The call, p.44
The Call, page 44
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PHILIP, Absolom, and Paul had the run of the ship. They were given, by everyone aboard, the impression that their little triangular constellation was at the exact center of the universe. That place seemed to them to define heaven. Their laughter was music of fifes and flutes. The ship’s officers rigged a deck tennis net for them. One day all three took turns steering the ship. They were given a table alone in the officers’ mess, where they were waited on by lascars as if they were admirals. At table serious Philip, eight and a half, wiped the chin of four-year-old Paul and whispered instructions on how to behave like a man. They sang adorably faulty rounds, “Three Blind Mice” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” to entertain the Chinese in one hold after another, and the devotion and courtesy of Chinese toward children formed shields around them, seeming to ward off from them the below-decks stink. Philip, his shoulders squared to bear the weight of his seniority, took it as a matter of course that he should be his mother’s helper in mopping up Chinese puke. Absolom, who was five, the mischief maker and clown of the family, tagged around after the Labor Corps officers, tugging at their coattails, putting salt in their coffee, untying their shoelaces. Paul, the youngest, who had inherited his father’s big build and was already taller than older Absolom, had to be advised by Philip not to swagger so much. All three were innocent. They did not share in imperialist guilt over the use of Chinese slave labor in a war in which China had no real stake. No, this was the world, and everything was quite natural in the world. Anyway, it was time for elevenses!—beef broth and salt crackers!—hurry!
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ON DECEMBER 13, the Chinese laborers and their escorting officers were offloaded at Vancouver Island, where they would camp for some weeks before being sent on by train to the Atlantic. Here the Treadups left them. They traveled east by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. To the children, habituated to the flat parts of China, the Canadian Rockies loomed like fables, and four-year-old Paul asked, “Why are there so many foreigners in Canada?”—a foreigner, of course, being anyone who was not Chinese. In a week they were in New York. The International Committee assigned Mrs. Treadup and the children to a small and rather bleak rented house in Montclair, New Jersey. With orders to rejoin the labor contingent at their port of embarkation, Halifax, in mid-January, David Treadup said good-bye to his wife and children on the front porch of the Montclair house. His diary: “Heavy parting. Going to a war is different from going on a lecture tour.”
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IN HALIFAX HARBOR David found a convoy of camouflaged ships riding at anchor. He was now in an officer’s uniform, sans insignia: high-collared tunic, riding breeches, leather puttees. With his oarsman’s frame and his piratical mustaches he cut a fine false figure of the romance of war. His orders took him by lighter to a troopship, F-8261, the Justicia, a magnificent four-funneled vessel of 32,000 tons, intended when it was built to be a luxury liner. Already aboard was the Chinese labor contingent he had left at Vancouver; the coolies had camped three weeks on Vancouver Island and then taken twelve days in primitive Canadian Pacific coaches to span the continent.
The Atlantic crossing was fairly calm and, apart from one torpedo alarm and the unsolved disappearance of 350 of the ship’s soup spoons, uneventful. The coolies drilled on deck each day. Many complained of terrible headaches—migraines of the unknown. A Scottish ship’s doctor, running low on aspirin, tried something new: A coolie came into ship’s bay with one of these splitting headaches. The doctor applied a small square of adhesive tape, a substance no Chinese coolie had ever seen, to the temple on the side that hurt most. Within minutes the patient felt no more pain. Others stormed the dispensary for the treatment. It worked nearly every time.
The laborers landed at Liverpool and traveled by train to Folkestone, and by ferry to Boulogne, and then, “packed like tinned meat,” as David wrote, in cattle cars, to the central control camp of the Chinese Labor Corps at Noyelles.
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THE LABOR CORPS had been formed, after China had entered the war, at the instigation of the British and French, who by shipping coolies from China would be able to free able-bodied white men from work behind the lines to go to the trenches, to replace the dead and be slaughtered themselves. In February 1917 the British had opened collection camps at Weihaiwei and Tsingtao, and by the time Treadup arrived in France, some 140,000 Chinese coolies had been imported. Ninety thousand were working in the British zone, unloading ships in the base area from Le Havre to Dunkirk, building and repairing roads and railways on the approaches to the front, and handling ammunition and digging trenches on the battlefields from Cambrai to Ypres. The French had 40,000, doing the same sorts of work as those for the British, in ports from Brest to Marseilles, inland from Rouen to Creusot, and on the front from Arras to Verdun; the French also had some working in munitions factories. The Americans had about 10,000, borrowed from the French. Noyelles was the nerve center. New recruits arrived there, to be assigned in time to one work center or another. It was a vast camp; it had, to give its measure, the largest hospital exclusively for Chinese patients anywhere in the world.
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IT IS not surprising that historians of the Allied cause in the First World War have played down, to the point of disappearance, the suggestion that the Allies used slave labor to relieve the manpower shortage which followed the gruesome carnage of young men in the first years of that conflict.
