As John Magee was speaking, a stooped man wearing a felt hat with earflaps and holding a walking stick turned up, leading a small girl with his other hand. “Please let us in?” the man asked in a listless voice.
“This place is only for women and children,” Minnie said.
The man smiled, his eyes gleaming. He straightened up and said in a bright female voice, “I am a woman. Look.” She took off her hat, pulled a bandanna out of her pocket, and wiped her face to get rid of the dirt and tobacco tar. We could now see that she was quite young, in her mid-twenties. Although her angular face was still streaked, her neck seemed longer now and her supple back gave her a willowy figure.
We let her and the little girl in.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Yanying,” she said. “This is my kid sister, Yanping.” She threw her arm around the girl.
Yanying told us, “Our town was burned by the Japs. They took lots of women and men. Our neighbors Aunt Gong and her daughter-in-law were tortured to death in their home. My dad told us to run. Our brother was too scared to travel in broad daylight, so my sis and I came without him.”
Minnie sent them to Holly in the Central Building. Then George Fitch appeared, wearing a corduroy coat and smoking a cigarette with a holder that resembled a small curved pipe. He looked exhausted, his hair messy and his amber eyes damp. Fitch was the head of the YMCA in Nanjing and the administrative director of the Safety Zone Committee; he had been born in Suzhou and spoke the local dialect so well that some Chinese mistook him for a Uighur. He told us that hundreds of Chinese soldiers had gone to the University Hospital camp to surrender. Many men dropped their weapons and begged the staff to let them in; otherwise they’d break into the buildings. He was sure that more soldiers, thousands of them, would come into the Safety Zone for protection, and this might get the committee into serious trouble with the victorious Japanese, so Magee and Fitch wasted no time and set off together for the hospital camp. Viewed from the rear, spindly Fitch seemed more stooped today, while Magee was stalwart with a sturdy back. Minnie said to me, “I hope no Chinese soldiers come to Jinling for refuge.”
“There won’t be any room left for them anyway,” I said.
That evening three buildings on campus were already filled, while the others continued taking in new arrivals. The Arts Building, the last one in reserve, was just opened. The Red Cross still hadn’t set up the porridge plant. The soup kitchen we had put together two days ago could meet only a fraction of the need. Minnie had proposed that we assemble the porridge plant by ourselves, but the local Red Cross people, who controlled the staffing of the kitchens and the distribution of some rations, insisted that they build the porridge plant. Apparently there was money to be made in this. Infuriated by their concern with profit under such circumstances, Minnie again sent Luhai to the local Red Cross headquarters to ask for permission.
THE NEXT MORNING it was quiet, as though the battle was over. We wondered if the Japanese had breached the city walls and gained full control of Nanjing. Word got around that the Chinese defense had collapsed after Japanese units had scaled the city walls and then dynamited them open in places. Soldiers swarmed in, shouting “Banzai!” and waving battle flags, but met little resistance. Big Liu said he’d seen the streets in the Aihui Middle School area littered with bodies, mostly civilians and some children — other than that, the downtown looked deserted.
For the whole morning Minnie scratched the nape of her neck continually. She felt itchy and sticky all over. She’d slept with her clothes on several nights in a row and hadn’t taken a shower since her visit to the wounded soldiers at the train station five days before. She hadn’t been able to sleep for two hours straight without being woken by gunfire or emergencies she had to cope with in person. Whenever she was too tired to continue, she’d take a catnap, and luckily she’d always been able to fall asleep the moment her head touched a pillow. If the battle was over today, she said she’d draw a hot bath and sleep for more than ten hours.
I was a light sleeper and had spent most of the night at the gatehouse and in different buildings. Thank God I was in good health and needed only three or four hours of sleep a day; still, I had underslept. Sometimes when I was too exhausted to continue working, I’d go into a storage room in the Practice Hall and doze off in there. These days my head was numb, my eyeballs ached, and my steps were unsteady, but I had to be around the camp. There were so many things I had to handle. My husband and daughter joked that I had become “homeless,” but they could manage without my help.
Late in the afternoon Minnie wanted to go to the riverside to look at the situation. Big Liu offered to accompany her, yet she told him, “No, you’d better stay.” Holly volunteered to go with her too, but Minnie said, “You should be around in case of emergency. Let Anling keep me company. No troops will hurt two old women.” In fact, I was fifty, one year younger than Minnie, but she looked like she was in her early forties, while my hair was streaked with gray, though I hadn’t lost my figure yet.
So I set out with her in a jeep, a jalopy given to us by Reverend Magee. Minnie was driving, which impressed every one of us, because she seemed clumsy with her hands and, unlike Holly, was not the kind of woman who could handle a car nimbly.
“Let’s hope this car won’t break down,” said Minnie. Indeed, the jeep was rattling like crazy.
“I wish I could drive,” I said.
“I’ll teach you to drive when the war is over.”
“Hope I won’t be too old to learn by then.”
“Come on, don’t be such a pessimist.”
“Okay, I might take you up on that.”
We dropped into the headquarters of the Safety Zone Committee and found John Rabe, Searle Bates, and Eduard Sperling there. They looked glum and told us that the Chinese army had been withdrawing. In fact, just three hours earlier, Sperling, a German insurance broker, had returned from the Japanese lines, where he had offered to negotiate a cease-fire on behalf of the Chinese army. But General Asaka, Emperor Hirohito’s uncle, had rejected the proposal, saying he meant to teach China a bloody lesson. He intended to “soak Nanjing in a bloodbath,” so that the Chinese could all see what an incompetent leader Chiang Kai-shek was.
More appalling was the story Rabe told us. The previous day, General Tang had received Generalissimo Chiang’s order that he organize a retreat immediately. Tang’s troops were already in the thick of battle, so it was impossible to withdraw them. If he carried out the order, it would amount to abandoning his army. He contacted the generalissimo’s headquarters to double-check with Chiang, who was adamant and reiterated the message, dictating that he must execute the retreat to preserve his army and cross the river without delay. Tang couldn’t even pass the order on to some of his troops. Besides having lost their communications equipment, some of the divisions had come from remote regions, such as Guangdong, Sichuan, and Guizhou, and spoke different dialects, so they couldn’t communicate with one another or relay instructions. Worse still, earlier that morning the Japanese fleet was steaming upriver. The Chinese army’s route of retreat would be completely cut off soon, since we had no warships to repulse the enemy’s navy. Desperate, General Tang approached the Safety Zone Committee and pleaded with the foreigners to intervene on China’s behalf for a three-day cease-fire. Eduard Sperling started out early in the afternoon, trudging west toward the Japanese position and raising a flag made from a white sheet and inscribed TRUCE & PEACE! in Japanese by Cola, a yellow-eyed young Russian man. Sperling carried the weight of our capital on his roundish shoulders in hopes of preventing further bloodshed.