting was to be opened to them or whether they had run into their final trap on the Tatu, as Prince Shih Ta-kai had done. The thought filled him with renewed determination and he checked all his weapons carefully one last time.

  “Comrades, the lives of thirty thousand Red Army men depend on you! The future of our revolution could be decided here on these chains!” Chiao looked toward the stone cottage behind which all the company buglers of the Fourth Regiment were gathered together, watching him. When he raised his arm the buglers, many of them Little Red Devils, lifted their instruments obediently to their lips.

  “The moment you hear the bugles, remember you’re the finest soldiers in the Red Army. Where the warriors of history have failed, the Chinese workers and peasants of the twentieth century will show the way to victory!”

  Chiao snapped his arm downward and a liquid shaft of sound split the skies above the gorge as a dozen bugles blasted out “Charge!” in unison. A wall of noise erupted from the top of the ridge, the heavy machine guns and rifles opening up simultaneously at the far bank, and Liang and the rest of the assault force rose up as one man, yelling at the top of their voices, to sprint frantically downhill toward the bridge. Chiao ran with them, brandishing a pistol above his head and shouting encouragement to each man by name as he went. Liang, running behind him, felt nothing until he flung himself full-length onto the heaving chains of the bridge. Fear and elation, rising like fire through his body, had fused inside his head with the thrilling blasts of the massed bugles: loping easily behind Chiao, he had barely noticed the weight of weaponry he carried and seemed almost to fly over the ground. Only when Chiao ducked aside by the western tower to continue directing the operation did he hear the roar of the Kuomintang heavy machine guns.

  A dozen of his comrades were moving ahead of him, hauling themselves forward on their bellies at great speed with both hands. Under the impact of the men’s weight the nine chains were beginning to writhe and shake like living serpents — waves rippled toward Liang through the jangling iron links, which lifted him violently, dropped him again, threatened to roll him sideways into the void. The whole bridge was swaying in the wind and the chains beneath him parted whenever he moved carelessly, revealing sickening glimpses of the surging waves far below. Remembering Chiao’s prime exhortation not to look down, he raised his head to stare toward the far bank and saw showers of sparks fly from the iron in front of his face as machine-gun bullets from the far tower gate ricocheted past him.

  The man immediately in front of Liang was the first to fall. Hit in the chest, he slipped between the chains to hang head downward for a second or two with his
foot twisted in the links: then the movement of the bridge shook him free and he plunged like a stone to disappear among the wave-lashed reefs. Gripping more tightly with his knees and arms, Liang tried to keep several chains bunched beneath him and inched forward, hugging them to his body. To avoid the deadly frontal fire of the machine guns in the tower, half a dozen of the volunteers lowered themselves deliberately through the chains and swung along on rapidly pumping arms, dangling vertically beneath the bridge. But the strong wind whirled two of them away into the raging torrent like winged sycamore seeds, and a machine gun dugout at the foot of the cliff cut the others down from below before they reached the middle of the river.

  With bugles still blowing at their backs, Liang and the surviving volunteers scrambled onward, struggling in the chains like flies in an iron-mesh spider’s web. Several Kuomintang aircraft appeared, winging down the gorge one behind the other, their engines only intermittently audible above the roar of battle. Making a belated attempt to destroy the bridge, they swooped low to attack and Liang watched a cluster of finned bombs arc gently through the air toward him as the aircraft rose above the chains at the last minute. Some of the bombs flew over his head, others passed beneath him, all emitting an eerie whistling sound. But the bridge of chains was a difficult target, and new, explosive pillars of spray erupted from the river below when the bombs burst harmlessly among the reefs.

  Watching from the shelter of the tower on the western bank, Chiao stood rooted to the spot; the second assault group, armed with planks and logs, had moved up behind the tower and was waiting anxiously for his order to move onto the chains. Regimental and battalion commanders who were ready to bring their reinforcements down from the forest watched and waited beside him too in an agony of suspense. Each time one of the volunteers fell or was shot from the bridge Chiao winced and added to the mental tally he was keeping inside his head. His gaze was fixed hopefully on five or six of the leading figures, who had struggled to their knees and were hauling themselves along the hand chains on one side, firing their big Mauser machine pistols at the tower with their free hand. Nearing the middle of the bridge, they were attracting the concentrated fire of the Kuomintang machine gunners in the tower and one by one they collapsed to lie entangled in the chains like lifeless rag dolls.

  “Fourteen! . . . fifteen! . . . sixteen!”

  Chiao in his anxiety began counting aloud without realizing it, gluing his binoculars to his eyes to watch the half-dozen survivors of the squad, who were still slithering forward in the belly of the bridge. Only twenty yards or so separated them from the nearest foot planks but they were having to crawl over the bodies of the fallen volunteers; seeing Liang pause beside one motionless figure, Chao cupped his hands to his mouth.

  “Keep going, Liang! Others will help the wounded. Go for the planks and charge!”

  Over a field telephone Chiao issued fresh orders to the heavy machine-gun companies and another sustained roar rose from the hillside behind him. He signaled to the regimental buglers too and immediately a renewed clarion call echoed across the ravine. Shards of tile, timber, and stone flew from the far tower under the new Red Army machine-gun onslaught, but the redoubt survived and the Kuomintang gunners continued to pour fire toward the dwindling shock force. Through his glasses Chiao saw Kuomintang soldiers run suddenly from the base of the tower carrying heavy cans. They sent liquid cascading along the planks toward the center of the bridge and one dropped a lighted rag before they sped back into the protection of the tower. The orange wall of kerosene flame that raced along the planking in the direction of the shock force moved faster than a man could run and Liang started up on his knees among the chains, staring fearfully at the flames moving toward him.

