The Unparalleled Invasion

by Jack London

It was in the year 1976 that the trouble between the world andChina reached its culmination. It was because of this that thecelebration of the Second Centennial of American Liberty wasdeferred. Many other plans of the nations of the earth weretwisted and tangled and postponed for the same reason. The worldawoke rather abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years,unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the developmentthat, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the wholeworld. The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and thehistorians of the time gravely noted it down that that event markedthe entrance of Japan into the comity of nations. What it reallydid mark was the awakening of China. This awakening, longexpected, had finally been given up. The Western nations had triedto arouse China, and they had failed. Out of their native optimismand race-egotism they had therefore concluded that the task wasimpossible, that China would never awaken.What they had failed to take into account was this: THAT BETWEENTHEM AND CHINA WAS NO COMMON PSYCHOLOGICAL SPEECH. Their thought-processes were radically dissimilar. There was no intimatevocabulary. The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but ashort distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze. TheChinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distancewhen it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall. It wasall a matter of language. There was no way to communicate Westernideas to the Chinese mind. China remained asleep. The materialachievement and progress of the West was a closed book to her; norcould the West open the book. Back and deep down on the tie-ribsof consciousness, in the mind, say, of the English-speaking race,was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words; back and deep downon the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind was a capacityto thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind could notthrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking mindthrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of their minds were wovenfrom totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens. And so itwas that Western material achievement and progress made no dent onthe rounded sleep of China.Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904. Now the Japaneserace was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples. In somestrange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer.Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, andso capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied, a world-power. There is no explaining this peculiaropenness of Japan to the alien culture of the West. As well mightbe explained any biological sport in the animal kingdom.Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptlyset about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself. Koreashe had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges andvulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria. But Japanwas not satisfied. She turned her eyes upon China. There lay avast territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits inthe world of iron and coal - the backbone of industrialcivilization. Given natural resources, the other great factor inindustry is labour. In that territory was a population of400,000,000 souls - one quarter of the then total population of theearth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, whiletheir fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervousorganization constituted them splendid soldiers - if they wereproperly managed. Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnishthat management.But best of all, from the standpoint of Japan, the Chinese was akindred race. The baffling enigma of the Chinese character to theWest was no baffling enigma to the Japanese. The Japaneseunderstood as we could never school ourselves or hope tounderstand. Their mental processes were the same. The Japanesethought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese, and theythought in the same peculiar grooves. Into the Chinese mind theJapanese went on where we were balked by the obstacle ofincomprehension. They took the turning which we could notperceive, twisted around the obstacle, and were out of sight in theramifications of the Chinese mind where we could not follow. Theywere brothers. Long ago one had borrowed the other's writtenlanguage, and, untold generations before that, they had divergedfrom the common Mongol stock. There had been changes,differentiations brought about by diverse conditions and infusionsof other blood; but down at the bottom of their beings, twistedinto the fibres of them, was a heritage in common, a sameness inkind that time had not obliterated.And so Japan took upon herself the management of China. In theyears immediately following the war with Russia, her agents swarmedover the Chinese Empire. A thousand miles beyond the last missionstation toiled her engineers and spies, clad as coolies, under theguise of itinerant merchants or proselytizing Buddhist priests,noting down the horse-power of every waterfall, the likely sitesfor factories, the heights of mountains and passes, the strategicadvantages and weaknesses, the wealth of the farming valleys, thenumber of bullocks in a district or the number of labourers thatcould be collected by forced levies. Never was there such acensus, and it could have been taken by no other people than thedogged, patient, patriotic Japanese.But in a short time secrecy was thrown to the winds. Japan'sofficers reorganized the Chinese army; her drill sergeants made themediaeval warriors over into twentieth century soldiers, accustomedto all the modern machinery of war and with a higher average ofmarksmanship than the soldiers of any Western nation. Theengineers of Japan deepened and widened the intricate system ofcanals, built factories and foundries, netted the empire withtelegraphs and telephones, and inaugurated the era of railroad-building. It was these same protagonists of