The prisoner began climbing the second gate like someone looking for the chance to persuade more intimately. From Compound C a roughly performed bugle call was now heard, and it seemed to give license to a sudden uproar, and caused the sentry all the more tightly to keep his weapon and his sharpest attention pointed at Ban’s torso, whose body was on the midstrands of the gate’s wire. A mass of raging men was streaming from the huts with outlandish threats on their lips; blossoms of fire were glinting through doorways and shattering windows and beginning to reach for the under eaves. Smoke already rose from rooftops, promising they would go too. The running figures in the compound, who appeared to be sprinting in all directions including towards him, were not figures stampeded by flames. These were the fire starters themselves. There were enough of them to take his breath, and they moved towards him across Compound C’s open ground, and some were very fast.
Now, he was sure, the entire garrison must know that this wasn’t a plain night, but the end of all plain nights. Two other guards with rifles were jogging towards him along the Main Road from the direction of the quarter guard tent and a little behind them limped Lieutenant Cook. The prisoner topped the wire and, rather than alarm the garrison, politely climbed down to turn and face them.
Lieutenant Cook and the three guards looked in bewilderment at Ban’s face as he yelled at them words that sounded impossibly like “For there are murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.”
But such an utterance defied belief.
“Escape!” then yelled Ban. “Escape all!”
The men did not know whether it was an announcement of fact or an order. They noticed that the prisoner had begun shivering and that there were tears and dirt stains on his face.
“Escape!” shouted the shuddering prisoner a third time, and from his space by the gates he pointed towards the masses of his comrades shattering the inner gate to the Main Road with clubs and the weight of their bodies and with such steady determination that the guards were near hypnotized to find it so easily forced, and its timbers shredded.
To meet this mass, and to be engulfed in it, stood the lieutenant with a pistol and sentries with rifles from wars past and an informer who spoke in Biblical riddles.
Lieutenant Cook fired one vain round into the mass and roared, “Run!” He hoped remotely that the prisoner would scale the last fence and run with them. It was obvious to him that the man had been his savior.
The sentries on the gate at the northern end of the Main Road—the gate that gave onto a safe, free world—opened it as all four men came running, or, in Cook’s case, shuffling along with the raging mass behind them. “Open!”
As Cook felt the stress of attempting to run, he cried, “Bugger, bugger, bugger!” and that, too, was a prayer for mercy. He was the last to the gate, beyond which lay the survivable world, by five yards, and hustled as he could through it, looking behind him for the prophet, hoping to find him beside them. But, no, the man was stuck in place as if bewildered, and for whatever reason had chosen not to run. “Close them!” screamed Cook.
Struggling for breath with the shock of it more than from exercise, he saw a tide of maroon-colored prisoners, undifferentiated, running at insane pace in Main Road, some towards the other outer gate, and a furious howling contingent towards this one. Their ambitions were obvious. They intended to possess the entire night, and he could feel the heat of their intentions. He saw the Bible-uttering informer overtaken by others. A crowd of them stopped and could not deliver enough blows, or hack his body sufficiently with knives to express their rage at him, their disappointment in him. The lieutenant saw his face turned, screaming, but could not hear his shrieks above the general howl.
Cook began to cry out as if the man were taking the attack meant for him. He saw bludgeons raised up above the prisoner and knives, delineated by moonlight, plunging into him. He saw another prisoner armed with a knife tied to a length of wood impale the man’s body and someone else kneel and cut open the throat and all the verses that had belonged in it. The assassination party itself, so adroit in its work, soon diffused and, carried on by men pushing from behind, came towards the Main Road gate where Cook was stationed.
Cook ordered his men now to fire at will. A gun from a nearby tower joined. They inflicted intimate death, for the front of the maroon host was perhaps ten yards from the guards outside the gate. No lack of light for marksmen. A positive dazzle from searchlights behind, westering moon above, and blazing buildings in Compound C. And, coming on, these men who intended not to return there! Yet, in the headquarters company in the camp behind him, no siren shrieked.
