“The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war.”—Li Po (circa 750 a.d.)
The 300-year reign of the Tang Dynasty often has been called “The Augustan Age of China,” and largely contributing to the brilliance of this period was a coterie of silver-tongued poets of which the great Li Po is perhaps the most famous and best remembered. He and his confreres were a rather disreputable crew in many respects, however, and above all they were decidedly and joyfully bibulous. They sang sweetly of the pleasures of the brimming wine cup, and it was on this subject that the master, Li Po, reached the very heights of poesy and wrote beautiful, enduring verse. Moreover, according to legend, his earthly existence ended upon just such a note, when, apostrophizing the beauty of the golden moon, he leaned far over the side of a sampan and attempted to embrace its reflection as it shimmered in the waters of the Yangtze.
Nevertheless, with all his conviviality, he wrote enduring verse also, upon a subject that apparently in his day, as in ours, was something ever present and existent in the lives of the Chinese people. This subject was the horrors and ravages of war, and in the fragment of his verse quoted above he seems to have epitomized much of the history of his country.
Certainly there has been no end to war in the land of China. The widespread misery and destruction that many of us have witnessed during the past several months are things that have been practically perennial and continuous, from the days of earliest record down through the centuries to the present day. Every generation has known them and every generation has known, with them, the most frightful famine, flood, and pestilence, until the wonder grows that the Chinese have survived at all.
Mongols, Tartars, Huns, Europeans, Japanese—all have invaded and laid waste the country. The most savage warfare has raged over the entire country, but outstanding as a theater of war has been the Yangtze Valley. Every city and every village in that area has undergone sack and rapine again and again, and every foot of the river’s banks has been thoroughly soaked with blood. It was the theater of the most appalling civil war that has ever taken place in any land. The great Taiping Rebellion raged here for almost 15 years, and was ended only after having destroyed 600 cities, and cost over 20,000,000 lives in the valley alone. Our own Civil War which ended at about the same time was a very minor affair in comparison.
Thus the vessels of the Yangtze Patrol, steaming up and down the length of the Yangtze and witnessing the present conflict from the side lines, have been operating in a region redolent with the atmosphere of war and all the suffering in its train. Throughout the history of Chinese wars the names of the river ports, so well known to the personnel of the Patrol, and so common in the news of today, always have been prominent; and the daily press accounts are almost the repetition of this history. Chinkiang, Soochow, Nanking, Wuhu, Anking, Kiukiang, Wuchang, Hankow; all of these now familiar names stood out in the past just as they do today. Many times, even within recent years, has Nanking known the agony of fire and sword; the city burned, its citizens massacred; and the numerous ponds in and about the city filled with dead. In fact it was but a few months ago, at sunrise of a winter morning, that the writer steamed by the city, where the ruined water front, the still blazing buildings, the overhanging pall of smoke, and an all-pervading stench, told that once more had Nanking been stormed and sacked.
The grief and suffering that war has brought to the Chinese people through thousands of years was exemplified once again in the present struggle. Even in the days of peace and comparative plenty seldom are the Chinese poor far ahead of actual starvation, and they exist with an almost incredible minimum of food and possessions. Then when the inevitable war breaks out, and armies begin to sweep over the countryside, even that minimum dwindles away and the very depths of misery are reached.
These depths of misery were only too apparent in the hordes of refugees streaming in and out of the river cities; traveling by steamer, junk, sampan, foot, or any other means possible, and blindly pursuing any direction they thought might take them out of the path of the advancing armies. Modern warfare had made the problem of self-preservation far more difficult for these unfortunates, as now hostile aircraft could destroy life and property in places far distant from the battle areas. For many of them, no doubt, their frantic efforts to escape death thus often resulted in failure.
It has been estimated that up to now over 30,000,000 Chinese have been dispossessed or have fled their homes during the present conflict. This tremendous hegira seemed to start almost immediately after the outbreak of hostilities far in the north, and traffic on the Yangtze increased by leaps and bounds as the Chinese people, with the foresight derived from centuries of experience, began to move. At a large port such as Hankow, the arriving steamers disgorged thousands only to take on thousands more. The docks or pontoons were piled high with cargo and baggage; all the while a continuous stream of laden coolies trotted back and forth between ship and shore. Herds of cattle were loaded and unloaded. Whole cargoes of pigs were handled like sacks of grain; these animals making the welkin ring in a manner such as none but a pig can equal. With the never ceasing “Hi-Ho!” of the carrying coolies, the squealing of pigs, the loud and vociferous bargaining between passengers and rickshaw boys, and the hullabaloo of the unending squabbles in which everybody seemed to engage; every water front was indeed a 24-hour bedlam.
