Torrance stared at the severed head in horror. He struggled to break free of the men holding his arms, but their grip was too firm. ‘You murdering fucking bastard! Is that how Japanese officers fight, then? Get two men to hold your opponent down so you can chop his head off? Oh, yeah, you’re a real fucking hero, you are! Go on, then! Get it over with, you gutless fucking bastard!’
Standing over Torrance, the officer raised the sword into the air once more.
Another Japanese officer called out, striding towards them. He spoke at length with the officer with the toothbrush moustache, who lowered his sword, wiping MacLeod’s blood from it with a rag, and slotted it back into its scabbard.
The new officer barked out another order, and two more soldiers grabbed Sheridan, dragging her across to one of the lorries. She began to struggle, resisting them, but they were stronger than her.
‘Where are you taking her?’ demanded Torrance. As if he did not know exactly what fate they had in store for her. ‘You let her go, you bastards!’ He struggled futilely against his own captors. Something solid smacked into the back of his head, and he felt a leaden hand on one shoulder, pressing him down. His legs gave way beneath him, the tin mine spun, and then the darkness came.
Twenty-One
‘You canna blame yourself, Slugger,’ said Rossi. ‘You did all you could. Fate – and the Japs – were against us, that’s all.’
Torrance smiled thinly. He appreciated that Rossi was trying to make him feel better. But you could not take responsibility for your fellow man when everything was going well, then wash your hands of them when it all turned to shit. ‘I don’t believe in fate, Lefty. Jimmy’s dead, Dr Sheridan’s a “comfort woman” in a Jap brothel by now, and we’re on our way to a Jap POW camp. Who am I supposed to blame? Winston Churchill?’
Rossi grinned. ‘Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.’
Torrance managed a wry smile, though his heart was not in it.
Stripped of their webbing, the two of them were in the lock-up in the police station at Batu Pahat. For the past week they had been marched down countless jungle trails by their Japanese captors. Now they shared a cell with nine Australians and four Indians, all of whom had been captured trying to make their way from Parit Sulong to Yong Peng. Which seemed to suggest that the vast majority of the men who had set out for Yong Peng had actually made it. There was some consolation in that – a cheering ‘up yours!’ to the Japanese – but it was a backhanded consolation when you were one of the tiny minority who had not made it.
‘Why does everyone call you “Slugger”?’ asked one of the Australians, a man named Braddon. Like the other Australians, he had received rough handling from the Japanese since he had been captured, and his face was covered in bruises.
Torrance preferred not to talk about what had happened in Waziristan that day. ‘Long story.’
Braddon glanced pointedly around their cell. ‘It ain’t like we’re pushed for time, mate.’
‘It’s frae when we were fighting the Fakir of Ipi’s men in Waziristan,’ said Rossi. ‘Mr Sinclair – our platoon commander – was ordered to lead us on a patrol up into the hills. We were supposed to rendezvous with Mr Erskine’s platoon at some godforsaken nullah at the back end of beyond. Only Erskine got lost and never found his way to the nullah. We’d been waiting half a day for him to show up when these Pathans started sniping at us frae the rocks above. Mr Sinclair was the first one killed, then CSM Soutar… Sergeant McDougall was only wounded, but he was away for oil… oh, aye, the Pathans knew to go for the officers first.’
‘Away for what?’ asked Braddon.
‘Out of action, he means,’ explained Torrance.
‘So that left Corporal Torrance in command,’ continued Rossi.
‘You used to be a corporal?’ Braddon asked Torrance in astonishment. Even in the short time they had been sharing a cell, the young Australian had picked up that Torrance was not cut from the same cloth that made a conscientious NCO.
‘Aye, well, he was a different man then,’ explained Rossi. ‘Always eager to do his duty. He’d only been in the army three years, but he’d had no difficulty earning his second stripe.’
‘He means I was young and stupid,’ said Torrance.
‘So there’s thirty men pinned down in this nullah, wi’ hundreds of Pathans sniping at us frae the rocks above—’
‘Hundreds!’ snorted Torrance. ‘Half a dozen, more like. And three of them buggered off when things got too hot for ’em.’
