Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

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СКАЧАТЬ in among a population which was fighting to survive. The streets of the international settlement had become home for tens of thousands of refugees driven from their villages in the countryside. For the first time in his life Hogg saw human degradation at first hand. The refugees ate, slept, made love, gave birth and died on the pavements of the city. Old newspapers were fought over by the street people because the scant warmth they provided could mean the difference between life and death during the bitter nights.

      Everything in Shanghai was for sale. Hogg described street sellers touting fried eels in one hand and fountain pens in the other. In between there was nothing that was not on offer. There was no luxury that could not be bought, no whim that could not be satisfied. This was an aspect to life in the city that even a naïve young Englishman could not have missed, although he took good care not to mention it in his letters home.

      Hogg arrived in the city only weeks before W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who had been commissioned to write a travel book about China. The book would be called Journey to a War, and in researching it the two writers joined the growing foreign press corps in China, of which George Hogg was about to become a very junior member.

      Auden and Isherwood had known each other since they were both at St Edmund’s school, at Hindhead in Surrey. They had achieved literary fame – and had become lovers – during the thirties, that ‘low, dishonest decade’, as Auden was to describe it a year later. Isherwood had already published his best-known works, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Sally Bowles (1937; later included in Goodbye to Berlin). The two men collaborated on three plays, and enjoyed a sporadic sexual relationship throughout their long friendship.

      Isherwood immediately saw through the ‘impressive façade of a great city’. Shanghai was nothing more, he thought, than a collection of semi-skyscrapers dumped on an ‘unhealthy mud bank’. Behind the façade lay a sordid and shabby mob of smaller buildings: ‘Nowhere a fine avenue, spacious park, an imposing central square. Nowhere anything civic at all.’

      Despite this indictment of China’s greatest city, the literary couple found plenty to distract them: ‘The tired or lustful businessman will find everything here to gratify his desires,’ wrote Isherwood. ‘You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bathhouses and brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult to obtain but there is enough gin and whisky to float a fleet of battleships. Finally if you ever repent there are churches and chapels of all denominations.’

      Hogg was concerned less with the decadence of the city than with the desperation of its citizens. Through Aunt Muriel, one of the great networkers of her time, he established contact with the Manchester Guardian. The paper had given generous coverage to Miss Lester’s campaigns for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and to her friendship with Gandhi. At the time it had no regular correspondent in China. The editor, William Crozier, agreed to take the unknown and inexperienced Hogg on trial as a non-staff correspondent.

      This was an extraordinary coup. The Manchester Guardian had achieved national and international recognition under the editorship of C.P. Scott, who held the post for fifty-seven years from 1872. In those days every correspondent, however junior and remote from the Manchester office, was made aware of Scott’s famous dictum which appeared in an article he wrote to celebrate the centenary of the paper in 1921: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred…The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard.’

      As Hogg was to discover, the then editor took this principle very seriously. The Manchester Guardian was a high-minded paper whose leaders inclined towards moral posturing. The paper had long refused to provide coverage of horse-racing, on the grounds that it encouraged gambling. But it insisted on giving a fair hearing even to its political enemies, and Mr Crozier made that point in a letter to his new China correspondent early on in Hogg’s career with the paper.

      After writing a first piece in February 1938 for his new employers about the frenzied daily struggle for existence in Shanghai – which the paper did not print – Hogg found little to do. The city was packed not only with refugees but also with missionaries who, he observed, ‘were only too willing to do anything that had to be done’. There was starvation in the Chinese quarter and death on the streets of the international settlement, but the restaurants and cabarets remained open. There was plenty of good food and entertainment for those with money. Hogg had just received a cheque from home for the large sum of £10, and was well able to afford good restaurants. ‘Chinese meals are absolutely enormous!’ he wrote home, unconscious of any irony. ‘Dish after dish comes in and the idea is to take a little of each. This has great effect in preventing indigestion but is rather unsatisfactory otherwise – I prefer a good tuck in on a few things.’

      Thanks to the Millicans and a visit to the imposing British embassy, where he was received by the lowliest of third secretaries, Hogg began to understand the complex sequence of events that had led to the destruction of much of Shanghai. He, like his missionary hosts and other members of the foreign press corps, was also hearing reports that tens of thousands of civilians were being slaughtered on the streets of Nanjing – reports that the expatriate population in Shanghai simply did not believe at first.

      The Sino–Japanese war, which was to cost an estimated fifteen million Chinese lives and to last eight years, began on 7 July 1937. Under the terms of a treaty imposed on China in 1901, the Boxer Protocol, Japan had stationed troops in north China between the port of Tientsin and Beijing. That night Japanese forces claimed to have been fired on by Chinese troops, and stormed a local garrison in search of a missing soldier. The history of Japanese aggression towards China leaves little doubt that this was deliberate provocation. Within days the two nations were at war, formalising a conflict that had been intensifying since Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931.

      On 7 August the leader of China’s nationalist government, Chiang Kai-shek, and his top advisers announced a national war of resistance. Chiang then took a military gamble that has been debated ever since. He decided to shift the major battleground of the war from north China to Shanghai.

      The thinking was that while Japanese mechanised forces, backed by air power, would be undefeatable on the plains of north China, the restricted area of China’s major sea port would nullify their superiority in armour. Equally, Chiang reckoned that an attack on the Japanese settlement in Shanghai – one of several autonomous zones granted to foreign powers – would force Japan to switch forces from the north, relieving pressure on the Chinese army there.

      Making a stand in Shanghai had the added advantage of rallying public opinion behind a government embroiled in a civil war with communist guerrillas. Above all, Chiang Kai-shek thought that any battle for Shanghai, under the eyes of the large foreign community, would draw the attention, sympathy and possibly the intervention of the Western powers. What Chiang and his commanders had overlooked was the sheer ferocity of the Japanese response. This was to lead to huge civilian and military casualties, culminating in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the capital Nanjing.

      On 11 August Chiang moved three of his best German-trained and -armed divisions inside the limits of Greater Shanghai, although outside the areas of foreign concession. The Japanese were caught by surprise, and rushed reinforcements into their sector. The fighting between the two sides began on 13 August.

      The use of heavy weaponry and air power took a terrible toll on both armies, and on the civilian population of Shanghai. In three months of fighting the majority of the nationalist army troops, the nucleus of Chiang’s modern army, were killed or wounded. Japanese casualties were over forty thousand. Thousands of civilians were killed. Large portions of the city outside the Western concessions were destroyed. Beaten and disorganised, the Chinese forces fell back towards Nanjing, the nationalist capital.

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