1 Casuals of the Road

From Ninghsia I turned southward again into Kansu. In four or five days I was back in Holienwan, where I again saw Ts'ai Ch'ang and her husband, Li Fu-ch'un, and had another meal of French cooking with them, and met the young and pretty wife of Nieh Jung-chen, political commissar of the First Army Corps. She had but recently slipped into the soviet districts from the White world, and had now just returned from a visit to her husband, whom she had not seen for five years.

I stayed three days in Holienwan with the supply commissariat, which was quartered in a big compound formerly owned by a Mohammedan grain merchant. Architecturally it was an interesting group of buildings of a generally Central Asian appearance, with flat heavy roofs, and deep Arabic windows set into walls at least four feet thick. As I led my horse into its spacious stables a tall white-bearded man, wearing a faded gray uniform, with a long leather apron that reached to the ground, stepped up and saluted his red-starred cap, while his sunburned face wreathed a toothless smile. He took charge of Ma Hung-kuei, my horse.

How, I wondered, had this grandfather wandered into our boy-scout encampment? I stopped to ask, and forced a story from him. He was from Shansi, and had joined the Red Army during its expedition there. His name was Li, he was sixty-four, and he claimed the distinction of being the oldest Red warrior. Rather apologetically he explained that he was not at the front just then "because Commander Yang thinks I am more useful here at this horse work, and so I stay."

Li had been a pork seller in the town of Hung T'ung, Shansi, before he became a Red, and he roundly cursed "Model Governor"Yen Hsi-shan and the local officials and their ruinous taxes. "You can't do business in Hung T'ung, "he said; "they tax a man's excrement."When old Li heard the Reds were coming he had decided to join them. His wife was dead, and his two daughters were both married; he had no sons; he had no ties at all in Hung T'ung except his overtaxed pork business; and Hung T'ung was a "dead-man"sort of place, anyway. He wanted something livelier, and so the adventurer had crept out of the city to offer himself to the Reds.

"When I wanted to enlist they said to me, 'You are old. In the Red Army life is hard.' And what did I say? I said, 'Yes, this body is sixty-four years old, it's true, but I can walk like a boy of twenty, I can shoot a gun, I can do the work of any man. If it's men you need, I can also serve.' So they told me to come along, and I marched through Shansi with the Red Army, and I crossed the Yellow River with the Red Army, and here I am in Kansu."

I smiled and asked him whether it was any better than pork selling. Did he like it?

"Oh-ho！Pork selling is a turtle man's sort of business！Here is work worth doing. A poor man's army fighting for the oppressed, isn't it? Certainly I like it."The old man fumbled in his breast pocket and brought forth a soiled cloth, which he carefully unwrapped to reveal a worn little notebook. "See here, "he said. "I already recognize over 200 characters. Every day the Red Army teaches me four more. In Shansi I lived for sixty-four years and yet nobody ever taught me to write my name. Is the Red Army good or isn't it?"He pointed with intense pride to the crude scrawl of his characters that resembled the blots of muddy hen's feet on clean matting, and falteringly he read off some newly inscribed phrases. And then, as a sort of climax, he produced a stub of pencil and with an elaborate flourish he wrote his name for me.

"I suppose you're thinking of marrying again, "I joked with him. He shook his head gravely and said no, what with one defile-mother horse after another he had no time to think about the woman problem, and with that he ambled away to look after his beasts.

Next evening, as I was walking through an orchard behind the courtyard, I met another Shansi man, twenty years Li's junior, but just as interesting. I heard a hsiao-kuei calling out, "Li Pai T'ang！Li Pai T'ang！"and looked in curiosity to see whom he was addressing as the "House-of-Christian-Worship."^[*] There upon a little hill I found a barber shaving a youth's head clean as an egg. Upon inquiry I discovered that his real name was Chia Ho-chung, and that he had formerly worked in the pharmacy of an American missionary hospital in P'ing Yang, Shansi. The "little devils"had given him this nickname because he was a Christian, and still said his prayers daily.

Chia pulled up his trousers and showed me a bad wound on his leg, from which he still limped, and he yanked up his coat to display a wound on his belly, where he had also been hit. These, he explained, were souvenirs of battles, and that was why he was not at the front. This hair cutting wasn't his real job at all：he was either a pharmacist or a Red warrior.

Chia said that two other attendants in that Christian hospital had joined the Reds with him. Before leaving, they had discussed their intention with the American doctor in the hospital, whose Chinese name was Li Jen. Dr. Li Jen was "a good man, who healed the poor without charge and never oppressed people, "and when Chia and his companions asked his advice he had said, "Go ahead. I have heard that the Reds are good and honest men and not like the other armies, and you should be glad to fight with them."So off they had gone to become red, red Robin Hoods.

