CHINA'S GALLANT CHILDREN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23169, 15 October 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

CHINA'S GALLANT CHILDREN

one Chinese Scout is left who is abb to tell the story of the 16 Scouts and Guides who left Singapore to beli> their country behind the fighting line.

Ng t'hee King, the last of the band who made the supreme sacrifice, lies in a military hospital in tortured Hankow with two bullet wounds and a fractured skull. His only friend from Singapore is Miss Chong \eng lack, who was one of the Singapore Chinese Service Corps. She, like the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, served iti the First Aid Squads of the battle front, and was wounded by machine-gun fire while serving in a field station during the fighting at Sliansi. She has lost a leg, ten of Ng Chee King's companions have lost their lives, two are badly wounded, the rest are missing. They were boys, and not one was twenty years old. They were the .cream of the Chinese Scouts and

Guides in Malaya, and the leader of the seven girls among them was the adored only daughter of a wealthy Singapore merchant. The Japanese bombs and bullets mowed them down impartially. When the Chinese troops abandoned Shanghai one Scout, while carrying a message, was killed bv a stray bullet, another fell in the bombing of a Bed Cross truck carrying wounded. Cheng Kong Tee, one of the the Girl Guides, lost her life during an air raid while she was directing the escape of war refugees around Lotien. These are the stories of those whose fate is known. Of the others, these Unknown Soldiers of the Bed Cross, nothing more can be learned. Tlicy have been lost under the flood of this cruel Japanese war. But what they did, and why they faced , their fate without fear, will forgotten. A pation which has stich sons and daughters can never bo overborne.