Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Having routed the 22nd Brigade the night before, the Nips now come after the 27th. Thank gawd, X Battalion isn’t included with the 27th. I don’t think I can take another helping of last night. Instead, we’re held back in reserve.

  ‘Poor bastards in the 27th cop the same as we done, first the shelling, and then the Japs coming at them in their hordes. They manage to hold on and repulse the first attack but their commander reckons they’re in danger of being cut off. He decides to withdraw to a more defensible position about three miles to the rear. Fair enough, but that’s when he makes his one big mistake that, in the end, may have cost us the battle for Singapore.

  ‘In the 27th sector are these huge storage tanks that contain oil and aviation spirit. The brigadier decides the fuel shouldn’t fall into enemy hands and he orders the cocks opened and the fuel set alight. Though he probably hasn’t planned it that way, a river of fire flows to the exact spot the enemy has been trying to infiltrate and incinerates an entire Jap battalion.

  ‘But now comes the disaster. It seems we’ve made such a good job of repulsing the Japanese invasion that General Nishimura, the Jap commander, overestimates the numbers he’s against and decides to call off the attack. But the flames from the storage tanks light up the whole area and Nishimura sees the Aussies retreating so he takes the initiative and continues the attack. The sector is lost.

  ‘That afternoon, X Battalion is ordered to move into position to mount an attack. The one day we’ve been out of the attack, we’ve been instructed in weapons and kitted out and kept on our feet. It’s been two days since those of us who have survived the first night’s fighting have had any sleep, except for a couple of hours, and we’re like zombies. The walking-dead. The bloke in charge of us is Colonel Boyes and towards sunset he’s told to advance to high ground a little beyond the village of Bukit Timah, slightly further on from where a unit of Indian troops is positioned.

  ‘It’s coming on dark, we don’t know the area and we stumble forward and get to the village just before dark. The whole place is up in flames and we skirt the village and come across where the Indian troops are supposed to be, only there’s hundreds of dead bodies and no live Indians. From the look of the bodies and the fresh blood, the enemy isn’t that far away. There’s a smell of roasted flesh in the air and I feel like puking.

  ‘We reach our designated position and we’re told to dig in.’ Tommy grins, ‘Well, there’s no way that’s going to happen, it’s now nearly three days since we’ve slept and the troops in X Battalion drop to the ground where they’re standing and are asleep in a matter of minutes.

  ‘At least the six of us stay awake long enough to find a deep ditch and slide into it and bivouac under a rocky overhang, just in case the Japs send in a few mortars. I reckon I’ve never been that tired in me life. Blades Rigby says he’ll keep watch. He’s the only one who’s got the stamina.’ Tommy laughs, ‘It must be the hashish. He was always chewing it in Malaya and it kept him going when the rest of us were completely rooted. He said he loved to kill the little yellow men and the ganja helped him to stay awake and get a few extra notches on his knife.

  ‘There’s no denying it, he was always in the thick of the killing. I dunno how he ever made sergeant because he was a law unto himself and completely unpredictable. But if it wasn’t for the knife drill he taught us, I’d have been long dead. As far as I know, knife drill don’t come out of any army instruction manual neither, so where did he learn it, eh?

  ‘There’s no way a mere mortal could have stayed on guard after three days of fighting without sleep, unless he was on something. With him it was hashish or maybe something else he’d found. He spoke fluent Malay and some of the Chinese lingo and was always talking to the locals, scroungin’ information, bartering something.’

  ‘What’s hashish?’

  ‘Hashish? It’s a drug they use in the East, the resin of marijuana, which is a plant. There’s lots of ways you can use it, smoke it, chew it, put it in food. In prison, some of the crims smoked the marijuana leaf when it could be smuggled in, it’s much weaker than hashish, which comes from the blossom. The leaf can be rolled like tobacco into a cigarette called a roach, these days it’s a joint.’

  ‘Have you? I mean have you smoked it?’

  ‘Yeah, makes you feel relaxed. Some blokes smoking it start to giggle a lot. If a screw finds it on you or in your cell, you get seven days solitary. The official name is cannabis.’ Tommy reaches for another Turf. ‘Personally I prefer these coffin nails.’

  He lights up, draws back and exhales. ‘Where was I?’ ‘You’ve just fallen asleep, Blades Rigby is on guard.’

