The call, p.42
The Call, page 42
He hurries ahead to one of the open third-class gondola cars, and begins to dicker with an officer for space enough for the lecture goods. He senses that being a foreigner and being a huge man are, for once, of no help. The officer firmly denies him the space. He pulls his wallet from his pocket and slips some bills half out, but the officer shakes his head. Treadup is astonished—a Chinese soldier who won’t take a cash push! Ching has now joined him; other officers ring the man Treadup has been talking with. It is obvious that a high hand will not be effective. Ching politely asks who the officer’s commander is.
The officer says it is General Feng Yu-hsiang.
Treadup and Ching both shout with pleasure. They recognize this as the name of “the Christian General,” about whom they have heard so much. Ching hastily tells the officer that Treadup is with the Young Men’s Christian Association. The officer softens at once, bows, apologizes for his rudeness, and turns to command his men to make room in the car for the boxes of apparatus.
Treadup asks where the General can be found. The officer says that he is in his “private car.” It is four cars forward. Treadup looks for a velvet-curtained first-class carriage but finds instead that General Feng’s “private car” is just one more open gondola. And there—not having made the connection before—he sees the huge soldier who came forward at the Todd lecture in Peking four years ago. He is dressed in a plain cotton uniform like those of his common soldiers; he sits among piles of duffel with a group of enlisted men. He instantly recognizes Treadup, recalling the day of “Mr. Todd’s teachings,” and he invites Treadup to ride with him. He and his men are going to the military camp at Langfang, between Tientsin and Peking.
During their ride through the countryside, Feng asks Treadup about his work. As Treadup describes it, Feng in all his hugeness cuts at the air with his hands, stretches his face this way and that, groans with pleasure at what he is hearing. He insists that Treadup must come and lecture to his troops. They are mostly poor farmers, he says—but eager to learn about the world of machines. Treadup says he grew up on a farm. Feng roars, claps his hands, and asks his men if they heard what the ta mu-shih, this big missionary, has said. A farmer! Delighted laughter all around.
* * *
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IT IS doubtful whether David Treadup had any sense yet of the real nature of the nascent warlord system of which General Feng was to be such a vivid and mercurial representative in the next decade. Treadup was naturally excited to encounter the already famous Christian General. “My thrill that day in the railroad car,” Treadup wrote from the safe distance of “Search,”
was, I guess, understandable, but it was also, in some unfortunate way, undiscriminating. I realize now how strongly attracted I was to any Chinese leader who was touched, no matter how lightly, with the Christian brush, and who gave hopes, no matter how real, of gaining power enough to change China.
So had it been, indeed, in Treadup’s almost fawning attitude, at first, toward Li Yuan-hung, who had favored religious freedom and had been so hospitable to the missionary Treadup; toward Sun Yat-sen, himself a Christian, converted in his youth; toward Yuan Shih-k’ai, who had early declared to the Christian community his support of freedom of religion, and who even earlier had directly helped Treadup; and now with this boomingly cordial man, the Christian General. And would be, one day, at least for a while, with Chiang Kai-shek, married to a Christian woman and himself eventually converted.
The warlord system, a product of the breakdown after Yuan’s death of any true national authority, was an almost animal arrangement of regional hegemonies. The warlords were like bull sea lions or great buffaloes or bighorn rams establishing and fighting to defend the territories where they would be supreme. They gave off heat waves of vigor, grandeur, and greed. Years later Pearl Buck would write:
Without exception the warlords I have known have been men of unusual native ability, gifted with peculiar personal charm, with imagination and strength, and often with a rude poetic quality. Above all, they carry about with them, in them, a sense of high drama. The warlord sees himself great—and great in the traditional manner of heroes of ancient fiction and history who are so inextricably mingled in the old Chinese novels. He is, in effect, an actor by nature, as Napoleon was. The warlord is a creature of emotion; cruel or merciful, as the whim is; dangerous and unstable as friend or enemy; licentious and usually fond of luxury.
