E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  When a squall pelted rain into the bellied remnant of the sail, and doubled the water supply, there should have been an easing of tension, but there was nothing of the kind. Maartens and Doom and the two Australians came to him and said, “We’re not getting anywhere. We’re going in circle. No matter what way we went, a straight course would certainly have brought us to land long before now.”

  Tarrant said, wearily, “You’ve all steered, and you’ve all held the course, and even if the compass is off, we could not go in circles.”

  “But where the bloody hell are we? What’s your log say? You’re shooting the sun, you’re getting some sort of latitude or longitude or whatever it is you’re supposed to get, where are we?”

  Tarrant turned to the fly-leaves of the atlas, on which he had kept his log. “See for yourself.”

  “If we knew anything about right ascension and declination and the rest, we’d be navigating.”

  Luden cut in, “What can you expect of home-made instruments and a Buginese manual? This is still better than staying at Pulau Besar.”

  “We want to know where we are.”

  “Twelve degrees south, one twenty-nine east.” Tarrant jabbed his pencil to the map. “Right here.”

  “Right there, eh? But how many days, how many bloody miles?”

  They were hard and angular and desperate, but they were also querulous, underneath it all like children begging for reassurance. Their maddening reiteration, their unspoken promises of violence, of wrath which would have to destroy someone when it burst out—they at last stopped oppressing Tarrant, for these people, though hating him, blaming him, nevertheless looked to him for reassurance. He began to think of himself, sulking on the beach, finding comfort in self-justification and in the repeated recital of how his own government had ruined his plantation.

  Everyone wanted comfort. Even a bungling navigator, a navigator in whom no one had any trust, was still tolerated instead of being thrown overboard: provided that he could offer encouragement, and plausibly.

  “I hate to tell you this,” he announced, “but we have at least five more days.”

  He sounded as though he believed every word, though he might as well have said seven or twelve or fifteen. But he had seen the effect of assurance, and he saw it work again. All but Luden went away, and Tarrant said to him, “Take over, while I sleep.”

  “Good! That will give them more courage than anything else could have done.”

  For the first time, Tarrant did not hear Jan Dekker, nor did the red sun dance behind his eyelids: and his cracked lips and dry mouth failed to disturb his sleep. It made no difference now what happened when, five days from now, there was no landfall. Let them do what they pleased.

  At first he thought that the concussion which had awakened him was thunder, and that a rainstorm was drenching him. But the prahu was not breaking up on a reef.

  Two rifles whacked. Sims and Pitt were blazing away at a plane which was beyond their range. Another stick of bombs hit the water, and geysers gushed high. Then he saw the fighters swooping down. Smoke poured from the bomber, masking the red rayed sun on its wing tips.

  It began to spin. All ablaze, it nosed into the sea. Some of the victors had concentric red and blue and white circles on their wing tips. Others had a red circle in the center of a white star, in its turn on a blue circle. The people of the prahu waved ragged shirts, and shouted, gestured until they dropped. But the planes, having done their work, streaked home, and without seeing the prahu. Or if they saw, they may have assumed that the waving was applause for a good job.

  “They’ll send help,” Tarrant declared, confidently. “We’re nearer than I figured. Line up for an extra ration.”

  The following afternoon, Pitt sighted land, and green jungle. There was an inlet whose waters were alive with grumbling and bellowing crocodiles. Parrots chattered, and flights of birds whirred from cover.

  The difficult landing was made. Some distance inland, poles with cross-arms readied black against the sky. Tarrant did not need an astrolabe to tell him that he had made Australia. Cutting a telegraph wire would bring a maintenance crew, and in a hurry.

  He laid his pistol on a rock, and beckoned to Sims and Pitt. “Come and get it. Lots of room now.”

  They chuckled, and shook their heads. “Digger, we have nothing to fight about,” Pitt said. “You can’t be more than a hundred miles from Cape York or Port Darwin, which is close enough for us. And we’re two years behind time, getting home.”

  “Two years behind time?”

  Sims nodded. “Same as yourself. Hated to leave a soft spot like Pulau Besar.”

