Red Star over China (46 page)

Back in Yu Wang again, I found the troops celebrating with a melon feast the radio news from south Kansu that a whole division of Ma Hung-kuei's Chinese troops had turned over to Chu Teh's Fourth Front Red Army. Li Tsung-yi, the commander of this Kuomintang division, had been sent to impede Chu Teh's march to the North. His younger officers, among whom were secret Communists, led an uprising and took some 3,000 troops, including a battalion of cavalry, to join the Reds near Lung Hsi. It was a big blow to the Generalissimo's defenses in the South, and hastened the northward advance of the two southern armies.

Two days later two of the three divisions of Hsu Hai-tung's Fifteenth Army Corps were prepared to move again, one column toward the South, to break open a path for Chu Teh, and the other to the West, and the valley of the Yellow River. Bugles began sounding at about three in the morning, and by six o'clock the troops were already marching. I was my
self returning to Yu Wang Pao that morning with two Red officers who were reporting to P'eng Teh-huai, and I left the city by the south gate with Hsu Hai-tung and his staff, marching toward the end of the long column of troops and animals that wound like a gray dragon across the interminable grasslands, as far as you could see.

The big army left the city quietly, except for the bark of bugles that never ceased, and gave an impression of efficient command. Plans for the march had been completed days earlier, I was told; every detail of the road had been examined, the enemy's concentrations were all carefully charted on maps prepared by the Reds themselves, and guards had stopped all travelers from moving across the lines (which the Reds permitted, to encourage trade, except during battles or troop movements), and now they went ahead unknown to the Kuomintang troops, as later surprise captures of enemy outposts were to prove.

With this army I saw no camp followers except thirty or more wild Kansu greyhounds who ran in a closed pack, ranging back and forth across the plain in chase of an occasional distant gazelle or a prairie hog. They barked joyously and scrapped in excellent humor and evidently liked going to war. Many of the soldiers carried their pets along with them. Several had little monks on leashes of string; one had a slate-colored pet pigeon perched on his shoulder; some had little white mice; and some had rabbits. Was this an army? From the youth of the warriors, and the bursts of song that rang down the long line, it seemed more like a prep school on a holiday excursion.

A few
li
beyond the city an order was suddenly given for a practice air-raid defense. Squads of soldiers left the road and melted into the tall grass, donning their big wide camouflage hats made of grass, and their grass shoulder capes. Machine guns (they had no antiaircraft) were pitched at angles on grassy knolls beside the road in hopeful anticipation of a low-flying target. In a few moments that whole dragon had simply been swallowed up in the landscape, and you could not distinguish men from the numerous clumps of bunch grass. Only the mules, camels, and horses remained visible on the road, and aviators might have taken these for ordinary commercial caravans. The cavalry (which was then in the vanguard, out of sight) had to take it in the neck, however, their only possible precautionary measure being to seek cover if it was available, otherwise merely to scatter as widely as possible, but always remaining mounted. Unmounted during an air raid, these Mongolian ponies were impossible to manage, and a whole regiment could be thrown into complete disorder. The first command to a cavalry unit at the drone of airplanes was
“Shangma!”
(“Mount horse!”)

The maneuver having been pronounced satisfactory, we marched on.

Li Chiang-lin had been right. The Reds' good horses were all at the front. Their cavalry division was the pride of the army, and every man aspired to promotion to it. They were physically the pick of the army, mounted on about 3,000 beautiful Ninghsia ponies, fine fleet animals taller and stronger than the Mongolian ponies of North China, with sleek flanks and well-filled buttocks. Most of them had been captured from Ma Hung-kuei and Ma Hung-ping, but three whole battalions of horses had been taken in a battle nearly a year before with General Ho Chu-kuo, commander of Nanking's First Cavalry Army, including one battalion of all-white animals and one of all-black. They were the nucleus of the First Red Cavalry.

