War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘That’s right. It’s to cure you.’ As well it might, Asai’s voice shook slightly, and his hand trembled as it held the stethoscope.

  The patient seemed to become more relaxed as the examination progressed and followed all Asai’s directions obediently. It was evident from his gentle blue eyes and the frequency of his friendly smile, that he had not the slightest misgivings about Suguro and the others. It seemed that the confidence that men have in doctors as a profession was quite enough to put the prisoner at ease. While giving him the explanation about the heart examination, Asai indicated the operating table, and the prisoner readily lay down upon it.

  ‘The straps?’ Toda quickly asked.

  ‘In a minute, in a minute,’ Asai answered keeping his voice low. ‘If you do it now, it will seem funny. When the second stage comes or if there are any spasms, then do it right away.’

  ‘The medical officers have asked if it’s all right if they come in,’ said Chief Nurse Oba, putting her head in from the anteroom.

  ‘No, not yet. I’ll let you know later. Suguro, have the anaesthetic mask ready.’

  ‘No, I can’t, Doctor Asai.’ Suguro’s voice was almost breaking. ‘Let me go. I want to get out.’

  Asai, over his rimless glasses, looked up searchingly, but he said nothing.

  ‘I’ll do it, Doctor Asai.’ Taking Suguro’s place, Toda put layers of oiled paper and cotton on the mask which lay on a wire screen.

  When he saw this, the prisoner looked as though he were about to ask something, but Dr Asai quickly put on a smile and gestured with his hand. Then he put the mask over the prisoner’s face. The liquid ether began to drip upon it. The prisoner moved his head from side to side as though trying to dislodge the mask.

  ‘Fasten the straps! The straps!’

  The two nurses, bending over, fastened the straps of the operating table to the prisoner’s legs and body.

  ‘First stage,’ Nurse Ueda whispered, looking at the dial. During this stage a patient, feeling his consciousness slipping away, struggles instinctively.

  ‘Stop the ether flow,’ ordered Asai, pressing the hand of the prisoner.

  A low animal-like groan began to come from beneath the mask. It was the second stage of the anaesthetic. During this stage, some patients roar angrily or sing. But this prisoner, in a voice like that of a dog howling far off, did nothing but utter drawn out, intermittent groans.

  ‘Ueda, bring the stethoscope.’

  Taking the stethoscope from Nurse Ueda, Asai hurriedly placed it upon the prisoner’s hairy chest.

  ‘Ueda, start the ether again.’

  ‘All right, Doctor.’

  ‘The pulse is slower.’

  Asai released the prisoner’s hands and they flopped back on to the operating table on either side of him. Then Asai began to examine his eyes with a flashlight the chief nurse had given him.

  ‘No reflex in the cornea. All right, that does it. I’ll go and call the Old Man and Dr Shibata.’ Asai took away his stethoscope and put it into the pocket of his gown. ‘Stop the ether for now. If you give too much, he’ll die, and that would be awkward. Miss Oba, get all the instruments ready please.’

  Casting a cold glance in Suguro’s direction, he went out of the operating theatre. The two nurses went back to the anteroom and did as Asai had directed. The bluish shine from the ceiling lamp was reflected from the walls. As Suguro leaned against the wall, the transparent stream of water flowed relentlessly around his sandals. Toda stood by himself beside the prisoner on the operating table.

  ‘Come over here.’ Toda suddenly spoke in a low voice. ‘You won’t come and help?’

  ‘It’s no use, no use at all. I can’t,’ Suguro muttered. ‘I . . . I should have refused before.’

  ‘You’re a fool. And what do you have to say for yourself?’ Toda turned, glaring at Suguro. ‘If it were a matter of refusing, yesterday or even this morning would have been time enough. But now, having come this far, you’re already more than half way, Suguro.’

  ‘Half way? What do you mean, half way?’

  ‘You’re already tarred with the same brush as the rest of us.’ Toda spoke quietly. ‘From now on, there’s no way out, none at all.’

