标题: 1926.11 南京: 东方的杰作 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-6-16 19:26 标题: 1926.11 南京: 东方的杰作 Oriental Battlepieces
By Eleanor Lattimore
NOVEMBER 1926 ISSUE
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I. THIRD-CLASS TRAVEL
TRAVELING third class in China is an uncomfortable process, and in war time it is little short of an ordeal. Then inducements must be great indeed that lure one into a train.
I was lured once last winter to attempt a trip to Nanking, and fortune favored me. I had spent the night in the station master’s office in Tientsin. He had told me that the train up from Nanking would probably be in sometime during the night and that as soon as it arrived it would start back again; and as the station was full of rowdy soldiers he had hospitably offered to let me wait in his office, had swept pens, ink, and papers from a long desk in the corner so that I could roll up in my fur coat and attempt to sleep, and promised to wake me when the train arrived.
All night the office was bedlam — messages pouring in from military officials demanding a private train to go here or so many troop trains to be sent there, officers themselves in clanking swords coming in to curse the station master because a certain troop train was not ready on the track or to complain insolently that a private car had not been properly arranged, until I marveled that any attempt at all was made to continue ordinary passenger service.
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About five in the morning the Nanking express pulled in, having taken nearly five days to make what was ordinarily a thirty-five-hour trip. The station master sent a clerk with me to the train, from which bleary, weary, and disheveled passengers were pouring, rejoicing to have at last arrived. Hurrying the length of the train, we found one third-class compartment car, a relic of the Blue Express. The clerk helped me into an empty compartment and admonished me not on any account to leave my seat or I should lose it. Whereupon I rolled up in my steamer rug and went to sleep.
When I awoke the train was jolting along and the compartment was full. There were several women, two with babies, and an old gentleman who had removed his long silk coat and was carefully folding it, leaving him feeling more comfortable and at home in his gray padded trousers and short black jacket. As I fell asleep again he was taking a noisy drink of tea from the spout of a teapot.
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We jogged along all that day, stopping interminably at stations to wait for troop trains to pass and getting farther and farther behind schedule. Late in the afternoon I was just dropping off to sleep again when we stopped at a station and I heard a great bustle in the aisle. The compartment next to ours was being cleared out for some new passengers. A guard looked at my ticket. He looked at the tickets of the others in the compartment, and three of the women who were not going all the way to Nanking were put out with their babies and their bundles into a crowded car behind.
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We stayed an hour at that station for much switching about of cars and engines. The new passengers seemed to have been shaken down into their places, and no one had come into our compartment. But I did n’t breathe freely until the bell rang for the train to start. Then curiosity got the better of me and I went out into the aisle to see what important people had caused all the commotion. I had just come out of the door when a fat, pompous little man in civilian clothes emerged from the next compartment. He smiled and bowed and, fumbling inside his silk jacket, produced a large calling card, with Chinese printing on one side and English on the other.
‘My name Wu. I brigadier general,’ he said ostentatiously, pointing to the name and title on the card. ‘I go to Nanking. You also go. We go very quick. Other cars not go.’
And sure enough, we were pulling out of the station and leaving all the other cars of our train sitting on a siding. I never knew how long it took them to reach Nanking, but our one car, attached in foolish solitary grandeur to the engine and carrying the retinue of the important little brigadier general who for some reason needed to get to Nanking in disguise, forged ahead. We no longer stopped at stations; troop trains waited on sidings for us to pass. Heat mysteriously appeared in the once cold pipes; I no longer needed my coat, and the old man in our compartment shed another jacket. We had room to lie down for a good night’s sleep. And, the involuntary beneficiaries of the power of the military, we arrived in Nanking an hour ahead of time instead of three days late.
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Inducements to travel proved great again this spring, and I set out to journey from Peking to Kweihwa, on the border of Mongolia, during this year’s war against the Kuominchun. Even to set out was more difficult than I had anticipated. For several weeks the other lines out of Peking, to Hankow and to Tientsin, and even the little railway into the Western Hills, had run no passenger trains, but trains on the line north from Kalgan had continued to be more or less regular.
