Weller's War

by George Weller

  One camp near Kumamoto, traced and found by Navy Lieutenant Edward Little, proved a regular Shangri-La whose chiefly civilian prisoners had not even been told by Japanese authorities that the war was over. This camp is still under Japanese guard, and the Japanese only permit escorted prisoners to leave the walls. They are receiving 300 grams of rice daily and are without doctors or medicine, shoes or clothing. These civilian prisoners, mostly accused of unsympathetic acts against the Japanese, had been engaged by their captors in building air fields.

  Another camp, with rooftops not marked as the Manila agreement specified, was found by Warrant Officer Houston Sanders. This camp, the third discovered by Americans near Omuta, has 546 Chinese soldiers captured in the Shenai drive. (Eighty were executed by the Japs since their arrival seventeen months ago.) About sixty per cent suffer deficiencies of vitamins A, C, or B6.

  Both Little and Sanders were formerly captives at Corregidor.

  DEPARTURE, WITH SWORDS AND ASHES

  A Short Story

  “We made a pretty good showing at tinko tonight, considering,” said Borum, the conscientious master sergeant of Camp 34, to Major Toth, the American veterinarian from Bataan, whom the Japanese had appointed commandant of prisoners.

  “Considering what?” said Major Toth.

  “Well,” said Sergeant Borum defensively, “considering that it's been such a strain, waiting here for the recovery team. Every prisoner would like to go over the hill and turn up in Nagasaki or Kobe. Everybody knows he wouldn't be blamed for jumping the gun a little, not after three years' waiting.”

  “How were our percentages at tinko tonight?” asked the major.

  “Dutch ninety-nine per cent, British ninety-five per cent, Aussies seventy-eight per cent and Americans sixty-nine per cent present,” said Borum. “There might be a few of our guys shacked up around here, but most of them have probably thumbed a ride to Okinawa or Manila by now.”

  “I haven't seen Captain Ralston all afternoon,” said the major. Captain Ralston was in charge of the four-man recovery team which had liberated the camp the day before.

  “Baron Satsumai asked the whole recovery team over for tea,” said Borum, his mouth commencing a smile. His smile, during his imprisonment, had acquired a peculiar and ironical Japanese twist, and often signaled a double meaning.

  “The baron and baroness are sure polishing that old apple,” said Major Toth mildly.

  “Oh, they're just mending their fences,” said Borum, diluting his irony with tolerance. “It's natural. After all, we'll be gone in a few hours. But another outfit is moving in to occupy and stay.”

  There were twenty-three square wooden boxes, each with a name and serial number painted on the plain yellow wood, stacked beside the major's desk. They contained the ashes of the American dead, two of whom had been beaten to death in the guardhouse. Major Toth rested his hand on the topmost box as he turned to look out the window, broken in the last bombing and half patched with paper.

  The major could see outside in the prison yard the giant statue of a greenish-black miner, tall and inspirational—an idealized Satsumai miner towering above the doll-like buildings. At the feet of this behemoth of industrial propaganda two Americans were making a business deal. Halborn, a bearded seaman second captured at Cavite, was disposing of a sword to Mendoza, a 200th Coast Artillery gunner from Bataan. Mendoza, a clean-cut kid from Albuquerque, had lost four fingers the first winter, when the rotten, mushy ceiling of the mine, abandoned till the Americans arrived, vomited coal by tons on him as he picked at what the prisoners called the long wall—that is, the most advanced part of the coal face.

  The deal was closed. The sailor walked away scratching his beard. Mendoza, acting on a buyer's impulse, turned and entered the prison office, swishing his new sword before him and setting the fat flies buzzing wildly.

  “Hello, Captain Toth,” he said. “Hello, Borum. Look, this sword I just bought, captain, I wanted to ask you—”

  “Major Toth, since yesterday,” reminded Borum gently under his breath. “And how about throwing a kirei to your commanding officer?”

  Mendoza threw the salute. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  All three of them grinned; these promotions were part of the wild fantasy of their new freedom, all unreal, totally incredible.

