Korea

by Simon Winchester

  And Mr Kim knew of the British, too, and of the Glorious Glosters, and their defence of Hill 235, just south of the Imjin river. ‘Ah yes, the Glosters,’ he breathed admiringly. ‘The only unit in your army allowed to wear its cap badge on the back as well as on the front.’ (I later looked it up. He was quite right. The Gloucesters (as they were properly known) had fought the French in the Battle of Alexandria in 1801 and were attacked both from the front and the rear. The rear rank promptly faced about and dealt with the situation—the honour of having successfully fought ‘back to back’ never being forgotten and thus memorialized on the uniform beret.)

  I knew only the schoolboy tales of the Glosters’ stand on Hill 235, of the massive casualties they sustained, of their heroism, of the Victoria Cross they won, and of the commendation from the Eighth Army’s Commanding General, James Van Fleet, proclaiming that theirs was ‘the most outstanding example of bravery in modern warfare’. But I was able to tell old Mr Kim something I had learned in Northern Ireland that he did not know. One of the generals dealing with that grubby little war in Ireland was Anthony Farrar-Hockley, who had been with the Glosters in Korea, and he told many stories of the time.

  Back then he was a captain, and adjutant to the battalion CO, Lieutenant-Colonel James Carne. When the Chinese began their final assault on Hill 235 they did a most peculiar, psychologically devastating thing: they blew hundreds upon hundreds of bugles, making a vast, discordant, strangely triumphal sound that echoed all around the war-scarred hills above the Imjin River. But Captain Farrar-Hockley refused to be intimidated by this weird music, and he ordered the battalion bugles to return the salute. There was only one instrument remaining, in the care of one Drummer Eagles, who gave it to the sergeant-major to play. And play it he did, giving the Chinese every tune and call and fanfare known to a British Army bandsman, with the single omission of the call ‘Retreat’.

  But finally, as the attacks went on and it became all too obvious that the Chinese would overrun the Glosters’ position, and there was no option but for the British to leave, Drummer Eagles made a final gesture. He blew his bugle apart with one of his own grenades, making sure that no British bugle would ever fall into enemy hands. I told Mr Kim this story, and he was so well oiled with soju and beer that he laughed quite helplessly for five minutes before suddenly appearing to sober up and suggesting that I go along the corridor to where my bed—a real Western bed, a legacy of his army days, he said—had been readied for me.

  I slept dreamlessly until the middle of the morning, by which time Mr Kim had gone out on some business, and it was left to Ae-ri to make me breakfast (she found some bacon and an egg and a glass of mango juice) and show me the way out of town. I was feeling quite dreadful and hoisted my pack to my back with no certainty that I could carry it much farther than I could throw it. Soju is powerful medicine, I decided. Never again.

  Before I left Illo I looked in at the local Catholic church, to see if any of the missionaries whose names I had been given back in Cheju were around. But they were away. All I found was a book, a history of the missionaries in Korea; my eye was immediately caught by the story of three of their number who suffered horribly. I jotted it in my notebook, and since it follows my memories of Mr Kim’s remarkable chronology of the war, it seems proper to include it here. The book, The Splendid Cause, tells of the fate that befell Monsignor Patrick Brennan and Fathers John O’Brien and Tom Cusack, who happened to be in Mokpo, Mr Kim’s hometown, on the day the Communists arrived, 24 July 1950 (exactly a month after the beginning of the invasion). The three priests were arrested and taken off by North Korean troops to the prison in Kwangju. A young American lieutenant, Alexander Makaroumis, found them there, and later wrote:

  It was a cold night for August, and there were no blankets for us in the cell. There were only three blankets in all, but these were immediately shared out by three missionaries. It was the first of the many acts of kindness and consideration the priests were to show us during the dreadful days we were to go through…

  When we first met the priests they had been prisoners for about five weeks. As the meals consisted of only a small bowl of barley with a slice of pickled turnip, the priests all lost a great deal of weight.

  Monsignor Brennan and Father Cusack were wearing black trousers and black shoes. The Monsignor had on a black suit; Father Cusack a blue one. Father O’Brien was all in white; he had a white collar, a white tee-shirt and a white cassock. They kept their cassocks rolled up and out of the way most of the time—I guess they didn’t want to use them.