Colonel Abercare had, however, run from his office, where he had been drowsing, at the very first shots, feeling but shaking off that depression and confusion of head that came from being woken in the small hours. The orderly room officer, having rushed from the guardhouse seeking orders, ran into him at the bottom of the stairs, where Abercare did issue genuine, military-style orders. Siren to sound, all men of the companies on either side of the Main Gate to assemble as arranged in a line to protect the camp. The men from Wye as well to report to Major Suttor. A line to be established between the gate into Main Road, where the sentries were obviously firing at the prisoners running so determinedly toward Machine Gun A.
Hurrying towards the assembly point, he met the captain of the headquarters company and asked him what had happened with the siren. In the abortive pattern of the night, the siren had been meant to startle the garrison but the bloody thing had remained treacherously silent.
“Sir, it seemed to break down,” the man yelled, his eyes flicking towards the sights of surging burgundy (so much light there that the tone could be distinctly recognized) within the compound.
“And the red flares?”
“Sir, I ordered them fired but they’d sweated in storage and burst at a low level and mightn’t be seen.”
“Is everything going to be this ridiculous?” asked Ewan Abercare too frantically.
“Don’t know, sir.” But the frightened captain gave every evidence he thought it might be.
And the machine guns weren’t even in action yet. Hadn’t he ordered them manned? Had what he said been ambiguous?
Reality had changed. The remotely possible had manifested itself. The acid taste of culpability flooded Abercare’s mouth.
• • •
When awoken in his bunk by shots and screaming, Headon got up in bemusement, his head a void of floating items that very soon coalesced into resolve. He could hear the strange roaring from inside the compound. It had happened; he knew at once they were unleashed, those fathomless men behind the wire. A sergeant in the doorway was bellowing about rifles. Headon himself, pulling on his boots, was aflame with eagerness to get to his gun and forestall any risk that at this incomparable instant the mechanism he had devoted such time to might nonetheless be ineffective against those ferocious cries within Compound C.
He was first out of the door—an overcoat on top of pyjamas, boots without socks on his feet—and was pleased that Cassidy was attired in the same manner, as they had discussed, for a night emergency. The surge of noise arising from beyond the fences was a phenomenon now—a storm. The purpose in those voices would have melted steel.
As Headon and Cassidy reached the trailer, the searchlight above it cast a long beam in through to the compound itself, where fires lit Headon’s targets more vividly still. Some front-runners were addressing themselves already to the first of the inner fences and tossing blankets over the wire to diminish the impact of the barbs.
He and Cassidy hauled themselves up into the trailer and dragged the cover off the weapon. The second machine-gun team, with more ground to negotiate to get to their trailer, ran past them over open ground as yet sacred to the garrison. Headon was strangely pleased to find the cans of ammunition belts remained within the trailer; that the arrangement had not been altered in some way by the noise and the enlarged reality of this hour. He made the r
ehearsed movements to prepare the machine, and Cassidy opened a number of the metal cans and fed a canvas belt of bullets with considerable concentration into the feed block. To an observer, the two of them would have seemed utterly undistracted by that dark-uniformed mass raging concertedly across Compound C with the purpose of reaching them.
In addition to blankets, a swathe of deep red figures had now hung themselves like huge fruit bats on the first of the fences, with the purpose of offering their own bodies for others to scale. And others were availing themselves, or else climbing by their own power.
“I always said we fed the buggers too well,” Headon called to Cassidy. The range was a little more than one hundred and fifty yards to the ones who had already climbed the innermost fence; two hundred yards to the oncomers behind. The burgundy vanguard fragments topped and then dropped from an inner fence and coalesced again in the intervening space. Across the compound, others hastened to follow, and that all happened without a decrease in chanting and raging and against that further extreme backdrop of a high barrier of flame.
