City of Defeat

While Peiping rode the crest of victory, Nanking languished in the slough of defeat. From the Nationalist capital TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin cabled:

Nanking lies quiet and hushed in the soft spring evenings. In the cool, cavernous railroad station, less than three months ago jammed with shouting soldiers and wailing refugees, a lone coolie sweeps his twig broom. Outside, street lights flicker wanly until 11 p.m. Then they go out. After midnight (curfew hour), the streets are deserted save for rifle-toting municipal gendarmes in shabby black uniforms and yellow armbands, who shamble along preceded by a youngster holding a lemon-colored paper lantern.

Despair Among the Tunghsi. Daylight does nothing to light up the funereal mood of the city. The morning rush hour crowds on Chungshan Road are too dispirited even to shove or grouse as they wait for buses or pedicabs.

At Sun Yat-sen Circle, in midtown, the dingy green loudspeaker, which used to blare out cacophonous versions of Strauss waltzes, has been silent for weeks. The shouting, arm-waving throng of money changers has dwindled to a few clusters. Only the silver dollar hawkers have kept up their professional spirits. They hang around street corners, clinking gleaming stacks of coins, their orthodox blue Chinese gowns topped by broad-brimmed brown fedoras that give them, from the neck up, that zooty air usually associated with Broadway characters in Li'l Abner. The price of their coins, like the price of everything else, has climbed dizzily.

The tunghsi, or curio salesmen, find business rough. Their bronzes, brasswork and jade figurines bring only a quarter of the price they commanded last winter. One tunghsi man reminisces mournfully: "The mandarin coats--ah! We used to sell them for $20 apiece. When we ran out of real ones we went to the undertakers and bought up their supply of secondhand burial clothes. The burial clothes were even more ornate, and the Americans were twice as happy."

Death Among the Blossoms. A grimy, black-toothed Buddhist monk, leaning over a balcony in red-walled, pagoda-roofed Chi Ming (Temple of the Crowing Cock), nods his head down the mountainside toward Lotus Lake. "The willow trees," he says, "are very beautiful this year, but no one seems to care." The willows are blossoming with delicate, pale-green traceries. Peach and cherry blossoms are out, too. Along the top of the crenelated wall that surrounds the city, daisies, pansies and violets bloom. But few notice them in this unhappy spring.

One day, while driving in Cheng Hsien Street, my car almost ran over a beggar who lay writhing and twitching in the roadway. I started to get out to help him, but my interpreter warned that in the eyes of the local police I would automatically become responsible for him, would probably have to pay for his funeral. The beggar, the interpreter explained, was dying of starvation. We drove on. On the way back we saw the beggar's body, quite still, with head and shoulders grotesquely protruding into the street while pedestrians and rickshas eddied around him.

There has been the same fatalistic reaction to the news that a Communist assault--or perhaps merely a peaceful occupation--might be imminent. Said a cobbler in the Fu Tze-miao, Nanking's chief bazaar: "The war is lost. Let them come. Shuikuan [Who cares]?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.