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To attend one of the Saturday night dinners, organised at this time at the International Club by a genial secretary of the British Embassy, was really an experience in cosmopolitan friendship. In addition to leading Chinese officials, there would be present persons of a great variety of walks in life and of a dozen different nationalities. As many as 50 would seat themselves to a meal, the relish of which would be stimulated by the incorporation of such pre-prandial solvents as were still obtainable. Amongst those present would be many of the newspaper correspondents and newsreel men, who had been attracted to Nanking by the war and who later were to achieve fame in a wider field.
But the reviving confidence in the capital was rudely shaken when the news came in of the Chinese retreat from Shanghai in November, and especially when the Government instructed its various departments to transfer to other places further inland.
Then there was such a coming and going in all directions of wretched persons seeking safety, but knowing not where to look for it, as to bring home to the onlooker, in a way which all the previous horrors of the bombings had failed to do, the ghastly side of the war. The inhabitants of Nanking had no illusions about the sort of treatment they might expect at the hands of the enemy.
On the Bund at Hsiakwan, as the river front outside the city was called, an accumulation of baggage, furniture, medical supplies, munitions and stores of war, piled up day after day, waiting for space on the British steamers, which were working at high pressure backwards and forwards between Nanking and Hankow. Fortunately the weather during the weeks following the Government's decision to move was wet and stormy and kept the Japanese bombing planes away. But it increased the difficulties of loading, and the Bund coolies and sampan men reaped a fortune. They were demanding as much as four dollars to carry a package across the Bund on to the steamer, and sampan owners, who normally would cheerfully accept a fare out to a ship for twenty cents, now demanded twenty dollars. It was beyond the strength of the government to control these racketeers, as it was beyond their strength at a later date to enforce impractical regulations for the control of prices.
For the foreigners the burning question was whether the Chinese