  “Charge now! The fate of the Red Army is at stake!” shouted Chiao desperately through his hands again, and the other officers and men around him took up the chant. “Charge now, comrades! Charge!”

  Clouds of thick black smoke swirled in the gusting wind, obscuring the bridge, and in its midst Liang rose unsteadily to his feet. To his dismay his tommy gun had slipped from his shoulder and he watched helplessly as it spiraled down into the river. Then the heat from the wall of fire rushing at him struck his face like a blow and the crackle of the flames mingled in his ears with the shouts of exhortation coming from behind him. Looking around, he found four other young faces at his shoulder staring in terror at the burning planks; the sight of their fear increased his own, but on hearing Chiao’s yelled commands, he drew his broadsword and flourished it above his head.

  “Forward, comrades!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Forward to victory!”

  Stumbling off-balance along the last few feet of slippery chains, Liang launched himself into the fire and felt his feet touch solid wood. His cap caught fire at once but the wind plucked it from his head and tossed it, flaming, into the river. As he dashed deeper into the fire he suddenly heard his own voice repeating long-forgotten foreign words. “O Lord God, in my hour of need, please forgive and protect me! . . . O Lord God, in my hour of need, please forgive and protect me!” Swerving through the smoke and flames and step pin where he could on unburned boards, the former cook boy realize he was unconsciously repeating a short prayer Pastor Ke had taught him after his baptism.

  Behind him he heard the frenzied drum of other feet, then abruptly out of the smoke reared the ancient yellow stone tower. A machinegun barrel was spurting flame from an embrasure just above his head, and dodging beneath it, Liang smashed at it with his sword, knocking it askew; snatching one of his stick grenades from his belt, he tossed it through the sandbagged viewing slit above the weapon.

  As the grenade exploded, Liang flung himself to the ground and rolled frantically back and forth on the stone terrace of the tower, trying to put out his burning cotton uniform. Through a mist of searing pain he saw the remaining survivors dash out of the flames with their own clothes smoldering, firing their tommy guns and hurling grenades at other enemy machine-gun emplacements around the base of the tower. Dimly he noticed that the khaki-uniformed defenders were fleeing in panic, and soon the Red Army men had swung the muzzles of the weapons around and were firing on other Nationalist strongpoints along the shore.

  Looking back across the swaying bridge, Liang saw men of the two support platoons rushing forward, fixing logs and planks across the bare chains. Engineers came on, beating out the flames, and from beyond them Liang heard a storm of cheering rise from around the eastern tower. Cries of “Long live the Red Army!” and “Long live the revolution!” rang out from hundreds of throats as reinforcement units began flooding across the bridge.

  The pain of the burns on his face and limbs grew more intense and Liang began to lose consciousness as he lay on the ground at the foot of the tower. The sounds of battle spreading through the walled town behind him grew fainter in his ears, and when stretcher bearers arrived fifteen minutes later his eyes were closed. As they bent to lift him he murmured “O Lord God, in my hour of need, please forgive and protect me,” but the English words meant nothing to the Red Army medical orderlies, and they paid no heed as they ran with him as fast as they could to a makeshift casualty station.

  5

  Beyond Luring the June sun blazed down on rich, fertile Szechuanese valleys dotted with pear, apple, and cherry orchards. Shady green forests swallowed them up, then gave way to field after field of tomatoes, potatoes, and pumpkins. Cloudless blue skies framed the stark beauty of the snow-covered Ta Hsueh Shan mountain peaks that every hour grew larger on the northern horizon. Finding themselves elated by these great vistas and their resounding victory at Luting, the Communist soldiers marching around the dejected figure of Jakob joked boisterously among themselves and sang one of their favorite songs over and over again.

  “Red Army sharpshooters are we,

  With each bullet we fell another enemy!”

  The battle in the walled town of Luting had lasted only two hours. The two defending Kuomintang regiments, astonished and dishear
tened by the speed and daring of the lightning strike across the bare chains, had quickly broken and fled. The First Division, which had crossed at Anshunchang, had marched up the eastern bank in time to put other Nationalist reinforcements to flight and all the remaining men, weapons, and pack animals of the entire Central Red Army had poured jubilantly across the swaying bridge during the next two days.

  Stumbling in their midst, Jakob had given little more attention to the spectacular bridge than he had to the dramatic Yangtze gorges or the great primeval forests of Lololand through which he had been marched under close guard. Since watching Liang carry out the burial in Yunnan, his feelings of despair had deepened and he seemed to live with only half his conscious mind in the pain-wracked reality of the daily forced marches. Some part of him, rebelling against the mute hostility which surrounded him, had lingered, sorrowing, beside the earth mound which the cook boy had heaped over the dosed zipper bag in the black sorghum field.

  An uneasy sense of shame at begging for death himself beside the tiny grave also haunted his memory and at other times he re-experienced the helpless agony of that pine-clad hillside outside Paoshan where he had last glimpsed the dislocated shadow of Felicity lying among the tree stumps. Feeding on one another, these bleak images replayed themselves in his imagination, numbing his reactions to his own suffering until he marched often like a sleepwalker, unconsciously blotting out the sights and sounds around him. Even the sight of the Red Army standard and the canvas bearing the Christmas star failed to inspire him when it appeared above the marching column, and without realizing it he began to pray less often and with less conviction. Only when the Hunanese guard commander jeeringly asked if his God had deserted him because he no longer said prayers openly over each meager bowl of food did he become aware how far his faith had been undermined.