Shooting the War

“And why shouldn’t I go out in this costume?” I asked.
“Because you will be so stared at,” said Elisaveta.
“I’ve been stared at in so many countries,” I replied, “that I might as well add one more to the list.”
However, a natural reluctance to be stared at by a whole stadium caused me to abandon my more convenient slacks for a skirt, on the day that I went out to photograph a football game; but my camera attracted an amount of attention that proved painful to me, nevertheless.
On a Sunday shortly before the war, when the Dynamo team played the Red Army, I took my place with the Soviet press photographers. It was with some pride that I brought out my new Speed Graphic, which had been built especially for me by the Folmer Graflex Company in Rochester. It has range and distance finders for five interchangeable lenses, and when a 30-cm. telephoto lens is used, on a 3%/ x 41/4 film, it is an excellent camera for sports. At least the Rochester technicians and I thought so. But the Soviet photographers all use the Russian Leica. It is made in one of their new factories, and while the lenses are ununiform, the camera itself is fairly well constructed, and the Russians are exceedingly proud of it. Any camera larger than the palm of your hand is something they think an antique. “Why does she use such an old-fashioned camera?” I could hear them say about my beautiful treasure, so newly designed that there was only one in existence.
No photographer likes to look old-fashioned in front of one hundred thousand people. I could not stand up and make a speech to the stands, explaining that in America practically all pressmen use Speed Graphics, and most of them a size larger than mine. It was even worse when, after I had photographed a few touchdowns, I turned my camera on the crowds, who interested me more than the game itself. Their incredulity—that the American photo-correspondent should turn her back on the game—was audible.
I shall probably never be able to redeem my reputation with the football fans, who perhaps think that in the United States we are still using wet plates; but I am happy that before I left the country I was able to vindicate my cameras before the Russian photographers. After watching on repeated occasions, with some amazement, what a peanut flash bulb could do, they requested me to show my equipment before a mass meeting of photographers, and they left in ecstasies over what were, to them, entirely new developments in camera construction and flash synchronization.
But some of the elements of our culture which they chose to borrow surprised me exceedingly, principally the cocktail. Its evolution, by the time it reaches Gorky Street, is something to astonish anyone who had been inadequately trained on Fifty-second Street. The new palatial Koktail Hall serves a Kowboy Koktail which would frighten into a stampede the cowboys after whom it is named. Several layers of brightly colored liqueurs, combined with gin and topped with brandy, are separated by the yolk of an egg into something that looks like a rainbow parfait and tastes like everything behind the counter.
I suggested to Erskine that maybe they were trying to symbolize the dawn of civilization, with a rising sun and everything, but he was busy murmuring under his breath, “Which came first, the cowboy or the . . . ?”
The Kowboy Koktail has a little cousin, The Beacon, also designed like a prism: a layer of chartreuse below the egg yolk and an inch of brandy above. These masterpieces are swallowed in one gulp (it was one gulp or not at all, I discovered) by actresses, literati, and Red Army soldiers on leave, to the tune of four rubles and ten kopecks a cocktail, or ninety cents. But these evidences of foreign culture are discarded by most Russians for vodka, which tastes like kerosene until you get used to it but usually turns out to be the best idea after all.
During those prewar weeks, whether we were attending a writers’ banquet with Petrov, or whether I was photographing schools and factories with members of the staff of VOKS, or whether I was just walking along the streets or sitting in a little restaurant with Elisaveta, I noticed that the jokes people told were beginning to take on a political significance. I have often thought that one can tell more about what the people are thinking by the anecdotes that they tell than any other way. Many of these stories were aimed at Hitler.
In one of their favorite anecdotes, Hitler goes to the edge of the English Channel and stands there looking longingly across the water. He decides that the problem is too much for him and summons the
oldest rabbi in the countryside, who, he believes, can give him expert advice.
Hitler explains his problem, and the rabbi says, “Oh, that’s not so difficult. Moses had the same problem three thousand years ago.” “What did Moses do?” asks the Riltrer.
“Oh, he solved it very simply,” answers the rabbi. “All he did was to pick up a certain stick, strike the waters, and everything was handled.”
“That’s just what I wanted to know,” exclaims Hitler. “Where is that stick?”
And the rabbi replies, “It’s in the British Museum.”
Another indication of the drift of international relations was a new rule that was passed, forbidding foreigners, even diplomats, from traveling outside Moscow without a government permit. This meant that even members of the diplomatic corps could not travel down to the Black Sea for a vacation without a special permit, which- was not often granted. This annoyed the diplomatic colony at first, but soon they guessed that it was a measure aimed at the Germans, to keep them from seeing too much.
However, it was essential for us to break through this regulation if we were going to do our work properly, and with the help of the Writers’ Union and VOKS, which felt it was all to the good to permit us to do a thorough reporting job of their country, in words and pictures, we were given permission to travel. Early in June we left for an extended trip through the wheat fields of the Ukraine, factories in Kharkov, Rostov, the Donbas Coal Region, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea. It seemed advisable to have Russian traveling companions, as our limited knowledge of the Russian language was hardly adequate for such a trip, and we asked Petrov and Elisaveta to come along. We were delighted when they were able to arrange to come with us.
A crowd of Soviet writers saw us off at the station with baskets of wine, vodka, chocolates, and packages of fresh caviar to eat on the train.
As the train pulled out of the station, Elisaveta took me aside. There were two compartments, and she felt a conference was in order.
“How shall we divide up?” she asked. “We two girls together, or what?”
“What is your preference?” I inquired.
“Preference doesn’t enter into it,” she said, using the phrase I had heard before in the Soviet Union. “An interpreter is a sexless person.”
“In that case, I have a preference,” I said. “I’d like to stay with my husband.”
And so it was arranged.

THE STADIUM is enormous—Ambassador Davies gives its capacity as 100,000, which sounds large but is probably right. A game is played every Sunday all through the spring and summer. It is not true football. Although the Russians use our word football for it, actually it is a kind of soccer. Russians are overwhelmingly proud of this “American” sport which they have adopted. They emulate our love of sports and have placed great emphasis, in their new soci-
ety, on the development of healthy bodies. Most interesting point to me is that they have never learned our American way of cheering. I think they would go cheer wild if they ever heard it. The crowd is rather solemn, follows the game intently, and shows its enthusiasm by clapping.
The teams wear brilliant uniforms of glistening satin. The Dynamo team wore bright-blue satin, and the Red Army team.

