Up Against the Wall

By Charles Elliott

THE LONG MARCH: 1935 by DICK WILSON

331 pages. Viking. $8.95.

No understanding of Mao Tse-tung's present state--psychological or otherwise--is possible without some knowledge of the Ch'ang Cheng, the Long March upcountry by which the Chinese Communist forces escaped annihilation nearly 40 years ago.

In the autumn of 1934, the Kiangsi soviet founded by Mao and his comrade-in-arms Chu Teh in the mountains of south-central China was about to be overrun by close to a million

Nationalist troops commanded by Chiang Kai-shek and his German advisers. On October 16, 100,000 Red soldiers and camp followers slipped southwestward through the cordon. For a year, harried continuously by Chiang's armies, hunger, disease and local warlords, they walked west and north, 6,000 miles in all, to reach the barren cave-pocked lands near the Great Wall northwest of Yenan. Failure at any one of a dozen points would have meant extinction of Communist hopes, possibly forever; but success meant more than mere survival. Veterans of the Ch'ang Cheng would wage war against the Japanese and finally take over all China. Today, wreathed in age and honors like Mao, they occupy four or five hundred of the country's key military and bureaucratic positions.

Even while it was going on, the Long March lay on the edge of myth. No one has done much to reduce its mythic content. In her own book called The Long March, Simone de Beauvoir made it an elaborate Gallic metaphor for revolution, while Andre Malraux (who got Mao to tell him about it in 1965) used it, in his non-biography An-timemoires, mostly as an excuse for some very elegant prose. Dick Wilson, an editor of the Singapore Straits Times, has modestly tried to assemble a straightforward account based on Chinese sources, scrupulously avoiding conjecture. The result is fascinating despite certain obvious problems. Original documents relating to the march are scarce and those that survive may well have been doctored.

Even so, Wilson's story is filled with heroism, excitement and sharp detail that even the dreariest agitprop boiler plate cannot obscure. On the march, reports Mao's batman, "he used to carry his briefcase himself, and the umbrella." Mao's so-called "Eight Additional Rules" for troop conduct included "Put back the doors you use for bedboards" and "Don't bathe in the sight of women." One nagging personnel problem was the German agent known as Li Teh, who annoyed Chou by his "need for female companionship," yet was so big that "small and thin women could not put up with him." Eventually he was fobbed off with a stout girl named Hsiao--until she deserted during the march.

The bare statistics of the Ch'ang Cheng are staggering: 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges crossed, ceaseless skirmishing, 62 cities taken, breakouts from ten encirclements. Negotiating La-shan (Old Mountain), troops had to ascend foot-wide steps cut in a sheer rock face. To cross the Tatu River, suicide squads crawled along swaying chains straight into Nationalist machine-gun fire. Before their men could pass through the land of the Lolos, a savage tribe living in western Szechwan, column leaders were forced to drink blood in a friendship ceremony. On the Great Snow Mountain mud was waist-deep, and in the valleys beyond, Fan warriors rolled boulders off precipices onto the marchers. "Everywhere from the mountains," one soldier remembered, "we heard the tribal horns calling men to battle."

Since Wilson attempts nothing in the way of original research, the full story of the Long March remains to be written. He does, however, venture a shrewd discussion of its emotional and political legacies--the rigid quasi-military party discipline, the guerrilla ethic, the Chinese independence from Russia (whose pre-march advice calling for urban uprisings was all bad).

Above all, one perceives how the unchallenged superiority of Mao came about. Animated by fierce peasant common sense, flexible to the point of heresy, Churchillian in his timing and eloquence, the Chairman dominated the Long March. He also distilled its hortatory romance into poetry. In February 1935, at the retaking of the Loushan Pass, he wrote:

Do not say

that the pass is defended with

iron.

This very day

at one step

we shall cross over it.

We shall cross over it.

The hills are blue like the sea, And the dying sun is like blood.

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