Red Star over China (42 page)

“When we go into a new district,” he said, “the peasants always volunteer to help our hospital service. They carry our wounded back to our hospitals from the front.”

Another: “On our Long March through Szechuan the peasants brought us grass shoes, made by themselves, and they brought us tea and hot water along the road.”

A third: “When I fought in Liu Chih-tan's Twenty-sixth Army, in Tingpien, we were a small detachment defending a lonely outpost against the Kuomintang general, Kao Kuei-tzu. The peasants brought us food and water. We did not have to use our men to bring supplies, the people helped us. Kao Kuei-tzu's men were defeated. We captured some and they told us they had had no water for almost two days. The peasants had poisoned the wells and run away.”

A Kansu peasant soldier: “The people help us in many ways. During battles they often disarm small parties of the enemy, cut their telephone and telegraph wires, and send us news about the movements of the White troops. But they never cut our telephone lines; they help us put them up!”

Another: “When an enemy airplane crashed against a mountain in Shensi recently, nobody saw it but a few farmers. They were armed only with spears and spades, but they attacked the airplane, disarmed the two aviators, arrested them, and brought them to us in Wa Ya Pao!”

Still another: “Last April, in Yen Ch'ang, five villages formed soviets, where I was stationed. Afterwards we were attacked by T'ang En-p'o, and had to retreat. The
min-t'uan
returned, arrested eighteen villagers, and cut off their heads. Then we counterattacked. The villagers led us by a
secret mountain path to attack the
min-t'uan.
We took them by surprise, and we attacked and disarmed three platoons.”

One youth with a long scar on his cheek got up and told of some experiences on the Long March. “When the Red Army was passing through Kweichow,” he said, “I was wounded with some other comrades, near Tsunyi. The army had to move on; it could not take us along. The doctors bandaged us and left us with some peasants, asking them to look after us. They fed us and treated us well, and when the White troops came to that village they hid us. In a few weeks we recovered. Later on the Red Army returned to that district and captured Tsunyi a second time. We rejoined the army, and some of the young men of the villages went with us.”

Another: “Once we were staying in a village of An Ting [north Shensi] and we were only a dozen men and rifles. The peasants there made bean curd for us, and gave us a sheep. We had a feast and we ate too much and went to sleep, leaving only one sentry on guard. He went to sleep too. But in the middle of the night a peasant boy arrived and woke us up. He had run ten
li
from [some mountain] to warn us that
min-t'uan
were there and intended to surround us. The
min-t'uan
did attack us about an hour later, but we were ready for them and drove them off.”

A bright-eyed lad without a shadow of whisker on his face arose and declared: “I have only this to say. When the White Army comes to a village in Kansu, nobody helps it, nobody gives it any food, and nobody wants to join. When the Red Army comes, the peasants organize, and form committees to help us, and young men volunteer to join. Our Red Army
is
the people, and this is what I have to say!”

Every youth there seemed to have a personal experience to relate to prove that “the peasants like us.” I wrote down seventeen different answers to that question. It proved so popular that another hour had passed before I realized that these warriors had been delayed long past their dinner call. I apologized and prepared to leave, but one “small devil” attached to the company stood up and said: “Don't worry about ceremony. We Reds don't care about going without food when we are fighting, and we don't care about missing our food when we can tell a foreign friend about our Red Army.”

One morning I went to P'eng Teh-huai's headquarters and found several members of his staff there, just finishing up a conference. They invited me in and opened a watermelon. As we sat around tables, spitting out seeds on the
k'ang,
I noticed a young commander I had not seen before.

P'eng Teh-huai saw me looking at him, and he said banteringly, “That's a famous Red bandit over there. Do you recognize him?” The new arrival promptly grinned, blushed crimson, and in a most disarming way exposed a big cavern where two front teeth should have been. It gave him a childish and impish appearence, and everybody smiled.

“He is the man you have been eager to meet,” supplied P'eng. “He wants you to visit his army. His name is Hsu Hai-tung.”

