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By Root 1059 0

at sixteen, and fought his first actions with a locally made Wuhan rifle which always jammed after four shots. His ambition was to arm himself with a sub-machine gun. In one of his regiment’s first battles as part of Chiang’s 29th Army, it lost almost half its sixteen hundred men. There were only rags to bandage the wounded. “The Japanese had so much more400 of everything,” Yan said, “and especially aircraft. By 1944, life was pretty wretched. We had just enough to eat, but the food was very poor. We went through the whole winter with only summer uniforms. Most of us, like me, simply had no idea what had happened to our families.” His only notable compensation for service in 29th Army, he said, was that he received his pay. In many of Chiang’s formations, senior officers stole the money. “I hated the war: so many battles, so many dead and maimed friends. When I close my eyes, I can see them now. An army is not just weapons and equipment, it is spirit. The Kuomintang army lost its spirit.”

The lives of Nationalist soldiers—notionally some two million of them in 1944, organised in two hundred divisions—were relentlessly harsh. Bugles summoned them to advance, to retreat, to die. Their weapons were an erratic miscellany: old German or locally made pistols and rifles; a few machine guns, artillery pieces and mortars, invariably short of ammunition, often rusting. They had no tanks and few vehicles. Commanders might have horses, but their men walked. Only officers had boots or leather shoes. Fortunate soldiers possessed cotton or straw sandals, but were often barefoot beneath the long cotton puttees which covered their legs. If they had a little kerosene, they used it to bathe chronic blisters.

Gunner captain Ying Yunping found himself walking more than two hundred miles during an epic retreat to Mianyang. One night, accompanied only by his batman, he staggered into a village and begged shelter and food. He was grudgingly given a few salted vegetables. His suspicions were roused, however, when he noticed that many of the people around him were carrying guns. His batman finally muttered: “They’re bandits. They want your sub-machine gun. They say they hate the Kuomintang, and they’re going to kill you.” Ying’s skin was finally saved by the eloquence of his batman, who parleyed with the bandits for the officer’s life, saying: “He’s not one of the corrupt bastards. He’s not a bad fellow.” Finally, a villager came to Ying and said: “Forgive us.” The captain shrugged: “There’s nothing to forgive401. You have given me my life.” Next day, he and his batman trudged onwards, away from the Japanese, towards Mianyang. When they rejoined the army, officer and soldier were separated. “In wartime, it was very hard to stay in touch. I never saw him again. But in my thoughts, for the rest of my life he has been ‘my Mianyang brother.’”

Off-duty, officers drank the fierce maotai spirit, played mahjong, visited brothels or attended the occasional show put on by a “comfort party” of actors and singers. Few rankers enjoyed such indulgences. Soldiers smoked “Little Blue Sword” cigarettes when they were fortunate enough to be able to get them. John Paton Davies described the pathetic pleasures on which Chiang’s men depended to relieve a life of otherwise unbroken hardship and oppression: “a cricket in a tiny straw cage402, a shadow play manipulated by an itinerant puppeteer, gambling a pittance on games of chance, or listening to the fluted tones of flights of pigeons, each with a whistle tied to a leg—any one of these was enough to make an off-duty afternoon.”

Among Nationalist soldiers leave was unknown, desertion endemic. Eight hundred recruits once set off from Gansu to join a U.S. Army training programme in Yunnan. Two hundred died en route, and a further three hundred deserted. Tuberculosis was commonplace. Wounded men often had to pay comrades to carry their stretchers, for otherwise they were left to perish. In battle or out of it communications, mail, tidings of the outside world, were almost non-existent. Ying Yunping, a thirty-year-old403