4 Red Companions

North Shensi was one of the poorest parts of China I had seen, not excluding western Yunnan. There was no real land scarcity, but there was in many places a serious scarcity of real land——at least real farming land. Here in Shensi a peasant could own as much as 100 mou^[*] of land and yet be a poor man. A landlord in this country had to possess at least several hundred mou of land, and even on a Chinese scale he could not be considered rich unless his holdings were part of the limited and fertile valley land, where rice and other valued crops could be grown.

The farms of Shensi could have been described as slanting, and many of them also as slipping, for landslides were frequent. The fields were mostly patches laid on the serried landscape, between crevices and small streams. The land seemed rich enough in many places, but the crops grown were strictly limited by the steep gradients, in both quantity and quality. There were few genuine mountains, only endless broken hills. Their sharp-angled shadowing and coloring changed miraculously with the sun's wheel, and toward dusk they became a magnificent sea of purpled hilltops with dark velvety folds running down, like the pleats on a mandarin skirt, to ravines that seemed bottomless.

After the first day I rode little, not so much out of pity for the languishing nag, but because everyone else marched. Li Chiang-lin was the oldest warrior of the company. Most of the others were lads in their teens, hardly more than children. One of these was nicknamed "Lao Kou, "the Old Dog, and walking with him I asked why he had joined the Reds.

He was a southerner and had come all the way from the Fukien soviet districts, on the Red Army's six-thousand-mile expedition which foreign military experts refused to believe possible. Yet here was Old Dog, seventeen years old, and actually looking fourteen. He had made that march and thought nothing of it. He said he was prepared to walk another 25, 000 li if the Red Army did.

With him was a lad nicknamed Local Cousin, and he had walked almost as far, from Kiangsi. Local Cousin was sixteen.

Did they like the Red Army? I asked. They looked at me in genuine amazement. It had evidently never occurred to either of them that anyone could not like the Red Army.

"The Red Army has taught me to read and to write, "said Old Dog. "Here I have learned to operate a radio, and how to aim a rifle straight. The Red Army helps the poor."

"Is that all?"

"It is good to us and we are never beaten, "added Local Cousin. "Here everybody is the same. It is not like the White districts, where poor people are slaves of the landlords and the Kuomintang. Here everybody fights to help the poor, and to save China. The Red Army fights the landlords and the White bandits and the Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should anyone not like such an army as this?"

There was a peasant lad who had joined the Reds in Szechuan, and I asked him why he had done so. He told me that his parents were poor farmers, with only four mou of land (less than an acre), which wasn't enough to feed him and his two sisters. When the Reds came to his village, he said, all the peasants welcomed them, brought them hot tea and made sweets for them. The Red dramatists gave plays. It was a happy time. Only the landlords ran. When the land was redistributed his parents received their share. So they were not sorry, but very glad, when he joined the poor people's army.

Another youth, about nineteen, had formerly been an ironsmith's apprentice in Hunan, and he was nicknamed "T'ieh Lao-hu, "the Iron Tiger. When the Reds arrived in his district, he had dropped bellows, pans, and apprenticeship, and, clad only in a pair of sandals and trousers, hurried off to enlist. Why? Because he wanted to fight the masters who starved their apprentices, and to fight the landlords who robbed his parents. He was fighting for the revolution, which would free the poor. The Red Army was good to people and did not rob them and beat them like the White armies. He pulled up his trouser leg and displayed a long white scar, his souvenir of battle.

There was another youth from Fukien, one from Chekiang, several more from Kiangsi and Szechuan, but the majority were natives of Shensi and Kansu. Some had "graduated"from the Young Vanguards, and (though they looked like infants) had already been Reds for years. Some had joined the Red Army to fight Japan, two had enlisted to escape from slavery, ^[*] three had deserted from the Kuomintang troops, but most of them had joined "because the Red Army is a revolutionary army, fighting landlords and imperialism."

Then I talked to a squad commander, who was an "older"man of twenty-four. He had been in the Red Army since 1931. In that year his father and mother were killed by a Nanking bomber, which also destroyed his house, in Kiangsi. When he got home from the fields and found both his parents dead he had at once thrown down his hoe, bidden his wife good-by, and enlisted with the Communists. One of his brothers, a Red partisan, had been killed in Kiangsi in 1935.

They were a heterogeneous lot, but more truly "national"in composition than ordinary Chinese armies, usually carefully segregated according to provinces. Their different provincial backgrounds and dialects did not seem to divide them, but became the subject of constant good-natured raillery. I never saw a serious quarrel among them. In fact, during all my travel in the Red districts, I was not to see a single fist fight between Red soldiers, and among young men I thought that remarkable.

Though tragedy had touched the lives of nearly all of them, they were perhaps too young for it to have depressed them much. They seemed to me fairly happy, and perhaps the first consciously happy group of Chinese proletarians I had seen. Passive contentment was the common phenomenon in China, but the higher emotion of happiness, which implies a feeling of positiveness about existence, was rare indeed.

They sang nearly all day on the road, and their supply of songs was endless. Their singing was not done at a command, but was spontaneous, and they sang well. Whenever the spirit moved him, or he thought of an appropriate song, one of them would suddenly burst forth, and commanders and men joined in. They sang at night, too, and learned new folk tunes from the peasants, who brought out their Shensi guitars.

What discipline they had seemed almost entirely self-imposed. When we passed wild apricot trees on the hills there was an abrupt dispersal until everyone had filled his pockets, and somebody always brought me back a handful. Then, leaving the trees looking as if a great wind had struck through them, they moved back into order and quick-timed to make up for the loss. But when we passed private orchards, nobody touched the fruit in them, and the grain and vegetables we ate in the villages were paid for in full.

As far as I could see, the peasants bore no resentment toward my Red companions. Some seemed on close terms of friendship, and very loyal——a fact probably not unconnected with a recent redivision of land and the abolition of taxes. They freely offered for sale what edibles they had, and accepted soviet money without hesitation. When we reached a village at noon or sunset the chairman of the local soviet promptly provided quarters, and designated ovens for our use. I frequently saw peasant women or their daughters volunteer to pull the bellows of the fire of our ovens, and laugh and joke with the Red warriors, in a very emancipated way for Chinese women——especially Shensi women.

On the last day, we stopped for lunch at a village in a green valley, and here all the children came round to examine the first foreign devil many of them had seen. I decided to catechize them.

"What is a Communist?"I asked.

"He is a citizen who helps the Red Army fight the White bandits and the Japanese, "one youngster of nine or ten piped up.

"What else?"

"He helps fight the landlords and the capitalists！"

"But what is a capitalist?"That silenced one child, but another came forward："A capitalist is a man who does not work, but makes others work for him."Oversimplification, perhaps, but I went on：

"Are there any landlords or capitalists here?"

"No！"they all shrieked together. "They've all run away！"

"Run away? From what?"

"From our RED ARMY"！

"Our"army, a peasant child talking about "his"army? Well, obviously it wasn't China, but, if not, what was it? Who could have taught them all this?

I was to learn who it was when I examined the textbooks of Red China, and met old Santa Claus Hsu Teh-li, ^[*] once president of a normal school in Hunan, now Soviet Commissioner of Education.

^[*]One Chinese mou is about a sixth of an acre.

^[*]Really indentured labor; in those parts it amounted to slavery. Chinese used the word ya-t'ou, which literally means "yoke-head."

^[*]See BN.