‘There has been a battle,’ he said calmly. ‘General Kwei had arms supplied by the Kuomintang Nationalists and General Tsu’s troops have been defeated. He has already moved his yamen further west along the river.’
Ira gave him a grim look. ‘What about petrol?’ he asked.
Lao looked at him frankly. ‘There will be no petrol in Hwai-Yang now,’ he said. ‘The students have made sure there will be none.’
Ira frowned, puzzled, and Lao gave him a stiff smile. ‘General Chiang and his warlords have begun to fight a different kind of war,’ he explained. ‘They have discovered you can fight with words as well as swords. They have persuaded the students that the Kuomintang is the party to support and that they must do all they can to hamper its enemies. I’m afraid all our petrol vanished long since into the gutters or south to Kwei.’
Ira nodded. ‘It’s as well to know,’ he commented. ‘We won’t waste time over it.’
Lao managed another smile, a warmer one this time. ‘You have about twenty-four hours,’ he said. ‘General Kwei’s cavalry is already heading round the lakes towards Hwai-Yang.’
Chapter 4
‘Well, that was short and bloody sweet,’ Sammy commented as they began to throw their spares into boxes and burn what they didn’t need. He was far from disturbed by the emergency. The crisis, he felt, was Tsu’s, not his.
The one thing that was firmly in Ira’s mind was that nothing must be abandoned that might conceivably be useful. They were so short of everything – even the simplest articles like three-quarter wood screws – he couldn’t afford to leave behind a single thing he could carry away with him.
In spite of a hurried search of the bars in the city, Fagan was not to be found, so they had left Ellie at the bungalow to pack up their possessions and, as soon as they reached the airfield, had bullied the unwilling Lawn into taking the Crossley to search for him and pick up Ellie on the return journey. Then, with the aid of the Chinese pupils, they had set the coolies to crating up every single spare, every nut and bolt they possessed, every screwdriver, every scrap of fabric, dope and paint, every can, every funnel, every yard of hose. Hwai-Yang was bad enough; their next stop might be even bleaker.
Sammy seemed to be the only person on the field Ira needed to consult. He was adult and responsible despite his youth and could be relied on to do everything he was asked.
‘I’m going to fly out everything that’ll fly,’ Ira said. ‘And fly ’em as far as we can. Let’s just hope the weather doesn’t shut down.’
The spring storms had by no means finished and, if it rained, all their efforts would come to nothing. A downpour that wouldn’t stop Kwei’s troops could certainly stop aeroplanes flying. Even a high wind would be sufficient to ground the fragile Farman.
‘I reckon we can get to Tsosiehn on the petrol we’ve got,’ he went on, spreading a map on the grass. ‘And I want you to take the Avro, and go ahead of us and find a field.’ He drew a rough circle to the south of Tsosiehn. ‘This area’s off the road from Canton and Peter Cheng says it’s flat enough to fly from. There’s a village here near Tsosiehn – Yaochow – and you shouldn’t have any difficulty identifying it. Tsosiehn’s the usual Chinese river town – walls and a bloody great pagoda, the Chang-an-Chieh, right alongside the water. You ought to pick it up as soon as you get west of here. Cheng says it’s so beautiful all the other pagodas in China fly through the air to fall on their knees before it. OK?’
‘OK’ Sammy was laconic and grave-faced. ‘I’ll look out for ’em at five hundred feet.’
Ira smiled. ‘Take Cheng with you. There are some Tsu troops down there, so get ’em to help. As a precaution, grab some carts and have ’em waiting in case there’s no petrol and we have to strip the machines when we arrive and tow ’em to safety. If you can find lorries, so much the better, and petrol better still. And get a message to this chap, De Sa, who’s supposed to have Fagan’s spares. Find out what he’s got.’
Sammy nodded again. ‘What about the machines that won’t fly?’
‘We salvage what we can – even off the Wingless Wonder – and burn ’em.’
‘His Nibs is going to like that.’
