ABSTRACT
When China’s War of Resistance against Japan broke out in 1937, many foreign correspondents rushed to China. Peter Fleming covered the war for The Times. Joris Ivens, the Dutch Left-wing film-maker, led the History Today film crew. He as well as Robert Capa, the war photographer, had moved on straight from Spain, where Franco had just prevailed in the Spanish Civil War. Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden felt like ‘characters in one of Jules Verne’s stories about lunatic English explorers’ when they travelled to the battlefields of China. Isherwood wrote with sympathy about Chinese soldiers and Auden in his poems expressed the sad absurdity of war. 1 Franco’s victory in Spain, the spread of militarism and fascism in Europe, the callousness of appeasing West European democracies, the alternative of Communism, and the dread of another world war were the themes featuring in their reporting on the events unfolding in China.
