The Edge of the Sword

by General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley

  Pyoktong is a small town on a southern inlet of the Yalu Paver. Its houses run down one side of a rocky spur jutting out into the clear water; a picturesque little town, when seen from afar, dominated by the old temple above it. In addition to accommodating General Wang Yang Kung, the Commander of the Prisoner-of-War Camps, and his staff, it had been for many months a high-powered interrogation centre and a camp for non-Korean captives. McCracken had spent the greater part of the previous year there, and confirmed the stories I had heard at Kang-dong of the appalling death-rate. Every day during the late spring and early summer, McCracken told me, fifteen to twenty men died; men whose last strength had been used up in fighting for life during the terrible winter of 1950-51 when there had been neither accommodation nor food nor clothing for such temperatures, and the North Koreans and Chinese had refused to permit the International Red Cross to come in with any form of comforts for the prisoners. Those under interrogation who did not answer satisfactorily, or others who resisted or spoke against political indoctrination by the Chinese, suffered the punishment of the “ice-box”—a reinforced concrete hut where the wretched offender was placed in sub-arctic temperatures to “consider” his errors. Sometimes, he did not “reconsider” in time, and was removed to the hill to join in the growing mound of unburied corpses. When spring came, the “ice-box” gave way to the “sweat-box” where errors were “considered” in little hutches in which a man could neither sit nor draw his legs up but lay continuously, night and day, on the ground.

  Having heard all this from the men who had been there, either through the winter, or during the later period when the effects of the winter were becoming daily more evident, I looked at Pyoktong with great interest as we approached by barge across the waters of the inlet, the wheels of our lorry held to its deck in token only by four pieces of rice-straw rope. At the headquarters I was received by an English-speaking Chinese and two girls, who gave me a seat and were very polite while they waited for my documents. One of the girls, little more than a child, began to converse in very good English which she said she had learned in Chunking. She asked me if it was true that conditions of life in Britain were really as bad as she had been told. Were people really starving to death? How could we stand such conditions, such oppression from our Government? Why didn’t we back the Communist Party’s Liberation Movement? I began to tell her that Mr. Harry Pollitt could not get popular support for his Movement—Liberation or otherwise—because people felt that he had nothing better to offer them than they had already; that many suspected he had a good deal less. She could not believe this. With her own eyes she had read details of the hunger of the workers—hunger that her Chinese comrades had known to the full before Liberation and the establishment of the New China under Chairman Mao. Of course, she added modestly, deprecatingly, she was not a true worker but came from the bourgeoisie; but she was trying hard to live it down. Her blushes were swept away by a flush of enthusiasm as she began to tell me of the success they had experienced in solving China’s old, old problem of famine.

  “What will your mother and wife do this year in England when the floods spread over your rice paddy?” she asked. “What will your family find to eat?”

  Before I could reply to this interesting question, documents arrived; and the young Chinese, after reading them, seemed rather less cordial than before. I was taken away to a hut just outside the main camp and left alone with a small pamphlet that the girl insisted I should read. It was called “One step forward, two steps back,” and was written by the late V.I. Lenin.

  Glancing at the title, I had a feeling that V. I. Lenin must have had one or two experiences in common with me.

  My hut was unheated but I had a blanket, a padded greatcoat, and my blue padded uniform. I awoke after a comfortable night to find a squat Chinese in the doorway holding an enamel washbowl of kaoliang and diacon soup. He ladled a portion into my two china bowls and shuffled off.

  The day passed slowly. I could see but little of my surroundings because the sentry had put a baulk of timber against the door and all observation had to be made through holes in the paper that covered it. By three o’clock in the afternoon I had improved my position, however. The sentry on duty had acceded to my request to be allowed to sit in the sun—the interior of my room was dark and very cold. I sat on the narrow wooden verandah, enjoying the warmth and light, taking this opportunity to see how the land lay.

