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.