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I finally found a friend who had a friend who knew the station master, and the station master promised to tell his friend to tell my friend to tell me when a train would leave. The next midnight word came that a train had come down from Kalgan and would probably start back about nine in the morning. I packed, collected a Mongol girl whom I had promised to take as far as Kalgan, and reached the station at eight. There was the train, nearly full already. After I had deposited girl and baggage in the least crowded car and stood in line for half an hour to buy the tickets, I was dismayed to find that the train was going only to Kalgan, about a third as far as I wanted to go. I trusted to luck, however, that there would be another train on from Kalgan, and bought the tickets.
When I returned to the train I found our car jammed full. A large family of Mongols had just crowded through the door, plunked their bedding rolls on the floor, and sat on them in such a position that the door could be neither opened nor closed, that the conductor could not even enter, much less walk, that the man who made the tea could not budge to deliver it, that the boy who sold cigarettes and pink sugar candy could not find space to stand to call his wares. There they sat, dressed in dirty gay red and yellow and purple and orange clothes, the women with gorgeous headdresses and rings and bracelets of heavy silver and coral and decked in extra bits of finery they had purchased on their visit to Peking, the men with gilt and yellow caps and sashes hung with pipes and tobacco pouches and pipe cleaners, knives, chopsticks, flints, and tinder boxes. The conductor, the guard, the tea man, and the candy boy all tried to move them into another car, but there they sat like potatoes, affecting neither to listen nor to understand. The louder and angrier grew the voices of the conductor and the guard and the tea man and the candy boy, the more dumb and placid grew the expressions on the faces of the Mongols, until finally the attendants were driven to the use of force, and one by one they shoved them out of the car on to the platform and dumped their luggage after them.
The Mongol girl with me regarded all this with a placid smile. She was not dressed in Mongol clothes, but wore a homely modern Chinese cotton coat and felt herself superior to her barbaric countrywomen. Besides, her father was a prince in his tribe, and although when she had left Mongolia she had had no nose at all, she had been to the foreign hospital in Peking and plastic surgery had presented her with a new one. It was rather sketchy and amateurish, and it had only one nostril; still it was a nose. When it was healing she had been given a complicated gauze bandage which tied around her head with tapes. The nose was quite healed now, but she liked the bandage. When she looked in the mirror it made her laugh; and no one else had anything like it at all. It was getting a little dirty, but still she continued to wear it. It gave her a feeling of distinction. She could speak very little Chinese, and of course no English, though one of the internes at the hospital had taught her to say ‘Top hole’ when the nurse asked her how she was in the morning, and she used this on every occasion.
All that afternoon the journey was delightful, and it did n’t seem to matter how late we got to Kalgan. It did n’t even matter that Mongols never wash, for a warm spring breeze blew through the open windows to keep the air fresh and sometimes even fragrant with spring blossoms. The unusually slow pace of the train and the long stops were pleasant as we rolled along through blossoming orchards and between long lines of vividly new green willow trees, and up beyond Nankow we had glimpses of the Great Wall climbing up over the ridges of the bare hills which loomed high above us. And, for contrast, beyond it were gentle slopes of orchards and a little brook and the glow of the sunset on them all.
The trip from Peking to Kalgan usually takes about six hours, but it was already dark and we were only halfway there, and the passengers were philosophically disposing themselves for the night. New Nose stretched out on the part of the bench where we had both been sitting, with the bundle which composed her luggage as a pillow under her head. I climbed up into the wide baggage rack, put one suitcase under my head and the other at my feet so that they could n’t be stolen without waking me, and tried to go to sleep.
At four in the morning we finally arrived at Kalgan. My instructions had been to drop New Nose at the station, but she was terrified at arriving in the night and assured me that she did not know where to go. On inquiring I found that a train would probably leave for Kweihwa at seven that morning. I knew that there was a small hotel at Kalgan kept by Americans and I determined to try to find it, in order to leave New Nose with someone who would see that she found the friends who were to take her the next lap of her journey, and to rest and wash and get something to eat in preparation for the next lap of mine.
