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scouts. An enemy search-and-destroy column was approaching. “It was pitch dark and blowing a gale. Our commander said: ‘We’ve got to get out—fast.’” Hastily seizing weapons and equipment, they set off towards another village, nine miles distant. They had marched barely a mile when the night erupted into gunfire. Somebody said: “The lead platoon has run into the Japanese.” Bai’s companions said: “We’ll have to make a run for it.” She had a special problem of her own, however. She was heavily pregnant. After struggling across country for two miles, she felt she could not run another step. In the midst of the fields, she told the others: “Leave me here—I’ll find a place to hide.” They argued fiercely for a few moments, then took her at her word. After a cold and frighteningly lonely night, early next morning she was able to struggle on to the village rendezvous where she joined her company. The Japanese were still close behind, however. The guerrillas had to keep going. In a few hasty exchanges with the villagers, they found a refuge for Bai, in the hut of a widow with no reason to love the enemy, for they had killed her husband.

For two weeks, they lived peacefully enough. Then, one morning, a boy dashed in shouting: “Japanese come! Japanese come!” At first they were disbelieving. Then they saw enemy soldiers approaching. Once again, Bai had to stumble into flight with her unborn burden. She lasted six miles, as far as another village, before again collapsing exhausted. She threw herself on the mercy of the peasants. They showed her into a deep, narrow hole. In stifling heat and total darkness, she lay secreted when the enemy column arrived. The Japanese announced that they knew people from 8th Route Army were in the village, and proposed to find them. After a search, which came close to Bai’s hole but did not discover it, they interrogated a ten-year-old boy and an old man. Both denied all knowledge of any fugitives. After raping the old man’s niece in front of the entire village, the Japanese marched on. Bai said: “I felt so guilty, completely powerless to interfere with anything the Japanese did.” She was safe, and rejoined her regiment. Soon afterwards, she gave birth to a son. She cherished the profound gratitude, common to all fugitives, of owing her life to strangers who suffered much and risked more.

2. With the Soviets

ONE OF MANY errors made by Western observers in China was to assume that Communists in Moscow must be sympathetic to Communists in Yan’an, and vice versa. In the winter of 1944–45, when Chinese Nationalist troops were everywhere retreating before the Japanese, the British Joint Intelligence Committee speculated: “If Chinese unable put up even show789 of determined resistance in defence of such important towns, considerable danger gov might not survive. With breakdown of centralised govt and dispersal Chinese troops, other than those trained and led by Americans, organised Chinese opposition would come only from Communists…who might get more support than in past from Russians who might see some advantage in maintaining some Chinese Government in opposition to Japanese.”

In reality, however, Stalin had long before reached brutally pragmatic conclusions about China. He believed that Chiang was the only man capable of ruling the country; that Mao was too weak to overthrow him; and that Soviet interests therefore demanded a working relationship with the Nationalists. For years before the war, Chiang received cash and military aid from Moscow. Mao’s people in Yan’an were far more isolated politically than Western visitors knew. Though Stalin had funded China’s Communists back in the 1920s, not until the war ended did the Soviet leader lift a finger to assist their cause against Chiang. Conversely, in the dark days of 1941–42, when Stalin’s emissaries in Yan’an urged Mao to exert all possible military pressure on the Japanese, to diminish the risk that they would join Hitler’s onslaught on Russia, the Chinese leader ignored their imprecations.

Yet the Soviets needed information from China, and above