Shooting the War

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.”