I explained to ricksha coolies that I wished to go to the foreign hotel. They appeared to understand perfectly. After pulling us for twenty minutes through narrow deserted streets lined with mud-walled houses weird in the light of the waning moon, they stopped before a great black gate. I had my doubts about its being the right gate because there was no name on it, but we knocked and finally aroused the gateman, who looked at us through a crack and disappeared. After several minutes the gate swung open and out tumbled a tousled sleepy Russian, who spit a torrent of explosive language at us and slammed the gate again. He was a foreigner and he may have kept a hotel, but it was n’t the hotel we wanted. The ricksha men had another bright idea in vain, and then another, but after knocking on several wrong doors and waking irate gatemen they finally managed to land us at the right place. By this time it was six o’clock and light, so all I could do was to leave New Nose in the care of the gateman, wash hastily, and return to the station, where I found my train already full to overflowing.
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I blew up my air cushion and prepared to make the best of a bad seat, my fellow passengers watching my every move with frank curiosity. After they had all become quite accustomed to what I looked like they began to talk to me. ‘China is bad, but America is very good,’ said an old workman, and I knew that the answer to that was, ‘Oh, no indeed; America is bad, but China is very good.’ ‘Ai, she is polite,’ they all nodded, and continued the conversation. ‘ Is America warmer or colder than China?’ ‘America is better than England. Americans are more polite to China. England is bad.’ ‘Yes. I heard,’ said one of the soldiers, ‘that Americans also do not like the English and that you had a revolution to free yourselves from their oppression.’ He spoke as if this had been a recent occurrence which somehow supplied a bond between us.
Doubtless inspired by the trend of the conversation, the two students across the aisle, who had evidently had a mission school somewhere in their past, began to sing softly, —
‘Jesus loves me, this I know,
(We will overcome the English!)
For the Bible tells me so;
(We will overcome the French!)
Little ones to him belong,
(We will overcome the Americans!)
We are weak, but he is strong.
(We will overcome all the foreigners!)’
By dark we were only halfway to Kweihwa and my seat had become so unbearably hard that I could scarcely face the prospect of a night on it. There was no room to stretch out, and the baggage racks in this car were far too narrow to sleep on. At about eight o’clock we stopped at a station and I went out to investigate the other cars in the hope of finding somewhere enough room to sleep. Each car I came to was as crowded as the next, but there was a half-empty baggage car the bare floor of which looked so inviting that I made bold to beg the guard to let me occupy a corner of it for the night. After several minutes’ parley he consented, hurried me in, and sent for my luggage. Delighted at the prospect of a good night, I immediately rolled up in my rug and went to sleep.
Alas, I had not slept long when I was awakened and gradually became aware of men standing over me and talking about me, and of a terrific clatter and chatter all about. I was terrified until I remembered where I was and realized that the men were only discussing whether or not to awaken me in order to ask me to move. I rose immediately and saw that the car had filled with soldiers who, when they had found it empty, had immediately appropriated it. I knew then that there would be no sleep that night, so I climbed on top of some sacks and made myself as comfortable as possible.
The soldiers were of course all curiosity at seeing a foreign woman, and immediately began discussing whether I was American or Russian. ‘There are four kinds of foreigners,’ proclaimed a soldier sitting on a high packing box and eager to exhibit his superior knowledge. ‘There are Americans, Japanese, English, and Russians. Japan is the largest foreign country, but I knew a man once who went to Russia. He traveled for days on a train and was so cold he nearly froze to death. This woman is probably an American. At any rate she is a Christian. All foreigners are Christians. A Christian is one who neither drinks nor smokes.’ Whereupon they all fell to discussing whether or not all foreigners were Christians, as several of them had seen foreigners smoking. It might be that some Christians smoked. Still, General Feng did not allow his soldiers to smoke because he was a Christian. The discussion was getting over their heads. And it seemed that some of them did smoke in spite of rules to the contrary, as cigarettes were pulled from pockets and passed from hand to hand. And then they started to sing, first a Chinese tune, then ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ and a Chinese tune again.