A witness of one of the rows that were constantly breaking out among the coolies would be quickly disabused of the ancient twaddle that “the Chinese are an imperturbable race.” The opening of such a row would be signalized by a violent explosion of shouts and screeching, in rapid crescendo. Then there was much excitement, milling around, yelling, and flailing about with carrying poles. Every disengaged coolie within earshot rushed to join the fray, until the row began to take on the semblance of a small riot. The arrival of a policeman with his stick or rattan, which he wielded unmercifully and indiscriminately, usually scattered the participants but did not end the battle. It would continue verbally in the form of insults shouted from a safe distance; now and then flaring up into a blaze of billingsgate and then subsiding into mutterings until probably some hitherto unused epithets would come to mind. Then the process was repeated; it seemed ad infinitum.
The raw cold and icy rains of winter in the Yangtze Valley brought even greater hardship to these people. What shelter they could get was usually of the sketchiest description, but in the stern presence of old Mother Necessity they invented and improvised with the greatest of skill, and contrived quarters that must have seemed comparatively luxurious. One family had moved into a small machine-gun nest on the Hankow water front, and there, snugly ensconced with sturdy sandbag walls, a roof of matting, and a mat curtain for door, they gazed out at the cheerless, streaming landscape and might have thought themselves proper sybarites.
Distressing as was the plight of the refugees, there was another aspect of the war perhaps even more distressing. This was the matter of the wounded Chinese soldiers. Their army had no medical service in the sense which we would term one, and these unfortunate soldiers frequently underwent terrible suffering and hardship until they reached the hospitals behind the lines. Large batches of wounded arrived at the upriver ports, often in open railroad cars, after having been without shelter or attention for days, and sometimes without having had even the ordinary first-aid treatment.
Well-equipped hospitals, that is well-equipped according to foreign standards, were very few. The others, however, achieved wonders in the housing and treatment of the soldiers wounded in battle and the civilians wounded in air raids. Their wards were crammed with patients, and they worked with often the scantiest of equipment, insufficient bedding, linen, gauze, and other essentials, and always with not enough money. Yet they managed to keep going and to fill a gaping need in Chinese warfare. There was much to admire in the spirit of those foreign medical missionaries and nurses, who carried on their work so well with facilities and under conditions that probably would appall a hospital surgeon in the States.
The wards in these hospitals were not the immaculate, gleaming spaces we think of as part of every hospital. Rather they were small and very crowded; the bed linen was of the coarsest, there might be a smoky soft-coal stove in the center of the room, the various rigs for fractured limbs were homemade and crude, and a high standard of cleanliness was practically impossible. Still the work of healing progressed very efficiently, and no doubt the wounded Chinese soldier thought himself living in absolute luxury. The story is told of one soldier who had been badly wounded early in the struggle, and at last had been healed after months in the hospital. When informed that he was to be discharged, however, he produced a pistol from under his pillow and resisted fiercely every effort to oust him. Finally the Chinese shot him, and as the doctor telling the story vexedly put it—“they undid the work of months.”
As the undeclared war grew in its intensity and began to spread over the country, the vessels of the Yangtze Patrol found their work load steadily growing. The little fleet of gunboats had to cover 1,300 miles of river, from Woosung at the seacoast to Chungking but 400 miles from Tibet. Every town with American nationals had to be visited and lists carefully checked from time to time. Contact was maintained also with the nationals in the interior near these towns. At Chungking, it was rather a problem to keep contact with the Americans scattered throughout the vastness and inaccessibility of Szechwan Province, but the efficient Chinese Postal Service helped make it possible.
These nationals comprised missionaries, physicians, press representatives, employees and agents of various commercial organizations, and a scattering of other persons. One lone American was far in the interior of Szechwan sinking a salt well for the Chinese Salt Gabelle. He had never been out of his native Pennsylvania until he was sent to China for this job, so every effort was made to keep track of him.
Navigation of the river in the summer and early fall presented many interesting difficulties as the ships carried out their mission. The swift current heavily laden with earth will silt up anchors in an amazingly short time and many are the anchors that steamers and war vessels perforce have left behind buried in the river bottom. At Nanking anchors had to be “sighted” once every 24 hours and even then they often broke ground very grudgingly. At Hankow a period of 48 hours was presumed to be the limit. Inasmuch as the ships usually rode to two anchors, the job of sighting anchors and re-anchoring every day or so indeed became a nuisance.
The merchant ships and the British gunboats had developed a technique in dealing with an embedded anchor which they claimed was never failing. They knocked out the ends of an oil drum and slipped the cylinder down over the cable until it hit bottom. They claimed that then the current did the rest; scouring out around or through the drum until the anchor was free enough to weigh. There was no demonstration of this method observed, however, and luckily there was no occasion for its use.
At Hankow another problem was the crazy jumble of currents, countercurrents, and “chow water” for which the Han River was mainly responsible. This goodsized stream poured into the Yangtze at a right angle, just above the anchorages, and its current mixed with the swift current of the Yangtze to form a rather difficult and bothersome situation. In midstream the Yangtze current was 5 to 6 knots; at the bank there was a countercurrent of 3 to 4 knots; and in between were currents of all rates and directions.
