THE DESPERATE URGENCY OF FLIGHT

TIME'S Correspondent Theodore H. White last week cabled from Chungking this dispatch on starvation in China:

Twenty or more thousand square miles in northern Honan Province are clutched in the grip of hunger. Men and women are eating the bark of trees and grass roots; swollen-bellied children are being sold for grain. Thousands have already died, hundreds of thousands are failing, ten millions face the slow winter-long agony of starvation. Causes: 1) the Japanese, who destroyed the rice before they retreated; 2) the gods, who sent no rain for the wheat.

Honan Province is shaped like a sloppy rectangle and is bounded on the northeast by the Japanese army, which also occupies one-third of its area. Seventy counties are left free in Honan. The 35 counties crowded close against the Japanese in the northeast pocket are being withered by the worst civilian disaster in China since the outbreak of war. Refugees crossing the Chinese lines from Shantung report worse conditions there than in Honan. The refugees drift along in a stupor of hunger and despair, having no destination, but only the desperate urgency of flight.

Missionary E. P. Ashcraft wrote from Chengchow in September: "At the mission a few days ago six children were tied to a tree by their parents so they would not follow them as they went in search of food. One mother with a baby and two older children, tired from the long search for food, sat down to rest under the tree. She sent the two older children to the village ahead to beg a little food. When they returned the mother had died of starvation and the baby was still trying to nurse at her breast. These are just a few authentic reports which come to us. Children are being sold, I mean larger ones, both boys and girls, for less than ten dollars."

Catholic Bishop Paul Yu-pin returned to Chungking last week from a tour of the stricken areas. In Loyang he saw bundles of leaves being sold to refugees for food, a dollar a bunch. Children's bellies were bloated and distended with such Foodstuffs. Sometimes starving families collect all remnants of food in their homes, eat their last meal and then commit suicide. While the Bishop was visiting one village, a farmer gathered his family round him, fed them their last full meal and then told them he had poisoned the food they had just eaten.

At nighttime missionaries rove the roads picking up waifs. They are afraid to collect children publicly for fear of increasing the abandonment of children on mission doorsteps. Other missionaries report an alarming increase of armed assaults on roads as hunger-mad peasants seek food. Farmers are starting to kill farm animals for meat.

From the 20,000-sq.-mile blighted area, refugees are streaming in hundreds of thousands along two main routes: the Lunghai railway and the trail of the old Peking-Hankow railway. The Government has placed a free train daily for refugee disposal along the Lunghai railway, which is carrying out 1,500 people every 24 hours. But the jammed cars, stuffed with clinging, clambering people, are evacuating only a portion of the stricken hordes. Four or five thousand people daily are setting out on the westward march along the line.

The flat and usually fertile plains of Honan are periodically visited by famine, but the last great famine, in 1927, was alleviated by rushing food supplies down railways from Manchuria. The railways and Manchuria are both in Japanese hands now, and all other roads within Honan have been cut in ribbons by the Chinese to prevent a Japanese advance.

Unless farmers get seed grain within the next two weeks, it will be too late to plant the winter wheat and next spring there will be no harvest either. The Chinese Government is rushing 1,000,000 piculs of seed grain from Shensi Province and the same amount from Anhwei. It is also urging farmers not to eat seed grain, but to plant it, assuring them that supplies for their relief are being rushed.

The Government has appropriated $10,000,000 Chinese for direct relief and ordered the Food Ministry to rush seed grain to the threatened areas. United China Relief appropriated $400,000 Chinese in August, $1,200,000 in September and $3,000,000 so far in October. The main relief agency is the Farmer's Bank, which has appropriated $40,000,000 for relief projects such as well-digging and irrigation.

However swift the decision in Chungking, all relief measures are bound by the slowness of the ancient Chinese countryside. The bone-piercing cold of the Honan winter is approaching. Already cholera is reported. The gaunt, hungering peasants cannot understand the administrative difficulties of their relief. For them this is only anger-heaviness which, according to folklore, is visited on earth for the misdoings of people.

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