IT WAS four o'clock in the afternoon, and already the light was turning gray. We knew we would have to hurry to make the thirty miles to Potow, first Communist city on the other side of the lines, before dark. Hastily we threw our cargo of iron cots and medicine boxes aboard the trucks and started out. As we wheeled through the gates of Tsanghsien's walls, a Kuomintang sentry at a barbed-wire barricade signaled us to a halt.

　　"You know me," said Barkley, smiling down at the sentry who came up to the cab of the truck, gun in hand. "I've been here before."

　　The sentry nodded.

　　"Who's that one," he said, jerking his head at me.

　　"UNRRA, too," said Barkley.

　　I sat silently in the cab, pretending I did not understand Chinese and trying hard to look like an international relief worker. Having scrutinized me with casual curiosity, the sentry tapped our medicine boxes once or twice, then drew aside the barricade and motioned us out onto the North China Plain.

　　Drawing away from the city walls, we crossed the Grand Canal and entered no man's land. Our road was an undulating cart track where we plowed along jerkily, now rising even with the fields, now falling abruptly where metal-wheeled carts had dug deep ruts. On all sides of us, the fields rolled away, flatly, looking bare, brown and decayed in the gloomy winter light.

　　We went on for ten miles - fifteen - twenty - but there was not a sign of a Communist, not a soldier, not a gun.

　　Dusk came. The countryside grew gray, the wind cold. The air was boisterous with a leashed-in kind of wildness. The noises of the sky and land were humming as if at any moment they would break into a violent, uncontrollable roar. The wind whistled past our topless truck with crazy laughter; the dust infiltrated around the flanks of our windshield in a dirty cloud and we lurched, rolled and plunged across the plain which fled away everywhere with harsh, monotonous flatness.

　　We wished the Communists would pick us up quickly. We did not want to be shot at in the dark. We examined the plain to the limits of the horizon, but saw nothing. It seemed as if the Kuomintang army might have rushed in here and taken all the outposts by surprise.

　　Turning from the fields, I bent down and lit a cigarette. Suddenly, below me, along the road on the right, there was a kind of stir, then a click, as of snapped rifle bolts, and at last - terrifying shout. I jumped, as if struck, Barkley slammed down on the brakes, and a dozen armed men sprang onto the truck as if they would tear us from our seats. We came to a grinding halt.

　　Unconsciously, I put up my arms to ward off blows, but that was not the intention of our boarding party. "We'e been expecting you," said one of the men; "we'll take you into Potow."

　　The militiamen - or that is who the boarders turned out to be - clambered aboard, some standing on the running boards, others lying flat on the hood of the radiator, and we went forward once more. A sharp crack rent the air and a bullet sang overhead like a bird. Our guards jumped from the truck; again we slammed to a halt. As more bullets whistled by, our guards ran forward, rifles in hand, bodies bent close to the ground, and mouths wide open, howling indistinguishable words. Passwords, we guessed, for the firing ceased, our companions returned to the truck and we went on again.

　　Coming once more to the Grand Canal, we halted at a bridge while a wooden gate was swung back and then crossed the river and entered Potow, first Communist-held stronghold on the destroyed Tientsin-Pukow Railway.
Inside the town, the streets were dark, there was no life and not a human being could be seen. We parked alongside a stone building; the guards got off and we waited in the trucks to see what would happen. In a moment, doors up and down the street flung open, small shafts of light shot onto the road and patches of men appeared beside the truck.

　　"Ho . . . Ha!" shouted some voices. Hands reached for the medicines boxes and carried them off in the dark.

　　A guide appeared and led us into a large room which belonged to the local Chamber of Commerce. In the middle of the room was a pan of charcoal which strove desperately, but without much success, to dispel the cold. In the flickering light cast by two tallow wicks burning in cups of oil, I could make out four men. They introduced themselves as the mayor of Potow, the assistant mayor, the local head of Clara (Communist UNRRA) and the secretary of Public Relations - this last, a shy young man, with the gift of halting English, named Chen. One by one I nodded at them. Someone pushed a stool at me and I sat down. Next I announced that I was an American journalist. At this they looked doubtful.

　　Had they not been informed of my coming? No, they had not. Was there not an interpreter waiting for me? No, there was not. I took out a letter of introduction and the pass that General Yeh Chieng Ying, chief of staff of the 8th Route Army, had given me. One by one, the mayor, the vice-mayor, the head of Clara and Mr. Chen went into another room and examined them. The caution they took to look at them in another room made me wonder if there were not secret marks on the letters.

　　I knew these letters instructed the authorities in Potow to send me on to the headquarters of General Liu Po-cheng, two hundred miles away to the southwest, and I expected that after reading them the men would give me some word of welcome. But instead, they came back into the room, without saying a word, and stared at me. Barkley, presuming on a previous acquaintance, tried to say something on my behalf, but the mayor only grunted and said: "The letters are clear." That was all.

