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Missionaries arriving from the interior told of bandit gangs raiding undefended villages in a spirit of grim carnival. In the formerly law-abiding province of Shantung, for example, the town of Wangchihpao was sacked and 1,000 Chinese killed. Many children whose parents had been murdered came to the bandits, begged mercy, food. Ogreish, the murderers amused themselves by seizing the legs and arms of the smaller children and literally tearing them to pieces. Older boys and girls were stripped, then flogged, or maimed, killed or set free at the whim of their captors.
Foochow. Nationalist soldiers looted the mission quarter of Foochow, a sizable southern sea port, abducted hundreds of Chinese orphan girls cared for by the missionaries, and forced the Spanish Bishop Aguirre to flee by sea to Hongkong. British and Y, M. C. A. missions were also looted.
Hankow. Strangely enough th Nationalists who had ousted the British from their concession ai Hankow found this valuable property a white elephant. Local Chinese merchants who habitually dealt through the British banks discovered their contact and means of trading with the outside world cut off. Manufacture, commerce, shipping were at a standstill. The few Britons who remained had barricaded themselves in a steel bank vault. Soon blotchy hysterical posters appeared: "Death to the British slaves who are trying tc strangle us by stopping our commerce!"
Plainly John Chinaman had opened his mouth so wide and bitten off so huge a chunk of foreign property that he was all but strangled. Pitifully enough, some coolies who saw starvation loom repaired the flagstaff of the British Consulate, which they had torn down a few days before, and ran up the Union Jack—though unwittingly upside down. A symbol, it was Hankow.
Big Four. From the British Legation at Peking, Counsellor O. O'Malley hastened to Hankow. In London Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain could find nothing more militant to say than that of course the Chinese could seize all foreign concessions if they were so short-sighted as to do so. This attitude made Mr. O'Malley's task most difficult, though nothing could have made it easy. He entered forthwith upon negotiations looking to re-occupancy of the British concession and resumption of trade.
Against his wits were pitted those of four Cantonese Nationalists whose names loomed internationally last week from the present headquarters at Hankow: 1) T. V. Soong, 33, a graduate of the Harvard School of Business Administration, later employed by the International Banking Corp. at Manhattan, now the outstanding civil leader at Hankow, partly because he is the brother-in-law of the late founder of the Nationalist movement, famed Dr. Sun Yatsen. He and his sister, the pretty widow, serve to remind soldiers and coolies of the great revolutionary name. 2) Eugene Chen, Foreign Secretary of the Nationalist Government, who employs a white U. S. citizen, as his under secretary, and said last week: "We are not antiforeign, but anti-imperial. We are not against Germany or Russia because they are not against us; but most other foreign nations are imperialists in China, and our enemies." 3) Chiang Kaishek, the generalissimo who has conquered half China for the Nationalists. 4) Michael Markovitch Borodin, famed Soviet Russian political adviser to the Nationalists (TIME, Jan. 3).