1 More About Horses
On August 29 I rode out to Hung Ch'eng Shui (Red City Waters), a pretty little town in Weichow county, famous for its beautiful fruit gardens of pears, apples, and grapes, irrigated by crystal springs that bubbled through the canals. Here part of the Seventy-third Division was encamped. Not far away was a fortified pass, and a temporary line with no trenches but with a series of small molelike machine-gun nests and round hilltop forts——low-walled earthwork defenses——from which the Reds faced an enemy that had generally withdrawn from five to ten miles to the walled towns. There had been no movement on this front for several weeks, while the Reds rested and "consolidated"the new territory.
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.