This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Between February and June 1938 W.H. Auden and his lover Christopher Isherwood went to see the Japanese war with China. Three years later, from March to April 1941, Ernest Hemingway and his new wife Martha Gellhorn made the same trip. All four went to China to write about their experiences, but Auden and Isherwood (whom I call the Audens) were amateur travellers whilst the Hemingways were professional war correspondents.
They all emphasised the discomforts and horrors of China, though Auden and Hemingway were stoical and tough, Isherwood and Gellhorn miserable and moaning. Hemingway was 42, the others were in their thirties. Auden and Hemingway were well known and got nearly all the attention; their less famous companions actually wrote the books that followed.
Both accounts describe the simultaneous conflict between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists that continues today in the constant threat of war between China and Taiwan. Hemingway noted the same unease in Hong Kong and said that “danger had hung over Hong Kong for so long it had become absolutely commonplace. People had completely adjusted themselves to the tension.”
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Both couples went to the war zones and were threatened by Japanese artillery and bombs, but didn’t witness the constantly shifting and always elusive war. Auden, Gellhorn and Hemingway had reported the Spanish Civil War, and saw parallels with the war in China. The combination of internecine conflict and foreign intervention in China’s battle against Japan resembled the situation in Spain, where the Communists fought their Republican loyalist allies, a major cause of their defeat by Francisco Franco’s fascists.
In China, too, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists opposed Mao’s Communists as well as the Japanese enemy. After the Allies defeated Japan in 1945, the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists in 1949 and driven to Taiwan. In Journey to a War (1939) the Audens criticised “the jealousy which native generals invariably display towards their foreign colleagues — as in Franco’s army in Spain”.
After meeting Chiang Kai-shek and his formidable wife, as well as the Communist leader Chou En-lai, the Audens, like the Hemingways after them, predicted “the future of China lay with Mao and the Communists”. The Audens feared war would break out in Europe; the Hemingways feared the outbreak of war in the Pacific.
In The Rise of Modern China, Immanuel Hsu writes that Japan (like most invaders) expected a short war, which began near Peking in July 1937 when the Japanese invaded from Manchuria. By December Peking and Nanking, where 100,000 civilians were massacred, had fallen to the Japanese. Hsu then puts a positive spin on the disastrous Chinese defeats. He adds that in October 1938, after the Audens had left, “The fall of Wuhan marked the end of the first phase of the war, which lasted 16 months. During this period the Chinese traded space for time and enticed the enemy deep into the hinterland.”
When the Hemingways arrived, the next stage of the war — from the fall of Wuhan to Pearl Harbor in December 1941 — “was basically one of attrition, where the Japanese occupied most of the cities and communication lines in the eastern half of China, whilst the Chinese pursued a scorched-earth policy followed by strategic withdrawals and guerrilla warfare”.
The Audens’ itinerary began in Hong Kong and nearby Canton. They travelled by boat (where they ate junk food and were nearly Shanghaied), train, car, horse, rickshaw and foot. They first went north to Hankow (Wuhan), the wartime capital, and to Suchow, then turned west to Sian and returned to Hankow. They escaped to a nearby mountain resort called Journey’s End, run by an eccentric Englishman, an illusory bit of Switzerland in the Yangtze Valley.
On the way back to the east coast at Meiki they met the writer Peter Fleming (elder brother of Ian Fleming) and his wife, the actress Celia Johnson, a couple as glamorous as the Hemingways. They reached Wenchow on the East China Sea, went up the coast and finished in peaceful and luxurious Shanghai.
Isherwood wrote the travel diary that formed the core of Journey to a War from separate journals kept by both authors. His apologetic foreword expresses their personal limitations, the aims of their book and the difficulty of getting any definite information: “We spoke no Chinese, and possessed no special knowledge of Far Eastern affairs.” They could only record for the reader “some impression of what he would be likely to see, and of what kind of stories he would be likely to hear”.
All their earnest interviews were either vague, misleading or absurd; their informants either “unreliable, merely polite or deliberately pulling our leg”. Isherwood’s quasi-military and film-director’s costume, “his new riding boots and his beret and his turtleneck sweater”, in which he unsuccessfully tried to look very stern and official, were “symptoms of an amateur’s stage-fright”.
In that dangerous country the Audens assume a jolly, mock-self-abasing style, and behave as if they were two schoolboys on holiday amidst a mass of strange and ludicrous figures. The foreign devils, called W.H. “Au Dung” and Christopher “Y Hsaio Wu”, are naïve though observant muddlers. They try to amuse each other on the interminable train trips by “screaming with laughter at mysterious jokes, singing in high falsetto or mock operatic voices, swaying rhythmically backwards and forwards on their seats, reading aloud to each other”.
