Eighteen Levels Down

Just before last week's Communist stab through the Nationalist Huai River defense line (see above), TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin made a visit to the Huai front. His report:

The railroad station at Pukow, just across the Yangtze from Nanking, was choked with people. Soldiers, bulky in padded winter khaki, bivouacked on the concrete platforms. Their rice cooked in big iron pots over wood fires. Grimy refugees hovered nearby with begging bowls. Petty traders, going uprailway to barter cloth and matches for sesame oil and tobacco, swarmed with their bundles on the rooftops of overpacked third class coaches, on couplings, on the coal tender, on the catwalk around the locomotive boiler.

"War's war," sighed the railroad traffic manager, "but a living's a living. We sell 4,000 tickets daily. Another 4,000 passengers take free rides. We can't stop them . . . nothing like this in America, is there?

You Americans are on top of heaven. We Chinese are eighteen levels down in hell."

"Hurry, Hurry!" Our train chuffed into Pengpu, 100 miles above Nanking, at dusk after a seven-hour trip. All along the steel corridor--single track except for station sidings--military traffic flowed heavily. Every railside town and village crawled with soldiers. Dumps of rice and munitions crowded rail platforms and yards. Bridges bristled with mudbrick pillboxes, defensive moats and brushworks.

Pengpu's narrow, cobbled streets bustled in the early darkness with shoving soldiers and civilians. At a quarter to 7 gongs rang, warning of curfew. Cries of "hurry, hurry home" sounded on the streets. Shopkeepers hastily boarded up their stalls. By 7 the streets were deserted and quiet save for military patrols with their rough bayonet-pointed challenge to late passersby: "Ni shut?" (Who is it?).

The front lay about ten miles north of Pengpu. Next morning in a curious military vehicle--an old rail coach converted by iron plates into an "armored car"--we clanked across the quarter-mile steel bridge spanning the Huai. The river's northern shore was buttressed at the bridgehead with zigzag trenches and barricades of sharp wooden stakes. It had been cleared of all sampans lest the Communists seize them for a crossing.

At Tsaolaochi, a grey brick station-house with a mud-walled village behind it, Nationalist forces had just set up a forward headquarters. Under General Li Yen-nien, commander of the Sixth Army Group, two field armies, the 99th. and the 54th, about 50,000 strong, were pressing northwestward in an attempt to join hands with the Twelfth Nationalist Army Group at Suhsien, 25 miles away. In a battered G.M.C. ten-wheeler truck, we lurched after them.

"All Lost." Kolachi village, on the way, no longer smoked but the smell of burnt thatch and straw (set ablaze by mortar shells) hung pungently over all. Its cottages were roofless, blackened earthen walls, through which children and women poked forlornly. On a slope in front of the ruins sat Fang Hu-shih, a wrinkled grandmother bundled in a black padded jacket and trousers. Her silver earrings danced back & forth as she rocked in silent grief. Yesterday at the height of the fighting she had hobbled on her tiny bound feet a mile away to a safe spot in the fields. Behind her now lay the ashes of her hut and strawrick. Had she saved anything? Tears ran down her soot-stained cheeks. She moaned: "All lost, all lost."

In the late afternoon, our ten-wheeler pulled into the large village of Chiang-chiahu, forward headquarters of General Hu Chang-ching's 99th Army. "We are fighting from village to village," said affable, silver-toothed Hu, pointing to some pillars of smoke a couple of miles ahead. "Chen Yi's sixth column and some of Liu Po-cheng's troops are. throwing up defense lines between here and Huang Wei's Twelfth Army Group." There were 20 or more tough miles still to go for a junction with the encircled Huang.

In a paddyfield on the village edge, stretcher bearers brought in wounded for relay to Tsaolaochi. About a dozen men in various states of shock and pain lay on the ground. Fresh bandages reeking of alcohol seemed their only care--no plasma or morphine. They suffered stoically. A battalion commander, his throat and shoulder torn by shrapnel, retched helplessly. Another man had a broken ankle bare in the chill air, propped up on a wad of straw.

In the Belly. Crouched in one of Chi-angchiahu's farmhouses were five Communist prisoners, well-fed, clothed in good yellow-brown uniforms and ranging in age from 20 to 38. Three were onetime Nationalist soldiers, captured a year ago and converted for Chen Yi's army. "We march all night," said one, "as much as 40 kilometers. By day we rest under trees behind paddy walls or in villages."

There was just enough time before dark for return to Tsaolaochi. On the way back we stopped for a village funeral. Lined against the twilight in an empty paddyfield stood half a dozen countrymen around a high-ended Chinese coffin. The chief mourners wore white headbands of grief. They were burying their mother, Chang Hu-shih, an old woman of 60.

"She was a heroine," said one of the mourners. "Yesterday when government troops marched here they could find no man to show them where the Communists were posted. Old Woman Chang led them across fields and pointed out the trenches. The Communists opened fire; a bullet struck her in the belly. She fell on this spot."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.