to living under the heel of the Japanese Army, and because, were misfortune to befall me, as a bachelor, my demise would be less extensively mourned than in the case of a man with wife and children. The dear old Department was considerate in such matters.
I was not so much as scratched, although we were bombed a bit. This was something of a novelty in 1938, unless one were an Ethiopian or a Spaniard. Air raids, troop movements, wounded soldiers arriving from the front, Soviet “volunteer” airmen and German military advisers in the streets, hordes of dazed refugees fleeing before the oncoming enemy, students rushing about the city pasting patriotic posters on walls and calling on everyone to resist the foe, and finally the Communists planting dynamite in key buildings to greet the invaders with a scorched earth—all of these made for a lively scene.
In Hankow I picked up strands of previous acquaintanceships: Colonel Stilwell, who, as Military Attaché, was observing the course of hostilities; Pinky Dorn, serving with him as Assistant Military Attaché; and Edgar Snow, reporting the war and less overtly violent forms of politics. His Red Star over China had recently been published and he had suddenly risen from journalistic obscurity to international acclaim without having been spoiled.
Because of the constricted wartime living at Hankow, with the American and British correspondents and officials concentrated in offices, apartments, hotels, and bars in a short strip along the bank of the Yangtze, and because of a mounting sense of crisis and doom from the approaching Japanese armies, the twenty or thirty Anglo-American newsmen and officials shared a feeling of camaraderie. My apartment in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building became one of the eating, drinking, debating, and recreational centers for the “last ditchers,” as we called ourselves.
A Marine Corps captain, Evans Carlson, whom I had known in Peking, came to Hankow from North China, where he had been observing firsthand the Chinese Communist Eight Route Army. Carlson was fortyish, a lanky, rawboned fellow, less homely than Abraham Lincoln, less handsome than Gary Cooper. He was unpretentious and direct; also a bit wanting in skepticism. Although at President Roosevelt’s request he wrote personally to FDR regarding the situation in China, I do not recall his ever mentioning this unusual relationship. It had begun in 1935 when Carlson commanded the President’s Marine guard at Warm Springs and Roosevelt took a liking to the rugged, idealistic officer, who had already served two stints in China.
Carlson was the first American military man to visit Communist-held areas. He came to Hankow greatly impressed by what he had seen of Communist troops and guerrillas, their exceptional esprit de corps, discipline, and solicitude for the civilian population. The Eagle Scout behavior of the Communist soldiers contrasted with the often dispirited, disreputable life style of other Chinese troops. Carlson reported his enthusiastic admiration of the Communist forces. This raised senior American military eyebrows. When he voiced his views to the press, the Navy attempted to muzzle him. Inspired to bear witness, Carlson resigned and in the United States publicly praised the Chinese Communists and prophesied a harmonious, unified, democratic China victorious over Japan, if only Americans would stop selling war materiel to Japan.
This did not happen. Carlson found himself back in the Marines in time for World War II. He was given a battalion, popularly called Carlson’s Raiders, in training which he incorporated lessons learned from the Chinese Communist regulars and irregulars. Perhaps Carlson’s most lasting contribution to the art of war and to American history and culture was lexicographical. By adopting the Chinese Communist slogan “gung ho”—work together—as a motto for the Raiders, he introduced the phrase into the American vulgate where it is now defined in a sense less reflective of the original Chinese meaning than of Carlson himself—“wholeheartedly, often ingenuously, loyal and enthusiastic.”
* * *
Here at Hankow in the summer of 1938 I also formed new acquaintanceships, some of which were renewed elsewhere or otherwise affected my life, particularly in the McCarthy era. One of these new acquaintances was Chou En-lai, then acting as the principal Communist representative with Chiang Kai-shek’s National Government. This was under the wartime arrangement of a so-called united front between the two mutually hostile regimes.
Fine featured, animated, quick-witted and magnetic, Chou was well equipped for another and more productive function—public relations with foreign journalists and officials. For a Communist oligarch he was remarkably catholic in his interests and vivacious in his manner. This was for Chou the beginning of 37 years of dealing with foreigners, continuing even into the period when he was Prime Minister.
Close to the Communist delegation was a middle-aged woman named Agnes Smedley. Agnes was indelibly American—not Booth Tarkington American, rather Upton Sinclair American, with a touch of Calamity Jane and the Wobblies. She had been born into the squalor of a turn of the century Colorado mining camp and grown up in poverty, bitterness, and anger. A rebel by temperament and a writer by vocation, she championed the poor and downtrodden; initially, of all things, the cause of Indian independence from British rule during World War I. In the 1930s she was in China and appalled by the poverty and oppression that she encountered. She associated herself with the Chinese Communists and left-wing organizations, visited the Communist headquarters at Yenan, and, with the 1937 Japanese invasion of China, joined Communist guerrilla units in the countryside.
Garbed in the shapeless gray cotton uniform of the Communist Eight Route Army, complete with puttees, cloth shoes and a limp cap on her lank brown bob, Miss Smedley arrived in Hankow from guerrilla country. She was in straitened circumstances, so the American Episcopalian Bishop, Logan Roots, a practicing Christian, took her in and gave her bed and board. They were spoken of as the Moscow-Heaven Axis. And Agnes entertained herself—and the Right Reverend Roots—by addressing him as Comrade Bishop. The Manchester Guardian employed her as a correspondent, which ameliorated her financial plight and made her a member of the international press corps.
Agnes also solicited medical supplies for the guerrillas and money with which to buy such supplies. The British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel) was one of the more forthcoming donors to her wounded and sick guerrillas. Sir Archie respected this ill-favored, fervent woman and learned from her about a China and Chinese to whom very few foreigners had access. So did most of the foreign correspondents.
Although she maintained that she was not a Communist, Agnes was generally regarded as one and was certainly closely associated with them. Because she was unruly, nonconformist, and at once cynical and pitying, I doubted that she was a Communist Party member—and that the Party would accept her for membership if she applied. It did not seem to me that a Party member would have said to me, as Agnes did, that while she respected and was fond of Chu Teh (whose biography she was writing) and other Communist fighting men, she disliked the principal political figures in Yenan: “They’re too slick.” I wondered if Agnes might not, given the opportunity, forsake fellow-traveling.
Shortly before the press corps left Hankow in the face of the Japanese advance—the embassies had gone earlier—I had a casual dinner for some of those who were about to depart, among them Agnes. After dinner she was momentarily sitting by herself so I went over to make conversation. Where was she going, I asked. Back to the guerrillas, “That’s where I belong.” I then delivered some thoughts on the degenerative course of revolutionary movements, that if the cause with which she identified herself came to power she would be disillusioned, her faith in the revolution betrayed. Why didn’t she give up the kind of life she was leading and function like other correspondents? “I can’t,” she said with tears in her eyes, “There is no other way for me.”
I regretted what I had said. She did not need my lecturing. She was already aware of what I warned. And I had not suggested any acceptable alternative. Indeed, there probably was no other way for her.
For several months after she left I received brief letters from Agnes reporting what was transpiring in the guerrilla areas. She was our only source of firsthand