Big warlords came to control areas as large as Germany or France; at the other extreme some petty warlords controlled no more than a few villages and might be pocketed within the territories of grander ones. The only difference between most warlords and bandits was that warlords controlled territory while bandits hit and ran. There was a circular logic in warlordism: A warlord needed an army to control a territory that would support an army. It was easy to recruit soldiers: poverty-ridden farmers, younger brothers, hungry jobless youths, glad to be clothed, fed, sometimes even paid, or at least given chances to loot. Since greed for power and money was the commanders’ driving motive, battles were often dances, or discreet surrenders, or “victories” in which the only bullets fired were silver. “We shall undoubtedly win,” said an officer of one conflict in which Feng was to be engaged. “It is simply a matter of waiting for treason.” “China’s wars,” a Chinese admiral said, “are always civil.”
Not always, in fact. Some, where relatively great power was at stake, were earnest and bloody, with bitter fighting and many casualties. The treachery was often cruel. One way of capturing an army was to invite its commander to a banquet, stuff him, seize him, and shoot him. Many units were superbly trained; Feng’s were. Most of the arms came from foreigners. This caused great resentment: In all the wars, one intellectual wrote,
the rifles and field guns come from abroad. The bullets and shells come from abroad. Bombs and powder and hardware all come from abroad. The money comes from abroad…. Only the blood and flesh of our dead countrymen who kill one another on the battlefields are Chinese.
A deep, voiceless, and futile resentment against the warlords would come eventually from the Chinese people, who were tragically oppressed by the greed that was built into the system. In the hands of the warlords, the land tax became a tool of frightful exploitation. Taxes were sometimes collected for years in advance. Ingenuity galloped on greed’s back, and here and there we find a pig-rearing tax, firecracker tax, opium-smoking lamp tax, marrying off one’s daughter tax, narcissus bulb tax, superstition tax (on candles, paper money for funerals, etc.), lower-class prostitute singing tax, and, terrible thought, night-soil tax, so that one couldn’t even defecate without paying. The people suffered horribly in other ways. Carts and donkeys and boats and wheelbarrows were seized; men were conscripted and torn from their homes as cartmen, porters, or boatmen. Disorderly troops robbed, looted, beat, raped, and burned. Masses of the population were in constant flight from place to place. During plague, flood, and famine, the warlords indifferently taxed and taxed. This next decade of their ravaging wars was to prepare the way, among the bitterly harassed common people, for China’s larger revolution to come.
* * *
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BACK IN SHANGHAI, David wrote his brother Paul about the train ride with General Feng:
I have every intention of visiting his encampment and lecturing to his men. It will be a great challenge: to speak to Chinese farmers and working men who live in a Christian setting. I will have to remember that I am not addressing the literati; I must pitch my discourse to simple hearts. There will be a great tension in it, between clarity and God’s truth. By that I mean: To make the laws of physics that govern the gyroscope clear to raw, untutored minds, I must take shortcuts, simplify, use rather crude mind-pictures, and tell much less than the whole truth, which would only confuse. Yet what I want to teach the Chinese, above all, is a love of exactitude. I know that in the Christian General’s camp I will have to teach exactitude inexactly. That will be painful.
But necessary! This man may well come to power, and if he does, think what a boost it will be for our cause! In his way he is a missionary. He sat there in the train on a bedroll, with his legs crossed—he is huge—big gestures—elastic face—and he talked to me about the stages of his coming to Christ.
He said he was the son of a poor soldier, and he joined the army when he was a small boy. The first stage was rank superstition. Soon after his enlistment, an epidemic broke out in Paotingfu, where he was stationed—smallpox, probably, or plague—and his unit was ordered to go through the streets shooting rifles just to make a noise to put to flight the evil spirits that were thought to be causing the disease. He told me he vividly remembers having fired at a sign in front of a Christian church. Foreign devils!