The soldiers sang and chattered all night long and I stood for hours at the door of the car watching the moonlight on the high hills. Finally, at five, we arrived at Kweihwa, and I spied the servant who had come to meet me peering up and down the train with a lantern in his hand. He had been at the station all night and still clung to his lantern, though it was light by now.
I may add that I expected to return to Peking in a week, everyone having assured me that the troop movements would be over in a few days. But no one can prognosticate about Chinese wars. In a few days the trains stopped altogether. I have been in Kweihwa for two months. And sometimes I wonder if I would n’t rather spend my life here than travel back in a third-class train in war time.
II. WHERE THE CARAVANS START
The China that we are living in now seems as far a cry from the storied China of emperors and poets and the pursuit of ancient learning as does the America of Western frontier towns in the days Zane Grey writes of from the America of Emerson or Thoreau. For we are on China’s frontier, on the edge of the desert, in a land of horses and camels and the barter of sheep and wool and furs.
It is from this ‘Blue City,’as the Mongols call it, that the camel caravans have, since the beginning of history, started on their long trek across the desert to Chinese Turkestan and the west, carrying out tea and silk and sundry trade goods and returning with wool and skins and fur. It is one of the oldest trade routes in the world, continuing much the same to-day as it was two thousand years ago, and on the wealth of its cargo depends largely the prosperity of all this northwest country.
Kweihwa, as the Chinese call the city, was for centuries a part of Mongolia and was not counted as Chinese until the advent of the Manchus in the sixteenth century. At that time the Manchus built a new city a mile or so away from the old Kweihwa, and, in spite of its now being three hundred years old, it is still called the ‘New City,’ and its four walls look as strong as if they had been built three or thirty instead of three hundred years ago. With the fall of the Manchu dynasty, however, the glory of the New City has departed. Of the wall of the old city only one crumbling gate remains, but the city itself is far the more picturesque of the two, as it is the lively centre of the caravan trade and contains all the inns, shops, markets, and amusements incident to it.
When I first came to Kweihwa I marveled most at the camels. The streets were full of camels. The country all about was strung with camels, long caravans coming down from passes in the hills or smaller groups of three or four being led about the countryside for exercise or water. And in the town, through the half-open massive wooden doors cut into high brick walls which in Peking would reveal a flowery courtyard or a vine-clad moon gate, one here sees the wide bare clay-floored courts of camel inns with shaggy camels lying or standing about and sometimes an old-fashioned camel cart.
One of our first excursions was to the camel market, which was held every morning in an open space before a crumbling Lama temple. There were hundreds of the gorgeous great beasts, still shaggy in their winter coats and forming an unforgettable picture against the red walls and wide curlyroofed gate of the old temple, for the shape of a camel, with the great sweeping lines of its huge body and the supercilious tilt of its proud and placid head, makes it a most impressive animal.
The owners of the camels, or their representatives who had brought them there for sale, were quite as interesting as the beasts — a merry collection of rascals, shrewd and unscrupulous, and picturesque in their baggy padded clothes. The buying and selling, like all other business transactions in Kweihwa, were done through brokers — a most useful scheme, since slandering the owner’s wares, accusing him of swindling, or imputing niggardly qualities to the purchaser can be accomplished with far more freedom and abandon through a middleman. Moreover much ‘face’ is saved all around if, instead of both parties humiliating themselves by having to alter their original offers, the owner’s broker can say to the purchaser’s broker, ‘The owner has magnanimously consented to let you have them at so much less than his original price,’ and the purchaser’s broker can say, ‘I have with difficulty persuaded my customer to increase his offer to so much.’
The ‘so much’ is never uttered, but is communicated by a mysterious system of wrist pressings, the bargainers’ clasped hands being entirely hidden under their long sleeves from the view of prying onlookers. By this means they ensure that business transactions carried on in a public market may be kept a private matter, and all about we saw lively bargaining going on beneath long sleeves. A good camel can be had now for the equivalent of fifty or sixty American dollars. One of the simplest ways by which one can tell a healthy camel is by the condition of his humps. If a camel is in good condition his humps are firm and upright, but if he is ill or underfed his humps flop limply to one side. The camels here are all the two-humped Bactrians of the type common in North China and Central Asia, and are larger and slower-going than their relatives, the dromedaries.
