Around besieged Hengyang the Jap lay fat and well-fed. Toward him plodded the patient, pauper soldiers of China. TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White went on one such expedition that tried to reach Hengyang's defenders, reported it in this dispatch:
We waited in our stuffy compartmenta middle-aged U.S. captain, a clean-cut colonel, Graham Barrow of Reuters and Iand were thoroughly miserable. Peddlers were hawking cucumbers, wheat cakes and tea to the Chinese soldiers jammed on flatcars and boxcars. Up front the tired locomotive leaked steam at the joints while soldiers loaded the train...