40
A Near Thing
(1923)

By the middle of July, soldiers were everywhere on the hills, and trouble was in the air. In fact, we were in the midst of war. Chungking was besieged by an erstwhile robber chief who used to be an ally of General Yang Sen. Now he had turned traitor and was taking advantage of General Yang's absence.^[1] His forces occupied the south bank of the Yangtze ("our side," with its hills and summer bungalows), and began to fire cannons at the city across the river. The two American gunboats were normally anchored on the south bank. Now the Monocacy was moved over to the city side to be closer in case of need.

The firing across the river was not very alarming. But ferry boats on the river seemed to be attractive targets. Bob (and many others) had to cross the river daily by sampan. The Palos , on the south bank, started sending a motor launch over to the Monocacy , on the city side, going over at nine and coming back at four in the afternoon. The opposing forces promised not to fire on this launch, but no Chinese were to be transported.

The army defending the city had detained most of the Chinese river craft on their side of the river. Even if boats had been available, the river was quite high, and any attack across it would have been difficult. Chou, the robber chief, looted what there was on the South Bank (particularly the Mint) and sent the plunder south toward his Kweichow home. The reports were that he had brought three hundred mule loads of opium with him from Kweichow to finance this incursion. Perhaps the same mules hauled the plunder home. After about ten days of this stalemate, our besiegers departed silently one night. Everything soon resumed its normal aspect and routine.

[1] This was the same General Chou Hsi-cheng who, in April, had tried to attack Chungking from across the Kialing River. In Szechwan warlord politics, Yang Sen was one of the big boys. Chou Hsi-cheng was small fry. There was a struggle going on for control of Chengtu; this would be of major concern to Yang Sen and probably accounted for his absence from Chungking.

In fact, things became normal enough for there to be a controversy over movies. There were still no movie theaters in Chungking, and movies were a great novelty. One of the British businessmen on the South Bank had a large house and a small electric generator. The Y had a portable projector and films selected and circulated by the National Committee of the Y. The businessman would supply the electricity and the veranda; Bob would supply the projector and film; and the foreigners on the South Bank were invited to a free weekly movie.

We soon learned that some of our Fundamentalist neighbors were grieved that missionaries attended such shows. That "so-called missionaries" (the Y) should sponsor the films was even worse. Papers and declarations concerning the showing of films were circulated. I suppose that many of these people told their Chinese Christians not to have anything to do with the YMCA. Bob avoided argument and would only smile; the Fundamentalists, he thought, put doctrine above love.

That summer was torrid, and there was very little rain. Wells dried up, and very few green vegetables could be bought. We got on mostly with potatoes and large onions. Our lads refreshed themselves by going to a neighbor's swimming pool, a mile or so along our range of hills.^[2] Young Bob rejoiced in earning seven dollars one afternoon. His father had promised five dollars to each boy as soon as he could swim the length of the pool, and I had added two dollars for the first to accomplish this feat. Jack could swim the width, but Bob was the first to accomplish the longer distance.

About the middle of August there were rumors that Chou Hsi-cheng was coming back. He had disturbed us twice already, in April and July, and had soon departed; no one seemed especially alarmed.

When we were at our tennis court on the afternoon of August 20 a number of soldiers appeared. They seemed to be looking around the area and investigating the several paths through and around the Friends' Mission property, which was quite large (about sixteen acres). This did not seem too strange. We were close to one of the important passes across our range of hills. The main road through the pass ran along the north edge of the property. Having soldiers about was quite common that summer. We asked the men what army they belonged to. They were General Deng Hsi-hou's men. And he was (at that time) an ally of General Yang Sen, and so an enemy of Chou Hsi-cheng.

That evening Bob returned late from the city. He reached the house at about nine. We finished supper, and the lads went to bed. I was reading from the Shanghai paper the account of a recent incident at Ichang in which the

[2] The swimming pool was somewhat less than the usual American version. It depended on fresh water diverted from a small stream. When the stream dried up, the pool suffered.

