“Well,” Peter Hardin said complacently. “First blood to us. They’re not so great, are they, Chink?”
“Damn it, Peter, don’t think it’ll be that easy,” Jonnie snapped. “Remember what happened to Gin Drinkers’ Line. They weren’t …”
The roar of exploding shells erased his rebuke. The earth trembled under the officers, and a gap opened in the concrete-block wall before them. The Dinah Lays shredded like paper, and, Peter later swore, he saw sand trickling in the explosions’ flash. The searchlight flicked off, and the salvoes from the Japanese guns across the Harbor ceased. Since their concussion-deafened ears could not hear the shrieks of drowning men, the night seemed silent again.
“Must’ve cut the light’s cables,” Jonnie said. “See to it, Peter.”
“Yes, Sir,” his Lieutenant replied.
But Jonnie was too busy to ponder his classmate’s astonishing display of respect.
“The Japs seem satisfied,” he told the Sergeant Major. “But I’ll want casualties counted and the men under new cover. Tell Peter to resite the searchlight. It’s too vulnerable.”
The Sergeant Major vanished into the darkness, leaving his Captain to sum up the engagement in his own mind. The Japanese, Jonnie decided, were neither as fierce nor as proficient as he’d feared. They had not pressed home the infantry assault, though they had responded with reasonably effective counterbattery fire. He could not know that Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi, jealously hoarding his crack units, had feinted with second-echelon troops; his purpose was to draw British fire and thus reveal British positions in order to provide against the unlikely event that the detailed British defense dispositions already communicated by his spies had been altered. Nor could Jonnie know that he was to wait through three days of mounting tension and desultory shelling for General Sakai to fling his murderously effective Thirty-eighth Division across the Harbor with orders not to return. The General was then to command the Thirty-eighth to take bridgeheads on the Island—or to die.
The Fifth Battery’s nerve-jangling inaction was enlivened by concerts from the Japanese loudspeakers on the Kowloon Peninsula. The artillerymen cheered the ancient but indomitable destroyer H.M.S. Thracian, which was supported by four motor torpedo boats when she punished the few junks and sampans that pushed off from the Peninsula. They swore at the intermittent, well-placed salvoes from the enemy artillery. Though the Japanese assault infantry had shown themselves inept, the professional Japanese artillerymen evoked wholehearted, fearful admiration from the Sunday soldiers, the amateur artillerymen of the Fifth Field Artillery Battery of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defense Force.
Jonnie Sekloong was more fortunate than the men under his command, since he was constantly occupied. He had little leisure either to nurture his fear of the coming battle or to console himself with the bamboo telegraph’s reports of Chinese relief columns driving toward Hong Kong. He knew, however, that he was afraid, perhaps more frightened than his comrades because life had been so generous to him. He had enjoyed not only great luxury, but an assured place in a milieu he loved. Just being Jonathan Sekloong of the Sekloongs in Hong Kong was a blessing he would exchange for no other conceivable position. Alone among his brothers and sisters, he had totally adjusted to his Eurasian heritage. He had felt no need to become more European than the British as had his sisters, no compulsion to immerse himself in their Chinese origins or a universal cause as had his brothers. Above all, there was Sarah, their love a mitzvah, a blessing, as she would say. The world, particularly his world, he knew instinctively, would be different after the Allies had won the war. But he desperately wanted to live and see that world.
Jonnie’s brief and uncharacteristic introspection was relieved by the need to resite his searchlights and guns after Japanese shells ripped into their emplacements. Not all the concrete blocks, the Dinah Lays, disintegrated like ripe mushrooms, but so many crumbled that he drove his men to rebuild the breastworks with sandbags and bricks. The Volunteers grumbled that they had not volunteered to act as coolies, but their officers’ casual good humor kept them at work. The men of the isolated Fifth Battery greeted the early twilight of December 18, 1941, in good spirits. They had absorbed the worst the Japanese artillery could throw at them—with minor casualties. The assault infantry was obviously inept, and they knew the Chinese Nationalists were coming.