Headon released the traversing clamp without having to look. He worked the elevating gear and looked through the rear and foresights. Like God’s elected angel, he held the handles now, thumbs up, knuckles as far back as he could, as he had been taught to do to avoid having them pounded by recoil. He pressed the button.
As he traversed the gun, the parts affected by recoil sang pleasurably in his mind. Immediately, men acting as human ladders for their comrades climbing the inner fence fell or hung on wire like abandoned clothes, and those who had used them as a means of climbing and then dropping into the intervening space between fences, fell and limped, and fell and succumbed.
• • •
Major Suttor had presented himself to the colonel early in the attack as Abercare, joined by a signaler with a radio pack on his back, stood watching the line form. Suttor’s company platoons deployed creakily and slowly a little forward, and were joined by men from the second company’s units whose barracks lay at this end of the camp and who normally lived and slept opposite one of the two Italian compounds. It was an uncomplicated formation, a ragged line near the place where Lieutenant Cook and others had fired into Main Road and apparently made a slaughter there.
They were now joined by a pale Lieutenant Cook, and the three of them assessed the astounding demonstration manifesting itself within Compound C, and Cook reported in brief militarese his adventure in Main Road and his dispositions at the gate. The adjutant told Abercare that the other garrison companies were securing their own sections of the perimeter in case similar phenomena developed there. Later, it would be reported that amazed Italians and Koreans and the rest looked at the flames leaping in Compound C and reaching northwards on the light breeze, and that even the Japanese officers in Compound B had been awed.
The battalion sergeant major, an old self-serious militiaman, called for the platoon commanders at the north gate to present themselves to the colonel, and Abercare told them, “Integrity of the garrison, integrity of the camp!”
It had a nice sound and would have pleased him, had he not already embarked on self-reproach. The moon had been an argument in favor of safety. Now it had turned on him. What clique of fools had argued that a dark night was necessary, when all along these men delighted in illumination and destruction, and had created their own within the compound? What was to be said of men who set their compound afire so that it would mark out their silhouettes and ensure their obliteration?
Stationed behind the line with his signaler and a field telephone, Abercare ordered Suttor to ensure the line was wheeled to the right to take in Headon’s machine gun, which had now begun to speak. But the movement was somehow never achieved, being beyond the garrison’s experience and repertoire of drill. They stood in a ragged line that tended to clump for the sake of shared certainties. At their officers’ orders they began to fire into the compound, some determinedly, some in bewilderment, as if they needed the purpose explained to them just one more time. It was unlikely that they halted the impetus in Compound C in any way. But it halted the garrison itself. A shot from the flank of the line somehow thudded and bounced, singing, off a post near the Broadway gate. It felled a private near Abercare. A medical orderly appeared with angelic suddenness.
At that moment the searchlights were still blazing on the red masses of humped, spread-eagled casualties in the compound and nearer, here, in open country; shapes that seemed to indent the ground, like bodies dropped from a height. Abercare felt he had wrought one of those most shocking of military and spiritual catastrophes: a disproportionate slaughter that was continuing and must, he was sure, do so. He was also aware with part of his brain that soon his superiors would ask him why he’d permitted some of the garrison to go to town earlier, on what had become such a night, and why he himself had been at dinner in town and not locked in permanent study of the omens within Compound C. They would ask him even about the siren. Along from the hecatomb, which made him swallow his nausea and might undermine his reason, they would count him a failed and distracted officer. But not so distracted that he did not see how unlikely the making of a link was between the line of riflemen and the machine gun, now that indeed living burgundy prisoners had energetic hands on the gun trailer. He saw a bald man in army overcoat and pyjamas leap from the trailer athletically, with machine-gun ammunition cans in each hand.
“He’s lost,” called Abercare to Suttor, but Suttor made the can’t-hear-you gesture, hand to ear, half his attention directed to his men ahead of him.
