The War That Is Not War: Letters From the Manchurian Border

TIENTSIN,Saturday,November 14,1931.
— This is the fifty-seventh night since Japan ungloved the mailed fist in Manchuria, and the sixth since the initial outburst of guns at Tientsin. Except for infrequent sniper fire and the occasional rumble of cannon to the northwest, the night has been quiet.
As I settled into my seat at the Tientsin Gayety Theatre at ninethirty, I found the concert hall but sparsely peopled. I knew that the seats had all been sold. Yet, in view of the barbed wire, sandbags, earth dugouts, concealed trenches, machine guns, tanks, and steel-helmeted sentries with bayonet rifles, placed not only by China and Japan, but by all the Western nations permitted by treaty to have soldiers in China, across the thoroughfares and passageways to challenge, in the name of martial law, the right of civilians to move from one place to another — in view of all this, we who succeeded in getting to the concert were a goodly number. Americans, Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Belgians, Russians, both White and Red, Italians, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Swiss, Chinese, Japanese — our cosmopolitan community was represented in the audience, with no nationality predominant. We were mostly feminine, also mostly middle-aged. Youth has faith to wait for easier conditions to attend concerts. We who have seen more of life take things as they come. Our men, for the most part, were elsewhere, their attentions entirely occupied with what was described, not as war, but as ‘a delicate situation.’
Life in the Far East is social in its most formal sense. When a woman with a husband of any possible international importance comes to live in a new place, the women in residence call upon her within the first fifteen days. Custom demands that these calls be repaid promptly. Then we lunch, tea, dine, ride, swim, skate, play tennis, golf, bowls, badminton, bridge, mah jongg, and dance at each other’s invitation with rotary frequence. Consequently, as I looked about me at the theatre, I knew every woman present and her husband’s location on the chessboard of international relations in China. And every other woman knew the same about me and the rest of us.
We were taut with waiting for the crisis, which is harder than meeting it directly; fatigued by caring for the wounded and by duty in refugee soup kitchens; too experienced in war to have any illusions about the power of battle to settle the dispute; too well read in treaties to have any faith in the power of the League of Nations; too versed in economics to believe that disinterested idealism could now enter the arena of world politics. In short, we were an audience of women whose national suspicion of one another was concealed behind courteous bows and smiles.
The auditorium lights went out; the stage lights went on. Jascha Heifetz walked forward. He lifted his violin and settled it with care. He raised his bow. The first number listed on the programme was the Allegro molto ed appassionato of Grieg’s sonata for the piano and violin in C minor. My ears strained for the opening note, but it did not come. Heifetz had sensed the unnatural tension that gripped his audience. He lifted his head and stood for a moment like some startled, sensitive creature of the woods. He put down his instrument, stepped back, and half turned to Isidor Achron at the piano. After a long pause he advanced resolutely to the footlights again and began to play — not the advertised programme, but a divine idealism which he seemed to summon forth, not from the strings of his violin, but from our own taut nerves.
Hour after hour far into the night, without rest and without applause, he flung his spirit out to succor us. When the stage lights went off and the auditorium lights went on again, we were no longer scattered over the hall. We had crept in close together. We were women with wet eyes, clinging to each other’s hands. We could not answer him, so we slipped away. My exit was blocked by two neighbors who stood in my aisle — one Chinese, one Japanese, both the wives of generals. They were staring into each other’s faces. Tears ran unheeded over the careful make-up of each countenance.
I made my two miles home through passages empty except for the tools of war and other women who, like me, were scuttling home from the concert. I was challenged at frequent intervals by sentries . . . sentries with pointed bayonets stationed twelve abreast across what was formerly Kaiser Wilhelm Street and is now called Woodrow Wilson Street . . . sentries of different nationalities, most of them courteous, many quite young, each somebody’s husband or sweetheart or son. All looked so tired and cold that every time I met one I wished I had a magic pot of hot coffee so that I could give him a warming drink. Dawn was painting the sky as I pounded for admittance on the stout barred gates set in the high stone wall around my residence.
Lui the Elder, our gateman, let me in. He said: ‘Guns have roared in the direction where the South Horse Road runs northwest of the Japanese Concession. Cook sat with me until an hour ago. Then he went to rescue his grandmother. I know that the master ordered that none of our household should go outside the home wall, but you went to the concert. Cook had been alarmed about this neighborhood for many weeks; too many officials live near here to make it safe for his grandmother. So this morning he took her to the house of his maternal aunt, up the South Horse Road. Now some are certainly dead and others cruelly injured there. Cook knows that he made a mistake in sending her to that quarter, but it is difficult to choose a safe location, because, although the wind has fallen, the waves have not yet settled.'

