Once More the Hawks (28 page)

The sustaining anger seemed to drain from her body. Her shoulders sagged wearily and there was something forlorn in the way her hands hung limply at her side. For a long time she didn’t speak; when she did her words came unhappily.

‘It was years after Rezhanistan,’ she said, ‘when I learned your wife was dead and then I had no idea where you were or how to find you. I decided by that time you must have remarried.’

‘Well, I didn’t. Marry me, Marie-Gabrielle.’

‘I’m Catholic.’

‘I don’t care if you’re a Turk, a Mormon, a Rosicrucian or even a bloody fire-worshipper.’

For the first time she smiled and, taking a step forward, she put her cheek against his. His arms went round her and they clung to each other, laughing at themselves. Then she pushed him away gently. ‘But it makes no difference, Dicken,’ she said quietly. ‘We’re both too old.’

Father O’Buhilly left in the first machine the following day, sitting in the cockpit alongside Moreno. The machine that flew in two hours later was a different one with a different pilot and contained Foote.

‘The General reckons he can hold off old Dogleg until we’re finished,’ he said. ‘There’s just one thing–’ his face grew hard ‘–Moreno’s engines cut on landing just as we left. It didn’t burn, though, and they seemed to be gettin’ everybody out.’

Even as Foote flew out, Johnson returned. ‘You heard about Georgie Moreno?’ he asked.

‘He crashed.’

‘Yeah. All the kids were saved, though. A few of ’em were burned but none of ’em bad. She broke in two and those Chinese teachers got ’em out fast.’

‘And Moreno?’

Johnson shook his head. ‘Not Georgie.’ He paused. ‘Nor Father O’Buhilly.’

The celebrations among the foreign element in Chungking at outwitting Chiang and his generals were muted for Dicken by the disappearance into an American hospital from which she never seemed to emerge of Marie-Gabrielle. Several times he called, trying to see her, but there were always excuses – she was off duty, she had gone somewhere with one of the American nurses, she was too busy – so that it wasn’t hard to form the opinion that she was dodging him. With the death of Father O’Buhilly, it left him empty of feeling and with the certainty that his time in China was growing short. He wasn’t wrong.

Hatto arrived from India, angry that he had managed to combat all Diplock’s evil influences throughout Dicken’s career only for him to ruin everything as he reached high rank by getting involved in the taboo subject of Chinese politics.

‘Officers of your rank aren’t asked to leave an ally’s country,’ he said. ‘What the hell happened?’

Foote came into the explanations and Hatto listened carefully. He seemed to appreciate what had occurred and when he had visited General Loomis he was in no doubt.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll fight it. The General’s on our side.’

As he flew back to India, Dicken, expecting his orders to leave almost hourly, was surprised to find they didn’t come, and he could only put it down to the changing attitudes. Suddenly the Communists, because they were fighting and Chiang was not, were being regarded as an unexpected ally.

‘Those wise guys in Washington are turning somersaults,’ General Loomis announced. ‘And as always, they don’t do the thing by halves. They’re beginning to see the Communists now as Jeffersonian democrats, and there are plans that when the Nips throw their hands in at the end of the war, their weapons will go straight to them so they can kick out old Dogleg. I hope to bejesus they’re right because I have a feeling we’ll have put one bogey down only to raise another.’

It was still bitterly cold and the walls of the offices and rooms in Chungking seemed to drip moisture. However, with their incredible energy, the Americans were beginning to make themselves comfortable, and it was a comfort which they generously spread to the other allied missions. Then, towards the end of the winter, American correspondents scenting a scoop north of Chengshan came back with horrific stories of famine. Lee’s blowing in of the dykes near Yuking had forced people nearer to Chengshan and the flooded fields gave no hope of crops. A relief effort had been started but it was marked by lethargy and inefficiency, and tax collectors were still trying to wring money out of the wretched people, while soldiers were rounding up men so weak they could hardly walk to collect fodder for their horses.

‘Lee’s retreating with the whole of his goddam army,’ Foote said. ‘He’s pulling out with all his men. He has a convoy of vehicles a mile long.’ His hand moved across the map on his desk. ‘Here. Moving south with the refugees between him and the enemy.’

