The Blue-Eyed Shan (12 page)

A number of Chinese officers were obviously in full dispute. They fell silent and goggled at him. “I want to go south to join the Americans,” he said quickly. “I want a truck headed south. Can you help me?”

All but one Chinese showed incomprehension or sullen resentment. The one exception, a ranking officer by the look of his shoulder boards, turned a round face to him and smiled a blinding smile. “Well! Company! I too swim against the tide. Can you drive a camion?”

“I can drive anything,” Greenwood said. “All these trucks are headed the wrong way. Is the war over? Have the Japanese invaded the United States?”

“The war has only begun. No one has invaded the United States. I shall explain later. For the moment you are an American intelligence officer with vital information, and you must find the Chinese Fifty-fifth Division. Is that clear?”

“Absolutely. Speed is essential.”

“I like you, laddie,” said the Chinese. “Show me identification and behave imperiously.”

Greenwood dug out his passport and glowered. He spoke forcefully. The Chinese officer translated. Other officers bestirred themselves reluctantly. In half an hour Greenwood was at the wheel of a six-ton truck—a Ford, of all things—blaring his way southward, his headlights boring through a thronged Lashio. “I haven't driven for two and a half years,” he said. “Christ, they're all coming north! It's not a retreat; I don't see soldiers; what the hell is going on?”

“My English is rusty,” said his companion. “By the way, I am Major General Yang Yu-lin.”

“A major general! My name's Greenwood. I'm an anthropologist.”

“And why have they sent an anthropologist here?”

“They haven't,” Greenwood said, wondering if he should add “sir.” “I was in the Shan States for two years, more, two and a half. I just heard about the war a few days ago and I figured I better come out and be useful.”

“Ah. An idealist. I feel much the same. It is not easy to be useful.”

“Can you tell me what's happening? What's the situation?”

“The situation.” Yang pondered. “You may not know that in nineteen forty the Germans swept through France and France simply collapsed. A few brave men stood their ground and died. Otherwise it was France repeating and paying for all her ancient sins, corruption, greed, cowardice, complacency, class. To a Chinese that sounds familiar. It was the end of the world, and during the retreat, somewhere along a hot dusty road crammed with refugees, crippled tanks, ambulances, horses and wagons, babes at the teat, fancy cars, deserters and trapped tourists, somewhere along that Via Dolorosa a journalist approached a wounded captain of French infantry, haggard and hobbling, and asked him for an appraisal of the situation. ‘The situation,' said the captain, ‘is desperate but not serious.'”

“Oh good God,” Greenwood said. “I knew there was a war in Europe. What else have the Germans got?”

“Europe. They've invaded Russia.”

“Holy Jesus,” Greenwood said. “What about here and now?”

Yang recited a brief history of the war in Asia.

“Then why are these trucks rolling north?”

“Ah, well, you see, China needs supplies. It is now Chinese habit—” The general held his peace while Greenwood maneuvered past a file of dazzling headlights, skidding off the shoulder at one point but recovering quickly. “—Chinese habit to consider all battles lost but the war won. If you find this confusing, it is because you are limited intellectually, and do not possess a subtle Oriental mind.”

The general was smiling again, teeth gleaming in the glare of oncoming headlights.

“We need supplies, you see.” The general's tone was calm, amused, only faintly ironic. “We Chinese, that is. We need them in order to lose more battles but win the war. These trucks are of value in themselves; they also carry arms, fuel, spare parts, tires, personal effects, sealed chests of Burmese jade and silver, antiquities, and, I imagine, spools of electric wire, radio sets, boots, canteens and misdirected payrolls.”

Greenwood groaned.

“Indeed. We have a general, you see, called Yü Fei-p'eng, who is in charge of transport. His mission is not to send a maximum of matériel to the front in a maximum of working trucks. That would be very Occidental and unsubtle. His mission is to withdraw as much matériel as possible from a lost battle so that we can win the war.”

“Then Burma's lost?”

“No, but I fear it will be shortly. Then, you see, General Yü's wisdom will be validated; having salvaged great quantities of this and that, including some personal fortunes, surely including his own, he will be awarded a medal and promoted.”

“And why are you the exception?” Greenwood asked. “And why do you talk with a burr?”