Black smoke from burning oil tanks lay thick on the Harbor, and opaque rain squalls constantly drove across the choppy waters through the dark, moonless night. When the elite 239th Regiment of the Thirty-eighth Infantry Division of the Imperial Japanese Army landed from ferries and lighters that glided silently to the foreshore, the Volunteers had no warning. General Sakai’s 7,500 cherished veterans laid down an overwhelming barrage from machine guns, trench-mortars, and rifles. The Battery’s defense platoon, detailed by the Royal Rifles of Canada, died in its shallow trenches at 8:35 P.M., having fired only a few shots. The weight of Japanese metal bore them down even before Japanese infantrymen emerged from the darkness, slashing with blackened bayonets clamped to long rifles. Lyemun Fort was then virtually defenseless. The field artillery fired over open sights at enemies who drifted in and out of the murk like the insubstantial figures of a shadow-play.
The Japanese were among the Volunteers, bayonets stabbing at their defenseless bodies. Jonnie fired two shots from his revolver and toppled the faceless figure advancing on him with bared bayonet. He could not fire a third. The revolver was knocked from his hand, his arms were seized, and his hands were roped behind him. His captors, he noted inconsequentially, stank of rancid sweat and pickled radishes.
Sick rage choked him. They had been effortlessly defeated by the “low-quality” Japanese troops. The “impregnable island fortress” was breached, and he was to blame. Then came fear, nauseating fear. Prisoners of the Japanese, he knew, did not live long.
Jonnie Sekloong looked for his men in the light of burning huts and intermittent flares. He counted only eighteen standing erect. Lieutenant Peter Hardin and the Sergeant Major sprawled on earth powdered into dust by the Japanese shelling. The hands of his surviving men were tied behind them, and the Japanese were tossing them back and forth like puppets. When they wearied of their sport, the Imperial infantrymen stabbed viciously with their short bayonets. Engrossed by the horror of the spectacle, Jonnie did not see the blow that felled him. A bayonet pierced his side, and he fell face down. It was all over, he thought, and recited softly: “Pater noster, qui est in coelis, nomine …” He relinquished his hold on consciousness.
When a split-toed sandshoe turned him on his back, Jonnie lay limp.
“Konokata shimatta … shijitta,” the Japanese sergeant said. “This one’s finished … dead.”
He turned to the next Volunteer. While the artilleryman’s fingers scrabbled imploringly in the dust, the sergeant fired his revolver into the wounded man’s left eye. Methodically, the Imperial infantrymen killed all the survivors. Its first mission accomplished, the Japanese platoon formed ranks to advance on its next objective.
Hong Kong Island’s main line of defense was breached. Worse, all the remaining British-held fortifications along the shore were untenable, and no other possible defense line was tenable for an extended time. The hilly terrain and tenuous lines of communication effectively divided the Island into isolated sectors no single line of resistance could protect. When improvised British counterattacks bogged down in a mire of blood, the fate of the British Broadcasting Commission’s “impregnable fortress” was sealed. Once they had landed at a half-dozen points on the Island’s northern shore, the Japanese could not be repelled. When communication between Defense Headquarters and the field broke down, the fog of war descended on Hong Kong Island. Many units were still to fight delaying actions as gallant as they were hopeless. But only seven days were to pass before the last Union Jack was hauled down in formal surrender. The Crown Colony would then have been under British rule for exactly one hundred years and eleven months.
; The chimera of Chiang Kai-shek’s relief columns still sustained men’s hopes when Mary Philippa Osgood Sekloong replaced the telephone receiver early in the afternoon of Sunday, December 21. For the first time since the Japanese landing on the eighteenth she had heard her husband’s voice. Unbidden, Francis Bacon’s observation rose to the surface of her mind: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.” She fervently thanked God that only three of her own hostages to fortune remained in Hong Kong: Charles himself, Jonnie, and Sarah. Her grandson, seven-year-old Albert, had in June been sent off to his aunts Charlotte Martin and Guinevere Parker, delighted at the prospect of spending his schooldays in New York and his holidays in Beverly Hills. Her other children and her grandchildren were scatttered from Paris and Lancashire to Chungking and Yenan.