  The New Mexican kid held the salute, his skinny half-naked body at stiff attention. His garrison cap was hand-stitched from the tail of the O.D. shirt of a prisoner who was now ashes. His black slit-toed sandals looked like flappy comedian's shoes on his thin feet. His neck bones and backbone showed through his pale skin. Among the ulcers on his legs Toth recognized the old one which Lieutenant Bernstein, the medical officer, had nourished and kept alive with cap lantern acid, so that Mendoza, after his amputation, would not have to go down the shaft again. It was the most famous of Camp 34′s many acid-fed ulcers; it had flourished nineteen weeks, and even in its present fossilized or emeritus condition it still had an eye like a devilfish.

  “I hope you don't want to go home on points,” said Toth.

  Ralston's talk of the first day, in which he explained how hard the point system was going to be on the occupying army, was derision to the prisoners.

  Mendoza relaxed, ignoring the question. “Sir, this sword. Take a look at it. Halborn owed me four rice rations and two cigarettes and a pickle. It's a legal debt, because it goes back to before you made trading food illegal. Now he offers me this sword to wipe out the debt. He's got a better one for himself, but this is the one he offers me.” He held out the sword, once a cheap prop to the authority of some sergeant now flown on the wings of fear.

  Major Toth took the sword, withdrew the blade until he saw rust, then shoved it back. “Good souvenir,” he said.

  Mendoza looked relieved as well as grateful; it's always shaky business discussing souvenirs with officers; now he had authority on his side. I showed it to Major Toth, he could say, if someone asked him. But he wanted a little more assurance.

  “Now here's what I wanted to know, sir,” he said, taking a big breath. He spoke very distinctly and emphatically. “Will they take these swords away from us in Okinawa or maybe in Manila when we board the plane for the States?”

  Major Toth looked at Borum. Sergeants know everything. Borum looked back at Major Toth. This time he did not know. This question was from the outside world, beyond Camp 34, beyond even Nagasaki.

  “Who told you they took swords away?” asked Toth.

  “That corporal on the recovery team, when he was getting our serial numbers this morning.”

  “He was just trying to beat down the price,” said Borum quickly. “You hang on to your sword. Don't let it go, no matter what they say. … Isn't that right, major?”

  “I don't know,” said Toth with a hesitancy unusual for him. “I might tell you that you could keep it, and still some brass hat might order you to turn it in.”

  A shadow was falling on him of the old bewilderment, the uncertainty that rottenly underlay everything in camp life, that supported the hunger, the dysentery, the stolen food parcels and the mail destroyed before one's eyes, and the corrupt ceilings of coal. Doubt was the mole of camp life, the mole under the miners.

  He looked at Borum and Mendoza and it struck him how Japanese they appeared. Their hair, thin from malnutrition, was cut in that surly down-pulled cowlick affected by the Japanese infantryman. So was his own, for that matter. Under their patched trousers, he knew, they wore not shorts, but breechclouts. By sale, theft and compromise, Japan had crept in and occupied the fortress of each man's body. The Christmas before last, when he had had diarrhea, Borum had sold his own Bataan knife and fork for three rations of rice for him, and had eaten with nothing but chopsticks for nineteen months. Often he caught himself thinking whole sentences in Japanese.

  Mendoza was still looking at the sword, and Toth felt impatient with himself for not being able to put his fears to rest. It reminded him of the afternoon when, after repe
ated rumors leaking through from Korean tunnels that Germany had surrendered, Lieutenant Kashihami had called him in. Because an Aussie had struck a foreman, Kashihami publicly had struck him, the Allied commandant, at morning tinko. But in the afternoon Kashihami offered him a cigarette. “Hitler has died,” said Kashihami.

  Was it a trick? Had Hitler really died? Or was Kashihami trying to bait him on something else? Nothing the Japanese ever said or did was unmotivated, except when they hit you, and that was like a reflex.

  As the three prisoners stood looking at the sword, a jeep grated to a stop in front of the giant miner. Captain Ralston swung free his long legs and jumped out. He had a thin, pointed face, full of energy, and healthy black hair with something electric about it. To Major Toth, the hair of all the Americans on Ralston's recovery team appeared thick with an almost artificial brushiness. Their skins seemed unnaturally clear and ruddy, like girls on a magazine cover. Their strapped fieldboots were heavy, they carried their revolvers lightly in their shoulder holsters, and there was a hint of unexpended violence in their purposeful walk.

