Foreign News: Longest Way Round

Shy, bespectacled Colin MacDonald, the London Times's Far Eastern Correspondent, was in Hong Kong en route to Chungking when war broke out. Hong Kong-Chungking air service was interrupted.

On Dec. 8 he boarded a British destroyer, which slipped by blockading Japanese warships and steamed into Manila Bay through strange mine fields which sank an intercoastal steamer. From Manila he hurried to Dutch Borneo, then to Singapore. From Singapore he got to Médan on Dutch Sumatra, took the last commercial plane to Rangoon. On Dec. 28 the Japanese made their parachute attack on Médan.

On Dec. 23 the Japanese bombed Rangoon, devastated the neighborhood of his hotel. He moved to another. On Christmas the Japanese razed that hotel with incendiaries. Finally cadging a ride by plane to Lashio and another to Kunming, much-traveled Correspondent MacDonald arrived in China, wrote his dispatch, then proceeded to Chungking to wind up his 4,700-mile trip in his usual unruffled state.