Terry was a young subaltern, not long out of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Yet, irrespective of his service and youth, he was, he saw clearly, an officer representing the British Commonwealth in enemy country: by his actions, the Commonwealth’s reputation would be judged. Quite simply, he was given a choice: life, and agreement to reject, at least outwardly, the principles for which he was fighting in Korea; or a steadfast adherence to those principles—and death. Coolly, loyally, like the gallant officer he was, Terry chose death. And so he died.
Things were improved now: the caves were empty. We were in the quarters once occupied by the miners under the Japanese; quarters long since fallen into disrepair, and quite inadequate for the severe winter temperatures which were yet to come. Already, in November, the cold kept us awake at night, though the rooms were overcrowded. The food was poor: three meals a day of mixed corn and rice—very little rice—or a bowl of fresh, watery rice as an alternative, and a half bowl of thin cabbage or diacon soup. Occasionally—a recent innovation—there would be a small issue of the strong Korean tobacco, sufficient to make two or three cigarettes per man; but there was only one such issue during my stay. Yet, in spite of the poverty of our standard of living, Kang-dong Camp was a palace to me—a palace filled with the good things of life! After the Interrogation Centre and, more recently, the inside of Pyongyang jail, to have three meals a day, to be given a few grains of tobacco, above all, to be able to sit outside in the sun and talk with one’s own kind, were luxuries indeed.
All these men—my comrades in the camp—had been collected from many different places: isolated headquarters and units, prisons and Interrogation Centres over a fifty-mile radius round Pyongyang, including the notorious “Pak’s Palace” where the methods employed by the chief interrogator, Major Pak of the North Korean Army, had led to many deaths. All our own officers had been brought down from a Chinese camp on the Yalu River to Pak’s Palace for interrogation by the North Korean Army. Mr. Day—a Quartermaster-Sergeant-Instructor of the Royal Marine Commando—Corporal Peskett, and four Marines had been captured on the east coast near Wonsan, and had drifted slowly towards Pyongyang and the hospitality offered by Pak. Colonel Mac, a red-bearded American pilot, had been held in solitary confinement for many months before being brought into an interrogation centre. Mike had joined him there on leaving me just north of Pyongyang. Fabian and Jaquette were two members of the renowned French Battalion, who had suffered many privations during the months spent under interrogation in Pyongyang. There was not one man fit for a long march when, a few days after my arrival, we were taken out and searched, before setting off on the road to the Yalu River two hundred miles away. The few articles of padded clothing which had been distributed amongst us were removed, in spite of our protests, and many airmen left to endure the November winds in summer flying kit.
Our escorts were all officers! Second lieutenants carried burp-guns, the lieutenant in charge a pistol. We set off in the afternoon, carrying our special rations of rice and melki—little fish like whitebait that are caught off the east coast of Korea—which had probably been given to us to keep us fit for the march. In the rear of the column came a cart, on which sat Tom, a sick American called Harold, who was only semi-conscious most of the time, and Madden, an Australian soldier who was so thin that he looked like a skeleton covered with a little skin. I was very worried about Ronnie, who still had every sign of beri-beri. Henry, too, and many of the Americans caused us concern because of their dysentery. There was a little medicine available: aspirins. A fat girl-soldier accompanied the column, as medical orderly to issue the aspirins to those who were very sick; but there were always too many sick men for the ration of aspirins available. As the march continued I realized that my strength had been so sapped by my experiences in the jail at Pyongyang that I could not continue to walk. Placed on the cart, my condition continued to deteriorate: I found to my horror that the relapsing fever I had thrown off in Munha-ri during the summer months had returned.
