Hiroshima Joe (39 page)

Sandingham held the photograph under the dim light. It showed the inhabitants of his hut ranked down the central aisle between the bunks and
tatami.
They were all dressed in their best articles of clothing – at least, those to the forefront were – some of which had been borrowed under orders from fellow PoWs in other barracks. No one was smiling. A few looked blankly at the camera while the rest attempted not to show malice for what was so obviously a put-up job. Any hint of disagreement or obvious displeasure would be certain to warrant a beating after the shutter had revealed its secrets.

Before them, his back to the camera, was the commandant. He was saluting. The prisoners were standing to attention, but each held in his hands either a book or a bowl within which was piled what appeared to be food. It wasn’t. It was sawdust. To add realism, one of two of them had real buns beside their sawdust ‘rice’; but these were taken away after the silver chloride plate was exposed.

‘One day, I’m going to get out of this shit-hole and tell the truth about that picture.’

‘Don’t be so optimistic, Taff. You’ll have to find a senior officer to tell the tale to. How many would believe it?’

‘Someone will believe,’ Sandingham said quietly. ‘One day, the story will get out and there will be people who will believe. There will be doubters and pooh-poohers and there will be those who will listen and exaggerate the stories for their own ends. There will be others who will believe it but will play it down just as there will be others who’ll listen and believe but ignore it all. What they won’t believe is the kindness of some of the Japs. Most of them – the whole damn nation, probably – will be branded for decades as mean-minded, sadistic little yellow sods. Nips. Narrow-minded little cunts, as quick with the rifle butt to the ribs as with the cigarette butt to the cheeks of your arse and the skin of your balls. We’ll remember them for that. We’ll forget the rest.’

Nobody answered him until Foster did. He was a prisoner who before the war had been an engineer for a tin mine up-country from Kuala Lumpur. He was thin on capture, and was now so near to death from starvation that his skin was tight across every surface bone of his body. His wrists looked as brittle as matches and his face was like a skull with eyes. His chapped lips were drawn to bloodless pencil lines. He had suffered worse than most from the deficient diet as he was allergic to some of the starchy root vegetables they were fed: if he ate them, he threw them up soon afterwards, losing not only what he could not eat but also what he had been able to swallow and could normally retain.

‘Joe’s right. We shall forget the kindnesses. Once we’re liberated, we’ll overlook the good things and recall only the bad. Joe’s man in the timber yard; the sympathetic
hancho
at the docks; Phil’s Private Higashino from Camp Seventeen; Natch’s two lady-friends at the railway marshalling yard … We’ll forget them. We’ll remember the bastards – Coffin Charlie, Pluto…’

‘Napoleon, Wada, White Pig, Fujihara…’

Sandingham stopped listening to the catalogue. He had his own index of horrors: Willy Stewart’s crucifixion, Baz’s voice drifting out to sea, the floating peak cap … Bob’s death and the ambush at Wong Nai Chung Gap. Enough was enough.

As for liberation – that was the ultimate in pipe-dreams.

*   *   *

There was a sound of loud, repetitive hammering in the early light, but no one took any notice of it until the prisoners began to stir for the day’s work.

‘This you’ve gotta see. You’d not believe it…’

Sandingham and two others of his
shotai
were heading for the parade ground where the lorry was due to arrive at any minute.

‘What is it?’

‘New school rools nailed up by the Headmaster him-self,’ replied the US naval rating. ‘You ain’t gonna believe it.’ He did not speak too loudly in case there was an interpreter about, out of sight around a corner.

A board, four feet square, had been nailed to the wall of the barrack that overlooked the square. The paint was new and the lettering was English, but also quaintly Japanese. Sandingham stood close to read it, his eyes smarting in the cold.

1. It no allow kill commandent:

Punished – life imprison & shooted to death

2. It no allow damage commandent:

Punished – life imprison & punished with shoot

3. It no allow think kill commandent:

Punished – shooted to death & imprison

4. It no allow steal Imprieal Japanese Army:

Punished – big punish & death may be

5. It no allow rude to Japanese Imprieal Army solder

Punished – ordinary punish & keep life

6. It no allow escap

‘Apropos Number Three,’ asked Foster, ‘do you think you’re shot before or after life in prison?’

