Red Star over China (38 page)

The consolidation of command of the First, Second, and Fourth Front Red armies had not yet occurred when I visited the front in August and September. Eight “divisions” of the First Front Red Army were then holding a line from the Great Wall in Ninghsia down to Kuyuan and Ping-liang in Kansu. A vanguard of the First Army Corps was moving southward and westward, to clear a road for Chu Teh, who was leading the Second and Fourth Front armies up from Sikang and Szechuan, breaking through a deep cordon of Nanking troops in southern Kansu. Yu Wang Pao, an ancient Mohammedan walled city in southeast Ninghsia, was headquarters of the First Front Army, and here I found its staff and Commander P'eng Teh-huai.
^*

P'eng's career as a “Red bandit” had begun almost a decade before, when he led an uprising in the Kuomintang army of the polygamous warlord-governor, General Ho Chien. P'eng had risen from the ranks and won admission to a military school in Hunan and later on to another school at Nanchang. After graduation he had quickly distinguished himself and secured rapid promotions. By 1927, when he was twenty-eight years old, he was already a brigade commander, and noted throughout the Hunanese army as the “liberal” officer who actually consulted his soldiers' committee.

P'eng's influence in the then left-wing Kuomintang, in the army, and in the Hunan military school were serious problems for Ho Chien. In
the winter of 1927 General Ho began a drastic purgation of leftists in his troops and launched the notorious Hunan “Peasant Massacre,” in which thousands of radical farmers and workers were killed as “Communists.” He hesitated to act against P'eng, however, because of his widespread popularity. It was a costly delay. In July, 1928, with his own famous First Regiment as nucleus, and joined by parts of the Second and Third regiments and the cadets of the military school, P'eng Teh-huai directed the P'ing Kiang Insurrection, which united with a peasant uprising and established the first Hunan Soviet Government.

Two years later P'eng had accumulated an “iron brotherhood” of about 8,000 followers, and this was the Fifth Red Army Corps. With this force he attacked and captured the great walled city of Changsha, capital of Hunan, and put to rout Ho Chien's army of 60,000 men—then mostly opium smokers. The Red Army held this city for ten days against counterattacks by combined Nanking-Hunan troops, but was finally forced to evacuate by greatly superior forces, including bombardment by foreign gunboats.

It was shortly afterwards that Chiang Kai-shek began his first “grand annihilation campaign” against the Red bandits. On the Long March of the southern Reds, P'eng Teh-huai was commander of the vanguard First Army Corps. He broke through lines of tens of thousands of enemy troops, captured vital points on the route of advance, and secured communications for the main forces, at last winning his way to Shensi and a refuge in the base of the Northwest soviets. Men in his army told me that he walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, frequently giving his horse to a tired or wounded comrade.

I found P'eng a gay, laughter-loving man, in excellent health except for a delicate stomach—the result of a week's forced diet of uncooked wheat grains and grass during the Long March, and of semipoisonous food, and of a few days of no food at all. A veteran of scores of battles, he had been wounded but once, and then only superficially.

I stayed in the compound where P'eng had his headquarters in Yu Wang Pao, and so I saw a great deal of him at the front. This headquarters, by the way—then in command of over 30,000 troops—was a simple room furnished with a table and wooden bench, two iron dispatch boxes, maps made by the Red Army, a field telephone, a towel and washbasin, and the
k'ang
on which his blankets were spread. He had only a couple of uniforms, like the rest of his men, and they bore no insignia of rank. One personal article of attire, of which he was childishly proud, was a vest made from a parachute captured from an enemy airplane shot down during the Long March.

We shared many meals together. He ate sparingly and simply, of the
same food his men were given—consisting usually of cabbage, noodles, beans, mutton, and sometimes bread. Ninghsia grew beautiful melons of all kinds, and P'eng was very fond of these. Your pampered investigator, however, found P'eng poor competition in the business of melon eating, but had to bow before the greater talents of one of the doctors on P'eng's staff, whose capacity had won him the nickname of Han Ch'ih-kua-ti (Han the Melon Eater).

