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to lend them cooking pots for their rice, or to provide the few vegetables that flavour the rice. They sometimes break into the houses and help themselves to what they need. It is a vicious circle difficult to control. Fortunately we could see a crack of light at the back of the building where we had last stayed and, when the occupants who were hiding inside heard who we were, they let us in; there was nothing too much they could do for our comfort.
They told us that a large bridge some miles ahead, over a side stream which flowed into the Tsien Tang, was down and that we should be unable to get across. This sounded bad and I ordered a very early start. When we got to the bridge we found that a freshet after the heavy rain had weakened the wooden piers, and when a lorry overloaded with troops had gone over on the previous day, it had fallen through. A whole span had collapsed; soldiers were wading in the water searching for corpses and laying them along the bank. The bridge was high, the banks steep; it was obviously impossible for our lorry to get through. We returned to the village and 'phoned Chin Ya with a request that they would send a relief lorry down to meet us on the far side. We then set about unloading the lorry and ferrying our stores across in a small boat. When we had emptied the lorry the driver was ordered to take it back to Hunan; he was a man who had been lent us for the trip. He just got through before the road was cut.
On the way through Yingtan and Shangjao we had passed many refugees; on old charcoal lorries, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and even chairs, but mostly on foot, escaping from the advancing Japanese. We heard afterwards that the driver on the return trip found some refugees who were willing to pay heavily for the privilege of a lift on our lorry; he made a "squeeze" of $30,000. That is the sort of thing we were up against.
In the afternoon a 'phone call came through to say that the relief lorry had reached within twenty kilometres of us, but had found another bridge down and had been unable to come further. By good chance we heard of a large junk, hiding in the Tsien Tang not far off our bridge in the hope of avoiding being commandeered. It was full of refugees who were escaping upriver from the Japanese. When we asked whether they would give us and our stores a passage for the next twenty kilometres they readily agreed; our presence would provide a sort of protection. I was careful not to explain too clearly the dangerous nature of our cargo. The Tsien Tang junks are long, rather narrow flat-bottomed boats, curved