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activity of the British Military Mission in Hunan and to withdraw the British troops to India. It looked as if our party would be all that remained, and I hoped that now at last we should be given a medical officer - Dr. Petro had in the meantime left us - and our full complement of officers. We had been much handicapped by the shortage of officers which prevented our manning the forward dumps properly and maintaining our contacts with the forward generals, while the school courses were in progress.
Reports continued to come in of successful operations by our teams at the front. We were particularly pleased with the report of one military train, the engine of which was blown up by a specially laid pressure-switch mine with considerable casualties to the passengers. We also had some failures. The members of one of our best guerilla teams were laying a pipe mine in the road at night, when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by Japanese. The leader promptly trod on the mine and the report we received stated that in addition to killing the team the explosion had killed some of the enemy.
It would be wrong if I gave the impression that there was a positive state of activity along all the fronts round us. At the time the Japanese were advancing on Shangjao the front was more active than usual; but on the whole the warfare was passive rather than active. I think a passive state of war accords more with the Chinese genius. The Chinese have had few foreign wars; their wars for the most part have been amongst their own people, where cunning and silver bullets counted for more than actual fighting. Life, God knows, is held cheaply enough in China and it cannot have been from any desire to save life that the preference for manoeuvre and deception arose; I would judge it derived more from an appreciation of the intellectual concomitants of warfare, as is well exemplified in the teachings of Sun Tze.
It was by denying facilities, rather than by fighting, that the Chinese resisted the Japanese. Not by any positive activity was a large Japanese garrison, supported by a still larger puppet army, held in the Yangtze delta; it was the negative pressure of a potential activity, which had not to assert itself to make itself felt. In the same way I argued that if the Japanese knew there were fifty well-trained demolition teams in the delta country astride their communications - and I had little doubt the Japanese knew just how many teams we trained - then they would feel compelled to increase their defensive arrangements by that much, in case all fifty