FOOTNOTES:
[3] See [Appendix II].
X
DUST AND GOSSIP
I don't suppose a country can go to war, without first having a war spirit. If the enemy doesn't rouse this spirit, doesn't provoke it, then some one else must. The ideal war, I suppose, is the one in which the enemy furnishes the incentive. Poor old China has now got to go to war, but it is mighty uphill work to create the war feeling. Since Germany has not provoked it, it must be manufactured somehow, and the task is now devolving upon those foreign influences which will benefit if China goes to war. They are getting to work rapidly and adroitly, but the situation requires some diplomacy. It is so difficult to incite feeling against one foreign nation without inciting it against them all. The poor Chinese can't distinguish. They can't understand why they should be especially irate against Germany at the moment, when rankling uppermost in their minds is the recent French grab of Lao Hsi Kai, and the still more recent deal of the Shanghai Opium Combine. It is so difficult to fan the flame yet not cause too great a conflagration. It requires nice discrimination, and these poor old heathen minds have a quaint logic of their own. The game is amusing, interesting, from the standpoint of the detached onlooker.
Roughly speaking, the people of a nation may be grouped into two classes, the inciters and the fighters. They are not the same people, as a rule. The inciters usually work in the rear, as noncombatants or molders of public opinion. In China—China being what it is, in the circumstances, and all—the noncombatants who have assumed this task of arousing the war spirit are foreigners. A delicate task, this arousing resentment against one set of foreigners without arousing it against all. It means diplomacy of the first water. Thus, the foreign press is very insistent that the Huns be got rid of. One English paper naïvely remarks: "We do not like to see Germans free to wander about our streets at will." Which is well enough in its way, although it must be galling to the Chinese to have outsiders refer to the streets of China as "ours." Americans would resent such a remark made by a foreigner concerning the streets of New York.
If only the European nations had been as decent to China as America has been! Then, in this crisis, China would have turned to them, been guided by them, with the same trust that she places in America. As it is, she distrusts all Europe to the core.
And over all this whirling dust of rumor and gossip, hatred and ill feeling, there has been raging for the past three days a physical dust-storm of tremendous intensity. The yellow, overhead kind, sifting downward in clouds of powder, and covering everything, inside and out. The China-boys about the hotel tell us with superstitious awe that when a dust-storm lasts more than three days it is "bad joss." Such a storm, of a week's duration, preceded the outbreak of the Chinese-Japanese War. Every one feels uneasy, the whole atmosphere is full of depression, tension, and suspense. One can't think or talk of anything but this impending disaster.
This afternoon we went out for a while to forget it, if we could. We went to the Lung Fu-Ssu, a sort of rag-fair held every ten days in the grounds of an old temple in the East City. It's a wonderful fair, usually, with booths and stalls stretching in every direction, and spreading all over the ground, underfoot as well. Everything is sold at this bazaar, everything made in China or ever made in China, to-day or in the remote past,—porcelain, bronzes, jade, lacquer, silks, clothing, toys, fruits, food, curios, dogs and cats. Three times a month everything of every description finds its way to the Lung Fu-Ssu, and three times a month all foreign Peking, to say nothing of native Peking, finds its way to the temple grounds to look for bargains. To-day, however, it wasn't much fun: neither the native city nor the legation quarter were out in force, for the dust was too thick, the air too cold.