‘Shut your geggy!’ said Rossi. ‘Who’s telling this story, you or me?’
‘You are. And you’re making it sound more like something out of King of the Khyber Rifles than anything I recollect.’
‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, there we were – pinned down, running out of water and Sergeant McDougall like to die without proper medical attention. “Wait here,” says Torrance. “I’ll crawl up there and see if I canna work ma way around behind them.”’
‘I spoke with a Glaswegian accent in those days,’ Torrance commented laconically.
‘And before anyone could stop him, he was gone. Well, we waited and waited, and after a while we got to wondering if he’d buggered off to leave us to die… I mean, that’s what the Private Torrance we all know and love would do.’
‘Too bloody right I would!’ said Torrance.
‘Then we heard shooting up above, then it goes quiet, and we’re wondering if Torrance has got himself killed. We’re arguing about who should take command – nobody wanted that job, I can tell you! – when up pops Torrance, covered in blood—’
Torrance remembered rolling over and over in the dust with a bloody great hairy Pathan on top of him, the sun glinting on the wickedly curved blade of the man’s Khyber knife, his wolfish grin revealing rotten teeth, and the stink of his breath hot in Torrance’s face. The recollection of how easily things might have gone the other way that day made him feel queasy. ‘I had a few drops on my sleeve,’ he said dismissively. ‘I’ve got more blood on me shaving.’
‘“It’s awreet, lads,” he says,’ said Rossi. ‘“We can go home now.” When we got back to base, Torrance reports to the CO, and then he goes to the infirmary where the MO tells him Sergeant McDougall’s died of his wound. So Torrance marches to the officers’ mess, and there’s Mr Erskine playing billiards wi’ one o’ the other subalterns. “What the hell are you doing in here?” he says when he sees Torrance. “D’you no’ know this is officers only?” Torrance disnae say a word, he just slugs Erskine on the jaw, so hard he goes flying arse over tip clean over the billiards table. And that’s why we call him “Slugger”.’
Torrance smiled at the recollection. ‘Broke my wrist.’
‘And Erskine’s jaw,’ said Rossi. ‘And that’s how Corporal Torrance ended up as plain auld Private Torrance again.’
‘Was it worth it?’ asked Braddon.
‘The broken wrist and the stripes?’ said Torrance. ‘Definitely. Six months’ hard labour in the glasshouse at Lucknow?’ Six months of breaking rocks by day and listening to the cockroaches scuttle about the floor of his cell by night, while a bunch of sadistic provost sergeants looked for any excuse to set about him with their lathis. ‘Definitely not.’
‘You got off lightly, if you ask me,’ said Rossi. ‘I knew a soldier who got six years’ penal servitude for striking one of his officers. If Erskine’d been performing his duties rather than playing billiards, you might have been shot.’
‘And I knew a bloke got twenty-eight days in detention for the same crime.’ Torrance shrugged. ‘You pays your money and you takes your chance.’
‘I reckon your actions in leading the patrol must have counted for something,’ said Braddon.
‘Yeah, well, I learned my lesson. You won’t catch me playing at heroes again. You gotta look after number one in this game. If the army doesn’t like it, they can shove it.’
One wall of the cell consisted of floor-to-ceiling bars. The steel d
oor beyond the bars opened, and two Kenpeitai guards entered. They wore exactly the same uniforms as regular Japanese infantry, with only white armbands bearing two Japanese characters in scarlet to differentiate them. Over the past week, Torrance and Rossi had got to know these two quite well: Nakajima was a right bastard, always looking for an excuse to hit one of the prisoners with his shinei, a bamboo sword, but Yasuda seemed like a decent enough bloke, not above slipping a couple of cigarettes to a prisoner when none of the other guards were watching.
Today Nakajima and Yasuda were accompanied by a trio of visitors to the prisoner-of-war holding cage. Two of them were Japanese and Torrance did not recognise either, though whatever some blokes said about all Japanese looking the same, one of them was the sort of feller you could not mistake in a crowd: he stood seven foot tall, with a gnarled brow beneath the peak of his field cap and a long, square jaw. The second was some kind of officer, if the rank insignia on his collar and shoulders and the white shirt he wore under his tunic were any indication.