Open, forthright, and undeviating in his manner and speech, quick in his movements, full of laughter and wit, P'eng was physically very active, an excellent rider, and a man of endurance. Perhaps this was partly because he was a nonsmoker and a teetotaler. I was with him one day during maneuvers of the Red Second Division when we had to climb a very steep hill. “Run to the top!” P'eng suddenly called out to his panting staff and me. He bounded off like a rabbit, and beat us all to the summit. Another time, when we were riding, he yelled out a similar challenge. In this way and others he gave the impression of great unspent energy.

P'eng retired late and arose early, unlike Mao Tse-tung, who retired late and also got up late. As far as I could learn, P'eng slept an average of only four or five hours a night. He never seemed rushed, but he was always busy. I remember the morning of the day the First Army Corps received orders to advance 200
li
to Haiyuan, in enemy territory: P'eng issued all the commands necessary before breakfast and came down to eat with me; immediately afterwards he started off on the road, as if for an excursion to the countryside, walking along the main street of Yu Wang Pao with his staff, stopping to speak to the Moslem priests who had assembled to bid him good-by. The big army seemed to run itself.

Government airplanes frequently dropped leaflets over Red lines offering from $50,000 to $100,000 for P'eng, dead or alive, but he had only one sentry on duty before his headquarters, and he sauntered down the streets of the city without any bodyguard. While I was there, when thousands of handbills had been dropped offering rewards for himself, Hsu Hai-tung, and Mao Tse-tung, P'eng Teh-huai ordered that they be preserved. They were printed on only one side, and there was a paper shortage in the Red Army. The blank side of these handbills was used later for printing Red Army propaganda.

P'eng was very fond of children, I noticed, and he was often followed by a group of them. Many youngsters, who acted as mess boys, buglers, orderlies, and grooms, were organized as regular units of the Red Army, in the groups called Shao-nien Hsien-feng-tui, or Young Vanguards. I often saw P'eng seated with two or three “little Red devils,” talking
seriously to them about politics or their personal troubles. He treated them with great dignity.

One day I went with P'eng and part of his staff to visit a small arsenal near the front, and to inspect the workers' recreation room, their own Lieh-ning Tang, or Lenin Club. There was a big cartoon, drawn by the workers, on one side of the room. It showed a kimonoed Japanese with his feet on Manchuria, Jehol, and Hopei, and an upraised sword, dripping with blood, poised over the rest of China. The caricatured Japanese had an enormous nose.

“Who is
that?”
P'eng asked a Young Vanguard whose duty it was to look after the Lenin Club.

“That,” replied the lad, “is a Japanese imperialist!”

“How do you know?” P'eng demanded.

“Just look at his big nose!” was the response.

P'eng laughed and looked at me. “Well,” he said, indicating me, “here is a
yang kuei-tzu
[foreign devil], is he an imperialist?”

“He is a foreign devil all right,” the Vanguard replied, “but not a Japanese imperialist. He has a big nose, but it isn't big enough for a Japanese imperialist!”

I pointed out to P'eng that such cartoons might result in serious disillusionment when the Reds actually came into contact with the Japanese and found Japanese noses quite as reasonable as their own. They might not recognize the enemy and might refuse to fight.

“Don't worry!” said the commander. “We will know a Japanese, whether he has a nose or not.”

Once I went to a performance of the First Army Corps' Anti-Japanese Theater with P'eng, and we sat down with the other soldiers on the turf below the improvised stage. He seemed to enjoy the plays immensely, and he led a demand for a favorite song. It grew quite chilly, after dark, although it was still late August. I wrapped my padded coat closer to me. In the middle of the performance I suddenly noticed with surprise that P'eng had removed his own coat. Then I saw that he had put it around a little bugler sitting next to him.

I understood P'eng's affection for these “little devils” later on, when he yielded to persuasion one night and told me something of his childhood. The trials of his own youth might amaze an Occidental ear, but they were typical enough of background events which explained many of the young Chinese who, like him, “saw Red.”

