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: with splinter holes, and inside broken glass and damaged furniture lay scattered around. In the vain hope that she might avoid further attention the "Whangpoo" had taken the hulk for a "cruise" up the river, while a British officer stood all the time with a loaded revolver guarding the lashings to prevent the excited crew cutting the hulk adrift. It was eventually decided to move an anchor over to the hulk and to moor her off by herself. To the officers of the Merchant Service this sort of thing is all in a day's work. To stand on his bridge and listen to the flow of language addressed by the Captain of the "Whangpoo" to the panicking refugees below was a treat not to be missed.
In the evening a reply was received from Wuhu that the officer commanding the Japanese troops had declared that, if any ship moved on the Yangtze it would be fired at. He was the notorious Colonel Hashimoto, a prominent member of the young Officers' group, who staged the military rising in Tokyo in 1936 during which several leading members of the Japanese government were murdered.
The news was discouraging and we had to face the possibility that in the morning the attacks would be renewed and the ships sunk, because we could not expect our phenomenal luck in avoiding direct hits to repeat itself. It was decided that before dawn all the merchant ships should be placed along the north bank, where there was deep water, so that the Chinese could step off onto the shore to hide in the reeds. That night it was thought wiser to leave all the ships' lights on in the belief that the Japanese would be less likely to fire at ships, of whose presence they had been repeatedly notified, than if the ships blacked-out and showed no marks of identification. Hurried arrangements were made against the possibility of having to abandon ship. We opened the Captain's safe and shared out thousand-dollar bundles of notes, on the one hand to save them going down with the ship, and on the other to finance any cross-country travelling which might lie before us.
Dawn found the ships tied up at intervals of 200 yards along the bank, with only a few foreigners and members of the Chinese crews left aboard. The bulk of the refugees were hiding in the reeds. Many of the sailors and engine-room hands, as well as the Chinese employees of the foreign firms, decided not to risk another day in this dangerous neighbourhood, and disappeared into the interior of