Quietly, so as not to disturb any of the children, Gladys carried the lamp back to her bedroom. “O God,” she prayed, “show me what to do.” With that, she picked up her Bible and opened it. She ran her finger over the Chinese characters printed on the page and then stopped. She read the verse her finger was on. “Flee ye! Flee ye into the mountains! Dwell deeply in the hidden places, because the King of Babylon has conceived a purpose against you!”
Gladys had her answer. Sometimes Christians should retreat, and Gladys believed from the verse she’d just read that this was one of those times. As she lay awake that night, Gladys knew she had to lead the children to safety in Sian herself. It was no use waiting any longer for Tsin Pen-kuang to return. Something must have happened to him, or he would have been back weeks ago. She could take the general up on his offer to protect her and the children. But if the Chinese Nationalist soldiers were forced to flee the advancing Japanese, what kind of protection could they really offer? Gladys had to face facts. She was right in the middle of a war zone. If the Japanese found her with ninety-four children, they would probably first kill the children right in front of her just before they killed her.
As the first rays of sunlight reached in through her rice paper window, Gladys set her plan in motion. She woke all the children and told them to put on every piece of clothing that they owned and tie any spare cloth shoes they had around their waists. Gladys knew that shoes would be a problem on the journey. The shoes were made of cloth with bark for soles and were expected to last only a month or so around the village streets. Over the rough rocks and narrow mountain tracks they would be following, a pair of shoes would barely last a day.
Once the children were dressed, Gladys had them gather up their bedrolls and line up in order of size, girls on one side, boys on the other. The line stretched out the door and across the courtyard. Gladys surveyed the scene. At the front of the girls’ line, she counted twenty girls who were thirteen to fifteen years old, including Ninepence. These older girls would be helpful in controlling the little ones, as would the seven older boys from eleven to fifteen. The remaining sixty-seven children were all too young to be helpful to anyone. The youngest was barely four years old, but she would have to be responsible for her own bedroll, just like everyone else.
Gladys gathered up the remaining food supply in the house, enough millet for two days, and wrapped it in a rag, which she gave to one of the older boys to carry. She carried the iron pot herself to cook the millet in.
The procession wound its way through the west gate of Yangcheng for the last time. Only a few of the older children had any idea of the danger that lay ahead of them. To the little ones, it was a chance to run and play in the open air. They chattered and giggled, running ahead and ambushing the main group, climbing plum trees, and scurrying from the front of the line to the back with silly messages for each other. It was only as the afternoon wore on that a few of them asked Gladys where they were going to sleep that night. Gladys had no idea. She had never taken the route to the Yellow River before. Some of the muleteers had told her it took five days on the main trails to reach the river, so she estimated it would take about twelve days to reach it going over the mountains on less-traveled trails.
The children were becoming hungry and tired when the first village appeared in the distance. Gladys encouraged them on, and as the sun began to set, they entered the village. Gladys walked near the front of the group, and as she turned to see the straggling line of children behind her, she wondered where nearly a hundred children would find shelter.
As if in answer to her question, she looked up and saw a Buddhist priest, dressed in his saffron robes, standing on the steps of a temple. “Where are you going with all those children?” he asked.
“To Sian. We are refugees,” replied Gladys.
The priest looked puzzled. “Are they all yours?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Gladys, too tired to explain further. “I need a place for us to sleep tonight.”
“Well, I don’t see why you can’t sleep in the temple. There is plenty of room on the floor,” he said as he waved the children inside.
Gladys was grateful for a roof over their heads. In the open courtyard over a fire, she boiled millet for everyone. After eating, the children unrolled their bedrolls and promptly fell asleep. Sleep didn’t come so easily for Gladys, however. For one thing, rats were scurrying in every corner. More serious than that, though, Gladys was beginning to have nagging doubts about whether they could make it to Sian or not. Today was the easiest day, and it had proved difficult enough. Some of the older girls, whom she was relying on, were not walking well. Their feet had been bound earlier in their lives, and although they had now been unbound for many years, they were not strong and flat like normal feet.
And then there was the food supply. The millet they had with them could be stretched to last only a couple of days. After that, where would they find enough food each day to feed nearly a hundred people? And although the little ones were still filled with enthusiasm, what about when they began to lag behind? There weren’t enough older children to piggyback them all. And Gladys wouldn’t even allow herself to dwell on the worst possibility of all—meeting Japanese soldiers. When Tsin Pen-kuang had taken the first hundred children to Sian, there had been little Japanese activity in the area. But lately, according to the priest, there had been many sightings of soldiers in the area. If the children were found with Ai-weh-deh, the woman on the wanted poster, there would be no mercy shown to any of them.