IN THE middle of the Red Square, on the first day of June, hailstones pelted down on me while I attempted to take pictures. All through the month of May it had been snowing fitfully. Never in the memory of the oldest peasant, everybody was saying, had there been such a spring in Moscow. I was shivering and coughing in the heaviest coat I had, which I wore with equal impartiality at chilly breakfasts in our room or outside in the Red Square. It was the same red coat which had been frowned on during air raids over China, but here, at least, it was the right color.
We had been in Moscow for a month. On our arrival we had been greeted cordially by the Union of Soviet Writers, some of whose members had helped select and translate Caldwell stories for the U.S.S.R. and were eager to welcome the author in person. VOKS, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which knew my Russian photographs from my three earlier visits, had obtained permission for me to take pictures again. There were many restrictions, but still I was happy that I could work.
The occasional limitations on subjects that I wished to photograph troubled me much less than the weather. It was the kind of weather that drives photographers alternately to ecstasy and madness. Piles of dazzling clouds let through the sunlight in short quick stabs, and before one could so much as whip out a yellow filter the skies became overcast and gray.
Not only did the weather delay my photographs; it retarded the crops as well. This did not worry the Russians as much as might have been supposed. War fears were growing. There was an ominous feeling that harvesttime might bring fighting with it; and when the unnaturally cold weather delayed the harvest of spring wheat for several weeks, everyone began repeating the favorite Soviet quip—that the Bolsheviks had learned to control even the weather.
While it was evident that uneasiness was growing, no one was discussing openly from which direction the war clouds were expected to gather. The nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was in effect; Germans were to be seen in all the leading hotels; the Soviet press, which is government controlled, contained not an anti-German word.
Still, I was interested to observe that if the man in the street opened his morning Pravda or Izvestia and read that a British ship had been sunk, he felt very bad about it, almost as though one of his own ships had been sunk. And if, on another day, he read that British pilots had downed an unusually large number of German planes, he was apt to tap his neighbor on the arm and show him the good news.
It made me feel that the Russian people recognized the pact as a marriage of convenience, designed to give their new industries more time to turn out needed munitions while their country remained at peace. In recent history, as short a time ago as 1918, the Germans had invaded the Ukraine, only to be driven out by the Russians, and the people had not forgotten. In the thirteenth century, the Huns had invaded the Ukraine and were driven out by angry peasant hordes led by the great Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky. And the people of Moscow had this invasion clearly in mind, too, because a vivid moving picture about it had been released in 1939. It had played to packed audiences throughout the city until the very day when the German-Soviet pact was signed, at which time it was withdrawn so suddenly that some of the movie audiences were left in darkened suspense as the Huns and the Ukrainians, clashing at saber points, faded from the screen. They were not even given the “Continued Next Week” slide, which American movie theaters run as the thriller breaks off at its most exciting point. If some omniscient theater manager could have run such a sign, it would have read, “To Be Continued After Two Years.” Its director, Sergei Eisenstein, ho-lever, had a bit of that kind of foresight. When we arrived in Moscow, he got the reels out of a safe where they were stowed away and gave Erskine and me a private showing.
“We think,” he commented sagely, “that it will not be much longer before Alexander Net,sky will be shown in public cinema theaters again.”
Although technically, in early June, 1941, Germany was the friend of Soviet Russia, there were other rumblings. The most significant, to us, was a report that came to our ears about an address that Stalin had made to the graduating class of the Military Academy. Stalin’s speech had already been printed in the Soviet papers, but we learned through one of the underground routes by which news sometimes reaches journalists that the printed version was merely the preamble to his fateful address. The main theme of his talk to the Red Army graduates had been: “Germany is our real enemy.”
This was so sensational that some of the foreign correspondents who heard it tried to cable it out; but such a statement, not even published within the borders of the Soviet Union, could not be expected to pass the censors. One foreign correspondent who smuggled the story abroad was deported within a week.
The American Ambassador, Laurence A. Steinhardt, had been preparing for weeks for the emergency he thought was impending. A second embassy was being established in the country about thirty miles north of Moscow in a dacha, or country house. He was importing tents from the United States and preparing to set them up under the birch trees to house needy Americans who might be blasted out of their hotels if action started.
He did not know until it was too late to change that the spot selected for this safe retreat was close to a group of munitions factories. More dogfights were to be held over those tents than if they had been pitched in the middle of the Red Square.
Mrs. Steinhardt was very busy making the dacha homey and comfortable. She was choosing harmonizing wall colors and fabrics and was hanging curtains in attractive color tones and heavy enough to be drawn for blackout purposes. A perfectionist down to the last pleated valance, she had curtains matched for fringes and chenille edgings by the courier who carried the pouch to Stockholm each week, as the Swedish capital afforded a wider selection of drapery trimmings than-could be found in Moscow.
Ambassadors’ wives were faced with extraordinarily complex problems in the social field during those last confusing weeks that the German-Soviet pact was in force. Protocol was assuming such proportions that it could be tackled only by supertechnicians. Within diplomatic circles each dinner called for divisions for which Solomon would have needed an advisory committee. How many Axis or Allied plenipotentiaries could be mixed, if any, and in proportion to how many neutrals?
Many embassy hostesses expanded their operating budgets by giving all entertainments in twos. But even when this was done, which of the neutrals could be trusted to speak to which of the belligerents? Some brave ambassadresses flung everyone together and continued to smile glassily while the room coagulated into sections, with floating icebergs, unseen but plainly felt, bobbing in between. One of the Scandinavian ministers evolved a superb handling of the situation. He gave a reception in which two great rooms judiciously divided up the Axis and Allied guests. These salons were not adjoining, but were connected by a short hall through which the waiters and the more fancy-free of the neutrals circulated impartially.
Lady Cripps flew into Moscow from Stockholm in the same plane which carried the wife of the French Minister, who had been her intimate friend for many years.
“It was too dreadful,” she told me. “We were the only two women on the plane and we felt so silly, not even being able to look toward each other. When the plane stopped at Riga, I found I didn’t have enough Russian currency in my purse to phone my husband. There was no way to change it at the airport, and when I saw my dear friend go to the telephone and ring her consulate in Moscow, it would have been so convenient if I could have asked her simply to tell them to call up the British Embassy and let Sir Stafford know when I was coming.”
The diplomatic colony was buzzing with a story which had recently leaked out, concerning the departure of Molotov earlier in the year for his visit to Berlin. The pro-Ally members of the diplomatic colony had been lucky in getting a long laugh at the German Ambassador, and long after the event the laugh was still good.
The station authorities had been notified, when it was time for Mr.Molotov to leave on a special train with the German Ambassador, that no one without the proper credentials would be allowed to pass the train gates. This was a routine rule in such a case. The Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs had already gone on board when the German Ambassador reached the train gate, closely followed by an attendant carrying his bags. There were, of course, credentials for His Excellency Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, but no one had thought to make out a pass for the attendant.
The fidelity with which Soviet citizens obey orders is one of their most admirable and, sometimes, most exasperating characteristics. His Excellency, of course, wanted his bags. Courteous regrets were expressed, but certainly the station guards could not be expected to break a ruling, particularly when such important personages were involved!
Hastily, because the train was due to pull out any moment, the German Ambassador decided to make the best of it and carry his bags himself. But how could this be permitted? No papers had been issued authorizing these articles to be carried within the gates.
Zero hour arrived, and Count von der Schulenburg, complaining in two expressive languages that he would not even have a clean shirt in which to disembark at Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, sprinted for the train and jumped on it as it moved out.
Hurrying through the moving train, he at last found Molotov in an observation car, beginning to worry about the nonappearance of the Ambassador. As soon as the Commissar understood the difficulty he issued an order. Immediately, not only the diplomatic train, but all trains coming in or out of the station on near-by tracks were stopped, and in twelve minutes a trouble engine had brought up the German Ambassador’s luggage.
During these last weeks of Russo-German peace, Erskine and I were living in a plain but comfortable room on the top floor of the old National Hotel. It was much like any European hotel room, but the service was greatly improved over Moscow hotel service as I remembered it nine and ten years ago. The bathroom plumbing worked, which it had not always done during the Five-Year Plan, and I was pleased to see small cakes of soap supplied daily with the fresh linen, for soap had been an almost unobtainable luxury in earlier years. At that time such efforts were being made to bring machinery from abroad that consumers’ goods were forced to sink to a low ebb.
Our windows looked over Gorky Street, which is the Fifth Avenue of Moscow. It was a very different-looking Gorky Street from the narrow alley which I remembered from ten years ago. Whole rows of buildings had been pushed back on rollers to make an extremely wide thoroughfare, and modern office buildings and new shop fronts gave the effect of a complete face-lifting program.
From our windows we could see the names of a block of shops; there was a Cheese Shop, a Champagne Store, a Children’s Store, with toys and frocks and suits designed for little boys and girls. Next to it was a new shop of which Muscovites were very proud. It was the Ice-Cream Parlor. We found that Eskimo Pies, which the Russians liked particularly because they considered them a symbol of Western culture, could be purchased there. But the store to which we paid the most frequent visits was the Dietetics Shop. Just inside the entrance was a door leading to the office of a doctor, who could be consulted free of charge by ailing customers who wished advice on diet. In the intervening years between the comparative famine of my last visits and the comparative plenty of this one, the Russians had discovered the vitamin and pursued it with unbridled enthusiasm.
While we were happily free from those ailments which made shopping at the Dietetics Shop necessary, it was interesting to see the array on sale. There were partially cooked meats and specially blended salads, prepared for people with specific diseases. There were thirty-two kinds of breads with various ingredients omitted or included for sufferers from ulcers, diabetes, and other illnesses. Then, there was one invalid product which we used to buy. We had discovered that an ordinary chocolate bar, at our disadvantageous rate of exchange, cost us the equivalent of $2.50; but in the Dietetics Shop, where prices were kept low for the benefit of’ invalids, their specially prepared excellent chocolate cost only thirty-five cents. So we became steady purchasers of diabetics’ chocolate.
During our early weeks in Moscow we had many visitors and we made many Russian friends. We were singularly fortunate in the kinds of contacts we had with the Russian people because it is not easy, as
a rule, for foreigners to mix with Russians. The changes in ideology—for example, like that which was then going on in regard to the Germans—were too unpredictable to the average Russian for him to want to take a chance on being seen too much in the company of foreigners. But our work, my photographs and my husband’s writing, gave us a kind of immunity which was one of our greatest assets in learning to know the country.
The people we saw most often were members of the Writers’ Union. The assistant to the editor of the foreign-literature department, young Elisaveta, who spoke almost perfect English, became one of the best friends I have had in any country. She was small and fragile-looking, with blue eyes and a cloud of black hair which she held back from her pale, sensitive face by a narrow ribbon tied Alice-in-Wonderland style. She had a warm curiosity about everything American and an almost fanatic patriotism about everything Russian. She went with me frequently while I took photographs, to act as interpreter. Each photographic expedition became at the same time a Russian lesson, for I was trying hard to increase my Russian vocabulary. I could understand short phrases, but I wanted to learn to follow longer conversations.
Erskine was busy collecting material for the book he planned to write and he often was accompanied by the young editor, Eugene Petrov, whom I had met six years before in New York City. Petrov and his collaborator Ilf, joint authors of a humorous book about the Soviet Union called The Little Golden Call, had visited America in 1935. They had driven about the United States in a Ford car, studying what to them was a strange and mysterious land, and returned to Moscow to write a book which they entitled Little Golden America. This book became one of the greatest best sellers the Soviet Union has ever known. From Siberia to Samarkand, Soviet citizens by the hundreds of thousands alternately marveled and split their sides with laughter over the humorous adventures of Ilf and Petrov among those quixotic and delightful Americans. Since the book was written, Ilf has died, and Petrov, as stern and grave in appearance as are most humorists, is now editor of the weekly picture magazine, Ogonyok.
Interest in American magazines, whenever the Russians could get their hands on them, was tremendous. One day when I was unpacking ome delicate pieces of camera equipment, Elisaveta came in and carefully smoothed out the sheets of old magazines that I had wrapped them in. When she saw that they were pages I had torn from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, she exclaimed: “We must carry these to the House of Fashion Models.”
She took me to visit the House of Fashion Models, on Gorky Street, and we found a fashion show in process of preparation. The chief designer received my old magazine pages eagerly. “We are improving on the American models to suit the needs of Soviet women,” she explained. They were also adapting native peasant dress for city wardrobes. This latter effort I found the more commendable of the two, for with the coming of modern clothes, peasant handiwork is too easily lost.
A “bathing costume,” as the institute’s staff called it, was being prepared for the style show. This was a more radical innovation than the “costume” itself might seem to indicate, for it marked a new interest in mixed bathing. Russians have always been enthusiastic swimmers and have carried on the sport in a monastic segregation of the sexes, in a universal costume which has needed no designing from the House of Fashion Models. However, I could not imagine the weather ever getting %varm enough for bathing with or without costumes.
No slacks were designed for the fashion show, a surprising thing in a nation of women workers. The first day I put on mine, for I always wear them if I am planning to do any particularly strenuous work with a camera, Elisaveta exclaimed: “Are you going out in that costume?”