Next stage, puckishness. He went to that same church out of idle curiosity, listened to some sermons. The preacher talked about turning the other cheek—“If someone takes your outer clothing, give him your inner clothing, too.” Feng and some friends carried a table out of the church rooms. The minister stopped them with roars of outrage. In mimicked pulpit tones they said he should be offering them the chairs that went with it! But Christ’s message apparently didn’t reach that far, and he made them return the table.
But next, gratitude. He was sick, and after failing to get help from Chinese doctors, he received it free on two occasions from missionary doctors, and when he tried to thank them they told him to thank God.
Then, he said, he became impressed by Chinese Christians, who never smoked opium, were industrious, always educated their children even if they were poor, and did not bind their daughters’ feet. He said he admired those simple things and thought that if all China could follow such rules, the nation might “find a way.”
And finally he began reading Christian literature and attending church. A particular sermon he heard in Manchuria moved him to the soles of his feet—and then James B. Todd in Peking! I wrote you about meeting him that day. Tears glistened in his eyes when he talked about Todd’s message.
He is such a feeling man. Emotions seem to rise from deep in him and burst on the surface, like big bubbles of air from the depths of a lake. While we were talking about recent events, he told me that when Yuan Shih-k’ai declared himself emperor, he wanted so badly to go and fight Yuan that he cried until his head ached—and even as he said this, he began to weep! He embraced me, Paul, when he detrained at Langfang, just as you, my dear brother, might have done….
There is a great deal of evidence, especially from Feng’s later history, that he was a shrewd and devious man, and many in China came to think that he may have cynically put Christianity on, as if it were a new fashion of clothing, in order to ingratiate himself with powerful foreigners, and in order to bewitch his troops with a ritualistic mystique like that of the Taipings. Years later, when his allegiances had begun to swerve with opportunity, he gave a mixed picture of his motives:
During the last years of the Manchu dynasty, revolutionaries were being arrested right and left. Therefore many of us became Christians in order to avoid difficulties. Moreover, that faith had its good points. It proposed universal love, sacrifice, no smoking or drinking, no gambling or chasing after women…
It is obvious from Treadup’s letters and diary that he had no inkling of Feng’s calculating side. The actor in Feng took him in. The ripples and bounces of strong emotion on the Christian General’s “elastic” face must especially have appealed to David in his time of misgivings; he needed the reassurance of the sincerity of salt tears brimming in eyes of power.
* * *
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DURING HIS SUMMER in Shanghai, Treadup learned that a so-called Chinese Labor Corps had been formed and sent to France to dig trenches and offload ships and supply human backs, arms, and legs for the supply lines of the Allies; and that there was some talk on the British end of asking the Y.M.C.A. to furnish canteens and other services to help ease the growing unrest of the Chinese coolies, who had found their life in a hostile alien setting brutally harsh and dangerous. Treadup took note of this news briefly in his diary, without comment.
* * *
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IT WAS mid-September before Treadup could travel north again. General Feng sent an “honor guard” to Tientsin to accompany him to Langfang. Its commanding officer told Treadup that this might not prove to be the best time for a visit, because there were said to be floods to the southwest of Tientsin; the waters were still rising, and General Feng might move his whole force out to give help to the refugees.
Treadup arrived at the camp of the 16th Mixed Brigade at suppertime. The General greeted him warmly: bear hugged bear. Feng said he would not be moving to the flood area for at least a few days. “No lamps,” David wrote in his diary. “A bugler put the troops to barracks not long after dark. Impressive discipline of silence thereafter.”
There was sufficient reason for early quiet: reveille came at four the next morning.