The most amusing scenario takes place when they prepare for a formal banquet by rehearsing ritualistic compliments lifted from comical stage-Chinese: “The Governor should have said: ‘My poor house is honoured.’ And we should have replied: ‘Our feet are quite unworthy to rest upon your honourable doorstep.’ On which, the Governor, had he known his stuff, would have cracked back: ‘If my doorstep were gold, it would hardly be fit for your distinguished shoes.’”
In his autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood, who was three years older than Auden, recalls his “despotism and sulks sometimes irritated Wystan. But more often he endured them good-naturedly and with humour”. Alluding to the war hero in their play The Ascent of F6, Isherwood writes that Auden “slept deeply, with the long, calm snores of the truly strong”.
Confidently safe and unafraid in perilous situations, Auden declared, “Nothing’s going to happen, I know it won’t, nothing like that ever happens to me.” He knew he wouldn’t “be killed because Nanny would never allow it”. Their Chinese “boy” saw danger as part of his job and stoically stated, “A servant cannot afford to be frightened.”
Their literary reputations and the propagandistic value of their book allowed the Audens to interview everyone they wanted to see. In Hankow, the wartime capital, they met the pro-Communist American journalist Agnes Smedley, “so grim and sour and passionate; so mercilessly critical of everyone”; and the gaunt, grizzled, unconvincingly optimistic General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the German military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek.
The Wellesley College-educated Madame Chiang asked, “Do poets like cake?” and Auden greedily accepted. Isherwood thought, “She could be terrible, she could be gracious, she could be businesslike, she could be ruthless; it is said that she sometimes signs death-warrants with her own hand.”
Chiang himself was less impressive than his wife: “We should hardly have recognised in this bald, mild-looking, brown-eyed man, the cloaked, poker-stiff figure of the news-reels … Chiang is an almost sinister presence; he has the fragile impassivity of a spectre.” Like his wife, he gave the predictable political line about cooperating with the Communists against the Japanese — whilst also desperately trying to defeat them.
Chiang’s adversary Chou En-lai, organiser of the 1927 Shanghai insurrection that André Malraux had portrayed in Man’s Fate, said he believed the struggle against Japan created national solidarity. Though Chiang had turned against his Chinese allies, killed them or driven them into exile, Chou felt “the longer the war continued the more complete would be China’s victory, and the closer would be the understanding between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Kuomintang. What he feared most was a compromise peace between the Kuomintang and Japan at the Communists’ expense”.
The Audens emphasised the horrors to show how terribly they’d suffered on their mission. The Chinese cleared their throats with unappetising relish and spat without the least restraint. Farmers squatted on bare haunches to manure the fields with their excrement. Women walked by “rolling along, balanced insecurely as stilt-walkers on their tiny bound feet”. A dog dug up and gnawed on a human limb. The folk medicine, “warm intestines of a freshly-killed chicken”, was revolting. In a military hospital, the stench of gangrene from rotting legs forced Isherwood to run outside to avoid vomiting. Chengchow smelled of disease; Sian smelled of murder.
Isherwood relished the disgusting details and the food provided some of the best jokes. The markets sold “the filthiest parts of the oldest and most diseased animals; stodgy excrement-puddings; vile, stagnant soups and poisonous roots … an orange which tasted of bitter aloes contained, in its centre, a large weevil”. (They chose the lesser of two weevils.)
In the shops, “Auden gazed in horror at the edible black beetles, I at the tubs of live swimming snakes. If I had to eat a snake, I said, I thought I should really go mad. Auden determined to trick me into doing so at the first possible opportunity.” There were no signs of the ancient Chinese civilisation, and Auden observed, “It gives you an idea of what Europe must have been like in the Middle Ages.”
Auden bravely declared, “A journalist has his duty, like a soldier. It is sometimes necessary for him to go into danger,” but their attempts to see the fighting were continually frustrated. Their offstage war was “untidy, inefficient, obscure and largely a matter of chance”.
Like Auden in Spain, they were near the front-line fighting for only a few days of their 15 weeks in China, saw gunfire but not battles and escaped from Meiki before the town was conquered. They hired rickshaws from Suchow to the front and were embarrassed to be pulled by scrawny human beings. But the front “was only occupied by the Japanese at night, when almost all the real fighting and raiding takes place. During the daytime the Japs retire” to the nearby village.
The Audens survived strafing from a plane when exposed in a field. But the unreality of the war was driven home when a Chinese officer explained that they had some big guns but didn’t shell the enemy: “You see, we don’t want the Japanese to know that we’ve got them.”
