Dropping in on a Chinese War in 1924

Here’s an anecdote from 1924 about the day the American novelist Peter B Kyne (below – a now largely forgotten, but once very popular author, whose books were the basis for many silent movies), his wife Helen and their friend Carl Crow (resident of course in Shanghai) visited the battlefield at Lieuko. It seems to have been rather an exciting day…this tendency for foreigners to take a drive out to battlefields was a long established one with people visiting Taiping battles right through to watching the Chinese fight the Japanese after 1937. What on earth the combatants thought of these foreigners wandering through their battlefields is not recorded!!