Of all the Red military leaders of China, probably none was more “notorious,” and certainly none was more of a mystery than Hsu Hai-tung. Scarcely anything was known of him to the outside world except that he had once worked in a Hupeh pottery and that Chiang Kai-shek had branded him a scourge of civilization. Recently Nanking airplanes had visited the Red lines to drop leaflets containing, among other inducements to deserters (including $100 to every Red soldier who brought his rifle with him to the Kuomintang), the following promise:

“Kill P'eng Teh-huai or Hsu Hai-tung and we will give you $100,000 when you join our army. Kill any other bandit leader and we will reward you accordingly.”

And here, poised shyly over a pair of square boyish shoulders, sat that head which Nanking apparently valued no less than P'eng Teh-huai's.

I acknowledged the pleasure, wondering what it felt like to have a life worth that much to any one of your subordinates, and asked Hsu whether he was really serious about the invitation to visit his army. He was commander of the Fifteenth Red Army Corps, with headquarters then located about 80
li
to the northwest, in Yu Wang
hsien.

“I already have a room arranged for you in the bell tower,” he responded. “Just let me know when you want to come, and I'll send an escort for you.”

We made it a bargain on the spot.

And so a few days later, carrying a borrowed automatic (a “confiscation” of my own from a Red officer), I set out for Yu Wang, accompanied by ten Red troopers armed with rifles and Mausers—for in places our road skirted Red positions only a short distance behind the front lines. In contrast with the eternal hills and valleys of Shensi and Kansu, the road we followed—a road that led to the Great Wall and the lonely, beautiful grasslands of Inner Mongolia—crossed high tablelands, striped with long green meadows and dotted with tall bunch grass and softly rounded hills, on which great herds of sheep and goats grazed. Eagles and buzzards sometimes flew overhead. Once a herd of wild gazelles came near us, sniffed the air, and then swooped off with incredible speed and grace around a protecting mountainside.

In five hours we reached the center of Yu Wang, an ancient Mohammedan city of four or five hundred families, with a magnificent wall of stone and brick. Outside the city was a Mohammedan temple, with its own walls of beautiful glazed brick unscarred. But other buildings showed signs of the siege this city had undergone before it was taken by the Reds. A two-story building that had been the magistrate's headquarters was partly ruined, and its façade was pitted with bullet holes. I was told that this and other buildings on the outskirts had been destroyed by the defending troops of General Ma Hung-kuei when the Red siege had first begun. The enemy had withdrawn from all extramural buildings, after setting fire to them, to prevent the Reds' occupying them as positions of attack against the city walls.

“When the city fell,” Hsu Hai-tung told me, “there was only a very minor battle. We surrounded and blockaded Yu Wang for ten days. Inside there was one brigade of Ma Hung-kuei's cavalry and about 1,000
mint'uan.
We made no attack at all until the tenth night. It was very dark. We put a ladder on the wall, a company scaled it before the enemy guards discovered it, and then they defended the ladder with a machine gun, while a regiment of our troops mounted the wall.

“There was little fighting. Before dawn we had disarmed all the
min-t'uan
and surrounded the brigade of cavalry. Only one of our men was killed, and only seven were wounded. We gave the
min-t'uan
a dollar apiece and sent them back to their farms, and we gave Ma's men two dollars each. Several hundred of them stayed and enlisted with us. The magistrate and the brigade commander escaped over the east wall while their troops were being disarmed.”

I spent five days with the Fifteenth Army Corps, and found every waking hour intensely interesting.
^*
And of it all nothing was better material, for an “investigator of the soviet regions,” as I was labeled in Yu Wang, than the story of Hsu Hai-tung himself. I talked with him every night when his duties were finished. I rode with him to the front lines of the Seventy-third Division, and I went to the Red theater with him. He told me for the first time the history of the Honan-Anhui-Hupeh Soviet Republic, which had never been fully known. As organizer of the first partisan army of that great Red area, which was second in size only to the Central Soviets of Kiangsi, Hsu Hai-tung knew nearly every detail of its development.

