convinced me of the validity of these stories. In the 1980s, President Yang Shangkun, himself a witness of the purge in Jiangxi, asked officials to investigate and he was told that Gong's book was ‘fairly accurate’. Re-reading the book on my journey, I could understand what made Gong give up the Communist cause. This was the reason he gave:
Every day I had nightmares. I seemed to have the images of tens of thousands of people floating in front of me. They were groaning, they were crying, they were screaming, they were struggling, and they were rebelling. I doubted they were nightmares because I had witnessed them.15
I returned to Yudu the next day in the early evening. The sun had, as we say, lost its poison, no longer burning with the heat of day. I strolled past Mao's residence back towards the river. His choice of that tiny courtyard now made sense. Perhaps nobody would think of leaving him behind, but he did not want to take the slightest chance. When he was told the Red Army was to leave from Yudu, he came here to wait rather than stay in Ruijin. And in Yudu he chose a house which could hardly have been closer to the nearest crossing point. He could not be without the Army he had created, the revolution he had led. He was confident he would rise again, and with this Army he would rebound and realize his ambition.
At about six o'clock in the evening on 18 October 1934 Mao left his house walking alongside the stretcher he had built for himself – two long bamboo poles with hemp ropes zigzagging across them, and thin sticks curved in arches over them, covered with a sheet of oilcloth to keep off the sun and rain.16 He would need it. He had not fully recovered from his malaria, though the best doctor from Ruijin had got him just about fit to travel.
He joined the Central Column with his bodyguards, secretaries and cook, and the porters who carried his stretcher. His wife, seven months pregnant, was assigned to the convalescent unit; she would be carried on a stretcher throughout the March. He left his 2-year-old son behind with his brother and sister-in-law – no children were allowed. This was the second child he had had to leave, and he never saw either of them again. Mao was also leaving the base which he had set up and fought for, the place where he had gained and lost his political eminence. He walked towards the river, into the dusk of evening.
FOUR Mist over the Xiang River
CHIANG KAISHEK'S PLANE soared into the air from Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi. It was 15 October 1934. The Central Daily headline read, ‘Chiang Confident He Will Get Reds’. It compared the Communists to the faltering end of an arrow's flight. Chiang looked down at the land, the green hills and meandering rivers of Jiangxi, and had a sense of relief, even jubilation. For almost a year, he had been in Nanchang, taking personal charge of the Fifth Campaign, which he thought would take care of the Communists once and for all. He felt free to tour the north and to spread his ideas for running China, unaware that Mao and his men were escaping under his nose and at that very moment. Still less did he know how easily the 86,000 men and women had broken through his lines of defence.
The biggest culprit was Chen Jitang, the warlord of Guangdong, the first province the Red Army had to pass through from Jiangxi. He had defied Chiang's economic blockade of the Red area by trading tungsten with the Communists. He did not like the Communists – he killed over 10,000 of them in Canton between 1931 and 1935 because they dared to challenge his rule – but he hated Chiang just as much, knowing his ultimate goal was to finish off all the warlords. He held anti-Chiang oath sessions with his officers, when they drank wine mixed with chicken blood, shouted ‘Down with the biggest dictator’, and then thrashed straw men or wooden sticks representing him. On 6 October 1934, immediately before the commencement of the Long March, he signed a secret treaty which agreed a ceasefire, exchange of intelligence, free trade, and right of way for the Red Army – his troops would retreat 20 kilometres from the route of the March. He presented a parting gift of 1,200 boxes of bullets, which had been airdropped by Chiang for him to fight the Communists. Even his nephew could not understand, saying, ‘Good grief, you let the Communists escape before your own eyes. I thought you hated them.’1
His neighbours, the warlords of Guangxi, Li and Bai, were even more hostile to Chiang. They made their first bid to oust him in 1929, but were sold out by their allies, who were bribed by Chiang with a few million silver dollars. As the Chinese say, if you have money, you can make ghosts work for you – let alone unscrupulous warlords. Li and Bai openly claimed, ‘Chiang hates us more than he does Mao and Zhu. If Mao and Zhu exist, we exist; if they are gone, we will be gone too. Why should we create this opportunity for him? We let Mao and Zhu live, and we will live too.’2 Chiang appointed Li as Commander of the Southern Route to chase the Red Army, with an up-front payment of three quarters of a million yuan, and then half million a month for his army, plus 100 heavy machines guns, 40 cannons and 1,000 boxes of bullets. He sent back a cable to confirm his acceptance and took his payment; but he did not lift a finger to organize the chase.
Chiang was exasperated, but he came up with what he thought was a perfect plan. He had just the excuse to enter the warlords’ territories and take control of them. He even became excited by the opportunity – the other half of China, from Guangdong in the south, Guizhou and Yunnan in the south-west, and Sichuan the biggest trophy of all, might be his at the end of the day. He spelled out his plan: ‘We do not have to wage war to conquer Guizhou … Henceforward if we do the right thing … we can unify the country.3 Chiang and the warlords were, as we say, sharing the same bed but with different dreams. Chiang could not wait to get into the warlords’ turf and attack the Red Army at the same time; the warlords wanted to speed the Red Army on its way to deny Chiang just such an excuse.
The Red Army could not move fast. Liu Bocheng, the Chief of Staff sacked by Braun, compared the March to an emperor's sedan chair. Carrying it at the front were the 1st and 3rd Corps; behind were the 8th and 9th, with the 5th Corps guarding the rear. In the middle were the Military Commission and the Central Column. The Military Commission had over 4,000 staff from the communications, logistics, engineers, artillery, hospital and cadet units, and the Red Army political department. The Central Column consisted of the Jiangxi Red government, reduced in size but with all its key functions intact, and 7,000 reserves and porters carrying files and cupboards, the entire content of the Ruijin Library, the Red Army's reserves of silver and gold in 200 battered kerosene cans, sewing machines, printing equipment, repair plant, and the cumbersome X-ray machine packed carefully in a coffin-size box which alone needed two dozen men to carry it. As Edgar Snow said, it was a nation on the move, 86,000 men and women with everything they might need in their new base. The autumn rains which fell at this time of year for days on end did not help either. The columns only managed three kilometres on the first day.
The rain and the march, even at a snail's pace, did not dampen Soldier Huang's spirits. He was excited by his first foray into the big world. They slept by day and marched at night to avoid the Nationalist planes, although there were none to be seen. At first he found it hard and kept dozing off and falling. One night his bamboo torch scorched his hair, but he soon got the hang of it. He found the march a pleasant change from battles, cannon fire, bombing raids and the dreaded turtle-shells. ‘The enemy seemed to have evaporated,’ he said. ‘I wondered why the leaders hadn't got us out and marching earlier. It would have saved a lot of lives.’
After a few days, the accents of the people in the towns and villages they passed through began to change and Huang became concerned. Where were they going? How long were they going away for? Were they coming back? Nobody knew. His commissar told them, ‘We belong to the Party. Wherever the Party points, we will go.’ But when the local dialect became completely incomprehensible, he was really worried. He did not know they had already left Jiangxi and were in Guangdong Province. He kept stopping and looking back, maybe trying to remember the route or just missing his home – he was not sure. He had to be pushed back into the marching column. And then after five weeks, they were in a