“You think I'm drunk but I have. More than once. My falling soldier's alive, you see. He is alive. He lives on in
VU
magazine, September 23, 1936. And
LIFE
magazine, July 12, 1937. I have given him life. He is resurrected. This is the power of art. Such a man didn't have a fighting chance before he died, if you see what I mean. Perhaps he was a noble fellow. Perhaps he loved his wife. Perhaps he had children and a glass of wine after work. But now he is immortalized.”
Ansell was sitting in the corner, his back against the brick wall. “We need more to drink,” he said. “I think the Shark's falling asleep.”
Capa said, with his eyes closed, “I think I'll go find the war tomorrow.”
*
It occurred to me yesterday that this landscape in northern China is a tremendous demonstration of God's great will and design. Isn't that a funny thing to admit? Or something my father might have said? How pleased he would be to know that, but in truth I'm almost inclined to agree with him on this point. It is really quite stunning out here, these hills so perfectly formed. Can nature be so geometrical, so studied? They say the Russian steppe is quite similar. But beyond this mathematical precision, what befalls you here is a sense of tranquility. Is this only my yearning for some order among all this raging chaos? Could this be the same reason my father aspired to his God? The irony is not lost on me that this landscape is busy with death. But let us remember, it is not this good earth's fault that so many murderous armies should prowl over her fine skin!
*
I would not wish upon my worst enemy a journey as difficult and circuitous as ours was to reach the Eighth Route Army in Shensi Province. Thousands of uprooted peasants swelled the railcars, and the lines we travelled on and the various towns and villages we passed through repeatedly fell under attack. It was an ordeal I would like to forget. Rivers ran swollen, slowing our progress. We stopped often to treat the wounded, and this too slowed our progress. The Eighth Route Army was in retreat, and eventually we were forced to fall into retreat with them. At Tung-kuan, our first stop, a Canadian Red Cross worker advised us to turn back. It was advice we decided to ignore, instead waiting a number of days until we were finally able to find a train heading north to Linfen. Upon our arrival, the city was in a frenzy of motor vehicles, horse-drawn wagons and civilians on foot, carrying with them what few personal belongings they had, streaming south to Tung-kuan, where we'd just come from. The state of confusion was so great that we weren't able to report to the local military commander, for whom we might have done some good. After painful deliberation we decided we had no option but to return to Tung-kuan.
We found room in a railcar loaded with an irreplaceable cargo of government-issue rice, perhaps four hundred bags in all, stacked right to the ceiling. Approximately three hours into our journey, however, in the middle of the night, I was awakened by an all-encompassing silence. We were no longer moving wondering if the track had been sabotaged or blockaded, or if at any moment we'd fall under attack, I leaned my head out the window into the darkness. Crickets were all I could hear. I looked ahead and saw that the locomotive had left us behind on the siding of some backwater station, in a village called Goasi, if I was to believe the sign posted on the wall. Ours was the only car left behind.
I woke Jean up and said, “It's time we made some new plans.” After I explained our situation, we stepped down from the railcar.
“How far behind do you think the Japanese are?” she asked.
“Far enough not to worry. I'll find the quartermaster.”
It was a clear night, the stars shining overhead. It seemed all of China was asleep. The quartermaster, the major who'd granted us permission to ride back to Tung-kuan, was already off the train and organizing the nearby villages for the evacuation of his precious rice.
By first light the following day he had arranged, in the name of the United Front, for the purchase of every mule in the village, totalling forty-two, along with a cart for each beast onto which volunteers would transfer the load. After three or four hours of lifting, sometime near mid-morning, I discovered that almost all my personal possessions, trunk and portmanteau, were gone. I was down to the old Remington and my kitbag, as was Jean down to hers, though she didn't seem the least bit concerned.
It was near noon by the time we'd transferred the last of the rice sacks. The quartermaster informed us that instead of going on to Tung-kuan, he and his guard, approximately fifty men and boys carrying only five rifles among them, would make the three-hundred-mile trek to Yan'an, back in the direction we'd just travelled. We were left with no alternative but to accompany them, for otherwise, with no transportation whatever, we'd have been abandoned in that village.