P'eng Teh-huai was born in a village of Hsiang T'an
hsien,
near the native place of Mao Tse-tung. It was a wealthy farming community beside the blue-flowing Hsiang River, about 90
li
from Changsha. Hsiang T'an was one of the prettiest parts of Hunan—a green countryside quilted with deep rice lands and thickets of tall bamboo. More than a million people lived in this one county. Though the soil of Hsiang T'an was rich, the majority of the peasants were miserably poor, illiterate, and “little better than serfs,” according to P'eng. Landlords were all-powerful there, owned the finest lands, and charged exorbitant rents and taxes, for they were in many cases also the officials—the gentry.

Several great landlords in Hsiang T'an had incomes of from forty to fifty thousand
tan
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of rice annually, and some of the wealthiest grain merchants in the province lived there.

P'eng's own family were rich peasants. His mother died when he was six, his father remarried, and this second wife hated P'eng because he was a constant reminder of her predecessor. She sent him to an old-style Chinese school, where the teacher frequently beat him. P'eng was apparently quite capable of looking after his own interests: in the midst of one of these beatings he picked up a stool, scored a hit, and fled. The teacher brought a lawsuit against him in the local courts, and his stepmother denounced him.

His father was rather indifferent in this quarrel, but to keep peace with his wife he sent the young stool tosser off to live with an aunt, whom
he liked. She put the boy into a so-called modern school. There he met a “radical” teacher, who did not believe in filial worship. One day, when Teh-huai was playing in the park, this teacher came along and sat down to talk with him. P'eng asked whether he worshiped his parents, and whether he thought P'eng should worship his. As for himself, said the teacher, he did not believe in such nonsense. Children were brought into the world while their parents were playing, just as Teh-huai had been playing in this park.

“I liked this notion,” said P'eng, “and I mentioned it to my aunt when I went home. She was horrified, and the very next day had me withdrawn from the evil ‘foreign influence.'” Hearing something of the young man's objection to filial worship, his grandmother began to pray regularly “on the first and fifteenth of each month, and at festivals, or when it stormed,” for heaven to strike this unfilial child and destroy him.

In P'eng's own words:

“My grandmother regarded us all as her slaves. She was a heavy smoker of opium. I hated the smell of it, and one night, when I could stand it no longer, I got up and kicked a pan of her opium from the stove. She was furious. She called a meeting of the whole clan and formally demanded my death by drowning, because I was an unfilial child. She made a long list of charges against me.

“The clan was about ready to carry out her demand. My stepmother agreed that I should die, and my father said that since it was the family will, he would not object. Then an uncle, my own mother's brother, stepped forward and bitterly attacked my parents for their failure to educate me properly. He said that it was their fault and that in this case no child could be held responsible.

“My life was spared, but I had to leave home. I was nine years old, it was cold October, and I owned nothing but my coat and trousers. My stepmother tried to take those from me, but I proved that they did not belong to her, but had been given to me by my own mother.”

Such was the beginning of P'eng Teh-huai's life in the great world. He got a job first as a cowherd, and next as a coal miner, where he pulled a bellows for fourteen hours a day. Weary of these long hours, he fled from the mine to become a shoemaker's apprentice, working only twelve hours a day. He received no salary, and after eight months he ran away again, this time to work in a sodium mine. The mine closed; he was forced to seek work once more. Still owning nothing but the rags on his back, he became a dike-builder. Here he had a “good job,” actually received wages, and in two years had saved 1,500
cash
—about $12! But he “lost everything” when a change of warlords rendered the currency worthless. Very depressed, he decided to return to his native district.

Now sixteen, P'eng went to call on a rich uncle, the uncle who had saved his life. This man's own son had just died; he had always liked Teh-huai, and he welcomed him and offered him a home. Here P'eng fell in love with his own cousin, and the uncle was favorably disposed to a betrothal. They studied under a Chinese tutor, played together, and planned their future.

These plans were interrupted by P'eng's irrepressible impetuosity. Next year there was a big rice famine in Hunan, and thousands of peasants were destitute. P'eng's uncle helped many, but the biggest stores of rice were held by a great landlord-merchant who profiteered fabulously. One day a crowd of over two hundred peasants gathered at his house, demanding that the merchant sell them rice without profit—traditionally expected of a virtuous man in time of famine. The rich man refused to discuss it, had the people driven away, and barred his gates.