The story of disaster left the Chungking government unruffled, and with their usual emotional generosity it was the Americans who organised the convoys of lorries north. In one of them was a group of American nurses, medical officers and missionaries in fur caps, parkas and heavy boots and among them was Marie-Gabrielle.

As the lorries disappeared Dicken left once more with Foote, Johnson and Babington in one of the old Tupolevs. As they landed at Chengshan, peasant families were already sprawled in acres waiting for trains to take them to safety in the west. Many had come in old and battered trains that had sneaked past the Japanese artillery in the night, riding on flat cars and in boxcars and ancient carriages, bracing themselves on the roofs in the freezing cold so that fingers became numb and they fell off to the track, but most had come under their own power, by cart or barrow or on foot.

The Americans were quick to set up radio stations, tents and marquees and organise soup kitchens. As the starving people queued up, all round the airfield were thousands more, here and there little food shops conspicuous in the growing darkness by the blue flames of their stoves and the smell of frying.

Several times Dicken saw Marie-Gabrielle, bulky in padded clothing, near the tents of the American hospital, but he was never able to get her on her own. He was convinced by now that she was avoiding him but he could never be sure whether it was because she distrusted him or because she distrusted herself.

In an attempt to round up refugees, Dicken drove with Babington into the town in a lorry. There had been a fire that had gutted booths and godowns and their wreckage was strewn across the cobblestones in a litter of smashed earthenware and frayed flapping cane matting. The wind lifted drifts of yellow paper, fragments of cloth and loose straw and chaff, and a red streamer twirled where it had caught on a projection.

The city’s population had been cut to a quarter of its normal numbers. Bombed, shelled and occupied in the past by the Japanese, the place could offer no comfort to the starving hordes. Buildings were empty shells, devoid of roofs, and the people who appeared from doorways, tottering on their feet and spreading their hands to ask for food, seemed like ghosts.

Lying alongside a doorway was a girl in her teens, her body only half-covered, as though someone had snatched away her outer garments for their own use. Her lips were black, exposing white even teeth, her hair frozen into the mud and snow of the roadway. Further on they found other bodies, an old woman beneath a table in a doorway, an old man, a child, its legs and arms like sticks. The whole town stank of urine and human filth and of the people who shivered in the cold, their grey and blue rags stirred by the bitter wind. Over the hordes of wretched people, steaming breath rose in clouds, and their eyes were like dark holes in expressionless masks. More people lay in the gutters. One or two who were still alive were lifted into the lorries to be taken to the hospital tents, but most were already dead. A woman in rags clutching a baby rose as they stopped alongside her, but as she did so the baby fell from her trembling hands into the snow and started to cry pitifully.

As snow began to fall, deadening the footsteps, the town became a tomb peopled by desperate grey-faced ghosts. In the evening, the hordes of starving people round the open kitchens of the food shops, their eyes watching every morsel as it was cooked and eaten, suddenly and unexpectedly made a rush. Pots were upset and hands snatched what they could reach in a desperate silence, as if their owners had no energy for speaking. As they hurried away, children followed them.

‘K’o lien! K’o lien! Mercy! Mercy!’

The members of the mission had filled their pockets with food from the American forces canteen and as they tried to give it away, the children snatched at it, their tear-stained faces smudgy and lost, small shrunken scarecrows with pus-filled slits for eyes. Starvation had made their hair dry and brittle, hunger had given them bloated bellies, their skins were chapped and raw, and their voices had shrunk to an unhappy muling.

The neighbouring villages were even worse. There the silence was terrifying. The countryside was bare and the streets deserted, doors and windows flapping open, and echoing with emptiness. Fields had been stripped and peasants living on peanut husks were searching the heaps of refuse for rejected scraps of edible material. Some even crammed earth into their mouths to fill their empty bellies, and people like spectres were skimming the green scum from pools for food.

