Shooting the War

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.