　　I must confess that this cold reception astonished and, at the time, even angered me. Back in 1939, when I made my first trip to Chinese Communist territory, General Hsiang Ying, commander of the New Fourth Army, had walked ten miles over a mountain so that he could greet me on the trail and personally lead me to his headquarters. Trees and rocks along the paths had even been decorated with signs welcoming me to Communist territory. But now how different everything was! The attitude of these officials seemed plainly to say: "We don't want you." I began to understand from their looks and vague answers to my tentative questions that they were suspicious of me, an American. I was afraid that if I were received everywhere in this fashion my trip might be unproductive.

　　The next morning, I began to feel even more doubtful. When I got up, Barkley had already gone back to Kuomintang areas, and there was no one else around, so I went out by myself into the streets of Potow.

　　I saw our tea boy poised atop a ladder, busy drawing some Chinese characters beneath a huge portrait of Mao Tze-tung, Communist party chairman, that was painted on the wall of the Chamber of Commerce. I photographed the painting, but a passer-by immediately halted and wanted to know if I had permission to take pictures. I wanted to say: "If you can paint pictures, why can't I take them," but I merely pretended I did not understand Chinese in order not to become involved in an argument.

　　Taking a turn down the street, I was immediately joined by a small boy who ran alongside of me shouting words that sounded like, "Mei Kuo fan tung." Now, mei kuo means America, but fan tung, as far as I had ever heard it, means rice bucket, and to call someone a rice bucket is the same as saying he is good for nothing but eating; or another way of saying a man is fat. Since I wore a fur-lined pilot's suit and since I must have looked well padded, I was not inclined to take offense at being called an American rice bucket. However, on walking a few steps further, a group of militiamen who were standing before a wall practicing songs, suddenly turned toward me, grinned and began singing: "First we had the Japanese Devils and now we have the Mel Kuo fan tung." I could not exactly understand it, but the general sense was quite clearly uncomplimentary and it was not long before I realized that I was being called a "fan tung pai"; that is, a reactionary. Being the only foreigner in town, I felt rather blue at being publicly ridiculed, but solaced myself with the idea that now I knew how a Chinese laundryman in America feels when children run after him shouting "Chinkee, Chinkee, Chinaman."

　　As a matter of fact, the treatment I received on my first morning in Communist territory was extremely mild to the receptions that other foreigners sometimes met in Chinese villages. Later as the war became more bitter, as President Truman evolved his anti-Communist policy, and as American-made planes bombed Communist villages, many Chinese peasants crudely insulted all foreigners in their areas. Feeling lonely and without friends, I went back to the Chamber of Commerce and engaged our tea boy in conversation. He made more sense than anyone with whom I had yet talked. He said that the Japanese had had a garrison in Potow for nearly eight years. They were bad, he said, because they beat and tortured people. When the Japs left, Kuomintang troops had garrisoned the area for four months. They were no good either. They drank tea without paying for it; looted and broke furniture. Worst of all, in 1946, they broke open the Grand Canal dikes and flooded people's homes. That this was true I had ascertained for myself in a walk outside the town where I saw some homes still underwater and the local match factory filled with mud which the flood had left behind. Later, I was to get a look at Kuomintang flood tactics at firsthand and I learned that Chiang's officers, if they thought it would bring them any military advantage, would break open any river, regardless of the cost to the civilian population.

　　My companion said he liked the 8th Route Army (Communist-led army) because it did not break open people's homes and did not steal food. Now, there was no 8th Route Army around Potow; the soldiers had gone for several months and there was only the militia. As for Communists - he did not know. Nobody had ever talked to him about Communists and he had never met one.

　　Something along this line was echoed by the vice-mayor that night over dinner.

　　"We are no-party-no-clique people," he said. "We don't necessarily want to follow the Russian way."

　　Thus, by my second night in the Liberated Areas, I had yet to meet my first Communist. I was beginning to wonder why I had come into the region.

　　During the meal it had been arranged that I would get a cart on the morrow and go to the town of Foutung, thirty-five miles away. There I would pick up another cart and continue on to the next stop and in this fashion proceed to General Liu's headquarters. It was figured I should be able to make the trip in eight or nine days. I thought that optimistic. It is hard for a cart to make more than twenty miles a day; it was snowing and besides it was just approaching Chinese New Year and I doubted if any farmer would want to take his cart out at this season, even for a foreigner.

　　As I lay down to sleep that night I was not very happy about the prospect for my journey. I would have much preferred to stay around the border areas and join up with some guerrilla outfit operating in no man's land. And while I welcomed the prospect of meeting the legendary One-Eyed Liu, I was not so sure that it made good sense to go wandering off through the countryside when everyone appeared so unfriendly.

　　Now, it's one thing to understand the reason for the people of one country being unfriendly toward the people of another, but it's quite adifferent thing to be the subject of that unfriendliness yourself. If people yell anti-American slogans at you, you don't like it, no matter how objective,you are. In all justice to the people of the Liberated Areas, I must admit I later was well received, but in those early days I felt very unwelcome indeed.

　　It was in this somewhat despondent frame of mind that I set out to find General Liu Po-cheng and the headquarters of the Shansi-Hopei-Shantung-Honan Border Region two hundred miles away.