  ‘Righto. Well, I don’t know how long we’re asleep when he shakes me and whispers urgently, “Japs! Wake up, Tommy!”

  ‘The Japanese 18th Division have found X Battalion asleep, though I only know this afterwards. The six of us just sit tight and from where we are in the monsoon ditch under the rock overhang, we can’t see nothing. They’ve simply come up and bayoneted most of the blokes in their sleep. Those who woke in time had a go but most don’t have a hope. Most are not fighting men anyway. We learned later that Captain Richardson managed to get away with a handful of troops. I reckon he should have got the VC.

  ‘Anyway, we play possum until we hear the Japs have all gone and then we come out of hiding. Everywhere we look there are dead Australians, some blokes left over from our battalion, not that that’s a lot. They’re mates you’ve shared a beer with. Worst thing is there are no Japanese dead. Either they’ve caught us completely by surprise or they’ve taken their dead and wounded with them. It’s the perfect ambush, the whole of X Battalion caught napping.

  ‘“Christ, I should’ve been fuckin’ there!” Blades shouts out, real angry.

  ‘“Remember, you were, mate, playing possum,” I tell him, “And thank gawd for that!”

  ‘“If I’d been up top, I’d have heard them coming, given a warning. Even if I’d only got two or three of the murdering sods!” The bastard’s off his scone.

  ‘What can I say? I know he’s saved my life. If it wasn’t for him, I would’ve been up top asleep. I’m getting a bit tired of Blades Rigby saving me life.

  ‘Can’t really call the Nips murdering bastards in this case. I reckon we’d have done the same if we had come across them asleep. Ambush is a part of war. I guess the sentries Colonel Boyes posted must have fallen asleep. Can’t blame them neither. Anyway, he was dead as well.

  ‘But it don’t take that long to find out that the Japs truly are murdering bastards. Remember, we only found out later what they did to our wounded at Parit Sulong, bayoneting them, then setting them alight. Until now, we’d thought of them as pretty worthy warriors.

  ‘We make our way back towards Bukit Timah, using whatever concealment there is.’ Tommy stops and looks at me. ‘Bukit Timah isn’t like a native village, it’s a small town with streets marked, sort of half-native and half like one of our towns. There’s a Catholic college and a post office, some administration buildings and shops owned by the Chinese that haven’t been destroyed by artillery fire. We’re creeping along a road named Jurong Road which is leading in the direction of the village when we come across this monsoon drain.

  ‘There’s sixteen Australian bodies lying in the ditch. They’ve been taken prisoner by the Japanese and they’ve been trussed and made to kneel above the drain. The Japanese have beheaded some of them and used their bayonets on the others. Their wrists are still tied behind their backs, some are without heads, their heads scattered willynilly in the bottom of the ditch like they’ve been kicked into it afterwards.

  ‘Later I meet a bloke in Changi named George Plunkett, who it turns out was in that ditch in Jurong Road. There was twenty of them taken there by the Japs and trussed up and executed. He told me how one of his mates, “Titch” Burgess, regained consciousness. In the killing frenzy, a bayonet thrust that was meant to kill
him had severed the rope they’d used to tie him up. Badly wounded, Burgess managed to untie Plunkett and three others. They all had deep stab wounds and sword cuts to the neck. Plunkett had been bayoneted thirteen times in the back.

  They managed to somehow get themselves out of the ditch and a Chinese family took them in. Three of them survived, but “Titch” Burgess, the bloke who’d saved their lives, had lost too much blood and died.

  ‘Soon enough we come across what was left of Brigadier Taylor’s Infantry Brigade HQ. They were strung out along Reformatory Road Ridge above Bukit Timah. We’d no sooner reported in when the Japs attacked and every able-bodied man, including the staff officers, were ordered to counter-attack across Reformatory Road.

  ‘Let me tell you, it was on for one and all. Up to now the Japanese had always been the enemy, you know, the other side, I even had a grudging respect for them. But after seeing them blokes in the ditch, I now hate the little yellow bastards. I reckon the others feel the same because now it’s a matter of grenade and bayonet. Only with us six, it’s the knife and we get stuck in. We cut our way through the buggers and have the rare satisfaction of seeing them running backwards. I’m no hero but there’s six Japs coming at me, and me and Blades Rigby with a knife coming at them. They take one look at us carrying nothing but a blade and they turn and run for their lives. I’m convinced after that that Blades is crackers, stark starin’ mad. The bastard just ain’t scared of no one and they’ve seen it in his eyes.’

