A Multitude of Sins

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Out!’ he heard Leigh Stafford shout chokingly through the dust and fumes and blinding smoke. ‘We have to get out!’

  Ronnie was in full agreement with him. He staggered to his knees, his uniform ripped, blood trickling down into his eyes, half-falling over the corporal who had been suffering so violently with stomach ache. He was suffering no longer. He had taken the full force of the blast and had been almost cut in two, sliced open from the neck to the navel, his entrails spilling bloodily to the floor. Ronnie gagged, falling over two more prone bodies as he struggled in the older man’s wake.

  The Japanese were all over the pillbox now, exhorting them to give themselves up. To surrender.

  ‘It’s no good, old boy. We have to do as, they say,’ Leigh panted, throwing down his revolver and stepping out of the pillbox towards the Japs, his hands raised.

  ‘No!’ Ronnie screamed at the top of his voice, but it was too late. The gentlemen’s war that Leigh Stafford imagined he was fighting was no gentlemen’s war at all. The Japanese jeered at him in derision as he did as they demanded, falling on him, bayonets raised, plunging them time and again into his defenceless body.

  Ronnie raised his revolver and fired and kept on firing. A piercing pain in his shoulder sent him stumbling to his knees and then, as they closed round him, a blow to the back of neck sent him sprawling to the ground. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe. There was blood in his nose and his eyes and his mouth. Julienne! he thought desperately. Julienne! And then he was dimly aware of the Japanese surging away from him, away from the pillbox. He lay motionless, fighting back cries of pain as scores of rubber-soled feet pounded past him on their way inland.

  ‘Bastards,’ he whispered as the last reverberation died away and he crawled in crucifying agony on his hands and knees. ‘Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!’

  Adam heard the news of the landings in the early hours of Friday morning. ‘The Japs have landed on the south-east coast,’ he was told tersely.

  ‘Get yourself and your men over to Brigade Headquarters. That’s where they are heading.’

  Adam had slammed down the telephone receiver and immediately given the order to abandon their position. Brigade Headquarters was at the Wong Nei Chung Gap, and the gap stood on high ground in the virtual centre of the island. If it fell into the hands of the Japanese, then they would have achieved a terrible tactical advantage.

  ‘Who are we linking up with, sir?’ one of his men asked as they rocketed across country in an army truck.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Adam had retorted grimly. ‘And I don’t care. Just as long as we throw the bloody Japs back into the sea!’

  Julienne had been posted, much to her disgust, with Miriam Gresby. She would have preferred a more congenial companion, especially in a dressing station as isolated as the one they had been detailed to. They were to the east of Wong Nei Chung Gap, their patients mainly men from the Rajputs who had come under Intense shelling from the Japanese batteries in Kowloon. It was a small station with only three medical officers, a British nursing sister, four other British Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, three Chinese Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses and three medical orderlies. By the time the Japanese swarmed inland early Friday morning, they had over a hundred patients in their care.

  ‘The Japanese have landed,’ the senior medical officer said to them grimly. ‘I’ve just been warned that they are coming this way.’

  Julienne did not pause in her ministrations to a young Canadian boy whose leg had been blown off by a shell. If the Japanese came, they came. There was nothing that she could do to stop them. But she was damned if she was going to cringe with fear at the mere mention of their name.

  ‘My God! You know what they’ll do to us if they capture us, don’t you?’ Miriam Gresby hissed to her, twisting her hands convulsively and ignoring the boy whose wounds she had been in the process of dressing.

  ‘No.’ Julienne was applying sulphur to a pus-ridden stump. ‘But, whatever it is, talking about it will make no difference.’ She looked across to the young boy Miriam was neglecting. His face was shiny with sweat, his knuckles clenched against the pain. ‘Your patient needs you to finish changing his dressing, Miriam.’

  Miriam’s lips tightened, querulously thin without their usual careful application of lipstick. ‘Don’t take it upon yourself to tell me what to do, Julienne Ledsham! I’m not surprised you’re unconcerned at the prospect of rape! It’s exactly the kind of activity you enjoy, isn’t it?’

