NANKING

P: The strategic railway running northward from Shanghai was cut last week when the Nationalists captured Nanking, a 2,000-year-old walled city of 400,000 inhabitants which was the capital of China five centuries ago. The effect of cutting the railway at Nanking was to bottle up the defeated Shantungese troops who were trying to escape northward, leaving them at the mercy of their Nationalist conquerors.

P:In these circumstances very marked disorder and looting broke out in Nanking. It was not clear that the insurgents were predominantly of one faction or the other.

Soon they had broken into the U. S., British and Japanese consulates, robbed, glutted. All the foreign houses except those of Ginling College were looted--the college escaping because a young Nationalist soldier who had a sister studying there arrived with a detachment to guard the campus. P: The Japanese suffered most. Several women servants at their consulate were stripped and subjected to carnal violence. The Japanese consul, who was sick in bed, barely managed to escape with his life, saved nothing but a portrait of his Emperor, the sublime Son of Heaven. Later a Japanese officer, ostentatiously without arms, landed from a Japanese gunboat in the harbor, and with great coolness brought 160 Japanese citizens in safety from the city. P: At Nanking were killed: one U. S. citizen, the Harbor Master and Mr. L. S. Smith, both Britons, one French and one Italian Catholic priest and one unidentified Japanese seaman.

The U. S. consul, his wife and their children hastily set out with other refugees for an eminence known to ancient Chinese poets as The Purple Mountain and to moderns as Socony* Hill. Arrangements had already been made that U. S. and British warships in the harbor would lay a barrage to protect this valuable property--the signal for the barrage to be a rocket.

U. S. Consul John Ker Davis, eleven U. S. marines and 24 refugees barely managed to gain Socony Hill, under a running fire from Chinese snipers. Marine Plumley alone was wounded, but was able to walk, continuing to return the Chinese fire. At Socony Hall, Mrs. Davis, the other women refugees and the children crowded into a spacious bathroom, lay down on the floor. The children, unconcerned, counted the bullets pinging into Socony Hall. Consul Davis parleyed with the Chinese attackers, buying them off from hour to hour, until those at Socony Hall had no more money. Then said a Chinese: "We don't want money, anyway, wei want to kill." Some Chinese Nationalist friends of Consul Davis next arrived, carrying a Nationalist flag. This appeared to displease the attacking Chinese who seized the flag, tore it to shreds, and moved to attack Socony Hall. "My husband," said Mrs. Davis later, "shouted: 'Men, get your guns! Guard the women! Send up a rocket!"1 Soon U. S. and British shells began to whine over Socony Hall, Tribune, "we fell upon our knees and thanked God."

Subsequently a U. S. landing party took off the refugees from Socony Hall, and it was later announced that all U. S. citizens at Nanking had been accounted for.

*A name formed of the initial letters of Standard Oil Company of New York, the U. S. concern with heaviest investments in China.