‘I can’t see a bloody hand in front of my face,’ Hollis whispered back to him. ‘Can’t we just sit it out until it gets lights?’
‘And find a score of Japs having breakfast fifty yards above our heads?’ Adam asked savagely. ‘No, we can’t. Our orders were to make it to the Gap and give what assistance we could. And that is what I intend doing.’
Hollis sighed. Adam had always been a stickler for discipline. He knew he could always refuse and say his legs wouldn’t carry him, but he didn’t fancy the idea of spending hours alone on a treacherous hillside with the Japs breathing down his neck. ‘I’m with you, sir,’ he said resignedly. ‘Lead the way.’
Adam led the way. Slowly and carefully they traversed the scree, the pre-dawn darkness intensified by a thick fog rolling in from the sea. Finally, bruised and bleeding, they crawled back on to the road a good hundred yards further on from the point where they had been ambushed.
‘We can’t just stroll along it as though it’s Pall Mall on a Sunday morning,’ Hollis whispered apprehensively. ‘What is it you intend doing?’
‘What I don’t intend is getting shot,’ Adam retorted crisply. ‘We’ll cross to the higher ground, taking what cover we can, but keeping the road in view to give us our gearings.’
Crouching low, rifles in their hands, they ran across the narrow road and into the scrub beyond.
‘I can hear an engine,’ Hollis said suddenly. ‘Coming towards us from the Gap. Is it one of ours, or one of theirs, do you think?’
Adam listened tensely. ‘It’s one of ours,’ he said with sudden certainty. ‘It’s a Bedford, I’m sure of it.’
As the truck lumbered into view and he saw the familiar-shaped bonnet, he sprang forward, waving it down.
The truck skidded to a halt and the driver leaned out, yelling: ‘Don’t go any further that way! The Gap’s alive with Japs!’
‘There’s a party of them this way as well,’ Adam warned. ‘They’ve got a machine-gun positioned above the road.’
‘Jesus Christ! Which way am I to go, then?’ the driver asked desperately.
‘Back the way you came,’ Adam snapped, disgusted at the man’s determination to retreat. ‘And you can take my corporal and myself with you.’
The driver rammed his truck once more into gear. ‘No bloody fear,’ he said forcefully. ‘I’m not driving back into that hell-hole! Everyone is falling back. There’s only one other platoon still trying to fight their way through to HQ and that’s led by a madman. He’s about five hundred yards ahead of you.’ And with that, he pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator and sped away.
‘Did you tell him about the Jap ambush?’ Hollis asked curiously as Adam sprinted back across the road.
‘Yes. He seems to prefer it to whatever is happening at the gap.’
‘And what is happening at the Gap?’ Hollis asked, knowing damn well that he would soon be finding out. If Adam had been going to retreat, he would have hitched a lift with the departing truck-driver.
‘Hand-to-hand fighting by the sound of it,’ Adam said, dropping down into the scrub and beginning to run at a steady pace. ‘There’s one platoon still trying to fight their way through, though.’
‘And we’re going to join it?’ Hollis asked, falling into a run at his side.
‘Yes,’ Adam panted, wondering how long he could keep up his speed over rough ground. ‘We damn well are!’
The sound of fighting was all around them. Dawn was beginning to break, and as the pale gold light seeped over the horizon it was easier for them to locate the sources of fierce enemy rifle-fire.
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ Hollis said as they threw themselves to the ground for the twentieth time. ‘The bastards are forming a ring round the Gap. No one is going to get out of there!’
There was the sound of a truck accelerating wildly, speeding in their direction down the nearby road. They raised their heads cautiously, and as the British army truck veered into view a barrage of shell shots were let loose on it. There was a scream of brakes and it keeled over, the cab a mass of flames. Spurts of fire flicked along the ground, and splashes of dust pitted the road. No running figures fled from the truck’s rear. It lay where it had fallen, burning brightly and the shell-fire died.
‘Poor devils,’ Hollis said thickly. ‘They were making a run for it. There’s no sense in trying to go any further. The Japs have the Gap. The best thing we can do is to try to retreat.’