The remainder of the march was a nightmare. Each night our cart would reach the billeting area long after the marching column, having been held back by the escorts, who stopped to eat in restaurants along the way. The result of this dawdling was that they frequently missed the way, and would leave us in the biting wind while they searched for the village concerned. Lying in the wind outside a restaurant, while they ate, in the daytime was bad enough; at night it was appalling. Our clothes were all ragged, and quite inadequate even for this stage of the winter. Spike and the others tried to give us portions of their own clothing and the few blankets available, but we could not accept all that was offered; to have done so would have caused them to fall sick themselves. Harold died on the second day of the march, after lying for two hours in a ditch outside a house in which the escorts were disporting themselves. A few nights later, Ronnie and I each fell into a coma, from which only I emerged alive. In the light of a candle stub begged of our guards, Spike, Mr. Day and Corporal Peskett worked hard to revive our chilled bodies. But Ronnie had died during the last minutes of the journey through the night. We were to miss him sadly.
By the time we reached the village one march from Chiang-song—our immediate destination twenty-three miles distant—three more had joined our cart: Henry, Ace, an Air Force lieutenant, and Dick, an American rifle platoon commander captured almost a year previously; all were weakened to the point of absolute exhaustion by dysentery. With these additions, the sick cart carried only those completely incapable of walking and many men had to be literally carried between their comrades for long distances each day. Fortunately, the ration bags were now much lighter, though their contents had been changed miles back along the road. The Lieutenant of the escort had sold our rice at villages as we marched, receiving cash and a like weight of maize and a little barley in return. The substitute for the melki was cabbage at each halt—a very little cabbage: perhaps one leaf between thirty men.
The sick remained almost two nights in this village. It had snowed during the first night, and our guards decided to stop a truck to carry us to Chiang-song. Late on the second night, in a snow-storm, we were dragged down to the cross-roads and thrown aboard. Henry was now quite unconscious, and died during the journey through the night. I would not, could not, believe that he was dead, though his body lay in the ditch right by me, cold and lifeless. Yet my thoughts had to turn from him: I had no shoes and my feet were beginning to freeze.
It was Tom, of course, who remonstrated with our North Korean escorts. Knowing that we could not escape, two of them went into the warmth of a house, while the third departed into the centre of the town to find a billet for the night. Tom demanded shelter and got it, caring for us as he had done so splendidly throughout that terrible journey. Though he was not sick, he was weak from his past privations and, above all, he had only one leg. How he managed to look after as many as seven sick men at one time I do not know. Only his great strength of character and courage made this possible.
The guards accommodated themselves in what passes for an hotel in North Korea and ate their fill on arrival. We were dumped in a disused corner and left supperless. We fed on the following afternoon only because Tom had been given a little money derived from the sale of a concealed watch—the property of a Texan pilot, who had earlier given half the proceeds to Tom for emergencies amongst the sick party. The hotel proprietor sold us the scraps that were left from the mid-day meal, and some of our party were able to eat a little cold rice and luke-warm soup. I could hardly face even the soup, though Tom rightly insisted that I eat a few mouth-fuls. We had just finished the meal when the senior second-lieutenant told us to come out to continue the journey.
I remember very little of what followed. I recall seeing a column of Europeans march past in blue uniforms, as we crawled out to a Chinese pony-cart a little way up the street. There were some friendly cries from the column—fellow captives—but I could not make sense of them. We drove on through the early dusk in a bitter wind,
our cramped bodies packed tightly on the cart. When we stopped and Tom alighted, we were chilled to the bone, two of us quite unable to move. A voice in English said:
“What are your names?”
Ace, who was left with me, answered a little before me. I felt myself lifted up on to the back of a broad Chinese, who took me down a path between mud huts to a courtyard. There was an open door and a floor covered with blankets. Tom was there, and Madden, the Australian. Dick was sitting by the glowing charcoal in a tiny brazier. Ace joined me on the blankets. Five of us were left of the eight men who had been unable to march.
A Chinese face appeared in the doorway; spectacles gleamed in the light of a flashlamp.
“You are lucky to have come this day,” said a voice. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.”