  Sitting there, I was approached by a middle-aged Chinese who asked me my opinion of the progress of the Peace Talks at Kaesong. I replied that, having no news of them, I was unable to form an opinion. He did not rise to this bait but changed the subject to the political pamphlet lying by my side.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  I nodded towards the reception office to which I had been taken on arrival.

  “The young lady in there gave it to me,” I said.

  “‘Young lady!’” he repeated, horrified. “‘Lady’ is a term like ‘gentleman’ which you use for your ruling classes—your aristocrats. There are no ‘ladies’ in China!”

  As he left me to converse with a passing friend, I could not but reflect that, apart from impugning the character of Chinese women-folk, he had probably provided a new variation to a very old music-hall joke.

  By now, the guard soldiers had settled down to their afternoon lessons. Further down the street, those who could find a place on a sunny veranda were squatting or sitting in groups of half-a-dozen, clutching elementary readers in their hands. One of their number—more advanced than his fellows—would conduct the class.

  “You see,” said the middle-aged Chinese, who had returned, “in the New China, everyone must learn to read and write. This is the new Happy Life.”

  “Very commendable,” I observed.

  “Not commendable,” he rejoined. “This is a necessary thing, I think. If our people cannot read, how else shall they study the books and newspapers we give them. Talking alone is no good. This is not enough.”

  “Perhaps, when they have learnt to read they may also read the books and newspapers that we print,” I said.

  He smiled, pityingly.

  “Ah, no. Once they have read our words they will know the Truth. Why, then, should they want to see the lies spread by your side?”

  He strolled away down the street and turned a corner.

  For some time I had been hoping to see some of our own fellows in order to find out what news, if any, they had from Kaesong. I knew it would be difficult, for I was an isolated prisoner, forbidden to communicate with others, as they were forbidden to do with me. At length, three young Europeans passed near to me and, the guards being idle at that moment, we exchanged a few words. It seemed that the third and fourth points on the agenda were still under discussion. The conversation was just developing when what I may only describe as a howl of rage came from the gable end of my hut. A tall Chinese with spectacles in blue-tinted frames, came running towards us in a fury. Pointing down the street, he hissed at three luckless listeners:

  “Go back to your company!”

  Then he turned to me. He was so angry that he could scarcely speak coherently. How dare I speak to other men without permission! The guard and the guard commander were called; I was flung into my cheerless little room, the door was slammed, two baulks of timber were placed against it, and the sentry glared in every five or ten seconds. I felt that I had probably been sent to bed without any supper.

  Much to my surprise, therefore, at about four o’clock, the Chinese mess-orderly returned with another wash-pan of food. I was in the middle of eating this when the man who had received me the previous morning came down with a guard. I was told to pack up at once and when I objected that I had not finished my meal, this was removed from me. The hint was too plain to ignore: I packed up.

  The guard took me through the narrow side-streets up to the main road, and then up the hill to the hospital in the old temple. But we had come to the wrong place and had to go back once
again to the road below. I climbed on to the truck waiting there. Amongst the crowd of soldiers standing in the back were four Europeans in prison blue. They helped me aboard, and we examined one another in the dusk.

  They were all Americans. Phil and I had met before at Kang-dong. His knowledge of Japanese had helped us considerably on the march north, when he had acted as the liaison officer with the North Koreans. Charlie was a Marine pilot, William P. and the other man were infantry platoon commanders from the Reserve. All four were discharged hospital patients. William P. had had a terrible time with beri-beri, contracted after spending months in a small, dark, filthy stable near Sunchon where he had been fed on one bowl of old maize daily. He owed his life to the fact that he had contracted to render safe some unexploded bombs in the area for the Chinese in exchange for rations for himself and two men. The bombs were already perfectly safe, but William P. made a great show of working on these, one at a time—the contract said, “one bomb, one meal,” and he was very hungry. Unfortunately, his scheme only succeeded in saving himself; the other two men were fed too late and died. It was said of William P. that he had remained alive only because he was what the Americans call “ornery”, and I believe they were right.