  Martin Booth

  HIROSHIMA JOE

  Set in the Far Eastern theatre of war, Martin Booth’s novel Hiroshima Joe (1985) tells the story of Captain Joseph Sandingham who after the fall of Hong Kong in 1941 is taken prisoner by the Japanese. After years in a PoW camp, he is transferred towards the end of the war to a slave labour camp in Japan. There he is present outside Hiroshima on the day when the nuclear bomb is dropped. When the guards abandon the camp, Joe makes his way into the city to look for a friend he has made among the Japanese workers.

  THE BICYCLE WAS old and heavy and his legs were not strong enough to propel it forward at any speed. At first he had wobbled: it was six years since he had last ridden a bike. This one was plainly a poor man’s model, for it lacked gearing and there was a metal-framed shelf behind the saddle for the carriage of packages and boxes.

  The road wound through paddyfields and vegetable farms, many of them partially harvested. The few hamlets he pedalled through contained knots of people talking excitedly to each other. Everyone was facing the city.

  The nearer he came to the city limits the more people he found to be travelling with him. Some were on cycles, some on foot, a few in cars or on lorries. As he came alongside the railway line to Kure the road took a bend. Here he decided to stop, to regain his breath. He squeezed on the brake levers and halted by the kerb under the shade of a tree that grew over a stone wall.

  From around the corner he could hear a mysterious sound. More accurately, it was a great number of disparate sounds melding together to make one orchestration, much as many notes join in unison to make a complex chord. He tried, leaning over the handlebars, to recognize any one of the noises but he was unable to do so, for whatever they were they registered in his brain as unlikely to unite. They did not fit into a pattern – much as a cawing crow would not be expected to join in harmony with a harpsichord.

  His breath regained, Sandingham shifted the pedals and took the pressure of the chain. He rode away from the kerb and around the corner.

  Ahead of him on the road, half a mile away, there was what appeared to be a tide coming in his direction. As he pedalled on and approached it, he saw it was a multitude of people. Behind them was the smoke of what Sandingham took to be the burning city.

  When he caught sight of them he assumed the crowd he was riding up to was made of refugees from the air raid. He had seen Chinese in droves leaving a district under fire in Hong Kong. As he got closer, he saw that he was only partly right.

  Within easy sight of them, he stopped again. He could not quite believe what he witnessed in front of him.

  The crowd was silent except for the shuffling of their feet and the creaking of the axles on their handcarts. A few moaned but none spoke. Many of them were injured. Cuts about the face and hands had bled into streaks upon their clothing. Some limped, while others were riding on the handcarts, sitting on an assortment of mundane household belongings. As they passed by, he saw that they were all stunned, bemused even. Refugees were usually more alert than this, eager in their escape. These people were strangely apathetic.

  He was about to set off the way they had come when an elderly man in a dirtied ukata – a light indoor kimono used by Japanese much as Europeans might use a cotton dressing-gown – touched his arm. Sandingham looked down at the man’s hand. It was badly grazed as if he had rubbed it along a rough surface. Straw-coloured plasma was weeping from the wound.

  The man said nothing but looked Sandingham straight in the face, then shifted his eyes to the bicycle. He pleaded through the telepathy that pain brings to the injured. Without a thought Sandingham lifted his leg over the saddle and relinquished his machine. The old man said nothing at all; he did not even smile his thanks. He steered the bicycle through the crowd and, propping
it by a pedal to the opposite kerb, helped a middle-aged woman on to the saddle, precariously balancing a child on the crossbar between her arms.

  Sandingham watched them rejoin the crowd.

  Walking was easier for him than cycling. His legs, after initially feeling weakened as he dismounted, set back into the stride to which they were accustomed.

  It was not long before he reached the outer limits of the blast damage. House walls were askew, trees leafless: windows were blown out and fences down. Debris littered the road.

  The more he walked, the worse the damage became.

  All the while, from the city, there rose the vast pall of smoke and dust. It was so wide and huge now that it entirely cut off the sun. The head of the tree-cloud over-toppled him and was widening its branches.

