9.
have stood out for some months, if the military situation had
not gone to pieces.
218
And this applied, in my view, to Chinese
and Portugese, as well as to Europeans.
So long as there was
hope, they were willing to go on. Old Sir Shou-son Chow, his
eyebrows sprouting as belligerently as ever, gripped my arm in
Pedder St., on Dec. 23rd "Do you think", he roared, pointing at
Kowloon, "that we cannot beat those damned monkeys over there!"
Chinese in general were not quite as aggresive as that, but they
were prepared to stick and they did frantically want us to hold
out. All the central government (Kuomingtang) organisations in
the colony co-operated to the nth. degree.
During the last week we gave a degree of prominence in our
official bulletins to the approach of the relieving Chinese Army
that was hardly warranted by what facts we knew. We did this
of course deliberately with the aim of keeping up people's
spirits: and if by some miracle our reduced and exhausted garrison
could have held off the enemy for another two weeks, our official
optimism might well have been justified a hundred times over.
As I neared Waichow about the 30th of Dec. on my way to ChungKing,
I passed thousands and thousands of Chinese troops moving back
towards KuKong.
These were the armies which had intended to
relieve H.K. They were not very well armed but I am certain from
what I saw of them, and later of their commander General Yu Han
Mow, that they were in earnest.
In another two weeks, had we
been/
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