The Great Road | Agnes Smedley

Chapter 1

“His mother, he said, “was so humble that she had no name of her own.” As a girl she had had a name, but after marriage she was known only by her position in the family: as “Mother” to her children, as “Second Daughter-in-law” to her husband’s parents, and as “You” or “Mother of our First-born” to her husband. She was always pregnant, always cooking, washing, sewing, cleaning, or carrying water, and she took her turn in the fields, working like a man. Peasant women were chosen as wives because of their ability to work.”

“After our revolution is victorious we will develop our country and our people will have enough to eat and wear, and they will ride in trains and motor cars, and have time and energy to develop themselves culturally—though we develop ourselves culturally even under the hardest circumstances.”

“Sometimes,” I would explain, “you seem to be describing my own mother. We did not work for a feudal landlord, but my mother washed clothing for rich people and worked in their kitchens during holidays. She would sometimes sneak out food for us children, give us each a bite, and tell us of the fine food in the home of her employer. Her hands, too, were almost black from work, and she wore her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck. Her hair was black and disheveled.”

“And your father?” he asked in wonderment.

“In my early childhood he was a poor farmer who plowed the fields in his bare feet, but wore leather shoes most of the time. He ran away periodically because he hated our life, and left my mother alone. He was not so disciplined as the men of your family. Then he became an unskilled day laborer, and we never had enough to eat. But we did have salt enough.”

“The poor of the world are one big family,” he said in his hoarse voice, and we sat for a long time in silence.”

Chapter 14

“After that he saw no more Chinese, and loneliness ate at his heart. India was dark and turgid, gaunt of body and with great eyes filled with torment, with palaces on the hills and squalid hovels in dank alleyways. Then came the black men of Africa, heaving and lifting in nakedness for their white masters. Egypt was a skeleton with pus-filled eyes against a background of cold and arrogant luxury.

Chu Teh’s voice was low and faraway:

“Everywhere I saw a dark world of suffering. China was not the most miserable land on earth—it was one of many. The problems of the poor and subjected are the same everywhere. After we landed in France I saw that Europe was not a paradise of modern science as I had thought: French workers were better dressed and better fed than Chinese, yet they were haunted men, and the French government was a market place where officials bargained and bought and sold.”

———

“He had come to Europe to study not only books, though books were the accumulated thought, if not always the wisdom, of ages. He had also come to study European civilization, which included the industrial and cultural institutions which had made it strong enough to conquer his own and other countries. The only way to do this was to go out and study it as best he could.”

Chapter 20

“The companies were to be ambushed, disarmed and captured without one man being killed or wounded. They were to be treated like misguided brothers. When the attack began, slogans shouted should begin with “Brothers! Welcome to the revolution!” and such things, which would confuse and “disconcert the students at first and perhaps prevent them from fighting.”

“A young commander in the revolutionary army stood up and explained that he also was a student whose entire family had taken part in the Great Revolution. When the counter-revolution began, one of his sisters and two of his brothers had been killed. Next a peasant soldier told of the tragic fate of his entire family who had struggled against the feudal landlords. As he talked the tears ran down his cheeks so that he had to cease speaking. Chu Teh looked at the captives and saw that some of them were also weeping.”

“Such meetings, which came to be known as the “Speak Bitterness Meetings,” were typical of the Chinese revolution in the more than two decades that followed before it was victorious.”

———

“Without food and shelter and carrying their wounded, the peasant rebels would enter a sleeping village at night, knock on a barred door, and say in a low voice:

“Brothers, open! We are a Peasant Self-Defense Corps. Give us shelter!”

Silence hung over the village, every hovel was listening yet not a sound came, not a ray of light glimmered. Inside the huts men and women, dressed in the rags they wore both night and day, had silently crept from their straw beds and were listening at the doors, the “women whispering to their men:

“Don’t open! Maybe it’s landlord Wu and the Min Tuan!”

Again the peasant guerrillas knocked and an urgent voice said: “Brothers! We have been fighting the Min Tuan. We have wounded.” After an endless silence one door would open and an old man would peer out through the crack and whisper with the peasants armed with spears, bird-guns and perhaps a few captured pistols and rifles. Swinging wide the door he would go out into the night and say to the listening houses:

“They speak the truth!”

As if in a dream, all the village doors swung open and men poured out, took straw from the stacks beyond and carried it indoors to make pallets on the earthen floors. Then the doors closed silently once more and the guerrillas and their hosts sat on the pallets and talked in whispers while the women lit flames beneath the cooking vat on the mud stove and brought rice from a jar for cooking.

