Raising his clasped hands, in the way that boxers do, and waving them to an imaginary audience, he returned to his corner, and sat there lost in thought.
General Wu tried to persuade him to reply to Flanders’s charge of uttering counterfeit, notes, but Rocco’s explanation was so incoherent that it would bear no meaning of any kind.
‘His brain may have been affected,’ said General Wu. ‘Did you by any chance sit upon his head?’
‘I went no higher than his brisket,’ said Flanders.
‘Perhaps he will get better in time. It is a pity he is disabled, however, as I wanted to explain to General Sun Sat-lo the equipment and design of our tanks. But possibly you can do that? Your knowledge of them may be even more extensive than Rocco’s.’
‘They’re light tanks,’ said Flanders, ‘bullet-proof and warranted against penetration, splash, flaking, and shearing of nuts and bolts. Their speed across country is ten miles an hour, they’ll cross a six-foot trench, a river four feet deep, climb a slope of forty degrees, and crush a tree six inches in diameter. Their range is a hundred and twenty miles, and their armament .303 Vickers machine-guns.’
The interpreter translated this for the benefit of the two generals, and Sun Sat-lo made a suggestion with which General Wu at once concurred.
‘My colleague,’ he said, ‘has expressed a desire to see the tanks, and as they are no more than a mile away, I have taken the liberty of telling him that you will come with us and demonstrate their mechanism. For I myself have only a nodding acquaintance with them.’
Flanders winced and started like a cow in summer with the gadfly on her. ‘No, no,’ he stammered, ‘take an expert – I’m no expert – you need an engineer, a man who knows the inner parts of machinery. I’d be no use at all, but worse than useless, for in all innocence, I’d mislead you. I know nothing of tanks, less than a babe unborn
‘But you have just described them with a very fluent exactitude.’
‘Out of book-learning only, mere pedantry. Set me beside a tank itself and I’m lost. I could neither tell which end goes first nor how you enter nor the tactics of their employment.’
General Wu was manifestly surprised at the vehemence and agitation of Flanders’s manner. ‘The tanks,’ he said, ‘are still a long way from the front. There will be no danger in going to see them.’
‘Danger? Danger’s my shadow,’ exclamied Flanders. ‘It’s followed me all my life, and I take no notice of it. But tanks are a different matter. I tell you I’m innocent as a pullet’s egg about them, and my left knee’s so stiff I can hardly walk. To go a mile would kill me.’
‘Either you are excessively modest, or you have some private reason…’
‘No reason at all but simple incapacity. There’s Rocco, though; lively as a sparrow again; take him, and I’ll go back to Shanghai.’
Rocco, indeed, having straightened his tie, buttoned his tunic, and swallowed half a bottle of brandy, was looking much better; but his recovery was more apparent than real. He had been listening solemnly to the conversation, and now, approaching Flanders with great care, he said, ‘So you’re going back to Shanghai, Major Flanders?’
‘Yes, I am.’
With an unexpected lurch, Rocco caught Flanders by the hand then swaying to the right he clasped the nearer hand of General Wu and in a hoarse Italianate tenor and his gunmetal accent, with much emotion, began to sing:
‘Home to our mountains, let us return, love,
There in our young days peace had its reign;
There shall thy sweet song fall on my slumbers,
There shall thy lute make me joyous again!’
General Wu disengaged himself. ‘My Military Adviser is not yet himself,’ he said, ‘and so again I must ask you to accompany us.’
‘My knee…’
‘I can lend you a walking stick.’
‘But I have urgent affairs in Shanghai
‘Your only hope of regaining the money, of which you say you have been cheated, lies in my goodwill, Major Flanders. And if you refuse to come and explain to General Sun Sat-lo and myself the mechanism of the tanks which you have sold me, then I must tell you frankly that you will lose my goodwill.’
Flanders scratched his grey hair and shuddered at some secret thought. Then, with a visible effort, he nerved himself to outface the danger that his imagination saw so clearly, and to trust to his luck, in which he no longer believed.