The first ten miles, despite the circumstances, made for an almost pleasant outing. The air was clear and the sun shining. Over my shoulder was slung only my kitbag, to the outside of which I'd securely lashed the Remington. My boots were still in a decent state of repair. I was not yet skin and bone. It seemed this leg of the journey might provide some temporary respite from the chaos we'd witnessed at Tung-kuan. I might even have smiled out there on that dusty track, for the peace that descended over me, moving as we did at our snail's pace over that seemingly endless expanse, might almost have been described as “trance-like.”
A few miles on, however, the reality of the war returned to me. In quick succession we encountered three walled villages whose inhabitants had fled or were unwilling to show themselves. The terror that was sweeping the land could not have been made more clear. Or so I thought, until my melancholy was replaced with fear by the sound of approaching aircraft. Two Japanese bombers appeared on the horizon as two missiles. Their drone grew louder, and then ferocious as they screamed overhead. We scattered, leaving the mules and cargo helplessly exposed. As the two aircraft roared past, the lead bomber dipped its wings to and fro to indicate to the second plane the decision to attack. Cutting a wide arc against the blue sky, they came around again to begin the hunt. The animals waiting below were easy prey, still locked to their carts.
What followed was a vicious display.
When the planes retreated Jean and I tended to the four wounded men, none of them critical, and then helped to clear the mule carcasses, which we heaped at the side of the road like mounds of red and grey sacking.
It was a miserable night of walking. Our spirits were battered by the attack, and matters were made worse by the damp cold that stung to the bone. We walked in silence. The night sky beckoned; the hard dirt road battered the feet.
Before first light we reached the Fen River, where we rested at an inn while waiting for an opportunity to cross over to Chiang-chou. As the barges that were finally provided for our animals and cargo were loaded, I studied the river and the far bank and the profile of Chiang-chou as it sat upon a low hill. I pulled my coat collar up against a biting wind. The Fen was swift and dangerous-looking, and when, mid-morning, I finally stepped onto the far bank and entered the town, newly chilled but grateful we'd made it that far, I discovered that it was largely abandoned, like those walled villages behind us. The Japanese cavalry was said to be only a half day's ride to the east. Mostly the old and the infirm remained. We treated as many of them as we could through the day and into the night before nodding off in a small room of the rectory provided for us by the two Dutch Franciscan priests who presided over this dying town.
Shortly after the noon hour on the following day we resumed our journey. A cold wind rushed at our backs and whipped up the tails of the animals before us. Our immediate objective being Ho-chin, some thirty miles distant and set on the banks of the Fen, we followed the river's southwest flow. We encountered dozens of wounded, all of whom we tended to with our ever-diminishing cache of supplies. As we walked, our ranks were joined by hundreds of refugees: desperate, lost souls who seemed much relieved to fall in with our ragged column. We were a river swollen by many dozens of human tributaries, and on March 3, still barely twelve hours ahead of the Japanese, we entered Ho-chin.
That grim town had fallen into a riot of misrule. Officers had lost the trust and discipline of their retreating soldiers. There was no organization among them. Desperate men roamed the neighbourhoods kicking at the black, long-eared pigs that snorted through the refuse piles heaped and stinking at every turn. Our numbers dispersed into the muddy streets for the night, and the following morning, anxious to leave that place, we made for the promise of the Yellow River. On the other side lay Shensi Province, our promised sanctuary. We would put the river between us and the enemy.
We collected in a deep gorge on the banks of the Yellow River, our party and many thousands of pitiful refugees and armed fighters, a full day's march from Ho-chin. It was an interminable night we passed on that cold, rough ground. The river pulsed and splashed out there in the dark, and in the dim light of the hundreds of campfires scattered along the riverbank crouched our expanse of miserable humanity. I walked among these people and offered what cursory medical attention I could. Infants, toddlers, young mothers. The aged. As I tended to the wounded and the infirm I read the fear of the unknown in their faces. How much had the enemy gained on us? Would we even survive the night?