The day that then began in the darkness of the North China plain was “my most thrilling in China,” David wrote. There was so much to stir him—first of all, an air of male exuberance, men shouting and singing, always on the run, willing and cheerful under pressure of fierce and sometimes nasty competition: the Chinese gift for laughter given free play by high morale. All day, the movement of faith: prayer, hymn singing, Bible reading—images of the evangelization of the whole world in one generation! And a martial spirit with no signs of real blood. From the beginnings of David Treadup’s recruitment by the Student Volunteer Movement there had been the idea of evangelization as a struggle of Christian soldiers against heathenism. “It is war,” David had written on his first arrival in Tientsin, “and I as a general must be willing to face even death.” Now there was a subtle undercurrent of another attraction of militarism: David Treadup’s feelings of guilt toward his “brothers” under arms in France. David’s blood brothers, like himself, were by now too old to enlist as soldiers (David was thirty-nine); his guilt reached out to a larger and more figurative, but no less poignant, fraternity. It now extended to this “brother General in Christ,” Feng, and to these “brothers in the arms of God,” his officers and men—as the diary would have it after this ecstatic day. From a report to Todd in New York:
The first order of the day after dressing was a bit of spiritual drill. The brigade assembled by companies in the open air in the quiet of first light. They sang! Oh, the singing all day! At dawn; at noon; the last thing at night. Before meals, at meals, as they march. The faces of the men show the heartiness of the singing as unmistakably as the continuous full-voiced shout. (The power of the ‘pianissimo’ to move the listener has not been discovered as yet by the Christian soldiers of the Sixteenth.) Their favorite song, needless to say, is “Onward Christian Soldiers.” They roar out—in Chinese, of course—“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus! Ye Soldiers of the Cross,” “Room for Thee,” “All People that on Earth Do Dwell,” and “O Happy Day.” And the good General has written some words of his own to hymn music: There’s a patriotic song of his called “The Nation’s Shame,” and then there’s “We Must Not Gamble or Visit Whores.”
General Feng in person took Treadup around the encampment to show him “how to keep an army busy.” “He made it seem as if it were all being staged just for me.” During an inspection of one unit, David was impressed by the General’s courtesy to his men. He knew the names of an astonishing number of enlisted men. He pointed out to David a notice posted outside a headquarters tent: “Eight No-Hitting Rules,” placing strict restraints on officers’ rights to beat soldiers, the most important being that they must use bare hands, must never use sticks or rifles or shovels.
“Feng is like Coach Ten Eyck: ‘You can’t win if you aren’t strong.’ ” On the exercise ground some men were jumping, vaulting on a gym horse, and doing bar exercises “with quite an amount of freak displays.” David watched obstacle races: “a long jump over a ditch; a run along a narrow baulks bridge across a pit; the swarming of first a brick wall, then a higher wooden barrier, and ending in a final run up a steep mound.” Pairs of officers competed against pairs of men and nearly always defeated them, but “there was rarely more than a second or two between the first to reach the goal and the fourth.” One unit went off in the countryside on the double under full pack. “The General said they would run twenty-five li”—nearly ten miles.
On another field Feng’s elite company, the Ta-tao-tui, the Big Sword Unit, in which each man carried a pistol, a rifle, and a large curving sword, was running through a dazzling series of dancelike exercises, their blades flashing in the sunlight. General Feng called one of the men over and showed Treadup the patch on his uniform that read:
When we fight, we first use bullets; when the bullets are gone, we use bayonets; when the bayonets are dull, we use the rifle barrel; when this is broken, we use our fists; when our fists are broken, we bite.
“But what moved me most, almost to tears like those that actually stood in the General’s eyes when we entered the building and saw the men bending over their work,” David wrote, “was the school!” The General wanted his men to learn a trade while they were in his army, so they would have a means of support when they went home. “As you pass through one room after another you see the young men busily engaged in making shoes and clothes, knitting stockings, weaving rugs, boiling soap, and making chairs and other articles of furniture.” But the reading classes! The General himself had written a lesson book of eight hundred basic characters, and “here were illiterate farm and coolie youths chanting their excitement at their march into the sacred ancient region of literacy. What optimism! What a dream for all of China!” And: “He told me missionaries had inspired much of this. He has a school for the children of his officers in the Methodist mission in Peking.”