An anchorage in midstream was undesirable because of the difficulty and danger of boating; an anchorage nearer the bank was undesirable because the ship would “weathercock” with wide and rapid swings in the crosscurrents. Therefore in anchoring it was often necessary to try several places before a spot could be found where the straight current was not too swift and the crosscurrent not too violent. The swirling currents about the steamship landings made going alongside a very unpredictable maneuver, and must have made steamer captains’ lives a misery. Almost every time it was a long-drawn-out operation for them; and sometimes the large steamers spent hours at it.
The huge log rafts coming down the river were ever a source of worry to an anchored vessel. Practically out of control in the swift current these unwieldy masses were things to be given a wide berth by a vessel under way, but an anchored vessel was helpless before them. Several times have rafts swept down broadside upon a ship and, parting its anchor chains, have carried the helpless craft downstream until perhaps by luck and furious effort the ship could work clear. The good ship Oahu had an experience of this kind at Hankow. Luckily the raft was one of the smaller kind, but the wild yells of warning, the splintering, shuddering crash, and the continuing splintering, grinding racket as the logs rolled and piled high against the ship’s bow, with the shrieking coolies clambering desperately over them as if on a treadmill; all made up something that was hair raising enough.
Fortunately the two taut anchor chains had taken the brunt of the collision and fortunately also both anchors dragged, instead of the cables parting. The ship started downstream stern first; the hand steering gear was manned and she was kept in the stream and clear of other ships until steam could be raised. This was done in a few minutes, and then by very cautious use of the screws, the hacking of as many of the raft lashings as could be reached, and the assistance of boats from other vessels present, the mess was finally swung clear, and it went careening downstream to the accompaniment of loud cries from 15 or 20 sampan coolies who were at the scene. These ever watchful freebooters had been hovering about until the logs were clear, and now they were following the tangled mass downstream, making hay while the sun shone, and fastening on to every log they could reach.
Seagoing on the Yangtze had other novel and sometimes disturbing experiences to offer. The first trip up through the Yangtze Gorges to Chungking was one of these. Steaming through narrow rock- bound passages, with currents that run in every direction, that boil suddenly underfoot, that whirl in the wildest manner, that carry the ship bodily sideways, while the Chinese quartermaster spins the wheel rapidly back and forth in response to the finger signals of the pilot, is something that keeps a ship commander just a little bit tense. Heading directly sometimes for the most terrifying pile of rocks, only to be set sideways and heading clear but a few yards away as the wily pilot takes advantage of every current, is not conducive to equanimity on his part.
On the upper river and through the gorges the war was evident, though in reduced degree. The upbound steamers carried capacity loads of Chinese, manifestly those with sufficient means to flee far into the interior; and many of the downbound ships were crammed with troops. Nevertheless the upbound junks were still being hauled painfully over the rapids, with the teams of 40 or 50 naked “trackers” leaning hard against their harness and planting each foot down in unison with the notes of their hauling chanty. The downbound junks still came rushing down, broadside on, with the 30 rowers laboring furiously at their long oars and the “tokung” pulling manfully on his huge bow-sweep, as they zigzagged from bank to bank.
At Chungking there was the usual water-front bedlam but not nearly as loud or continuous as that at the lower river ports. Also there were no swarms of poor refugees. The water bearers and other coolies still toiled up the hundreds of steps at the city gates, carrying back-breaking loads all day long. The Szechwanese soldiers were all about, in large numbers, with their straw hats, shorts, and sandals.
On the Lungmenhao side of the river where the gunboats anchored, the troops were constantly passing in single file along the narrow footpaths in the steep banks, and as they marched they sang and shouted in unison. Our interpreter gravely informed us that “the soldiers shout slagons to show they are not sad.”
The war waxed in length and ferocity as winter approached, and slowly but surely the struggle moved up the Yangtze toward the Chinese capital. The boom or blockade at Kiangyin was pierced; next was overcome the blockade at Mud Fort. The gunboats shuttled rapidly back and forth covering the most likely danger spots as the situation constantly changed. Americans directly in the path of the storm were evacuated and carried to safer places. The ships steamed many miles in icy rain and high winds, and through that vast monotony of brown mud which makes the Chinese winter landscape the very acme of dreariness.
The climax was reached as Nanking fell. That fateful Sunday the radio of our gunboat at Nanking suddenly ceased in the midst of a message. Throughout that afternoon and night then there was nothing but ominous silence despite the frantic efforts to make contact with her again. It was the next morning before we learned that the Yangtze Patrol had been thrust from the side lines into the combat at last, and in a manner shocking in its barbarity. The little vessel had gone down fighting, and literally with colors flying. She had met an unprecedented and horrible situation in a fashion that added something to navy traditions, and made the rest of us just a little bit proud of her.