In the morning Jean and I were among the first to cross, along with many wounded and precious supplies. Snow fell heavily from a charcoal sky to further engorge the river, which was, I now saw in the dim light, treacherous with jagged ice floes. There were only four junks in service at this crossing point, each with a capacity of approximately one hundred passengers. It would be slow going to clear the east bank, I remember thinking, and easy hunting for the enemy should the evacuation stall.
The first night on the other side, we set up a makeshift triage unit in a nearby village, which we then transferred to a cave closer to the river when the Japanese artillery barrage began the following afternoon. There in that cave, some forty feet underground, Jean performed with a consummate and unwavering professionalism. If she felt fear during the attack, I couldn't see it in her eyes or her actions. Committed to caring for the wounded, she showed no thought for her personal safety and repeatedly forswore the security of the cave to greet the stretcher-bearers, without regard for the constant shelling.
She also proved to be a useful interpreter of language and customs. On the second day of the bombardment I remember a wounded boy was delivered to me. The barge that had carried him across the river had received a direct hit. Dozens of women and children had been killed outright or drowned. This boy's mother, a woman of no more than twenty, had survived the attack and somehow managed to pull him to shore. Wet and shivering, she stood before us and begged us to save her son. Jean told her that we would do all we could, and then an orderly led her out. Not much later we heard a strange, primitive howl echoing down into the depths of the cave.
When asked what was happening, Jean said, “The boy's mother is calling his soul back. She thinks it's lost out there, wandering in the hills.”
It took four days to evacuate the east shore of the Yellow River. On the morning of our departure the day broke sunny and clear. As we emerged from that cave for the last time I wondered about the many souls that would be left behind there, including that boy's, trapped between the steep walls of that valley.
I asked Jean if she believed any of that business about scattered souls. A contemplative mood had seized me. She shrugged and looked down across the river into occupied China and said, “I don't know what I believe any more.”
At Han-ch'eng, after a full day's walk, we slept in a village house, provided for us by the military council of the region, on beds of wood and straw that were at least dry if not warm and comfortable. Sheets of stiff white paper served as windowpanes. Our only source of light was a single candle propped up in a wine bottle. The label, though mostly obscured by wax, looked impressive.
“Where would you find a bottle of wine like that in the middle of this war?” I said, wishing it were still waiting to be drunk. “It's French.”
“It's probably been empty for twenty years,” Jean said.
Some minutes of silence passed between us.
“You're still young,” I said. “You have something to look forward to when you get back.”
“That seems very far off.”
A light wind rattled the paper window.
“Yes, it does,” I said. “What will you do when you get home?”
“Who says I'm going home?”
Outside there was no noise to indicate fighting in the area, only the sounds of the nighttime village. Doors closing. Distant calling. A dog.
I said, “You like it here that much?”
“I think I do,” she said.
“Tell me something about Shantung. Why there? Why not somewhere else?”
“Where would you have me go?”
“That's up to you,” I said.
She looked at me, her eyes glowing in the candlelight. “I've been thinking about what Charles said that day.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Something about Madrid.”
“Parsons wasn't
in
Madrid,” I said. “Madrid is long gone.”
*
Here I am, Christmas in China. Not a soul around here has heard of it. It came and went yesterday without a peep, and truthfully I wasn't bothered. It was possibly the most peaceful Christmas I have ever experienced, though likely the coldest one, too. Some things are best kept to oneself out here. That's what I decided. I sat with my memories for as long as I could stay awake, watching my small fire, and that was enough. Maybe I'm getting used to it out here. Perish the thought!
We were stalled in Han-cheng for a week, waiting for transport to be sent down from Sian. The two-hundred-mile journey took another two days, and when we arrived we were presented to Chu Teh, Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Route Army. It was a great relief to see with our own eyes the capable intelligence of this man after so many days of chaos and retreat. My confidence in the ultimate success of this struggle had not been dashed, but it had been severely tested under those trying conditions. Here was a man who inspired those around him.