Torrance recognised their companion at once, however: ‘Professor’ Ziegler, now wearing a Japanese army uniform. All three of them wore white armbands, but instead of Japanese characters embroidered in scarlet, these each bore a Latin letter ‘U’ enclosed in a hexagon, in black.
He nudged Rossi and nodded at Ziegler. ‘Funf is back!’
Seeing the two Argylls, Ziegler smiled broadly, clicked his heels together and flung up an arm in a Nazi salute.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Torrance. ‘Sieg heil to you too, and I hope you bloody choke on your sauerkraut! Caught any rare butterflies lately, or have you been too busy stabbing blokes in the back?’
Ziegler pointed them out to the officer in the white shirt. ‘That one and that one.’
The officer spoke to Nakajima and Yasuda in Japanese. Nakajima covered the prisoners through the bars of their cell with a Thompson, while Yasuda unlocked the gate. As soon as it was open, one of the Indians – a brawny havildar – tried to rush the guards. The giant caught him effortlessly, picking him up and throwing him to the back of the cell.
‘I am Lieutenant Ishikawa,’ the officer told Torrance and Rossi. ‘Will you come out, or must I ask Sergeant Ogata here to come in and get you?’
After a week on Japanese rations – a handful of rice and a little fish – neither had the strength to offer much resistance. They bowed to Ishikawa: if they had learned one thing in the past week, it was that refusing to bow to Japanese officers was not worth the beatings such defiance invariably brought down on them. Yasuda locked the cell gate behind them, and Ogata closed handcuffs over their wrists, securing their hands behind their backs.
Ishikawa questioned Nakajima in Japanese, before turning to Ziegler. ‘He says the only papers found on them when they were captured were their pay books.’
‘What did you do with the geological survey you took from the wreck of the aeroplane?’ Ziegler asked Torrance.
‘What geological survey?’
Ziegler gave him a backhanded slap, hard enough to make Torrance reel back against the bars of the cell.
‘Enough!’ snapped Ishikawa. ‘We will take them to Captain Mitsumoto so they can be properly interrogated.’
With one massive paw on Torrance’s right shoulder and the other on Rossi’s left, Ogata marched the two prisoners out of the police station to where a Bedford three-tonne lorry was parked.
Ziegler climbed in the cab while Ogata picked each of the prisoners up in turn and tossed them over the tailgate. As they lay on the floor, he sat over them with Lieutenant Ishikawa.
‘Where d’you think they’re taking us?’ asked Rossi.
Ogata kicked him savagely. ‘Damare!’
‘That means “No talking!”’ said Ishikawa.
‘Oh, aye,’ said Rossi. ‘Nakajima’s been teaching us all the standard phrases from the tourist phrasebooks. “Good morning”, “Which way to the railway station?”, “Ingerisu prisoner bow to Japanese officer.”’
The journey lasted perhaps an hour, so far as Torrance could tell, though given the discomfort of the hard surface he lay on and the handcuffs biting into his wrists, it might only have been a fraction of that time. Finally the lorry moved off smooth tarmac and back on to a rutted dirt track, pulling up with a grating of gears a couple of minutes later. The tailgate was lowered and Ogata descended, dragging out Torrance and Rossi in turn and setting them on their feet.
The lorry was parked on a patch of dry ground in the midst of some marshes where thick strands of reeds grew over Torrance’s head. A couple of other vehicles were parked nearby: a Kurogane Type 95 Japanese scout car, a Humber wireless truck, and a familiar-looking Riley Kestrel. Over the reeds to their left, he could make out the top of what at first glance appeared to be some kind of industrial building, which seemed out of place in the desolation of the marshes. As the two prisoners were marched around the edge of a lake, a gap in the reeds gave them a better look at the ‘industrial building’, which Torrance now saw was a tin dredge, floating on its own pontoon, nearly as long as a football field.
