Hemingway on the China Front: His WWII Spy Mission with Martha Gellhorn by Peter Moreira

Author:Peter Moreira [Moreira, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Potomac Books
Published: 2006-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

9

CHENGTU

On April 10, just four days after arriving in Chungking, Hemingway again boarded an aircraft to travel to the northern Szechwan city of Chengtu. Hsia, who the local press described as the secretary of the executive Yuan, Chiang Kai-Shek’s cabinet, escorted him.1 The local media in Chungking reported that Gellhorn accompanied Hemingway, and she filed material on Chengtu for Collier’s that blended into her first person account of the southern war zone, but in fact she was too sick to travel. Hemingway went alone and agreed to give any good stuff to his wife if he saw it. It was in Chengtu that Hemingway saw something so remarkable that he wrote an extra story for PM about it, much to the chagrin of the gang at Collier’s. It was the only piece of his reporting in Asia in which Hemingway used his powerful talent for description, and he described what he beheld wonderfully.

The plane landed at about 4 P.M. and they proceeded to the military academy—a “Chinese West Point,” as he later referred to it—near the officer’s club where Hemingway was staying.

Chengtu is a cosmopolitan city located along the trade routes to Tibet. When the Han Dynasty fell in 220 AD, it was already a noted center for crafts, and its history is rich with tales of emperors, mandarins, poets, and intellectuals.2 Hemingway described how “the caravans come down from Tibet and you walk past red and yellow llamas in the dust-deep streets of the old high-walled city.”3 With a cold wind from the snowy mountains blowing dust through the streets, he wore a handkerchief over his face for protection. At one point, he had to duck into a silver-beater’s shop to make room for a caravan of llamas coming down the street.

Hemingway stayed in the U.S. Servicemen’s Club, which was in a compound enclosing several streets with blocks of apartments, offices, and mansions. Jung Chang, who would one day write the best-selling family portrait Wild Swans, moved into the compound in 1958 and wrote: “The club building was in the traditional Chinese style, with the ends of its yellow tiled roof turning upwards, and heavy dark red pillars.”4 One thing Hemingway noted was that the numbers on the doors were in Russian, and at breakfast they ate such “delicacies” as cocoa and butter that had been shipped from Vladivostok and Chita.5

The German general Alexander Von Faulkenhausen had set up the military academy, and its professors were German-trained Chinese, although there were also Russian advisers. Before the rise of Hitler, several German officers had decided that Germany would never again be involved in grand campaigns, and China seemed to be one of the few places that could offer a soldier adventure. They helped Chiang build and train his army, and they were far more enthusiastic in battling the Communists than Chiang’s American and Russian supporters. By 1938 the Germans were in an awkward position, given Germany’s poor relations with China’s other allies, so the general and his officers returned home as the Second World War approached.

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