The days that followed were filled with tragedy and setbacks along the road to recovery. We had arrived at a hospital; by which I mean a collection of mud huts in a Korean village, the floors covered with rice-straw mats and the walls papered with old copies of The Shanghai News. With two exceptions, the nurses and orderlies spat on the floor, rubbing the mucus in with their feet; they attended us with hands that were washed at the most twice in a day. The rooms filled with smoke whenever the fires were ht beneath the floors to drive out the bitter cold. Yet there were compensations. Two of the nurses—Chinese girls—had been trained at a European hospital in Shanghai. They were devoted to their profession, and gave us their best without caring whether we were friend or foe. Similarly, two of the doctors were sincerely concerned with making us well. We were provided with clean, lice-free clothing and the blue, cotton, padded uniforms and quilts that the Chinese had issued throughout the camps that winter. And, at last, we were fed food fit for human beings: rice, white bread, and a little meat each day; or bean curd, potatoes, occasionally onions, and—especially welcome to the British patients—a bowl of green leaf tea every other day. For the dangerously ill patients there were eggs and powdered milk. There were even medicines—penicillin, sulfa compositions, vitamin compounds, and so on in small quantities. But we were so sick, so weak, that it seemed as if these good things had come too late—except for Tom; and he was soon sent away along the road to the east.
One by one, the remainder of the group died. Ace became unconscious on Thanksgiving Day, and died the following afternoon: Madden died a few days later. Dick lingered on until Christmas time, but was too far gone with beri-beri to recover. In the house up near the doctors’ quarters, someone died almost every day; men whose skeleton bodies had been starved or maltreated beyond the point of response to their improved circumstances. When I raised this question with Mr. Li, the hospital interpreter, he informed me with a ready smile that it was due to the American bombing; they had been unable to bring the supplies in. And when I asked him why the services of the International Red Cross to remedy this had been refused, he smiled even more blandly: “That is another matter,” he said, “I must go now; I have other duties.”
Mr. Li was a naval architect by trade; in character, a hypocrite; a professed Marxist who did not love his fellow-men. It was his duty to conduct political lectures and discussion groups for those patients who were fit enough to get up each day. He forbade me to attend these, as he knew that I was priming the men attending them on the questions they should ask and the answers they should give to his questions. He announced publicly that I should not take part in any way. We were always polite to one another: he called me by my rank as well as by my surname; and in return for this courtesy, I called him Mister Li. We had many long political arguments, walking slowly along the shore of the frozen Yalu River inlet by the hospital, or in the hut I occupied. And always, when I asked a question which he was unable to answer without admitting one or another of the many fallacies inherent in Marxism, he would reply:
“That is another matter. I must go now. I have other duties.” And he would smile his bland smile.
My recovery had been a long and difficult struggle. Early on, I had made up my mind that to remain on my bed day after day might be literally fatal. I decided that I had to get up each day, if only for a little while, and walk a few paces. I could hardly stand the first day; it was cold outside and warm within my hut; dressing was a great effort. Yet each day I managed to push myself outside the hut and walk a set number of paces: twenty-five the first day, thirty the next, and so on, increasing my walk by five paces a day. By the spring, I must be fit again to escape. I forced myself to eat the food which, at first, I could not even smell without feeling sick. But by Christmas Day I was a walking patient and able to visit the wards to say a prayer and sing two carols with a small group of die-hards.
I was lucky in having good companions. There was a group of American infantry sergeants who were sterling characters: Hensen, Strong, and Barkovic. The last-named had suffered three operations on his leg without an anaesthetic; and, though often in great pain and constant discomfort, he retained a cheery spirit which helped many of his comrades through dark hours. There was Tremlett from C Company of my own Battalion—captured at the Imjin River battle. And there was Fowler, a young north-country National Serviceman of the Rifles, who had a sharp Geordie country wit and remarkable strength of character. In my own hut I was lucky to have most pleasant companions in five American soldiers, one of whom was a Scottish emigrant, an ex-Glaswegian named John McCracken. He and I passed many a weary day of blizzards or high winds walking up and down Sauchiehall Street in imagination or discussing the respective merits of one or another brand of whisky.