I rode with the Red cavalry several days in Kansu—or more precisely, I walked with it. They lent me a fine horse with a captured Western saddle, but at the end of each day I felt that I had been giving the horse a good time instead of the contrary. This was because our battalion commander was so anxious not to tire his four-legged charges that we two-legged ones had to lead horse three or four
li
for every one we rode. I concluded that anyone who qualified for this man's cavalry had to be a nurse, not a
mafoo,
and an even better walker than rider. I paid them due respect for kindness to animals—no common phenomenon in China—but I was glad to disengage myself and get back to freelance movement of my own, in which occasionally I could actually ride a horse.

I had been grumbling mildly about this to Hsu Hai-tung, and I suspect he decided to play a joke on me. To return to Yu Wang Pao he lent me a splendid Ninghsia pony, strong as a bull, that gave me one of the wildest rides of my life. My road parted with the Fifteenth Army Corps near a big fort in the grassland. There I bade Hsu and his staff good-by. Shortly afterwards I got on my borrowed steed, and from then on it was touch and go to see which of us reached Yu Wang Pao alive.

The trouble with that ride was the wooden Chinese saddle, so narrow that I could not sit in the seat, but had to ride on my inner thighs the whole distance, while the short, heavy iron stirrups cramped my legs.

The road lay level across the plain for over 50
li.
In that whole distance we got down to a walk just once. We raced at a steady gallop for the last five miles, and at the finish swept up the main street of Yu Wang Pao with my companions trailing far behind. Before P'eng's headquarters I slithered off and examined my mount, expecting him to topple over in a faint. He was puffing very slightly and had a few beads of sweat on him, but was otherwise quite unruffled, the beast.

One morning I climbed the wide, thick, yellow wall of Yu Wang Pao, from the top of which you could look down thirty feet and see at a glance a score of different and somehow incongruously prosaic and intimate tasks being pursued below. It was as if you had pried off the lid of the city. A big section of the wall was being demolished. Walls were impediments to guerrilla warriors like the Reds, who endeavored to come to battle with an enemy in open country and, if they failed there, not to waste men in an exhausting defense of a walled city, where they could be endangered by blockade or annihilation, but to withdraw and let the enemy put himself in that position. The broken wall simplified their work if and when they were strong enough to attempt a reoccupation of the city.

Halfway around the crenellated battlement I came upon a squad of buglers—at rest for once, I was glad to observe, for their plangent calls had been ringing incessantly for days. They were all Young Vanguards, mere children, and I assumed a somewhat fatherly air toward one to whom I stopped and talked. He wore tennis shoes, gray shorts, and a faded gray cap with a dim red star on it. But there was nothing faded about the bugler under the cap: he was rosy-faced and had bright shining eyes. How homesick he must be, I thought. I was soon disillusioned. He was no mama's boy, but already a veteran Red. He told me that he was fifteen, and had joined the Reds in the South four years ago.

“Four years!” I exclaimed incredulously. “Then you must have been only eleven when you became a Red? And you made the Long March?”

“Right,” he responded with comical swagger. “I have been a
hung-chun
for four years.”

“Why did you join?” I asked.

“My family lived near Changchow, in Fukien. I used to cut wood in the mountains, and in the winter I went there to collect bark. I often heard the villagers talk about the Red Army. They said it helped the poor people, and I liked that. Our house was very poor. We were six people, my parents and three brothers, older than I. We owned no land. Rent ate more than half our crop, so we never had enough. In the winter we cooked bark for soup and saved our grain for planting in the spring. I was always hungry.

“One year the Reds came very close to Changchow. I climbed over the mountains and went to ask them to help our house because we were very poor. They were good to me. They sent me to school for a while, and I had plenty to eat. After a few months the Red Army captured Changchow, and went to my village. All the landlords and moneylenders and officials were driven out. My family was given land and did not have to pay the tax collectors and landlords any more. They were happy and they were proud of me. Two of my brothers joined the Red Army.”

“Where are they now?”

“Now? I don't know. When we left Kiangsi they were with the Red Army in Fukien; they were with Fang Chih-min. Now I don't know.”

“Did the peasants like the Red Army?”

“Like the Red Army, eh? Of course they liked it. The Red Army gave them land and drove away the landlords, the tax collectors, and the exploiters.” (These “little devils” all had their Marxist vocabulary.)