Most of the caravans from Kweihwa go straight across the Gobi Desert for 1500 miles to Barkul or Kuehengtze in eastern Chinese Turkestan. Fast camels can make the trip in seventy days, but the large caravans of heavily loaded freight camels sometimes take as long as five or six months, the custom being to make one round trip a year. An average caravan consists of 120 camels, each animal carrying about 280 catties or 375 pounds.
We often saw them going to or from the pass in a long line, tied nose to nose in groups of twenty, each group led by a bow-legged camel man, always shuffling along with his eyes on the ground, a habit acquired from long years of stolidly walking for endless dreary miles across the desert, accommodating his pace to the slow gait of the camels. And camel freight is the slowest freight in the world, as the animals travel only about two and a half miles an hour.
The last camel on each string wears a bell about two feet long, and the deep clang of these bells can usually be heard for an hour before the caravan comes into sight. The caravan is headed by black shaggy dogs that protect its encampments, and at the tail end rides the caravan bashi or leader, mounted high on a camel and armed with a heavy old blunderbuss.
Crossing the Gobi, the caravans usually camp during the day and travel at night, as the camels, which depend on the often scant desert grazing for their food, will not eat at night. They set out about five in the afternoon, travel all night, and pitch camp at daybreak. There are only three or four days during all of this long trip when it is not possible to find fresh water, though often it is necessary to dig deep into the sand for it.
My husband was making arrangements to join one of these caravans as a passenger, and this entailed long and circuitous discussions with representatives of camel transport firms. After long and tricky bargaining he finally came to an agreement. He was to be supplied with seven camels, one for himself to ride, one for Moses, his Chinese servant, and five to carry his luggage. They were to arrive in Kuchengtze within eighty days, and if they took longer a fine was to be paid of half a tael for every day they were late. His fuel and water were to be supplied and two pounds of flour apiece for himself and Moses. All other food for the journey he must carry himself, as there was no chance to obtain anything along the way, save for an occasional opportunity to shoot antelope or to buy a sheep from the Mongols.
Outfitting my husband for his journey proved an interesting task. We prepared large sacks of toasted bread like rusks and bought fat wicker flasks of vinegar and soya-bean sauce, dried onions, and canned goods from Peking. We went one day to the warehouse of a firm that sends many expeditions across the desert, and I have seldom seen so romantic a collection of junk as they have there for the outfitting of their caravans. We purchased a tripod and rough cooking utensils, felts to sleep on, and, best of all, a picturesque octagonal tent made of blue cotton bound in red, with a great scrolly design appliquéd on in white.
During these days of preparation we absorbed considerable information about the immense trade being carried on from Kweihwa, both with Outer Mongolia and with Chinese Turkestan. About twenty thousand camels leave Kweihwa for these two districts every year, seventy per cent of which go to Chinese Turkestan. They go out laden with brick and black tea from Hunan and Hupeh, pongee from Shantung, Hangchow silk, tobacco, paper, sugar, matches, and sundry articles. These goods are usually bartered for wool, fur, and skins, so that no money changes hands. The hide and wool dealers in Kweihwa sometimes stake the agents with the goods for barter in order to have an option on the wool that they bring back. This is risky business for the dealers, as there is no security for such stakes and unscrupulous agents are often known to disappear permanently from Kweihwa. Most business is done through verbal understandings, and a written contract is rarely seen.
The camels returning from Outer Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan are laden with the skins, fur, or wool of foxes, hares, bears, squirrels, goats, sheep, marmots, and camels. Dog skins and deer horns are brought from Mongolia, yak tails and rhinoceros horns are imported from Chinese Turkestan, as well as smaller quantities of medicines, raisins, apricots, melons, gold, quartz, and jade.
Until ten years ago caravans frequently suffered from the raids of bandits, but in 1916 the enterprising organization of Suiyuan merchants raised a protective corps of four hundred men, supported by taxes on incoming goods, and since then travelers have been well guarded.