‘Yes,’ answered Sandingham. ‘And in Number Four, who the hell would want to steal the IJA?’

The American rating looked about him. The nearest guard was seventy-five feet away, staring out through the wire.

‘I sure know. Gen’ral MacArthur sure would!’

‘I wonder,’ Sandingham pointed out in the lorry, just as it was about to leave, ‘how they’d prove Number Three.’

‘They wouldn’t. They just do it and fuck you, Jack.’

*   *   *

It was evening, the first week of March. The sun was set, the sky a light, flesh pink and Sandingham was sitting on the steps to the kitchen building cleaning the woks that had been used to prepare the evening food. As chemical cleaners were short to the point of invisibility, he was using a mixture of grit, wood-ash and water to remove the smears of food from the metal.

Foster appeared and sat next to him on the bottom step. He had a cigarette in his right hand, the fingers now so bony it looked as if he were clawing at the tobacco rather than holding it between two digits. He lifted it to his lips and sucked noisily on it. He had had trouble getting his lips to meet and air eked in at the corners. He had been off sick from the
shotai
for more than a fortnight and had spent his days with two other seriously ill men down at the beach, under the single gaze of a guard who had lost an eye fighting in China. He was a member of the
gunzoku,
the corps of disabled servicemen from all ranks who had been invalided into the prison camps to release fitter men for active service.

Every morning, they were marched – ‘walked’ would be more accurate, for they no longer had the strength to march in the rigid goosestep of the Japanese Army style – to the sandy beaches two miles away where they spent the day seeking out the tiny white crabs that inhabited the littoral zones. The crabs were no bigger than a half-crown coin, even when fully grown, and they were found in burrows in the sand from which they carried out sorties to establish their own territories against others of their own kind, searched for any organic material washed up and left behind on the tidemark and ran to the waters’ edge to wet their gill filaments. If one were careful, one could waylay them on their route back from the sea to their burrow, for under no circumstance would they entertain hiding in another crab’s tunnel.

These crabs, with winkles, small shore clams and mussels, tiny fish trapped in rock pools and edible seaweed were stirred into the evening meal, giving it a gritty texture but adding valuable protein in the process. On occasion, the three prisoners would discover sea birds’ nests and steal the eggs. If they were particularly hungry, and if they were sure the fragile linings to their stomachs could accommodate it, they ate some of the shellfish raw. More often they would eat the gulls’ eggs by drinking the yolk and sticky albumen from a sliced eggshell.

‘Do you know what happened today, Joe?’

Sandingham shook his head and grunted, his hands swilling and grinding the grey mixture in the utensils.

‘Our
gunzoku
– Cyclops – was mounting guard on us at the beach when we found a gull’s nest by the spring in the rocks. Four eggs in it, bluey-whitish colour. Big as a bantam’s. He saw us find it from where he was squatting on the first dune and shouted something to us. We thought we were in for it for wandering too far from him, but instead he gets up from his dune and walks over to us, leaving his rifle in the grass.’

‘Why didn’t you grab it?’ was Sandingham’s automatic response.

‘What’s the use?’

He nodded in agreement.

‘Anyway, when he got to us,’ Foster carried on, ‘he pointed to the eggs. We’d not touched them. He signals to pick them up, so I do. Then what?’ He drew on his cigarette and waited until he had exhaled before speaking again. ‘He takes one, cuts off the top with a little jack-knife he had in his pocket, gives it to Brackenby. Takes another from me, slices it open and hands it to Alan. Takes a third. Tops it. Gives it to me. Takes the fourth, removes the top, says, “Jabber-jabber onzarokku” and drinks it back in one, just like any old
shogoto.
What do you make of that?’

He thought: if the guard was prepared to share a raw egg with a PoW, this meant either that the egg was a rare local delicacy or the captor was as hungry as his captives. The latter seemed the most likely explanation, and Sandingham said so.

‘I never thought of that,’ said Foster. ‘Poor bastards…’

Leaning against the door jamb of the kitchen building, he pulled again on the cigarette. Sandingham heard his hiss of breath above the swishing sounds of his chore.