machine-civilizationthat discovered the great oil deposits of Chunsan, the ironmountains of Whang-Sing, the copper ranges of Chinchi, and theysank the gas wells of Wow-Wee, that most marvellous reservoir ofnatural gas in all the world.In China's councils of empire were the Japanese emissaries. In theears of the statesmen whispered the Japanese statesmen. Thepolitical reconstruction of the Empire was due to them. Theyevicted the scholar class, which was violently reactionary, and putinto office progressive officials. And in every town and city ofthe Empire newspapers were started. Of course, Japanese editorsran the policy of these papers, which policy they got direct fromTokio. It was these papers that educated and made progressive thegreat mass of the population.China was at last awake. Where the West had failed, Japansucceeded. She had transmuted Western culture and achievement intoterms that were intelligible to the Chinese understanding. Japanherself, when she so suddenly awakened, had astounded the world.But at the time she was only forty millions strong. China'sawakening, with her four hundred millions and the scientificadvance of the world, was frightfully astounding. She was thecolossus of the nations, and swiftly her voice was heard in nouncertain tones in the affairs and councils of the nations. Japanegged her on, and the proud Western peoples listened withrespectful ears.China's swift and remarkable rise was due, perhaps more than toanything else, to the superlative quality of her labour. TheChinese was the perfect type of industry. He had always been that.For sheer ability to work no worker in the world could compare withhim. Work was the breath of his nostrils. It was to him whatwandering and fighting in far lands and spiritual adventure hadbeen to other peoples. Liberty, to him, epitomized itself inaccess to the means of toil. To till the soil and labourinterminably was all he asked of life and the powers that be. Andthe awakening of China had given its vast population not merelyfree and unlimited access to the means of toil, but access to thehighest and most scientific machine-means of toil.China rejuvenescent! It was but a step to China rampant. Shediscovered a new pride in herself and a will of her own. She beganto chafe under the guidance of Japan, but she did not chafe long.On Japan's advice, in the beginning, she had expelled from theEmpire all Western missionaries, engineers, drill sergeants,merchants, and teachers. She now began to expel the similarrepresentatives of Japan. The latter's advisory statesmen wereshowered with honours and decorations, and sent home. The West hadawakened Japan, and, as Japan had then requited the West, Japan wasnot requited by China. Japan was thanked for her kindly aid andflung out bag and baggage by her gigantic protege. The Westernnations chuckled. Japan's rainbow dream had gone glimmering. Shegrew angry. China laughed at her. The blood and the swords of theSamurai would out, and Japan rashly went to war. This occurred in1922, and in seven bloody months Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa weretaken away from her and she was hurled back, bankrupt, to stifle inher tiny, crowded islands. Exit Japan from the world drama.Thereafter she devoted herself to art, and her task became toplease the world greatly with her creations of wonder and beauty.Contrary to expectation, China did not prove warlike. She had noNapoleonic dream, and was content to devote herself to the arts ofpeace. After a time of disquiet, the idea was accepted that Chinawas to be feared, not in war, but in commerce. It will be seenthat the real danger was not apprehended. China went onconsummating her machine-civilization. Instead of a large standingarmy, she developed an immensely larger and splendidly efficientmilitia. Her navy was so small that it was the laughing stock ofthe world; nor did she attempt to strengthen her navy. The treatyports of the world were never entered by her visiting battleships.The real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins, and it was in1970 that the first cry of alarm was raised. For some time allterritories adjacent to China had been grumbling at Chineseimmigration; but now it suddenly came home to the world thatChina's population was 500,000,000. She had increased by a hundredmillions since her awakening. Burchaldter called attention to thefact that there were more Chinese in existence than white-skinnedpeople. He performed a simple sum in arithmetic. He addedtogether the populations of the United States, Canada, New Zealand,Australia, South Africa, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria,European Russia, and all Scandinavia. The result was 495,000,000.And the population of China overtopped this tremendous total by5,000,000. Burchaldter's figures went round the world, and theworld shivered.For many centuries China's population had been constant. Herterritory had been saturated with population; that is to say, herterritory, with the primitive method of production, had supportedthe maximum limit of population. But when she awoke andinaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had beenenormously increased. Thus, on the same territory, she was able tosupport a far larger population. At once the birth rate began torise and the death rate to fall. Before, when population pressedagainst the means of subsistence, the excess population had beenswept away by famine. But now, thanks to the machine-civilization,China's means of subsistence had been enormously extended, andthere were no famines; her population followed on the heels of theincrease in the means of subsistence.During this time of transition and development of power, China hadentertained no dreams of conquest. The Chinese was not an imperialrace. It was industrious, thrifty, and peace-loving. War waslooked upon as an unpleasant but necessary task that at times mustbe performed. And so, while the Western races had squabbled andfought, and world-adventured against one another, China had calmlygone on working at her machines and growing. Now she was spillingover the boundaries of her Empire - that was all, just spillingover into the adjacent