Shooting the War

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.

“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.