2 “Little Red Devils”

One morning I climbed the wide, thick, yellow wall of Yu Wang Pao, from the top of which you could look down thirty feet and see at a glance a score of different and somehow incongruously prosaic and intimate tasks being pursued below. It was as if you had pried off the lid of the city. A big section of the wall was being demolished. Walls were impediments to guerrilla warriors like the Reds, who endeavored to come to battle with an enemy in open country and, if they failed there, not to waste men in an exhausting defense of a walled city, where they could be endangered by blockade or annihilation, but to withdraw and let the enemy put himself in that position. The broken wall simplified their work if and when they were strong enough to attempt a reoccupation of the city.

Halfway around the crenellated battlement I came upon a squad of buglers——at rest for once, I was glad to observe, for their plangent calls had been ringing incessantly for days. They were all Young Vanguards, mere children, and I assumed a somewhat fatherly air toward one to whom I stopped and talked. He wore tennis shoes, gray shorts, and a faded gray cap with a dim red star on it. But there was nothing faded about the bugler under the cap：he was rosy-faced and had bright shining eyes. How homesick he must be, I thought. I was soon disillusioned. He was no mama's boy, but already a veteran Red. He told me that he was fifteen, and had joined the Reds in the South four years ago.

"Four years！"I exclaimed incredulously. "Then you must have been only eleven when you became a Red? And you made the Long March?"

"Right, "he responded with comical swagger. "I have been a hung-chun for four years."

"Why did you join?"I asked.

"My family lived near Changchow, in Fukien. I used to cut wood in the mountains, and in the winter I went there to collect bark. I often heard the villagers talk about the Red Army. They said it helped the poor people, and I liked that. Our house was very poor. We were six people, my parents and three brothers, older than I. We owned no land. Rent ate more than half our crop, so we never had enough. In the winter we cooked bark for soup and saved our grain for planting in the spring. I was always hungry.

"One year the Reds came very close to Changchow. I climbed over the mountains and went to ask them to help our house because we were very poor. They were good to me. They sent me to school for a while, and I had plenty to eat. After a few months the Red Army captured Changchow, and went to my village. All the landlords and moneylenders and officials were driven out. My family was given land and did not have to pay the tax collectors and landlords any more. They were happy and they were proud of me. Two of my brothers joined the Red Army."

"Where are they now?"

"Now? I don't know. When we left Kiangsi they were with the Red Army in Fukien; they were with Fang Chih-min. Now I don't know."

"Did the peasants like the Red Army?"

"Like the Red Army, eh? Of course they liked it. The Red Army gave them land and drove away the landlords, the tax collectors, and the exploiters."(These "little devils"all had their Marxist vocabulary.)

"But really, how do you know they liked the Reds?"

"They made us a thousand, ten thousands, of shoes, with their own hands. The women made uniforms for us, and the men spied on the enemy. Every home sent sons to our Red Army. That is how the lao-pai-hsing treated us."

Scores of youngsters like him were with the Reds. The Young Vanguards were organized by the Communist Youth League, and altogether, according to the claims of Fang Wen-p'ing, secretary of the CYL, there were then some 40, 000 in the Northwest soviet districts. There must have been several hundred with the Red Army alone：a "model company"of them was in every Red encampment. They were youths between twelve and seventeen (really eleven to sixteen by foreign count^[*]), and they came from all over China. Many of them, like this little bugler, had survived the hardships of the march from the South. Many had joined the Red Army during its expedition to Shansi.

The Young Vanguards worked as orderlies, messboys, buglers, spies, radio operators, water carriers, propagandists, actors, mafoos, nurses, secretaries, and even teachers. I once saw such a youngster, before a big map, lecturing a class of new recruits on world geography. Two of the most graceful child dancers I had ever seen were Young Vanguards in the dramatic society of the First Army Corps, and had marched from Kiangsi.

One might wonder how they stood such a life. Hundreds must have died or been killed. In the filthy jail in Sianfu there were over 200 of them, captured doing espionage or propaganda, or as stragglers unable to keep up with the army on its march. But their fortitude was amazing, and their loyalty to the Red Army was the intense and unquestioning loyalty of the very young.