The phrase “slave labor” is, of course, not strictly accurate. The Chinese coolies were paid for their work. In the British zone they were paid one franc for each ten-hour day, or at a rate of two American cents an hour; the French paid all of five cents an hour. In most cases these rates of pay were probably as high as, or higher than, what the coolies could have earned in cruel China.
But in a deeper sense, theirs was slave labor. The Chinese government’s motive for entering the European conflict was to ensure that the flow of loans to China from the British and French would not be cut off. China was not threatened in any direct way. Germany had taken its bite from the China coast, but so had other nations. Most Chinese citizens hadn’t the faintest idea who the Kaiser was, or even what or where Germany and France and England were. Nothing but memories of endless suffering—hunger pains, animal squalor, the rhythmic and murderous wash of swollen rivers—could have persuaded coolies to offer their bodies for a voyage into the zone of the unknown, where their work would be to help strangers kill each other.
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AT NOYELLES, it took a whole week of importunity before Treadup could even get his orders cut.
At last they were: Given the assimilated rank of first lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Forces, he was ordered to report to the C.O., Chinese Labor Corps, British Area, Le Havre.
Within a few days he had amended all that, in his diary, to: “Commanding Hornet, Chinese Hornet Corps, British Hornets’ Nest, Le Hornet, France.”
Items from those first few days, from various letters and diary entries:
• “Reported on arrival to H.Q. Boss is Colonel Urquhelmsy, which as nearly as I can tell is pronounced whimsy. Retired from Indian service. Nose seems to wobble from side to side, as though a pint of what?—port wine?—is sloshing around in it. Eyebrows and mustaches could be traded without slightest change in appearance. Never been near China. Calls the laborers ‘these blaahsted Chinks.’ First words to me: ‘Name of Christ, sir, who sent humph you here? Enough trouble keeping humph discipline, now they send me bleeding Young Men’s Christian Association.’ He does everything he can to keep me away from the laborers.”
• “Uproar in the barracks this morning. The Colonel called me in and said: ‘Raddup’—never gets my name right—‘you talky-talk their bally palaver, don’t you? Go in there and humph find out what the bloody fuss is.’ So I went in one of the huts. Bedlam. When they found out I could speak Mandarin—these are Northerners, you know—they gradually quieted and let a noncom explain things. One of the Brit officers here was a Leftenant Brend, who’d once done a tour in Peking, spoke a few words of Chinese, and was very considerate, and the Chinese adored him. He was shipped out by the C.O., who probably thought he was soft at the core. He was to leave this morning. The Chinese decided they’d all muster out at dawn and give him an honor march—all of them!—to La Gare Centrale. So they got themselves up an hour before reveille and formed ranks on the parade ground. Someone reported their being out there to Whimsy. He flew into a rage and without any idea what it was about, • he ordered them to quarters. They deeply resented the rudeness with which the order was given, and they sent word to the C.O. that they were going on strike. Enter yours truly. I suggested they should stay in the barracks all day, take their mess as usual in the evening, go to bed as usual, get up in the morning as usual, and go to work as usual. I assured them if they would do this, I would explain to the C.O. their good intentions and they could know that nothing more would be said. The old boy, it turned out, was relieved to have things come out that way.”
• “Another frightful ruckus. A real riot mob was marching from the waterfront to attack headquarters. They were armed with nasty staves and box hooks and poles, and I tell you, they had murder on the agenda. Raddup into the breach! I met them in the camp street. Got them to stop shouting and explain. It was so simple. These men belonged to three new Labor Corps companies that had just come in. They had finished unloading one ship and were to march to another. Apparently there was some delay, and the British noncom in charge, I finally figured out, shouted impatiently, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ He gave the word go an exasperated dipping inflection that made it precisely the word meaning ‘dog’ in Chinese. No possible greater insult. I said to them, ‘This is not the way we do in China when we have important matters to discuss. We do not settle them by shouting in the middle of the road. We do it with more dignity by taking a cup of tea together.’ They liked my saying that. They calmed down.”
• “Supreme habit of Chinese life: frequent sipping of tea or hot water. No one had taken the trouble to learn this. Terrible gastric consequences. Rage. I persuaded Whimsy that a ten-minute recess for tea in midafternoon would increase late-in-the-day productivity by 20 percent. Grumbling in his whiskers he allowed it. I was proved wrong. The improvement was 100 percent.”
• “Boche air raid. We ran for our dugout. Found that a coolie had hanged himself in the entrance. I learned he had done this to show his countrymen’s displeasure at the unbearableness of this life and at Whimsy’s bad manners. At next morning’s muster on the parade ground, Whimsy said to the interpreter: ‘Tell the blighters that if any more of them must hang themselves by the neck, be so good as to humph do it in their own dugouts. We don’t like such a mess in ours.’ ”
• “Two plagues, spread by boredom: gambling, opium. It seems that within a couple of days of each payday, most of the money in the camp of three thousand men winds up in the hands of five or six sharks. Enough left over, however, for many to buy a pipe’s worth of the poppy from despicable French parasites—one-legged or one-armed army dischargees—who skulk about.”