  It would be hard to tell you what these guys did for our morale-they boosted it by at least 500 per cent!. Monsignor, for instance, would stand at the cell window and listen to the birds chirping merrily outside, then he’d turn and cheer us by telling us a singing bird was a messenger of hope….

  At other times he’d encourage Father O’Brien to sing us a song and do one of his Irish jigs. Father O’Brien sort of made you forget you were cooped up in a prison cell, and sent you flying back home….

  The priests were sent off to another prison near Seoul. Makaroumis went, too.

  In preparation for the journey the priests’ hands were tied with ropes. The hands of the military people were fastened with hand-irons and ropes. We travelled only at night to escape allied bombers….

  We were on this truck for three nights straight and then, when we were approaching the city of Taejon, the truck broke down for good. We were told to get off and walk…. It was a sad procession.

  When we got to Taejon we were made to sit out in the open for about thirty minutes while a Korean with a small camera took pictures of us. We were put on display for about two hours while hundreds of North Koreans, army people and others, came in to look at us. For us, the story of the missionaries ends in the prison of Taejon. We do not know what happened after we were taken from the cell. But wherever they are I shall always remember them for the comfort, cheerfulness, kindness and courage they somehow communicated to us when they were no better off themselves.

  The next news of the three Columbans came from the wife of a South Korean judge. She had been confined in the same room as the three in the old Franciscan monastery in Taejon and heard that on the afternoon of 24 September, when the Communists were preparing to hurry north to avoid a huge party of advancing UN troops, there was a massacre of all remaining prisoners:

  Later no one could recognize any of the Columbans among more than a thousand corpses piled up in the monastery garden. The bodies were so decomposed and swollen…a well in the garden was filled with bodies that no one had a chance to inspect…in the archives of the society of St Columba, Monsignor Brennan, Fathers O’Brien and Cusack are recorded as having died in the massacre of 24 September 1950. Thus the matter rests today, but a beautiful new church in the city which they served now honours their brave fidelity.

  I left shortly before lunch, having read that morning’s Korea Times, which had come down from Seoul on the milk train. How close that made me feel to journey’s end, and yet I wasn’t even halfway through! Ae-ri came with me for the first half mile, apologizing (though I kept insisting that no apology was needed) for her father’s loquacity, his stories of the war. ‘I just wish he’d forget—and forget all this nonsense about the Japanese,’ she said.

  It was market day in Illo—once every five days the country people stream into Illo to buy and sell each other’s wares—and the town was crowded. Most people seemed to be selling huge bundles of leaves to each other—the makings of some form of kimchi, Ae-ri said, and innocuous enough—but there was one distressing scene when a huge dog, just sold for some unspecified and unimaginable end use, was being pushed into a plastic bag for the journey back home to its fate.

  It was a large beast, spotted like a Dalmatian, and it had no intention at all of going into the bag. It wanted to spend the rest of its life, no matter how attenuated, leaping about. But the customer had bought it and, for reasons that may have had something to do wit
h squeamishness, was not about to walk his dinner (for that is what I imagined the dog to be) home on a leash. He wanted it in the bag. So he and the seller grabbed the shrieking animal’s rear legs and thrust and pushed them and tail into the bag and then gave their attention to the forelegs-whereupon the animal flexed its rear legs and leaped out of the bag like a jack-in-the-box. Under any other circumstances the business might have been comic—if the dog was being bundled up to go on holiday, for instance—but the fact that I supposed he was going to be rendered into poshin-tang, the famous Korean dog soup, made it rather ghastly. So I left the three protagonists at it and walked steadily away without turning, until the shrieking of the terrified animal faded away. (Later a specialist on canine cuisine informed me gravely that this dog was not for the pot: only medium-size yellow dogs go into poshin-tang, and they are hung up at least a week before their appearance on the dining table. This may simply have been a very belligerent pet.)

  I did eat a dog in Korea once, and quite bearable it was. I was in Seoul, and a friend named Park Choon-sil had urged me to try it, since in her view to write about Korea without trying dogmeat would be to write about England without eating roast beef. ‘Both are rituals, are they not?’ Now I am the owner of two exceptionally stupid but very endearing dogs—an elderly beagle named Biggles and a Jack Russell terrier called Tusker—and I have to confess I felt no shame in tucking into their colleagues, just once, for the sole purpose of better understanding the nature of those who eat them.

