pans, but no anchor from a barbarian war vessel. “You have wasted your time,” he said, and laughed bitterly.
Just then a young Chinese woman who worked at the museum came down the stairs. She had been reading a novel—the museum had few visitors—and was chewing on a sweet called sugared cow skin. She offered me one. She smiled warmly. “I heard there was an anchor here,” she said in halting English. “But it is buried in grass, I think. Besides, they are doing some demolish work. Come with me.”
My interpreter and I followed her up a hillock, through an archway, past a flight of stone steps that must have once seen processions of clerks and second secretaries and consuls. We came out onto a newly flattened area of wrecked brickwork, where one of the seven buildings had recently been flattened. Behind it was a small slope covered with jungle. The girl pointed to it. “There, I think. Use a knife, if you have one,” she cried, and went off, back to her novel and her bag of sugared cow skins.
Thick laurel bushes had infested the hillside, and the branches slashed atmy legs as I waded through to the edge of the cliff. And then, burdened by growth but unmistakably nautical, there was the anchor—four feet tall, its shank covered in some kind of cracked poultice, its ring solid, a half-shackle with a pin hanging loosely from it. The anchor's crown was firmly cemented to the ground, and the flukes rose sharp and spadelike into the surrounding bushes. It looked half a century old, but it had been built well, and it was neither rusty nor broken. The Admiralty commissioned its iron to last.
A small notice, half-illegible from dirt and growth, was mounted in front. I rubbed away the grime and read: “This was the anchor from the foreign Imperial War Vessel
Purple Stone Hero,
captured in the fourth month of 1949 by Heroic Members of the People's Liberation Army after the ship had made a cowardly run away down the Long River to the Sea.”
I cut away some of the plants and took pictures. I had known Sir Edward Youde when he was governor of Hong Kong. I had liked him and gone to his funeral. His widow was living in Britain; I thought she might like to have a reminder. The little ship herself had long since been retired and scrapped. This, thousands of miles away in China, under a canopy of laurel leaves, was all that was left.
Or was it? Since coming back and poring over the pictures, I have begun to wonder.
The anchor in Zhenjiang is a much smaller device than that normally used to hold a warship. Its design is that of a fisherman's anchor, made specifically to hold a little craft. It is most certainly not the standard Admiralty “pattern stockless anchor,” with which pictures show the
Amethyst
's bows to have been equipped. My guess is that the Chinese have actually duped us, and them-selves—not, one might say, for the first time. What stands among the undergrowth in Zhenjiang may well be another anchor, possibly from one of the
Amethyst
's lifeboats—thus perhaps indeed a British anchor, and so a symbol of the treachery. But my guess is that the real half-ton of iron, together with all its chains—that which was so silently slipped on the night of the getaway— remains buried in the Yangtze mud. It might have been a good idea to raise it, but it was in all likelihood far too heavy and far too sunk for even the bitterest Chinese to recover it and put it on show. A lesser substitute had to do.
II
POLICE ACTION
The United States, the U.N., and Korea
JAMES CHACE AND CALEB CARR
It was four in the morning on June 25, 1950 (Korean time), when ten North Korean divisions led by tanks and supported by 1,643 guns crossed the 38th Parallel into an unsuspecting South Korea. In a rainy half-light, the Korean War began, “the first overt military assault,” the historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, “across an internationally recognized boundary since the end of World War II.” The North Koreans envisaged a
Just then a young Chinese woman who worked at the museum came down the stairs. She had been reading a novel—the museum had few visitors—and was chewing on a sweet called sugared cow skin. She offered me one. She smiled warmly. “I heard there was an anchor here,” she said in halting English. “But it is buried in grass, I think. Besides, they are doing some demolish work. Come with me.”
My interpreter and I followed her up a hillock, through an archway, past a flight of stone steps that must have once seen processions of clerks and second secretaries and consuls. We came out onto a newly flattened area of wrecked brickwork, where one of the seven buildings had recently been flattened. Behind it was a small slope covered with jungle. The girl pointed to it. “There, I think. Use a knife, if you have one,” she cried, and went off, back to her novel and her bag of sugared cow skins.
Thick laurel bushes had infested the hillside, and the branches slashed atmy legs as I waded through to the edge of the cliff. And then, burdened by growth but unmistakably nautical, there was the anchor—four feet tall, its shank covered in some kind of cracked poultice, its ring solid, a half-shackle with a pin hanging loosely from it. The anchor's crown was firmly cemented to the ground, and the flukes rose sharp and spadelike into the surrounding bushes. It looked half a century old, but it had been built well, and it was neither rusty nor broken. The Admiralty commissioned its iron to last.
A small notice, half-illegible from dirt and growth, was mounted in front. I rubbed away the grime and read: “This was the anchor from the foreign Imperial War Vessel
Purple Stone Hero,
captured in the fourth month of 1949 by Heroic Members of the People's Liberation Army after the ship had made a cowardly run away down the Long River to the Sea.”
I cut away some of the plants and took pictures. I had known Sir Edward Youde when he was governor of Hong Kong. I had liked him and gone to his funeral. His widow was living in Britain; I thought she might like to have a reminder. The little ship herself had long since been retired and scrapped. This, thousands of miles away in China, under a canopy of laurel leaves, was all that was left.
Or was it? Since coming back and poring over the pictures, I have begun to wonder.
The anchor in Zhenjiang is a much smaller device than that normally used to hold a warship. Its design is that of a fisherman's anchor, made specifically to hold a little craft. It is most certainly not the standard Admiralty “pattern stockless anchor,” with which pictures show the
Amethyst
's bows to have been equipped. My guess is that the Chinese have actually duped us, and them-selves—not, one might say, for the first time. What stands among the undergrowth in Zhenjiang may well be another anchor, possibly from one of the
Amethyst
's lifeboats—thus perhaps indeed a British anchor, and so a symbol of the treachery. But my guess is that the real half-ton of iron, together with all its chains—that which was so silently slipped on the night of the getaway— remains buried in the Yangtze mud. It might have been a good idea to raise it, but it was in all likelihood far too heavy and far too sunk for even the bitterest Chinese to recover it and put it on show. A lesser substitute had to do.
II
POLICE ACTION
The United States, the U.N., and Korea
JAMES CHACE AND CALEB CARR
It was four in the morning on June 25, 1950 (Korean time), when ten North Korean divisions led by tanks and supported by 1,643 guns crossed the 38th Parallel into an unsuspecting South Korea. In a rainy half-light, the Korean War began, “the first overt military assault,” the historian John Lewis Gaddis has pointed out, “across an internationally recognized boundary since the end of World War II.” The North Koreans envisaged a
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