• “They flock to me with their woes. Misunderstandings about hours and wages. A Paris bank has undertaken to deliver money to families in China, and many coolies, never having heard from home about what had been sent, are wildly suspicious of French swindles. Befuddled interpreters. Constant loss of face because of haughty manner of British and French and American officers. Innocent, accidental, or purposeful violations of incomprehensible Western military regulations, resulting in rude reprimands, fines, extra hours of labor, and even imprisonment in stockade. Untreated diseases—especially trachoma, every other pair of eyes, it seems. Chinese army officers who have been shipped to France against their will. Petty thievery. Two murders; firing-squad executions of the killers. Desertions. For the Chinese, in this ambience of peculiar customs and bone-grinding work, everything is topsy-turvy.”
• “The first question every coolie asks me: ‘When do we go back to China?’ ”
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“I NOW SEE,” Treadup wrote in “Search,” many years later,
that my real function, the real reason why scores of Y secretaries like me had been recruited for France, was to keep the Chinese slave laborers docile and hardworking. We were gangers, whip men, in benign disguise. At the time all I understood was that these were miserable human creatures wrenched from their habitat and desperately in need of the warmth of Christian love.
But even then, he added, he dimly perceived “something having to do with the colonial system”—namely, that the coolies in the Le Havre camp needed a more comprehensible love than that of Britons whose experience in dealing with “natives” had been acquired in nineteenth-century Poona and Hong Kong. In 1917, before the American entry into the war, the British Y.M.C.A., with the reluctant permission of the British military authorities, had begun establishing “red-triangle huts” at the Labor Corps camps; and there was one such at Le Havre. The hut had a “tuck shop,” where coolies could buy Huntley and Palmer biscuits, Players “smokes,” and hard candies and caramels. There were pictures on the walls of King George, of Crystal Palace, and of a race horse named Baracloo. Four soccer balls were available for sign-out, but they seemed not to have been used for a long time and were partially deflated. Classes in English were offered, but there were no takers, and Treadup learned that a rumor had run around the camp that any coolies who learned English would have to stay five or six more years. A British noncom was assigned to the hut to lead dawn calisthenics—“nip-ups,” he called them—for men exhausted by an endless succession of ten-hour days of physical labor. In Treadup’s first week a stereopticon lecture, “Western Civilization and Its Christian Safeguards,” was offered to a hutful of dispirited men who came to see the funny pictures.
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COLONEL URQUHELMSY, for all his opacity, quickly saw Treadup’s “way with the Chinks” and its sudden effect on camp morale, and he began to give him tether to do pretty much what he wanted with the hut. Treadup went to work with his oarsman’s energy and with a craft which, he wrote Emily, he had “learned from Chinese tradesmen.”
His first huge success was that he “chivvied from a Brit officers’ club two idle badminton sets.” He did not string up the nets and he never took the racquets out of their cases. What he did do was to take out the shuttlecocks and announce a Chinese battledore contest on the camp parade ground. Nearly two thousand coolies showed up. They already knew which dozen men were most expert in the graceful, dancelike game of bouncing a shuttlecock off one foot, with dazzling moves, knee bent, foot swung backward, pock!, then left, pock!, then right, pock!, back proudly arched and head canted to watch the flying feathers, then hunched over and, having instinctively judged the arch of the bird, taking the next bounce blind!—beautiful!—then a fast series of little six-inch bounces, then whoosh! into the sky—always the flying foot right there, perfectly in balance, never touching the ground, ever ready to receive the shuttlecock, each movement of the whole body smooth as a poem, now chatter-rapid, then suddenly with a brief slow flowing motion as if doing t’ai ch’i. What roars from the crowd! What a stir in the camp that night! They had had something of home!
Soon, other Chinese pastimes appeared. Treadup set up a woodworking and mechanics shop in a corner of the hut, and artisans among the coolies built elaborate Chinese-style kites: flying insects, birds, and even fabled tigers and dragons, all of which soon rode the evening skies. Others made singing diabolo tops, which could be kept spinning on a loop of string attached to the ends of a pair of batons. One man built “stone locks”—round stones with metal handles affixed to them, for a game of strength and grace in which the locks were thrown from man to man with elegant formal fluid swinging gestures that made great strains appear to be delicate handling of featherweights.
But David Treadup knew the ultimate secret: The Chinese temperament, even that of the most abject coolie, preferred mental diversion to games. A stereopticon with slides of no matter what subject drew evening crowds. The men flocked to brief reports he gave on news from China and news of the war. Somehow he wangled a movie projector and a half dozen Charlie Chaplin shorts, and the laborers fought for seats for the privilege of grasping, with laughter and tears, the international language of those who are put upon.
All the time he was doing mysterious work in the hut shop. He was taking a bicycle apart, doing strange things with the wheels; making a kind of cover for one of them; building a queer, derricklike frame; attaching a crank to a kind of flywheel which held a circular chain…. And then one day he announced at morning muster that he would entertain anyone who was interested that evening with a talk on “The Magic of Whirling Wheels.”
