New Poet

After the carnage of battle or in the ruins of a captured city, long-faced, scholarly Communist General Chen Yi liked to compose poetry.

Once, 14 years ago, Chen wrote a poem which he thought would be his last. It was at night, deep in the Fukien mountains. Chen had been wounded; his troops were starving; he was surrounded by Nationalists. He saw no way out but suicide. Wrote the despairing general:

Now I am going to hell to assemble my former troops,

One hundred thousand strong . . .

All of you who die after me must struggle on;

Let the communiques of your victories

Come to me as joss paper.

But Chen's officers begged him to lead a last attack. In a midnight sortie, Chen and his handful of troops cut their way to safety through the Nationalist lines. Later, during the war with Japan, Chen built the survivors into the Reds' new Fourth Army. He opened a corridor into Shantung province, where Japs were mauling the Nationalist defenders. Then Chen moved in and attacked--not the Japs--but the disorganized Nationalists. He wrote another poem, an ode to victory:

I see my comrades riding together on horseback . . .

Fluttering under the sky are the red flags of October . . .

Last year the government tried to pry Chen out of Shantung. It launched a big and costly offensive that plunged across Shantung to the seaport of Chefoo. Strafing Nationalist planes shot up his staff car, wounded Chen. His men were again driven into mountain hideouts.

But by this week Chen had again proved his catlike ability to survive disasters. In a series of swift, well-timed drives, slashing behind the Nationalist lines, he had won back nearly all of Shantung. General Wang Yao-wu, the Nationalist provisional governor, was bottled up in his capital at Tsinan. Chen's surging armies threatened to burst out of the province and imperil the entire shaky Nationalist defense system in Central China.

There was even a verse by Chen Yi to cover the situation:

When old friends meet you and inquire about me,

Tell them to look closely at the desolation in the enemy's rear.

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