territories with all the certainty andterrifying slow momentum of a glacier.Following upon the alarm raised by Burchaldter's figures, in 1970France made a long-threatened stand. French Indo-China had beenoverrun, filled up, by Chinese immigrants. France called a halt.The Chinese wave flowed on. France assembled a force of a hundredthousand on the boundary between her unfortunate colony and China,and China sent down an army of militia-soldiers a million strong.Behind came the wives and sons and daughters and relatives, withtheir personal household luggage, in a second army. The Frenchforce was brushed aside like a fly. The Chinese militia-soldiers,along with their families, over five millions all told, coolly tookpossession of French Indo-China and settled down to stay for a fewthousand years.Outraged France was in arms. She hurled fleet after fleet againstthe coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort.China had no navy. She withdrew like a turtle into her shell. Fora year the French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposedtowns and villages. China did not mind. She did not depend uponthe rest of the world for anything. She calmly kept out of rangeof the French guns and went on working. France wept and wailed,wrung her impotent hands and appealed to the dumfounded nations.Then she landed a punitive expedition to march to Peking. It wastwo hundred and fifty thousand strong, and it was the flower ofFrance. It landed without opposition and marched into theinterior. And that was the last ever seen of it. The line ofcommunication was snapped on the second day. Not a survivor cameback to tell what had happened. It had been swallowed up inChina's cavernous maw, that was all.In the five years that followed, China's expansion, in all landdirections, went on apace. Siam was made part of the Empire, and,in spite of all that England could do, Burma and the MalayPeninsula were overrun; while all along the long south boundary ofSiberia, Russia was pressed severely by China's advancing hordes.The process was simple. First came the Chinese immigration (or,rather, it was already there, having come there slowly andinsidiously during the previous years). Next came the clash ofarms and the brushing away of all opposition by a monster army ofmilitia-soldiers, followed by their families and household baggage.And finally came their settling down as colonists in the conqueredterritory. Never was there so strange and effective a method ofworld conquest.Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary ofIndia pressed against by this fearful tide of life. To the west,Bokhara, and, even to the south and west, Afghanistan, wereswallowed up. Persia, Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt thepressure of the flood. It was at this time that Burchaldterrevised his figures. He had been mistaken. China's populationmust be seven hundred millions, eight hundred millions, nobody knewhow many millions, but at any rate it would soon be a billion.There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world,Burchaldter announced, and the world trembled. China's increasemust have begun immediately, in 1904. It was remembered that sincethat date there had not been a single famine. At 5,000,000 a yearincrease, her total increase in the intervening seventy years mustbe 350,000,000. But who was to know? It might be more. Who wasto know anything of this strange new menace of the twentiethcentury - China, old China, rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!The Convention of 1975 was called at Philadelphia. All the Westernnations, and some few of the Eastern, were represented. Nothingwas accomplished. There was talk of all countries putting bountieson children to increase the birth rate, but it was laughed to scornby the arithmeticians, who pointed out that China was too far inthe lead in that direction. No feasible way of coping with Chinawas suggested. China was appealed to and threatened by the UnitedPowers, and that was all the Convention of Philadelphia came to;and the Convention and the Powers were laughed at by China. LiTang Fwung, the power behind the Dragon Throne, deigned to reply."What does China care for the comity of nations?" said Li TangFwung. "We are the most ancient, honourable, and royal of races.We have our own destiny to accomplish. It is unpleasant that ourdestiny does not tally with the destiny of the rest of the world,but what would you? You have talked windily about the royal racesand the heritage of the earth, and we can only reply that thatremains to be seen. You cannot invade us. Never mind about yournavies. Don't shout. We know our navy is small. You see we useit for police purposes. We do not care for the sea. Our strengthis in our population, which will soon be a billion. Thanks to you,we are equipped with all modern war-machinery. Send your navies.We will not notice them. Send your punitive expeditions, but firstremember France. To land half a million soldiers on our shoreswould strain the resources of any of you. And our thousandmillions would swallow them down in a mouthful. Send a million;send five millions, and we will swallow them down just as readily.Pouf! A mere nothing, a meagre morsel. Destroy, as you havethreatened, you United States, the ten million coolies we haveforced upon your shores - why, the amount scarcely equals half ofour excess birth rate for a year."So spoke Li Tang Fwung. The world was nonplussed, helpless,terrified. Truly had he spoken. There was no combating China'samazing birth rate. If her population was a billion, and wasincreasing twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would bea billion and a half - equal to the total population of the worldin 1904. And nothing could be done. There was no way to dam upthe over-spilling monstrous flood of life. War was futile. Chinalaughed at a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed invasion. Inher capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could behurled at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life pouredout and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazinesthe learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.But