Ira laughed. He could just imagine the Baptist General’s horror when he found out they were planning to abandon the ramshackle machines he had bought at such expense. But Kwei, according to Sammy’s rumours, had Russian advisers now and even if Kwei wouldn’t know what to do with the old machines his advisers would. They might have engineers with them and access to enough spare parts to get them flying again, and Ira had no intention of allowing the opposition to get control of the air between Hwai-Yang and Tsosiehn. In spite of the dubious nature of Tsu’s air force, it was stronger than Kwei’s, which, so far as they could tell, still consisted only of a single balloon.
‘He’s got to like it,’ he said. ‘There’s no alternative.’
The Crossley arrived back in the afternoon. Fagan was only half-sobered and in a bad temper and Lawn was shaking with nerves. They’d had to run from an unexpected mob of students rampaging along the bund, smashing windows and attacking any Tsu soldiers they could find.
‘Ach, the pride of ’em,’ Fagan jeered. ‘The bounce and, Holy Mother of God, the self-importance. They’re threatening to sweep away all the warlords and all the foreign gunboats. They say Tsu won’t fight and the time’s come to get rid of him.’
The only gleam of hope was that Lawn had learned that the petrol Fagan had ordered in Shanghai actually existed and was near Tsosiehn, on a junk whose captain had no intention of venturing any further until he knew whether Tsu or Kwei controlled the river.
‘Did I not tell you?’ Fagan jeered. ‘Did I not offer you a look at the invoice?’ He gestured towards Hwai-Yang, impatient to be off. ‘We’re best out of here,’ he said excitedly, more than willing to shuffle off any responsibility he owed. ‘Tsu’s finished in this province. They’re shouting down there for Kwei.’
Ira ignored his excitement and Fagan lit a cigarette quickly, his hands nervous. ‘They’ve chopped a few more heads off,’ he said, with a shrill laugh. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have stopped much. The bloke in the shipping office says the kids have all joined the Kuomintang, and a Yank gunboat’s arrived to take everybody downriver who wants to go.’
Ellie stood nearby, watching Ira as though Fagan didn’t exist. She was holding a suitcase and a few cushions she’d collected. They seemed an odd burden, but they seemed to represent the comfort she’d never had time to enjoy.
‘Ready, Ellie?’ Ira asked her.
She nodded calmly, her face expressionless, as though he’d never seen her half-naked and suicidal the night before. Only her eyes betrayed the fact that she’d been crying. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Nothing to it.’
She seemed to have a gift for taking things as they came. The only thing in her life she seemed unable to handle was Fagan who, even now, couldn’t resist trying to be funny.
‘Been having a good blub on the way out,’ he said gaily. ‘She’ll get over it.’
They spent the morning hoisting the generator and the lathe and the engine from the Wingless Wonder on to the thirty-hundredweight, and stacking the vices and boxes of tools and spares, the tents and the ladders and the trestles and fitter’s benches, the barometers and wind-speed indicators Kowalski had sent them from Shanghai, stuffing the gaps with mattresses, sleeping bags, canvas sheets, tarpaulins, suitcases, trunks, crates and baskets.
The field was a confusion of hurrying figures and loud with the sound of hammering as crates were nailed up. Ira was just superintending the last few spares when Sammy appeared alongside him.
‘Ira!’ His face was tragic. ‘We forgot Mei-Mei! We can’t leave her behind to go on the Fan-Ling. If the students catch her you know what they’ll do to her.’
It seemed to be standard practice in the pointless and savage little civil war that had been tearing China apart for two generations that women were mere chattels who could be dragged off, raped on t
he spot or simply butchered and left in the gutter. The South China daily papers that came up on the steamers were always full of harrowing details of villages that had been taken over.
‘Take one of the Peugeots, Sammy,’ Ira said. ‘And shove her into it. She can travel on the lorry with Lawn.’
Sammy was back within an hour, with the smiling girl alongside him, clutching her birdcage and her bundle. She looked small and drab in grey cotton and, without make-up, like any girl from any provincial town anywhere in the world. To Ira she didn’t seem to have understood the possibility of danger and had come merely because Sammy had asked her.
‘You’ve explained, Sammy?’
Sammy shrugged. ‘She’ll go on the lorry,’ he said shortly, as though he’d not found explaining easy.