Adam’s mouth tightened obstinately. He hadn’t waited years for a military confrontation in order to make a retreat before he had even engaged the enemy. ‘No,’ he said stubbornly, ‘we’re not retreating while there’s still a platoon fighting ahead of us. We’re going to join up with them and fight with them.’
A shell exploded in a dip of ground to their left, showering them with debris.
‘But there’s no point!’ Hollis protested when he had satisfied himself that he was still all in one piece. ‘Even if we manage to fight our way through to Brigade HQ, we’d never be able to fight our way out! It’s surrounded!’
The pale gold of early dawn was deepening to rosy red. Adam crouched on his haunches, looking around him. They were above the Gap, and the gullies and ravines running down to it from the surrounding mountains were full of Japs. Brigade Headquarters was a hundred yards or so on the west side of the Wong Nei Chung Gap Road, and he could see the bunkered roofs and the nearby company shelters half-buried in the hillside, and the ammunition-dumps. The Japs had closed in a tight ring around them, but they had still not broken through. From all around the Headquarters there were pockets of fierce fighting, and the one nearest to them was now clearly visible.
Adam’s fingers tightened purposefully around his rifle. There were six men, probably seven – all, apart from the officer leading them, in volunteer uniform and all running low through the dense undergrowth towards a Jap machine-gun post. He didn’t wait to see what would happen when they came within firing distance of it.
‘Come on!’ he snapped to Hollis. ‘There’s a party going on, and we’ve been invited! Get moving!’
Braving sniper-fire and falling shells, they raced over the pot-holed ground. ‘Christ! I don’t know who those chaps are in front of us, but they’ve been busy!’ Hollis gasped as they swerved to avoid the bodies of butchered Japs. ‘What are they fighting with – carving-knives?’
Adam didn’t answer. His heart was pounding against his chest, the blood drumming in his ears. ‘Please don’t let my leg let me down,’ he was praying as he ran and leaped and surged down the hill towards the Volunteers in front of him and then, as the Volunteers opened fire on the machine-gun post, and he hurled himself into battle alongside them, he found himself uttering the prayer of a man who had entered into battle over three hundred years earlier. ‘O Lord! Thou knowest how busy I must be this day,’ Sir Jacob Astley had prayed before the battle of Edgehill. ‘If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.’
Bullets, heavy and hissing, flew past his head like swarms of angry bees. Mortar-shells began to plop down into the ground around him, exploding in sharp blasts and sending shrapnel flying. One of the men in front of him caught a piece in his throat and fell to his knees, choking on blood.
‘We have to put the gunner out of action!’ the officer leading the Volunteers yelled.
Adam was aware that Hollis had fallen, but whether through injury or to take shelter from the withering blast of machine-gun fire he didn’t know.
‘I’ve got a grenade!’ he shouted, aware that the men he was fighting with had long since exhausted such supplies.
‘Then, give it to me, man!’ the officer exhorted, whipping round to face him. His steel helmet was gone, his dark hair falling sweat-damp across his forehead; his bayonet dripped blood from his earlier hand-to-hand engagement; he had an ugly gash in his left forearm; and his eyes blazed with fanatical determination.
Adam felt himself falter and half-fall as he thrust the grenade into the officer’s blood-soaked
hand. ‘Thanks!’ Raefe said with an exultant grin. ‘This will put the bastard out of action! Give me all the cover that you can!’
There was no place to hide, no place to take cover. If Elliot was going to lob the grenade with any hope of accuracy, then he was going to have to expose himself suicidally to enemy fire.
As Raefe sprang forward, heedless of the gunfire ricocheting round him, Adam opened fire at the machine-gunner with his rifle. Bullets beat down on him like hail, and other pellets bounced off the ground, casting gigantic firefly sparks into the air. Through the smoke and fumes he saw Raefe raise his right arm and lob the grenade with deadly accuracy. Crazily, as the machine-gun post erupted in screams and smoke and flames, all he could think was what a magnificent spin-bowler Elliot would have made.
‘Thank God,’ Hollis croaked, crawling up beside him.
‘That bloody gun has been silenced.’
‘Not for long!’ Adam whooped gleefully. ‘Now we can turn it on the bastards and give them a taste of their own medicine!’