  I’m smiling inwardly at this, little Tommy and his mates mounting a knife attack and the Japs, all bug-eyed, seeing their fierceness and running. I can see it in my mind and I admire him. But then he’s squinting at me, reading my thoughts.

  ‘Mate, you’re probably thinking it’s like the films, Errol Flynn, blokes fighting hand to hand, knives flashing. It ain’t like that. You’re in there and you can’t think. If you think, you’ll run, so you just charge and fight and hope your training and instinct will take over. It’s a sort of fighting frenzy you’re in, afterwards you’re so scared you can’t lift your arms and you’re sobbing and can’t stop shaking. I remember sitting on a forty-four-gallon drum after that fight, me arms like lead, shaking like a leaf and I look down and, right up to the elbows, I’m covered in Jap blood and it’s still wet.’

  ‘But you didn’t run away, you fought them, didn’t yer?’ Tommy doesn’t reply. ‘Next day Brigade HQ, which is where we now are and where I meet a few other blokes from in the 8th Division, retreats down Holland Road and then we move to the outskirts of the city. What’s left of us, that is the 22nd Brigade, are hardly enough to form one battalion of three hundred soldiers. Let me remind you, a brigade is around three thousand men and now there’s two hundred, maybe a few more stragglers comin’ in every day.

  ‘The rest are all dead, wounded, lost or cut off. Transport, supply and service personnel are now making up the numbers. Like X Battalion, they know bugger-all about hand-to-hand fighting. That’s the point, sometimes the front between the enemy and us is twenty yards. It’s not difficult to see we’re pushing shit uphill with a broken stick.’

  Tommy pauses and I can see he’s wearing out but I don’t want him to stop, there is so much telling yet to be done. ‘You’re tired, Dad, would you like to stop?’ My heart is beating faster. ‘Please, please don’t let him stop,’ I think to myself.

  ‘She’s right, mate, just need to take a piss, too much char.’

  Tommy returns a couple of minutes later and settles back into his sleeping bag. ‘Now, where was I? Oh yes, we’re into the outskirts of the city. If I make it through the day, I’m gunna sleep in a dry place, maybe even a bed. It seems a funny thought, our chances of seeing the dark of another night are pretty slim but you can’t think about that. What’s it Nancy always says? Yeah, that’s right, “Hope springs eternal”.

  ‘We enter the outskirts of the city and it’s a repeat performance, the Japs just have too many fit fighting men and us too few. Their artillery is pounding the shit out of the city and bombs are falling everywhere. The Japs own the skies and it’s a considerable advantage. Pretty soon they overrun our hospital at St Patrick’s College at Katong and we set up two makeshift ones at St Andrew’s Cathedral and the Cathay building, both of which are well within the Allied perimeter. Later we learn that when they take Alexandra Hospital they murder the wounded along with the doctors and nurses. Some of the wounded men were taken outside and used as bayonet practice while the Jap soldiers laughed at the fun of it all.

  ‘We were beginning to realise that the Japanese take no prisoners. That they regarded surrender as cowardice, which was a bloody good reason to keep fighting. I reckoned at the time I’d rather die facing the enemy than be trussed and on my knees so some little yellow rice-munching midget wearing thick spectacles can behead me with the family sword. No, that’s a lie! You don’t think like that. That comes after.

  ‘But we knew in our hearts it was only a matter of time before it was all over, there’s nothing we could do to stop the rampage. On the afternoon of the fifteenth, General Percival surrenders. I don’t know why he bothered, we were convinced we’d all be killed one way or another. But at 8.30 p.m., on the fifteenth of February 1942, the guns stop and hostilities cease. The fortress that couldn’t be took has fallen in just seven days. We’d seen enough of the mongrels to know that whatever was to come it wasn’t gunna be no Sunday School picnic.