The speed of both contingents was very swift, and the effect, to one who stood still, was dizzying.
Storekeepers closed the blinds of their doll-house shops, snatched the advertising signs off the outsides, locked their shutters with lightning speed, and were off. Soon the upper classes, easily distinguishable because they proceeded in rickshas, began making for the mountains, urging their coolies to pull them at a faster and still-faster pace.
As we stood, absorbed in this lively scene, a voice behind me said, “Missy take her coat off. Missy be arrested. Red color against the law in air raid.”
It was Show King watching out for us. Appreciating the reasonableness of this position, I turned my coat inside out so that only the black lining was visible.
The Japanese dropped their loads that day on some near-by villages. The cessation of the alarm brought the people promptly back to town, opened like magic the doors of the shops, but did not bring our plane to the landing field.
The next day it was a raid over Chengtu, some three hundred and fifty air miles away, that detained our plane; but on the day following, the good news was true news. We paid for our pigeon coop, which, complete with stewed chicken and tea and an occasional souffle thrown in, averaged the equivalent of fifteen cents a day; we accepted with thanks the parting gift of a bag of hard-boiled eggs from the airport manager; and we swept up into the air, leaving Lanchow, its segment of Chinese Wall and its venerable history, behind forever.
At Siichow, just across the border of Inner Mongolia, where we spent the next night, we began to notice the beginning of Russian influence. The airport hotel, which was laid out like an adobe tourist camp in the Arizona desert, was hung with Soviet posters. My husband slept under a portrait of Lenin, and over my bed hung a map of Spain, with pins still in place indicating the Loyalist lines during the battle of the Ebro front.
In the Gobi Desert, sandstorms began blowing toward us. Frequently the sand became too thick for flying, and as our plane descended for a forced landing, the co-pilot faithfully followed military regulations—drawing the blackout curtains so the passengers might not look Once we managed to reach a small airfield, but usually we landed in trackless wasteland; nevertheless, the curtains were always faithfully drawn. I have yet to discover what military secrets there are in the shape of a sand dune, but there must be some.
So that the hours might pass more pleasantly while we sat in our sealed plane on the hot desert floor, Erskine brought out his Chinese-checkers set, his favorite game. It was in the Gobi that we made the discovery that Chinese checkers are unknown in China. At least the game was unknown until we taught the Chinese how to play. The pilot and the co-pilot were fascinated by the board with its bright-colored marbles and entered into the game with such zest that frequently I would have to remind them to look out and see if the sandstorm had died down so that we could be on our way.
As we continued on our course, it was easy to believe the geographers who say that the Gobi is the largest uninhabited portion of the globe. After the sandstorm belt was left behind, we flew over huge level areas as polished as agate and over vast tumbled precipices as dead as the mountains of the moon, until at last a group of little rooftops took form on the horizon and we swept down on the windy airport of Hami.
Hami is in Sinkiang, the border province between the Soviet Union and China. Freight is carried through it on trucks and camels. Here we were to leave our venerable Junkers for one of the newer Douglases of the Hami—Ata Russian-operated line.
It was completely in key with our record of airplane delays that no attempt had been made to connect with the weekly Russian plane. It did not therefore surprise us, although we certainly were not pleased, to discover that the plane to Alma-Ata, the nearest large city on the border of the Soviet Union, had taken off only two hours before. We looked with envy at the three passengers who had disembarked from Russia just that morning and who were to connect miraculously and immediately continue across China to their destination. And then our envy was momentarily forgotten in curiosity. The three were stout middle-aged women, in sensible black coats and old-fashioned pancake hats. Since it was impossible for us to guess the business of three plump ladies in the middle of the desert, we forgot politeness and asked them. They were Dutch missionaries who had taken the long journey through the Reich and across the Soviet Union and were on their way to central China. They chattered to us in eager German about how poor the food had been in Germany and how delighted they were to find plenty of butter and cream on their trip across the Soviet Union.
Our pilot came up to bid us good-by and to write down the particulars of our Chinese-checkers set, so that he could order one at Hong Kong. He copied the lettering on the board carefully into his notebook: “Chinker Chek, the Game for All Ages.” We helped the trio of decorous ladies embark and wondered if there might be some deep reason why missionaries journeying on their benevolent errand should be more speedy on their travel than journalists and photographers. We stood quietly on the field and watched the ancient German-born vehicle which had brought us rise on its tired wings and return the way it had come.
During the interval in Hami I attempted to enlarge my meager Russian vocabulary by practicing with the cook and the little boy who waited table, only to discover later that due to the mixed dialect spoken in this border province I had laboriously committed many lengthy words to memory which turned out to be unintelligible in Moscow because they were Chinese.
It was an American-made Douglas, containing a smartly uniformed Russian pilot and co-pilot, that carried us across the border into the Soviet Union. Alma-Ata, the southeastern doorway into Russia, was reached after a total of thirty-one days spent in crossing China, from its Pacific gate at Hong Kong to its western border in central Asia. Within this month of travel across China, the mileage was covered in a mere twenty-four hours of actual progress through the air.
In Alma-Ata the Soviet customs official made an unbelievably minute examination of my equipment, even prying open the cans of hypo and probing with a stick to make sure nothing was hidden inside. The carved gourds from Lanchow he examined with a magnifying glass and removed all the naughty ones. “Censored!” he explained.
One and a half days more of flying over great red smudges of poppies in the wheat fields of Turkestan, along the marshes of the Aral Sea, where peasants who have never seen a train or automobile get their letters by mailplane, over a city called Kuibyshev (soon to become the secondary war capital) sprawled within loops of the Volga. On we flew to Moscow, and when we landed on its crowded Dynamo airport we had traveled fifteen thousand miles, almost two thirds of the distance around the world, in a total flying time of one hundred hours.

