Gladys Aylward Leads 100 Orphans Over Mountains

The train had already emptied of ordinary passengers when the conductor reached me, waving his arms in wide circles and pointing back along the track. I understood only that we could go no farther. Snow lay deep on either side, and the wind cut through the open door. I stepped down with my single bag and began walking the rails toward Chita, each step sinking to the knee. Wolves called from the treeline after dark. I kept moving until the cold forced me to stop, then curled against a bank with the bag under my head. Cannon fire sounded somewhere ahead, distant and irregular.

Two days later the border officials took my passport and read the word “missionary.” One of them smiled and said they needed machinists instead. They kept most of my clothing and put me on another train. The new stamp on the passport read “machinist.” At Vladivostok a hotel clerk followed me through the lobby and into the street, insisting I report for factory work. A young Japanese girl found me on the third day and told me where to meet her at first light. She led me through back alleys to the docks. I boarded a ship for Japan with nothing left of my original clothes but what I wore.

The missionary compound in Japan gave me a bed and a meal. I slept through the night for the first time since London. From there the steamship carried me to Tientsin. Another train, then a bus, then a mule brought me into the mountains of Shansi and the city of Yangchen. Mrs. Lawson met me at the gate of the old inn. She was seventy-three and walked with a stick. We repaired the roof and stocked grain for the mule caravans. When the first caravan passed, I took the lead mule by the rein and turned it into the courtyard. The others followed without argument. That night we fed the men and the animals, then told them stories about Jesus while they rested.

Mrs. Lawson fell on the stairs one afternoon and did not recover. Yang the cook stayed on with me. Caravans continued to stop. The Mandarin arrived in a sedan chair with an escort and announced that the government had banned footbinding. He needed a woman whose own feet were unbound to travel the district and enforce the order. I was the only candidate. I began the inspections the following week, walking from village to village with the new regulation in my satchel. Women opened their doors because I was female and because my feet could carry me where theirs could not.

The Japanese advance reached the province in 1940. The children at the inn numbered nearly one hundred. We left Yangchen on foot with what food we could carry. The mountains rose steep on every side. We crossed rivers on narrow bridges and slept in abandoned huts when we found them. At night the children huddled together for warmth. I counted them each morning before we started again. Some days we covered only a few miles. On others the path opened and we made better time. No one turned back.

We reached the Yellow River after several weeks. Boats ferried us across in groups. On the far bank we walked the final stretch into Sian. The children were placed with families and missions already there. I stayed long enough to see the last of them settled, then returned to the work that remained. Yang had kept the inn running in my absence. The caravans still came. The stories were still told at night.

In the spring of 1941 the Japanese garrison at Yangchen sent three officers to the inn gate demanding an accounting of every child who had passed through our hands the previous winter. Lieutenant Sato read from a typed list that included the name of the boy we called Little Wu and asked where the child had been hidden after we crossed the Yellow River. I answered that the boy now lived with a family in Sian and that the papers had been signed by the local magistrate on the twenty-third of November. The officers searched the storerooms and broke two of the grain bins before leaving. Yang the cook replaced the lids with new planks cut from the old mulberry tree behind the kitchen. Caravans resumed their stops that summer, though the muleteers now traveled in smaller groups and carried extra rice hidden in the saddle packs.

By the winter of 1943 the Nationalist army had placed a field hospital in the lower rooms of the inn. Major Chen arrived with twenty-six wounded men and asked for space to boil dressings. We cleared the main hall and used the remaining grain sacks as mattresses. One soldier, Private Li from Shantung province, told me that his unit had lost forty-seven men at the bridge near Linfen on the ninth of October. He asked for a Bible verse to recite when the fever rose at night. I read from the copy Mrs. Lawson had left behind, the same volume the Mandarin had once examined with a magnifying glass. The hospital remained for eleven weeks until orders came to move the men south toward Loyang.

After the surrender in August 1945 the first British consular official to reach the province arrived on a borrowed army truck. Captain Reynolds counted the remaining children at the inn and recorded thirty-four names in a ledger dated the fourteenth of September. He offered passage on a supply plane to Chungking, but I stayed to settle the last property claims with the families who had taken in orphans during the fighting. One girl, now twelve, returned from a village near Pingyang carrying a letter from her adoptive mother that stated she had learned to read and could recite the names of the provinces. The letter was dated the third of March 1946 and bore the stamp of the local school.