I returned to London to find a letter from a White Russian, approving strongly of the fact that I had begun the book with the Soviet victory of Khalkin Gol over the Japanese in August 1939. He had been a schoolboy at an English school in Tientsin at the time and was travelling on a Japanese run train. ‘We had stopped at the railway junction of Feng tai and suddenly rather hysterical Japanese conductors came racing through the compartments, and pulling down the blinds – warning us, mainly Europeans, not to try to steal a look.  As soon as they left, I lifted our blind and recoiled with horror. I was staring into the compartment of a hospital train – with racks of stretchers bearing badly wounded Japanese soldiers, blood seeping thought their bandages. With a schoolboy’s inherent curiosity, I had discovered a military secret – the defeat and heavy casualties suffered by the Japanese at the hands of the Russian forces in Mongolia.’