IT is a complete puzzle to me why all the planes in China, with the exception of the new ones coming from the United States, do not fall to pieces all at once, like the One-Hoss Shay. Many of them are Junkers purchased from Germany ten years ago, and no one knows how many years they were in use before then. The only reason why we finally reached the Soviet border was that our plane did not fall to pieces all at once—only bit by bit.
The disintegration process started when we were circling over some extremely high mountains. Our pilot managed to bring down the plane successfully on a landing field in a bend of the Yellow River, at a town called Lanchow, in central China.
Lanchow is an old historic city at the end of a branch of the Great Chinese Wall. It is of great interest to students of medieval China, and I am quite willing to leave it to the historians. We went into the walled city to find a place to stay, and settled down in an arrangement that was called a hotel but more closely resembled a pigeon coop. We set up a hand-to-mouth existence in a little cell which had an earth floor, no windows, and two benches against the walls, which could serve as cots. The sanitary arrangements were a kind of every-man-for-himself idea. Despite the primitiveness of our “hotel,” each morning as soon as we were seen stirring we were brought cups of tea with the regularity with which the better American hotels deposit the morning paper outside your door. These first cups of tea we sprinkled on the floor in order to settle the dust, and then called for two more cups. These we used to brush our teeth, a ritual we performed in tea after being unable to identify certain bits of foreign matter we had seen floating in the water;the tea, we felt reasonably certain, had been boiled. If we were lucky enough to obtain a third cup each, we used it to take a bath. When I was a child, I had been told that a Chinese can take a bath in a teacup. I now am able to state from experience that this is possible.
Every day, we would ride out in rickshas to the airport and watch the mechanics attempting to fit pieces from other dismantled planes of varying sizes into the gaps of our Junkers, and when twilight fell we would go back to our pigeon coop.
Finally, the airport manager telegraphed to Hong Kong for repair parts. It was a happy day when we loaded our bags into Lanchow’s one bus and went out to the airport to see the Hong Kong plane come in. It was a matter of only a few hours to repair our plane with spare parts that fitted; but when it was done, our plane and the repair plane both took off and flew back to Chungking and back to Hong Kong, leaving us still in Lanchow. The reasons for this curious maneuver were never explained to us.
There was nothing for us to do but go back to our pigeon coop. It was at this period that we cultivated the acquaintance of a young Chinese named Show King.
Show King was the cook boy, and he stepped into an important place in our lives. He was a refugee from Shanghai, where he had worked in a fashionable tourist hotel. When the Japanese had come uncomfortably close, Show King had escaped, carrying one of his most valuable worldly possessions—an enormous cookbook with the recipes written in an elaborate hand in Chinese and the titles translated neatly into English. There were ninety-six ways of fixing beef, one hundred and eleven ways to prepare chicken, forty-seven salad dressings, eighty-four meat sauces, and twenty-eight different kinds of souffles. Every morning, in consultation with Show King, we would choose our menu for the day, though no matter what we ordered we almost always got stewed chicken.
Each day, we took a little shopping tour along Lanchow’s teeming Main Street. We bought crude rings of hammered silver, and bracelets jingling with little bells; and after each buying orgy, Show King, in his limited English, scolded us for letting the Lanchow merchants take advantage of us. However, in terms of American currency translated from Chinese dollars, it was seldom that we could spend more than twenty cents.
Whenever we saw them for sale, we would purchase the intricately carved little gourds, about the size of a walnut, which are a specialty of Lanchow artists. These are exquisite pieces of workmanship, with tiny figures carved with extreme delicacy, illustrating episodes from Chinese history. Once, when we brought a handkerchief full of these back to our cell, we examined them closely and several of them turned out, surprisingly, to be pornographic.
It was a happy day when we found, in a bookstore hollowed out in a thick stone wall, an enormous map of Asia with the place names in Chinese characters. While Erskine was paying for his purchase, I explored the shelves, deep in dust, and found a textbook for students of English literature. It contained short stories by Conan Doyle, Chinese on the left-hand pages and English on the right. Thus even in Lanchow I was able to buy detective stories.
We used to sit out in the sun on a box in the courtyard, following our respective studies of map examining and mystery reading. The map of Asia was so large that Erskine needed the whole courtyard to open it up in.
Then one evening the airport manager called at our cell, with the happy tidings that a plane was coming through the next morning on the way to Inner Mongolia and would pick us up. We were almost too excited to sleep that night, and the cold dawn light found us standing at the roadside outside the hotel, with our bags and cases strapped up beside us, so that the bus could not possibly miss us when it went to the airport.
Suddenly people began running in two directions to the tune of a rising sound which we reluctantly recognized as an air-raid siren. We didn’t have to be told that no Chinese Airways plane would land in Lanchow that day.
We dragged our bags to shelter and stood at the door and watched. It seemed that all the residents of the north end of the city wished to reach the mountains on the south side, and all the people who lived in the shadow of the South Hills preferred the shelter of the slopes toward the north.

