Peiping, Sept. 20.
An interesting description of conditions in the area between Peiping and the Japanese front on the Peiping-Hankow railway line was given by a representative of Trans-Ocean who tried to reach the Japanese front but was compelled to desist by ihe frightful conditions of the ronds which are blocked by military traffic and also are partially destroyed.
The direction of -the Japanese advance beyond the Marco Polo bridge was clearly traceable by shell-holes and demolished houses. The pressman added that at several points he encountered deep ditches dug by the Chinese in the fields and across the roads as "tank traps" He failed to see the horrors of war usually associated with a battlefield as corpses of soldiers killed in the recent fighting had already been buried by the troops of the Japanese engineering corps or by Chinese labourers. His general impression was that the fighting in this section could not have been as violent as earlier reports indicated.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.