TIENTSIN, November 15. — Long before my serving woman, Bald-the-third, brought my morning coffee I heard my daughter telephoning. She dialed number after number in steady succession, reassuring herself in English, French, German, or Chinese that her friends had come safely through the night.
‘Everyone in my world is splendid to-day, ’ she said later as she perched on my bed, ready to pilfer sugar from my tray; and I did not tell her that Cook and his grandmother were outside the home wall.
She chattered away merrily, telling me all the news she had gleaned from her telephone conversations. ‘Yvonne was so comic about the antics of their grumpy fat cook, who is compelled to make breakfast on charcoal braziers because a shell cut their kitchen stove to bits last night. . . . Another shell went through the west wall of Mr. Jannings’s office, but Gunrun says that although it whizzed right over the head of their night watchman, Ling, who is still in a panic, it did not even scratch the picture of her Uncle Emil, hanging on the north wall. . . . Bullets danced in the garden of the Methodist Mission last night, but did no damage except to plough up the surface of a tennis court. . . . Yuch Mai-lei wants me to come to her home this morning. I may go, may n’t I? Daddy could drop me there; he has to go to his office, so Chang told me. Oh, thanks, Muggles. I’m so glad that you are n’t a stupid. Mai-lei’s Family Elder is such a stupid. He has said that she may not visit anyone until all the guns are muzzled and all the soldiers of all nationalities have gone away. She is bored to death.’
Chang, our house steward, came into the room accompanied by Bald-thethird. He carried before him a dull green lacquer bowl filled with gorgeous single-petaled red roses. Bald helped him to place and arrange them beside my pillows. I knew by these tactics that they had agreed to cajole me into doing something. My daughter’s presence kept them from making any request, but I guessed that they were hatching some scheme for getting Cook and his grandmother home. I was certain of this when my daughter asked about Cook, who is one of her favorites, and Chang replied: ‘Certainly, Small Girl, I will give your greetings to Cook. He is in the kitchen now, preparing a good breakfast.’ To the Chinese conscience, it is worse to hurt a child than to tell a lie.
Below my window the morning hotcake vendor strolled along the Tungchow Road, balancing his griddle stove on a bamboo pole over his left shoulder and chanting a falsetto that floated up to me over my home wall: —

My husband came to say goodmorning, saw the roses, and said, ‘Do try to keep out of mischief! ’ When he had driven off, taking Small Girl to the Yueh homestead on the way to his office, Bald-the-third told me that Cook had telephoned from the pawnshopwith-the-green-glass-windows-on-theSouth-Horse-Road, fifteen li to the northwest. He had his grandmother safe, but was unable to get back with her through the barricades which he had passed alone in the night. Baldthe-third has been my mentor all my days in China, dating back before my marriage; she suggested that the way to get them home was for me to drive out in a car and fetch them, since I could get through where nobody else could. I responded to this flattery by agreeing to try.
When I came downstairs, my ‘house helpers,’ with their wives and children, were grouped in the entrance hall as their etiquette requires. The doors were open, and my car stood ready in the driveway. But before I could pass out I had to wait until each person had kotowed three times and they had said in unison, ’Ch’uju p’ing an!' (May you go and return to us in peace!)
There is a Chinese proverb which says, ‘If one makes one’s self friendly wherever one travels, where can one travel and not find a friend?’ Although it took time, my zigzag across the First Special Area of Tientsin and up the South Horse Road to the pawnshop was not arduous. In front of the Mayor’s residence, where an important conference was in session, I was halted by four tall men in smart police uniforms of black and white. But as soon as I made them understand that I was en route to rescue Chou, their friend and my cook, and Grandmother Chou, they apologized for delaying me and sent me forward with ‘May the star of good luck shine on your errand!’
American soldiers of the Fifteenth Infantry, assigned by Colonel Taylor to help keep peace in the First Special Area, were encamped in brown tents in the woods by the River Road. A delicious odor of baking beans came from the canteen wagon, and around it was gathered an assembly of Chinese, American, and German boys.
At the entrance to the British Concession, Chinese in luxurious automobiles, in hired taxis, in horse carriages, in rickshas, and on foot, with their cherished possessions in trucks, wagons, and packs carried by servants or on their own backs, waited for permission to be admitted and dwell under British protection. Similar refugees petitioned for entry at the border of the French Concession. A Chinese friend, whom I met at the foot of the International Bridge, informed me that across the river on the borders of the Italian Concession every road of approach was blocked by queues of country folk a mile long, all frightened to remain in their homes in Chinese territory. At the barricades of the Japanese Concession bewildered refugees were petitioning to get in, and others, equally bewildered, were clamoring to get out.
Through the Japanese Concession I had to drive with extreme caution. Innumerable trucks loaded with coils of barbed wire, machine guns, sandbags, and soldiers tore through the streets like fire engines, except that they did not sound any horns. I saw no other wheeled traffic. On the sidewalks there were a few pedestrians, both Chinese and Japanese, and all the shops were open. The Japanese soldiers in the outer barricades on the Chinese border were very friendly. They showed me their dugout under a wall of sandbags. It was well designed and quite comfortable. It was furnished with a table and some books, and tacked to the canvas sacking with which the dugout was neatly lined there was a lovely picture of a robin nesting in the branch of a blossoming cherry tree.
Martial law was lifted in the Chinese city from ten until one o’clock that day so that people could go out and buy food. Consequently I had no difficulty in my passage through the streets of the native quarter. The pawnshopwith-the-green-glass-windows is well known, and kindly people helped me to find it. I arrived just before twelve — to discover that Cook and his grandmother had gone. The pawnshop keeper was sympathetic. He said that they had been there waiting for me and had disappeared only a few minutes before my arrival; perhaps they had gone out to buy food and would soon return. He made fresh tea for me, and insisted that I looked tired and must eat some noodles with it.
After half an hour I telephoned home.