The violence and atrocities were clearer than this pointless deception. The British-owned riverboats near Canton were never bombed by the Japanese, though they “playfully aimed their machine-guns at our heads”. The Audens put on dark glasses to watch a spectacular air raid, when 500 civilians were killed, from the Consulate lawn in Hankow.
Told by their officers that the Chinese behead their prisoners, the Japanese, who want to be buried whole, “prefer to commit suicide before the enemy arrives”. But when the Japanese take a town, the reprisals are terrible: “Whole villages have been burnt. There have been mass-executions of men, women and children.” Survivors are ruthlessly raped and then killed.
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The Audens encounter familiar reality when they meet the flamboyant Peter Fleming and his attractive wife. He sports (like Isherwood) a gent’s tropical exploration kit and seems a living parody of the Indian pukka sahib. Though the Audens had been to public schools, they are jealous of Fleming’s Eton background and professional expertise. He is also a tireless traveller and indefatigable journalist who understands the labyrinth of oriental politics and can penetrate the obscure and optimistic answers to vital questions: When would the Chinese attack? Who would win the war? That night the Audens fall lazily asleep whilst Fleming types out his latest dispatch.
In Shanghai, on the East China Sea northeast of Canton, the war seemed distant and life was normal, though the Long Bar at the Club seemed too short. The Audens discreetly omit what Isherwood hedonistically describes in Christopher and His Kind. In the bathhouse “you were erotically soaped and massaged by young men. You could pick your attendants, and many of them were beautiful”.
The Audens were looking for exciting experiences that would make good copy. Journey to a War belongs with fashionable travel books about incomprehensible people in perilous countries, mocking the authors’ own discomforts to amuse readers who sit at home in comfy chairs. The Hemingways, writing for important publications, were more serious and analytical reporters.
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When Martha Gellhorn accepted an assignment from Collier’s magazine, Hemingway arranged to write for PM, a tabloid-size highbrow journal of current affairs supported by Marshall Field, the department store millionaire, and edited by Ralph Ingersoll, the publisher of Fortune magazine.
Hemingway’s mission was to study the strategic, economic and political situation, see how Chiang’s war against Japan was progressing, and (shortly before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor) decide how the war affected American commercial and military interests in Asia. In 1941 the war in China was four years old, and the Japanese occupied a quarter of the country.
Hemingway explained, “the only reason I went along was to look after Martha on a son-of-a-bitching dangerous assignment in a country shit-filled” with human excrement. In a letter from Hong Kong, Martha wrote that Hemingway was the more perceptive observer: “Ernest goes about really learning something about the country, and I go about dazed and open-mouthed, just seeing things and not having an idea what anything means or might prove.”
She also paid tribute to Hemingway’s congenial hedonism in her 1978 Travels with Myself and Another (i.e. Hemingway), based on her articles in Collier’s and the main source of information about their trip:
He had learned to speak coolie English, a language related to West African pidgin and Caribbean English, and was seen laughing with waiters and rickshaw coolies and street vendors, all parties evidently enjoying each other. He loved Chinese food and would return from feasts with his Chinese crook-type friends swearing they’d been served by geisha girls, and describe the menu until I begged him to stop, due to queasiness. He was ready to try anything, including snake wine, the snakes presumably coiled and pickled in the bottom of the jug … He felt that the Hong Kong Chinese, given to gambling, rice wine and firecrackers, had great savoir vivre.
The Hemingways’ journey was quite different from the Audens’, though both began in Hong Kong and travelled by land and water with car, boat and horse. Instead of going northeast, they went northwest to Namyung, Shaokwan, Wongshek, the beautiful Kweilin, Chungking and Chengtu, then continued south to Kunming and Rangoon in Burma.
At the Canton front, headquarters of the Twelfth Army Sector, Japanese machine-guns were only two miles away, but an undeclared truce was in effect. After visiting a cadet training camp, Hemingway outdrank 14 Chinese officers who gradually slid under the table. Martha found the squalor unbearable: “The pond water was rotting garbage and mud rather than water, pigs rooted in the muck, flies swarmed, and over all villages hung the smell of China: night soil, the deadly national manure.”
She told a friend: “China was a hell of a thing, absolutely exhausting and appalling and discouraging and dreary because there are 400 million people who live worse than animals and in a state of filth and disease to break your heart.”
After driving all day to Shaokwan on roads that were “rivers of mud, rutted, gouged, strewn with boulders”, they spent three days visiting the monastery and dining with the provincial governor and the general of the Seventh War Zone. They took three hours on an old truck to cover 35 miles to the North River; spent 24 hours on an antique Chris-Craft motorboat that passed through a cholera epidemic; and completed the final stage to Wonshek, where there were no roads at all, on horseback.