Alice Dollar had been fired on. Suddenly there was much yelling and rifle fire—close by.^[3]

I ran into the bedrooms at the front of the house to tell the boys to lie still in their beds. The walls of the house were brick, the windows rather high, and the beds low. Bob and Dick were in the room at the left of the small front hall; Jack and a friend were in the bedroom on the right. The attack was coming up the hill, toward the back of the house; the safest place seemed to be the front. Of course, we put out all lights. We could hear our servants calling out that this was the house of foreigners, that there were no soldiers present. Still the shots and shouting came nearer and nearer. Bob and I were standing in the corner of the left bedroom, near its door into the hall, and thus very close to the front entrance of the house. Suddenly, we could hear men talking and the sound of their feet as they ran up the brick steps to our front door.

Bob caught my arm and said, "I must speak to those men before something happens." I think he really felt more fear for our servants than ourselves: their lath and plaster walls gave them little protection compared with our brick. The front entrance of the bungalow was a double door. The top half of both sections was glass. The right-hand door stood open, the left-hand one was closed. As Bob stepped into the hall, he was just inside the closed, glass-paned door. At that instant there was the shattering report of a rifle, the sound of splintering glass, and yells from soldiers. I was only a few feet away, but no sound came from Bob. I stepped at once into the long, narrow hall. Moonlight streamed through the front door and I could see soldiers on the veranda. In the gloom of the hall I saw Bob bent over double at the far end, away from the door. He was holding his head in his hands.

I rushed to him and asked if he had been hit. He told me to keep away: he was injured, but must speak to the soldiers. With this, he brushed past me and went to the door. He told the men that we were foreigners, and asked to whom they belonged. One man, perhaps the man who had fired the shot, spoke up and said they were Chou Hsi-cheng's men. Bob had met this general in Chungking, so he told the men he knew their commander and was sure that General Chou did not want foreigners to be molested in this way. "You might have killed me," said Bob, "You had better go away now for we have no soldiers around this place." "All right, all right," said they, and moved down the steps and slowly off the premises.

[3] Grace's mention of "yelling" hardly seems adequate. This was an attack, not just on our house, but against a range of hills. It involved a force of hundreds, perhaps several thousands, of men. The Chinese have always believed that sound effects have an important place in military tactics. In this case, there seemed to be hordes of men, advancing up the hill toward us in the dark, all hoarsely shouting, "Sha! Sha !" (Kill, Kill). So far as we boys were concerned it was a very effective tactic: it was the most frightening sound I have heard in my life. It was, apparently, also militarily effective. Any defenders there may have been on our hilltop very quickly decamped.

I ran to Bob and asked him where he was hurt. Then I saw him groping at the wall of the hall. He was saying, "My eyes, my eyes." "Well," I said, "surely you weren't hit by the bullet or you couldn't be going around as you do." But his remark frightened me. We went into our bedroom and I called to Amah to bring a lamp. As soon as Bob sensed the light coming near, he cried out that he could not have it. Even a tiny hand-lamp was too much. We had to fetch a candle before I could get a real view of his eyes. In spite of pain, he tried with his own fingers to pull up the eyelids so I could look. Amah, the cook, and I all stood there, and all we could see was blood covering both eyeballs. His forehead was cut; his hands and handkerchief were covered with blood. The servants and I exchanged glances: nothing was said. Amah told me later that my face was "like a dead woman's"—fortunately Bob could not see it. I felt an awful despair; but I knew I must do something .

It was out of the question to send for aid; soldiers still ran riot all over the hills, and the doctor was forty-five minutes away. It was clear that Bob's only injury was to his eyes, and that probably by small bits of shattered glass. Boiling water was at hand. With the cook's help, I soon sterilized our eyecup and made boracic solution, cooling it with cold drinking water—thanks to our new refrigerator. With eyecup and abundant boracic solution we washed the eyeballs thoroughly. As it proved later, very good treatment this was. The doctor told me that I had cleared out any glass particles that might possibly have remained within the lids.

