SOMEWHERE IN SHANSI
North China Front. By James Bertram. (Macmillan. 15s.)
MR. BERTRAM is something more than the first Englishman to shake hands with the Commander-in-Chief of the 8th Route
Army, formerly known in China as the Communist-Bandit forces. He is a gallant and a patient traveller, with a gift for diplomacy and a useful command of the Chinese language. He is an effective writer and a tireless assimilator of informa- tion, and he has combined these gifts to produce a very valu- able book.
Its value—which is not evenly distributed—lies in the fact that Mr. Bertram saw, and has vividly described, a phase and an aspect of China's attempt to defend herself against aggres- sion of which scarcely any other Europeans had the courage and the qualifications to constitute themselves eye-witnesses. He was in Tokyo when the " China incident " began in July, 1937.• From Tokyo (where, " it seemed to me, a general un- easiness was discernible that meant more than any private anxiety ") Mr. Bertram made his way to Peking, whence he is able to summarise in convincing detail the Chinese military debacle in the first weeks of hostilities. After that debacle he went coastwise to Tsingtao, inland by rail to Sian, and so joltingly north to Yenan by road. Yenan provides well- selected extracts from long interviews with Mao Tse-tung and others ; and from this capital of lost causes and nationalist-communism Mr. Bertram headed east and north —against the ebb of routed provincial troops—for the Shansi battle-front. He finished up with Ho Lung's forces to the north of Taiyuanfu, and, though he never saw fighting, the extent of his journey and the circumstances in which it was made reflect the highest credit on him. Mr. Bertram, as he modestly claims, " shared as fully as any foreigner may do in the life of a Chinese army." He is an important eye-witness of a war whose progress today few find the time to chart and whose ultimate significance is little apprehended here.
Mr. Bertram shares Mr. Edgar Snow's opinion of the Chinese Communist armies. They are (he thinks) the goods ; in them lies China's salvation. On form, the probability is that he is at least partly right. Even before General Chiang Kai-shek dislodged—at (was it?) the sixth attempt—the " Reds " from Kiangsi, their politico-military achievements had been marked by an un-Chinese effectiveness. Since then their leaders have remained unchanged, their policies have been improved by substantial modification, and their visitors have been unfailingly enthusiastic.
It is this enthusiasm which (though it nowhere obtrudes unduly in North China Front) is in a sense the most dis- appointing feature of Mr. Bertram's rapportage. His 8th Route Army, like Mr. Snow's, is almost too good to be true. Stories about Chinese peasants are, elsewhere, so seldom success-stories that the unbroken saga of victories won. difficulties overcome, loyalties awakened and moral sustained becomes, without any disrespect to Mr. Bertram, faintly im- plausible. What he saw he describes faithfully, and often brilliantly (" the icicles at the ponies' fetlocks tinkling like castanets "). What he was told he recoils fully, in inverted commas. 'The result is all light and no shade, as though Lord Kemsley were writing again about the Cabinet. Was there no shade? No avoidable blunders or failings or setbacks? Mr. Bertram's book would have been, to at least one student of the Chinese, more interesting and more valuable if he had been able to discern and diagnose any such.
But this is wistfulness, not criticism. Mr. Bertram is en authority whom only two or three Europeans have the ritzht to challenge on his own subject. On some other subject,— notably the activities of the Chinese and Japanese air forces —he is unexpectedly inaccurate ; and his comparisons of Spin with China will recommend themselves only to the wool:lest ideologists. His book is strongly to be recommended to students of the Far East ; but I wish that, after reading it. I was not so convinced that defensive preparations, whicl-
st
Hong-kong are (to Mr. Bertram) " frenzied," would have 1:en " swiftly and ingeniously improvised " at an 8th Route A:;r1Y
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