  “Practical minded,” Pitt cut in. “Never the ones to go looking for trouble.” Then, to Sims, “Let’s cut the bloody wire, while the skipper picks a spot to camp.”

  They plunged into the jungle. Luden said to Tarrant, “I think they—I think we’ve all met the war. And how is your grudge?”

  Tarrant laughed. “Oh, that! I’ve got a brand new one. It’s been growing ever since things blew up on Pulau Besar. Say, they must have some American troops in Australia, judging from those planes, yesterday.”

  “You wouldn’t think of joining the navy,” Maartens asked, as he joined the two. “See here, Tarrant, where did you learn to read a Buginese pilot manual?”

  “I can’t read it. And it’s not Buginese, it’s a Koran I picked up in Mindanao. It was just as clear to me as the working of an astrolabe.”

  “I thought as much,” Luden said. “But how—” His gesture, including all that part of Australia, completed his question. “Nothing to it,” Tarrant answered. “With a compass, I figured it’d be simple heading south. Australia was too big to miss entirely. Now, when we head the other way, it’ll be just as simple. With Japs in practically every damned island, we can find some wherever we land.”

  SCORCHED EARTH

  Originally appeared in Speed Adventure Stories, July 1944.

  When Mu Lan fingered a curl which was already faultless, and paused for a moment to admire the hair-do which she had invented, a blend of Chinese and Manchu styling, plus a touch of her own. All her life, Mu Lan had been revising rules to suit herself, but this was the first time that the freedom of a sing-song girl promised to have real meaning.

  Her amah stood behind her, watching with pride and apprehension; Yu Tang was glad when her mistress smiled and said that all was perfect. Then Mu Lan twisted a jade pendant of her ornate head gear. The jewel separated into hollowed halves, into whose cavity she put several small pellets. This was not her first invitation to appear at General Yasuda’s quarters, but it might be her last.

  General Yasuda was Japanese, and a gentleman, and so, particularly disliking his guest of honor, he had outdone himself in arranging the dinner to welcome Gunther Dreckhauffen, who had come to observe the workings of Co-Prosperity in the Rice Bowl. The bullet-headed Nazi, on the other hand, true to the training of his kind, was not content with being as boorish as nature had made him: he pointed out how German efficiency would have improved every course from bird’s nest soup and steamed sweet doughnuts to the flattish and sticky champagne.

  “General Yasuda—” Dreckhauffen consistently ignored both field and company officers, his gesture including them with the litter on the table. “It is already plain that instead of occupying China, and then breaking the Russian truce, you are becoming as Chinese as your cuisine.”

  Yasuda smiled. He was a delicate-looking little man, as frail and unsubstantial-seeming as the evasion which he offered, instead of a retort: “After all, the Chinese are better cooks than we are.”

  The Nazi was so shocked that his monocle dropped from his eye. Um gottes willen, what kind of a man is it who can see good in another nation? Not a bit more character than the Dagos! With such allies, no wonder that der Fuehrer had to save the world single handed.

  Yasuda had a fair idea
of what passed behind the envoy’s fat face, but his amiability did not waver. “Mr. Dreckhauffen,” he went on, using the English which served as a common tongue for the two, “when you see the final Chinese touch, I think that you do not blame me for—for—making concessions to art.”

  “Eh? More food?”

  He mopped his dripping face, and ran a thick finger inside his collar, over which his neck made a red bulge.

  “Oh, not at all. Now that we have titillated our palates, we have a feast of wit and reason. Chen Mu Lan, the Shanghai sing-song girl, consents to entertain us.”

  “Consents? Herr Gott! Could she refuse?”

  “Of course not. But one can hardly be entertaining, witty, and charming by command.”

  Dreckhauffen snorted. “In Germany, one can, and one does.”

  And then the Number One announced Chen Mu Lan. Yasuda nodded, beamed at his guest; the general, having the soul of an artist, took pride in being the patron of China’s loveliest sing-song girl, and ignored the possibility of her having had unusual motives in leaving Shanghai.