After this, Bob lay on his bed fully dressed (neither one of us undressed that night). We lacked ice for cold compresses, so I used hot ones to take away soreness. I think Bob felt he must have lost the sight of one eye. He told me he could bear it if I could! I tried to cheer him. The servants wanted to show their sympathy and concern, and it was hard to keep them out of the bedroom. They asked if they could stay the rest of the night in the living room. I gave permission, so they all brought their sleeping mats and lay there on the floor, the chair men and all. Doors were all left open, so I had them on one side; on another side was the lads' room, and there lay Amah on her mat between the two younger boys. I did not sleep a wink, and could hear the men servants discussing the whole affair in low voices during the night. "If our teacher (Bob) was a man like some of the foreigners, who would care? But he is always kind to everyone. It is a great pity our teacher should be injured when he was quiet in his own house." And so on and on.

That night will live forever in my memory. I learned the value of reticence and discipline. What Bob and I both feared, we did not put into words. The knowledge lay between us; each tried to save the other. We could still hear the soldiers all over the hills, yelling and shooting until it sounded like Bedlam. But the moonlight made it almost light as day. It shone into the living room on the men lying there, and into our bedroom on our beds where we

lay. I threw myself on mine between fixing compresses for Bob. There was the fragrance of pines on which rain had fallen that day, a scent of flowers, a freshness of the night breeze. The dogs whimpered and lay under our beds. They were never allowed in the house, but that night we took pity on them. In the far distance we could hear faint sounds of soldiers, sudden bursts of gunfire, and echoes of turmoil rolling across the hills from range to range. Amah called out to me now and then, telling me that the children slept, or asking what she could do to help.

The chair men had said that as soon as there was light and the soldiers were gone, they would carry Bob to the doctor. At dawn, we got him off in his sedan chair, with a bath towel around his head to keep out the light. The head chair man carried a note to Mr. Spiker, our consul, who lived near the doctor. The chair man was to tell the consul's Boy to waken his master and deliver the note at once. Thus it was delivered before six. Mr. Spiker got up at once and went over to the doctor's. The relief was tremendous when it was found that Bob's eyes were safe. The right eyeball, closest to the bullet's path, was badly cut and always carried scars; but the vision was not impaired. He had had a most fortunate escape.

The rifle had been fired from the hip. The bullet had gone upward, through the glass, close past Bob's head, through the frame of the door into the bedroom, and finally imbedded itself in a comforter folded on a cupboard shelf in the lads' bedroom. When we measured it carefully, it seemed that the bullet missed him by an inch or less. Bob always said that he felt it pass his temple!

A few days later, Chou Hsi-cheng sent an officer to call on Bob and to find out how badly he was hurt. Mr. Spiker came at the same time. We held a thread from the bullet hole in the glass to the hole in the door frame, showing the officer the tiny space in which Bob's head was when the bullet passed. He looked and could make only one remark, "Ai-ya, ai-ya!" General Chou expressed regrets and offered to pay any hospital bill. There was none, so he paid nothing.^[4]

Although I have referred to this man as a robber—and that is what he was called in Chungking in those days—he was highly thought of in Kweichow Province. A few years ago I heard of his death there, and learned that he was considered a benefactor in the city of Kweiyang, the provincial capital.

[4] General Chou was probably happy to express regrets, and genuinely happy that Bob was not more seriously injured. His soldiers on the spot, however, could not—under the circumstances—be entirely blamed. There had been opposing forces on the hill (the soldiers scouting about the tennis court that afternoon). When the attack started, the men on the hill may have fired some shots (we were confused at the beginning about the direction from which the firing was coming). If there had been shots from the defenders (visible as flashes in the dark), they might well have come from the grove of trees on the crest of the hill, just above our bungalow. The attackers were strangers to the area; there was no way for them to know—or for us to indicate—that the house was occupied by foreigners.

