"Geographical Reasons"

In a long awaited proclamation the Nanking Nationalist Government clarioned last week: "The nation's hopes accompany President Chiang Kai-Shek as he goes northward to do battle!"

Chiang has put off his going from day to day for over a month. So chaotic is the state of civil war throughout China--with disaffected "generals" constantly forming new combinations for and against the government--that the president has often not known from whence to expect attack. At one tragi-comic moment he hustled 30,000 troops aboard transports and sent them sailing around the nether edge of China to Canton, only to order them, all home again when the trouble there proved a false alarm. Last week, however, the presidential gunboat sailed with definite purpose up the broad Yangtze to the great inland city of Hankow.

Arrived off the Hankow bund, spruce Marshal Chiang prudently debarked through a double file of his famed Wampoa cadets, the best antidote in China to assassination. Far into the night he studied maps, despatches, tried to gauge the strategy and numbers of the so-called "People's Army" which for several months has been advancing slowly southward along the railway from the region of Peiping (once Peking). Next day the president set off by armored train for the battle area, near Chengohow. Subsequent despatches reported quaintly that "the Nationalist forces are holding their own but are not advancing at present for geographical reasons." Startling was a Japanese despatch from Hankow reporting a great "People's Army" victory in Honan Province, and streams of wounded Nationalists pouring into the city of Tengchow "the majority suffering from sword and bayonet wounds, indicating that the People's Army were engaging in hand to hand combat, to conserve ammunition."