5 Life of the Red Warrior
The Chinese soldier had had a poor reputation abroad. Many people thought his gun was chiefly ornamental, that he did his only fighting with an opium pipe, that any rifle shots exchanged were by mutual agreement and in the air, that battles were fought with silver and the soldier was paid in opium. Some of that had been true enough of most armies in the past, but the well-equipped first-class Chinese soldier (White as well as Red) was now no longer a vaudeville joke.
There were still plenty of comic-opera armies in China, but in recent years there had arisen a new type of Chinese warrior, who would soon supplant the old. Civil war, especially the class war between Reds and Whites, had been very costly, and often heavily and brutally fought, with no quarter or umbrella truces given by either side. Those ten years of strife in China had, if nothing else, created the nucleus of a fighting force and military brains experienced in the use of modern technique and tactics, which would before long build a powerful army that could no longer be dismissed as a tin-soldier affair.
The trouble had never been with the human material itself. The Chinese could fight as well as any people, as I had learned during the Shanghai War in 1932. Technical limitations disregarded, the trouble had been the inability of the command to train that human material at its disposal and give to it military discipline, political morale, and the will to victory. Therein lay the superiority of the Red Army——it was so often the only side in a battle that believed it was fighting for something. It was the Reds' greater success at the educative tasks in the building of an army that enabled them to withstand the tremendous technical and numerical superiority of their enemy.
For sheer dogged endurance, and ability to stand hardship without complaint, the Chinese peasants, who composed the greater part of the Red Army, were unbeatable. This was shown by the Long March, in which the Reds took a terrific pummeling from all sides, slept in the open and lived on unhulled wheat for many days, but still held together and emerged as a potent military force. It was also demonstrated by the rigors and impositions of daily life in the Red Army.
The Red troops I saw in Ninghsia and Kansu were quartered in caves, former stables of wealthy landlords, hastily erected barracks of clay and wood, and in compounds and houses abandoned by former officials or garrison troops. They slept on hard k'ang, without mattresses and with only a cotton blanket each——yet these rooms were fairly neat, clean and orderly, although their floors, walls, and ceilings were of whitewashed clay. They seldom had tables or desks, and piles of bricks or rocks served as chairs, most of the furniture having been destroyed or carted off by the enemy before his retreat.
Every company had its own cook and commissariat. The Reds' diet was extremely simple：millet and cabbage, with a little mutton and sometimes pork, were an average meal, but they seemed to thrive on it. Coffee, tea, cake, sweets of any kind, or fresh vegetables were almost unknown, but also unmissed. Coffee tins were more valued than their contents; nobody liked coffee, it tasted like medicine, but a good tin could be made into a serviceable canteen. Hot water was almost the only beverage consumed, and the drinking of cold water (very often contaminated) was specifically forbidden.
The Red soldier, when not fighting, had a full and busy day. In the Northwest, as in the South, he had long periods of military inactivity, for when a new district was occupied, the Red Army settled down for a month or two to establish soviets and otherwise "consolidate, "and only put a small force on outpost duty. The enemy was nearly always on the defensive, except when one of the periodic big annihilation drives was launched.
When not in the trenches or on outpost duty, the Red soldier observed a six-day week. He arose at five and retired to a "Taps"sounded at nine. The schedule of the day included：an hour's exercise immediately after rising; breakfast; two hours of military drill; two hours of political lectures and discussion; lunch; an hour of rest; two hours of character study; two hours of games and sports; dinner; songs and group meetings; and "Taps."
Keen competition was encouraged in broad jumping, high jumping, running, wall scaling, rope climbing, rope skipping, grenade throwing, and marksmanship. Watching the leaps of the Reds over walls, bars, and ropes, you could easily understand why the Chinese press had nicknamed them "human monkeys, "for their swift movement and agile feats of mountain climbing. Pennants were given in group competitions, from the squad up to the regiment, in sports, military drill, political knowledge, literacy, and public health. I saw these banners displayed in the Lenin clubs of units that had won such distinctions.
There was a Lenin Club for every company and for every regiment, and here all social and "cultural"life had its center. The regimental Lenin rooms were the best in the unit's quarters, but that said little; such as I saw were always crude, makeshift affairs, and what interest they aroused derived from the human activity in them rather than from their furnishings. They all had pictures of Marx and Lenin, drawn by company or regimental talent. Like some of the Chinese pictures of Christ, they generally bore a distinctly Oriental appearance, with eyes like stitches, and either a bulbous forehead like an image of Confucius, or no forehead at all. Marx, whose Chinese moniker is Ma K'e-ssu, was nicknamed by the Red soldiers Ma Ta Hu-tzu, or Ma the Big Beard. They seemed to have an affectionate awe for him. That was especially true of the Mohammedans, who appeared to be the only people in China capable of growing luxuriant beards as well as appreciating them.