  She moved with a mincing pace, artificial as it was graceful. Jade ear pendants, and the jade pendants handing from her satin hood made a thin, sweet tinkling, fragile as the conventional twitter of her voice when she kowtowed, greeting host and guest of honor.

  Dreckhauffen eyed her from tiny embroidered slippers to the arch of close-packed curls which framed her forehead. Mu Lan was neither tall nor as slender as she seemed, for the knee length tunic combined with her silk trousers and prim, high collar to exaggerate her slimness, while the Manchu styled headgear increased the illusion of height.

  The Nazi grunted, and with not quite his usual disparagement. “Nimble enough, for her crippled feet.”

  Yasuda hissed, somewhat out of politeness, and somewhat to conceal his amazement at ignorance. “Please, begging pardon, those are naturally small. Sing-song girls never binding feet.” Mu Lan’s training had taken more time, and covered more ground than an American debutante and an American Doctor of Philosophy could claim between them; she knew how a wine glass should be touched, and how even the incorrect inflection of her smallest finger could detract from the perfection of the gesture: and so with her repartee. But none of the company knew enough Chinese to be worthy of her talent, so she sang in that studied falsetto, and pantomimed with all the finish developed in forty odd centuries of training sing-song girls.

  The sam yin wailed. The drums muttered; drums, and the shivering, hissing brazen gongs. Dreckhauffen shuddered, and growled, “Herr Gott! This is worse than those stupid geishas!”

  Between songs, Mu Lan drank tiny cups of mui kwai lu, which tastes like sewing machine oil flavored with attar of roses. Though she wheedled Dreckhauffen into emptying cup after cup of orange-red ng ka pay, her glance slid always to Yasuda, a glance which, as to angle and the droop of eyelids, had been prescribed a thousand years before the ancestors of both Gunther Dreckhauffen and the Son of Heaven had quit raw meat and smoky caves.

  The general smiled his appreciation. Of the girl, the Nazi thought; he didn’t know that the Jap relished the triple-edged mockery of Mu Lan’s song about the foreign devil with the eyes of a pig and the manners of a buffalo, sweating and grunting and fingering his tight collar.

  Mu Lan knew now that she had not wasted those weeks of establishing herself in Cheng Teh, to make her presence the touch without which a dinner would merely have been a meal.

  To impress the Nazi observer, Yasuda had inevitably to make an important move to convince him that the failure to complete the seizure of this sector of the Rice Bowl had been according to plan. Sooner or later, such a gesture would have had to come, if only to maintain Yasuda’s “face” in Japan. Dreckhauffen’s presence had merely hastened the climax.

  The next move would be toward Ching Pao, Mu Lan’s native village; so she was going to her own people. The same instinct which once made Chinese section hands arrange to have their bones shipped from California to the ancestral burial ground, now drove Mu Lan to Ching Pao, “Precious Gold,” as the dumpy little village called itself, to sound more impressive than its neighboring rival, Yin Pao, Precious Silver.

  She seated herself, smiled dazzling at Dreckhauffen, and proposed a game of chai mui.

  “Like this,” Mu Lan explained, thrusting out three fingers. “I call three! You answer, seven, and put out enough fingers to make ten. A mistake, and you lose.”

  “What do we bet?”

  “You have to drink a cup of General Yasuda’s brandy. And if I lose—”

  Dreckhauffen brightened some more. “You drink one, eh? Very good.”

  But it wasn’t what he expected. Voice and fingers tricked him, and when it came his turn, he could not catch Mu Lan off guard. Though the general lost, he took it good-naturedly, while the Nazi considered that honor was being affronted.

  The more bets he lost, the more ng ka pay he drank, and the more he fumbled. Yasuda began to enjoy the thus far unpleasant dinner, and so did his officers, until they fell on their faces to snore into the banquet remnants. Food rather than brandy had overcome them, since years of short rations had made them unaccustomed to hearty eating.

  The amiable little general blinked owlishly through his misted glasses when Dreckhauffen crumpled in a heap, knocking down bottles and jugs and glasses.

