(7 of 20)
I was glazed with the sight when I arrived in Loyang, the provincial, capital of Honan; and there at the station, in the dark, they were packing refugees into boxcars like lumber for the night run over the gap. And again, the stink of urine and bodies; then, through the deserted streets to the Catholic mission.
Its master was Bishop Thomas Megan, of Eldora, Iowa, a stocky, cheerful, healthy man, devoutly Catholic and American. In this theater of death, the missionaries were partners in charity, Americans joining with Europeans, Catholics with Protestants. What outside relief came in, came through the missionaries; where we located them on our travels they were beleaguered—assailed by wasted men, frail women, children, people head-knocking on the ground, groveling, kneeling, begging for food, wailing, "K'o lien, k'o lien"("Mercy, mercy"), but pleading really only for food.
With Megan, we set out on horseback through the winds of February and March, because he felt we should see the people dying. What we saw, I now no longer believe—except that my scribbled notes insist I saw what I saw. There were the bodies: the first, no more than an hour out of Loyang, lying in the snow, a day or two dead, her face shriveled about her skull; she must have been young; and the snow fell on her eyes; and she would lie unburied until the birds or the dogs cleaned her bones. The dogs were also there along the road, slipping back to their wolf kinship, and they were sleek, well-fed. We stopped to take a picture of dogs digging bodies from sand piles; some were half-eaten, and the dogs had already picked clean one visible skull. Half the villages were deserted; some simply abandoned, others already looted. One saw, as one traveled, people chipping bark from trees, with knives, scythes and meat cleavers; you could grind bark and eat it. The trees would then die and be chopped down for firewood; perhaps all China had been deforested that way.
The orphanage of central government General Tang En-po stains memory with its smell. It stank worse than anything else I have ever smelled. Even the escorting officer could not stand the odor and, holding his handkerchief to his nose, asked to be excused. Abandoned babies were inserted four to a crib. Those who could not fit were simply laid on the straw. They smelled of baby vomit and baby shit, and when they were dead, they were cleaned out.
So I saw these things, but the worst was what I heard, which was about cannibalism. I never saw any man kill another person for meat, but it seemed irrefutably true that people were eating people meat. The usual defense was that the people meat was taken from the dead. In one village a mother was discovered boiling her two-year-old to eat its meat. A father was charged with strangling his two boys to eat them; his defense was that they were already dead. In one village, the army had insisted that the