  Captain Ralston came in, and Sergeant Borum and Mendoza saluted him. “Well, major, it looks as though our last train would be ready about two in the morning,” he announced. “The slanties may go for an atrocity now and then, but say what you like, when you want a special train whipped up, they're right on the ball.” Holding up his fingers, he ticked off his triumphs, “We got the Dutch out at eleven, the British at five, the Aussies and Wake Island civilians will be gone by seven, and I think we can turn the camp over to the Chinese and be aboard the train by one in the morning.”

  Not so fast, not so fast, the major wanted to say. We've been here twenty-three months. Don't yank us out by the roots. Give us a little time.

  “Mendoza here has a sword,” he said. “He wants to know whether they'll take it away from him in Okinawa.”

  “Let's see the sword,” said the captain, with the air of a professional.

  He had been hardly five days on Japanese soil, but on swords he had already a collector's eye. He drew the blade and looked at it frowningly “Looks like a sergeant's, maybe from the military police,” he muttered.

  “That's right, a kempeitai sergeant,” said Mendoza eagerly. “Can I get it through, do you think?”

  Major Toth, watching Ralston finger the blade with connoisseur's precision, found himself inquiring silently where the brush-haired younger officer had been on an afternoon in April three years ago.

  On the afternoon, two of General Homma's sergeants had arrived at Toth's camp on Bataan and by gestures indicated that they wanted to borrow a roll of toilet paper. When it was provided they went methodically around the circumference of the camp, tying little bowknots of toilet paper in the bushes. They then posted guards and explained that any American or animal who went outside the toilet-paper lines would be shot.

  On that afternoon, Toth reflected, this healthy captain was probably sitting in some auditorium, sweating out an officer-candidate examination. And now Ralston was a captain of swords, while he was a captain of ashes.

  Ralston had made up his mind about the sword. He looked Mendoza square in the eyes, deadly serious. “Try to get it through,” he said. “If the MPs try to take it away, make them show you the ruling. But whatever you do, don't sell it to the Navy in Nagasaki. You can always get a better price in Okinawa or Manila.”

  Mendoza gave him a beaming Mexican smile, took back the sword, sheathed it, saluted and walked out.

  “Captain Ralston,” said Sergeant Borum. The captain turned readily to him. “Sir, there are a couple of things a lot of the men have been wanting to ask you. We haven't heard any news, you know, for a long time.” The captain nodded encouragement. “First, can you tell us whether Bing Crosby is dead?”

  “Bing is very much alive,” said Ralston, picking him up quickly, as though he had been waiting and prepared for this very question. “So is Benny Goodman and so is Jack Benny. Those were just rumors that circulated around the camps in southern Japan.”

  “Who is dead, then?” asked Borum searchingly “Who did those rumors actually refer to?”

  “Nobody's dead,” said Ralston cheerfully. “Nobody big that I know of.” He began to pick up recovery forms from Toth's desk, and Toth observed that they were the forms for the deceased men whose ashes were in the boxes.

  Ralston slid them unseeingly into his briefcase.

  Suddenly he raised his head and looked at Borum sharply. “Of course, Roosevelt's dead,” he said. “They certainly told you that, didn't they?”

  “At the time, our officers thought it was just a new Jap trick,” said Borum with his Japanese style of self-apologetic timidity. “You know, psychological warfare. They were always experimenting with little lies, testing our reactions.”

  “No,” said Ralston, not greatly interested. “Roosevelt definitely died, right after Yalta. Yalta was a conference. Truman succeeded him—Truman—T-r-u-m-a-n. Bing and all that old gang, they're fine. Even Errol Flynn. … Major, would you care to ride over to the club with me in the jeep? I'd like to coordinate with you on a few things.”

  When Ralston and Toth drove through the open gate, the sun had gone down and the skeletons of the collieries stood out against the dark red in the west. Ralston turned on the headlights.

  The Korean miners coming off shift, their lives unchanged by the liberation of the Americans, walked with sunken shoulders along the black, coal-saturated road on their way to their bunkhouses.

