Nanking Page #5

Zone committee's headquarters.

The Japanese had broken into the city.

The wall had been breached,

and the damage to the southern part

of the city was tremendous.

No one will ever know

what the Chinese casualties were,

but they must have been enormous.

Soldiers streamed

through the city from the south,

many of them passing through the Zone.

In the morning,

the fresh-blood-colored flags

of the Rising Sun were fluttering everywhere,

each proclaiming, with its red symbol,

the freshly spilled blood of Nanking.

Three dangers are past:

that of looting soldiers,

bombing from airplanes,

and shelling from big guns.

But the fourth is still before us:

our fate at the hands of a victorious army.

It's not until we tour the city

that we learn the extent of the destruction.

We come across corpses

every 100 or 200 yards.

The bodies of civilians that I examined

had bullet holes in their backs.

These people had presumably been fleeing,

and were shot from behind.

From 8:
30 this morning

until 6:
00 this evening,

I stood at the front gate of Ginling College,

as the refugees poured in.

They'd disguised themselves

in every possible way.

Many had cut their hair,

most of them had blackened their faces.

Many were wearing men or boys' clothing,

or even that of old women.

Nanking has no lights, no water,

no telephone,

no telegraph, no city paper, no radio!

We are indeed separated from all of you

by an impenetrable zone.

The Japanese march through the city

in groups of 10 to 20 soldiers

and loot the shops.

They smash open windows and doors,

and take whatever they like.

We ran across a group

of 200 Chinese workers

whom Japanese soldiers have picked up

off the streets of the Safety Zone,

and after having been tied up

are now being driven out of the city.

At the last moment,

thousands of Chinese soldiers

threw away their uniforms and equipment,

looted civilian clothes,

and crowded into the Zone.

I had made up my mind

to bury the Chinese soldiers' clothes.

They had been thrown

onto the campus by the fleeing soldiers.

But when I got to the carpenter's shop

I could see that the gardeners were wiser.

They had burned them,

and thrown the grenades into a pond.

At headquarters,

we found a mob of men

outside that had been disarmed.

About 1,300 in all.

We argued the Japanese

would not shoot disarmed men.

So we went to our staff conference

quite relieved.

We knew that there were a number

of ex-soldiers among them.

But Rabe had been promised by an officer

that very afternoon

that their lives would be spared.

But in a half-hour, we were called back.

The Japanese had come back for them.

The men were lined up

and roped together in groups of about 100

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