  Julienne was surprised at how little anger she felt. Miriam had always been a fool and now she was a frightened fool. ‘No,’ she said, readjusting a draining-tube. ‘I have never had any experience of rape, Miriam, and I doubt if I would enjoy it at all. Would you like me to help you with that bandage?’

  They worked together in silence, Miriam’s hands trembling as she lifted her patient’s leg and Julienne deftly bound the cumbersome dressing-pad into place.

  At the slightest sound all eyes swivelled towards the doors, the patients lying still, tense and apprehensive.

  ‘We are a hospital,’ one of the Chinese nurses said nervously to Julienne. ‘The Japanese will not harm sick men, surely?’

  ‘No,’ Julienne said reassuringly. ‘Of course not.’ But she remembered the stories she had heard of Japanese behaviour in China and she was not at all sure.

  ‘They’re coming,’ one of the medical orderlies said suddenly. ‘I can hear them.’

  Julienne wiped away a trickle of blood from the corner of the mouth of a Rajput whose right lung had been pierced with shrapnel. He was dying, but he was still lucid. ‘What is happening, Nurse?’ he whispered. ‘Why has it gone so silent? What is wrong?’

  She took his hand, giving it a comforting squeeze, saying gentry and praying that she was speaking the truth: ‘There’s no need to worry about it, Sergeant.’

  The outer doors of the dressing station were slammed open and a barrage of running feet thundered towards them. Julienne’s hand tightened on the hand of the dying Rajput, and then the doors to the ward were flung open and a squad of Japanese with rifles at the ready and bayonets fixed burst in on them.

  ‘Out of beds!’ they screamed. ‘Out of beds!’

  ‘This is a hospital,’ the senior medical officer said forcefully, stepping forward and addressing himself to the officer in charge. ‘These men are all seriously injured. They cannot leave their beds. I must ask you to withdraw—’.

  The officer raised his rifle butt, hitting him full across the side of the head, sending him sprawling across the floor. ‘When Japanese officer gives order, English pigs obey! Now, out of beds! Everyone out of beds!’

  Those who could began to try to do as they were ordered; those who couldn’t remained helplessly where they were.

  ‘Out! Out!’ a Japanese screamed, jabbing his bayonet towards the young Canadian boy Julienne had been so recently tending.

  Julienne withdrew her hand from the dying Rajput’s and flew across to the injured Canadian, throwing herself in front of him.

  ‘Non!’ she spat, knocking the bayonet aside as contemptuously as if it were a toy. ‘Ça n’est pas possible!’ Her riot of Titian-red curls tumbled from beneath her crisp white headdress, her grey cotton nursing dress was creased and spattered with blood, her violet-dark eyes blazed. ‘This patient has only one leg! He cannot stand! Do you understand? He cannot stand!’ She spread her arms wide so that the Japanese could approach no further.

  The Japanese goggled at her and stepped backwards and as he did so his commanding officer barked an order. It was the signal for a bloodbath.

  The retreating Jap retreated no further; he lunged forward, and with a cry of horror Julienne flung herself protectively over the body of the helpless Canadian. The bayonet went through the flesh of her arm and into the Canadian’s stomach, skewering them bloodily together. Through her screams of pain, Julienne was aware of the other soldiers, pausing for a moment half-crouched over their bayonets, and then storming
forward, dragging patients from their beds and bayoneting them with murderous glee.

  A booted foot was stamped down on her pinioned arm as the Jap sought leverage to wrench his bayonet free. As she slithered bloodily to the floor she caught a glimpse of Miriam Gresby cowering in a corner and of one of the Chinese nurses being hurled away from the patient she was trying to protect. A bayonet went into the senseless body of the senior medical officer, another through the throat of the dying Rajput.

  Julienne crawled to her hands and knees, slipping and sliding on the blood-soaked floor, trying to reach a scalpel, a surgical knife, anything that would end the life of one of the beasts rampaging around her. There were no instrument-trays within her reach, and she staggered to her feet, sobbing in frustration, deafened by the screams of the dying men and the shrill gleeful laughter of the Japanese.

  ‘Murderers!’ she howled as she lunged forward towards the nearest Jap. ‘Murderers!’ and she hurled herself at him, clawing at his face with the hand of her uninjured arm, her nails raking his flesh.