31
Making for the northernmost segment of the wire, towards the machine gun beyond the perimeter, the last cigarette of his lifetime now smoked and its redolence still on his tongue, Aoki found it hard to believe he was not in China, for China had returned to him with the hubbub and the shattering of the night by rifle shots and, above all, the nattering of machine guns. Progressing over open ground towards the inner fence, he had seen the men outside the compound, elevated in their trailer, preparing their gun, and then firing the machine. The cordite smell came to him not as densely as it had in China but sufficiently to evoke his past.
All was brightness, and in it he saw the garrison forming a line that raggedly defended their huts, and firing now and then with casual inaccuracy, uncertain in their drill, facing a duty for which they were spiritually unprepared but for which they might actually be required to act as soldiers. He and his brothers could provide them with some help, could elevate their performance, could evoke from them the skills they might doubt they had. They might already be doing it by the howls they uttered, some of them coherent—“Ten thousand years of life!” He himself, he found, was also bellowing, though he had not realized it, calling upon the imminent machine-gun rounds.
To the left, as he stumbled along, being outstripped in the rush to the wire by younger and less-marred men, he could see men torn by rifle fire and rolling on the ground or driven by the force of impacts into ditches on either side of the road. He was more exultant than affrighted. He had always been calm in action and rowdy only in victory.
Ahead, more young men tossed blankets over the inner barbed wire or prepared to climb over the bodies of those lacerated and wounded men who dangled from the upper strands of the fence. He had forgotten the disquieting, authoritative noise of machine guns, and was amazed how the men around them progressed despite that. The flash of a light weapon from one of the guard towers made more of the climbers sag, eternally safe. Now you could tell from the mi-nute discordance between their fire—the improbably short interval between a round leaving one gun and a round leaving the other—that the machine guns from both ends of the outer fence were in operation. He flinched but welcomed the fullness of sound.
He continued to progress at a fast amble, and looked left and right as other men passed him. It was easier to run towards one’s culmination than to walk towards it, and he wished he could be faster. In looking to his right he saw Sakura, moving with
a long stride, her head decorated with a fringe of fabric flowers and on her body an underlayer of full-bodied pink top and trousers, and around the lot of it swathes of bright cloth. She ran barefoot. Aoki thought for an instant she had debased the entire demonstration. A partially lame prisoner she passed patted her on her posterior as she hustled along. But then it became obvious that she meant to prove that her pretense did merely clothe a he, and the he was as willing to be valiant as any of the men who had never left behind their masculinity.
Aoki now saw Sakura as if she were a heavy garment slung on the wire of the fence. A machine-gun round that had borne away the crown of her head had left her suspended there, a great swathe of vivid, blood-drenched cloth. Men were using her shoulders as leverage.
Aoki himself began to climb, at first by way of a blanket. An ultimate respect for Sakura’s craft as a balladeer made him avoid the steps of flesh and cloth offered by her body. Higher on the fence, he hauled himself over the body of a young man who proved to be dying, not dead, and who groaned at the weight Aoki put on him. From the top of the fence Aoki looked down into the ground between this fence and the second. Below him men ran and wallowed and fell. He saw the silver of a blade with which one prisoner had cut the carotid of a wounded friend.
He climbed down backwards like a man descending a ladder, expecting the end and seeing other men topple from the top strands and pass him on their descent. He himself reached the bottom still upright amongst these others who had landed dead. A man he recognized was writhing in front of him. As a matter of etiquette, Aoki went down on his knees and asked the man if he needed a final mercy. He could find a knife, he said, or ask someone for one. But the man perished and another fell dead against his back before he had reached his feet again. Between here and the next fence, Aoki assured himself, I’ll know what it’s like, the whole mystery. He experienced the peculiar feel of air punctuated and knitted by machine-gun rounds, whose buffets made some men clump and, despite themselves, raise a hand as if the way ahead were not transparent to them or could be forced apart like curtains.
Shame and the Captives Page 27