  ‘What followed was this big Japanese parade with their soldiers marching or riding in trucks or tanks or in streams of cars taken from the civilian population, every vehicle bedecked with the flag of the rising sun. They’re yelling and blowing their hooters and laughing, like a bunch of larrikins outside the movies on a Saturday night. We watch them, too tired to look away. If, during that week of fighting, I slept in a dry place I don’t recall it, mostly because I don’t ever remember sleeping except under the rock when X Battalion was ambushed.

  ‘But now, with the surrender, the real slaughter starts. To the Japanese everyone is the enemy, even the civilians and in particular the Chinese. They hate the Chinese something terrible, more even than us. The poor buggers had already suffered enough. The city was a bloodbath, 70,000 civilians were killed. The bombing had been responsible for a lot of the destruction but once inside the city the Japs are merciless, rounding up women and children and lopping heads off looters and anyone they don’t like the look of.

  ‘There are bodies and parts of bodies lying piled up in the streets, infants, women and children as well as men. They lie on front lawns, on the steps of the bigger buildings, the monsoon ditches are piled full of them. In some streets and pavements the surfaces are so black and slick with congealed blood, from the blood oozing from bodies piled up to make roadblocks or to be burnt, that you didn’t dare walk there.

  ‘Pretty soon the bodies start to rot in the tropical heat, the gases bloating the corpses. The Japanese would wait until the stomachs were huge, blown up like a balloon by the gases roiling inside the dead, then they’d hurl a hand grenade in among them or pepper them with bullets so the bloated stomachs would explode and spray intestines and everything else thirty or forty feet into the air. Bits of body hung off roof gutters and telegraph wires. They thought this was huge fun. There was shit and human parts, blood and rotting human flesh everywhere you turned. We had no hope of burying the dead. We had to leave the job of cleaning up to the maggots and flies. All we could do was try to care for our own wounded.’

  Tommy is silent and I’ve got my head bowed. My imagination is working overtime to try to understand what Tommy’s just told me, to try to see it in my mind’s eye. I’m glad we haven’t eaten nothing because I reckon I’d be sick. I can’t offer him another cup of tea because if I do there’ll be nothing left for the trip home. ‘A mug of water?’ I ask him and he nods. I rinse the mugs, then fill them at the cold part of the stream. I know that what’s next is Changi, I’ve read a bit about Changi whe
re the prisoners were taken and I’m expecting more of the same. Maybe it was Changi where Tommy got his shoulder and jaw and eye bashed.

  To my surprise Tommy now says, ‘Mate, tell you the truth, the march out of the city to Selarang Barracks at Changi I hardly remember. We were that happy to be alive and getting out of the stinking city, away from the smell of rotting corpses, I reckon my mind drew a blank. I was that exhausted anyway, probably didn’t even know where I was. We’d scrounged a bit of gear here and there and I’d changed my uniform for one on a dead bloke as mine was in tatters. I took his kit as well, keeping only me slouch hat which had a bullet hole through the crown where a Jap rifle had come close to parting my hair. I remember finding this pork-pie hat somewhere, so I stowed mine in my kitbag and wore the pork-pie. Lots of the blokes were wearing civilian headgear, pukka-sahib helmets and one bloke I saw was wearing a female wig. We was laughin’ and jokin’ as we marched, Christ knows why, there wasn’t nothing to laugh about, ’cept of course we were still alive when a lot of our mates weren’t. But the six of us are still there and unhurt, which is a flamin’ miracle and good reason to be happy.’

  I find it strange that in all Tommy’s telling and with what all them six have been through together, he’s never given their names, except for Blades Rigby. ‘You’ve never mentioned the names of your mates, why’s that?’

  Tommy looks up, ‘Suppose you think it strange, eh? I’ve only named the one, Blades Rigby?’ ‘Yeah, you seemed to be good mates?’

  Tommy nods his head, ‘Never any better. Only mate I ever had better than any one of them was John Crowe.’ He squints, ‘I’m scared to say their names or how they died, they’s locked into me head, if I say their names they might fly away.’ He looks up, ‘It’s not something I can explain.’ He looks down again between his hands which are resting on his kneecaps, his legs inside the sleeping bag, his arms out, one hand holding the mug of water. ‘I’ve never done no mourning for them, see. Never put them to rest in me heart.’He says it softly so that I only just hear him. Then he looks slowly up at me, ‘After them I knew I could never make a new friend, that if I did, he would die violently before his time, just like they done.’