Nanjing Requiem

5




IT WAS EERILY QUIET the next morning, and for hours few gunshots were heard. The cannonade in the east, south, and west had ceased too. We couldn’t help but wonder if the Japanese had entered Nanjing. That seemed unlikely, since the Chinese troops were still holding their positions. As Minnie and I were discussing the influx of refugees, Old Liao, our gardener, came and handed Minnie a leaflet. He was her longtime friend. Minnie had hired him from Hefei eighteen years ago when she came to Jinling to become its acting president—in place of Mrs. Dennison, who had gone back to the States for fund-raising for a year—because she wanted to create a beautiful campus. “I found this on the west hill this morning,” Liao said in a husky voice, pointing at the sheet, and smiled as if it were just a regular day for him. “There’re lots of them in the bushes. A Japanese plane must’ve dropped them. I don’t know what it’s about but thought you might want to take a look.”

Minnie skimmed it, then handed it to me. The leaflet bore words from General Matsui, the commander in chief of the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Forces. He demanded that the Chinese side capitulate without delay, declaring, “This is the best way to protect the innocent civilians and the cultural relics in the ancient capital.” So we must all lay down our weapons and open the city gates to welcome the Imperial Army. The decree continued: “It is our policy to deal harshly with those who resist and to be kind and generous to noncombatants and the Chinese soldiers who entertain no hostility to our invincible force. Therefore, I order you to surrender within twenty-four hours, by 6:00 p.m., December 9. Otherwise, all the horrors of war will be unleashed on you mercilessly.”

There were fewer than ten hours left before the zero hour. Minnie told Liao, “This is an order from Iwane Matsui, the top Japanese general.”

“Never heard of him. What’s he want?”

“He demands that the Chinese surrender the city to him. What do you think we should do?”

“Well”—Old Liao scratched the back of his round head—“I don’t know. I hope he’ll leave people in peace.”

His answer seemed to amuse Minnie. Unlike the other staffers, Old Liao was untroubled by the coming of the Japanese, though his daughter had left with his grandchildren. We knew he was a timid man, and all he cared about was growing flowers and vegetables. War was simply beyond his ken. Yet Minnie had deep affection for this old gardener, who had a marvelous green thumb—whatever he touched would turn pretty and luxuriant in due time. As he slouched away trailing the grassy smell that always clung to him, I turned his answer over in my head. Maybe he was right to a degree—the common people would have to live, so whoever the ruler was, insofar as he did not interrupt their livelihood, they could accept him. But I stifled this thought, because all the recent Japanese atrocities spoke against such a possibility.

The leaflet from General Matsui might explain the quiet of this morning—the invading force must have been waiting for our side to respond to the ultimatum. I told Minnie this, and she agreed. Lewis Smythe confirmed our hunch when he came later that morning to inspect our medical clinic. Our telephone was already out of service, so he had to come in person. Lewis was surprised that Jinling had so far admitted only three hundred refugees, but he praised our careful planning and also told us that the four Britons and the Danish man on the Safety Zone Committee had just left Nanjing. We shouldn’t worry, though, he assured us, because more people, especially the locals, had begun participating in the relief work.

Lewis was a sociologist from Chicago teaching at Nanjing University and was also a missionary. He was rather sensitive and frail but always spoke eloquently. Even when conversing with people, he’d speak as if he were giving a lecture, with his hand gesticulating vividly. These days Lewis seemed quite spirited, as if the impending siege had charged him with vim and vigor; he even confessed to Minnie that he enjoyed “all the activities.” I guess he had never found his life so active and purposeful—above all, so intense.

Minnie invited him to a late lunch in the main dormitory, and I joined them. The food was plain: rice, sautéed mustard greens, and salted mackerel. Lewis, like Minnie, was one of the few foreigners who liked Chinese food. This was an advantage, since all stores had disappeared in town and foreign groceries were impossible to come by; what’s more, it was believed that eating the local food every day could build up one’s immunity to diseases, such as dysentery and malaria. Lewis told us that his effort to organize the ambulance service had collapsed, because the military commandeered automobiles at will. At the moment, he had only two vans that ran. As the secretary of the Safety Zone Committee, he was swamped with work, running around to make sure that basic medical services would be available in every camp.

While we were eating, Lewis talked about a truce that he and some other members of the Safety Zone Committee had attempted to arrange. The previous day they had proposed a three-day cease-fire, during which the Imperial Army would remain in its positions while the Chinese troops withdrew from the city, so that the Japanese could march in peacefully. In spite of General Tang’s belligerence in public, he was actually anxious to secure the truce. He asked the Safety Zone Committee to send a radiogram to both Generalissimo Chiang and Tokyo through the U.S. embassy, which was on the Panay now. Searle Bates and Plumer Mills, a board member of the Northern Presbyterian Mission in Nanjing, set out with one of General Tang’s aides for the American gunboat anchored upriver a little off Hsia Gwan. The message about the cease-fire was dispatched, and both General Tang and the Safety Zone Committee were waiting restlessly, but Chiang Kai-shek had replied earlier this morning: “Out of the question.”

