The autumn of 1938 brought another phase of discouragement. Relying on the prestige of British power and the nearness of Hong Kong, the Chinese were not watchful in the Canton area. The Japanese landed almost unopposed. Chinese negligence, corruption, and a little treachery worked in their favor. The landing forces performed almost superhuman feats of endurance in forced marches overland; on several occasions Japanese advance troops ran so far ahead of schedule that Japanese warplanes, thinking them disguised Chinese, strafed them![15] Canton fell without a major battle. Hankow, the great radical capital, scene of the 1926-27 Leftist upsurge and of the anti-Fascist enthusiasm of 1938, was entered by the Imperial Japanese army, and the entire Wu-han area was lost to China. [Footnote 15: An engrossing first-hand account of this is to be found in Hino, Ashihei, _Sea and Soldiers_, Tokyo, 1940. This, with its three companion volumes, _Mud and Soldiers_, _Flower and Soldiers_, and _Barley and Soldiers_, Tokyo, 1939 and 1940, forms an eloquent, humane, sensitive narrative of a young Japanese writer serving with the Imperial forces in China. The series ranks with the great narratives of the European war of 1914-18, and expresses the Japanolatrist devoutness, the naïveté, and bewildering courage of much of the Japanese infantry, but does so through the medium of a literary craftsmanship rare in any army.] Not only was the Hankow period ended. By breaking the last rail connection of the Chinese government and the outside world, and by driving the Chinese leadership into the remote interior, Japan shut off the ready play of international influence on domestic Chinese politics. Foreign visitors became more rare. The government, moving to the mountain fastnesses of Szechuan, found a home on the great Gibraltar-like promontory of Chungking city, tiered along cliffs above the Yangtze and Kialing rivers. The last withdrawal was a final test of strength. Hankow, six hundred miles up-river, was commercially, architecturally, and politically a coastal city. It was still an outpost of world imperialism and of modern technology. With the next remove the Chinese government found itself beyond tangible Western influence; for the first time since 1860 the capital was out of the military reach of Western powers, and in a city which had only slight traces of Western influence. THE CHUNGKING PERIOD