With the rail routes from Peiping blocked by the battle front, the journey now took eight days, first by sea around the Shantung peninsula, then via the Lunghai line to Chengchow, then southbound to Hankow. Already “quite fed up with everything and everybody,” as Win wrote to her daughters, Stilwell boarded the train at Hsuchow in a swarm of refugees: “13 occupants in 8 seats, didn’t dare get up to go to the toilet. Cold…no food, no water.” After two days and two nights he drank the cold tea from a sleeping passenger’s teapot, for the first moisture in 44 hours.
