They dream-walked, many of them. Murray Sneddon shut his eyes and imagined himself on “a clean mattress with snow-white sheets.” Many a man envisioned a waterfall spilling over rocks or a cool green valley filled with wildflowers and meadowlarks.62
Such drift was dangerous. A few cataleptics came to at the point of a Japanese bayonet. So some of the men played mind games to keep awake. Ernie Miller pictured a calendar and started checking off the days. January 1, 1942, January 2, always pausing to reflect on the holidays or days with special meaning. By the time he got to September 1, the sun was setting and that day’s walking was done. Lester Tenney concentrated on the image of his wife, Laura (he still had that photo tucked in his sock). Robert Levering had grown up on a farm in Ohio, and as he walked the blistering road, he imagined himself a boy again, following behind a plow, his bare feet enfolded “in the fresh, cool furrows.”63
BEN STEELE would not allow himself to drift.
This was no nightmare with bugbears chasing him up the road. The beatings, shootings, and stabbings were real, and he knew he wasn’t going to wake from them.
Here was a blond-haired boy half collapsed on the shoulder, desperately trying to push himself to his knees, and here came a Jap to finish him. The boy groaned, that’s all, just groaned as the bastard stuck him in the back.
Turn away, Ben Steele thought. Turn away from the horror and hurt of it. Just another corpse by the side of the road.
No room for loathing or hate. A Jap spits in your face, so what? To hell with the bastard. Just keep walking, he told himself. “Make the best of it.”
Men were still clawing at him for water, but by the time he had reached Balanga, walked some thirty miles, he’d become selfish with his can.
Sure, he could sympathize with a guy and want to help him, but he’d been carrying that water all day, careful not to spill a drop of it, and the can held only enough to last a couple of hours.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” he thought. “You gotta look out for yourself.”
WHEN WAR CAME to Bataan, the tao, the local people, at first fled and scattered. Some wanted to stay close to their herds and crops and hid in the fields and fishponds until the shooting stopped and they could return to what was left of their homes. Thousands of others abandoned their barrios and fled south down the Old National Road to an “evacuation center” that the Americanos had set up at Mariveles. The rest of the people, townsfolk, most of them, packed what they could carry and headed for the hills. A few had a rough idea where they were going, but by and large the rugged hill country was terra incognita, and they soon became lost.64
“The Japanese are there, walk this way.”
“No, compadres, you will run into the Hapón if you go that way.”
So they just kept hiking, kept climbing into the wooded hills, until they were sure they were safe. They built lean-tos or sought shelter in caves and under outcroppings. In the morning half-light they came out of hiding to cook a meal over a campfire, then slipped back into their warrens until dark when they could emerge again and sit together in a circle, staring at the stars and the explosions that were lighting up the night.
In the hills they had little to eat—banana stalks and papaya leaves cut into strips and boiled, and rice, dirty rice, they made into lugao, a kind of watery gruel. They got sick in the hills, dysentery at first, then malaria. The little ones suffered the most. At first they were colicky, then listless, then still, very still. Their parents cried over the bodies (quietly), said prayers, wrapped them in rags, and buried them there. No funeral Mass, no burning incense, no stone to mark the grave. Bahalâ na, they told themselves, come what may they would leave it to God.
The thousands of refugees who had fled south to the evacuation center at Mariveles fared no better. Their crowded camp was in the open and they were bombed by the Japanese. So many were killed (how many no one could say), it took four days to gather the dead. After surrender the Japanese ordered the refugees out. Go home, they said. Walk north, north up the Old National Road.
The road was crowded. Long columns of prisoners, sundalos, on one side, a steady stream of refugees on the other. The parade of people was so long, Rosalina Cruz could not see either its beginning or end.
Ay! Susmariosep! Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, she said, crossing herself. There were so many of them.
When war came to her home on Bataan, Rosalina Almario Cruz was sixteen years old and pregnant. She and her young husband lived with her family (her father, mother, brother, and five sisters) in Bagac, a seaside town on Bataan’s west coast. Her father and husband were away when the shooting started and were cut off from home, so Rosalina’s mother, following the lead of her neighbors, took her family into the hills, then a few weeks later led them south to the evacuation center. Now they were walking north toward Orani, thirty-three miles up the Old National Road, there to find a boat that might take them to Manila and the rest of their kin.
For the most part the Japanese ignored the refugees. They were allowed to stop at will, eat if they had food, drink from the artesian wells, nap in a field off the road.
Six months pregnant and weak from malaria, Rosalina Cruz found the walking hard, but her misery seemed small compared to the suffering of the sundalos marching beside her. She could not look at the stumbling line of prisoners across from her without being overcome by a feeling of tenderness. She had never seen men so low, so miserable, the tattered clothes, the sad eyes.
“I pity their suffering,” she thought.
And they in turn pitied her, the pretty young girl holding her belly and gasping for breath as she walked.
“Can you make it?” they would say. “It must be so hard for you.”
When she was able, which is to say when the guards were not watching, she would pour some water from an earthen jar into a coconut shell and slip it to one of the men begging for a drink.
