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The Generalissimo, too, was in for a change. She took him walking every morning and told him Bible stories, until he became a Christian.
Dirty Politics. In December 1936, Madame went to Shanghai for a rest; she was ill. The Generalissimo flew up to Sian in the northwestern province of Shensi to put down the Red foolishness once & for all, and to discipline some insubordinate Central Government troops who preferred fighting Japanese to fighting Communists. He was in for a surprise.
On the morning of Dec. 12 he awoke at his usual hour, 5. At 5:30 he heard shots. His bodyguard ran in to tell him there seemed to be some sort of mutiny, that he had better take to the mountain behind the house. Dressed only in his nightshirt and without his false teeth, he tried to leave by a side door. It was locked. He and two of his men had to climb a ten-foot wall. On top of it the Generalissimo slipped and fell into the moat outside, a drop of 30 feet. For three minutes he could not move. Then a number of bodyguards helped him up the mountain. The Generalissimo fell into a cave that was hidden by thorny shrubs, and lay there, exhausted. Later soldiers found him. "Let us fire a shot," said one. "Don't do that," said another.
Said Chiang: "I am the Generalissimo.
Don't be disrespectful. If you regard me as your prisoner, kill me, but don't subject me to indignities." Chiang was taken to a house under guard. There he furiously reprimanded his captor, Chang Hsueh-liang, the "Young Marshal."
Wild rumors reached the outside world.
Madame Chiang and the other Soongs gathered in Nanking. They sent William Henry Donald, their Australian confidant, to Sian to see what he could do.
The Generalissimo had determined to starve himself to death. "The martyrs of the former ages always defied death," he wrote in his diary. "I prefer to follow in their footsteps instead of disgracing myself."
In Nanking, Madame found herself surrounded by men apparently glad to have Chiang out of the way. When she tried to argue that the future of China was bound up with his, they taunted her: "A woman pleading for the life of her husband."
The Generalissimo wrote her a letter which never reached her: "I will never allow myself to do anything to make my wife ashamed of me, or become unworthy of being a follower of Dr. Sun Yatsen. . . . You must never come to Shensi."
At great personal risk, she went to Shensi. At Sian she gave a revolver to Donald and made him promise to shoot her if she was seized by the rebels. The kidnappers let her see the Generalissimo. As soon as she entered the room where he lay, shockingly emaciated, he showed her a verse in the Bible he had found that very morning: "Jehovah will now do a new thing, and that is, He will make a woman protect a man." She read psalms to him until he slept.
Conferences followed. The outside world may never know exactly what was said at Sian in the next days, but apparently the Chiangs convinced the Young Marshal and the other rebels of his intention to fight Japan in proper time—when China was properly unified. He was freed.