Another feature of the Lenin Club was a corner devoted to the study of military tactics, in models of clay. Miniature towns, mountains, forts, rivers, lakes, and bridges were constructed in these corners, and toy armies battled back and forth, while the class studied some tactical problem. Thus in some places you saw the Sino-Japanese battles of Shanghai re-fought, in another the battles on the Great Wall, but most of the models were devoted to past battles between the Reds and the Kuomintang. They were also used to explain the geographical features of the district in which the army was stationed, to dramatize the tactics of a hypothetical campaign, or merely to animate the geography and political lessons which Red soldiers got as part of their military training. In a hospital company's Lenin room I saw displays of clay models of various parts of the anatomy, showing the effects of certain diseases, illustrating body hygiene, and so on.
Another corner of the club was devoted to character study, and here one saw the notebook of each warrior hanging on its appointed peg on the wall. There were three character-study groups：those who knew fewer than 100 characters; those who knew from 100 to 300; and those who could read and write more than 300 characters. The Reds had printed their own textbooks (using political propaganda as materials of study) for each of these groups. The political department of each company, battalion, regiment, and army was responsible for mass education, as well as political training. Only about 20 per cent of the First Army Corps, I was told, was still hsia-tzu, or "blind men, "as the Chinese call total illiterates.
"The principles of the Lenin Club, "it was explained to me by Hsiao Hua, [*] the twenty-two-year-old political director of the Second Division, "are quite simple. All the life and activity in them must be connected with the daily work and development of the men. It must be done by the men themselves. It must be simple and easy to understand. It must combine recreational value with practical education about the immediate tasks of the army."
The "library"of the average Lenin Club consisted chiefly of standard Chinese Red Army textbooks and lectures, a history of the Russian Revolution, miscellaneous magazines which might have been smuggled in or captured from the White areas, and files of Chinese soviet publications like the Red China Daily News, Party Work, Struggle, and others.
There was also a wall newspaper in every club, and a committee of soldiers was responsible for keeping it up to date. The wall newspaper gave considerable insight into the soldier's problems and a measure of his development. I took down full notes, in translation, of many of these papers. A typical one was in the Lenin Club, Second Company, Third Regiment, Second Division, in Yu Wang Pao, for September 1. Its contents included daily and weekly notices of the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League; a couple of columns of crude contributions by the newly literate, mostly revolutionary exhortations and slogans; radio bulletins of Red Army victories in south Kansu; new songs to be learned; political news from the White areas; and, perhaps most interesting of all, two sections called the red and black columns, devoted respectively to praise and criticism.
"Praise"consisted of tributes to the courage, bravery, unselfishness, diligence, or other virtues of individuals or groups. In the black column comrades lashed into each other and their officers (by name) for such things as failure to keep a rifle clean, slackness in study, losing a hand grenade or bayonet, smoking on duty, "political backwardness, ""individualism, ""reactionary habits, "etc. On one black column I saw a cook criticized for his "half-done"millet; in another a cook denounced a man for "always complaining"about his productions.
Many people had been amused to hear about the Reds' passion for the English game of table tennis. It was bizarre, somehow, but every Lenin Club had in its center a big ping-pong table, usually serving double duty as dining table. The Lenin clubs were turned into mess halls at chow time, but there were always four or five "bandits, "armed with bats, balls, and the net, urging the comrades to hurry it up; they wanted to get on with their game. Each company boasted a ping-pong champion, and I was no match for them.
Some of the Lenin clubs had record players confiscated from the homes of former officials or White officers. One night I was entertained with a concert on a captured American Victrola, described as a "gift"from General Kao Kuei-tzu, who was then in command of a Kuomintang army fighting the Reds on the Shensi-Suiyuan border. General Kao's records were all Chinese, with two exceptions, both French. One had on it "The Marseillaise"and "Tipperary."The other was a French comic song. Both brought on storms of laughter from the astonished listeners, who understood not a word.
The Reds had many games of their own, and were constantly inventing new ones. One, called Shih-tzu P'ai, or "Know Characters Cards, "was a contest that helped illiterates learn their basic hieroglyphics. Another game was somewhat like poker, but the high cards were marked "Down with Japanese Imperialism, ""Down with the Landlords, ""Long Live the Revolution, "and "Long Live the Soviets."Minor cards carried slogans that changed according to the political and military objectives. There were many group games. The Communist Youth League members were responsible for the programs of the Lenin clubs, and likewise led mass singing every day. Many of the songs were sung to Christian hymn tunes.
All these activities kept the mass of the soldiers fairly busy and fairly healthy. There were no camp followers or prostitutes with the Red troops I saw. Opium smoking was prohibited. I saw no opium or opium pipes with the Reds on the road, nor in any barracks I visited. Cigarette smoking was not forbidden except while on duty, but there was propaganda against it, and few Red soldiers seemed to smoke.
Such was the organized life of the regular Red soldiers behind the front. Not so very exciting, perhaps, but rather different from the propagandists' tales, from which one might have gathered that tha Reds' life consisted of wild orgies, entertainment by naked dancers, and rapine before and after meals. The truth seemed to be that a revolutionary army anywhere was always in danger of becoming too puritanical, rather than the contrary.
Some of the Reds' ideas had now been copied——with much better facilities for realizing them——by Chiang Kai-shek's crack "new army"and his New Life movement. But one thing the White armies could not copy, the Reds claimed, was. their "revolutionary consciousness."What this was like could best be seen at a political session of Red troops——where one could hear the firmly implanted credos that these youths fought and died for.
[*]See BN.