She was very afraid doing this, for the guards had no feelings at all. They stabbed the soldiers who fell. Whenever she saw a guard running up to a man who’d gone down, she would look away and say to herself, “I should not remember this.” She knew they might stab her too, but she could not stop herself from filling the coconut shell and passing it to one thirsty man after another.
“Please! Please, can you give us something to drink?”
“Ay, Diyos!” How could she refuse?
After a while, the Americans began to hand things back, or toss them at her—jewelry, money, anything of value they had managed to hide from their swag-seeking captors. At first Rosalina Cruz could not imagine what they were doing and was afraid to pick up the rings and gold chains and wads of pesos. Then she thought, “I guess they are throwing those things because they think they will not be needing those things anymore.” And that only deepened her áwa, her pity for them. “They think they will be killed,” she told herself. So when an American soldier, a pleasant but sad-looking man, tossed his bankbook at her feet, Rosalina Cruz bent down and picked it up and brushed it off.
She said nothing to the man but made sure he could see she had hold of the little ledger, the record of his life savings, and hoped he saw that she meant to keep it safe.
WITHIN A DAY of the surrender, word spread across Luzon that the Japanese were marching Filipino and American prisoners of war up the Old National Road out of Bataan and through Pampanga Province to the railhead at San Fernando. Now from provinces near and far, Filipino kith and kin began to make their way to Bataan and take up positions along the road, hoping for a glimpse or perhaps a word with their soldier.
In the neighborhood of Batac in the town of Abucay, Armando Pabustan, nine years old, stood next to his mother, Rosalina Maxali, behind a long iron fence that fronted the Batac Elementary School, a white one-story building next to the road. They’d gotten there early, an hour before dawn, to wait in the cool and dark. Now with the light came the columns of men.
The boy was hoping that his father, Damian Pabustan, a soldier in the Philippine Arm
y, had survived the fighting and was among the long lines of soldiers passing in front of him.
His mother told him to watch carefully. There were so many men, all wearing the same thing, all dirty and tired. They would have to study each face, note each man’s way of walking. They would have to hope, and they would have to pray.
They kept coming, the men, one group of sundalos after another. They were so payát, thin and haggard, hanging on to one another as they walked, the guards punching, kicking, and beating them.
Whenever Armando looked at his mother, she was crying, and the boy became convinced his father was dead, but he continued to search among the faces coming up the road. And then, Ay! Ay! There was his father in the middle of a column of soldiers.
He crossed the yard, rushed through the gate, and threw himself into his father’s embrace. His tatay felt thin. He must be sick, the boy thought.
“Where is your mother, Armando?”
The boy pointed toward the fence.
“You must get away from here now,” his father said. “Go back to your mother.”
But he did not want to go. He was holding his father around the waist, hugging him, and he would not let go.
“Have you eaten anything, Father?”
“I haven’t had any food or water for three days.”
His father glanced at the fence again.
“Go over to your mother,” he said.
But the boy wouldn’t move.
A guard who’d been watching came over to break them apart, and Armando buried his face in his father’s midriff. Suddenly he felt a pain in his back, the toe of the hobnail boot. And here came a second guard, grabbing at him, catching the scruff of his shirt, pulling him from his father and tossing him to the road.
Kora! Kora! the guards shouted, shoving his father back into line.
“Take good care of your mother,” his father yelled back to him.
Then the column of men moved on, past the fence, past the school, down the road out of Abucay, out of sight.
THERE WERE THOUSANDS of them waiting, townsfolk from the dusty burgs and barrios along the Old National Road, waiting to do whatever they could for the men slogging their way north.65
They filled tins and earthen pots with water; they made rice balls stuffed with meat and vegetables and wrapped them in banana leaves; they boiled eggs and picked fruit and collected panocha, small cones of dark brown sugar.
They set the water beside the road and at first tried to hand the victuals to the soldiers as they passed by. Soon the guards had had enough of this, and they started to beat the people off with clubs and rifle butts, so the people started tossing their treats into the columns.
In Lubao, where there were a number of two-story buildings, people packed the upper windows and rooftops and showered the soldiers with hunks of bread and rice balls and cookies and chocolate bars. Enraged by the disruption, the guards stomped the food into the dirt and beat the prisoners who stooped to retrieve it, but there were too many tao and too few hohei to stop them.
From the side of the road children would dash into the columns, shove something into a soldier’s hand—a banana leaf full of rice, a small melon, a sugar cookie—and dash off before the guards could kick or club them. After a while some of the guards relented; as long as the columns kept moving they let the men shag what they could.
North of Orani, Bernard FitzPatrick spotted a Chinese man in a dark ch’i-fu standing beside the road with his arms crossed, hands hidden in the robe’s wide sleeves. Now and then, when the guards were not looking, the man would pull something from a sleeve, a sugar cake or banana, press it surreptitiously into a prisoner’s hand, nod a greeting, then fold his arms again and wait for the next column to come along.
As FitzPatrick’s formation passed into Pampanga Province, a small boy gave him a piece of sugarcane and an old Filipino handed him some panocha.