‘If you put it that way,’ he said, ‘and ask me to do you a favour – I take it that was your meaning? – then I have only one answer. I’ll come. I don’t like to be driven, and I can’t be bought; but if you appeal to my good nature, then my nature’s to say yes. Forget the rest; I’m with you and ready to go.’
Wu Tu-fu and Sun Sat-lo, with their numerous staff, and Harris and Juan, all set out to inspect the tanks. Rocco also accompanied them. Observing a general movement he exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘Step on it, brother!’ and obeying his own command revealed the old soldier’s faculty of suddenly appearing sober when the need arose.
They left the nursery by a path that took them into a road sheltered on one side by a low bank. The two generals walked together, and Flanders so contrived it that several other officers were a barrier between himself and Juan and Harris. Rocco, walking in a very stiff and military fashion, brought up the rear.
Every few yards they passed a group of grey-uniformed soldiers, most of them idle, but unaware of idleness; for those who did nothing at all were doing it with the utter indifference of beasts in a field, and those who were more busily inactive were volubly talking in a high-pitched clattering tongue, or gnawing gobbets of strange food sitting with rounded shoulders over a small bowl of rice – or earnestly chewing dried melon-seeds.
The tanks, guarded on all sides by a line of soldiers, were heavily camouflaged with winter branches and boughs of willow. Their armour-plated sides shone dully, like a sunless sea, and their characteristic shape, with their slanting stern and blunt raking bow, gave them a ponderous and menacing appearance. Their function was single and unmistakable, and though they were a triumph of modern invention they curiously suggested a brood of primeval monsters. Beneath their untidy thatch of willow-boughs their smooth brutality was prehistoric in its sterile malignity, like dinosaurs in a Jurassic wood; but the ingenuity and strength of their mechanism was the last word in civilization – or as near to the last word as could be expected in China. Impervious to rifle and machine-gun fire, armoured against shrapnel, they could trample a thicket of barbed wire, stride across trenches, shatter stone walls, and all the time at ease bombard the enemy. The simplicity of their name was a tribute to the contemptuous simplicity of their tactics. If there were difficulties, they ignored them; if there was opposition, they crushed it; and to the generals and all their subordinate officers, to Harris and Juan, it seemed as though China’s armies, led by these mighty engines, could hardly fail to triumph.
The roof of willow-branches was removed from the nearest tank, and General Sun Sat-lo examined it with interest. Wu Tu-fu, wearing a happy proprietorial smile, accompanied him in his circuit of the monster, and prodded its steel sides with a stick as though he were a farmer at a sale of fat stock. Flanders watched them with ill-concealed anxiety. Then Sun Sat-lo asked a question about their mode of propulsion, and General Wu, having translated it, invited Flanders to explain in detail the transmission of power to the revolving tracks.
‘That’s very complicated,’ said Flanders.
This information was immediately amplified by Rocco, who with the voice and manner of one crying: ‘Walk up, ladies and gentlemen! Walk up and see the Bearded Lady, the Two-headed Calf, and the Fattest Boy on Earth!’ – recited: ‘in the Vickers machine-gun there are three types of fouling and three principal stoppages. After firing, the gas-affected parts must be thoroughly cleaned, and always remember that the sear is a safety device. If the roller breaks during firing, what stoppage occurs and why?’
‘Thank you very
much,’ said General Wu; and told his fellow general that the mechanical details were unfortunately beyond his comprehension.
‘Is the armouring proof against fire from point-blank range?’ asked General Sun.
Wu Tu-fu repeated the question, and Rocco in a stentorian voice declared: ‘The armour-plating of this tank is guaranteed unpenetrable and will deflect rifle or machine-gun fire at any range. It is composed of one-inch toughened steel, and is also proof against shrapnel. But what you don’t see, you can’t believe, so I will now shoot the works.’
From his twin holsters he pulled his two revolvers, and pointed them at the tank. But before he could fire Flanders had caught his nearer wrist, and shouted imperatively, ‘No, Rocco, no!’
‘But why not?’ asked General Wu.
‘Because there’s no sense in destruction.’
‘But the tank is bullet-proof…’
‘That’s what I mean. The bullets will ricochet, bounce away from it, and fly back at us. We may all be killed, so put away your pistols, Rocco, and tell us more about the sear and the stoppages.’