  The rifle butt came down hard on the side of her head, fielding her sprawling in blinding agony to the floor. All around her, as she lay unable to move, barely conscious, she could hear the screams of the dying Rajputs. Then there were no more screams, only gasping agonized groans, and then silence.

  ‘What are you going to do with us?’ Miriam Gresby’s, voice quavered. ‘Dear Lord, what are you going to do with us?’

  Julienne tried to move. Her vision was dislocated, objects dancing and merging together, but she was sure that she could see the glint of metal just inches away from her.

  ‘You soon see,’ a Japanese said to Miriam as the nurses were dragged from wherever they had tried to hide and were hauled, stumbling and falling, over the bodies of the dead medical staff and the few patients who had managed to die on their feet.

  Julienne’s hand stretched an extra fraction of an inch further. It was a knife. A surgical knife. Her fingers closed ground the haft.

  ‘How old are you, Englishwoman?’ the Jap snapped at Miriam.

  Julienne lifted her head, the knife safe in her grasp, dizzily trying to focus. Miriam looked as if she were about to faint. Her steel-grey hair, usually so elegantly styled, now hung damply against her cheeks. Her hands, naked without their lavish decoration of rings, looked pathetically old.

  ‘Forty-seven,’ she said waveringly.

  The Japanese hooted with laughter. ‘Too old,’ he said derisively. ‘Too old, old woman. No good.’ And as the four British girls and the three Chinese girls were herded for ward she was pushed contemptuously aside.

  One of the Chinese girls was whimpering in fear another was praying rapidly and urgently, a rosary sliding with desperate haste through her fingers. The mea pressed round them, bloody and sweaty, jostling for position, and then the screams began.

  Julienne held the knife concealed, in the palm of her hand. She would only be able to kill once, but she would kill with merciless relish. Brutal hands seized her, throwing her on to her back, and she could see nothing but lustful yellow faces closing in on her, and rampant cocks held in blood-soaked hands.

  She had only one hand in which to hold the knife, but, she held it firm and as the first of her ravagers fell on top of, her the knife slid unerringly in and up beneath his ribs. She saw an expression of dumb amazement on his face, heard his choking intake of breath and knew it would be the last he would ever take. As his companions realized what she had done, they fell on her with howls of rage, but Julienne was triumphant.

  The Jap whose dead body was being dragged away from her to make way for the others had been the Jap who had so brutally bayoneted the young Canadian.

  ‘Vous avez été vengé, chéri,’ she whispered as her victim’s comrades fell on her like ravening wolves. You have been avenged.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The night sky lightened imperceptibly, presaging dawn, as Adam and his companions hurtled in their army truck towards Wong Nei Chung Gap.

  ‘How the hell did the bastards manage to get so far inland so quickly?’ their driver asked as he took a perilous corner at the foot of Shouson Hill with a screech of tyres.

  ‘God knows,’ Adam said tautly. ‘They must have overrun the Rajputs on the north coast and the Volunteer batteries at Sai Wan Hill and Jardine’s lookout.’

  ‘Ronnie Ledsham was at Sai Wan Hill,’ one of the men behind him said as the truck bumped and rocked over the uneven ground. ‘I wonder if he copped it or not?’

  ‘That bloody horse of his ought to cop it,’ another voice said darkly. ‘I lost a bloody packet on it last Saturday.’

  There was a burst of nervous laughter, and then the driver said brusquely: ‘Pack it in, chaps. I can hear gunfire.’

  Adam leaned forward tensely, straining his eyes into the darkness. To the left was the dense black mass of Mount Nicholson, and with a stab of memory he recalled Beth leaning against the rails of the Orient Princess as they steamed into harbour, and Tom Nicholson pointing out to her Victoria Peak and Mount Butler and Mount Nicholson, and laughingly saying that he liked to think Mount Nicholson had been named after an ancestor of his. He wondered where Tom was now. He had always liked Tom and had stayed friends with him, as he had stayed friends with Alastair and, to a lesser extent, with Ronnie.

  There was a rattle of gunfire, and the flank of the mountain was suddenly thrown into lurid relief as flames from exploding mortar shells soared skywards.

