It was a world full of characters. The Caveau Montmartre, for instance, was owned by a Corsican admiral who had been the chief-of-staff to the warlord Wu Peifu.

Mercenary considerations - more so in Shanghai probably than anywhere else - played the chief role in assessing social standing. Affluence opened the top drawer - often to morons.

In the military world money also decreed what the role should be. The American marines ranked, comparatively, in the millionaire class in joints which were not out of bounds to service personnel. American soldiers were still called doughboys and not G.I.s and it rankled the lesser-paid members of the international garrison, particularly the British lads, that the 'bloody Yanks' could fling the dollars about with gay abandon, grab all the 'tail' and buy a drink on a Wednesday while they were dying of thirst in barrack-room sobriety - and celibacy.

The Italians, too, had grave financial worries. Nevertheless, the Italians did have one asset - their Rudolph Valentino looks. The Adonises among Mussolini's men appeared to be concentrated on a gunboat in the river, the Bariolomeo Colleoni. Compared with the homespun Geordies, or the rugged marines, they were the male chorus line of the combined services, particularly the petty officers who wore their caps at rakish angles and whose uniforms, nipped at the waist and well padded about the shoulders, looked like tailors' dummies.

While they were well favoured by the girls in such places as the Majestic cabaret and its neighbour, the Little Club, which were the most popular taxi-dance ballrooms in bounds to servicemen, it was noticeable that during working hours they were scarce on the ground. Not so the American marines, who were noted for their generosity when there was a 'piece of ass' in prospect and threw around great wads of dollar bills. It was this predilection by the girls for the bed-time favours of the Fascisti that transformed the Majestic into a disaster area.

Thursday was the marines' pay-day. They were out in full force in the Majestic in their grey-green walking-out uniforms, or in civvies, and they were spending heavily. They were also fully confident that their money, if not their looks, would buy them the rewards they desired. They were Uncle Sam's men. Their faith in the magnetism of the Mighty Dollar was supreme.

Sadly their patriotic faith was misplaced. The dollar - or its equivalent in local currency - was gladly accepted by the girls but when it came to knocking-off time at about one in the morning its purchasing power was greatly devalued by the Italians who appeared like a plague of locusts to abduct many of the taxi-dancers for romps between the sheets.

This led one Thursday to an assault on an Italian petty officer by a marine corporal whose dancing partner spurned him by a waiting rickshaw for a dark-haired Romeo from the Bariolomeo Colleoni. And what irked the American was the fact that the goddammed wop hadn't spent a cent in the joint.

One blow led to another. In no time the ballroom floor of the Majestic was a seething mass of wildly flaying arms and feet and prostrate bodies as the Americans tore into the Italians, most of whom were from the Savoy Grenadiers.

It was after an Italian NCO had been flung bodily out of a window by a marine, to drop from second-storey height on to the Bubbling Well Road tramlines, that a call was sent to the Italian Grenadier barracks for reinforcements.

They came in trucks and burst in armed with clubs, knives, bayonets . . . anything handy. The gore flowed freely. The outnumbered marines, retreat cut off fox,-ht to the end. Screaming cabaret girls, dashing for the powder room, were sent flying. One poor Russian girl ended up completely out to the wide in the bass drum of the band. Others fainted dead away. Glass columns were shattered. Tables were reduced to matchwood. The floor was littered with the groaning wounded.

The carnage became even worse when the American military police arrived and, in true New York style, began clubbing their own men to insensibility. They were joined by the Italian police who, less robustly, managed to herd off the Grenadiers and navy boys so that a fleet of ambulances could be loaded with the casualties who were, in many cases, in extremely dangerous conditions.

Poor Mr Wong, the owner of the Majestic, lost all his oriental inscrutability as he surveyed the damage, wrung his hands and estimated the colossal cost of the repairs that would have to be carried out. He let it be known that he would sue both the American and Italian governments for the havoc caused by the 'long-nosed barbarians' it was China's misfortune to have to accommodate.

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