‘If we go back some twenty yards, however, there will be no danger of a ricochet.’
‘You never can tell. If you want my advice, I say no shooting. Leave that to the Japanese.’
‘Colonel Rocco will fire from twenty-five yards,’ said General Wu, ‘and I cannot doubt that we shall all be perfectly safe if we stand behind him.’
Flanders, with a gesture of despair, turned away and muttered to himself, ‘I should never have come. By God in his solitude, I should have stayed at home. This shooting will be the death of someone.’
He stood a little way apart, his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in the pockets of his ulster. Rocco, having stepped the distance, turned towards the tanks and stood in a swaggering attitude, his feet wide apart and his chest out. He had a revolver in each hand. With a violent movement, as though he were punching the air, he fired, left and right. At the sound of the two shots all the soldiers who were guarding the tanks turned their startled faces towards him, and little groups and clusters of soldiers, whose presence no one had suspected, leapt up, staring, and in high-pitched voices made excited comments.
‘We will now go forward and give the target the once-over,’ said Rocco, ‘and we’ll be tickled to death to find that those bullets haven’t done it no harm whatsoever.’
Rocco staggered slightly as he led the way. The spectators, having examined the tank, were much impressed by its quality of resistance. Its plating was quite unmarked.
‘Would you fire two more shots?’ asked General Wu. ‘And please aim just there.’ He pointed to an intersection of rivet-lines in the centre of the turret.
Rocco, assuming a truculent expression and a pose of yet more extreme bravado, fired again. Immediately there came a loud shriek from a soldier at the left-hand corner of the perimeter-guard, and a frightened howl from another in a little group of onlookers who stood far away on the right. The former soldier stooped and clutched his ankle, and the latter clapped his hand to a blood-stained ear. Rocco had missed rather badly to begin with, but he was now getting closer to his target.
There was, however, no ill-feeling. The wounded soldiers at once became objects of great interest, and their comrades, crowding round them, were evidently struck by the humour of the situation; for on all sides rose shouts of happy laughter.
Ignoring both Rocco, who had the grace to appear embarrassed, and his victims, whose howling could be heard above its circumference of laughter, General Wu drew his own pistol and fired several shots at the target he had indicated. Then he walked forward alone, and stood for a long time, motionless, looking at the result of his shooting.
‘Come and see what’s happened,’ said Harris, and he and Juan joined Wu Tu-fu beside the tank.
He had fired four shots, and within a space that a plate could have covered were four neatly-punched holes. The bullets had gone right through the armour-plating; which on inspection proved to be wood, about an inch thick, covered on each side with tin. The rivets, though their heads were genuine steel, were merely glorified drawing-pins.
‘Looks like we got into something up to our necks,’ said Rocco.
Juan whispered to Harris: ‘We’d better get hold of Flanders and go back to Shanghai as quick as we can.’
‘Flanders is on his way there now,’ said Harris.
With the casual air of one who was walking merely for amusement, Flanders had already put two hundred yards between himself and General Wu, and he was beginning to lengthen his stride. But Wu, turning a moment later, shouted an order, which was repeated and again reiterated by all the officers who had accompanied him, and like a flock of pigeons rising from the stooks a grey crowd of soldiers set out in pursuit.
In a few minutes Flanders was brought back, indignant at being surrounded by bayonets and chattering coolies, but also frightened and somewhat breathless; for he had been compelled to hurry.
General Wu was no longer smiling. His lips were closed in a narrow line and his eyes were cold as a lizard’s. He pointed to the bullet-holes in the tank and said: ‘You have complained of receiving fraudulent notes in payment for these tanks. But now it appears that the tanks themselves are fraudulent.’
Flanders tried to simulate astonishment on seeing such damage done to armour-plating by a mere pistol; but his pretence was unconvincing. Then he blustered, and said that in commerce the first commandment was caveat emptor. Wu Tu-fu grew visibly angry, and when he spoke, there was a harsh tremor in his voice.