Our journey up the precipitous path was one of extreme anxiety, not only because it seemed that our swaying sedan chairs might be pitched off our coolies’ shoulders at any instant into the gorge below, but also because of acute worry as to whether our visas would really be there. People were delayed weeks, sometimes months, for Soviet visas—often to find that they were not getting them after all.
We saw the Soviet Ambassador after a wait of only five minutes and received our Russian visas after only fifteen. While our credentials were being stamped in our passports, we talked with him over glasses of Russian tea and munched little chocolate candies in wrappers stamped “Red October Candy Factory, Moskva.”
Over our tea, we commented on what a target the Soviet Embassy must make, situated as it is on the highest point in Chungking. We knew that most of the diplomatic staffs of other countries had moved to the South Bank, which is much less frequently attacked than the main part of the city.
“We stay here,” said the Soviet Ambassador, “because we think that if the Chinese people can stand the bombing we call share it with them.”
This expression of solidarity with the Chinese people was demonstrated again a little later, when the Ambassador’s secretary led us down to our waiting coolies. As we were hoisted in our sedan chairs to the shoulders of these human beasts of burden, the Russian said. “None of us in the Soviet diplomatic service ever use sedan chairs. because we do not feel that it is right to exploit the back muscles of other men.”
It was not a pair of exploited backs, however, but a body by Buick that called to take us to the residence of the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
Their house might have been built for a well-to-do resident of Kansas City, Missouri. It had a square frame, regularly spaced Nvindows, and mission furniture. The living-room suite, complete with sofa, was the same overstuffed style that has been multiplied time without number throughout the United States. There was nothing either beautiful or exotic about the house or its furnishings. The only Oriental touches lay in a few Chinese scrolls hanging on the walls.
But when Madame Chiang Kai-shek entered, it was immediately evident that there was nothing ordinary about her. I doubt if one would ind that complex assortment of characteristics anywhere else. She has a combination of purpose and of glitter, of capacity for intensive hard work with a dash of the theater thrown in.
She spoke in a voice so soft-timbred and low that one had to listen carefully to hear her. Her spare but graceful gestures seemed studied, her beauty was of a restrained sort held back under an enameled exterior and glowing out of a pair of hot eyes. She was dressed in that severely cut tube dress which is so becoming to the slenderness of Chinese women; hers had tiny flower patterns woven in the black fabric, picking up the color notes of the emerald, sapphire, and diamond clips that gleamed in fashionable smartness on her tiny ears.
After a few minutes of conversation with her, the overwhelming impression of theatrical perfection was forgotten in the feeling that here was a person with a will like a stretched steel band.
While tea was being served, Madame Chiang and Erskine entered into such an absorbed conversation that I set down my half-empty teacup and got my camera into operation as quickly as possible. It is always a help to me when my subjects are interested in conversation while I work, because it gives me a chance to record a varied succession of facial expressions while they forget the camera. Madame’s beautiful face was very expressive as she talked.
Erskine was telling her that she should visit the United States as soon as possible, in order to convince the American people that it was to America’s interest to send more military supplies to China.
“But I have written a book for publication in the United States,” said Madame Chiang. “That will do more good than anything else.”
“A book will help some,” Erskine said, “but your personal appearance would help China more than a dozen books at this time.”
Madame Chiang was silent for several moments.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said, “but I can’t leave China now. There is so much to do here that I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t stay here every minute.”
“Just the same,” Erskine told her, “I wish you would go for a quick visit. Americans haven’t been able to keep up with the world. They don’t know what it’s all about any more—and they probably won’t find out until it’s too late—or almost too late.”
“But Americans should know that by helping China they are contributing to the defeat of our enemy, and theirs—Japan.”
“The average American thinks this war is taking place on another planet,” Erskine said.
At which point the photographs, which were progressing with the conversation, were interrupted by the entrance of the Generalissimo, who came in to have a cup of tea.
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is a masterpiece of monotone. His hair and mustache are the texture of straw, his skin is the color of dried grass. He is as immobile as a wheat stack, and his general impassiveness contrasts with the striking personality of his dynamic wife. But here, also, one has that feeling of hard, strong purpose, and one hears constantly that the men fighting under him are ready to die for him.
I asked the Generalissimo’s permission to take his portrait and went on working again: it seemed odd to photograph a general holding a teacup and sitting on a sofa with a lace antimacassar behind his head, but when you are a photographer you learn to take what you can get. While Chiang did not speak English, he gave the impression of not missing a single thing when English was spoken. At rare intervals he smiled, and I was able to catch a startling mouthful of false teeth, gleaming in his otherwise impassive countenance. When he talked with Erskine, Madame Chiang interpreted.
My husband asked Chiang if China was getting sufficient military supplies from the United States and England.
Chiang was quick to say that he was satisfied with American help to the extent that it had been promised, but that very little had been promised at that time.
“What about England’s help?” Erskine asked him. “Is it enough?” “No! no! no!” Chiang said. “England has done very little. England does not understand. England is afraid of offending Japan. The British should realize that Japan will eventually attack them.”
Erskine told Chiang of the crated warplanes he had seen on the docks in Los Angeles Harbor, waiting shipment to China.
“Did you see many of them?”
“Very many,” Erskine said.
“Good! good!” Chiang said. “Were there any big bombers?”
“I am quite sure there were,” Erskine told him. “We saw several shiploads of all types of bombers and fighters.”
“Good! good! good!” Chiang said. “It is heartening to hear of planes on their way from America. That is what we have always needed. We can defeat Japan only with planes. Japan cannot be defeated without planes.”
Every facility was to be provided for Erskine and me if we could take time to fly to the front, but since our destination was Russia we decided to take the first plane available to the U.S.S.R.
“But before you leave, you must surely photograph my war orphans,” said Madame, and the next day I set out into the hills across the Kialing River to visit the “Warphanage,” as it is called.
There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese orphans whose parents were killed in bombing or fighting. When great areas had to be hastily evacuated, too, countless children became hopelessly lost and separated from their families. In Madame Chiang’s various “Warphanages” 30,000 children are cared for. In between climbing into dugouts, which air raids make a frequent necessity, the children are taught to raise their own vegetables and care for their own pigs and are given their arithmetic lessons just as are the school children of any country.
Arithmetic was in progress when I made my visit. I was interested to see that the children in learning to count use symbols of the war which has become such a part of their lives. Under I on the blackboard was pasted a cutout of a bombing plane; under 2 were two antiaircraft guns. The other numbers were illustrated by rifles, tanks, Chinese sabers, and so on, through 9, which was represented by nine bombers. But under 10, I was pleased to observe that the children had pasted up cutouts of ten butterflies.
However, there is more of bombing than of butterflies in their childish lives. Bombs enter even into their songs. They put up their fists to .their ears and chant, “The enemy planes are coming”; then they crouch down, ducking their heads, and sing, “So you must crouch down quickly,” and at the end of their song, when the raid is over, they jump up, clapping their hands and singing, “Chan tong kazoai,” which means, “Very, very happy.”
When the air-raid alarm comes, the orphans wind their way, double file, over jagged cliffs to their shelters a mile away, the two leaders carrying a stretcher that may be needed before the raid is over, and the other children carrying little stools so that they will not have to sit on the cold stone floor of their cave dugout. This stool has become as much a companion to each child as a doll would have been in a happier age, and he calls it his “sister-in-law.” The war orphans have a song even for their little stools:
My sister-in-law she drinks and gambles
So she pawns her socks and sells her sandals.
From these rocky peaks, over which the war orphans must hurry many times a month, one can command a fine view of Chungking. Down in the valley, near the broad and always misty Yangtze, there are factories —if you know where to look for them. Their smokestacks are camouflaged like trees, draped with green-dyed nets and newly covered every few days with fresh branches. Under some of the terraced gardens are factories set up in caves, their machinery installed after having been dismantled and moved laboriously across the country ahead of the invading Japanese.
It is this constant moving on coolie back, moving things in river sampans and in hand cars, moving everything from a dismembered dynamo to the family teapot; it is this constant excavating, mending, and building that tells the story of China at war.
Chungking is like the movie lot at Warner Brothers’ in Burbank. The Hollywood store fronts seem real, but look behind them and you see a wasteland. The hastily erected shop fronts of Chungking seem solid; but walk behind them and you see piles of blasted ruins like waste piles of a deserted stone quarry.
Yet in the midst of all this devastation the work goes on: a constant tapping and splitting of rock and carrying away of spoonfuls of earth, a steady rebuilding of houses and shelters at the slow continuous pace which has been typical of the Chinese for centuries.
On our last day in Chungking there was an air-raid alarm, and we watched a curious sight from above the great stone steps that lead from the center of the city down to the Yangtze. When the warning sounded,the great staircase suddenly overflowed with what looked like little black ants, so densely matted that it seemed as if an enormous black curtain were being pulled down the white steps to the river. The people near enough the water to escape the city got into little sampans and rowed across the swift stream, and in half an hour thousands of them had evacuated to the hills.
The next morning, we left the Kialing House, which, sooner than we knew, was to be blown to bits. We had arrived in a wedding and we departed in a funeral. As we stacked our Six hundred pounds of luggage into the providential truck that the Soviet Embassy had loaned us, the procession swept past us. The Chinese love American tunes, and the mourners were singing unintelligible words to “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground.”
While the bags were being tied firmly on the truck, we started ahead on foot down the steep road toward the airfield. It was a long funeral procession, and as we pushed our way through the dense ranks of mourners, they began chanting their dirge to the unmistakable lilt of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

