3-023-556 - British Pathe Ltd/Heritage Images

Japanese Soldiers Marching and Riding On Horseback Under an Arch and Through a Street of a Chinese Town With a Japanese Flag, 1937. 'The Japanese marching into China. Battles amid the rice fields and the swamps. Not just another minor Japanese adventure but an all-out attempt to conquer the whole country...The Japanese have not yet realised that from China's point of view, this is a war which could last, if need be, forever...The guns thunder over the brown plains of China. Mud huts dissolve fast under high explosive, but China is big, China is vast, China is Asia. So they begin their triumphant spectacular march into the interior, an interior vaster even than the ambitions of their leaders, marching on and on into a land that will, like the deadly fly-catcher, resist them, then accept them, and finally suck the blood from their bodies. On and on, even to the Great Wall itself. And so they cross the Wall, and conquer, not realising that in fact, all that they have conquered is space'. From "Time To Remember - Sense Of Values", 1937 (Reel 3); documentary film about the events of 1937, war in the Far East, build up to war in Europe.