But we weren’t sad or bitter about anything in particular. It was just that we felt forlorn and helpless.
Usually we sang when we were unhappy, but that night we didn’t. We lay on the floor to sleep, using our packs as pillows. The guns we had guarded so carefully were gone. It was a short, restless night.
After that we spent many unreal days—numb at heart, but frantically busy. Putting our arms and equipment in order, turning them in, transporting them, making various reports and investigations, looking for provisions—all this kept us so rushed that we had no time to think.
When I look back on that period I always recall a certain incident.
The British troops had decided to stay in that village for three or four days, and relegated the menial tasks to us prisoners of war. One morning several of us were on K.P. duty. We were to pluck some chickens the villagers had offered to the troops.
Packed tight in a basket, the chickens stuck their heads out through the meshes and worriedly looked here and there, jerking their cockscombs. A Burmese cook grabbed one bird at a time from the basket, laid it on a stone, and chopped its head off with a dah—a hatchet-like implement that the Burmese wear hanging from their waist.
The cook chewed betel nut and spat out red juice as he lazily did his work. Betel nut is the fruit of the betel palm; the people of Southeast Asia chew it like chewing gum, but it is red and dyes the mouth, teeth, and lips an unpleasant color. The cook chopped the heads off one bird after another, and we were to pluck them.
To our astonishment, one of the chickens that had just had its head cut off started to flutter about. Flapping its wings and scattering downy feathers, it hopped around erratically. We were caught by surprise and dropped the chickens in our hands. They came alive too, and stretching their headless necks ran around in circles.
There were about a dozen chicken heads lying strewn on the ground. All of them had a sickly, reproachful look about them with their beaks open and their whitish eyelids closed. But the headless bodies were still alive; they were still flapping their beautiful sleek wings. Drunkenly weaving here and there, the birds finally ran into the bushes, or cowered down in the grass.
Everybody gathered to see this strange sight. There were some who laughed, but others frowned distastefully. “How do you suppose it feels, running around like that without a head?” someone asked.
At that point the captain came over, looking for Mizushima. “Mizushima, where are you?” he called in a loud voice. Mizushima came on the run.
“We just got an intelligence report,” the captain told him. “You see that mountain?” He pointed to a triangular rocky peak in one of the distant ranges. “Some Japanese troops are holed up there, and they won’t surrender. For three days now the British have been attacking them, but they’re still fighting back. At this rate they’ll have to be wiped out. I asked a British officer to let one of us go over and try to talk them into giving themselves up. I told him we want to do what we can to prevent any useless killing, and he said we could try it. How about it, Mizushima, will you go and see if you can persuade them? If you don’t, I will.”
We all looked toward the triangular peak. It seemed to be about half a day’s walk away. It was near the Siamese border, and its gray head jutted out of a thick forest. We strained our ears to listen but could hear no explosion. Thin columns of smoke rose from villages here and there in the valleys below; perhaps it was only our imagination, but the atmosphere near that peak looked yellowish and turbid. There dozens of our fellow countrymen were about to die a useless death. Knowing this, we stared toward the peak.
Mizushima thought for a while and then answered crisply, “I’ll go.” Then he added, “I don’t know how I’ll manage it, but I’ll do whatever the situation calls for.”
“Good,” the captain said. “Our company is being sent to a P.O.W. camp in Mudon, in southern Burma. When you’ve finished your mission, follow us there. The British officer says they’ll let you rejoin us.”
The two men saluted.
Mizushima got ready right away. He dressed lightly, carried no arms, and wore no insignia. The captain took off his own shoes, which were still in fairly good condition, and insisted on exchanging shoes with him. Then he gripped Mizushima’s hand firmly. For our part, we slipped him a broiled chicken leg.
Ten minutes later we saw Mizushima with a British soldier and a guide walking along a path under the cliff far below us. Mizushima had rations strapped to his waist and was carrying the harp on his shoulder. When he looked up and saw us waving our caps, he smiled, raised his hand to the harp, and strummed a loud chord.
As we watched him go, we thought that Mizushima was the kind of man who could carry it off, that his mission would probably be a great success.
CHAPTER TWO
UNDER the orders of the British army, our company went from the mountains into the plains, then by boat down the Sittang River, and at last by train and truck to Mudon. There we were put into a P.O.W. camp.
Our fears for our own lives soon disappeared. We learned that our country had been defeated, almost destroyed, but that it was not entirely ruined and that we prisoners of war were to be repatriated some day.
In Mudon we began our new life of waiting for the day to go home.
Our quarters consisted of a simple nipah house—a hut of bamboo poles with the floor high off the ground, topped by a thatched roof. It was too well ventilated to get very damp. We had to sleep without bedding, but that was no real hardship in such a hot climate. The house was enclosed by a bamboo stockade, which not only kept us in but kept others out. An Indian sentry stood at the entrance, and whenever he saw a vendor or anyone trying to steal in, he would fire blank shots to scare him away.
There was a long row of stockades like this, and each of them held a group of prisoners. However, we were forbidden all communication with the other prisoners, so we knew nothing of what was going on outside. Regulations of this kind were strictly enforced, but otherwise the treatment was lenient.
Now and then we would be ordered out on some construction or lumbering job, but on the whole we lived an uneventful, monotonous life, with nothing to do.
We hadn’t spent peaceful days like this for a long time—for years, in fact. We had been constantly agitated, harassed, pursued; always tense and anxious about what might happen next. During the past year especially, we lived in a world of blinding flashes and deafening explosions. Suddenly all that stopped—now there were no bombings, no commands, no jumping to our feet in the middle of the night. From one day to the next we stayed quietly in our little nipah house, gazing out at a palm grove. At first it seemed almost unbearably strange to us. As we sat there vacantly, we felt nervous and fearful in our hearts. Eventually, though, this vague uneasiness left us and we became used to our quiet life.
But just as we were feeling more relaxed, a different sort of uneasiness began to trouble us. This time we worried because Mizushima had been gone so long.
At the beginning we were confident that Mizushima would join us here in a few days. We expected the gate to swing open any moment, and Mizushima to walk in as vigorous and high spirited as ever. We often found ourselves looking toward the gate. Sometimes we even thought we heard his footsteps.
But no matter how long we waited, he never came.
Конец
