Geling Yan - The Flowers of War

‘I asked you to put the fire out. Did you not understand?’ Father Engelmann said, pointing at the fireplace.

‘I was just about to,’ said George.

‘You’ve obviously added more wood!’ said Father Engelmann.

‘But George can’t bear to see a nice woman like me freeze,’ said Hongling with a twinkle in her eye.

Outside, in the dark and the cold, a Chinese soldier pulled his greatcoat tightly around him and tried, in vain, to sleep. For the past two days he had been hiding in the church’s graveyard, surviving on strips of dried yam that he had found hanging under the eaves of a bombed building, and on water from the cistern.

The soldier was twenty-nine-year-old Major Dai, of the Second Regiment of the 73rd Division of the Nationalist Army. On the night of December 12, while everyone in the compound slept, exhausted by their failed attempt to board the ferry, Dai had climbed over the wall into the church grounds in a desperate search for safety.

Major Dai’s unit was part of a crack division which Chiang Kai-shek had used against the Japanese in Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek had three regiments of the calibre of the Seventy-Third, and they were the jewels in his crown. The military instructor for all three divisions was General von Falkenhausen, a German aristocrat with a German temperament to match. The troops that had almost succeeded in driving the Japanese Army into the Huangpu River in the space of a week were Major Dai’s.

On the evening of the twelfth, Major Dai was prepared to take half a battalion and defend Nanking’s Central Road to the death. As it got dark, they came across large numbers of soldiers running in the direction of the river. The soldiers spoke an almost incomprehensible dialect but Dai gathered that, according to them, his commanding officer, General Tang, had called a meeting of senior officers that afternoon and decided on a general retreat to the river. They said the order to retreat had been given an hour ago.

This could not be true, Dai thought. There had been no order to retreat received from his runner. If Major Dai’s crack troops had not received such orders, then what had made this rabble decide to throw away their weapons, bury their munitions and retreat?

Those in favour and those against retreat then got involved in discussions that became so acrimonious shots were fired. One of Dai’s company captains was pushed to the ground by a retreating soldier and, when he got to his feet, he shot the man. At that, those under orders to defend the city split into two. Most were swept along by the retreating forces. Twenty or thirty soldiers were left and, taking advantage of the fact that they were still armed and the retreating forces had laid down their weapons, launched an attack on them. After about five minutes of being fired on, the retreating officers and men took refuge in tanks and lorries. Major Dai and his men blockaded the vehicles. In those few moments of pandemonium, it dawned upon Major Dai with terrible clarity what the word ‘rout’ meant. For a military man such as he was, doomsday could not have been more tragic than this. He gave the order to cease fire.

By the time he and his junior officers arrived at the river, it was a desperate scene: bloodied bodies crammed the banks, hands emerged from the water to cling to the gunwales of every boat. Dai’s officers escorted him up and down, proclaiming his rank and number, but no one heeded them and they could not get near the few remaining boats which could take them to safety. By one o’clock in the morning, those wanting to board outnumbered those on the boats by a hundred to one. Innumerable hands still clung to the gunwales, and even the decks, with inhuman persistence, until the captain threatened to hack them off.

Dai decided this was futile. The river was now filled not just with motor boats and rowing boats, but wooden bathtubs, camphorwood chests and scrubbing boards. People, out of their minds with desperation, were prepared to risk the dangers of the river and try to paddle their tubs and boards to the opposite shore and safety. Dai reckoned that the first contingent must already have gone to a watery grave in the icy river. He and his officers turned and squeezed their way back through the crowds.

It was now four o’clock in the morning. The road was still jammed with fleeing soldiers and civilians. One soldier was trying to wrest a thin, patched and tattered cotton gown and trousers off one man, in exchange for his own army uniform, but the man would not give them up even though he was barefoot and unable to speak from the cold. Major Dai’s shouted command went unheard and the soldier who desperately wanted to pass himself off as a Nanking shopkeeper would have ended up as another victim of ‘friendly fire’ had Dai not wanted to hang on to his remaining five bullets.

Dai groped his way through the unlit alleyways. Any buildings still standing were locked and barred. He came to an almost totally destroyed compound with a charred entrance door, walked in and found strings of yam strips hung from the eaves to dry. He cut them all down and filled his pockets with them.

He headed in what his memory of the layout of Nanking told him was an easterly direction. Most of the enemy troops had come from the east and if he could slip through to their rear and get into villages which had already surrendered, then he could hide away in these sparsely populated areas. From there he could plan the next step. It was not only knowledge and experience which made a soldier, it was natural aptitude, something Dai had in abundance and which was the reason why, at twenty-nine, he had been promoted over his peers so speedily at Baoding Military Academy.

Dai came across the first Japanese invaders at about five in the morning. This small group of soldiers appeared to have come in search of food, and were torching every house where they found none. When they arrived at the compound where Dai was hiding, he retreated to the innermost courtyard. Then he discovered that there were only half a dozen of them; he began to itch to have a go at them. A hand grenade was probably enough to deal with them. He would be a hopeless son of a bitch if he did not put his weapons to good use. Dai felt the grenade which hung from the rear of his waistband and pondered whether it was worthwhile. He did not hesitate long. A good soldier had not just knowledge, experience and ability, but also the kind of fervour which drove him into action. And Dai was seized now with the same burning hatred of the Japanese which had filled him when he fought them in Shanghai.

His heart pounding, he hid himself in the main hall of the innermost courtyard. There was a narrow alley outside the window, which he had opened and could get out of in a matter of seconds. Now he was really fired up, his frustration at the loss of Nanking completely forgotten.

The Japanese soldiers arrived in the inner courtyard and came into view. He held the pistol in one hand and, with his teeth, pulled the pin out of the grenade, silently counted to three, and then lobbed it out on the count of four. He was anxious not to waste any of the explosives he had, so the grenade had to land in the best possible position. As he threw it, he turned and hurled himself at the window. With the benefit of all his hard training, it took no more than a couple of seconds to scale the wall and land on the other side.

But the Japanese were also well trained. They had not been seriously wounded and were soon at the back windows themselves. Bullets hit the tree trunk to the left of him and the crumbling wall to the right. Then he realised one had hit him in his left side.