UNTIL THE HARVEST IS REAPED

How ageless are China's problems and how bitterly Chinese history repeats itself in cycles of wars, floods and famines, TIME Correspondent Teddy White could tell last week from firsthand knowledge. He was just back from a two-week trip through starving Honan Province. His report:

My notes tell me that I am reporting only what I saw or verified; yet even to me it seems unreal: dogs eating human bodies by the roads, peasants seeking dead human flesh under the cover of darkness, endless deserted villages, beggars swarming at every city gate, babies abandoned to cry and die on every highway. Nothing can transmit the horror of the entire great famine in Honan Province, or the irony of the green spring wheat with a promise of a bumper crop which is not ripe for harvesting for two more months. Most terrible of all is the knowledge that the famine might have been averted.

Those Who Run Away. With Harrison Forman of the London Times I arrived in a town called Tunghsientien, a funnel through which refugees pour out of Honan. The refugees are stuffed into boxcars, flatcars, old coaches, layer upon layer deep. They are crowded on the roofs, children, old men & women clinging to any possible fingergrip as the trains hurtle along. Sometimes their fingers get so numb from the cold they fall off. The trains never halt.

In ten minutes we saw the first casualty--a peasant lying bleeding near the roadbed. He had fallen from a refugee train some hours before. The train wheels had cut his foot off. He was all alone, crying, and his flesh was mangled on the rail. The bones of his foot were sticking out like a thin white cornstalk. I broke open my medicine kit and gave Kim some sulfanilamide and we raced on to tell someone to send water and a doctor. But there was no doctor within a day's journey.

Nobody knows or cares how many refugees die on this road. They say two million people have moved out along this route since fall, by now probably 10,000 a day are drifting along westward. Of Honan's 34 millions we estimated that there have been three million refugees. In addition, five million will have died by the time the new harvest is gathered.

Those Who Stay and Beg. In Loyang we went to call on Bishop Thomas Megan of Eldora, Iowa, a greathearted Irish padre. When we came out of his relief dispensary, which is supported by American funds, the refugees tried to mob us. Men fell on their knees, surrounded us, folding hands in supplication.

The next day we went east, riding in an Army truck accompanied by Father Megan. Trees on the road had been peeled of their bark. Peasants dry and powder the elm bark and then cook it. They also eat leaves, straw roots, cottonseed and water reed.

The Army gave us horses to ride on farther east. In the cold first hour after dawn we passed the first corpse--a woman dead on the road. She must have been there at least overnight.

Those Who Die. When we arrived in Chengchow the snow-covered, rubble-ruined streets seemed full of ghosts in fluttering grey-blue rags. They darted from every alley to screech at us with their hands tucked in their gowns to keep warm. When they die they just lie down in the slush or gutters and give up. We prodded one or two of them gently to see whether they were still alive. The relief committee here is supported almost entirely with American funds, from United China Relief and tries to keep some women & children alive in a relief camp. The next day we saw the relief committee distributing grain. There were only six sacks of flaked bran.

That afternoon we heard of a cannibalism trial. A Mrs. Ma was being tried for eating her little girl. Parts of the baby's flesh were brought in as evidence. The state charged she killed the child and ate it. Her plea was that the baby had died from hunger first and then was eaten.

Those Who Eat. When we left Chengchow we had a fairly good idea of what had happened in Honan. Crops had failed since 1940. The normal surplus had disappeared. The Army in this vital war area is supported entirely by local foods collected as grain taxes. Civilian officials also each get a monthly quota of grain. The Government people hoped the fall crops of millet corn would meet the needs of the peasantry. But no rain fell and the autumn harvest was almost a total loss.

By a tremendous miscalculation no grain was sent to the famine land in autumn when it might have arrived in time. Now, aside from American relief money and energy, there seems little hope of getting enough grain over the war-smitten routes of interior China before it is too late.

Before we left Chengchow the officials gave us a banquet. We had two soups. We had spiced lotus, peppered chicken, beef and water chestnut. We had spring rolls, hot wheat buns, rice, bean-curd, chicken and fish. We had three cakes with sugar frosting.

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