About 15 or 20 per cent of Canton's population may well be termed its floating population, drifting away to other parts when there is a war scare, coming back when their nerves get a bit steady again. Talk of promiscuous bombing on a wholesale scale, and of the certainty of an invasion of South China from the sea, as evidenced by a fleet of 20 Japanese warships near Macao, have gotten the "floaters" off to Hongkong once more.
Nor have all of the more timid picked Hongkong as the safe spot this time. Too much gossip about Britain being China's ally has had the marked tendency to turn their thoughts to Kwangsi as a safer asylum and many of the throngs that have been arriving from Hankow have had their luggage carried over to West River ships that will take them to Wuchow.
Japanese infantrymen tried, at Bias Bay, marines at Mirs Bay, to put ashore in the one instance 1,000, the other 800, men, doubtless without the serious intention of maintaining a foothold on Chinese soil, but simply to test the strength of Chinese resistance. It is significant that both times planes flew over the roads to detect signs of troops being moved up.
Equally significant is the way in which air raids have been conducted. On three separate days it was more than five hours after the first warning was sounded in Canton until the *"all clear" signal was given, and one group after another of Japanese aircraft followed the path of the Canton-Kowloon, Canton-Hankow and Canton-Samshui Rail-they want to make it hard for troops [Fin to be brought into that region. Were the Sinning Railway, however, to be obliterated, the Chinese can fall back on the highways and these can never be made useless from the air.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.