Her gratitude that most of the family had avoided the trap of Hong Kong only briefly postponed the sad responsibility of conveying Charles’s inconclusive report to Sarah. Aware that her white smock was stained with blood and soot, she delayed to renew her lipstick. Looking in her hand-mirror, she avoided the gaze of her red-rimmed eyes and hastily glanced away from her haggard face, which for the first time, looked her full sixty-one years. At least her age enhanced her authority at the Tung Wah Hospitals, where all racial barriers had finally collapsed under the Japanese assault. Scots privates with stomach wounds groaned beside Chinese merchants with shattered legs. In a screened-off corner, a captured Japanese colonel lay dying. Shrapnel had ripped away half his face. Some hand had laid the rising-sun flag over his slight form to honor a fallen enemy. Assisting the Chinese doctors and nurses, Sarah and Mary gave what help they could to those patients who might survive—and what consolation they could to the dying.
Mary beckoned her daughter-in-law into the virtually bare drug cupboard, where they could talk privately.
“My dear, the news isn’t good,” she said. “But we can still hope. Charles says there’s been no word of Jonnie’s battery since the landing. We just don’t know …”
“Jonnie’s alive,” Sarah asserted fiercely. “I’d know otherwise. I’d know. A wife’s instinct.…”
“I wish a mother’s instinct were as certain,” Mary whispered, half to herself. “But we have work to do.”
“Doong-yong gwai lay-la! Yat-bun gwai lay-la!” The shriek seemed to rise from the battered building itself. “The devils of the Orient are coming! The Japanese devils are coming!”
“Under the bed with you,” Mary commanded. “The Japanese colonel’s bed. The flag will hide you.”
Sarah Haleevie Sekloong docilely slipped under the bed and lay very still. They had heard that drunken Japanese soldiers were raping all women, regardless of age. But she knew it would be vain to implore her mother-in-law to join her in hiding. Mary’s authority was unchallengeable in the ultimate crisis.
The erect figure in the filthy smock strode toward the entrance hall. Mary no longer saw that the teak floors, normally spotless, were filthy with blood- and mucous-encrusted bandages, discarded uniforms, broken bottles, and empty food tins. Not trusting herself to glance sideward, she swept past six Canadian soldiers lying on pallets, their faces waxen from loss of blood. Unseeing, she breasted the tide of terrified nurses and amahs who were seeking refuge in the recesses of the compound. Mary Sekloong consciously steeled herself for the most dangerous encounter of her life by divesting her mind of all but her immediate purpose—the confrontation with the enemy.
Four Japanese infantrymen—privates or noncommissioned officers, it appeared from their ill-cut uniforms—swayed in the doorway waving bottles of potent shamshu spirits and flourishing bayonet-tipped rifles. Three uncannily resembled the stereotyped caricature of the “brutish Japanese”; they were bespectacled, squat, and buck-toothed. The fourth was a slim youth with light skin and the patrician features of a Noh mask. Cheeks glowing red with alcohol, he was also the most aggressive.
“We come inside,” he demanded in pidgin Mandarin. “We come in … want women … want drink.”
“This is a hospital,” Mary said. “Only sick people. No women. No drink.”
“Have got nurses,” the drunken youth insisted. “Have got wine.”
“No!” Cold anger overcame Mary’s fear. “All nurses go away. All wine finished, all bottles broken.”
The tall youth lifted his rifle with one hand like a javelin, still clutching the shamshu bottle in his other. The bayonet tip wavered six inches from Mary’s breast.
“You are foolish,” she said contemptuously. “You look for what does not exist.”
The shamshu bottle splintered on the teak floor. The Japanese grasped his rifle with both hands, and the bayonet’s stained point was steady only an inch from her breast.
“Out of the way, old woman!” he shouted.
“Tomare!” The brusque command, “Halt!”, brought the four soldiers to unsteady attention.
A Japanese lieutenant led a ten-man squad into the entrance hall. Noting the deliberate effort with which he held himself erect, Mary saw that he too had been drinking heavily.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked in excellent English. “How dare you defy His Imperial Majesty’s troops?”