Most of them wore uniforms too big for them, with sleeves dangling to their knees and coats dragging nearly to the ground. They washed their hands and faces three times a day, they claimed, but they were always dirty, their noses were usually running, and they were often wiping them with a sleeve, and grinning. The world nevertheless was theirs：they had enough to eat, they had a blanket each, the leaders even had pistols, and they wore red bars, and broken-peaked caps a size or more too large, but with the red star. They were often of uncertain origin：many could not remember their parents, many were escaped apprentices, some had been slaves, ^[*] most of them were runaways from huts with too many mouths to feed, and all of them had made their own decisions to join. Sometimes a whole group of youngsters had run off to the Reds together.

Many stories of courage were told of them. They gave and asked no quarter as children, and many had actually participated in battles. It was said that in Kiangsi, after the main Red Army left, hundreds of Young Vanguards and Young Communists fought beside adult partisans, and even made bayonet charges——so that the White soldiers laughingly said they could grab their bayonets and pull them into their trenches, they were so small and light. Many of the captured "Reds"in Chiang's reform schools for bandits in Kiangsi were youths from ten to fifteen years old.

Perhaps the Vanguards liked the Reds because among them they were treated like human beings probably for the first time. They ate and lived like men; they seemed to take part in everything; they considered themselves any man's equal. I never saw one of them struck or bullied. They were certainly "exploited"as orderlies and messboys (and it was surprising how many orders starting at the top were eventually passed on to some Young Vanguard), but they had their own freedom of activity, too, and their own organization to protect them. They learned games and sports, they were given a crude schooling, and they acquired a faith in simple Marxist slogans——which in most cases meant to them simply helping to shoot a gun against the landlords and masters of apprentices. Obviously it was better than working fourteen hours a day at the master's bench, and feeding him, and emptying his "defile-mother's"night-bowl.

I remember one such escaped apprentice I met in Kansu who was nicknamed the Shansi Wa-wa——the Shansi Baby. He had been sold to a shop in a town near Hung T'ung, in Shansi, and when the Red Army came he had stolen over the city wall, with three other apprentices, to join it. How he had decided that he belonged with the Reds I did not know, but evidently all of Yen Hsi-shan's anti-Communist propaganda, all the warnings of his elders, had produced exactly the opposite effect from that intended. He was a fat rolypoly lad with the face of a baby, and only twelve, but he was quite able to take care of himself, as he had proved during the march across Shansi and Shensi and into Kansu. When I asked him why he had become a Red he said："The Red Army fights for the poor. The Red Army is anti-Japanese. Why should any man not want to become a Red soldier?"

Another time I met a bony youngster of fifteen, who was head of the Young Vanguards and Young Communists working in the hospital near Holienwan, Kansu. His home had been in Hsing Ko, the Reds' model hsien in Kiangsi, and he said that one of his brothers was still in a partisan army there, and that his sister had been a nurse. He did not know what had become of his family. Yes, they all liked the Reds. Why? Because they "all understood that the Red Army was our army——fighting for the wu-ch'an chieh-chi"——the proletariat. I wondered what impressions the great trek to the Northwest had left upon his young mind, but I was not to find out. The whole thing was a minor event to this serious-minded boy, this little matter of a hike over a distance twice the width of America.

"It was pretty bitter going, eh?"I ventured.

"Not bitter, not bitter. No march is bitter if your comrades are with you. We revolutionary youths can't think about whether a thing is hard or bitter; we can only think of the task before us. If it is to walk 10, 000 li, we walk it, or if it is to walk 20, 000 li, we walk it！"

"How do you like Kansu, then? Is it better or worse than Kiangsi? Was life better in the South?"

"Kiangsi was good. Kansu is also good. Wherever the revolution is, that place is good. What we eat and where we sleep is not important. What is important is the revolution."^[1]

Copybook replies, I thought. Here was one lad who had learned his answers well from some Red propagandist. Next day I was quite surprised when at a mass meeting of Red soldiers I saw that he was one of the principal speakers, and a "propagandist"in his own right. He was one of the best speakers in the army, I was told, and in that meeting he gave a simple but competent explanation of the present political situation, and the reasons why the Red Army wanted to stop civil war and form a "united front"with all anti-Japanese armies.

