Volume 17, Number 1 · July 22, 1971
Peanuts and the Good Soldier
By John Gittings
Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945
by Barbara Tuchman
Macmillan, 621 pp., $10.00
In 1927, the province of Shantung was under the control of the warlord Chang Tsung-chang, a ferocious excoolie with a taste for white mercenaries and white women. His forces included a Russian brigade with four armored trains; he himself went to war with a trainload of forty-two concubines, of whom half were also White Russians. Warlord Chang went by the nickname of 'Old Eighty-six,' because, so Mrs. Tuchman delicately explains, 'the height of a pile of that number of silver dollars reputedly represented the length of the most valued portion of his anatomy in action.'
Review, 2756 words
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