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unaccustomed and which they might not like; it is, of course, a good deal more difficult to provide foreign fare in China than Chinese fare. So we decided to have one Chinese mess and one British mess. We found a very good cook for the Chinese mess, but were less successful, until later Lao Teng joined us, with a cook for our own food. It seemed the obvious solution, but the young Chinese interpreters from Shanghai took it in ill part and claimed that we were giving them "unequal treatment”. The Hongkong boys were only too pleased with the arrangement, as were the accountant and storekeeper I had engaged; they had previously worked in a foreign firm and were not influenced by the same inferiority complex. It was unfortunate, and it was a dilemma which we never quite got over.
On April 1st we held the opening ceremony and our training commenced. We were extraordinarily encouraged by the quality of the students sent to us. I should explain that we were accredited to the Chinese Regular Army, not to the guerillas; but I had heard such favourable reports of the work the guerillas were doing, that I had asked especially that some guerilla teams should be sent to us. There appeared to be reluctance in agreeing to this request; possibly because, as we were to discover later, the guerillas only owed a nominal allegiance to the 3rd War Zone; they were really directly under Chungking. However, we did get guerillas, and also some men from special front-line organisations, who appeared to be a cross between guerillas and regular troops.
As the success of our type of work depended so much on team spirit, I was determined from the start only to teach in teams, and so far as possible we tried to arrange that the teams sent to us for training should remain as teams when they returned to the field. We had some difficulty in putting this idea over, and I am afraid that our teams, only too often, after leaving us were shuffled. Each team had a leader, and we had insisted that only men who could read and write should be sent to us. In practice that meant that our students were mainly drawn from the ranks of the junior officers or non-commissioned officers. The students proved extremely keen; they were intelligent, good with their hands, and developed a fine team spirit. In the first course, we had a good many students from the engineers, though I was not too anxious to receive these, because I feared our object might be misunderstood and that our ideas would be confused with the work of defensive military engineering, where the deliberate methods of laying explosives on your own ground before the arrival of the enemy were quite different to the type of hasty attack demolition calling for expert team work in which we were