The day came when I was asked to pay my hospital fees. There had been a first demand about two weeks before, when we had been asked to send a New Year’s greeting to Mao Tse Tung and Kim II Sung. I had informed all the patients that we should not do so. Then we were asked to fill in a so-called International Red Cross form in respect of the two doctors and nurses who had Red Cross membership cards. In the faint hope that our names might be delivered to the International Red Cross Committee, I wrote:
“Dr. X and Dr. Y, Nurse A and Nurse B, members of the Chinese Red Cross, have attended me at the Headquarters of Prisoner-of-War Camp No. 3 during the period in which I have been recovering from recurring fever and malnutrition.”
I signed this. I then dictated the same tiling to Sergeant Hensen and got him to include the number, rank, and name of every patient in the hospital. Mr. Li said that it was not sufficient but saw that he would get nothing more after we had argued for about an hour and let it go at that. But I knew then that the time was approaching for a reckoning.
One sunny morning, I was strolling down towards the frozen shore. I had just seen the better of the two good doctors, who had told me that I should stay in the hospital for about six more weeks. He was concerned about the weakness of my limbs, and the pain I still got from the ribs that the Young Major had cracked with his boots. Though I was restless to rejoin my friends in the Officers’ Camp somewhere to the east, I felt that six more weeks would really improve my condition so that, in spite of the poor diet in the camps, I should be ready to escape when the time came. My thoughts were disturbed by a hail from a little, sharp-eyed Chinese who had evidently been looking for me. He carried a camera in his hand.
“I think you are getting very well,” he said, without bothering to say who he was. I agreed that the condition of my health had improved.
“I think this is due to the skill of the comrades of the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers. I think you are very grateful to them.”
With the memory of Henry and Ronnie, and the many, many others still fresh in my mind, I replied:
“I think that the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers are merely mending what they have broken.”
But he was not to be put off in this way.
“I think you shall write for us a day-by-day account of your recovery, explaining how each member of the staff has helped you.”
“I’m afraid I cannot do that.”
He might not have heard me.
“Y
es, and you shall have some pictures taken with the staff. I shall take some pictures with this camera now. We will find the doctors and the nurses.”
I felt that he had to be told plainly how I felt: I told him. We had a hot argument, both became angry, and finally parted when he told me that he gave me twenty-four hours to think it over. On the following day he returned at about eleven o’clock and asked me how I felt.
I said: “You had my answer yesterday. It is the same answer to-day.”
He looked at me angrily with his bright little brown eyes as we stood in the courtyard outside the door to my hut.
“You are not grateful for all we have done. You do not deserve to get well,” he said.
It may have been the purest coincidence that, on the evening of the same day, I was told that the doctors had changed their mind about my condition: they were going to discharge me the following day. I felt that they might have added, Reason for Discharge: failure to pay hospital fees.
About a week before I left, Sergeant McCracken had a letter from his family. It was his first letter after eight months as a prisoner, and he hugged it to his great chest before opening it. It had taken less than a month to reach him and gave him the glad news that his name had been read out from the list of prisoners-of-war declared by the North Koreans and Chinese. That letter did McCracken more good than a year’s hospital treatment.
The important thing, as far as I was concerned, was that the forms we had filled in on the 18th December, giving—for the umpteenth time—our numbers, ranks, and names, had really been of some use at last. Mr. Li had told us at Christmas time that there was to be an exchange of names, but I had not dared to believe him. For once, he had told us the truth.
This knowledge was a source of great comfort to me, as I said goodbye early one morning to McCracken and climbed on board a truck bound for Pyoktong. It was the 15th January, 1952: the fifteenth day of a New Year that I hoped and prayed would see me a free man again. Even if I was not completely fit, it was a great joy to think that I was going to rejoin so many of my comrades from the Battalion.
The Edge of the Sword Page 22