All that I have written so far has been of the Kweihwa that we found when we arrived three months ago — a lively and prosperous trading centre, with goods pouring in from the west by camel transport and being sent on southward on the Peking-Suiyuan Railway. But to-day it is as a dead city, for its trading has completely stopped. No more goods are coming in from Mongolia or Turkestan, no more goods are being sent south on the railway, and what was caught here in transit is piled idle in the warehouses.
Our first indication of this sudden change came on the day of my husband’s departure for Chinese Turkestan. There had been many delays; one counts on delays in China. But at last the morning arrived when we heard the clang of camel bells and looked out of the window to see our very own camels filing into the courtyard, seven great gorgeous creatures. With them was a merry pigtailed camel man named Li, who marshaled the dunnage in a miraculously effective manner, slinging ropes about in a way to prove his statement that he had been assisting camels back and forth to Turkestan continuously for a vast number of years. And before we knew it they were loaded and filing out of our courtyard, accompanied by the noble Moses, carrying the teakettle.
I had expected to leave for Peking that same afternoon and had sent a servant to arrange for a cart to take me and my luggage to the station. To my dismay he returned with the news that there would be no train to Peking that day and probably none for several days. No one knew exactly why, except that it was on account of the civil war which has been dragging on for months between the various war lords of the republic for the control of the Peking government, and that it was probably the retreat of Feng Yu-hsiang’s soldiers from Peking that had blocked the railway.
I had been inconvenienced on other occasions in the past by Chinese wars stopping trains for several days at a time, and now I tried not to chafe at the delay. But I was rather dolefully unpacking when to my utter amazement my husband appeared at the door. At the entrance to the first pass into the hills his camels had been commandeered by soldiers and brought back to the yamen, where he learned that on that very morning an order had been issued by the military governor for the commandeering of three thousand camels to transport military supplies and that all the camels for miles around the countryside were being collected by the soldiers and police. All my husband’s pleas that he was a foreigner and that surely seven camels could make little difference to them when they were looking for so many proved of no avail, as most of the spring caravans had already left for the west and it would be a difficult task for them to collect three thousand very soon. Even Mongol-owned camels were being requisitioned — a drastic measure, since the Chinese are usually most careful not to offend the Mongols who contribute so largely to the prosperity of trade in Kweihwa.
This was two months ago, but the camels are not yet released and the trains are not yet running.
III. MARTIAL LAW
For three months we have been living among the soldiers of the Kuominchun on their last line of defense in China’s Northwest.
Most Chinese wars do not last long. The armies fight for a few months in the spring or fall, and nothing so effectively stops them as cold winter weather or a very hot summer. The fact that this present war has continued for nine months through a cold winter and into the beginning of a hot summer means that it is something new to be reckoned with. For more than a year the Peking government has been in the hands of a temporary compromise cabinet, while its fate has hung — as it has since the beginning of the republic, for that matter — on the manœuvres of the war lords who have been fighting for its control.
The present war, roughly speaking, is a combination of the chief tuchuns of China to eliminate Feng Yu-hsiang from their military chessboard. He originally came to power by betraying Wu Pei-fu, who was fighting against Chang Tso-lin. Then the ruling powers in China, hoping to get rid of him, induced him to take over the administration of the Northwest. Here, however, he built up his power until he was able to appear in national politics again by marching on Peking. His increasing power and his association with the New China and the Student Movement have appeared so serious a threat to the makeshift system of tuchuns or military governors by which all North China has been ruled since the death of Yuan Shih-kai that old enemies like Wu Pei-fu and Chang Tso-lin have united in an attempt to crush him, accusing him of betraying China to the Soviets.
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When this combined movement began, Feng Yu-hsiang was in occupation of Peking and continually threatened to extend his control down to the seacoast at Tientsin. The attack of the allies, however, forced him to withdraw behind the hills which at Nankow, thirty miles from Peking, shut off the northwest province from the North China plain. This was in April, and since then the war has developed into an effort to dislodge him by attacking him from Shansi through Tatung, which is at the centre of the PekingSuiyuan Railway, his only line of communication through the length of his territory, from Paotow on the Yellow River to Suiyuan, Kalgan, and Nankow.
