THE SOLDIER MOANED: "MA MA!"

Outnumbered 10-to-1 in the air, 3-to-1 on the ground, beset by natives who feared the Japs more than they liked the British, the Allies all but conceded the loss of Burma last week. As the retreating British prepared to demolish the oilfields and refineries in their rear, TIME'S Correspondent Jack Belden visited the front where Chinese troops defended Burma under U.S. command. His dispatch follows:

Japanese flying ships are playing over the Mandalay Road in a fashion Kipling never imagined. Jap pilots fix towns under their sights like bugs beneath a microscope, stab them with hundreds of incendiary plummets, consume wide wooded areas and wipe out scores of villages. Flames nightly lick the demi-jungle under a full yellow moon, so that a ghastly orange ring encircles Burmese arsonists, looters, desolate lines of Indians' oxcarts beginning to go northward on their long hegira to India, and Chinese trucks, cyclists, American scout cars and artillery going southward to the front.

Down this road, 200 arid miles through nearly uninhabited, semidesert country akin to southern California and New Mexico, I went in a car supplied by Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell's Sino-U.S. headquarters. An officer gravely snowed me how to use a Tommy-gun in case I met Burmese traitors.

I wended endless miles of desolate country, relieved only by hundreds of gold-leafed temples. Once I saw a yellow-skirted Poonghie--a Burmese priest-and the driver screamed: "Goddam priests, every other one of 'em is a traitor or a Japanese in disguise and nobody dares touch 'em for fear of starting an insurrection." Later I saw Chinese soldiers leading a priest, two handsome Burmese with long flowing hair, bare to the waist and hands tied behind their backs, to be executed.

Halfway to the front, the car I was in suddenly had to return and I, without transportation, found myself in the midst of Chinese soldiers who were overjoyed to hear me speak their language, Said a soldier: "Good country, but the people are all gone. There is no one to help us."

The General of Supply invited me to ride to the front in a lend-lease U.S. Army scout car, loaded with soldiers and armed with riot guns, and explained that I must not travel at night unarmed: "This is not China. People are unfriendly." An orange glow tinted the sky when we ran into a truck jam and a hubbub of cursing Chinese soldiers. "Six planes incendiarized a town south of the river, and traitors burned the north of the river," an officer explained. In the woods, the tall, straight trees formed pillars in the column of fire, and stood trembling silently for a few moments, then crashed to earth. The whole town was going up in a great conflagration. The fire heated the steel of the scout car and we detoured around the lake, which reflected the fiery glow.

I found a British liaison officer, who was driving a bus, trying to pick up wounded from the fires, trying to get food to the Chinese division to which he was attached-doing many jobs at once in the coolest manner.

Skirting the center of the fire he brought five Chinese soldiers to a makeshift hospital. There, in a palm-treed courtyard on an open, unroofed stone porch, I saw a muscular white man, stripped to the waist, making swift jabs with a surgeon's knife in a struggling Chinese soldier's arm. Three Burmese 90-lb. nurses were holding down the soldier. Gas lamps strung on wires provided the only light. In the background the crackling of the fire could be heard.

Blood was streaming down the soldier's arm. The arm jerked into the air and the fingers stuck out stiff like red arrows. The soldier grew violent. The tiny Burmese girls were unable to hold him down. The surgeon held with one hand and cut with the other. The soldier moaned in Chinese: "Ma ma." It was pitiful to hear the Chinese calling his mother in the same sounds we use. The doctor, his body gleaming with sweat in the tropic night heat, finished the operation, picked up the patient, carried him off in his arms, laid him on the floor in an inside room, picked up another Chinese soldier and resumed operating. The nurses rushed out to the courtyard and washed towels in a pool beneath the palm trees.

I gasped: "Who are you?" He answered: "My name is Seagrave," and turned back to operating.

He was Burma-born Gordon Seagrave of the American Baptist Mission (TIME, April 13). Seagrave called to the British liaison officer: "Try to get us some food. I have not a bite in the house. Some of these soldiers have not eaten for three days." As I went out the British Friends' ambulance units were bringing in more Chinese wounded in American jeeps; all of them would be handled by Seagrave, who was the only surgeon. The house was full of wounded. When he buried two dead, under the moon, he said: "Now that the shooting has started, we have got to get down to work. Nobody's doing enough."

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