The Avro took off in the early afternoon with Cheng in the passenger cockpit. It was stuffed with tools and personal belongings and there were canvas-covered shapes roped into the wing-roots. It bumped along the uneven field, the long wings swaying, the engine crackling and throwing out clouds of blue castor oil smoke, then it rose into the air over the willow-fringed river and began to head south-west.
Ira watched it growing smaller, knowing that nothing in the world would make Sammy let him down. Sammy would do exactly what he’d been told and do it properly, and he knew he could trust him as he could trust the sun and the moon to rise. But aeroplanes were pernickety things and there was no guarantee that something would not go wrong with the Monosoupape that would throw all their plans awry.
As he turned away, he almost bumped into Wang, the carpenter. At the last moment he had decided that servicing aeroplanes had suddenly become more important to him than carving wooden screens, but he wasn’t prepared to accompany them further inland without his family.
Ira threw him into one of the Peugeots before he could argue. Wang had become an asset to the little squadron and, despite the tardiness of his decision, it was well worth the risk of getting his family out of Hwai-Yang to have him with them.
They found the city in a turmoil. Stragglers from Tsu’s army were busy in the streets, but there was no one in authority and they controlled only the areas where they looted. The dusty cobbles were littered with paper and fluttering pamphlets and half the shop windows were broken. In the main street the crowd was so thick they had to stop, the shaven Chinese skulls in front of them like a sea of pebbles on a beach.
There was a big placard, ‘Go Home, Japanese,’ wavering above the yelling crowd and they could see a little Citroën with a Japanese merchant in it, being heaved to and fro.
The Citroën went over at last and they saw the Japanese running for his life, then the mob surged round the car like water in a whirlpool, the students in the lead, ardent for anything but study, willing to have anyone hurt or maimed for an ideology, and there was a puff of smoke, a flower of crimson flame and a howl of glee. Carrying poles began to whack the remaining shop windows into showers of shining splinters, then, as the mob paused, looking for more to destroy, its eyes fell on the Peugeot, and the noise rose to a screech. ‘Sha! Sha! Kill! Kill!’
Ira gave Wang a quick grin. ‘Time we left,’ he said.
Behind them the American gunboat was anchored in midstream and they could see hoses being operated from the decks to keep a way clear through the sampans which circled it, filled with coolies and students yelling abuse. The riverbank was packed tight with Chinese rent-collectors, and landlords, all pensioners of Tsu and the objects of the crowd’s dislike, all being ferried off with the missionaries in ship’s boats. The sampans that waited off shore, none of them quite daring enough to come to close quarters, carried flags Ira had never seen before – red with what looked like a serrated sun on a blue field in the corner.
The American sailors on the bund, most of them young and looking like schoolboys in their white shorts and caps, were setting up a machine gun on a tripod now and the officer waved to Ira.
‘This way,’ he yelled over the din.
As they reversed, the back of the Peugeot hit a fruit stall that collapsed in a welter of baskets and rolling fruit, and the proprietor began to screech abuse and slammed his stick with a clang against the tonneau, A coolie joined him, bringing down his steel-tipped carrying pole on the bonnet, then another, but just as the mob surged forward to hammer the car to wreckage, it swung away and fled with howling engine and honking klaxon to safety.
‘Kinda tough,’ one of the sailors grinned as they took up a position behind the machine gun. ‘New kinda riot.’
It was an hour before the mob moved on, hitching up its cotton pants, to wreck warehouses along the bund, an hour that Ira spent dancing with anxiety with Wang alongside the car, staring at his watch and glancing at the smoke-filled sky, knowing that in the time he was away Fagan could be doing something stupid enough to wreck his plans, or that the mob could have changed direction and headed for the airfield.
Eventually they were given the all-clear and they made their way to the back streets where Wang lived near the railway in a little hovel that was filled with smoky paraffin lamps. They brought out his family – ten of them, including a grandmother and eight children, all with their hair in elaborate tufts – and a whole pile of pots and pans, and packed them hastily into the back of the car. It was a desperate squeeze, with the excited children chirruping like a lot of young birds and Wang dealing out cuffs with both hands, but although several of them had to ride on the mudguards, Ira had no intention of leaving them behind. Wang had fallen in love with aeroplanes and if it meant taking his family to keep him, then the family would go, too.