The next morning, the children obediently rolled up their bedrolls, ate their bowl of millet, thanked the Buddhist priest for his help, and marched out into the countryside once more. The next night they spent squeezed into a house, and the two nights after that were spent out in the open. On the fifth day, they began to trek over the mountains. They were walking along small tracks that kept forking into two tracks, and each time they came to a fork, Gladys looked at the sun and calculated which way was southwest. That was the track they took. By the fifth night, the laughing, carefree group that had left Yangcheng was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a group of older girls with cut and bruised feet, older boys struggling under the burden of piles of bedrolls, and little four- and five-year-olds who cried when they were hungry and cried when they were scared, which meant there were ten or twelve of them wailing together at any one time. Gladys herself was feeling a strange tiredness. She’d felt it often since being struck in the head with the rifle butt in Tsechow. Sometimes more than anything, she just wanted to curl up under a rock and sleep, even in the middle of the day. But with the lives of so many children depending on her, she wouldn’t give in to the fatigue.
Sometimes the children sang hymns as they walked, and sometimes they trudged on in silence, except for the crying children. It was during one of the quiet times that two of the older boys who had been sent on ahead to scout the trail came rushing back. “Soldiers,” they yelled.
Gladys clutched the hands of the nearest children. Her eyes darted from side to side. Gladys and the children were in a narrow ravine, and there was nowhere for them to all get off the track. For a sickening moment, Gladys was unsure of what to tell the children to do next. Then she heard a voice in the distance. The voice spoke Chinese, not Japanese. Gladys’s grip on the children relaxed. The soldiers coming were friends not enemies. Gladys and the children stood waiting as the soldiers came closer. Just as the soldiers came into view, the sound of airplanes was heard above. Everyone looked up, and overhead were the shimmering silver underbellies of Japanese bombers. The children and the approaching soldiers instinctively dove for cover under trees and rocks.
Gladys crouched under a bush, huddled over three of the smallest children, waiting tensely for the hail of machine-gun bullets or the bombs that always seemed to accompany Japanese airplanes. This time there was no attack. Because of the steep, rocky ravine, the pilots hadn’t spotted the escaping people. Once the planes were out of sight, the children and soldiers crawled from their hiding places and greeted each other. They were glad to see each other, the soldiers no doubt because they were a long way from their own children, and the children because the soldiers’ knapsacks were filled with sugar treats and food the children had not seen for many months in Shansi province.
Since it was nearly nightfall, the soldiers invited Gladys and the children to spend the night around the campfire with them. They provided a feast for the children, and for the first time on the journey, Gladys felt free to eat her share of food. They all slept well that night. Early the next morning, both groups wished each other well and set out in opposite directions.
In the following days, Gladys often thought of the meal they had eaten with the Nationalist soldiers. She and the children hadn’t eaten since. Now to sustain them they had only hot tea made by boiling twigs and leaves they picked along the way. They sipped the brew from the few rice bowls that had not been broken or lost.
The sun beat down during the day, cracking the children’s lips and sapping their energy, and at night, the howl of wolves filled them with terror. But they plodded on, making more and more frequent stops, and looking around every bend in the path for a glimpse of the mighty Yellow River in the distance. Gladys had told them that once they saw it, they would soon be out of the mountains, and once across the river, they could ride on something called a train the rest of the way to Sian.
By the twelfth day, the journey had become almost unbearable. The little ones no longer laughed or showed any of the silliness they had exhibited on the first day of their march. Now everyone concentrated on the grim task of placing one cut and blistered foot in front of the other. Gladys worried that if any more Japanese planes flew overhead, none of them would have the energy to hide. But still they trudged on. At midday, Gladys noticed they were no longer climbing. In fact, the trail was beginning to head downward, out of the mountains. And then Gladys saw what they had been waiting so long to see—the Yellow River, glistening in the distance.
“Come on, children, that is where we are going,” yelled Gladys, pointing towards the river.
“But it is so far away,” replied one of the children.
“The rocks are hurting my feet,” complained another.
“We’ll never make it that far,” stated a third.
“Of course we can make it,” said Gladys. “Look down there.” She pointed to a small village between them and the river. “I think that is Yuan Chu. We will find food there, and then it is a short walk to the river. We’ll get a boat across, and before nightfall we will be eating delicious hot soup, and then we’ll sleep on a warm k’ang tonight.”
This thought cheered the children up. Along with the fact that the trail now led steadily downhill, they all walked a little faster and began to sing hymns as they had done on the first few days of the trek.
Two hours later, nearly a hundred hymn-singing children with shredded shoes and cracked lips straggled through the gates of Yuan Chu. They expected to be met by the local people, but none were there. The children yelled and opened gates into private courtyards. They peered into the temple and looked in the marketplace, but not a person was in sight.
Finally, one of the children saw an old man asleep under a tree. She went to fetch Gladys, who hurried off in the old man’s direction, hoping he was indeed asleep and not dead. By the time she reached him, he had been awakened by the children’s noise and was grumbling about it.