“They ask for women and wine,” Mary replied. “The nurses have all fled, and there is no wine.”
“You lie!” the lieutenant snapped.
“Do come in if you must,” Mary invited. “But, first, may the defeated show you how they have behaved?”
“What do you mean, woman?” the lieutenant asked suspiciously.
“If you’ll come with me? You alone.”
The lieutenant turned and ordered his sullen men to squat on the floor.
“You must understand,” he explained patiently. “My men have fought hard. They are entitled to the fruits of victory.”
“We do not believe so,” she answered evenly. “Just let me show you just one thing.”
“You may,” the lieutenant conceded. “We are not barbarians, but civilized men. What have you to show me?”
Mary did not reply, but led him through the crowded wards where the wounded stared in fear. She stopped at the bed where the dying Japanese colonel lay under the flag of the Rising Sun.
“This is how we treat the vanquished,” she said softly, terrified by her knowledge that Sarah lay on the grimy floor concealed by the draped Japanese flag. “I am afraid the colonel will die. But we have cared for him as best we could. And we have honored his bravery.”
“Shitsurei itashimashita.” The lieutenant bowed low to the dying colonel. “I have erred grievously.”
Sobered, he wheeled as if on parade and returned with a stiff-legged gait to the reception hall. His brusque command brought the fourteen enlisted men to their feet.
“I express the gratitude of the Imperial Japanese Army. I have erred grievously,” he repeated.
Incredulous, Mary watched the Japanese squad march out of the compound behind the lieutenant. She grasped the door frame to support herself, fearing that, for the second time in her life, she might faint. Shocked relief overwhelmed her, for she had fully expected to die beneath Japanese bayonets. Verified accounts of women raped and men mutilated by the Imperial Army were as prevalent as the illusory reports that the Nationalist relief force had already entered the New Territories.
“They just went away, Mother,” Sarah babbled. “They just went away. I can’t believe it.”
“Nor can I,” Mary replied weakly. “I never thought …”
“You were magnificent, Mother. I could hardly believe …”
“Nor could I. To tell the truth, Sarah,” Mary’s voice quavered, “it was the only thing to do, but it was a foolish thing to do.”
“And you did it!” Sarah laughed.
Reminded of her brazen motto, Mary’s self-control broke. Simultaneously laughing and crying, near hysteria, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law embraced. Nurses and amahs emerging from their hiding places gazed astonished through their own tears.
�
��We still have work to do here. But for how long?” Mary painfully resumed her self-control. “They’ll be back. And miracles don’t happen twice, not in the same place.”
Similar fleeting miracles occurred elsewhere on the ravaged Island. Defended by a company of aged warriors, none less than sixty, most in their seventies, the Island’s main electricity plant held out for four days. Three of the defenders died of heart attacks before repeated assaults by elite Japanese troops overwhelmed them.
A quartermaster captain and three sergeants locked the steel door of the innermost chamber behind them when the Japanese invaded the concrete passages of their underground magazine. Unable to break the door down, the Japanese fired submachine guns through the steel grill and tossed hand grenades that exploded amid the stacked artillery shells. Finally, the Japanese withdrew in disgust, leaving the four astonished British soldiers unscathed. When they finally emerged into the wintry sunlight, they found their old Dodge sedan undamaged and drove unchallenged to the British position athwart Wongneicheong Gap.
It was that kind of war. Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi, who had promised his superiors he would take Hong Kong in a week, sent vitriolic messages reproaching his field commanders. He too was amazed by the obstinate gallantry of isolated British units after organized resistance had collapsed.
A private miracle was vouchsafed Captain Jonathan Sekloong, who had yielded himself to death reciting the Pater Noster. As consciousness slowly returned to him, the sun shone yellow through his closed eyelids. His entire body ached, and his side burned where the bayonet slash had been turned by his ribs. Without moving, he slowly opened his eyes to look upon the corpses of his men lying in the dust with flies buzzing around their wounds. He cautiously twisted his head, but saw no life, hostile or friendly. He gingerly rose to his feet, alone among the dead. Though his left arm hung limp, he was still functioning.
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