“Foolish and crazy,” Lewis said about Chiang’s rejection. “He simply would not consider how many lives a truce would save. Now the city is doomed.” Lewis sighed, his mustache twitching as he chewed. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, the small lenses barely covering his lackluster eyes.

“He must have meant to save face,” Minnie said. I knew she liked Generalissimo Chiang, who was a Christian and had once come to Jinling’s commencement. I remembered that occasion, when he’d said he converted because the burden on his shoulders was so heavy that he needed God’s succor. I lifted the porcelain teapot and refilled everyone’s cup.

“Thanks,” Lewis said. “When a city and tens of thousands of lives are at stake, it is insane to worry about one’s own face.”

“The poor soldiers—they’ll all be trapped like rats,” said Minnie.

“Chiang Kai-shek should not have attempted to defend this place to begin with. The only explanation for this imbecility is that he desires to get rid of his rivals in the military.”

All of us knew of his eagerness to diminish his rival General Tang. Chiang’s German advisers had exhorted him not to defend our capital. The terrain around the city was like a sack, its mouth at Hsia Gwan, abutting the south bank of the Yangtze. If the Japanese forces, about 100,000 men in total, attacked from both east and west along the river, they could seize the docks in Hsia Gwan and completely cut the withdrawal route of the thirteen divisions and fifteen regiments defending our capital, about 150,000 men, who could then be squeezed into the “sack” demarcated by the city walls. From a military point of view, it was self-destructive to defend such a place.

Minnie asked Lewis, “So this morning’s peace is just the eye of the hurricane?”

“The Japanese will resume attacking any minute.”

The artillery bombardment of the downtown area started that evening. Huge shells landed near New Crossroads, the center of the city. Then explosions burst out in various places. Time and again shells fell in the Safety Zone, into which the civilians were flocking. All the streets leading to the neutral district were thronged with people carrying their possessions by whatever means they had—wheelbarrows, rickshaws, bicycles, even baby carriages, anything with a wheel on it. Many men bore their things with shoulder poles, and some had bedrolls on their backs. Women held babies, clothes bundles, thermoses. Some old people, too feeble to walk, were carried in large bamboo baskets by pairs of men with long poles. We heard that the camp at the Bible Teachers Training School was already filled to capacity with fifteen hundred people, yet they continued receiving new arrivals. By contrast, Jinling had admitted nearly seven hundred. Numerous families came, but we were adamant about taking in only women and children. Many women, reluctant to be separated from their menfolk, left for the camps that accepted families. Some men cursed Big Liu, Miss Lou, Holly, and me at the front entrance, and one even threw mud on our college’s sign and the steel-barred gate.

Throughout the night refugees kept streaming in. As the other camps were already full, all men now were willing to leave their families at Jinling and seek shelter for themselves elsewhere. Our college was said to be the safest place for women and children, so more and more of them were coming. Our staff, overwhelmed, was aided by dozens of refugee women who offered to help. There were so many arriving that by noon the next day the Faculty House was full, and the Central Building and the Practice Hall were also filling up. Some people, once admitted, wouldn’t go to any of the buildings, instead taking bricks from a construction site nearby to set up their own nests on the sports ground. These rectangular shelters were like giant cooking ranges, covered with pieces of bamboo matting supported by thin beams, which were mostly whittled branches.

In the south machine guns had been chattering without cease since daybreak; in the northeast, where a battle was raging, Purple Mountain was in flames. The smoke often obscured the sun. Time and again bombs exploded somewhere outside the Safety Zone. Japanese bombers were appearing without any alarm being sounded, though once in a while a flak battery or two still fired at them. Whenever a plane flew over our campus, most people would run for cover, but some from the countryside had the false notion that the Safety Zone was bombproof, and they’d stay in the open to watch the planes bombing or strafing something. Luhai and Big Liu had to yell to disperse them into the trenches and dugouts.

All day long, the mother who’d lost her eleven-year-old daughter two days earlier stood behind our college’s front gate, staring at the crowds in hopes of spotting her child. She kept asking people if they’d seen a little girl with bobbed hair and dimpled cheeks. No one had. Miss Lou took a bowl of rice porridge to the woman, who ate it without a word. I thought of having her brought into the campus but decided to let her continue grieving where she was.