  Sounds increased. From the city came the noise of human turmoil, of burning, of disintegration and the musical tinkling of metal bending or breaking, glass shattering. In the firestorm were the popping detonations of houses igniting in an instant and exploding. It was the symphony of destruction.

  He walked with his head lowered, his brain struggling to recall the instructions from Mishima on reaching his Japanese friend’s home. If he looked up, what he spied wiped his thoughts clean with horror.

  Around him, few buildings stood. They were heaps of wood and tiles, cloth and glass and metal. Some smouldered. Brick or stone edifices were cracked and leaning. Everything had collapsed. The narrower sidestreets between the houses were filled with rubble. Further on, the sides of buildings were burned as if scorched. Telegraph and power poles were charred down one side. Flimsy upright objects, like some of the street lamp-posts, were bent over. The air was filled with the acrid stink of the ruination of war.

  Everywhere, there were the people. Or what was left of the people.

  The tram was gutted. Only a steel skeleton remained. The side-panelling had warped, fractured and prised loose. The glass that had been the windows had melted and run down the sides, cooling like a coating of speckled sugar on the wheels and road surface. The paint was seared off.

  Sandingham walked up to the tram, not knowing why he did so. Nothing was making sense to him. Inside, the seats had disappeared and only the frameworks remained in their original rows, twisted crookedly. On the floor of the tram cabin was a partly congealed liquid slush of greyish-brown matter in which lay some broken branches, stripped bare of their bark.

  It was more than a minute before he realized that the floor-covering had been people, the branches nude bones.

  He did not vomit at this realization. His stomach did not even lurch towards his throat. There was nothing left to throw up – not food nor bile nor rage. He was growing devoid of new emotion, his inner store insufficient for what he was experiencing.

  He simply cried. It was not a loud venting of tears but a gradual, miserable sobbing, such as a child might make when its toy was irretrievably lost.

  Their hair, eyebrows and eyelashes had been scorched off and, when they closed their eyes, the upper lids snagged under the lower. Few had skin left on the fronts of their bodies. Some were smeared with vomit that had stuck to their chests and breasts. Some walked with their arms held out before them, as if in supplication to a greater power for a hint of mercy. Many were naked and, of those, some had even their pubic hairs singed short.

  They all moved with their heads hung, not speaking, not complaining. Their submission chilled Sandingham even more than their hideous wounds.

  As he studied them shuffling past him, he saw upon the backs of a few the patterns of straps or elastics, of flowers or birds or delicate designs printed indelibly upon their skin.

  A boat was being punted across a river by a Japanese man. Helping him was a priest. He was European. His soutane was besmirched and stiff with sweat and grime.

  Sandingham watched them guiding wounded over the water. They worked with little conversation, passing instructions to each other but saying little else. He thought at once that he should give them assistance, to help them as any man might another in a crisis, and began gingerly to step over the debris to where a flight of stairs was cut into the bank.

  As he neared them the punter spoke to the priest in German.

  ‘Da ist nichts zu machen.’

  Joe thought better of offering his assistance and turned aside, keeping his face to the rubble-strewn ground.

  ‘Wakarimasen,’ the old man uttered.

  The teenage boy lifted his index finger to the smoke as if instructing his elder on one of the finer points of warfare.

  ‘Molotoffano hanakago.’

  He overheard this as he shuffled by the pair. They were sitting on an inverted and much-dented trader’s tricycle. No other words passed between them.

  Hanakago, Sandingham knew, meant flower-basket. He wondered how a bomb could bear blossoms.

  In the middle channel of the river there sailed a gunboat of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It made slow headway. In the bows stood an officer. He was holding a megaphone through which he shouted unintelligibly.

  The marvel to Sandingham was not that the gunboat had appeared but that it was trim and tidy, so unadulterated, its shape clean and purposeful, deliberate and ordered. And the officer was so neat in his uniform, so dispassionate. He was almost serene.

  It was nearly evening and the fires were dying in the city centre. Against a wall that had withstood the blast because it had been end-on the epicentre, Sandingham paused. He was utterly tired but unable to consider sleep quite yet. He slid down to a sitting position against the wall and hunched his knees to his chin, hugging his calves with his arms. So far, no one had recognized him as a foreigner. Few people were in a position to care.

