(8 of 20)
What had happened slowly became clear. The war was the first cause. If the Japanese had not made war, then the Chinese would not have cut the dikes of the Yellow River to stop them by switching the river's course. Then, perhaps, the ecology of North China would not have changed. Or, perhaps, food might have been packed in from food-surplus areas. But in addition to the war had been the drought. That was nature's guilt. At this point, men had become guilty—either for what they did or failed to do.
The only verdict was that the Chinese "government had let these people die, or ignorantly starved them to death. The government was fighting a war against Japan; it was relentless in collecting taxes for the war. But since it did not trust its own paper money, its armies in the field were instructed to collect taxes in grain and kind for their own support. ("If the people die," said an officer to me, "the land will still be Chinese. But if the soldiers starve, the Japanese will take the land.") The army had emptied the countryside of food; shipped in no gram from grain-surplus areas; ignored the need of the people to eat. The army's tax, I found, was usually equivalent to the full crop, but in some cases it was higher—and peasants were sometimes forced to sell animals, tools, furniture, for cash to make up the difference. Moreover, the peasants were required to feed the army's animals when they marched; and one civilian official said of his peasants, "It's very hard to make them give grain to army horses when I know they're eating straw themselves." In some army units, storehouses bulged with surplus grain—which officers sold for their own profit, and which missionaries and good officials bought from the black market to feed the starving.
I concentrated my last week in the famine area on estimating figures. My best estimate was five million dead or dying —which may have been 20% off the mark, one way or the other. But figures that large become statistics, thus forgettable. My sharpest memory is a glimpse, at evening as we were riding, of two people lying in a field sobbing. They were a man and his woman, and they were holding each other in the field where they lay, intertwined to give warmth to each other. I knew they would die and I could not stop.
So impatient had I been to get the story out from the famine area that I had filed it raw from Honan, from the first telegraph station en route home—Loyang. By regulation, it should have been sent back via Chungking to be censored and almost certainly stopped. This telegram, however, was flashed from Loyang to New York via the commercial radio system in Chengtu, direct and uncensored. Thus, when the story broke, it broke in TIME magazine—the magazine most committed to the Chinese cause in all America. Madame Chiang K'ai-shek was then in the U.S., and the story infuriated her; she asked my publisher, Harry Luce, to fire me; but he refused.
In Chungking I was denounced by some officials for avoiding censorship,