“I am not serving bird’s-nest soup or shark fins,” she explained, “because I don’t feel it is right to have such delicacies in time of war.”
She spoke with the same faint trace of a Georgia accent that my husband has, for she had received her early American schooling in Macon, which happens to be not far from the town where my husband was born.
I tried, in an experimental spirit, all the peculiarly flavored dishes. They included the peppered sinews of fowl, and other items less recognizable, but delightfully seasoned and served in bewildering array.
Course after course was served, but each time an exotic-looking dish was brought in, Erskine waved it aside and asked for another serving of rice.
Madame Kung was perturbed.
“Rice is peasants’ food,” she said, “and I served it tonight only because I wanted you to sample truly Chinese dishes.”
“That makes me a peasant then,” Erskine gulped, “because I was raised on rice in Georgia and I like it. This is the first time I’ve been able to find any since we reached Hong Kong.”
Madame was speechless for a moment and then she called the maids and ordered them to bring in all the rice in the kitchen. She and Erskine ate nothing else during the remainder of the dinner.
We came to find out later that it is surprisingly difficult for a foreigner to get rice in China. Foreign travelers are expected to prefer more elite fare.
Hong Kong had the unreality of stereopticon slides. Its streets showed three dimensions, but even as we were rolled through them at breakneck speed in rickshas they still retained that insubstantial quality of one picture succeeding another. The hillsides were piled high with crowded houses. Decorative Chinese-lettered signs were strung across the alleys, and fabulously plentiful flowers were sold under all the archways. The stores were spilling out into the streets with their stocks of Swiss watches, English woolens, carved ivories, and embroideries at fantastically low prices. Everything was cheap, because Hong Kong was a free port for foreign articles, and coolie labor made native products cost next to nothing.
We were astonished when a tailor arrived unsolicited with our breakfast tray. He quickly talked my husband into ordering a suit, which he copied from one of Erskine’s old ones—for the Chinese can copy anything—and it was delivered with our morning paper the next day, perfectly tailored and finished down to the last hand-stitched lapel.
We were startled but delighted when, the following morning, the instant we woke up, a shoemaker was at my husband’s bedside with a pencil to draw the outline on a piece of paper when his foot first hit the floor. A pair of Erskine’s old shoes served as a model, and by noon my husband had a beautifully finished pair of new shoes.
I gave the shoemaker some jobs, too. I ordered cases of chamois leather, closing with zippers, for each of my five cameras, for each flash gun and chromium reflector, and for all of my filters. When they were finished they fitted each piece of equipment like a glove and acted as perfect dust protectors. When it came to final packing of supplies, I tore off and discarded all the cardboard protectors of my three thousand peanut bulbs. The bulbs themselves I packed into two large wicker baskets such as Chinese peasants carry. Merely removing the wrappers saved one third of their weight. I knew that it risked a great deal of breakage, but space would be at a premium as we flew across China. During my work later in Moscow, in that vast quantity of flash bulbs I found only six that were even cracked.
The luxurious Chinese world which Hong Kong presented began swinging toward the opposite extreme when we started our flight to the war capital of Chungking. We were taken to the airport at midnight to wait for an unannounced departure time. Since three hours of the flight were made over Japanese-held territory, the take-offs were planned when two layers of cloud would offer the best possible chance for the Douglas to pick its course between them, unseen from the ground, and with the hope of being undetected by enemy planes that might be scouting above. Since there was always the chance that we might have to make a forced landing back in the wilderness, in case an air raid over Chungking should make it impossible for us to land there, we were told to carry a couple of sandwiches.
We were flown by an American pilot and co-pilot, volunteers flying for the Chinese National Airways, who have since become famous in the group of American “Flying Tigers” who attacked the Japanese during the invasion of Malaya.
We flew in a plane laden with bales of money freshly printed to pay the Chinese soldiers, and every kilo of extra luggage brought for us, every camera and every film pack, displaced its weight in money. We sat on stacks of Chinese dollars, we tucked our legs around them, and I believe that if we had actually had to land in the wilderness we would have warmed our hands in front of fires built of money.
But the Japanese stayed out of our way that night, and after circling over intricately sculptured mountains, carved into whorls and arabesques by the agriculture of thousands of years, we darted down between two towering peaks and stepped out on a narrow landing field at the bank of the Yangtze.
At first I could hardly believe I was in Chungking; in the early-morning light it was difficult to see a human habitation anywhere. Then we began climbing the stone steps on the north bank-446 steep, by actual count—toward the capital on the mountaintop. Halfway up we began seeing people, hundreds and thousands of people. They were carrying little baskets of cracked rock out of the newly blasted dugouts; they were squatting in the road, dipping chopsticks into bowls of rice; some of the luckier ones were riding in sedan chairs carried up the breathlessly steep streets by two human beings. The roads were lined with dugouts carved out of solid rock, dugouts not only for humans, but also for automobiles and trucks. Everywhere there was the never-ending activity of building.
The Kialing House, our hotel, in addition to being filled with its usual foreign population, was overflowing with a fashionable Chinese wedding, proceeding in the midst of much starched pink tarlatan and massed artificial flowers. The many cell-like bedrooms were being utilized by the gentlemen guests, who were changing to swallow-tails and tuxedos, the last costume that we expected to see in war-torn China. However, a corner cot was found for us, and depositing our luggage on it we made off to the Soviet Embassy.

