The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  The last was a taciturn farmer from a village west of Tokyo. He had given no clear sign of whether he would evacuate or stay, but when I looked around after the others had gone, he was still there. Appearing on the verge of tears, he rolled over to face the other way and went to sleep without even doing up his gaiters.

  Since none of us had a watch, I do not know what time the evacuees departed. A short while later, a passing soldier kindly brought me some water in my mess tin, and I made several attempts to pour it into my canteen before giving up. Complete silence settled over the mountain. No one else came by.

  Three dull reports sounded somewhere farther down our canyon. Moments later we heard three sharp explosions in the vicinity of the command post on the ridge above us.

  This, obviously, was not small-arms fire. I had never heard the sound of mortars before, but for some reason I instinctively knew that was what the reports were. I surmised these first three rounds were test shots for measuring the range.

  We all immediately sat up. No one showed any emotion.

  “I guess this is it,” I said.

  “Maybe we’d better head up top.”

  “Yeah,” they said, as they moved into action.

  I tried again to transfer the water from my mess tin into my canteen, but my hands shook too much and the water spilled down over the sides.

  “What do I need water for when I’m about to die, anyway?” I muttered, and I hurled the mess tin away as far as I could.

  Friends have often criticized me for being too quick to give up, but in this case I would never have returned home alive, and I would not be writing these words today, had I not recklessly thrown that water away.

  I wanted to avoid weighing myself down with unnecessary items, so I took only a single cartridge belt. At that point I could not imagine surviving long enough to use even those thirty rounds.

  My three companions were still rustling around inside the hut. Our command post was not much more than a hundred yards up the hill, but I lacked confidence whether I could make it even that far.

  “I’m going on ahead,” I called out, and began walking.

  “Aren’t we going together?” K asked, as if in protest.

  “I don’t know how far my legs’ll hold up, so I thought I’d get a head start,” I said. “You’ll probably catch up to me when I’m resting somewhere along the way.”

  Using my rifle as a walking stick, I started up the narrow path winding up the side of the mountain. It turned out to be the last time I saw those three men. They took too long getting ready and never made it out of that canyon, which presently became the main target of the American mortar barrage.

  I surprised myself with my strength and managed to climb all the way without resting. The mountaintop was alive with activity. Tense-faced soldiers hurried back and forth in twos and threes without a word. I staggered into a squad hut just over the ridgeline and sat down to rest. Several sick men lay inside, hugging their rifles and looking unspeakably grim.

  The roar of an explosion shook the hut. Reflexively, I dashed outside and threw myself to the ground in the direction from which the shells were coming—which is to say, in the direction of the canyon from which I had ascended only moments before. More explosions followed one after another.

  “Move forward! Move forward!” someone started yelling. A guard post located about ten yards behind me had been hit, and one of the sentries had gotten a leg blown off. Still hugging the ground, I slowly pulled myself ahead a short distance, but a series of shattering explosions in that direction made me stop. The voice still yelled, “Move forward!”

  Our CO emerged from the command hut. His helmet dangled at the back of his neck, and he had pulled his coat on over it, making him look like a hunchback.

  “Isn’t this great?” he said, his face beaming. “We’re finally seeing some action.” Holding a pair of binoculars in his hands, he moved across my field of vision toward the explosions like a man striding dramatically across a movie screen. It was the last I saw of him.

  About twenty other men remained flattened on the ground around me. I looked at the fellow next to me. His pale, puffy pallor revealed instantly that he was in the grip of the fever, but his face, like the lieutenant’s, was beaming.

  Another, more concerted barrage of shells came, still falling some distance ahead of us. Then the shelling stopped.

  “The CO’s been hit!” someone yelled. “Medic!” (The medic I met later at the prison camp said he had been unable to find a single part of the lieutenant’s body.)

  A sergeant came by and ordered, “Everyone who’s not in condition to fight, get down into the canyon!”

  I returned to the hut where I had rested a few minutes before and prodded the men there to come with me. They had not moved a muscle since the first time I came in. Whether or not they heard me now, they made no effort to comply with my urgings.

  A file of men started down into the canyon on the other side of the ridge. Perfectly healthy men joined the column as well. I walked right behind the sergeant.

  “The CO’s been hit!” someone shouted again. The sergeant walked on, paying no attention. I watched him from behind, feeling as though I were gazing at some mysterious life-form.

  “Sergeant, sir. They’re saying the CO’s been hit,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he said, neither turning around nor slackening his steps. “I wonder.” Another sergeant sat beside the path at the bottom. The first sergeant halted.

  “They say the CO got hit. I wonder if it’s true?” he said.

  “Hmm, I wonder if it’s true?” the other parroted.

  I did not care to listen to their inane exchange, so I moved on.

  “Assemble over there and wait for orders,” the first sergeant called to everyone within hearing, pointing toward a break in the trees on the far side of the canyon floor.

