“Little Red Devils”
Edgar Snow
1. One morning I climbed the wide, thick, yellow wall of Yu Wang Bao, from the top of which you could look down thirty feet and see at a glance a score of different and somehow prosaic and intimate tasks being pursued below.
2. Halfway around the crenellated battlement I came upon a squad of buglers — at rest for once, I was glad to observe, for their loud calls had been ringing constantly for days. They were all Young Vanguards, mere children, and I assumed a somewhat fatherly air toward one to whom I stopped and talked. He wore tennis shoes, gray shorts, and a faded gray cap with a dim red star on it. But there was nothing faded about the bugler under the cap: he was rosy-faced and had bright shining eyes. How homesick he must be, I thought. I was soon disillusioned. He was no mama’s boy, but already a veteran Red. He told me that he was fifteen and had joined the Reds in the South four years ago.
3. “Four years!” I exclaimed incredibly. “Then you must have been only eleven when you became a Red? And you made the Long March?”
4. “Right,” he responded with comical swagger. “I have been a hongjun for four years.”
5. “Why did you join?” I asked.
6. “My family lived near Zhangzhou, in Fujian. I used to cut wood in the mountains, and in the winter I went there to collect bark. I often heard the villagers talk about the Red Army. They said it helped the poor people, and I liked that. Our house was very poor, we were six people, my parents and three brothers, older than I. We owned no land. Rent ate more than half our crop. So we never had enough. In the winter we cooked bark for soup and saved our grain for planting in the spring. I was always hungry.”
7. “One year the Reds came very close to Zhangzhou. I climbed over the mountains and went to ask them to help our house because we were very poor. They were good to me. They sent me to school for a while, and I had plenty to eat. After a few months the Red Army captured Zhangzhou; and went to my village. All the landlords and moneylenders and officials were driven out. My family was given land and did not have to pay the tax collectors and landlords anymore. They were happy and they were proud of me. Two of my brothers joined the Red Army.”
8. “Where are they now?”
9. “Now? I don’t know. When we left Jiangxi they were with the Red Army in Fujian; they were with Fang Zhimin. Now I don’t know.”
10. “Did the peasants like the Red Army?”
11. “Like the Red Army, eh? Of course they liked it. The Red Army gave them land and drove away the landlords; the tax collectors, and the exploiters.”
12. “But really, how you know they liked the Reds?”
13. “They made us a thousand, ten thousands, of shoes, with their own hands. The women made uniforms for us, and the men spied on the enemy. Every home sent sons to our Red Army. That is how the lao-bai-xing treated us.”
14. Scores of youngsters like him were with the Reds. The Young Vanguards were organized by the Communist Youth League, and altogether, according to the claims of Feng Wenbin, secretary of the CYL, there were then some 40,000 in the Northwest soviet districts. There must have been several hundred with the Red Army alone: a “model company” of them was in the every Red encampment.
They were youths between twelve and seventeen (really eleven to sixteen by foreign count), and they came from all over China. Many of them, like this little bugler, had survived the hardships of the march from the South. Many had joined the Red Army during its expedition to Shanxi.
(Excerpted from Red Star Over China. 657 words)