Chang had spoken with Cook at eleven o’clock. He said that at that time Cook had certainly intended to wait for me, but had been anxious concerning my whereabouts and worried because martial law would close down again at one. I waited until ten minutes to one, when I felt compelled to set out on the return journey. The pawnshop keeper ran after me by short-cut passages and, climbing on to my running board, whispered that Cook, when last seen, was wearing a postman’s uniform.
The wait had made me nervous about the Japanese army trucks, so I went home by a devious route, which took me over some dirt roads and across some fields. I came through without incident.
There was no one on duty at my home gates, but I was able to unbar the Honan Road gate from the outside. There was no one in the garden, no one at the garage. I entered my house quietly through the kitchen court. The cook-room door stood open. There, his back to me, was Cook, making pastry. He was dressed in his usual spickand-span grass-cloth overalls and cap. His little grandmother was enthroned in her own cushioned chair by the west window. She had been carried home, as I learned later, in a mail bag. Her sleek appearance betrayed no signs of her discomforting journey. Her hair was brushed to a glossy black shine, and she wore a tight bouquet of winter violets in her nape-knot. There she sat in her trimly tailored coat and trousers of blue nankeen and her three-inch satin slippers embroidered with lavender and gold butterflies. About her, sitting cross-legged on tables, chairs, and on the floor, were assembled as many people as could crowd into the spacious kitchen. There were my daughter, the household helpers with their wives and children, the gateman, the gardener, the night watchman, together with their wives and children, Mayor Chang Hsuehming’s cook and his son, two policemen off duty, a hot-bath vendor, and an itinerant tinker. To this company the little grandmother was relating the epic of her night on the battle front.