  Some thirty men had already gathered in the clearing. Fever-stricken men had collapsed on both sides of the path. Some lay face down with every appearance of being dead; others lay curled on their sides, hugging their rifles, resting. One man had his right hand on a cartridge pushed halfway into his magazine, apparently having reached the end of his strength right in the middle of loading. More cartridges lay scattered about on the ground. I pushed the cartridge in place for him and shook his shoulder, but he failed to open his eyes.

  Among the men gathered in the clearing was a corporal. I told him the sergeant had said to wait there for orders.

  “Cripes! Who’s got time to wait for orders? I know a way out. Come on, men, follow me.” He started up another path at a fast clip. I followed mechanically. The uphill climb was a severe strain for me, and I soon fell behind. As I was catching my breath some fifty or sixty yards up, the others came rushing noisily back down.

  “It’s no good,” the corporal said with bloodshot eyes, “They’re shooting over this way, too. Let’s try that way. If that doesn’t work either, then, hey, we’ll just have to dig in at the gun emplacement and fight to the finish.” He slipped by me and proceeded on down the path.

  A navy man I had never seen before looked me in the face as he started after the sergeant. “Pull yourself together, man,” he said.

  I gazed blankly after their receding figures. I had exhausted all my strength climbing to that spot. Should I follow them? Could I follow them? Uncertain what to do, I sank to the ground. The file of men reached the bottom of the hill, then veered off to the left and disappeared into the forest. A little farther up the canyon in that direction, there was supposed to be another path that led up the next rise in the mountain and eventually merged with the path the men had just come back down. I had never gone that way.

  Another file of men marched quickly across the clearing and disappeared into the forest. I thought I spied among them the figure of a young soldier who had befriended me and had come by now and then to chat. He, too, had been battling malaria. Seeing him going with the others reawakened in me the desire to follow. I mustered en
ough strength to get to my feet and started back down the path.

  The clearing now stood empty except for the men who had collapsed. There was no obvious track leading into the forest. At first I could hear the fleeing men sailing back and forth in the distance, but their voices moved quickly away, becoming mere murmurs then fading altogether. I knew from the speed with which they receded that I had no hope of catching up.

  I sat down again. “OK, OK,” I mumbled aloud, “I give up.” (After I was left alone, I fell into the habit of thinking out loud like this. I suppose it was my way of making sure I knew what was going on in my own mind. Hadn’t I already decided I would die here, anyway? I had surprised myself with my own strength and managed to get this far, but there really had never been any chance that I’d be able to keep up with the others. So, OK, I accept my fate. That was what I meant when I said “OK, OK.”)

  Lowering myself against the foot of a huge tree resembling a Japanese oak, I carefully detached the hand grenade from my belt and placed it on the ground beside me. This had now become my sole friend, my one and only hope. Its powerful explosive force would transport me painlessly into the afterworld.

  Curiously, I did not think of the Americans who would be coming that way soon. I suppose I was too overwhelmed by the realization that my final moment was at hand. Or perhaps subconsciously I assumed I still had ample time before the Americans made their appearance. Though the corporal had mentioned gunfire, I had heard no reports myself.

  I felt no emotion. I had already exhausted every possible thought about death. From the time my unit shipped out of Moji, fate had led me in a single straight line that offered no escape. I had simply come to the final point on that line. “Well, then. Water for a dying man’s lips,” I mumbled and lifted my canteen. It was empty.

  I recalled how I had cast my water-filled mess tin aside as I prepared to leave the squad hut. Scarcely had I imagined then that I would have time later for a leisurely drink of water. Maybe I had been too hasty. A sour smile of chagrin came to my lips. My thirst multiplied.

  I told myself it hardly mattered whether I had a drink of water when I was preparing to put an end to my existence momentarily. Even as I tried to persuade myself of this, however, my thirst continued to intensify.

  There was no source of potable water nearby. The stream running down that canyon had already stopped flowing by the time we bivouacked in the area, and its bed had continued to dry up as the rainless season advanced. Now, only a few muddy pools remained here and there. If I wanted water, I would have to climb back up to the command post and then down the other side to the spring near my squad hut. I doubted I had the strength to travel such a distance anymore.

  Then I remembered that I had once crossed a stream farther up this canyon—probably the upper reaches of this same stream—and the pools of water there had not yet turned black. In this case, too, getting there by the familiar route required a climb back up to our command post, but if that stream was indeed this stream, then all I needed to do was follow the streambed up the canyon and I would eventually reach the same spot. It would be a level path, so I could probably still make it there with the strength I had left.

  After reattaching the hand grenade to my belt, I rose to my feet and pushed my way through some underbrush to step down into the dry streambed.

  I wrote before that I am alive today solely because I threw my water away at the squad hut. First, that action allowed me to quit, in the barest nick of time, the place that became the main target of the American mortar barrage. And second, my waterless canteen now made me abandon the first spot I chose as my final resting place. As I learned later, a scout from the platoon near San Jose penetrated as far as that clearing the next morning and found the soldier who had collapsed in the midst of loading his rifle shot through the chest. One prong of the Americans’ attack came straight up that canyon, so if I had remained in that spot much longer, regardless of whether I had tried to put up a fight, my life would most surely have come to an end at the hands of an American GI.

