ROBIN HYDE’S ORDEAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 July 1938, Page 6

ROBIN HYDE’S ORDEAL

TERRIFYING EXPERIENCES IN CHINA TRAVEL THROUGH BATTLE AREAS. TREATMENT BY JAPANESE. By Telegraph —Pres? Association. Copyright. (Recd This Day, 12.55 p.m.) LONDON, July 15. The Hong Kong correspondent of "The Times” says an amazing story of terrifying experiences in China is related by Miss Iris Wilkinson (the New Zealand writer, Robin Hyde), who is still in hospital suffering from nervous prostration. She said the position became acute on May 5, when Japanese planes dropped 200 incendiary bombs on Suchow. Many buildings were set on Are and the hospitals overflowed with civilian casualties. The Chinese on May 14 informed her that the railway had been severed by the Japanese and that the only way to escape would be on foot. She decided to trek northward to the coast. She started illequipped and suffering from an almost blinded eye, caused by a crazed Chinese refugee striking her with an electric torch. This injury is still evident. After a long and exciting trudge, she was given a lift foi' part of the way by a Japanese lorry, an officer declaring that she would have been shot if she had been Chinese. After further foot-slogging, she reached a Chinese outpost, where the commander provided her with a uniform and a donkey, on which spie rode some distance, seeing occasional fighting. Eventually she reached the Tsinpu Railway and decided to walk along the frack to Tsingtao. A Japanese troop train overtook her and offered her a lift to Tsingtao, but when she was aboard she found the train was going to Suchow. which she reached again on June 7. Undaunted, she decided again to attempt the trudge. After two days she was overtaken along the railway by Japanese soldiers on a trolley and was offered a lift, but because of the unpleasantness of her companions she left the trolley at Lungchen, where she met a Japanese officer who placed her on a troop train going to Tsingtao, which she reached after spending two days and

two nights in the same compartment with fourteen Japanese soldiers, sleeping on a mat. She was taken to Japanese headquarters at Tsingtao. given a hotel lodging for one day, and then was handed over to the British authorities. Later she went to Hong Kong, where she is slowly recuperating.