The woks were finished. He stood up, tipped out the filthy water, piled them into each other and lifted them into the kitchen. The rice cauldron was next. He lifted this off the floor by the big stove, slopped some clean water in it from the storage barrel, dropped some ashes on the water and tipped in a handful of sand. Carrying the cauldron outside, he put it down by the step and started to rub the inside clean.

‘I think they’re starving. The Japs. I think things are getting pretty bloody tight for them, too. The raids have increased, the USN’s semi-blockading Japan and their own navy’s getting thrashed to hell.’

Sandingham looked to the ground by the cauldron where something thin and white caught his attention. It was a half-smoked cigarette, the flame still feebly glowing.

Foster was dead. His head was tilted to one side and his mouth was shut. His eyes were open and blank and his hands were loose on his lap. Sandingham touched him and he was already cold. It couldn’t have been three minutes.

Looking in the direction of the dead man’s eyes, he saw what he had been looking at last. It was the side of a barrack hut, the dust whipping in an evening breeze. It was the typical panorama of captivity. The last of the sunlight was dimmer now.

‘Poor bastard,’ he whispered to Foster, unaware that he was quoting the man’s last words. ‘You poor bastard.’

There was nothing else to do. He left the cauldron and went in search of the senior officer who would act as priest. The Dutchman had been dead for less than a month.

*   *   *

The summer of 1944 inexorably moved along. News of the successes in Europe filtered through, partly via the study group and partly through the good offices of Mr Mishima who was able, on rare occasions, to receive the BBC or the Americans on his radio. He did this late at night, without anyone knowing.

He wasn’t a turncoat. Nor a traitor. He explained it all to Sandingham one midday break.

‘You see, I know Japan is finished. We are an island and we cannot fight. We live under Bushido and Bushido is old-fashioned now. The laws of Bushido, of honour, of that kind of patriotism, are out of date. We must move into the new era.
How
is the question.’

It was not defeatist but realist talk, and both men knew it.

‘See there.’

Mishima pointed to an ant nest under a pile of bark chippings and debris.

‘See the ants? There are red ants and there are black ants. The black ants eat tree juice and the red ants eat meat. They eat dead moths and grasshoppers, dead mice and rotten things like that. Now the black ants are in the red ant world. They are fighting.’

Sandingham looked closer. Sure enough, the red and black ants were going at each other hammer and tongs. The battle was fierce and many black ants were dying. Many more than the red ones.

‘Watch.’

A few minutes later, there was a distinct pause in the fighting. The black ants surged forward, collected up their dead and retreated with them, heaping them under a large roof of bark. Then the battle recommenced.

‘They have a truce to collect their dead. Now they fight. All over again.’

Three times a truce was invisibly, inaudibly ordered. Finally, the black ants came forward and there was much feeler waving with the red ants; then the black ants retreated and the red ants, after a final assault, won the day. They did not follow the black ants to their nests, but left them to retreat – ignored them. Even so, the black ants had decisively lost.

‘Japan is the army of black ants,’ Mishima said. ‘They could not win. But still they fought until it was hopeless. Too many were dying. Then they ask for peace and the red ants give it after showing for a last time how strong they are.’ He shifted to keep himself in the shade. ‘Men are like ants. If you were a Buddhist teacher you would know. Watch ants and you see the world of men in tiny.’

‘Miniature,’ Sandingham corrected him.

Mishima smiled and thanked him for the putting right, before saying, ‘But you and I? Are we black or red? We are neither. It doesn’t matter. So long as we live and do not fight amongst ourselves. Perhaps we are Buddhist ants.’ The
hancho
was getting up from his chair in the shadow of the office. ‘Best we are no colour. Just be ants.’

That afternoon, as they strove at the saws and planers, Sandingham thought to himself that Mishima was wrong. At least, he was partly so. Ants accept when they are beaten or winners and then they stop. Men don’t do that: they go on and on until the bitter, attritious end.

Arriving back in the camp that evening, Sandingham was met by an uproar of excitement amongst the prisoners. An IJA vehicle convoy had visited them during the day and delivered thirty-seven prisoners. They were all American sailors and they were billetted in the hut by the latrines, everyone originally in there having been moved out and distributed to the other barracks, to step into dead men’s places.