ALL WE HAD TO TELL

Around besieged Hengyang the Jap lay fat and well-fed. Toward him plodded the patient, pauper soldiers of China. TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White went on one such expedition that tried to reach Hengyang's defenders, reported it in this dispatch:

We waited in our stuffy compartment--a middle-aged U.S. captain, a clean-cut colonel, Graham Barrow of Reuters and I--and were thoroughly miserable. Peddlers were hawking cucumbers, wheat cakes and tea to the Chinese soldiers jammed on flatcars and boxcars. Up front the tired locomotive leaked steam at the joints while soldiers loaded the train with supplies --chickens, pigs, a couple of fresh red and white slabs of meat crusted with flies. Finally the train lurched sorrowfully out in the heat up the line to the railhead.

The colonel, who was an American liaison officer with the Chinese Army, peeled off his gun, unbuttoned his shirt, let the sweat pour down his dusty face in tired rivulets. I peeled down to bare middle and the heat slowly settled in to choke us. The train was making about six miles an hour and the colonel was telling us about the evacuation of Hengyang.

"I was lying asleep by the railway station one night in the rain, then I woke up because there was a train going by. They were stuffed on roofs and in boxcars. They had lashed themselves to couplings between cars. There were refugees on the cowcatcher in front; underneath the trains they had laid some boards across the rods between the wheels. They stretched their mattresses on the boards and there they were, lying one on top of the other between the rods and trains."

The captain began to tell how he sold cosmetics for Max Factor all through the Orient before the war. Then, as if something clicked in his mind, he reverted to the story of the evacuation of Hengyang:

On Top of the Car. "I was riding on the roof of a boxcar that night. It was raining. Refugees were so thick you couldn't move. You know, one of those woman refugees, she had a baby that night, right there on top of the car. About an hour after it was born she had a fever of 101 degrees, the baby had 103. There was a Chinese Red Cross man with us. So we broke open my army first-aid kit and I took out my sulfanilamide. The Red Cross man broke one of the tablets into six little pieces and fed them to the baby one at a time. You know, they both lived, too."

It took working bloody, two hours to do twelve miles and we came to the railhead. Thirty miles up ahead were Japs. It was six o'clock by the time we found billets in an old factory dormitory that smelled like an abandoned pigsty--the kind whose odors are latent but deep, and revive each time you kick over a stale pile of dirt. We lay sleepless through the night.

It was dawn when Barrow and I joined the troop movement; the cruelty of the heat and cloudless skies was already unbear able. The whole Sixty-Second Army was on foot. As far as you could see, strung over the horizon through rice paddies, in single file along the ruined rail bed, crawling through ditches on the devastated highway, were single files of Chinese troops.

For every man who carried a rifle there seemed to be two carrying supplies and other impediments. Larded between the plodding, unsmiling, heat-burdened soldiers were blue-gowned peasant coolies, pressed for carrier duty.

One Day Farther. The army was quiet--the Chinese quiet of men who are not suffering acutely but merely bearing the bitterness of decades one day farther up the road. The soldiers were wiry and brown with the sun. Their rifles were old, their clothes threadbare. Each of them carried two grenades tucked in a belt about his neck and a long blue stocking inflated like an enormous bologna roll. The blue stocking was stuffed with dry rice kernels, the only iron rations the Chinese soldier gets.

The soldiers wore straw sandals, yellow and green shorts and shirts, and their heads were covered by crowns of leaves that gave shade from the sun.

At muddy brooks some soldiers would break discipline, stoop and guzzle the water--nothing else could be had en route. The fields were barren and deserted, the houses shuttered and hollow. Once we saw a hunchbacked cripple spading his garden. In one village a blind peasant sat on his doorstep amidst the empty houses of his neighbors and listened to the plodding shuffle of passing troops.

As dusk fell, the army fell out along the road. We slept. Next day about noon we arrived at divisional headquarters, four miles behind the lines. We had been assigned to the famed 151st Division, whose chief of staff 25 years ago was Chiang Kaishek. The 151st, like all Chinese divisions, was understrength. The entire division had two pieces of artillery--two antique French 75's--several mortars, some machine guns and rifles. It also had guts. What it had to do was to move up the hills in the daylight, ignoring Jap artillery, and dig live Japs out of holes they had had prepared for three weeks.

Hope in the Morning. The division had struck at 3:30 that-morning, creeping up the hills in the dawn. By midmorning it had taken seven of the ten hills that guarded the town. Divisional headquarters was certain that by next day the division would break through the Japs and the road to relieve Hengyang would be open. We set out for the front to see the fighting.

We climbed to a regimental command post at the very top of the Chinese positions. From the loopholes you could see out over the field of battle. The nearest hill recaptured was a wooded one and Chinese troops were already sheltered there. But three Jap hills beyond were the highest of the cluster and on these the Japs had concentrated their guns and men. Two white farmhouses in the slopes of the hills held invisible Japs, and Chinese guns were trying to reach them unsuccessfully. Mortars of the Chinese belched from behind us, but nothing happened.

It was the heat of afternoon and in the giddy shimmering waves that rose from the hills there was finally silence. The regimental commander said the Chinese would start attacking again in the evening. By morning, he promised us, we could go through the notch in the hills--the Japs would be cleaned out.

Morning found us at divisional headquarters waiting to move up. But the attack was bogging down. I trudged over, to the hospital to see the wounded. Casualties had been heavy and hospital orderlies were working fitfully among the bloody, uncomplaining bodies. The smell of the old barn and the fetid, heavy odor of sickness was crushing. I asked the director where he got his medical training. He said, "I am self-taught. I joined the army medical service four years ago."

Despair in the Dark. The second evening of the attack we could not sleep. From over the ridge came the steady crash of mortar shells, the rumbling, ugly sound of artillery, the rippling of Japanese machine-gun fire. Now and again enormous flashes--whether of artillery or ground lightning from summer heat I could not tell--silhouetted the area in red and black.

By evening of the third day the attack had stalled. The divisional commander, in short, unhappy grunts, gave the old, sad diagnosis--the Japs were dug in; the Chinese could not clean out the enemy with rifle, bayonet and machine gun alone.

What could be done, I asked the commander. He said his decision had been made by higher headquarters--he was to shift attacking forces from the railroad into the hills, try to bypass the Jap garrison, close with the enemy positions at some point nearer Hengyang high in the roadless hills. We could go with him or return. We thanked him, said we would go back and write what his men had tried to do.

In the morning we set out once more in the heat on the long road back. Chungking radio was telling of victories on Saipan, at Minsk, in Italy, in France. All we had to tell about was an obscure campaign in an unknown valley and the suffering of a sick, ragged, dauntless army.

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