A dog digging at the turned earth had exposed a body and they found the corpse of a woman clutching the cold ground. She had once been pretty but now her body was grey-blue, a thin rain moulding her clothes to the lines of her frame. Here and there, however, hardier characters were still trying, with clubs in their hands, to guard their spring wheat, knowing that if it was stolen, they would be joining the hungry mob. And even now the Chinese instinct for trading was at work, and people had chipped bark from trees and pounded it for food, which they were selling with leaves and a scrap of sauce.

By the time they returned the hospital tents had become like scenes from Doré’s pictures of Hell. Marie-Gabrielle, her face haunted, was feeding two children who had been brought in. Desperate with hunger, their parents had tied them to a tree so they couldn’t follow as they searched for food. Another family, she said, had been sent by their mother to search for food and when they had returned had found her dead, the baby still at her breast.

‘We’ve even heard of parents killing their children rather than see them starve,’ she said in shocked tones. ‘And of whole families committing suicide. And cannibalism! Cannibalism! The whole thing’s too big!’

Tears streamed down her face as she spoke. ‘I think I’m tired of despair,’ she said.

‘It could be,’ Dicken said bluntly, ‘that you’re just tired.’

The following day the enormous throng of misery heaved and began to move. Small groups began to set off across the plain, like the broken remnants of a string of beads, bunched together, their heads down against the wind. Two people who couldn’t keep up lay in the snow sobbing their desolation.

‘Jesus,’ Foote said bitterly. ‘I always thought of the Chinese as a lively lot. Misery’s made these poor bastards mute.’

The silent horde passed the airfield slowly, shuffling past in a soundless hush that was broken only by the scrape of feet and the squeak of carts. They walked mechanically, concentrating on getting one foot in front of the other. A man pushed a barrow, the figure lying on it covered with a blanket, the naked feet covered with goose-flesh, the limp head wobbling. Fathers dragged carts, mothers pulled at ropes, their eyes unseeing, their backs to the cold wind and the destroyed land.

The old Russian bombers ferried American supplies and medicaments but it was like trying to hold back the flood. Even the old Hart was brought into service, with Dicken and Babington flying from one bare, empty patch of land to another to inform the Americans where the refugees were gathering.

Then, with Foote heading south to raise more supplies, Babington, who had been north, travelling on a pony with a Chinese interpreter, risking his life among peasants more than willing to kill anyone with transport, brought back a new story.

‘That column of Lee’s, sir,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t contain weapons or supplies. No soldiers. No officers. Not even a snot-nosed little boy bugler. It’s the loot he’s gathered round him over the last four years. I was in Chingku when it stopped and I saw the lorries. They’re stuffed with furniture, carpets, chests and God knows what. He’s using his troops to push the refugees between him and the Japanese.’

There was still snow on the summits of the mountains as the Hart lifted off and the land between looked bare and bleak and empty. The refugees were all moving in the direction of Chungking along a wide road that wound round the hills, a long stream of human beings, with here and there an ox, a donkey, a mule or an odd cart, thousands of blue-clad figures trying to struggle to safety. As they flew low over them, a few waved but for the most part they continued to plod on indifferently, their eyes on the road.

Just ahead of them the road divided so that the junction looked like an upside-down Y. The Japanese were coming down the main leg from the north, a mass of lorries in a briskly-moving column. Among them Dicken could see guns and carts carrying machine guns. Then, swinging south, one eye on the swarm of refugees coming down the western arm of the Y, he saw that on the other arm troops were stationed across the road, behind them a string of lorries that he recognised as General Lee’s. They were facing north, their weapons directed towards the junction of the arms of the Y. Behind them was a bridge over a steep gorge. It was Lee’s intention to fire on the refugees to force them north into the path of the advancing Japanese.

When they returned to the airstrip Foote was holding a signal flimsy.

‘You’re for home, Buster,’ he said bluntly to Dicken. ‘The General couldn’t hold off Chiang any longer. You and Stilwell both. You go as soon as your relief can fly in. He’s on his way now with Willie Hatto who’s coming to protest. The General fought as long as he could but old Dogleg had all the aces.’

Dicken frowned and explained what they’d seen.

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ Foote argued.

‘We can blow that bloody bridge out,’ Dicken said. ‘One good bomb on it and Lee’s lorries will be stranded and so will the Japanese, because
they
’re using wheels as well.’