EVERYONE HEARS about “The Three Graces” immediately upon reaching China. However, it is only slangy Americans who would dream of calling them that. To the rest of the world they are the Soong sisters: from eldest to youngest, Madame Kung, Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.
The names of all three of their dazzlingly eminent husbands are treated with deserved and justifiable reverence throughout China. This does not prevent some of the resident Americans, who admire the ladies but still are not easily overawed, from referring to the two younger sisters as, respectively, the widow of God and the bride of Christ.
Madame Kung, the eldest of the three, is the wife of Dr. H. H. Kung, Minister of Finance and Executive Vice-President of the Bank of China. Madame Kung is said to keep a guiding iron hand on the finances of her wealthy family. Her understanding of industry is rather remarkable, and she holds the position of Adviser of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. The second sister, Madame Sun Yat-sen, is head of the China Defense League. Although both these ladies are very active, their executive positions had an absentee character until the fall of Hong Kong sent them on to Chungking. During our visit to Hong Kong, they had residences there, where they held in effect the odd position of refugee guests of the British government.
Madame Kung is self-effacing almost to the point of invisibility. She is rarely seen and almost never photographed. When I heard that the last time she had consented to sit for a portrait was twenty years ago, I was especially eager to make a new portrait of her.
It was through Madame Sun Yat-sen that I finally reached her. Madame Sun is not very accessible either, but her interest in her China Defense League made her listen to my arguments that submitting to have her portrait taken was the best way to publicize her cause in America, since Americans take such an interest in personalities. I found her plump, jolly, and gracious, and so shy that I think the very fact that she had overcome her timidity sufficiently to be photographed made her willing to talk her elder sister into doing the same thing. The next day, Erskine and I received an invitation to dine at the home of Madame Kung. Madame Sun would also be a guest, and I was allowed to bring my camera.
I had heard various guesses as to the age of the eldest Soong sister, ranging from fifty to a little over sixty. When I saw her, I thought she looked hardly forty. She had that smooth, enameled slimness which makes many Chinese women ageless. She wore the typical dress which the women of China wear like a uniform—a straight-cut tube, slit up the side, of identical cut for rich and poor, and made of fabrics ranging from the faded blue cotton of the coolies to heavy black silk embroidered in pearls. Madame’s was embroidered in pearls. As she walked into the room I was startled to observe that even this modest lady’s dress showed the expanse of well-shaped slender leg, from ankle to a bit above the knee, that flashes out through slit skirts all over China.
During the portrait, she was so bashful that all the servants and even my husband were sent from the room. I was grateful that she allowed her sister to stay, for I needed someone to help me hold reflectors, a job which Madame Sun Yat-sen performed with evident pleasure at the novelty of the operation and with many exclamations over the miraculous quickness of flash bulbs. Madame Sun powdered her sister’s nose at intervals and straightened her coiffure, although it was already as sleek as polished bakelite. When I had finished, the two promised to write letters to “little sister Mei,” so that on arrival in Chungking I should be able to make portraits of her and of her husband, the Generalissimo.
Then Erskine was permitted to return, and we were led in to what appeared to me, in my inexperience, to be an unusually well-loaded table. As we took our seats, Madame Kung expressed regret for the inadequacy of the meal.

Margaret Bourke-White wrote in 1943:

I SUPPOSE it was those Irish ancestors of mine, deep-sea sailors all of them, whose sons in each succeeding generation ran away to sea when anyone tried to dry-dock them at home, who were responsible for my passionate love of seeing the world. If they were in a position to make observations, they would surely feel that it was a mistake to pass on their wanderlust to a female descendant, for in their day, as far as I have heard, the distaff side never ran off to sea. They might even think that I have an unfair advantage if they could know how quickly our flying boats take us from one part of the world to another.
In view of this ancestral roaming tendency, it was a lucky thing, I think, to marry a man who knows how to read maps. Before making this happy arrangement, I had managed to find my way with a camera through a little more than two dozen countries located on five continents, sometimes for Fortune magazine, sometimes for Life, and sometimes to satisfy my own curiosity. The only time I ever got seriously lost was in northern Canada, flying over the Arctic near the North Magnetic Pole, where compasses don’t work anyway; but direction finding in the Far North was something my Canadian pilot excelled in, and he managed to find his way at last to a tiny Eskimo settlement.
However, when I come back from trips to Siberia or the Sahara Desert, my friends often marvel at how easily I can lose my way between Grand Central and Fifty-first Street while walking to the dentist. Just recently, driving home from New York to Connecticut, I managed to lose my sense of direction so completely within an eighth of a mile of our house that I had to ask the neighbors the way home. This astonished my neighbors, but it didn’t puzzle me at all, for I am no good on the short hops.
But now that I am married, all is changed. My husband reads maps the way I read detective stories. The only difference is that he follows the clues of latitude, longitude, air and ocean currents, and topography, and emerges with the correct deduction, while I, even though attempting to follow that simplest of all clues—the person least suspected—rarely guess the murderer, for I am seldom able to deduce successfully who is the least suspicious.

Erskine Caldwell’s map reading is much more than a simple matter of finding his way from one place to another. It is a whole study in agriculture, economics, and sociology. It is as though, through the surface of the map, he had felt the rainfall, the winds, the altitude, and the fertility of the earth. When he folds up his map, he reminds me of one of his own fictional characters, Jeeter Lester, who in the end of Tobacco Road lets a handful of soil sift through his fingers. Erskine has been feeling the land and he knows in advance what it can be expected to produce in the way of crops and men.

When two persons who have deep professional interests marry, there are two ways of pursuing those interests: together or separately. In our family we do both. Sometimes Erskine is interested in writing about America at the same time that I feel I simply must do some photography in central Asia. The solution is simple. He does his job on one continent and I do mine on another. Sometimes both of us feel that the time has come to work together, in the same country, he with typewriter and I with lens, and then we do something that we both greatly enjoy. We make a trip together and work together.

Russia was one of the countries which we selected to do together, and we had a joint and urgent conviction that we should get there soon, to record in words and pictures what we expected to be the coming tide of the war. We kept our plans somewhat secret, for we do not like to talk about things until we are sure we are going to accomplish them. The State Department granted us validations, although they accompanied our passports with a dutiful and somewhat ominous letter warning us that due to distressed world conditions, we could have no assurance of being able to get back to our native land again. The Soviet Ambassador in Washington promised us visas, which would be waiting for us in Chungking, but he warned me that photographs by visitors in the U.S.S.R.
had been forbidden for some years, and I could have no certainty in advance that the camera ban would be lifted for me.

I was willing to take a chance on this, however. When I first went to Russia, in 1930, few photographs had come out of the country, and those few had been taken by Soviet photographers; foreigners had not been allowed to take pictures at all. This had sharpened my ambition to bring the first photographs, taken by a non-Russian, out of the Soviet Union. I had been successful in accomplishing this not because of any special pull, for I had none at all, but because when I arrived in Moscow and showed the Soviets the many industrial photographs which I had been taking in America, they decided that it might be a good thing after all to let an American industrial photographer record their Five-Year Plan. I was ready to take the gamble again.
Among the extremely few people who knew of our plan was the picture editor of Life magazine. He shared our conviction that Russia was the coming key country in the march of the war, to such an extent that he bade me good-by with the words, “Don’t stop on the way to play marbles!” I had to stop and play marbles in the Gobi Desert, but that comes later.
Erskine does all his writing in a defiantly free-lance way; consequently, he made no commitments beforehand. He did, however, have an understanding with Life and the Columbia Broadcasting System to supply material if he got around to it.I spent the entire month before departure planning my equipment and taking lessons in elementary mechanics so as to be able to repair cameras when I was beyond hope of assistance. Some of my most bulky photographic materials went ahead by ship to Hong Kong, where we would connect up with them at the end of our Pacific clipper flight. My quota of supplies included three thousand flash bulbs, peanut variety, a large quantity of film packs, five cameras,* twenty-two lenses, four portable developing tanks, bottles of Dk21 fine-grain developer, several papers of dressmaker pins,’ duplicates of every screw found in all the

minute parts of my lens mounts and synchronizing magnets, a synchroscope, and a jeweler’s screw driver and pliers. In addition, I carried twenty-eight paper-bound detective stories.