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They endured 43 hours on the boat back to Shaokwan and 25 hours on a 400-mile train trip to a filthy hotel in Kweilin, with its rivers, caves and cone-shaped mountains, then flew northwest to remote Chungking (700 air miles from Hong Kong). Hankow (Wuhan) had been conquered in October 1938; and the new wartime capital was Chungking, a walled city at the foot of a high mountain above an airstrip in the riverbed.
Hemingway called it a “terraced, grey, bomb-spattered, fire-gutted, grim stone island”. Martha added that it was “gray, shapeless, muddy, a collection of drab cement buildings and poverty shacks, the best feature a lively market. The Japanese bombed when they wished though not whilst we were there”.
When staying for two weeks in the run-down house of a friend, the Hemingways (like the Audens) interviewed Chiang and his wife. The Generalissimo — who was “thin, straight-backed, impeccable in a plain grey uniform and looked embalmed” — discussed the Communists, whom he feared more than the Japanese. On 15 June 1941 Hemingway wrote in PM, “Grave friction between the Communist troops and the Central Government has been present for close to two years … For ten years Chiang’s objective was to destroy the Communists.”
Martha’s biographer notes, “She had known perfectly well at the time that Chiang Kai-shek’s regime was brutal, corrupt and inefficient, and that he and his wife were more interested in making their own rule safe against insurrection than in pursuing the war against the Japanese.”
The high point of their trip to the interior was a secret meeting with the impressive Chou En-lai who was living underground and in constant danger in Chungking. Martha called him “the one really good man we’d met in China”. Chou predicted that there would be a civil war in China and that the Communists would be victorious. During their debriefing in Washington, the Hemingways, following Chou, said the Communists would take over China after defeating the Japanese.
Whilst Martha remained in the capital, Hemingway flew north to Chengtu, northwest of Chungking and the farthest point of his Chinese journey. He described the people and weather in his characteristically vivid style: “The caravans come down from Tibet and you walk past yellow and red lamas in the dust-deep streets of the old high-walled city; the dust blowing gray in clouds with the cold wind from the snowy mountains.”
He visited a Chinese military academy established by the Germans, and watched 100,000 workers build a new airfield in only 90 days. After his return to Chungking, he and Martha flew southwest to Kunming and over the Burma Road to Lashio. They continued by car to Mandalay and by train to Rangoon, where they spent a sweltering week in late April, just before the monsoon.
Hemingway was always best in adversity. Martha praised his calm, flexibility, patience and courtesy — not “his most familiar qualities”. During the “unsurpassable horror journey” she constantly complained whilst he remained silent. She had to endure the nightmare of China; he had to put up with both China’s nightmare and Martha’s laments. Martha admitted that “he saw the Chinese as people whilst I saw them as a mass of downtrodden valiant doomed humanity”.
But he loyally praised her dispatches, if not her temperament: “Her pieces are always about people. The things that happen to her people really happen, and you feel it as though it were you and you were there … She gets to the place, gets the story, writes it and comes home. That last is the best part.”
Hemingway wrote seven rather flat dispatches for PM and cautiously concluded that Japan might well go to war with America. On 11 June 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, he said America would enter the war in the Pacific if “Japan attacked the Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies or British Malaya”.
His best story concerned the farmers’ dissatisfaction with the quality of the watery night soil during a cholera epidemic. When the buyers complained, the vendors invited them to test the thickness of the product by sucking it up through straws. China remained a repulsive memory, and he was fond of comparing William Faulkner’s A Fable to “the night soil from Chungking”.
The uncomfortable, exhausting and often boring trip to China was a disappointing experience for Hemingway. He had no real interest in the country (which was Malraux’s literary territory) and went only to accompany Martha. He had a good time with his drinking cronies in Hong Kong, did his duty at tedious official functions and tried to ignore the horrors that made Martha writhe with discomfort.
He never actually saw the war — or anything else of extraordinary interest — during this relatively quiescent period in China. Neither his imagination nor his emotions were deeply stirred by this journey, and he didn’t feel he knew enough to write fiction about China.
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Speaking for all four authors, Auden concluded: “China was utterly different. Spain was a culture one knew. One could understand what was happening, what things meant. But China was impossible to know. A country which, quite apart from fighting a war, just had no respect towards human life.” Auden’s sonnets at the end of Journey to a War express his fears about the tragic wars in Asia and Europe.
He writes: “History opposes its grief to our buoyant song, / To our hope its warning.” The China he witnessed is “A land laid waste with all its young men slain, / Its women weeping, and its towns in terror.” He sums up his despair in the lines: “When Austria died, when China was forsaken, / Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken.” (The battle of Teruel in February 1938 was a major Loyalist defeat in the Spanish Civil War.) Auden’s fears were realised and he gave up all hope of a peaceful world.