  The victim-dog—a big yellow mutt specially bred for the table—was served up in medallions on a bed of onions and lettuce (and then served again as poshin-tang), and it tasted quite reasonable—very strong, very rich, and with a background flavour of kidney. The restaurateur, a fat and kindly woman, came up to me as I took the first forkful—as I was wondering how Biggles would react if ever he came to know, by smelling it on my breath, for instance. ‘Very good, poshin-tang, for’—and as the entire café collapsed in helpless laughter, she pointed at a spot some six inches below my navel—‘good for stamina!’

  And that was, and still remains, the core of my understanding. There’s nothing in all this guff about dogs keeping you warm in winter and cool in the summer. Hardly anyone can be found who ever likes these more weird breeds of food. They all eat them to prove the axiom that the more disgusting it is, the more good it will do the libido. So Korean men tuck into dogs for the same reason the Cantonese eat snake and the Thais eat the brains of still-living monkeys and the Filipinos crunch up the entire embryos of ducks—they all labour under the apprehension that by so doing their sexual drive and ability will be immeasurably enhanced, their erections will last longer, their performances will be of a more virtuoso nature, and their children will be more numerous. Tired? Jaded? Listless? A little dog’ll do ya.

  I walked eastward, dazzled by the high sun. Ae-ri turned back, a little sadly I thought. She had given me a telephone number in Seoul. I stumped along the railway line as she had advised. I could have taken the road, and crossed the Yongsang River by the bridge, but that would have taken the best part of a day and a half. By taking the railway line—a modest illegality with which the police apparently did not bother—I would save eight hours’ walking. I would have to cross the river by boat. Sure enough, after an hour of trying to work out why railway sleepers the world over are all placed in such a way that it is impossible to walk along them, and after dodging perhaps a dozen trains that hurtled by, I arrived at the river. A bridge is to be built, the locals say; but for now it was a short ride on an old ferry, with six old men, one blubbery old hog, and a motorcycle and a payment of 250 won. I fetched up on the eastern side at a place called Okchong-ri and started along a dusty, unpaved road towards the town of Naju.

  (Korean administrative districts range from the-do, the largest, as in Cheju-do, Chollanam-do, Chungchongbuk-do; to the smallest, the-pan, which is roughly equivalent in size to the city block. In between are the-dongs, the-ris, the-myuns, the-ups, the-shis, and the-guns, the last being the name of the county. So the full address of the person I was planning to visit in Naju, for example, might well be: Mr Kim Young Sam, Song-pan 24, Ilsa-dong, Uichang-ri, Simban-myun, Yangwon-up, Naju-shi, Naju-gun, Chollanam-do, South Korea. And if pedantry be your game, then it should be added that the name of Korea is, to Koreans, not Korea at all, but Daehan Minguk, which is what you will see on Korean stamps. North Korea, which uses the same-pan to-do system, is given the portmanteau name of Choson Minchu-chui Inmin Konghwa-guk.)

  From here it was a good long slog. The sun was out, I was feeling well rested and healthy, and I strode along contentedly mile after mile. First it was pine forests and lakes; then, down in the lowlands again, apple orchards and some of the old and gnarled blossom trees that would soon produce another crop of the pears for which Naju is rightly famous; then uplands again, and a long haul up a mountainside. Occasionally jet fighter planes would roar past, streaking down the valleys, hugging the contours. Team Spirit was on, the huge annual springtime exercise staged by the American and Korean troops to prove that they could work well together in war; I assumed the aerial activity had something to do with that. I cursed the planes for spoiling the silence. So did the farmers: I saw one gaze up at the sky after one particularly low-flying plane had startled the beast that was pulling his plough, and though he stopped short of shaking his fist, he looked extremely displeased. Team Spirit, as I have no doubt its organizers know, is not much of a public relations exercise, whatever else it may be.

  I had been going for perhaps half an hour when I was suddenly aware of someone behind me. I stopped, and the someone crashed painfully into my rucksack. ‘Mian hamnida!’ came a strangled voice, and a young man, a fellow I remembered having seen waiting by a bridge five miles or so back, picked himself up, dusted himself off, and continued to apologize.