“I was tutored once by a Scots lady,” said General Yang. “I have been seconded to the Fifty-fifth Division and am merely obeying orders.”

“Nobody else is obeying orders.”

“On the contrary, everybody is. You forget: all battles are lost if they require combat. Patriotism demands that we withdraw in good order.”

“Well, we'll find your Fifty-fifth,” Greenwood said. “I wish I knew more about war.”

“Never say that, laddie,” General Yang admonished him. “Your wish may come true.”

They struggled south for two long days against a swelling stream of northbound traffic, more and more of it on foot, more and more of it swathed in bloody rags. They discussed politics, the First World War, America, China, village life, the lost bones of Peking Man, unearthed outside that great city in the 1920s, and where were they now? “Ah yes, Sinanthropus pekinensis,” said the general. “A cousin at several removes. A scapegrace. The family has not heard from him for ages.” They discussed languages; Greenwood spoke English and Shan and read technical German; Yang's mother tongue was Mandarin, his French perfect if accented, his English burred and enthusiastic, his German military, his Japanese rudimentary. They enjoyed each other's company. Each was impressed, and saw in the other an exotic of distinction.

Twice they filled their tank from jerricans. Traffic thinned. They found a wounded lieutenant who reported in full. The 55th had vanished. Burma was surely lost.

“Drive me to Mandalay,” said General Yang to Greenwood, with a loose wave at the wall of shadowed forest. “Turn right somewhere.” Again that luminous, golden smile irradiated the Burmese twilight.

The lieutenant declined a lift, and proceeded northward.

In Maymyo the general and the anthropologist parted, firm friends, vowing reunion; they had, in the old phrase, made tea together and made water together. Yang attached himself to a Chinese unit retreating westward, and Greenwood haunted the small airport. He announced that he had just spent two years in the Shan States and had intelligence to deliver. By a combination of persistence, gall and tattoos he finagled himself aboard an RAF light bomber that barely lurched into the air from the short strip, and was flown, at the end of April and not a moment too soon, to Imphal in India.

For some days no one had time for him. The withdrawal had become a rout, and Imphal was crowded. He cabled his parents, after a battle with olive-drab bureaucrats; he wrote to them, and to his university. In mid-May he heard that the Japanese had swept north through Burma, entered southwest China along the Burma Road and reached the gorge of the Salween. Loi-mae! Lola!

A week later he stood at last before a sunburnt American colonel and asked to join the army.

The colonel said, “Let's see your draft card.”

Greenwood said, “My what?”

The colonel said, “Your draft card.”

Greenwood said, “What's that?”

The colonel said, “Boy, where you been the last two years?”

Greenwood told him.

The colonel was no fool. He enjoyed war, did his job well, and knew exactly where to put Greenwood, who raised his right hand the next day and swore various preposterous oaths. This recruit was then questioned intensively about the Shan States; was asked to converse with a Shan porter, who confirmed that he spoke the language well, that his tattoos were genuine, and that he seemed to know the territory; was set to work with an American sergeant who could field-strip any American weapon while you poured him a cuppa joe and reassemble it before the coffee was cool enough to drink; was interviewed by the aftermentioned General Stilwell, now exhausted, whose resemblance to a jungle cockatoo almost made him laugh; and was, to his enduring astonishment, commissioned a lieutenant of infantry within thirty days.

“Lieutenants have privileges,” the colonel said, “and your first privilege is, you are going to learn to use a parachute.”

“Now wait a minute,” Greenwood said.

“Wait a minute
sir
,” the colonel said.

In August of 1942 Greenwood was dropped into a poppy field half a day's ride from Loi Panglon. With him tumbled a radio so heavy as to be useless (it survived the fall but required its own donkey) and several crates of arms, ammunition and rations.

He was met mysteriously by a band of laughing Kachin, who thought these methods of warfare a grand joke. Greenwood thought it a grand joke that, speaking South Shan fluently and sporting Shan tattoos, he should have been plumped down among Kachin, where Jinghpaw was the lingo and the Wild Wa were thick as fleas. But he was then a veteran of three months in the army and understood that there was a right way, a wrong way and an army way.