  Toth lit a cigarette. Ralston at the wheel looked at it and saw it was Japanese. “Throw that nail away,” he said. Toth looked inquiringly. “Throw it away, sir,” said Ralston with a wink. The major still hesitated. The young captain reached a thick, freckled arm across the wheel, took the cigarette gently from the major's lips and threw it on the road, where two Koreans immediately sidled toward it. “Here,” said Ralston, passing over a silver cigarette case. “Take an American smoke.” He watched Toth light up, smiled, and then continued smiling ahead as he guided the jeep over the bumpy tracks of the Satsumai coaling yards.

  “Now major,” Captain Ralston said, “I've got a couple of things to check with you. First, did your engineering detail paint ‘gone’ in white on the roofs of all the buildings?”

  “Finished them this morning,” said Major Toth.

  “Then that takes care of the drops,” said Ralston. “It's like stopping the milk when you close an apartment. I'll have Nagasaki send confirmation to Saipan that we don't need any B-29 stuff, and tomorrow drops can go to the Chinese camps. Good. Now, what else was there? Oh, yes, ashes. You didn't have a camp chaplain, did you?”

  “I used to read the services myself,” said Toth quietly.

  “Well, can you take care of the ashes, then?”

  “All right.”

  “Have you got some sort of flag?”

  “We've got a crude sort of camp flag we made out of parachute canopies from the drops,” said Toth. “Do we need a flag before we get to Nagasaki?”

  “As a matter of fact, we do. You see, major,” said Ralston, “when we pull in on that train to the wharf siding at Nagasaki, things are going to get a lot more elaborate than here. But fast. Clean clothes, fumigation baths, Red Cross girls, a big Navy swing band, ice cream, telegraph blanks. Then those big white Navy hospital ships, and the admiral on his cruiser out in the middle of the harbor. So we have to watch appearances as we come in, especially about things like ashes.”

  “I always planned to take care of the ashes myself,” said Major Toth. “Borum is packing all the boxes together in one big box the shape of a coffin. He and I will sit with it in the baggage car.”

  “How about the flag?” said Captain Ralston.

  “Well, just before the train gets in to Nagasaki we can drape the flag over the big box.”

  “I should think the colonel ought to be satisfied with that,” said Captain Ralston, reasoning aloud. His young face cleared and relaxed. “That's about every
thing, I guess.” He took a cigarette and lit it from Toth's. “Thanks. Everything on the serious side, that is. Now that we're cooking, how about a little recreation tonight? Feel like a little party?”

  “What kind of party?”

  “A geisha party, of course,” said Ralston gaily.

  They turned in to the driveway of the club where the executives of the Satsumai banks and mines used to meet when they came down from Tokyo. The Allied officer prisoners had moved in there at the baron's invitation after the B-29 drops began, two weeks before the arrival of Ralston and the recovery team.

  “Who's giving the party?”

  “The baron,” said Ralston. “It's for the recovery team and the American officers of the camp. He told me to invite you.”

  “Did the baron tell you anything about working conditions in his mine?” said Toth. “Did he tell you that the mine had been abandoned as nonproductive before we arrived? Did he tell you that our boys lost their legs and arms stripping out the coal, knocking out the supporting pillars for less than a cent a day?”

  “Well, I didn't push him too hard on that,” said Ralston. He had the guarded air of an arbiter between extreme dissenters. “We're not war-crimes commission, you know; this team is strictly limited to prisoner recovery. I just let the baron do the talking. He took his MA. at Berkeley and enjoys showing off the slang he knows. He admitted conditions were deplorable, but he said he was helpless. I get the impression that the military ran the mine over his head and never gave him much leeway to intervene.”

  “Did he tell you whether he knew about Pappy Ryan being beaten to death, and Bos'n Bill, and why the fellow we called ‘Mother’ Williams went mad?” Something indignant was stirring in Toth, deep below his prisoner's passivity. “Did he show you any of the clubs the size of baseball bats that were used on our men? Did he tell you why Doc Bernstein walks with a limp?”

  “He didn't touch on any of that,” said Ralston soothingly. “Maybe he knew about it, maybe he didn't. The baroness was there, and perhaps he didn't want to speak about that stuff before a lady. They both said they sympathized, and the baron kept repeating how much he admired you, now that he knew you.”