  ‘Jesus, but they’re bloody close!’ the man who had lost a packet on Ronnie’s horse said apprehensively.

  ‘The Japs aren’t heading towards the Gap, they’re on the Gap!’ the driver gasped, as volley after volley of machinegun fire ripped out over the sound of the rifles and the crump of exploding shells.

  Adam’s hand tightened on his rifle. They had only the ammunition in their belts and a small supply of hand grenades. His driver flashed him a quick glance. ‘It looks as if we’re not going to be meeting up with anyone, sir,’ he said grimly. ‘It looks as if we’re going to be on our own.’

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ Adam ordered, and as he did so a machine-gun opened fire on them. Bullets raked the windscreen, spattering across the chest of the driver, burrowing into the door. From behind him Adam heard screams as men were hit and his own voice yelling at them to get down. The truck was veering wildly out of control, and he seized the wheel, trying to hold it on the road, to drive through the crucifying hail of fire.

  ‘I’m hit, sir! I’m hit!’ the youngest member of his platoon shrieked, stumbling towards the front of the truck, blood pouring down his face and over his hands.

  ‘Get down!’ Adam shouted at him as he fought to hold on to the wheel, to keep the truck on the road.

  There was another withering blast of fire, and the young corporal screamed in agony, lifted off his feet by the momentum of the shots plummeting into him. When he fell, it was bloodily forward, over the rear of Adam’s seat. Vainly Adam tried to free himself of the boy’s weight, but it was too late. He had lost control of the wheel, and before he could regain it the truck toppled off the edge of the road, crashing and rolling and splintering down the side of a ravine.

  Adam was sandwiched between the driver and the dead corporal, and when the disintegrating truck finally rocked and slithered to a halt on the scrub-filled dark hillside he knew he owed them his life. Without the protection their bodies had afforded, he would have been smashed to a bloody pulp.

  Pain screamed through his shoulders and legs as he tried to move, tried to free himself from them. He had to get out of the truck before the petrol-tank exploded or a hand-grenade went off, and he had to get his men out with him.

  ‘I’ve got you, sir,’ a voice panted, and Adam recognized the voice of Freddie Hollis, the middle-aged punter who had lost money on Ronnie’s horse. ‘Just hang on tight, sir, and I’ll have you free in a jiffy.’

  ‘Get back!’ Adam shouted to him. ‘The petrol-tank is about to go!’
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  ‘Not yet, it isn’t,’ Freddie gasped, with the confidence of a man accustomed to long shots. ‘Not till I’ve got you free, it isn’t.’

  With a massive heave, he pulled Adam from beneath the weight of the dead driver and out of the truck’s shattered cab.

  Adam crawled painfully on his hands and knees, looking about him with horror. ‘What about the others?’ he asked, stumbling to his feet, sick and stunned. There was no movement from the wreckage. No sound.

  ‘I didn’t see what happened to the two who were behind me,’ Freddie said, fighting for breath. ‘But the three in front of me are all goners.’

  With a choked cry, Adam staggered forward towards the wreckage.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for them!’ Freddie protested urgently. ‘We need to get the hell away from here!’

  Adam was in complete agreement with him, but before he left he had to satisfy himself that he wasn’t leaving wounded men behind him. His hands, moving feverishly and bloodily over the darkened shapes of the mangled bodies still trapped in the rear of the truck, assured him that he was not.

  ‘Come on, sir!’ Freddie hissed. ‘That tank is going to go any minute.’

  Adam sucked his breath between his teeth. Apart from one man, his entire platoon had been wiped out without even having had the chance to fire on the enemy.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said harshly, hardly able to speak for grief, and they began to run and stumble over shale and between stunted Chinese pines. As they did so, there was another long chattering burst of machine-gun fire and the petrol-tank was hit, exploding with hideous force, flames leaping into the air, the heat blasting their retreating backs.

  ‘That was a near one,’ Freddie gasped, throwing himself face down on the scree.

  They lay still for a few moments, trying not to think of the bodies being incinerated only yards away from them.

  ‘Come on,’ Adam said, when the machine-gunner had been given time to direct his attention elsewhere. ‘We have to try to skirt this ambush and regain the road. Somehow or other, we still have to make it to the Gap.’