  We drove along the snow and ice-bound roads in the darkness. The moon was waning; only the pale starlight showed us the outlines of hills and valleys, of scattered villages and hamlets along the way. After about an hour we drew up in a village street. The guards indicated that we should alight and led the way over a ploughed field to a large Korean house. This was the receiving point for the camp to which we had been consigned. After filling in our registration forms, we had a meal of cold rice and potatoes—we all protested that we had not eaten, and none more vehemently than I, remembering the bowls that had been snatched away. Then we waited for over three hours, sitting round a stove which smoked abominably. At last, at about half past ten, we were led through a barbed wire fence, searched at a house called “the company headquarters” by two very irritable Chinese who had been awakened to do it, led on into a compound and thrust into a small house.

  William P., the other infantry lieutenant and I were put into a room in which there were already three men. They sat up in their blankets, blinking in the dim electric light. I was delighted to see that one of the faces belonged to Anthony, the Intelligence Officer of the Fifth Fusiliers. I realized that my hopes had been fulfilled: I had reached the Camp containing my friends.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WE had arrived on a Saturday evening; a good time to start life in the Camp, we discovered, since there was no early reveille on a Sunday, nor any compulsory political study. On that day, too, the meals were the best of the week. There was a minute portion of pork per man which was served as pork soup in the morning and pork stew—a thicker soup—with beans, in the evening, and two loaves of bread per man instead of rice. In my own case, these Sunday treats were overshadowed, however, by the joy of reunion with my friends. The Colonel and all the officers and warrant-officers taken in the 29th Brigade battle on the Imjin River in April 1951 were there, except for Ronnie, Henry, Beverley, and Terry, who had died. With them were the officers captured from the Brigade in the New Year, 1951, when we had fought a rearguard action north of Seoul. From the Rifles, I found Joe, James, Robin, and Sandy, their Doctor; and from the Gunners, Spud, whose comrade had died on the march north. These five had suffered terribly as prisoners in the bitter cold of January and February, 1951; and at one time or another had suffered, too, from the cruelty of their captors. Spud, for instance, had been strung up by his thumbs at Pak’s Palace and, worse, experienced the agony of pins being thrust underneath his fingernails. In spite of it all, they were relatively fit, thanks to an improvement in the diet since the preceding Thanksgiving Day and, not least, to their own splendid spirit. Only Denis was actually sick, lying at that moment in the Camp “Hospital” with pneumonia. I looked in on Tom, Ron, and Jack, whom I had not seen since November; and found Duncan, whom I had left in his bunker the previous September when I escaped to the coast. They had kept him there for a further seventy days, during which time he never once came outside even to make a visit to the latrine. He had swollen up with beri-beri as a result though, by now, he was on the road to recovery.

  Sam, our Support Company Commander, decided to take me on a tour of the Camp. He explained that the compound was based on the main schoolhouse in Pyn-chong-ni, a village ten miles east of Pyoktong and four miles south of the Yalu River. The schoolhouse ran approximately east/west, a long building of timber and mud constructed during the Japanese regime. A corridor ran its entire length at the rear and, off this, sliding doors opened on what had once been classrooms. At the western end was a double classroom known as “The Library”, which contained, in addition to portraits of all the Communist Party leaders throughout the world, all of twenty books and a few three-month-old copies of The Shanghai News, The London and New York Daily Worker, and the San Francisco Peoples ’ World. As the books were all either treatises on Marxism or translations of Russian novels, one may say fairly that “The Library” had a definite political bias. The other classrooms were used as sleeping-quarters, each room having a central alley, on either side of which the floor was covered with rice-straw mats. On these, at night, the prisoners lay, each covering himself with a padded quilt, a blanket, and a greatcoat as protection against the penetrating cold. Outside each door, a stove stood in the passage for which a small ration of wood was provided to heat water for washing clothes and bodies.