Back at the field, they found Ellie growing uneasy and Fagan almost gibbering with impatience. The airfield coolies, scenting disaster, had departed while they’d been away, and the high-pitched chattering and laughter had gone with the creak of barrows and the clatter of picks and shovels. With one or two exceptions they hadn’t ever been much use for anything but labouring and had always had a habit of doing ridiculous things like looking into petrol tanks with a cadged cigarette in their mouths, but the absence of their noise and cheerfulness made the place ominously empty.
General Tsu’s motor-car entourage passed the field as they threw the last of their equipment aboard the lorry, and stopped to find out what was happening to the aeroplanes.
Ira indicated the pupils dragging the ancient Blériot and the Parasol and the wingless, engineless, gunless Fokker from the hangars and pushing them together, nose to nose. They were a shorn and dreary lot now. Propellers and rudders had been taken off, wheels had gone and the wings drooped because bracing wires and turnbuckles and even struts had been removed.
‘You can tell the general,’ Ira said to Lao, ‘that he won’t be losing anything worthwhile. We’re going to set them on fire.’
Lao looked shaken and, when he told Tsu, the Baptist General was visibly shocked. He stood by the car, with his French wife and the little dark-eyed, grey-gowned boy clutching a violin case, and the amah who went everywhere with them, gesturing and yelling at Lao, and it required a good quarter of an hour of arguing before they could convince him that the old machines weren’t worth saving. Even then he gave his consent reluctantly.
As the motorcade rattled off, trailing dust, the first of Tsu’s soldiers began to straggle past the airfield on the way west. They were only a horde of undisciplined men now, holding umbrellas and parasols and even wearing boaters to protect them against the sun, slouching along with their rifles slung and most of their equipment missing. Their officers jogged by on shaggy ponies and at the end, among the rag-tag and bobtail of the army, the wives and the children and the camp followers, came the artillery – the ancient Maxim and the .75, and the battered Russian guns – and finally the ox-carts with the luggage and equipment.
‘I don’t give much for their chances,’ Fagan grated. He had sobered up abruptly but he was nervous and irritable and he and Ellie were sparking off each other’s ill-temper again.
Several of the pupil-p
ilots were rushing through the Bessoneaux and the wooden barracks now, yelping and whooping as they set fire to straw mattresses with torches, then they heard the ‘whoof’ as they put a torch to the two old aeroplanes. The two Peugeots were started and began to tick and rattle as they were lined up alongside Lawn’s chain-driven Peerless and the Crossley tender, the pupils excited and yelling to each other from the tops of the crates and canvas and valises.
One or two of the less ardent had already begun to drift away on their ponies or on bicycles they’d commandeered from Kailin. They had instructions to join up again at Tsosiehn but Ira had a feeling he’d never see half of them again, and he was not unwilling to be rid of them. One of them, in fact, wearing a Manchu gown instead of uniform, didn’t even trouble to turn west but headed on his bicycle straight towards Hwai-Yang, clearly intent on joining General Kwei.
There was no point in hanging on any longer and Ira gave the signal to start engines. His eyes alert for any sign of drinking in Lawn, he helped the remaining pupils to push Mei-Mei and the Wangs on top of all the equipment. There was an immediate crisis as one of the smaller Wangs slipped out of sight between the generator and the lathe and set up a frantic screeching as if he were being boiled in oil, and they had to off-load half the equipment to get at him before they could free him.
They were ready at last and Lawn started the engine.
‘Keep an eye on the cars and keep the thirty-hundredweight behind,’ Ira advised. ‘If the Crossley conks and you can’t start it, the most important things are spares. Not tents or food or personal belongings – or people.’
With Wang and the pupils draped across the tails, they got the two German machines started and facing into wind, and Ira climbed into the high wicker seat of the Farman and set the throttle.
The Mercenaries Page 14