TIENTSIN,November 20. — To-day I witnessed a ‘long winter coat’ incident. Ever since the beginning of trouble here the Rotarians and the Chambers of Commerce have been trying to convince the military authorities that martial law not only was imposing terrible hardships on the populace but was also bankrupting big business, so on the seventeenth it was announced that martial law would be lifted for five hours daily. To-day I took advantage of the new edict to go shopping in the southwestern part of the Chinese city, at Hsi Kung Kai. The writingpaper shopkeeper was just bidding me the usual courteous farewell in his doorway when he suddenly whispered, ‘Look to the north!’
Twenty men in long new winter coats filed solemnly out of an alley into the crowded street. They held rifles at arm’s length above their heads and shot them off into the sky. There was an immediate panic and the police started shooting. On the pavement near us two pedestrians — a woman and a child — fell with blood staining their clothes. They were carried into the shop, where I helped to dress their wounds. The news spread that we knew how to stop blood, and a policeman with a bullet in his leg was brought to us. The capable wife of the shopkeeper supplied cloth for bandages, kept the clerks boiling water, made beds on the counters for the wounded, and with cups of green tea quieted the frightened folk who crowded in for safety.
The disturbance occurred just after noon. Martial law was immediately declared, the streets cleared, traffic closed. We could not move until three o’clock, when police criers announced that martial law would be lifted for one hour to permit people to get to their proper places.
At Peking, two young Chinese captured wearing long new winter coats and possessing Japanese rifles made a public confession that they were of a party of fifty hired at one dollar a day just to shoot off guns into the air to start riots similar to those which have been almost a daily occurrence at Tientsin. They were beheaded at the Temple of Heaven. At Tientsin, executions of the same kind were staged publicly each morning after the first five nights of disturbances. The Bund was selected as the place at which the example would be visible to the largest number of people, and on each occasion from nine to twelve men in long winter coats were beheaded with a large sword. Blood soaked into the paving stones and left a dull red scar.
Neither the newspapers nor the regular posters for government edicts have published any notice that Mayor Chang Hsueh-ming would pardon men who surrendered Japanese rifles, permit them to keep their winter coats, and reward them with ten dollars. But vendors, minstrels, ricksha runners, men hitched to carts, and strolling street actors chant the news on every hand. And in shops I have frequently met folk spending what they said was ‘the Mayor’s reward.’
Nightly, and sometimes during the day, I continue to hear the snap-snap of rifle fire, followed by the explosion of trench mortars and lighter artillery. Usually it comes from the point where the Japanese Concession borders on the Chinese city. Each day the press reports fresh incidents begun by the ’long coats.’ When shells have exploded in the French, British, and Italian Concessions, the Occidental soldiers have not responded; but when they have fallen in the Japanese Concession the Japanese have replied with fifteen minutes or half an hour of bombardment directed against the Chinese city.
One night the Japanese shells riddled the Public Safety Office and other buildings of the Chinese local government, so that since then all Chinese government business has had to be conducted at the Mayor’s private residence. Scores of people were killed and injured. The Empress of Japan sent bandages made by her own hands for the Japanese wounded. The Chinese Red Cross Society nursed and doctored the Chinese wounded. Hundreds of the populace, unable to gain admittance to the Occidental Concessions, have left their homes and shops, and are now camped far out in the fields despite the bitter weather.
The National Government at Nanking has lodged a protest with the Japanese Minister blaming the Japanese for the disturbances at Tientsin. The Japanese Minister has lodged a protest with the National Government at Nanking blaming the Chinese for the disturbances at Tientsin.

TIENTSIN, December 1. — Notices written in Chinese and signed ‘LieutenantGeneral Kashii, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Troops at Tientsin,’ have been tacked up at frequent intervals on the outer side of the barricades embracing the Japanese Concession. The notices read: ' The Chinese, without expressing any thankfulness for our cordial friendship and not listening to our kindly advice, have been shooting at us day and night. Our answer is that we hereby declare our Tientsin Concession a district of siege by Martial Law.’
The Japanese Consulate has also suggested to the consuls of Western nations that they will be wise to bring all their Christian missionaries in from Chinese territory.

December 2. — Tientsin is quiet. Following a conference with the Japanese Commander, Mayor Chang Hsueh-ming has issued a proclamation stating that the menace of the ‘long winter coats’ has been suppressed, and urging the merchants, the populace, and the gentry to resume their normal activities.

December 13. — President Chiang Kai-shek has announced his retirement in a circular telegram in which he states that during the years since he first assumed the Chairmanship of the National Government he has striven to carry out the teachings of Dr. Sun Yatsen, but has met with such failure, as a result of repeated party disloyalty and civil war, that he has come to the conclusion that he is incapable of uniting his country. Unless he has unity behind him, he says, he knows of no means by which to resist foreign aggression, and foreign aggression is fast making China a vassal state. So, since the Canton leaders, especially Hu HanMin, think they can do better, he is finished, and will only wait at Nanking until the next President comes forward to take the seal.