  “The foreign devil cannot even pass out like a gentleman,” Mu Lan said, laughing. “Now with your permission, worthy general?”

  Though Yasuda handed the sing-song girl’s maid an envelope containing more than the customary fee for making an appearance, his enjoyment of his triumph made him reluctant to dismiss her; and Mu Lan, after pleading another engagement, let herself be talked into staying.

  She did not stay long. A song and three drinks settled Yasuda, and without the assistance of the opiate in the hair pendant.

  Yu Tang gathered up Mu Lan’s cape and fan and discarded bracelets. The musicians had long since left. Then, as the amah watched at the door, Mu Lan searched first the general’s pockets, and next the living quarters. She returned with a sheaf of orders, all in Japanese, which she could not speak; but since the monkey men had cribbed their hieroglyphics from the Chinese, lacking any writing of their own, the significance of many of the characters was clear to anyone who could read.

  Rumor had been right. There was an order to make a demonstration because of the Nazi’s presence.

  Once outside the house, Yu Tang awakened the coolies who snored in a corner. Mu Lan got into the sedan chair; her amah followed, then drew the curtains. The coolies shouldered their burden, and set out at a trot.

  The pass which Yasuda had given Mu Lan to smooth her late return from his quarters was more than enough for the sentries posted at intervals beyond the outskirts of Cheng Teh. All night long the knotty-legged coolies trudged down the yard wide trail which wound and snaked among the rice patches.

  During the hours of darkness, little more than instinct kept them from stumbling over slabs placed lengthwise to bridge ditches which led water from higher to lower terraces. There was no shoulder, nor any allowance for swerving; once off the paving, a pedestrian dropped into the knee-deep mud of the fields on either side.

  When the moon rose, Mu Lan looked between the drawn curtains, and out across the headed rice which swayed in the hot breeze. Some of the terraced plots were no more than a few yards square; other reached a li in every direction.

  Irrigation had for the time ended. Only here and there was the moonlight reflected from a dyked field. When once the waters sank, invaders and harvest time would come to the unoccupied stretches of the rice bowl.

  Mu Lan had no reason to hope that her warning could put into the field enough guerillas to block Yasuda’s troops. The best she expected to do in Ching Pao was to persuade the villagers to destroy their crops rather than to harvest for the enemy. Now she wondered how any argument of he
rs could succeed when all others had thus far failed; for, seeing again, after those years of absence, how much backbreaking work went into building dykes, and ploughing knee deep in mud, planting rice shoots by hand, and ladling fertilizer to each cluster, she understood why the peasants stubbornly held out against scorched earth.

  And the loneliness added its bit. She was in another world, a rural world cut off from news, from cities, from the rest of China. Her parents, if they still lived, bending in the mud of rice fields, could not see beyond local feuds, and the rival village, Yin Pao. To them, an enemy in Cheng Teh was an enemy in the moon.

  Unless she could convince them, they wouldn’t learn until it was too late.

  At times shelters loomed up, dark and massive: brick columns, supporting a tiled roof, flanked brick benches. Here the coolies rested, smoked a few pipes of finely shredded tobacco, and trotted on.

  Mu Lan was not afraid. There could not be any pursuit until Yasuda emerged from his stupor, and had occasion to refer to an order whose contents already formed an unpleasant part of his memories. And though suspecting Mu Lan, he would hardly issue an order for her arrest, for to do so would make him lose face with whatever subordinates he detailed to execute his commands. Having been outwitted by a sing-song girl was not a subject he would care to mention, all the more so since the inevitable rumors which no vigilance ever prevented would certainly have warned the villagers. Every Japanese plan was so sure to become public property before being put into effect that Yasuda as a matter of routine included precautions to offset leaks.

  Yet she craned her neck, and begrudged the coolies their short rest, some time after sunrise, at a grimy little inn, a hovel of brick and timber, where pigs and chickens shared quarters with the proprietor and his family.

  The day’s heat was made worse by steam exhaled by the drying rice fields. In some villages, farmers were already cutting the clusters, and beating the grain out of the heads. The continuous drumming and thumping was like the far off rumble of thunder.