“Vaya con Diyos, compadre,” the old one said.66
RICHARD GORDON loved the army—the good order and discipline, the clean white sheets, starched uniforms, and stacks of pancakes at morning chow. He felt more at home in a barracks than he ever had growing up in a tenement in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, but now, dragging himself along in a ragged column of defeated men, he began to think that the “training” he had gotten coming of age in Manhattan’s gritty Irish ghetto might keep him alive in the dog-eat-dog world of the prisoner of war.67
By the third day of the march Gordon noticed that his comrades had lost all respect for authority. At a well or water hole, if an American officer tried to organize things and ensure every man a drink, the officer was either ignored or knocked down in the rush. He wasn’t part of an army anymore, Richard Gordon told himself, he was a member of a mob. Gone was the close society that had given him so much comfort. Now when he watched soldiers fighting over a filthy scrap in the road or clawing one another to get a drink, he was embarrassed for them.
Perhaps it was this feeling that moved him one morning to take a chance and leave the line of march to answer the appeal of an aging colonel calling out from a stretcher beside the road.
The colonel was desperate: his legs were broken, he said, and his litter bearers had abandoned him the night before. He’d survived the night, but he knew the buzzard squads would be out in the morning, so at first light he started pleading with the passing columns for help.
“Please!” he yelled from his litter. “Please, someone!”
Hundreds of soldiers had passed him by, he said, pretending not to hear or see him.
“Come on fellas,” Richard Gordon was yelling now. “Come on, some of you Joes, gimme a hand.”
But each time a man started to leave the column and head toward Gordon and the litter, the other marchers jeered him. Had they come to hate their officers that much? Gordon wondered.
He kept up his pleading and finally found a volunteer, then another and a third.
Their load was bearable at first, but the stretcher became heavier and heavier, and by noon the four sweating Samaritans were imploring others to spell them.
That night, after they had settled down in a compound, two of Gordon’s helpers snuck off. The next day he found replacements, but that night, Gordon’s second with the colonel, they too abandoned him.
Gordon was tired. That afternoon he’d almost passed out carrying the colonel, and now, in the early morning dark, he was worried about his own health, his own chances. Sometime before first light, his conscience surrendered to his instinct to survive, and Richard Gordon walked away from the stretcher before the colonel awoke, slipping into an anonymous mass of men moving slowly toward the road.
TO KEEP HIMSELF GOING, to make sure he didn’t fall back to the buzzard squad, Zoeth Skinner tried to distract himself by counting the dead, the corpses that were accumulating in the drainage ditches and along the shoulders of the road.68
“Nine.”
“Eighteen.”
“Thirty-two.”
At first he thought himself demented (“fifty-four . . . one hundred and seven”), but he kept counting anyway (“two hundred and twenty-six . . . four hundred and fifteen”).
He counted Filipinos and he counted Americans. Sometimes he recognized a patch or an emblem on a uniform and made note of the unit. Here was an artilleryman sprawled in the gravel, there in a wallow was a Philippine Scout.
Once in a while he noted a man’s injuries—how many bullet holes in the chest or stab wounds in the back.
Somewhere before or just after Balanga, his grim census reached a thousand.
“Holy shit!” he said to himself, “You better stop this crap or you’re going to go wacko.”
SO MANY were dropping to the road, Ben Steele thought, it was better to stay aloof, not to get close to anyone, but north of Layac Junction, about fifty miles into the march, he lost his resolve and befriended a march mate.
They had talked a bit while walking, talked about where they’d been, where they might be headed, what might happen
when they got there. Talking made the walking easier, the heat a little less intense. That night sitting together in a compound they chatted some more, and Ben Steele felt better for the company.
Next afternoon on the road, he noticed his new friend beginning to wobble, and a mile or two later the man’s legs gave out and down he went, grabbing for Ben Steele’s leg as he hit the ground.
“Come on, Ben! Help me.”
He and another man hauled the dropout to his feet and started to drag him along between them down the road. They hadn’t gone far before a guard rushed up and screamed at them to let the invalid go. His helper obeyed, but for reasons beyond all understanding, Ben Steele hung on to the man, and the next thing he knew his buttocks were on fire.
The guard’s blade had penetrated to the pelvis. Blood was beginning to course down Ben Steele’s leg and flies were starting to swarm the wound.
He looked at the man he was holding, hoped he’d understand, then let him sink slowly to the road at the guard’s feet.
“No!” the man said. “No. Please. Help me, please.”
AS A TRANSIT CENTER, San Fernando, sixty-six miles from Mariveles, had always been a busy city, known for its gaudy Easter and Christmas festivals and as the location of the large Pampanga Sugar Company. Coming up the Old National Road from Guagua and Bacalor, the long columns of exhausted prisoners could see the sugar company’s tall red-brick smokestacks rising in the distance, and, knowing that familiar landmark, some began to spread the word that at last they had reached their destination. Here, they’d been told, they would be put on trains and hauled off to prison camp.
The first columns arrived on April 13, the others across the two weeks that followed. Without enough trains and guards, the Japanese supply and transportation officers in charge of the movement of prisoners were overwhelmed by the logistics and the staggering number of men, and San Fernando, their final collection point, was soon a shambles.
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