there was one scholar China failed to reckon on - JacobusLaningdale. Not that he was a scholar, except in the widest sense.Primarily, Jacobus Laningdale was a scientist, and, up to thattime, a very obscure scientist, a professor employed in thelaboratories of the Health Office of New York City. JacobusLaningdale's head was very like any other head, but in that headwas evolved an idea. Also, in that head was the wisdom to keepthat idea secret. He did not write an article for the magazines.Instead, he asked for a vacation. On September 19, 1975, hearrived in Washington. It was evening, but he proceeded straightto the White House, for he had already arranged an audience withthe President. He was closeted with President Moyer for threehours. What passed between them was not learned by the rest of theworld until long after; in fact, at that time the world was notinterested in Jacobus Laningdale. Next day the President called inhis Cabinet. Jacobus Laningdale was present. The proceedings werekept secret. But that very afternoon Rufus Cowdery, Secretary ofState, left Washington, and early the following morning sailed forEngland. The secret that he carried began to spread, but it spreadonly among the heads of Governments. Possibly half-a-dozen men ina nation were entrusted with the idea that had formed in JacobusLaningdale's head. Following the spread of the secret, sprang upgreat activity in all the dockyards, arsenals, and navy-yards. Thepeople of France and Austria became suspicious, but so sincere weretheir Governments' calls for confidence that they acquiesced in theunknown project that was afoot.This was the time of the Great Truce. All countries pledgedthemselves solemnly not to go to war with any other country. Thefirst definite action was the gradual mobilization of the armies ofRussia, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Then beganthe eastward movement. All railroads into Asia were glutted withtroop trains. China was the objective, that was all that wasknown. A little later began the great sea movement. Expeditionsof warships were launched from all countries. Fleet followedfleet, and all proceeded to the coast of China. The nationscleaned out their navy-yards. They sent their revenue cutters anddispatch boots and lighthouse tenders, and they sent their lastantiquated cruisers and battleships. Not content with this, theyimpressed the merchant marine. The statistics show that 58,640merchant steamers, equipped with searchlights and rapid-fire guns,were despatched by the various nations to China.And China smiled and waited. On her land side, along herboundaries, were millions of the warriors of Europe. She mobilizedfive times as many millions of her militia and awaited theinvasion. On her sea coasts she did the same. But China waspuzzled. After all this enormous preparation, there was noinvasion. She could not understand. Along the great Siberianfrontier all was quiet. Along her coasts the towns and villageswere not even shelled. Never, in the history of the world, hadthere been so mighty a gathering of war fleets. The fleets of allthe world were there, and day and night millions of tons ofbattleships ploughed the brine of her coasts, and nothing happened.Nothing was attempted. Did they think to make her emerge from hershell? China smiled. Did they think to tire her out, or starveher out? China smiled again.But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city ofPeking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would havewitnessed a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filledwith the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back,every slant eye turned skyward. And high up in the blue he wouldhave beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderlyevolutions, he would have identified as an airship. From thisairship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fellmissiles - strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass thatshattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house-tops. But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass.Nothing happened. There were no explosions. It is true, threeChinese were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from soenormous a height; but what were three Chinese against an excessbirth rate of twenty millions? One tube struck perpendicularly ina fish-pond in a garden and was not broken. It was dragged ashoreby the master of the house. He did not dare to open it, but,accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasingcrowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of thedistrict. The latter was a brave man. With all eyes upon him, heshattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe. Nothinghappened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought they sawsome mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd set up a greatlaugh and dispersed.As Peking was bombarded by glass tubes, so was all China. The tinyairships, dispatched from the warships, contained but two men each,and over all cities, towns, and villages they wheeled and curved,one man directing the ship, the other man throwing over the glasstubes.Had the reader again been in Peking, six weeks later, he would havelooked in vain for the eleven million inhabitants. Some few ofthem he would have found, a few hundred thousand, perhaps, theircarcasses festering in the houses and in the deserted streets, andpiled high on the abandoned death-waggons. But for the rest hewould have had to seek along the highways and byways of the Empire.And not all would he have found fleeing from plague-strickenPeking, for behind them, by hundreds of thousands of unburiedcorpses by the wayside, he could have marked their flight. And asit was with Peking, so it was with all the cities, towns, andvillages of the Empire. The plague smote them all. Nor was it oneplague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every virulentform of infectious death stalked through the land. Too late theChinese government apprehended the meaning of the colossalpreparations, the marshalling of the world-hosts, the flights ofthe tin airships, and the rain