I stayed in that house for another six days, during which they fed and cared for me as if I was one of their own. The old man would come in to see me in the mornings and evenings, often taking my hand to lay it beside his own seamed and calloused one, running his finger tips over the comparative smoothness of my skin. After three days my appetite returned; on the fourth I got up after dark and walked round the courtyard behind locked doors. The old man was very conscious of my security. The cupboard in which I lived was always kept closed, unless one of the family was in the room; never once was the house empty, though I am sure that they needed all hands in the fields just then. After the evening meal, once I had got up, I would play with the child—games of penny-conjuring with an old Japanese coin, or peep-bo. But it was all done in whispers; all speech was in whispers. I had absolute faith in their friendship—the more so when I got from the old man the story of how he had found me beside the track, and brought me into his own house, when, without enmity, he could have left me there rather than take the risk of hiding and succouring me under pain of death. I, too, explained my position with many signs. As we grew to understand one another better, I pin-pointed my position fairly accurately and began to make preparations to move on.
The sea was about two li away—roughly, half a mile. He said that he would find me a boat to take me to Cho-Do, the big island nearby, which I had hoped to reach since the day of my escape with Duncan, almost a month ago. I cut open my clothing and gave him all the money I had so carefully put away months before; water-soaked, sweat-soaked, earth-stained money. I put it all into his hands and promised him the same amount again if we were successful. Reluctant to take it at first, he finally agreed and, with many “Comupsom-nidas”, stowed it away in some hiding place.
I was still extremely weak, yet knew that every day spent there was not only a danger to me but to the old man and his family. The girl’s husband had been killed at the front, I gathered—on which side he fought, I was not quite sure. There would be no one to say a word for them, if it became known that they had sheltered me. Each one of them, possibly even the child, if precedent in Korean punitive measures was applied, would be put to the sword. After two days’ gentle exercise, to show the old man that I could walk to the shore, he agreed to send me off on the evening of the sixth day.
Early in the afternoon I was watching the track that ran past the house, as I had done since breakfast time, my eye peering through a crack in the back of the cupboard. Outside the house, sitting on the path that led down to the track, the child was playing with some little round mudballs which she had made the day before. All was quiet, except when some neighbour passed to exchange a greeting with her. The afternoon shadows were lengthening, when I saw a North Korean soldier coming from the direction of the sea, a burp-gun slung across one shoulder, his jacket open, a pack on his back. He stopped by the well to take a drink of water and called to the little girl to come over, producing from his pocket an apple which he held up to her. She went over with reluctance, the apple helping her to forget how shy she was. Munching a piece of apple each, she and the soldier began to talk. The Korean words were incomprehensible to me, but I could not take my eyes off the soldier. I longed for him to go. Suddenly, I heard the word “Yungook” spoken by the child amongst others. The soldier leant forward and took her by the shoulders questioning her. Then he got up, slung his burp-gun forward, and walked towards the house. Just short of the entrance to the courtyard he seemed to change his mind, for he ran back to the well, pulled on his pack, and went off down the track at a sharp pace. I had an idea that it was time for me to go.
The old man was in the courtyard as I came to the door. When he saw me standing there in daylight, he probably thought I had gone mad. He came hastily into the room, shutting the door. I tried to explain by signs what had happened, but realized that I was going much too fast to convey anything. After one more attempt I knew that it was hopeless trying to convey my many thoughts to him quickly by signs. I must leave, and trust to luck that I could find a boat on my own, if I did not manage to contact him again. Patting him on the shoulder reassuringly, I ran out through the door, through the courtyard, down the path. The area behind the house was open. Only the far side of the track contained good cover, where the maize stalks remained tall, leafy, and green, with some form of bean growing up round their roots. As I crossed the track, four armed Chinese came running round the bend further down, giving a hoarse shout as they saw me. I jumped into the maize, hurried along the narrow passage between the stalks, and had just decided that I would head east—away from the coast—for a short distance, when I saw some Chinese soldiers enter the far end of the maize field from the direction in which I was going. Footsteps approached me from both ends of the field, closing in on me. The last moments of my freedom were, even then, dying, within a quarter of a mile of the coast.