  The stream held even less water than I remembered. Every fifty feet or so there was a muddy pool perhaps five or six feet across.

  Discovering a narrow path beside the stream, I started mechanically placing one foot before the other. My thirst was intensifying moment by moment, and soon I could endure it no longer. I had not gone this long without water since first coming down with the fever.

  I stared at the blackened liquid before me. A foul smell rose to where I stood. A dark insect of some kind crawled along beneath the surface. Dropping to my knees, I scooped up a handful of water and drew it into my mouth, but a terrible bitterness stabbed at my tongue and I could not swallow it.

  I came to a larger pool where four or five carabao were soaking. They had served as our pack animals when we came here from San Jose.

  One of them looked up at me suspiciously. We stared at each other for several moments. The more I stared at him, the more human he looked, and I felt a strange sense of confusion come over me. Then the carabao turned away as though suddenly embarrassed, mooed once, and started up out of the pool. Water splashed off his huge body into the pool. Needless to say, I could not drink this water, either.

  The carabao climbed from the streambed onto the bank and made his way into the forest. As I followed him with my eyes, I noticed how just above the pool the two banks of the stream formed low cliffs that pressed in from both sides, and my path turned away from the stream into the forest where the carabao had gone. Beyond the cliffs the streambed took an abrupt turn and disappeared from sight.

  I could not bring myself to wade through the pool between the other carabao. Guessing that the path through the forest would most likely rejoin the stream somewhere farther on, I decided to stay on the path.

  The gently sloping path was on the opposite side of the stream from the hill I had most recently descended—which is to say, it was on the side of the ridge atop which our command post was located. By this time I had to support myself by grabbing hold of branches on both sides of the path. The path continued to angle away from the stream and, before long, emerged from the forest into an open meadow. At that point it curved even farther away from the stream.

  I realized then that I was not on a path that followed the stream, but a path that led to our stronghold. (We had not in fact constructed anything that could truly be called a stronghold, but some fifty or sixty yards from the command post, at the point where the trails from Bulalacao and San Jose met, we had dug an emplacement for our one and only machine gun and called it our stronghold; this was what the corporal referred to when he said we would dig in at the gun emplacement.) If I wanted to make it to where I had once crossed the upper reaches of the stream, I would apparently first have to climb all the way up to the emplacement and proceed from there along the path I had taken before.

  Once again, I had exhausted my strength. I began to wonder whether the water at my destination would be sufficient to reward the effort involved in getting there. Considering how much drier the streambed had become down here, did I not have to assume that the same had happened farther upstream? I stumbled to the ground at the edge of the forest.

  The meadow before me was only about a hundred feet across, hemmed in by dense foliage on the stream side to my left as well as straight ahead, but it spread open to the right, sloping gently up the mountainside toward the stronghold. It was covered with the same tall cogon grass, rather like Japanese kaya grass, that brought such a soft, dreamy green to hills and meadows throughout the Philippines.

  Silence reigned all around. I do not know how long I lay motionless in that spot. Nor do I know whether I spent that time contemplating my suicide or merely suffering from unquenchable pangs of thirst, for the event that followed erased from my memory all recollection of anything not directly related to it.

  I do know that I contemplated what action I would take if an American GI appeared before me. I decided I would hold my fire.

  Whether I s
hot an enemy soldier in that place could in no way alter my own fate or that of my brothers in arms. Its only effect would be to change the fate of the man I shot. I did not wish to stain the waning moments of my life with another man’s blood.

  I envisioned the encounter: A GI appears. We stand facing each other with our rifles poised. An eternity goes by but I do not shoot, and finally, impatiently, the GI pulls his trigger. I crumple to the ground. He dashes up, wondering what to make of my strange behavior.

  A real encounter could not possibly have followed such a script, but I am recording the scene here exactly as it played out in my imagination at the time. Hand in hand with the final moral decision I had made came the desire to have someone else know of my benevolent intentions. Deep in the mountains of the Philippines, that someone could be none other than the man who would kill me.

  It did not take long for my decision to be put to the test.

  A shout rang out high up on the other side of the canyon. “Yes, something or other,” a second voice responded—in English but with a Philippine accent.

  The voices reverberated through the crisp forest air. This was my first direct contact with the opposing force of violence against which my outfit had for so long remained at a distant standoff, and I felt oddly cleansed by it. I rose to my elbow.

  The voices said nothing more. In their place I heard the rustling of footsteps in the grass, and I turned my head in that direction. A lone GI had come into view, still some distance away.

  I had no desire to shoot.

  The GI was a tall youth of about twenty, his cheeks red beneath the deep-set steel helmet covering his head. Standing erect and holding his rifle at an angle before him, he advanced toward me with the gentle stride of someone on a pleasure outing in the mountains.

  His lack of caution astonished me. The possibility that an enemy soldier might be lying in wait for him along his path seemed the furthest thing from his mind. A soldier across the canyon shouted something I couldn’t make out, and this young GI gave a clipped reply. Probably some simple exchange like: “Finding anything?” “Negative.” The youth continued to approach.