He enjoyed learning Jinghpaw. He enjoyed trotting about on a pony. He enjoyed shooting at Japanese. He enjoyed laying compass courses, sleeping in the open, sharing Kachin women and decorating his turban with finely worked bits of silver to commemorate successful skirmishes. He enjoyed glassing the hillsides and watching the Wild Wa watch him, little dark people who looked murderous, imps from hell, even at half a mile.

Most of all, he enjoyed working his way east and south, toward Pawlu; and trotting down the road by East Poppy Field, turban off and blond hair, shaggy, for a passport, to take the track along North Slope and make his way, watched, challenged, greeted with uproar, back to Loi-mae. He was in exuberant health and spirits. They coupled four times that night, a catalogue, a primer of pornography, and Greenwood made Pawlu his headquarters. Japanese were few in these hills but he roamed miles to fight his war, joining his Kachin warriors near Mong Paw or Mong Si or Mong Hawn, swooping about the border area like some flying battalion out of a boys' book, destroying whole Japanese patrols and the small fortified camps they used as field headquarters, firing at Japanese aircraft in sheer optimism, returning always, after days or weeks or months, to make certain of Pawlu's peace.

In 1943 he branched out: in addition to the occasional pilot off course, shot down, victim of mechanical failure, he had various British and American invasions and campaigns to keep track of, bits of fact and rumor racing through the jungle or across the plain. Greenwood's radio was long dead. He sent dispatches as best he could, suffered mild guilt as he fought his private war, fun, fun, he blew up a bridge, he raced north through Kachin territory to divert the Japanese from an operation called Galahad, he fought through the monsoon in the summer of 1944 because to the Americans war was not a seasonal occupation. Greenwood understood. Had he been told that the war was to last forever, his eye might have sparkled.

Late that year three separate but identical urgent messages rustled through the hills, one from his counterpart near Bhamo: A DC-3, crossing the Hump, had been posted missing with pilot, co-pilot and one passenger, a Chinese lieutenant general. Intensive search was obviously in order, not merely to rescue these fighting men but to add one more heroic verse to the guerrillas' unsung saga.

Greenwood sent men to all eight winds, and six days later, with a fired-up squad of mountain men who fought to the love of fighting, crossed the Salween north of Kunlong and penetrated a sparsely settled range of hills, along fifty miles of which not one village was large enough to be a dot on the Burmese map. There was a narrow river to cross. Greenwood was assured that a wooden bridge existed. Topping a ridge, he saw it, bathed in a clear autumnal noontime glow.

He also saw, seated, sprawled back against the railing at the east end, smoking a cigarette and
reading
, an oddly familiar, round-headed, uniformed figure. Even before he put a name to the man, he heard echoes of happy hilarity, saw the grin, recalled the old truck and the jouncing ride through Burma. He led his cutthroats downhill at reckless speed, valuted off his pony like a circus clown, and embraced the startled general with vigor. Recognition dawned; Yang smiled immoderately; the whole squad grinned in appreciation. “By God, laddie, I made it!” Yang cried.

Greenwood asked, “The pilots?”

Yang shook his head. “We all jumped. Into a gale. I never saw them again.”

“They can't be far.” Greenwood gave orders.

Yang told his story.

“You'll come back with me,” Greenwood said. “We'll run you home by way of Yunnan.”

“Ramghar,” Yang said later. “Two years training with the Americans. We finally put together a Chinese army. Came down with the Five-three-oh-seventh and threw the monkeys out of Myitkyina. We'll blast our way into China yet, you watch. And you? Do you still pretend to be an anthropologist?”

“That was some time ago,” Greenwood agreed. “My daughter is four years old.”

“My son is dead,” Yang said sadly, and they rode in silence.

Pawlu goggled at this apparition decked with insignia, and was properly impressed when his origins, rank and mode of transport were explained. Yang in turn was impressed when the Wild Wa were explained: they prowled the roads and trails at this season, and there might be skirmishes. “Then I can be a lieutenant again,” Yang said wistfully, “if the knees allow, and the back pains.” He offered the village a banquet in gratitude, solemnly conferring a gold piece on the Sawbwa. The Sawbwa was not so easily won; some primeval memory warned him off. The villagers saw this, and turned cool.