Here in Kweihwa, only a few hours west on the railway from Tatung, around which the fighting has centred for the last two months, it has been almost impossible to keep in touch with the developments of the war, as all communications with the outside world have been cut off and so effective a censorship is enforced by the Kuominchun that little news leaks through. A few mails have struggled in, sent overland by cart by a long and roundabout route through Shansi, but the stray foreign newspapers that they have contained have been so many weeks old that as news they have lost all value. Chinese newspapers from the South have been rigidly kept out. Local newspapers are obviously retained, and everyone knows that the occasional official proclamations on the progress of the war are almost sure to be untrue.
Even without news, however, we are continuously conscious of the nearness of the war and of living under rigid martial law. The country swarms with soldiers. We continually hear them counting or singing as they march past on the road.
A Chinese soldier is an unmilitarylooking object. His baggy gray trousers are unshapely, the sleeves of his gray cotton jacket are usually shrunk half to his elbows, and his insignia are merely a ragged armband inevitably pinned on with a large safety pin. The spring style in Kuominchun headgear consists of a wrinkled and drooping cotton hat, which gives the wearer the appearance of a down-at-the-heels and very overgrown boy scout. Many of the soldiers, those trained for hand-tohand fighting, do not carry rifles, but are armed with Mauser pistols and huge swords, which they wear slung across their backs. These swords are known locally as ‘cheese-cutters’ and look as if they were made of tinfoil and came from a theatrical costumer’s, though in reality they are rather bloody weapons and evidently meant to hack with, as they are too wide and blunt to stab. To Westerners perhaps the most unmilitary in effect of all the Chinese soldiers are the buglers. At any hour of the day, but particularly at dawn and dusk, we hear them struggling pathetically to produce the Western bugle calls, always off the tune.
Chinese people are always afraid of soldiers. Moses, our Chinese servant, appeared one morning with a tale of a soldier who took from a food vendor some of the white cornstarch jelly the Chinese are fond of eating in the summer time, ate it, and then refused to pay him. The vendor naturally set up a hue and cry, which attracted the attention of a passing officer who saw that a soldier was involved in a fracas and came up to see what the trouble was. The vendor accused the soldier of having eaten the jelly and not paid for it, and the soldier insisted that he had eaten nothing. The officer crossquestioned them both and the trembling vendor still vowed that the jelly had been eaten, and the bystanders affirmed that he was telling the truth. ‘On your life?’ asked the officer. ‘On my life,’ insisted the vendor. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ said the officer, and ordered his bodyguard to rip open the stomach of the soldier with a ‘cheese-cutter.’ Then they looked carefully at the poor fellow’s gory insides, but could find nothing that looked like the white jelly, so in punishment for the false accusation the officer caused the execution of the food vendor, his wife, his mother, and his four children.
There are, however, comparatively few such stories about the soldiers of the Kuominchun, and they seem never to be reported from the place that one is in, but always from another place.
In contrast with other Chinese armies the discipline and esprit de corps of the Kuominchun seem a remarkable phenomenon and one which is largely due to the genius for organization and the understanding of human psychology possessed by Feng Yuhsiang. He has often been called a hypocrite by both Chinese and foreigners. There are many missionaries who support and believe in him implicitly, because he calls himself a Christian, because he has Bible classes and evangelists in his camps, and because his soldiers sing hymns and are not allowed to smoke or drink. Yet unprejudiced observers know that his policies and tactics are no more Christian than those of other war lords, and that his betrayal of Wu Pei-fu, by which he originally rose to power, was generally considered exceptionally underhanded.
His attitude toward opium affords an example of the way in which missionaries and others are sometimes deceived as to his Christian principles.
I have heard supposedly intelligent men praise the Christian general for his influence against the iniquitous opium traffic because he does not allow his soldiers to smoke it. And yet the Northwest, which he completely controls, is partly financed by revenue from opium. Here in Kweihwa the use, sale, and transport of opium are quite open. Opium pipes and lamps are sold everywhere on the streets and there are public inns where an opium smoke may be had for a few coppers. And this year, with the extra need of money, poppy growing has been not only licensed but encouraged.