"Maybe Dr. Li Jen just wanted to get rid of you, "I suggested.

The barber indignantly denied it. He said he had always got along very well with Li Jen, who was an excellent man. He asked me to tell this Li Jen, if I ever saw him, that he was still alive, well, and happy, and that as soon as the revolution was over he was coming back to take his old job in the pharmacy. I left House-of-Worship with much reluctance. He was a fine Red, a good barber, and a real Christian.

Incidentally, I met several Christians and ex-Christians among the Reds. Many Communists had once been active Christians. Dr. Nelson Fu, head of the Red Army Medical Corps, was formerly a doctor in a Methodist hospital in Kiangsi. Although he volunteered to work with the Reds, and enthusiastically supported them, he still adhered to his faith, and hence had not joined the Communist Party.

In Kiangsi the soviets carried on extensive "anti-God"propaganda. All temples, churches, and church estates were converted into state property, and monks, nuns, priests, preachers, and foreign missionaries were deprived of the rights of citizenship; but in the Northwest a policy of religious toleration was practiced. Freedom of worship was a primary guarantee, in fact. All foreign mission property was protected, and refugee missionaries were invited to return to their flocks.^[1] The Communists reserved the right to preach antireligious propaganda of their own, holding the "freedom to oppose worship"to be a corollary of the democratic privilege of the freedom to worship.

The only foreigners who took advantage of the new Communist policy toward religious institutions were some Belgian missionaries who were among the great landlords of Suiyuan. They owned one vast estate of 20, 000 mou, and another of some 5, 000 mou of land near Tingpien, on the Great Wall. After the Red Army occupied Tingpien, one side of the Belgians' property lay adjacent to soviet territory and the other side was held by White troops. The Reds did not attempt to expropriate the Belgians' land, but made a "treaty"in which they guaranteed to protect the church property, provided the priests permitted them to organize anti-Japanese societies among the tenants who tilled the land of this big Catholic missionary fiefdom. Another stipulation of the curious agreement provided that the Belgians would dispatch a message from the Chinese Soviet Government to Premier Blum of France, congratulating him on the triumph of the People's Front.

There had been a series of raids by min-t'uan near Holienwan, and one village only a short distance away had been sacked two nights before I arrived. A band had crept up to the place just before dawn, overpowered and killed the lone sentry, and had then brought up bunches of dry brushwood and set fire to the huts in which about a dozen Red soldiers were sleeping. As the Reds ran out, blinded by the smoke, the min-t'uan had shot them down and seized their guns. Then they had joined with a gang of some 400, most of them armed by the Kuomintang general, Kao Kuei-tzu, who were raiding down from the North and burning farms and villages. The Twenty-eighth Army had sent a battalion out to attempt to round them up, and the day I left Holienwan these young warriors came back after a successful chase.

The battle had occurred only a few li from Holienwan, which the White bandits were said to be preparing to attack. Some peasants had discovered the min-t'uan lair in the inner mountains and, acting on this information, the Reds had divided into three columns, the center one meeting the bandits in a frontal clash. The issue was decided when the two flanking columns of Reds closed in and surrounded the enemy. Some forty min-t'uan were killed, and sixteen Reds, while many on both sides were wounded. The min-t'uan were entirely disarmed, and their two chieftains taken captive.

We passed the battalion returning with their captives as we rode back toward Shensi. A big welcome had been organized in the villages, and the peasants lined the road to cheer the victorious troops. Peasant Guards stood holding their long red-tasseled spears in salute, and the Young Vanguards sang Red songs to them, while girls and women brought refreshments, tea and fruit and hot water——all they had, but it creased the faces of the weary soldiers with smiles. They were very young, much younger than the front-line regulars, and it seemed to me that many who wore bloodstained bandages were no more than fourteen or fifteen. I saw one youth on a horse, half-conscious and held up by a comrade on each side, who had a white bandage around his forehead, in the exact center of which was a round red stain.

There in the midst of this column of youngsters, who carried rifles almost as big as themselves, marched the two bandit chieftains. One of them was a grizzled middle-aged peasant, and one wondered whether he felt ashamed, being led by these warriors all young enough to be his sons. Yet there was something rather splendid about his fearless bearing, and I thought that he was, after all, possibly a poor peasant like the rest, perhaps one who had also believed in something when he fought them, and it was regrettable that he was to be killed. Fu Chin-kuei shook his head when I asked him.

"We don't kill captured min-t'uan. We educate them and give them a chance to repent, and many of them later become good Red partisans."

It was fortunate that the Reds had erased this group of bandits, for it cleared our road back to Pao An. We made the trip from the Kansu border in five days, doing more than 100 li on the fifth, but though there was plenty of incident there was no event, and I returned with no trophies except cantaloupes and melons I had bought along the road.

^[*]Literally, "Sunday Temple."