I understand that there has been a statue to his memory erected there by friends.^[5]

The very morning after Bob's injury, when it was still none too safe to be going around freely, the news of his trouble flew all over our hills. It was an illustration of how news travels in China.^[6] In some mysterious way it soon became known even to those at considerable distances. Notes began to come in as soon as he returned from the doctor's. By afternoon, when the fighting had cleared away from our neighborhood, men came to call, and more messages rolled in. Everyone rejoiced with us that his vision was going to be saved.

Still Bob suffered a great deal. He had to remain in a dark room for days, and his eyes had to be bathed and treated every two hours. In hot weather this was trying, but our joy that his eyes were saved carried us through these minor discomforts. The shock of the whole affair, however, seemed to have done something to me. I could not sleep more than an hour at a time, and felt on the edge of a catastrophe during most of the daylight hours. At night we felt more restless. The fighting cut us off from the city for eight days, so Bob would have had to take a vacation anyway. During these days there was always the sound of gunfire. One day, five sailors on the Palos were injured by splinters from steel plates being hit by bullets. Shipping was at a standstill. When it resumed, foreign ships were fired on whenever they moved— the military hated them because they refused to transport troops.

The urgent thing now was to get the boys off to their school in Shanghai. Dick had not been very well that spring. Life was so tense in Chungking that we decided to send him to Shanghai with the two older boys. He was only nine, too young to go to the American school as a boarder. However, the Yards—our old Chengtu friends, now in Shanghai—urged us to send him down, saying that they had room and would gladly keep him that fall. As we were to go on home leave in January 1924, Bob had already planned for me to leave early and spend the month of December in Shanghai with Mabelle. This meant that it would be only three months until I would be there with Dick. So we got the three lads ready to leave for the Coast with Hugo Sandor. Small Bob gave us some excitement for two days as he ran a temperature after being bitten by a snake. He also had a headache, but had no other bad

[5] When I retraced the Long March with the Salisburys in 1984, we stopped in a county town named Tungtze in northern Kweichow. It was a pleasant place. After the local historian had told us about the Red Army stopping there, we asked him what else the town was famous for. "For fighting men," he said; "the town is known as the home of generals." Pressed for names, he came up with some early ones and then mentioned Chou Hsi-cheng. "Ah, yes," I said, "my father knew him." I think Grace's story of a statue of the general in Kweiyang can be treated with some reserve. If there was such a statue, it was certainly paid for by the general. And it certainly does not still stand.

[6] Today this phenomenon is known as the "bamboo wireless"; in those preradio days it was the "bamboo telegraph."

effects. Around us, things were happening every day, and we were anxious to get them away.

On Sunday afternoon, as we sat on our veranda trying to keep cool, we heard awful screams. A man accused, our servants told us, of being a spy had been seized by soldiers at the pass below our house. He had been hung up in a tree, feet first, and was being beaten with slender split bamboos. Of course the lads wanted to go at once to see what was happening. I told them not to go, but they found a spot where they could look down and see what was going on.^[7] I said over and over to Bob, "If we can only get the children away before another storm breaks!"

Everything was packed for the three lads. We left for the city on the afternoon of September 3 and put them on the Robert Dollar , scheduled to sail the next morning.

[7] For us boys the adjustment to military conditions may not have been as difficult as Grace assumed. We found enough material lying about to start an ammunition collection. At first this showed the remarkable diversity in caliber and bullet characteristics of bush league warlord armament. Then, when we found that we could disassemble live ammunition, we put together quite a display of different types of explosives. (The family had recently had its periodic series of typhoid inoculations: the small bottles were just fine for powder samples.)
One day the three of us boys encountered a group of soldiers. For some reason which I cannot now imagine, we had our Daisy air rifle, ordered from Montgomery Ward. The interest of the soldiers was immediate. A foreign rifle! It must be something special! When their acquisitiveness became transparent, my quick-thinking brother Bob whispered, "Shoot me." So I did, aiming at his chest from about fifteen paces. He was wearing a heavy khaki shirt, which the BB did not penetrate. The soldiers had no more interest in the air rifle, and we all parted amicably.