But in spite of opium the Northwest is exceptionally well governed, and, whether he is a Christian or not, Feng Yu-hsiang is an exceedingly clever man. For certain it is that opium smoking does not make strong soldiers, nor do cigarettes or strong drink, while just as surely hymn singing does help in the building up of a loyal army. He has been intelligent enough to see the psychological value of the Christian ‘line,’ and he has used it to instill into the simple minds of his soldiers the Christian virtues of temperance and loyalty and patriotism, of contentment and submission and a hope for the hereafter, which have made them into a strong and powerful force. He pays them little and often that little is heavily in arrears, but since they are not allowed to smoke and drink there is little for which they need money, and to prevent them from pining for those forbidden pleasures he keeps them busy and happy with games and athletics and tree planting and hymn singing and thoughts about their souls. All this interest in their morals and their souls naturally inspires a loyalty which has gone a long way toward keeping up the morale of the men through retreats and defeats and exceedingly trying circumstances.
Whether Feng Yu-hsiang believes in Christianity or not, he has used it as an effective tool. And his other clever stroke has been the opportune championing of the cause of the ‘New China.’ When he was stranded high and dry, without political affiliations or a strong army or strategical territory, he had the astuteness to champion a growing movement when it needed a strong champion, and it has given him a backing which he could not otherwise have acquired. This connection, and his dependence on the supply of arms and ammunition from Russia, which also champions the New China, have naturally brought upon him the accusation of being Bolshevist. And the fact that he took up first with the Christians and then with the New China has earned him the reputation of being somewhat of a faddist or a crank. But it would seem that there is method in his madness and that he is shrewd enough to be a crank only when it pays him.
The Kuominchun has also earned for itself the reputation of being antiforeign. It would probably be truer to say that, being of the New China, its leaders are sensitive in regard to their dignity. If this dignity is recognized we have found them always friendly. It is true that our freedom has been hampered and that, together with the Chinese, we have felt the severity of their martial law. Other parties have continually made exceptions of foreigners, granting them special privileges and being afraid of restricting or displeasing them, and under such parties we might have fared better. Yet in spite of our own personal discomfort we cannot help having respect for a party that has the courage to rule firmly and without kowtowing to us because we happen to be foreigners.
东方的杰作
作者：Eleanor Lattimore
1926年11月号
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我们在那个车站呆了一个小时，换了很多车和引擎。新来的乘客似乎已经被摇到了自己的位置，没有人进入我们的车厢。但是，直到火车开动的铃声响起，我才自由呼吸。然后我的好奇心得到了满足，我走到过道上，想看看是什么重要人物引起了所有的骚动。我刚从门里出来，一个穿着便服的肥胖、浮夸的小个子男人从旁边的车厢里走了出来。他微笑着鞠了一躬，在他的丝绸外套里摸索着，拿出一张大的电话卡，一面印着中文，另一面印着英文。
'耶稣爱我，这我知道。
(我们将战胜英国人！）。
因为圣经这样告诉我。
(We will overcome the French!)
小孩子们属于他。
(We will overcome the Americans!)
我们是软弱的，但他是强大的。
(我们将战胜所有的外国人！)'
到了天黑，我们只走了一半的路程就到了桂花，而我的座位已经变得非常难受，我几乎无法面对在上面过夜的前景。没有空间可以伸展，而且这辆车的行李架太窄了，无法在上面睡觉。大约八点时，我们在一个车站停了下来，我出去调查其他车厢，希望能找到有足够空间睡觉的地方。我来到的每节车厢都和下一节车厢一样拥挤，但有一节半空的行李车厢，其光秃秃的地板看起来非常诱人，我大胆地请求警卫让我在其中的一个角落过夜。经过几分钟的交涉，他同意了，催促我进去，并让我去拿行李。我为今晚的美好前景感到高兴，立即卷起毯子睡觉了。