At the same time he know that the suspicious and not too friendly Wu-Han armies were on his heels and that, if he moved in sufficient force to make sure of seizing control in Chibli he would Jose the balance of} power in Honan, lose his grip on the western road through Tungkuan into Shensi and would put himself in position where ho would simply' have to have Tientsin, Peking and Kalgan or find himself high and dry a poor country between the railways with no base, no line of retreat] and no outlet to the sea. His!
"into Yen's prospective therefore a desperate not yet fully' attained his objectives but is being blocked so effectually politically that he cannot very well attain. them without throwing off his Kuomintang mask, desperate things are still expected of him.
As the Fengtien armies fell back on the Peking-Hankow railway, releasing first the Shansi armies at Shihehiachuang, it became _knqwn that the Kuominchun force were not following the retreat north of Shihehiachuang but wer moving eastward from the railway, their first objective being Hochienfu. Sun Chuan-fang was sent from Machang to face them and Heilungkiang and Kirin support was promiscd_him. From that time forward until young] Chang Hsueh-liang's flight from Peking it was impossible to get acfeurate information here of Kuomin-fe hun progress except that Feng's feavalry were known to have appeared not only at Hochien but far to the eastward within striking distance of the Tsin-Pu line. -On the day before. young Chang's flight the Chinese press here published a report that a large Kuominchun force had appeared at the town of Ku-an, not over thirty miles due sooth of Peking, but no one believed it, except perhaps the high military officials who had information which they did] not give out,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.