Nanjing Requiem Read Online Free PDF Page B

end, Miss Lou, the zealous little woman, read Psalm 70 loudly. She cried out the refrain in a shrill voice: “Make haste to help me, O God.” Then we all stood up and sang the chorus from the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” I’d bet that only a few of the attendees knew the words by heart; nevertheless, we all sang with abandon, some holding large hymnals with both hands, and our voices were earnest and strong.
    THAT EVENING we received the first group of refugees. Most of them had come from the countryside, and some had trekked all the way from Wuxi, a city more than a hundred miles to the east. The Japanese had not only plundered their villages and towns but also seized young men and women, so people had abandoned their homes and fled to Nanjing, or had tried to cross the Yangtze to reach Pukou, unaware that the Japanese had just captured that area outside Nanjing to cut the retreat route of the Chinese army. The Japanese torched most houses along the way, destroyed whatever they couldn’t use, and had felled thickets and forests within a quarter mile of the railroads to prevent their supply trains from being ambushed. To defend the capital, the Chinese army was also razing civilian homes, especially in the Jurong area; it ordered people to leave their villages and then burned their houses to clear all possible obstructions to its cannons. This created more refugees, and now crowds of them swarmed at the city gates, waiting to be let in.
    A woman with salt-and-pepper hair collapsed in front of us, sitting on a boulder and weeping while relating her story. “My daughter and I came to town to sell taros,” she sobbed, “but there was such a big crowd gathering outside Guanghua Gate that I lost her. I thought she’d get through the gate anyway and we could meet inside the city wall, but after I came in, the gate was suddenly closed ’cause the Japs began shelling that area. I waited inside the wall for the whole afternoon and couldn’t go out to look for her. Our home’s already gone, and she wouldn’t know where to go. Oh, my poor child, she’s just eleven.”
    Some families came intact, but the men had to go elsewhere to find shelter for themselves. Most of them were willing to do so, grateful that their wives and children were in safe hands. A sleepy-eyed man went up to Minnie and implored her to give his family a little food because they had no money. She told him, “Don’t worry. We won’t let them starve.”
    Word had it that the camps that accepted men as well were filling rapidly. We had not expected to receive refugees so soon, and now, on the evening of December 8, more than a hundred were already here. Minnie told ruddy-faced Luhai to set up a soup kitchen that would open the next morning.

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    I T WAS EERILY QUIET the next morning, and for hours few gunshots were heard. The cannonade in the east, south, and west had ceased too. We couldn’t help but wonder if the Japanese had entered Nanjing. That seemed unlikely, since the Chinese troops were still holding their positions. As Minnie and I were discussing the influx of refugees, Old Liao, our gardener, came and handed Minnie a leaflet. He was her longtime friend. Minnie had hired him from Hefei eighteen years ago when she came to Jinling to become its acting president—in place of Mrs. Dennison, who had gone back to the States for fund-raising for a year—because she wanted to create a beautiful campus. “I found this on the west hill this morning,” Liao said in a husky voice, pointing at the sheet, and smiled as if it were just a regular day for him. “There’re lots of them in the bushes. A Japanese plane must’ve dropped them. I don’t know what it’s about but thought you might want to take a look.”
    Minnie skimmed it, then handed it to me. The leaflet bore words from General Matsui, the commander in chief of the Japanese Central China Expeditionary Forces. He demanded that the Chinese side capitulate without delay, declaring,