Hsu struck me as the most strongly “class-conscious” man—in manner, appearance, conversation, and background—of all the Red leaders I met. While the majority of the subordinate officers were from the poor peasantry, many of the higher commanders were from middle-class or middle-peasant families or from the intelligentsia. Hsu was a very obvious exception. He was proud of his proletarian origin, and he often referred to himself, with a grin, as a “coolie.” One could tell he sincerely believed that the poor of China, the peasants and the workers, were the good people—kind, brave, unselfish, honest—while the rich had a monopoly of all the vices. It was as simple as that for him, I thought: he was fighting to get rid of the vices. The absolutism of faith kept his cocky comments about his own daredeviltry and his army's superiority from sounding like vanity and conceit. When he said, “One Red is worth five Whites,” it was to him a statement of irrefutable fact.

He was immensely proud of his army—the men as individuals, their skill as soldiers, as horsemen, and as revolutionaries. He was proud of their Lenin clubs and their artistically made posters—which were really very good. And he was proud of his division commanders, two of whom were “coolies like myself” and one of whom—a Red for six years—was only twenty-one years old.

Hsu valued very highly any act of physical prowess, and it was his regret that eight wounds he had collected in ten years of fighting now
slightly handicapped him. He did not smoke or drink, and he still had a slender, straight-limbed body, every inch of which seemed to be hard muscle. He had been wounded in each leg, in each arm, in the chest, a shoulder, and a hip. One bullet had entered his head just below the eye and emerged behind his ear. And yet he still gave the impression of a peasant youth who had but recently stepped out of the rice fields, rolled down his trouser legs, and joined a passing “free company” of warriors.

I found out also about the missing teeth. They had been lost during a riding accident. Galloping along the road one day, his horse's hoof struck a soldier, and Hsu turned in the saddle to see whether he had been hurt. The horse shied and knocked Hsu into a tree. When he regained consciousness two weeks later, it was to discover that his upper incisors had been left with the tree.

“Aren't you afraid you'll be hurt some day?” 1 asked him.

“Not much,” he laughed. “I've been taking beatings since I was a child, and I'm used to it by now.”

Like most other combat Reds, he spoke mainly about battles, but his few references to his childhood seemed to me significant.

Hsu Hai-tung was born in 1900 in Huangpi
hsien
—Yellow Slope county—near Hankow. His family had for generations been potters, and in his grandfather's day had owned land, but since then, through drought, flood, and taxation, had been proletarianized. His father and five brothers had worked in a kiln at Huangpi and made enough to live. They were all illiterate, but ambitious for Hai-tung, a bright child and the youngest son, and they scraped together the money necessary to send him to school.

“My fellow students,” Hsu told me, “were nearly all the sons of landlords or merchants, as few poor boys ever got to school. I studied at the same desks with them, but many hated me because I seldom had any shoes and my clothes were poor and ragged. I could not avoid fighting with them when they cursed me. If I ran to the teacher for help, I was invariably beaten by him. But if the landlords' sons got the worst of it and went to the teacher, I was also beaten.

“In my fourth year in school, when I was eleven, I got involved in a ‘rich-against-poor' quarrel and was driven to a corner by a crowd of ‘rich sons.' We were throwing sticks and stones, and one I threw cut the head of a child named Huang, son of a wealthy landlord. This boy went off crying, and in a short time returned with his family. The elder Huang said that I had ‘forgotten my birth,' and he kicked and beat me. The teacher then gave me a second beating. After that I ran away from school and refused to return. The incident made a deep impression on me. I believed from then on that it was impossible for a poor boy to get justice.”

Hsu became an apprentice in a pottery, where he received no wages
during his “thanking-the-master years.” At sixteen he was a full journeyman, and the highest-paid potter among three hundred workers. “I can turn out a good piece of pottery as fast as anyone in China,” Hsu smilingly boasted, “so when the revolution is over I'll still be a useful citizen!”

He recalled an incident that did not increase his love for the gentry: “A traveling theatrical troupe came to our neighborhood, and the workers went to see it. Wives of the gentry and officials were also there. Naturally the workers were curious to see what these closely guarded wives of the great ones looked like, and they kept staring into the boxes. At this the gentry ordered the
min-t'uan
to drive them out of the theater, and there was a fight. Later on our factory master had to give a banquet for the offended ‘nobility,' and shoot off some firecrackers, to compensate for the ‘spoiled purity' of those women who had been gazed upon by the people. The master tried to take the money for this banquet from our wages, but we threatened to strike and he changed his mind. This was my first experience of the power of organization as a weapon of defense for the poor.”