Scenes such as this, repeated over all south China in succeeding years, caused General Chu to remark time and again that “the peasants of China are the most revolutionary people on earth” and that all they needed was good leadership, a sound program—and arms. And it was back into this small world in south Hunan Province that General Chu, in that black winter of 1927, led his troops and established the that characterized the army which he and Mao Tse-tung led for the next twenty-two years.”

Chapter 24

“When General Chu came again to resume the story of his life, he spoke of song and battle; for he was a man to whom singing was a part of life and whose own life and thinking had been molded by battle.

“Until we came,” he began, “the people seldom sang. Of course there were a few old mountain songs, sung chiefly by individual men singers; but it was the revolution that released the energies of the people and gave birth to all kinds of songs—some very simple, even primitive, such as men sing when emerging from serfdom or slavery, but some more developed. They would be laughed at by rich people who like poems or songs above love, wine and moonlight or about the beauty of a concubine’s eyebrows. They were songs in which the peasants expressed their hopes, or even the new things they had learned to lead them to freedom. It was the Red Army that taught the people mass singing. The peasants in the mountains of Fukien and Kiangsi also made up new words to old melodies and sometimes created completely new ballads.”

“Our troops and the people cooked and ate together and at night the streets resounded with drum and gong, bursting firecrackers, and singing. Paper dragons danced to the light of thousands of colored lanterns and I wrote down a new song which the partisans sang as they marched in. It began:

“You are poor, I am poor,

Of ten men, nine are poor.”

“If the nine poor men unite,

Where, then, are the tiger landlords?”

———

“Thus began what General Chu called “the greatest study movement in Chinese history,” a movement reflected in slogans painted on walls, cliffs, and even the trunks of trees: “Learn, learn, and learn again!…Study until the light fails!…Study as you plow!…Study by the reflected light of snow!”

Memories of that first hungry search of the “oppressed and injured” for knowledge filled General Chu with both pride and melancholy. In those days, he recalled, the army had to do almost everything.”

Chapter 30

Heroism is an ancient concept,” he said. “In the past, individual heroes arose above the masses, often had contempt for the masses, and sometimes tried to enslave the masses. The Red Army embodies a new concept of heroism. We create mass heroes of the revolution who have no self-interest, who reject all temptation, and are willing to die for the revolution or live and fight until our people and country are liberated.

The way before us is even more difficult than the one behind us. We must cross some of the highest mountains in the world, glacier-clad mountains wrapped in eternal snow, and often we will have to break our own paths. We must cross torrential rivers, construct our own bridges. In this vast region of the Tibetan-Chinese borderland are warlike tribes who fight all Chinese. Chinese oppressive regimes for centuries have tried to exterminate these tribesmen, and have succeeded with some. But we must try to make friends and work with these oppressed tribes as we have worked with Chinese workers and peasants.”

—-

“Until we came,” he began, “the people seldom sang. Of course there were a few old mountain songs, sung chiefly by individual men singers; but it was the revolution that released the energies of the people and gave birth to all kinds of songs—some very simple, even primitive, such as men sing when emerging from serfdom or slavery, but some more developed. They would be laughed at by rich people who like poems or songs above love, wine and moonlight or about the beauty of a concubine’s eyebrows. They were songs in which the peasants expressed their hopes, or even the new things they had learned to lead them to freedom. It was the Red Army that taught the people mass singing. The peasants in the mountains of Fukien and Kiangsi also made up new words to old melodies and sometimes created completely new ballads.”

“Now listen closely to my song:

Workers and peasants are very poor,

Eating bitterness while landlords eat meat,

Working while the landlords play,

Ah, so hard!

First we must unite and raise the red banner.

Second, sew a badge upon our sleeve,

Third, destroy reactionaries in the village,

Fourth, capture rifles from the landlords.

Arm ourselves!

We the masses must be clear!

Destroy the militarist Lu Han-min But not the captive soldiers,

Poor men like ourselves,

Ah, so poor!

Enter Shanghang, disturb no merchants

And always protect the poor.

Capture the landlords and tiger gentry,

No compromise with them!

Bandits, all!

Never forget the hundred-headed landlords:

Militarist; moneylender; magistrate;

Tax collector; police chief; Min Tuan leader;

Chamber of Commerce and Kuomintang masters,

Dog-men, all!

Red Guards and peasants be clear!”