My husband packed one small suitcase with his old corduroy jacket and a few shoes and shirts and got an extra ribbon for his portable typewriter. His professional equipment weighed seventeen pounds. My equipment weighed six hundred pounds.

At last all the preparations were completed, and in late March we took off from the West Coast. There is something about each new trip that fills me with a proud, secret excitement. Even if it is just getting on a train to go from New York to Indianapolis, I feel as if I were traveling toward an adventure. This was to be my first trip completely around the world, and I was walking on wings.

Our clipper’s first stop, at Honolulu, should have been a matter of overnight only. It seemed like imprisonment in paradise when unusually severe weather in the Pacific forced us to spend a week in Hawaii. Honolulu had been a perfect place for a honeymoon when Erskine and I had visited it for that purpose, exactly two years before, but with our eyes directed toward a world at war, Waikiki Beach had less appeal for us.

War was closer even to this dreamy spot than anyone could know. Many of the old-time residents were uneasy. A friend of ours whose lovely home we visited at Hilo, the main harbor of the “Big Island” of Hawaii, said to us, “I want to fly to Maui to visit my sister-in-law. The flight takes only an hour, but you have to stay for five days until the return plane picks you up again. I’d hate to stay away so long and find my house had been bombed. We’re so exposed here on the top of this Cliff.”

Bombing of Hawaii sounded fantastic to us in March of 1941, but it sounded equally fantastic when it became a reality in December. At last, on the eighth day, the waves abated, and our clipper took off. In a few minutes Pearl Harbor was left behind us; the scalloped hill; of Oahu, patterned like a textile with curving rows of pineapple plantations

vanished into the distance. We were flying into a translucent nothingness where air and water were indistinguishable, headed toward the Orient.

Our fellow passengers constituted the major portion of the Dutch government in exile; the group was headed by Foreign Minister van Kleffens, looking like a high-school boy in prim spectacles. The Netherlanders had flown from England with communications from Queen Wilhelmina to President Roosevelt and, after conferences in Washington, were now on their way to the Dutch East Indies.

Our pilot, big, burly Captain Steve Bancroft, invited me up to sit beside him at the controls, where I could watch, as though from a glass cage, the barely perceptible cloud shapes coagulate and take form over a buttermilk sea. After seven and a half hours of flying we coasted into the lagoon of Midway. Sand Island and the smaller Eastern Island make up Midway—projections of an extinct volcano two million years old, whose base rests forever unseen two miles down on the ocean floor.

Long before our giant flying ships had found this a convenient refueling point on the way to the Orient, long before the Japanese had coveted it as a valuable steppingstone toward our Pacific shore, the discovery of Midway as a halfway rest post had been made. Millions of birds, winging their way over the paths of ancestral memory on their mysterious migrations, stop here with the regularity of certain Manhattanites who return to their favorite Florida hotel during the season.

On Midway the season for visitors in wings and feathers is from November to July. The entire sanded, beshrubbed surface of the island was one huge bird nursery. Spaced at a distance of three feet, each standing singly in a primitive sandy hole which passed for a nest, stood half a million gooney youngsters demanding their suppers. Each baby gooney bird was as big as a goose, and their combined voices blanketed the island with chronic protest. Their parents were ignoring their children’s wishes completely, as though their offspring should not be allowed to interfere with their enjoyment of this tropic resort. In twos and threes they circled around each other in a strange little dance, nodding their heads and snapping their beaks, like socialites exchanging polite conversation.
The goonies fascinated the clipper passengers, and I found them especially interesting, since natural history has always been a hobby of mine. We were permitted to walk only a few yards outside the pleasant little Pan American Hotel, far enough to watch the goonies, but not far enough to observe the work of the marines who were engaged in defense construction on the other side of the islands.

At dawn, as we made our way down the slippery pier, the half-million goonies bowed with equal politeness to us and to each other. I hope that when their hour of trial comes they will not show such courtesy to the Japanese.

After seven hours of flying over a sea like shimmering cellophane, we saw below us, suspended in translucent light, a slender little horseshoe, Wake Island. We stepped out on a sand bar, wild with wind and waves. On the fringe of the atoll, which surrounded the island like the rim of a cup, the breakers rose into fountains of spray.

“I always go swimming when I get to Wake,” said Captain Bancroft. “They have the most gol-darned fish here you ever saw.”

We jumped into bathing suits, and the Captain strapped heavy glass masks over our faces. I took a deep breath, plunged down, and found a miraculous pink coral world which opened up just below the surface of the water. I had to keep my fingers and toes out of the way of giant clams which, embedded forever by their own growth in rocky pockets, still were able to reach for me with their thick scalloped lips of purple velvet. Suddenly I realized that I was being watched by hundreds of eyes. A school of transparent fish, almost invisible except for their coal-black eyes, was staring into my face. Soon I felt like a fish myself as exquisite creatures, some sapphire, some indigo, and some smart black ones with red circles on their tails, began swimming along with me. A flounder, looking like an old tire, flapped its way along the ocean floor. Then ahead of me the disembodied leg of a giant with five human toes swam into my vision. I came up, gasping for breath, and identified it as the magnified foot of my husband, who was lost in the exploration of a little cave just ahead of me.

In the morning, while the clipper’s motors warmed up, the Dutch Foreign Minister and I took a last walk along the beach and watched the love terns maneuvering themselves on and off their eggs. The tern, who

lays her single egg on a slender branch, where it remains balanced despite constant winds, executes her take-offs with miraculous precision so as not to knock off her egg.

The perfection of Captain Bancroft’s take-off from a choppy sea also had something ternlike about it, and after seven hours he deposited us gently at Guam. On this hot, lush island we sipped cool drinks with navy officers, who complained, with more prophecy than any of us could know, about Senators who refused to vote appropriations for adequate armaments, for fear of offending Japan.

During our dawn departure we were witnesses to a small dispute between the A and D nations. The Dutch Minister protested heatedly that he had diplomatic immunity when asked to conform to the blanket rule that all passengers open their baggage for examination before boarding the clipper.

“What do you think I have in my dispatch case,” he stormed, “a time bomb?”

“We’re not taking any chances,” replied the Captain. “Someone else might put one there.”

As his ruffled excellency stepped down the dock, the Captain said, “The Japs make the most trouble on this rule. We had one of those special Japanese diplomats a while ago who continued making a scene during the whole time the ship was warming up. ‘He says he doesn’t have to open his brief case for inspection,’ said the dispatcher. ‘No, he doesn’t have to,’ I answered as sweet as sugar, ‘and I don’t have to take him along or take his brief case either.’ At which I took off, leaving the Jap on the pier to reconsider until the next clipper arrived.”

At Manila our clipper was met by a flock of Filipino correspondents, eager, well-informed young people, hungry for news of the mainland. What were people reading? What was being done about this or that social problem? These natives showed a surprising amount of knowledge about the United States. Several of the Filipino correspondents were endeavoring to get assignments in Free China, whose struggle they greatly admired, for they all had a deep-seated distrust of the Japanese.
One more day of flight above the truly china blue of the China Sea, and we descended over rocky coves patterned with groups of sampanslike floating wheat grains, circled over a city rolled out across hills and valleys and beaches, and finally swung into Kowloon Harbor. We were A in Hong Kong, and we had flown halfway around the world.

Lubov Orlova and Grigory Alexandrov, Moscow 1941