  He said he wanted nothing more than to talk. He was a member of the Pine Tree Club, he explained, an English conversation group that met every week in a hall in Illo. What was my name? He was Mr Lee. He was seventeen years old. What was I doing? Did I like Korea? His English was execrable. He could barely speak a word. And worst of all, after the pleasantries, the questions and phrases I had come to anticipate, he then proceeded to go quite mad. He embarked on a number of theories, all of which related the inexplicable nuances of Korean history and their relationship to geomorphology.

  The only theory I felt I could understand was his strange belief about how the hills in Chollanam-do were, in the view of Confucian scholars, of entirely the wrong shape—they all looked like tortoises, and not like the more favoured lions and tigers—and that was the reason why the old Koryo kings of Korea (those who gave the country its name) had never liked the Cholla people. ‘They think we bastards!’ he kept saying. ‘They think we bastards.’ He gave me an apple and talked a little more about his various theories—I think I would have found them hard enough to understand had they been announced on the BBC-and then, with no more warning than a cheery wave, he turned off onto a country road and in seconds had vanished among the pine trees.

  What on earth! Had he been for real? I wondered. And then I remembered someone in Seoul warning me. ‘Watch out for the angibu,’ he had said. The secret police, the tappers of phones and followers of dissidents and beaters-up of radicals, they would be bound to be on my trail. Watch out for them. But had this young fellow been from the angibu? I frankly doubted it—he had seemed too peculiar, too mad. A member of the Pine Tree Club if ever there was one, I concluded, and with a shrug, walked on.

  It grew cloudy for the rest of the afternoon and was pouring with rain as I passed between the huge stone guardian lions of Naju, and so, not thinking I was cheating too seriously, I flagged down a taxi. ‘Cho-un hoteru odi isumnikka?’ I said, wondering if that was indeed the way to ask for a good hotel, but he replied with ‘nay,’ which, confusingly for Westerners, is the Korean word for yes (‘anio’ being no), and we lurched off into the rain. Five minutes later, as
we passed under the shadow of an enormous tobacco factory, we came to a mess of tiny streets and a large and gloomy hotel. There was a room, for about £7 a night—it was huge, with a massive Victorian bed and three clocks. I squeezed the water from my socks, put my boots on the radiator, took a bath, clambered into bed, and fell asleep. I woke in total darkness, hungry as hell.

  It was about nine o’clock, cold, still raining, and the people of Naju had clearly seen very few foreigners. I was stared at from every doorway. People would nudge each other and point at me. Girls would squeal and put the palms of their hands to their mouths, the classic expression of shy terror and bewilderment. It was not a cruel or mocking curiosity: the people who saw me, and who had never seen such a lumbering and hairy creature before—a head taller than most Koreans, pale and ghostly skinned, and covered with a primeval fur—were amazed. They had seen such creatures on television; now here was a real live one, and in their town, too. (Having said that, it has been reported that Koreans with blue eyes and light-coloured hair have been seen in both Namwon and Sunchon, cities where Hendrick Hamel and his party of shipwrecked Dutch sailors spent some years. Naju was one of the towns in which they had spent time en route to Seoul—my journey through Korea, it may be remembered, was designed to follow their approximate route—and it is entirely possible that genetic relics of the Dutchmen’s passage may still be found. I had imagined that a man who was a little taller than normal and had blue eyes and sandy hair might be living in Naju somewhere; but the locals’ reaction to me suggested that such a signal was totally alien—the collapse, I realized, of my small theory. The Dutchmen must have behaved themselves, or else their stock was too insubstantial and has vanished in the wash of the twelve generations since their wreck.)

  But it turned out I was not the only Westerner in town, anyway. I was mooching along a lane, looking for a bulgoki-jip, a restaurant serving the barbecued beef for which this part of the peninsula is famous, when I glanced into a bookshop. There, standing at the back in animated conversation with the owner, were two white men in long raincoats. I opened the door, and they looked up at the jangling of the bell, their faces portraits of blank astonishment. ‘What…’ they both spluttered, and then I told them what I was doing, and we all marched off to dinner. ‘Simon,’ said the taller of the pair, ‘my name is Elder Harper and this’—he pointed to his friend, a small, blond boy who looked about eighteen—‘is Elder Cran’. They were both missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormons.