THE BURMA ROAD

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXII, Issue 16, 28 February 1941, Page 6

THE BURMA ROAD

HOW IT WAS MADE

A GIGANTIC TASK

The whole civilised world looks on with admiration at the spectacle of the Chinese people standing up to the bullying Japs, who for years have been making war on them and stealing their country.

The war has taken a new turn with the substantial loans made to China by Britain and the United States and the reopening of .the Burma Road, which in itself is a romantic achievement bearing witness to the indomitable courage of the hard-pressed and much-tried Chinese people. The Burma Road is a new back door into China, running from the seaport of Rangoon in Burma thousands of miles north to the seat of Chiang Kaishek in the Province of Yunnan. It has come about in this way, writes Arthur Mee.

Biggest Single Country As Japan has taken port after port and city after city in Eastern China, Chiang Kai-shek has moved his people westward, for China is the biggest single country in the world, with 400 million people. So it is that, as the Japanese make their way slowly forward the Chinese can press on hundreds of miles inland and start building up a new life and a new resistance.

They can go back 500 miles from the seacoast till "they come to the mountains and forests and rolling rivers and upland pastures of Tibet. In Yunnan Province, Chiang Kaishek has trained large reinforcements for his troops.

This vast army in the heart of China must have arms and munitions, and it is to supply these that the Burma Road has been developed out of an old mule-track.

The new piece of Chinese road is about 650 miles long and links up with the general road system of the country. It links up also with the great road the British made in Burma long ago, when it was hoped to carry the road from Rangoon to Mandalay right into China. Part of the old road is as old as Marco Polo, who walked along it when it was a narrow stone track. The whole of the British road has now been put right, and the Chinese made themselv.es responsible over a year ago for their own part of it.

We read lately of some Royal Canadian Engineers who shocked an English county council by doing a piece of road work in seven weeks for which the council had estimated on a timetable of two years. But they had all the facilities of mechanised service; the Chinese have had to make much of their road with such tools as have been in use for 2000 years, and most of the work was done by hand.

The people rallied to the call of Ohiang Kai-shek and made this highway with a marvellous enthusiasm born of the knowledge that it meant life and liberty to them. Families or clans gathered together, men, women, and children in their thousands, breaking down great rocks, leading oxen to draw the heavier boulders on sledges, and setting up these rocks as walls to line the road.

Grandfathers cracked rocks into small pieces for the making of the road itself and for the concrete bridges, and the surface was made with stone fragments, and smoothed down with crude rollers.

One section of the new road had to be blasted through a narrow gorge; other sections ran through mountain passes 8000 feet high, and over rivers. A marvellous road it is, often running through miles of pine forests and vast stretches of rhododendrons, . so that it. is beautiful as well as strongly built.

We must 2iope it will prove to be a new life-line for China, enabling her to throw back the Japanese Army, which after two generations of civilisation has gone back to barbarism in the true Nazi-Mussi style.

An old woman of 82, after "being rescued from her bombed home in London, said to the ambulance workers when they asked her how she felt: "I .am fine, but if any of you boys are going back to that rubble, you might bring me my knitting, for I hate sitting about doing nothing."—The Children's Newspaper, London.

A golf club near London has posted the following wartime rules: "1. The position of known delayed action bombs will be marked by red flags placed at a reasonably, but not guaranteed, safe distance. 2. A ball removed by enemy action may be replaced as near as possible to where it lay, or if lost or destroyed, another ball may be dropped not nearer the hole without penalty. 3. Competitors during gunfire or while bombs are falling may take cover without penalty."—Daily Express, London.

Much of the professional aspect that life assurance has taken on is due to the security which it affords. Men have seen it weather the winds of war and pestilence, of depression and financial adversity— they have seen it steadfast in a time of disaster. It has been a

great rock upon which to found their homes and business, it stands as a sure foundation in an uncertain world and they are duly appreciative.