I was taken up to the village of Sosa-ri; a miserable journey on which I collapsed twice. Finally the escort, tired of accompanying me at a snail’s pace, got me a lift on a passing military pony cart whose driver was a good fellow—unlike my scowling guards—and gave me a half of his tin of beef and six biscuits, despite their attempts to dissuade him. At Sosa-ri, the guards changed. A surly-faced non-commissioned officer and two privates took me on to the town of Songhwa, where an attempt was made to interrogate me by the North Korean police, through an interpreter who knew less English than I did Korean—a man who had evidently lived on a reputation as a linguist for a long time, without expecting to be called on to show his skill. The Chinese soon got tired of his efforts to make me understand him, and sent him packing. They put me on a Korean civil truck, with my three guards and a great number of Korean civilians and their luggage, which reached the main western railway two days later and dropped me off. It began to rain as the guards did their best to hurry me along the railway track, away from the main road. We took shelter for an hour in a small village inhabited by railway sappers. They were mostly older men, easily distinguishable by their blue uniforms, which many of the transport personnel wore. One group we joined had been having a party on saki—a rice wine—which they had got from one of the houses in the village. As we arrived a great argument was going on between the Chinese and an irate villager who was refusing them more wine. I stood there for some time, watching them, until, all at once, he noticed me. He was a nasty little man, wanting to jump on me with a knife to demonstrate to the Chinese how tough he was. Two of the soldiers, thinking it all a huge joke, threw him out of the house bodily, returning to give me a packet of cigarettes, some pipe tobacco, and a half box of matches. I refused saki, but had some of their beef. My pockets full of luxuries like tobacco and matches, eating my second meat meal in three days, I felt that things were looking up after my recapture. When, eventually, we continued our journey in light rain, I was in excellent spirits once more. Here I was, back at the railway line and highway. Well, no matter. With a bit of rest and some food, I could do it all over again. I began to watch the country carefully.
We left the railway, entering a long valley, stopping frequently to rest my wretchedly weak body. A path led us up to a pass, beyond which a large headquarters was dug into the hillsides. During the day, after giving my military particulars, and admitting to escaping from a column of prisoners marching northwards, I was asked, with great friendliness, if I wished to write a letter home. I had had this chance only once before—at Munha-ri one wet day in Bob—s “mediaeval pest-house”—and had little hope that this letter had got past T’ang’s inquisitive eyes. I said that I should be delighted to write, and spent half an hour with an unfamiliar pencil in my hand, writing on cheap white paper. That evening, when I came up for further interrogation, my inquisitor drew my letter from his pocket, when I refused to answer his questions, and asked me whether I wished to send my letter or not. I told him that I did want to send my letter home, but was not prepared to pay for the postage with military information. Thereupon he tore the letter up in front of me.
“Hell! is there any room in here?” I asked.
To my complete surprise, a very young, English voice replied:
“Is that another Englishman?”
A minute later I was shaking hands warmly with Mike.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WE were both seized by that enthusiasm one experiences on meeting one’s own kind, after being separated from them for a long period—an emotion intensified in this instance by being in the hands of a captor who insisted, much of the time, on treating one as a felon. It seemed to me that I was incredibly lucky, in finding a comrade so far away from the routes along which our enemies normally evacuated their prisoners; although it was less surprising when I discovered that Mike was a fighter pilot, shot down in a P51 while flying with the South African Squadron. After a short period of captivity, he had escaped and remained at large for about four days, only to be recaptured by a couple of stray Chinese who had come upon him by accident. When I learned that he had been shot down only six weeks before, I considered myself doubly fortunate; for here was not only a companion for the irksome life one led in captivity, a potential colleague in escape, but also a man who had all the news of the battle and the outside world—news that I had missed so much during the long days of enforced idleness at Munha-ri.
Lying there alongside Mike on the dirt floor, I questioned and he replied about all that had happened since that day in April when the battle began for us on the Imjin River. Mike had a good memory, and obviously took an interest in outside affairs; but I taxed him to the limit that night with my questions. Finally, we were both so tired that we agreed to go to sleep, covering our cold bodies with a ragged piece of straw matting. As we adjusted this to our mutual comfort, Mike said:
“By the way, have you got lice?”
I replied that I had rid myself of them some weeks before.
“I’m afraid I have them,” he said. “I wish you’d tell me how to get rid of them.”
“Mike,” I said, “if you’ve got lice, you won’t need me to tell you how to get rid of them. To-morrow morning, I’ll be giving you a very necessary demonstration on myself!”
Next morning Mike turned out to be tall, ginger-haired, and a second-lieutenant. The two of us were taken up to a bunker in a nearby hill, immediately after our kaoliang breakfast, and thrust inside with a group of South Korean soldiers whose uniforms had long since been exchanged for rags. Whence these filthy, starved, dejected men had originated, neither Mike nor I discovered. We just managed to identify them as ROKs, after considerable sign-making, but this exhausted the conversational resources of both sides.
On the posting of a sentry and guard commander less hostile than their predecessors, the two of us contrived to get permission to leave the stinking, crowded bunker. Outside, we sat in the sunlight, discussing our exact location in relation to the most important thing that lay before us: escape. Undoubtedly, we were now about ten miles south of Sinmak, and a little to the east of the main western railway and highway, which run, broadly speaking, side by side. Escaping from this point, we could make for the coast again; or, in the light of Mike’s knowledge of the Kaesong neutral zone established for the Truce Negotiations, we could head south. There were many factors to be considered before making a final choice: our immediate task was to break with our captors.
