Anthony Grey by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (mobi)

Author:Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (mobi)
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-10-02T05:13:35.734000+00:00

10

On a rain-drenched afternoon in late June, bedraggled Central Red Army troops standing shoulder to shoulder along both sides of a banner-decked village street stared enviously at the columns of fit, well-equipped soldiers of the Fourth Front Army who were marching jauntily into the village between them. The bandoliers and cartridge belts of the Fourth Front men gleamed with ammunition, their ration bags bulged, and the uniforms and red-starred caps they wore were cut from strong new cloth. Strings of donkeys, mules, and horses swayed under the weight of crated munitions and stores, and the smiling, confident faces of all the marching men, unlike those of the roadside sentries, were round and well fed.

Above their heads, blood red banners strung between the mud- brick houses had been emblazoned with white characters proclaiming “Long Live the Unity of the Fourth Front and First Front Armies!” and “March North Together to Fight the Japanese Invaders!” Similar slogans had been painted on the walls of the houses and in a field adjoining the road a platform of farm carts had been decorated with banners so that short speeches could be made to mark the historic joining of the two forces. Beneath a temporary tarpaulin shelter erected at the roadside nearby, Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh waited tensely, darting glances from time to time at the advancing troops of the Fourth Front Army who were streaming down the road toward them from the north. Around the shelter were clustered about a hundred Party and Central Red Army leaders, and among them stood Lu Chiao and his sister, Mei-ling.

“If you wanted proof of the friction that’s building up between us and the Fourth Front, there it is,” said Chiao quietly to his sister, nodding in the direction of a bobbing red banner being carried into the village by the marching troops.

Mei-ling followed his gaze. The banner said “Let Us Together Expand the Revolutionary Northwest Federation of Szechuan and Sikang.”

“We’re saying we must all hurry north to fight the Japanese — but General Chang Kuo-tao wants to take us all farther west into the wilderness to build his ‘Northwest Federation.’

“Why does he want to do that?”

“He thinks the vast spaces of the Tibetan-Chinese borderlands are the best place to set up a new soviet. He wants to build up our military strength here. Three quarters of his troops are Szechuanese — and they’d rather stay in their home province. But nobody who has marched fifteen thousand Ii from Kiangsi wants to hide on this high plateau. It looks more and more like an occupied zone than a liberated area. We’ve discovered that the Kuomintang has spread lying propaganda saying the Chinese Communists were coming to kill the tribes people and eat their children. So it’s not surprising they’ve all fled from their villages and hidden their cattle and grain.”

Mei-ling screwed up her eyes and peered northward into the rain. She had pinned her hair beneath her uniform cap and she wore the Mauser machine pistol in her belt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.