‘You are in Chinese territory,’ he said, ‘and China is at war. Our enemies are the Japanese, and on your own admission you procured these tanks by means of your influence with the Japanese. That is to say, you deliberately, and in collaboration with the Japanese authorities, supplied me with worthless armaments in the expectation that our enemies would thereby reap a military advantage. You have shown yourself hostile and. treacherous, and I am justified in ordering your arrest.’
Before Flanders could reply, Wu Tu-fu had turned away and was walking with a quick nervous stride in the direction of General Sun’s headquarters. But when he had gone a few yards he stopped, and summoning one of his officers, said to him in a voice which he could scarcely control, ‘You will also put under arrest Colonel Rocco and Mr Motley.’
Chapter 21
Flanders and Juan, having returned to the nursery under the alert but untidy guard of several officers and about twenty soldiers, were confined in a greenhouse. Rocco, under a separate escort, was detained elsewhere until he had been questioned by Wu Tu-fu.
The choice of a greenhouse for the place of imprisonment appeared to be a deliberate refinement of cruelty, but it was really due to the fact that in the small group of over-crowded buildings there was nowhere else available for them. It did, however, increase their discomfort, for there was always a double row of soldiers staring at them in solemn wonderment, the inner rank with their noses pressed whitely against the glass, the outer rank leaning over their comrades’ shoulders. The greenhouse was empty except for a hank of bass and a few dozen flower-pots on shelves from which the paint was flaking. In this transparent cage, Juan, leaning against the door, preserved an admirable composure; and Flanders, striding to and fro, was now furious and now intimidated. At one moment he would stop and glare at the flattened faces of the soldiers, at the next he would lurch into movement with the head-sunk heavy-shouldered gait of an angry bull.
Suddenly he picked up a flower-pot and threw it at a large pockmarked face that was peculiarly irritating in its patient and witless curiosity. The flower-pot crashed through a pane of glass but missed the coolie, who, with a quickness not to be expected in such an oafish creature, had ducked in time. There was a shrill and wrathful outcry, but in a few seconds the crowd settled down again to its dispassionate watch.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Juan. ‘It’ll be cold when it gets dark, and there’ll be a nasty draught.’
&nb
sp; ‘You don’t think we’ll have to stay here all night?’
‘I expect so.’
‘But by God in his three hypostasies, we’re British subjects. We can’t submit to bilboes and a Chinese clink.’
‘I don’t see what else we can do. In any case, I’ve got far more to grumble at than you have. You’ve earned your imprisonment on a rough estimate, you’ve earned about three years – but I’m guilty of nothing but curiosity and keeping bad company.’
‘If it hadn’t been for you I’d never have come here.’
‘I didn’t know that your tanks were only a clutch of biscuit-tins. You’d told me that you wanted to see Rocco, and I wanted to see what happened when you met him.’
A minute or two later Flanders spoke with more confidence. ‘Harris’ll turn the key,’ he said. ‘They’ve got nothing against him, and he’ll go back to Shanghai and raise such a whirlwind of protest as will suck us out of durance on the very instant.’
‘There’s going to be a storm of some kind,’ said Juan, and looked up through the glass roof at a swiftly moving sky. Throughout the afternoon there had been a coy uncertain wind that blew fitfully against the shapeless clouds, and whirled with spasmodic violence among the walls and heavy curtains of mist. Now it was blowing in earnest, and the sky was like a bundle of tattered ribbons straining to the north. Between the strips of cloud the lift was a pale and dusky blue, the shadow of night already upon it, and the earth-bound lower winds were noisily combing the shuddering plantation of young trees.
Flanders continued to speak hopefully about what Harris could do, and how soon he might be expected to do it. In the middle of his hopeful prediction, however, the row of faces that surrounded the greenhouse was suddenly removed, and the watchful soldiers turned to look at a new spectacle. This was Harris and his interpreter, who had also been arrested, and were now approaching the greenhouse with a small but self-important escort.
The door was thrown open, and Harris and his Chinese colleague were thrust inside.
‘You’ve come to join the gold-fish?’ said Juan pleasantly. ‘And what’s your crime?’
Juan in China Page 25
