2 AUGUST 1963, Page 7

'An Eastern Westem

Grabbing the gun at his side, Lee shot one of the bandits. The other, whose knife was already at Lee's ribs, dropped it in fright and turned to run. But by then Lee had whipped out his own knife. With one spring Lee was upon him, and ended the bandit's life. His strength spent, Lee [who had been wounded on the previous page] collapsed to the ground. His black horse re- turned atid lay down beside him....

Typical (you were about to say, Comrade?) of the crude, sensational fiction with Which the Americans attempt to glorify their pioneering day. Not at all. Lee is a Mao-boy, not a cow- boy; the time is the present, the scene Tibet; and the quotation is from a short story published this summer in Chinese Literature, an English- language monthly printed in Peking. The author, Hai Mo, has attempted a sort of politico-military version of Black Beauty, his central character be- ing an undersized wonder-horse ridden by a trooper in the People's Li,beration Army. The ,story is clearly based on some first-hand ex- perience of occupied Tibet; but it is also based on an almost measureless ignorance of horses, and thus cannot be accounted a success. All the same, I found it full of interesting things. One was the role allotted to the Tibetans. who serve exactly the same purpose as Red Indians and bite the dust only after strenuous fighting. Another was the reference to 'the second [Tibetan] campaign against the English invaders.' A friendly Tibetan had been forced to take part in this frightful affair in his youth. Since his en- rolment in the Chinese forces provides the story with its happy ending, and since, if the reference was to the Younghusband expedition, the man would have been getting on for eighty, the author clearly had some later act of aggression in mind. I wish he had told us more about it.