“But really, how do you
know
they liked the Reds?”

“They made us a thousand, ten thousands, of shoes, with their own hands. The women made uniforms for us, and the men spied on the enemy. Every home sent sons to our Red Army. That is how the
lao-pai-hsing
treated us.”

Scores of youngsters like him were with the Reds. The Young Vanguards were organized by the Communist Youth League, and altogether, according to the claims of Fang Wen-p'ing, secretary of the CYL, there were then some 40,000 in the Northwest soviet districts. There must have been several hundred with the Red Army alone: a “model company” of them was in every Red encampment. They were youths between twelve and seventeen (really eleven to sixteen by foreign count
^*
), and they came from all over China. Many of them, like this little bugler, had survived the
hardships of the march from the South. Many had joined the Red Army during its expedition to Shansi.

The Young Vanguards worked as orderlies, messboys, buglers, spies, radio operators, water carriers, propagandists, actors,
mafoos
, nurses, secretaries, and even teachers. I once saw such a youngster, before a big map, lecturing a class of new recruits on world geography. Two of the most graceful child dancers I had ever seen were Young Vanguards in the dramatic society of the First Army Corps, and had marched from Kiangsi.

One might wonder how they stood such a life. Hundreds must have died or been killed. In the filthy jail in Sianfu there were over 200 of them, captured doing espionage or propaganda, or as stragglers unable to keep up with the army on its march. But their fortitude was amazing, and their loyalty to the Red Army was the intense and unquestioning loyalty of the very young.

Most of them wore uniforms too big for them, with sleeves dangling to their knees and coats dragging nearly to the ground. They washed their hands and faces three times a day, they claimed, but they were always dirty, their noses were usually running, and they were often wiping them with a sleeve, and grinning. The world nevertheless was theirs: they had enough to eat, they had a blanket each, the leaders even had pistols, and they wore red bars, and broken-peaked caps a size or more too large, but with the red star. They were often of uncertain origin: many could not remember their parents, many were escaped apprentices, some had been slaves,
^*
most of them were runaways from huts with too many mouths to feed, and all of them had made their own decisions to join. Sometimes a whole group of youngsters had run off to the Reds together.

Many stories of courage were told of them. They gave and asked no quarter as children, and many had actually participated in battles. It was said that in Kiangsi, after the main Red Army left, hundreds of Young Vanguards and Young Communists fought beside adult partisans, and even made bayonet charges—so that the White soldiers laughingly said they could grab their bayonets and pull them into their trenches, they were so small and light. Many of the captured “Reds” in Chiang's reform schools for bandits in Kiangsi were youths from ten to fifteen years old.

Perhaps the Vanguards liked the Reds because among them they were treated like human beings probably for the first time. They ate and lived like men; they seemed to take part in everything; they considered themselves any man's equal. I never saw one of them struck or bullied. They were certainly “exploited” as orderlies and messboys (and it was
surprising how many orders starting at the top were eventually passed on to some Young Vanguard), but they had their own freedom of activity, too, and their own organization to protect them. They learned games and sports, they were given a crude schooling, and they acquired a faith in simple Marxist slogans—which in most cases meant to them simply helping to shoot a gun against the landlords and masters of apprentices. Obviously it was better than working fourteen hours a day at the master's bench, and feeding him, and emptying his “defile-mother's” night-bowl.

I remember one such escaped apprentice I met in Kansu who was nicknamed the Shansi Wa-wa—the Shansi Baby. He had been sold to a shop in a town near Hung T'ung, in Shansi, and when the Red Army came he had stolen over the city wall, with three other apprentices, to join it. How he had decided that he belonged with the Reds I did not know, but evidently all of Yen Hsi-shan's anti-Communist propaganda, all the warnings of his elders, had produced exactly the opposite effect from that intended. He was a fat rolypoly lad with the face of a baby, and only twelve, but he was quite able to take care of himself, as he had proved during the march across Shansi and Shensi and into Kansu. When I asked him why he had become a Red he said: “The Red Army fights for the poor. The Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should any man not want to become a Red soldier?”