I met a youth of fourteen who had been an apprentice in a Shanghai machine shop, and with three companions had found his way, through various adventures, to the Northwest. He was a student in the radio school in Pao An when I saw him. I asked whether he missed Shanghai, but he said no, he had left nothing in Shanghai, and that the only fun he had ever had there was looking into the shop windows at good things to eat——which he could not buy.

One "little devil"in Pao An served as orderly to Li K'e-nung, chief of the communications department of the Foreign Office. He was a Shansi lad of about thirteen or fourteen, and he had joined the Reds I knew not how. The Beau Brummell of the Vanguards, he took his role with utmost gravity. He had inherited a Sam Browne belt from somebody, he had a neat little uniform tailored to a good fit, and a cap whose peak he regularly refilled with new cardboard whenever it broke. Underneath the collar of his well-brushed coat he always managed to have a strip of white linen showing. He was easily the snappiest-looking soldier in town. Beside him Mao Tse-tung looked a tramp.

This wa-wa's name happened by some thoughtlessness of his parents to be Shang Chi-pang. There is nothing wrong with that, except that Chipang sounds very much like chi-pa, and so, to his unending mortification, he was often called chi-pa, which simply means "penis."One day Chi-pang came into my little room in the Foreign Office with his usual quota of dignity, clicked his heels together, gave me the most Prussian-like salute I had seen in the Red districts, and addressed me as "Comrade Snow."He then proceeded to unburden his small heart of certain apprehensions. What he wanted to do was to make it perfectly clear to me that his name was not Chi-pa, but Chi-pang, and that between these two there was all the difference in the world. He had his name carefully scrawled down on a scrap of paper, and this he deposited before me.

Astonished, I responded in all seriousness that I had never called him anything but Chi-pang, and had no thought of doing otherwise. He thanked me, made a grave bow, and once more gave that preposterous salute. "I wanted to be sure, "he said, "that when you write about me for the foreign papers you won't make a mistake in my name. It would give a bad impression to the foreign comrades if they thought a Red soldier was named Chipa！"Until then I had had no intention of introducing Chi-pang into this strange book, but with that remark I had no choice in the matter, and he walked into it right beside the Generalissimo.

One of the duties of the Young Vanguards in the soviets was to examine travelers on roads behind the front, and see that they had their road passes. They executed this duty quite determinedly, and marched anyone without his papers to the local soviet for examination. P'eng Teh-huai told me of being stopped once and being asked for his lu-t'iao by some Young Vanguards, who threatened to arrest him.

"But I am P'eng Teh-huai, "he said. "I write those passes myself."

"We don't care if you are Commander Chu Teh, "said the young skeptics："you must have a road pass."They signaled for assistance, and several boys came running from the fields to reinforce them.

P'eng had to write out his lu-t'iao and sign it himself before they allowed him to proceed.

Altogether, the "little devils"were one thing in Red China with which it was hard to find anything seriously wrong. Their spirit was superb. I suspected that more than once an older man, looking at them, forgot his pessimism and was heartened to think that he was fighting for the future of lads like those. They were invariably cheerful and optimistic, and they had a ready "hao！" for every how-are-you, regardless of the weariness of the day's march. They were patient, hardworking, bright, and eager to learn, and seeing them made you feel that China was not hopeless, that no nation was more hopeless than its youth. Here in the Vanguards was the future of China, if only this youth could be freed, shaped, made aware, and given a role to perform in the building of a new world. It sounds somewhat evangelical, I suppose, but nobody could see these heroic young lives without feeling that man in China is not born rotten, but with infinite possibilities of personality.

^[*]Traditionally, Chinese age count begins at conception, and everyone becomes one year older on New Year's Day.

^[*]Child slavery had been abolished by Kuomintang law, but the mandate was seldom enforced even in areas where the law was known; elsewhere child slavery was still common.