  Wherever he went there were bodies. He had never seen such carnage. In Hong Kong at the fall, when someone died, they just – died. The bullet that did for them might make a small hole going in and a large hole coming out, but that was all. Someone freshly shot in the head was not mutilated but simply broken. Those caught in the ambush at Wong Nai Chung Gap had lain on the road looking like humans that were now ceased. Even those caught in a crossfire of mortars were still recognizably human until the flies and the ants started their forays.

  The dead he now saw littering the wreckage of the city were not like that at all. Many were as unlike to human form as was conceivably possible. They were not necessarily dismembered, but hideously disfigured. Sandingham was used to seeing the dead lying in grotesquely contorted positions, but not like these.

  He found a man bent backwards over a post, his head touching the backs of his knees, his stomach unsplit but stretched so tight it had contouring under it the coiled map of gut. The man’s skin was maroon and his arms hung back against the shoulder sockets.

  At one point in the afternoon, he had paused by a water butt to drink. His throat was parched from retching and swallowing smoke. He also wanted to try to wash off the blotches the rain had given him.

  He reached into the water. It was cool, indescribably cool. It was luxurious. He slopped water on his arms and rubbed at them. The rain spots did not even smudge let alone show signs of washing clean.

  Resigned to leaving himself dirty, Sandingham leaned over the edge of the barrel to press his face into the surface and suck up the water. His reflection stared back at him. Beside his face was another. It was floating a foot under the surface. The eyes were holes. The mouth was a slit cavern of darkness. The hair willowed around the scalp. He did not drink but watched. The face folded up in the water. He was dreaming. It was the effects of exhaustion. He thrust his fingers into the clear jet-black of the water and felt for the face. There was nothing hard there. No skull. No corpse. Yet something soft brushed against the back of his hand and his forearm. As he brought his arm clear, something clung to it. It was light and wrapped itself on to his arm like algae. He straightened his arm. Clinging to it was the face: no features, just a flat mask of skin, peeled from its owner and cast into the water.

  Sandingham screamed.
He flicked and threshed his arm trying to dislodge it, but it would not move. It was glued to him by the water and its own grossness. He could not bear to touch it: instead, grabbing a piece of wood, he scraped it off, all the time hollering. The face fragmented and came away like curds off milk.

  In a temper of panic, he toppled the butt over, the water soaking invisibly into the dry ground.

  By the time he reached the river again it had become a tide of dead. The once-living wallowed to and fro in the wash, rising and falling with the slow motion of obscene lovers. Old men, young women, children. For fifteen minutes, Sandingham had blankly watched a baby floating next to its mother, her hand entangled forever in the infant’s clothing. Between the bodies, where they were not log-jammed together against the shore or a collapsed waterfront building, hundreds of tiny fish floated belly-up. An occasional seabird filled in the occasional space. In death, they were all equal.

  He found himself talking quite loudly to himself in English and instantly jammed his mouth with his fingers. This slip of concentration brought him out in a cold sweat of fear, for leaning against the wall a few feet away was a young Japanese man.

  Sandingham glanced sideways to see if he had been overheard.

  The man was bruised all over his side and was nursing a broken left arm. The shattered bone was protruding not just through the skin but also through the shreds of clothing he was wearing. He was moaning.

  Sandingham edged along the ground to the man’s side.

  ‘Doshita no desuka?’ he asked.

  The man raised his face to Sandingham but made no reply. His open eyes saw nothing. It was quite obvious that he was blind.

  Finally he mumbled a reply. Sandingham, not understanding it, said, ‘Doshite agema shoka? Nanio motte kimashoka?’

  ‘Mizu,’ answered the man, his fingers pressing to his arm. Then, again, ‘Mizu. Mizu.’

  Sandingham could do nothing. There was no water.

  After a while the young man got to his feet, rubbing his back up the wall. He staggered off in the direction of the river but, after going about a hundred yards, he fell on to his side, gave a yodelling howl and lay still.