The dredge was as big as a small cathedral, with a central section like a cathedral’s tower rising from the middle, three or four storeys high. That was as far as the similarity stretched: with its corrugated-iron sides, the dredge was entirely functional. At one end, the bucket-line jutted suggestively forward, like an enormous chainsaw, except that instead of teeth it had a chain of huge buckets designed to scoop silt rich in clay ore up from the bottom of the marshes. The bucket-line carried the ore into the heart of the processing plant, where the tin was separated out by a process that, as far as Torrance understood it, was akin to some kind of mechanical panning. Seven chutes projected out of the other end, suspended from an array of girders by a network of steel hawsers; via these, the spoil was deposited in areas which had already been dredged. Like a mechanical monster with a digestive tract, chomping up the soil, keeping the goodness and excreting the waste.
Beneath the dredge’s corrugated sides, the lowermost deck was open, and a gangplank bridged the open water between the side of the pontoon and the dry ground where the lorry was parked.
Ogata marched them across the gangplank and Ishikawa and Ziegler followed. Even with the sides open to the air, it was gloomy after the brightness of the tropical day. Most of the machinery of the dredge ran down the centreline, with an open space all around it, although much of that space was actually a confusion of turbines, gears, winches, drive belts, chain pulleys, pumps, pipes with valve wheels on them, arrays of levers, and spare links for the chain of buckets on the dredging arm. Torrance and Rossi were thrust through a door into a small compartment, some kind of storage room perhaps, but now bare of stores. Torrance stumbled and fell headlong on the dusty floor. He did not have the energy to get up again. Rossi slumped down, leaning against one wall with his shoulder, his head hanging.
‘There’s no lock on that door,’ said Torrance.
‘There’ll be a guard outside,’ said Rossi. ‘They’d no’ put us in a prison wi’ no lock and no guard.’
Torrance rocked on to his knees and rose to his feet. Creeping to the door, he turned his back to it so he could grasp the handle with his cuffed hands. Opening it a crack, he peered out over his shoulder and found Ogata peering back at him. Torrance essayed a smile. ‘Turned out nice again, eh?’
Ogata opened the door fully and rammed the butt of his rifle between Torrance’s shoulders, driving him back into the room and slamming the door again.
‘Told you,’ said Rossi.
Torrance squatted on the floor. ‘No one likes a smart alec, Lefty. D’you think Boris Karloff out there speaks English?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ asked Rossi. ‘What do you care, anyway?’
‘It’ll make it a lot easier to plan our escape if we don’t have to worry about them overhearing.’
‘Plan our escape? God, d’you never give up?’
‘I ain’t spending the rest of the war in no P
OW camp. I’ll die first.’
‘You would too, you barmpot. What have you got in mind?’
‘Sooner or later they’re gonna come for us, right?’
‘Aye.’
‘So we jump ’em, grab their guns, take that Riley, and head south for Johore.’
‘That’s it, is it? That’s your master plan?’
‘You got any better suggestions?’
‘I’d be hard-pressed to come up wi’ a worse one. What if one of them’s Boris Karloff? Gaunae jump him, are you?’
‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall.’
‘Oh, aye, I’ve no doubt. It’s how you make them fall in the first place that’s the tricky bit. Why are they holding us on a tin dredge, d’you suppose?’
‘How the hell should I know? Maybe they like their peace and quiet. Maybe they don’t want any neighbours to be incommoded by the screams of the prisoners they’re torturing. Maybe they’re just trying to avoid forking out for ground rent.’
The door opened and Ogata entered with another guard who kept Rossi covered with a Thompson while the big sergeant grabbed Torrance and dragged him outside. Leaving the other man to guard Rossi, Ogata marched Torrance along the lower deck towards the stern of the dredge with one massive hand gripping his shoulder like a vice. In the shadows below the pipes and gantries, Ziegler waited for them, toying with a shinei in one hand which he patted against the palm of the other. Next to Ziegler stood a Japanese officer wearing a Sam Browne belt over his tunic, jodhpurs tucked into riding boots of undressed black leather, a peaked cap on his head and – disconcertingly – a paisley cravat at his throat. On the floor was a ladder no more than eight feet long, with a rope tied around one of the end rungs and looped over a girder supporting one of the gantries overhead. There was also a hose screwed on to the tap of a standpipe and coiled on the deck.
Ziegler handed the shinei to Ogata.
The Japanese officer produced a gold-plated cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’
The Name of Valour Page 25