There was still heavy sniper-fire as he crouched low, sprinting forward to Elliot’s side. ‘That was bloody marvellous!’ he enthused, seizing Elliot’s uninjured arm and slapping him on the back. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it! Why the hell you’re not gutted with bullets I’ll never know!’
‘I’ve got my fair share,’ Raefe said wryly as the blood continued to run down his left arm. ‘Now let’s put this machine-gun to good use.’
Adam didn’t move. He suddenly realized what it was he had done. This man he was congratulating on his foolhardy bravery was the man he hated most in the world. The man who had taken Beth away from him. The man he yearned to put a bullet through.
Raefe grinned, and for the first time Adam was aware of the force of the man’s personality. Of the reckless zest for life that had so attracted Beth. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Harland,’ he said as a shell whistled close over their heads, ‘But forget it for the moment. All that matters now is that we get through to Lawson.’
‘Brigadier Lawson?’ Adam asked, wondering what the hell Elliot was doing holding the rank of a British army captain.
Raefe nodded grimly. ‘He’s in there with only a handful of men. The Winnipeg Grenadiers who were with him were detailed to Jardine’s lookout shortly after midnight. His only reserve company left two hours ago to try to capture Mount Butler.’
‘Then, who has he got in there with him?’ Hollis asked, reaching them in time to hear the tail end of the conversation.
‘Clerks, cooks, signallers, storemen,’ Raefe said tersely. ‘They’re putting up a hell of a fight, but you can see for yourself what the odds are.’
Another shell plummeted heart-stoppingly near them.
‘Yes,’ Hollis said fervently. ‘I can, but I don’t see what we can do about it. We can’t take on the entire Jap army single-handed. There must be two divisions at least swarming over these hills.’
Adam and Raefe ignored him. The other Volunteers who had been pinned down by fire were now running low towards them. Of the six, there were only four left.
‘We leave two men here to man this gun,’ Raefe said decisively. ‘The rest of us keep going forward, is that understood?’
Hollis squirmed slightly. He wasn’t a coward and he didn’t like being made to feel like one. If the madman giving the orders had an ounce of sense, he would realize that continuing to go forward was nothing short of suicide. As it was, he didn’t have sense, and of the two options open to him he much preferred the thought of remaining with Adam, whom he had begun to regard as a lucky mascot.
‘If Captain Harland is staying with the gun, I’ll stay with him.’
‘I’m not,’ Adam said unhesitatingly. ‘I’m going forward with Captain Elliot.’
Hollis wondered what the odds were on them ever coming back. ‘All right,’ he said fatalistically, ‘I’ll go forward, too.’
They had gone only fifty yards when a party of Japanese surged over the lip of the hill, bearing down on them with frenzied shouts of ‘Banzai! Banzai!’
In the long hideous days afterwards, when Adam had plenty of time to remember and reflect, it was Raefe’s sheer physical strength that remained his clearest memory. As hand-grenades fell among them like fine rain, Raefe shouted blasphemous encouragement to the men he was leading, and hurled unspeakable oaths at the enemy. When his rifle would no longer fire, he clubbed the Japanese to death with the butt. When his bayonet remained pinioned in the body of a Jap who had been bearing down on Hollis, he wrested a sword from an officer and decapitated him with it; he picked up grenades and threw them back at the attacking hordes; he fought with his boots and with his bare fists. He wasn’t one man, he was ten men, and by the time the Japanese lay dead around them Adam knew that he would never again be able to speak of him with contempt.
They lay on the ground, among the fallen Japs, gasping for breath. Hollis was badly wounded, blood pouring from a shrapnel wound in his leg. One of the original Volunteers had died at the end of a Japanese bayonet thrust, his last anguished cry being for his mother. Adam had been wounded in the shoulder and the thigh but he could still lift his arm, still limp at a creditable rate on his good leg.
The gunfire in and around the Headquarters was fiercer than ever.
‘They’re still holding out,’ Adam panted, ‘Surely to God there should be reinforcements breaking through soon?’
Raefe was just about to answer him when he saw a score of Japs emerge from the scree of the east side of the Wong Nei Chung Gap Road and take up sniper positions perilously close to the beleaguered Headquarters. Dragging himself to his feet, he waved Hollis and Adam on behind him. Before they had gone a dozen yards, they could see more Japs, this time on the roof of the Medical Aid shelter, only thirty feet or so from Brigadier Lawson’s command post.
