"On Bended Knee"

Good as goldmines are the warm oases of chill, bleak, mountainous Jehol, the buffer province between "China Proper" and "Manchuria Proper." Spouting hot springs make the oases ideal for growing opium. Opium has made vastly rich the Governor of Jehol, walrus-mustached War Lord Tang Yulin. Last week Tang's strapping big North Chinese soldiers on their small, shaggy Mongolian ponies, jogged down precipitous mountain passes to pot shot at the mighty clanking War Machine of Imperial Japan as it debouched from the railway's end.

Thirty-five troop trains had bellowed down from Mukden, Japan's Manchurian war base, to the borderlands of Jehol where railways end. Japanese, though they have never held Jehol, claimed it as part of their puppet state "Manchukuo." Last week Japanese were pained by what seemed to them the ignorance of Western editors in printing such headlines as this in Manhattan's Herald Tribune: JEHOL INVADED BY JAPANESE, CHINA LEARNS. On the contrary, Imperial Japan claimed to be "repulsing" from Jehol soldiers who by their mere presence there were clearly bandits and invaders of Manchukuo.

No fool, War Lord Tang kept his whereabouts in Jehol a secret, last week, to avoid being bombed by Japanese planes. He used a portable wireless transmitter to give orders to his generals. For not selling out to Japan he was hailed as a hero in far distant teeming Chinese cities where heroism begins again, after centuries, to be fashionable.

In Shanhaikwan, frontier city between Jehol and "China Proper" (Chinese of course consider Jehol and all Manchukuo part of China), the Japanese spoke their minds memorably. "We can assure the world we have no intention of advancing a foot beyond the Great Wall," said Japanese General Suzuki who was at that moment sitting well inside the Great Wall in Shanhaikwan at 40DEG below zero. "We have nothing to be ashamed of. The Chinese must come to us on bended knee!"

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