December 24. — A party of twentyfour Japanese soldiers and three officers toured the city and the suburbs of Tientsin to-day, starting at seventhirty in the morning and continuing until nine in the evening. They were followed through their investigation by another party of ten soldiers, two officers, and three civilians on bicycles, who asked even more questions and peered into more doorways than the advance group. Housewives in three sections threw scalding water out at them. Both expeditions gave special attention to the Manshih district, the Hei Wen Academy, and the Nankai Girls’ Middle School. The Mayor protested to the Japanese Consulate, which replied that the tour was entirely educational and no offense was intended.

December 29. — Ever since the first of the month, when the Commander in Chief of Japanese troops at Tientsin posted the notice declaring the Japanese Concession a district of siege, from twenty to thirty Japanese men in civilian garb have arrived each day by passenger trains from beyond the Great Wall. I sent a servant to meet each train and count them. Soon there were so many photographing life at Tientsin and writing in little notebooks that I could not take a five-minute walk in any direction without encountering one of them. They are very polite. They have evidently tried to avoid disturbing the Chinese people, but their very presence is a source of constant irritation.
Yesterday the Japanese Commander and the Japanese Consul separately informed the Mayor of Tientsin that, beginning to-day, Japanese troops will undertake sham battles daily for a week. The streets are deserted to-day, all homestead gates closed. There are no curious Chinese out to observe the Japanese in sham battle.

NANKING, January 4, 1932. — Just after New Year’s Day my daughter and I came to visit friends at Nanking. We traveled from Tientsin by the wagon-lits carriage on the Pukow express. Chinese soldiers, wearing the colors of three different military governors, boarded the train and searched many passengers at several stops during our two-day journey, but we were not bothered. The soldiers ran their hands down over the bodies of the men, women, and children whom they chose to examine, and ripped luggage open with their bayonets if the owners were at all slow in untying covers or turning locks. Any weapons discovered were taken — nothing else.
We found Nanking as quiet as a city of the dead. The change of government had given rise to tension and fear. Both the common people and the gentry in China are docile under any government as soon as they know the regulations; in times of uncertainty they withdraw behind their homestead walls and barricade their gates. The roads, the markets, the parks, and the temples were empty. Shops were shuttered. In ordinary times, even if homestead gates are closed, children’s voices, folk songs, and the occasional sound of shrill family squabbles drift over the walls. But now Nanking is hushed and silent.
I had one walk along the top of the city wall and took my child to see the tomb of Sun Yat-sen, but my friends were apprehensive, saying that it was dangerous to venture outside their gate. At Sun Yat-sen’s tomb on Purple Mountain the silver wreath presented by the Japanese Emperor in 1928 had been removed.

SHANGHAI, January 7. — My Chinese friends in this city speak more often about the empty government offices at Nanking than about Japan. Those whom I know among the deposed officials and their wives keep themselves occupied reading the classics or modern novels, attending to commercial business, embroidering slippers, teaching the poor to read and count, playing mah jongg and bridge, shopping and dancing and riding. The newly appointed government officials are doing the same.
The Yangtze is filling up with the warships of Western nations. In Occidental homes I hear the fear expressed that Japan will next strike at China through Shanghai, but in Chinese homes I am scoffed at whenever I mention such a possibility. ‘Japan has no concern with this part of China, ’ they say. The Chinese show no signs of making defensive preparations against such a move by Japan.

YOKOHAMA,January 2. — Four days ago we came to Japan en route to America. As always, I was surprised anew by the unbelievable storybook charm of this country, the exquisite arrangement of every detail in town and countryside, the restrained use of bright splashes of color; and I was reenchanted by the people.
In contrast to Shanghai, I find that in Kobe, in Tokyo, in Yokohama, it is commonly believed that China and Japan are on the eve of open war. In every home where I have visited, a father, a husband, or a son has been notified to be ready to go forth to right Japan’s wrongs. Much as it is regretted, the opinion is all but universal here that if the anti-Japanese boycott is to be stopped, if decent treatment for Japanese people residing in China is to be secured, if China is to be brought to fulfill her treaty obligations, Japan will have to secure the attention of the Chinese National officials by striking at that country through Shanghai, its strategic economic centre. Everywhere I see women knitting and stitching with sad courage to make their men ready.

PHILADELPHIA, March 17. — We arrived here yesterday after stopping off at Denver on our way East. I found two letters waiting for me. One is from Tokyo, the other from Shanghai. Both are from dear friends whom I have loved since girlhood. All three of us were married in the same month. Each letter contains but one sentence: ‘My husband fell at Chapei.’ Both men were educated in the United States. Each took honors in political economy at one of our universities.