‘We can’t get there in time to be of any use,’ Hollis gasped, and then he heard Raefe Elliot’s savage intake of breath and Adam’s choked cry. Down below them, where the gap road wound through the converging hills, towards Repulse Bay and the sea, the Brigade Headquarters was completely surrounded and under a barrage of gunfire. Half a dozen men, one of them in the distinctive uniform of a brigadier, burst out of the shelter, firing from the hip. They were almost instantly cut down.
‘Oh God,’ Hollis said, sinking to his knees. ‘Oh God! Oh shit! Oh hell!’
Adam and Raefe looked down on the now silent Headquarters, the skin stretched tight across their cheekbones, their mouths grim. There was no more gunfire, only exulting Japanese swarming down into the bunkered recesses of what had been Brigadier Lawson’s command headquarters.
‘What now?’ Adam asked bleakly, turning away, unable to bear seeing any more.
Raefe was silent for a minute. The Japanese had closed in a tight ring all around them, and he knew they would have to fight just as fiercely to break out of the ring as they had had to do to break into it.
‘We head towards Repulse Bay,’ he said at last. ‘The Japanese will have their work cut out consolidating their positions on the ground they’ve taken. Any counter-attack will have to come from East Brigade, and they’re down around the bay and the peninsula.’
Hollis groaned. ‘But that’s nearly two miles over rough ground. There’s no way that I shall be able to make it.’
‘There’s an advanced dressing station between here and the bay,’ Raefe said, helping Adam haul Hollis to his feet. ‘We’ll leave you there. They’ll soon patch you up.’
They were so exhausted by the time the dressing station came into view that none of them noticed how suspiciously quiet it was.
‘I’ll get them to put a pad on this wound in my thigh,’ Adam said as they limped up to the door. ‘It isn’t deep, but it’s bleeding like the devil.…’
The door swung open, and he didn’t speak again. Not for a long time. It was a charnel house. The senior medical officer lay directly across their path, hideously bayoneted. Men with only stumps for legs lay half-dragge
d from their beds, bayoneted to death despite their obvious wounds.
Hollis choked, vomiting over the floor as Adam and Raefe stepped disbelieving forward. The nurses had been herded together, and lay in a pathetic discarded heap, their broken bodies bearing dreadful witness to the way they had been used before death.
‘Christ Almighty!’ Adam whispered, turning his head away. ‘It’s beyond belief.…’ It was then that he saw her. She was lying apart from the other nurses, a dead Jap only a few feet away from her, a surgical knife protruding from his chest.
Adam sobbed, kneeling down at her side. ‘The bastards,’ he wept, taking her hand. ‘The unspeakable, unbelievable, goddamned bastards!’
Every muscle and tendon in Raefe’s body was rigid. Lizzie! he was screaming inside his head. Lizzie! Lizzie! If the Japs had raped and murdered once, they would rape and murder again.
Adam turned his chalk-white face towards him. ‘What about Beth?’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘What if the Japs overrun the Jockey Club?’
Raefe was taking off his jacket, bending down towards Julienne. ‘There’s a huge concentration of troops around the Wanchai and the Jockey Club,’ he said tersely, praying to God that they were still there. ‘Lizzie will be safe.’
His voice was odd, so tight that it was almost strangled. With unutterable tenderness he wrapped the jacket around Julienne, closing her pansy-dark eyes.
‘At least she took one of the bastards with her,’ he said, and as he spoke Adam realized that it wasn’t rage or horror that was transforming his voice, but tears.
‘We can’t just leave her here,’ Adam said helplessly. ‘We can’t just leave any of them here. It’s indecent. It’s—’
A noise from a large cupboard only a yard or two away from them made them both spring to their feet.
‘Bastard!’ Adam sobbed, leaping forward and yanking open the door, his bayonet ready in his hand.
Miriam Gresby toppled out on top of him, no longer elegant and aggressive and well groomed, but a barely recognizable incoherent wreck.
A Multitude of Sins Page 50