  The main entrance to the building was in the centre, where a wide passage ran back to the classroom corridor and an exit to the rear. As we stood in the doorway—there were no doors—Sam pointed out to me a huge red star and two white peace doves which had been hung above it by the Chinese as Christmas decorations. The word “Peace” had been placed there, too. The prisoners had protested at this decoration, taking the view that the red star was no symbol of theirs, and that peace doves and the slogan “Peace” should really mean Peace and not be used as an instrument of propaganda. They had torn the word down secretly. Sam and I agreed that we would remove the star and pigeons at the earliest opportunity.

  Below the main entrance was a large mud playground, covering about half the area of a full-size soccer pitch; now an exercise and parade ground for us. The schoolhouse stood on a higher level and, to reach the mud rectangle, one had to cross a promenade about fifteen feet wide and descend a flight of concrete steps. From the promenade, which ran the whole length of the exercise ground or “square”, there were three flights of steps leading down: one below the main entrance, one at the western end by the exit gate to the Chinese headquarters, and one at the eastern end which led to the cook-house. We walked east along the promenade and descended to the kitchen.

  This Camp had been established in the previous October, when all officer and warrant-officer prisoners not held back for further interrogation had been concentrated in it, with a few non-commissioned officers of the United Nations Command Air Forces. The cook-house had been built at this time, a long partitioned building containing a kitchen with nine huge cast-iron cooking pots heated by wood fires, a small room to accommodate the fourteen cooks, and a communal bath-house which had been built so inefficiently that it had never been serviceable. Sid and Tony, and Sergeant-Majors Gallagher and Morton were the British representatives working as cooks under Mac, the American Major in charge. The kitchen was more often than not filled with smoke as the chimneys drew off only half of it, the remainder finding its way out through air vents in the roof, as in mediaeval times. Our eyes watering, Sam and I returned to the schoolhouse by the main entrance and came to the back of the building, by way of the rear exit.

  A few yards behind, there was another, higher platform, on which stood a short promenade and a number of Korean dwelling houses. Originally, these had been the quarters of the school staff. Now they housed the overflow of prisoners from the schoolhouse who had named the area of their residence
“Snob Hill”. I discovered that I and the other four new arrivals were quartered in this area which was now almost filled to capacity.

  Perhaps the most important residence on “Snob Hill” was the Barbers’ Shop. In this snug little room were a stove, a table, two home-made chairs, and three home-made barbers: one engineer, one marine, one airman. They had built a little empire there; an empire which provided a weekly shave with a cut-throat razor, a monthly haircut, and unlimited repartee. As in many a small town, the Barbers’ Shop provided a sounding-board for all matters of controversy in the community. The time came when the barbers constituted a self-appointed board of assessment for all rumours relating to the peace talks, which many took more seriously than they cared to admit.

  The daily routine in the Camp, though often irksome, was very simple. Within a week, a newcomer felt that he had been following it for months.

  At dawn, the compound was roused by the Chinese and assembled on the square for physical training exercises or, occasionally, taken for a short, escorted walk along the road. What made this so tiresome was that after returning, washing, and tidying one’s quarters, there was a wait of two and a half hours until breakfast. After the meal, the school bell was rung for morning political study. A lunch break followed—there was no lunch—and the afternoon study session commenced at two o’clock, ending at four. The second meal was at half past; and this was followed, again, by further study in small groups. At nine o’clock, the lights were extinguished at the main. This was the weekday routine.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the fare was the same at both meals: rice—very bad rice in those winter days—and diacon soup. On Tuesdays we had rice and beans for the evening meal and two and a half buns of bread. On Saturdays, though we had no bread, there were beans to relieve the monotony of the diet in the evening. And on Sundays and Thursdays—what a feast we had! Rice and pork soup in the morning; pork stew and bread in the evening.