After we had eaten our kaoliang on the following night, I was taken out of the room I shared with Mike to a house on the western edge of the village. Sitting in one of the rooms, I found three Chinese—presumably officers—whom I named Adolescence, Smart-Alec, and Darkie. After a long silence, during which the three stared at me with almost unblinking eyes, Darkie opened the convenation.
It was the same old nonsense: I was a war criminal. My “attitude,” revealed at the headquarters two days before, by my refusal to answer military questions, showed that I was not sorry for what I had done. My guilt was intensifying each day under these circumstances and I could not expect my captors to continue much longer with their “humanitarian treatment!”
This summary of the case for the prosecution was presented in its entirety by Darkie, who, after the prolix fashion of the Chinese Communist Forces, took something over an hour to state it. Immediately I began to reply, Adolescence jumped up, pointed a finger of accusation at me, and began a lengthy explanation of the causes and history of the Korean war. It was all deliberately melodramatic. He would rise, speak for several minutes, beating the air passionately with the hand that was not outstretched in accusation, conclude with a toss of his head, and sit down in complete composure while Darkie caught up with the translation. This done, Adolescence would switch on the melodrama again, even to assuming a special facial expression as he got to his feet. As the hours passed, it occurred to me that he had probably been preparing his subject since the day of my arrival—and this was confirmed when I caught him peeping at some notes in his pocket during one of the periods of translation.
The points that Adolescence made bear repeating, if only because they were identical with those put out by the Chinese Communist Government for internal and, not infrequently, external consumption on the subject of Korea. Thus they are the points that were made again and again to the United Nations prisoners-of-war in Korea, in the innumerable addresses they received during their captivity, and formed a part of the programme of attempted political indoctrination.
In the first place, said Adolescence, the American war-mongers—the more powerful members of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street—began the war in Korea for two reasons: they thirsted for bigger and better profits, which armaments would give them; and they wanted to blacken the name of the Cominform countries to dupe their own restless, oppressed workers. These two reasons were complementary. On looking round for a suitable battleground, they chose Korea, saying, in their duplicity, that the very people whom they were attacking by an act of wanton aggression were the cause of it all. If I needed evidence of the United States’ guilt, said Adolescence, what better proof could I ask than that the arch-enemy of liberty—John Foster Dulles, himself!—was in South Korea just before it began. The most doubting of hearts could doubt no longer when confronted by such a fact.
Though greatly outnumbered, the North Koreans crushed the puppet forces of Syngman Rhee, whose remnant withdrew in disorder. Determined to end the threat of aggression from the south once and for all, and not least, to liberate those unhappy Koreans living under the Syngman Rhee regime, the North Korean Army marched on victoriously, overcoming the resistance that the regular American Forces attempted en route. Only later, when the whole Capitalist world had been mobilized against them, were the soldiers of the gallant North Korean Resistance Movement thrown back from the box formed round the Naktong River. Well knowing that the predatory forces following them up to the Yalu River intended to cross into China to continue the aggression there, the Chinese people, spontaneously, and independently of their Government, formed a military body, for the specific task of protecting their Motherland and aiding the North Koreans in their fight against American aggression. Armed with their democratic Marxist spirit, led by commanders enlightened by the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalinist philosophy, this body—the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers—had marched across the Yalu River, fallen upon the aggressors and driven them back. Any responsibility placed on Mao’s Government for their formation, control, or supply was a calumny of the vilest kind.
It seemed, too, that any reference to the Chinese Fourth Field Army—in our terms, an Army Group—which had app
arently volunteered for Korea to a man, under its commander. General Peng Teh Huai, was considered a calumny also. I was not permitted to raise the point again; though I tried to ask what they would have said, if the British Government had said that the 29th Independent Infantry Brigade Group was a volunteer force, released as such from the United Kingdom Order of Battle—with all their armament, equipment, vehicles, clothing and necessaries. I gathered that there was no answer on the written “crib” to this or any similar points.
Adolescence spoke for another hour, and I gave up attempting to argue with him. He had his speech prepared, and he was not going to be put off saying it. Switching the scowl from his face, he suddenly sat down and began to eat an apple. I believe he was still serving his apprenticeship as a politico and, secretly, was rather glad it was all over.
It was now the turn of Smart-Alec. As I had suspected, he was the most powerful of the three. In honeyed tones, he now suggested that I should sign a written confession of my guilt as a war-criminal—a confession that they would be delighted to assist me to prepare!—which would relieve me of responsibility for my former crimes. In the plainest possible terms, I told them that I would not. They threatened to separate me from Mike. I pointed out that he was, mentally, a sick man—he had been trying to convince them of this before my arrival as part of an escape plan—and that he would almost certainly become completely insane without my care. I cannot think they cared whether he was looked after or not, but whatever they felt, after a further prolonged argument about my confession, I was returned to Mike just before dawn. A full night had passed without either of us being able to work on our escape.
The Edge of the Sword Page 17