of the tubes of glass. Theproclamations of the government were vain. They could not stop theeleven million plague-stricken wretches, fleeing from the one cityof Peking to spread disease through all the land. The physiciansand health officers died at their posts; and death, the all-conqueror, rode over the decrees of the Emperor and Li Tang Fwung.It rode over them as well, for Li Tang Fwung died in the secondweek, and the Emperor, hidden away in the Summer Palace, died inthe fourth week.Had there been one plague, China might have coped with it. Butfrom a score of plagues no creature was immune. The man whoescaped smallpox went down before scarlet fever. The man who wasimmune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he wereimmune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague,swept him away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, andmicrobes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West,that had come down upon China in the rain of glass.All organization vanished. The government crumbled away. Decreesand proclamations were useless when the men who made them andsigned them one moment were dead the next. Nor could the maddenedmillions, spurred on to flight by death, pause to heed anything.They fled from the cities to infect the country, and wherever theyfled they carried the plagues with them. The hot summer was on -Jacobus Laningdale had selected the time shrewdly - and the plaguefestered everywhere. Much is conjectured of what occurred, andmuch has been learned from the stories of the few survivors. Thewretched creatures stormed across the Empire in many-millionedflight. The vast armies China had collected on her frontiersmelted away. The farms were ravaged for food, and no more cropswere planted, while the crops already in were left unattended andnever came to harvest. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was theflights. Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds ofthe Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of theWest. The slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries wasstupendous. Time and again the guarding line was drawn back twentyor thirty miles to escape the contagion of the multitudinous dead.Once the plague broke through and seized upon the German andAustrian soldiers who were guarding the borders of Turkestan.Preparations had been made for such a happening, and though sixtythousand soldiers of Europe were carried off, the internationalcorps of physicians isolated the contagion and dammed it back. Itwas during this struggle that it was suggested that a new plague-germ had originated, that in some way or other a sort ofhybridization between plague-germs had taken place, producing a newand frightfully virulent germ. First suspected by Vomberg, whobecame infected with it and died, it was later isolated and studiedby Stevens, Hazenfelt, Norman, and Landers.Such was the unparalleled invasion of China. For that billion ofpeople there was no hope. Pent in their vast and festeringcharnel-house, all organization and cohesion lost, they could donaught but die. They could not escape. As they were flung backfrom their land frontiers, so were they flung back from the sea.Seventy-five thousand vessels patrolled the coasts. By day theirsmoking funnels dimmed the sea-rim, and by night their flashingsearchlights ploughed the dark and harrowed it for the tiniestescaping junk. The attempts of the immense fleets of junks werepitiful. Not one ever got by the guarding sea-hounds. Modern war-machinery held back the disorganized mass of China, while theplagues did the work.But old War was made a thing of laughter. Naught remained to himbut patrol duty. China had laughed at war, and war she wasgetting, but it was ultra-modern war, twentieth century war, thewar of the scientist and the laboratory, the war of JacobusLaningdale. Hundred-ton guns were toys compared with the micro-organic projectiles hurled from the laboratories, the messengers ofdeath, the destroying angels that stalked through the empire of abillion souls.During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno. Therewas no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out theremotest hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remainedunburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last,millions died daily of starvation. Besides, starvation weakenedthe victims and destroyed their natural defences against theplagues. Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And soperished China.Not until the following February, in the coldest weather, were thefirst expeditions made. These expeditions were small, composed ofscientists and bodies of troops; but they entered China from everyside. In spite of the most elaborate precautions againstinfection, numbers of soldiers and a few of the physicians werestricken. But the exploration went bravely on. They found Chinadevastated, a howling wilderness through which wandered bands ofwild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived. All survivorswere put to death wherever found. And then began the great task,the sanitation of China. Five years and hundreds of millions oftreasure were consumed, and then the world moved in - not in zones,as was the idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, accordingto the democratic American programme. It was a vast and happyintermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982and the years that followed - a tremendous and successfulexperiment in cross-fertilization. We know to-day the splendidmechanical, intellectual, and art output that followed.It was in 1987, the Great Truce having been dissolved, that theancient quarrel between France and Germany over Alsace-Lorrainerecrudesced. The war-cloud grew dark and threatening in April, andon April 17 the Convention of Copenhagen was called. Therepresentatives of the nations of the world, being present, allnations solemnly pledged themselves never to use against oneanother the laboratory methods of warfare they had employed in theinvasion of China.-- Excerpt from Walt Mervin's "CERTAIN ESSAYS IN HISTORY."

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