Mao's Long March

In October 1934 the Chinese Communist Party was facing total extermination by the encircling armies of Chiang Kai-shek. One hundred thousand Communists broke through the trap and marched to safety a year later in a barren area of China 6,000 miles from where they started. When they were not fighting or fleeing the well-equipped land and air forces of their political enemies of the Kuomintang, they were under attack by enclaves of savage warlords and desperate aborigines whose stake, like their own, had long been sheer survival. They braved almost insurmountable extremes of high altitude, cold, cyclonic winds, quicksands and torrential rains, struggling against agonizing odds across twenty-four rivers and eighteen mountain ranges. Many perished, but the nucleus of the Red Army survived.

In trying to measure the physical and spiritual endurance that brought the tough, resilient revolutionaries through their long ordeal, historians reach back to accounts of the retreat of Xenophon’s 10,000 from the Persian onslaught, Hannibal’s march across the Alps to Rome, and Bolivar’s march over the Andes to Venezuela. All agree, however, that in sheer endurance and variety of trials surmounted by its heroes, the Chang Cheng beggars all comparison. Here, in spare prose that does not needlessly belittle their image, is the saga of their Long March and almost superhuman feat.

Readers of Mr. Edmonds’ account of the Red Army’s adventures, written from the most reliable source materials available, will appreciate Mao Tse-tung’s own words as he contemplated the fabulous journey at its end: “Since Pau Ku divided heaven and earth and the Three Sovereigns and the Five Emperors reigned, has there ever been in history a Long March like ours?”