Torrance- Escape From Singapore

by Onbekend

  He stepped into the stream, felt the refreshingly cool water invade his chestnut-brown army boots. It was scarcely above his knees when he was halfway across, and he relaxed a little, though it was not until he had climbed up the opposite bank – churned to mud by the passage of dozens of boots – he felt he could relax a little. He walked a short distance up the trail – still not a hundred per cent convinced some Japanese officer was not going to appear from behind one of the trees and try to lop his head off with his sword – then walked back to the top of the bank and waved for Hubbard to follow.

  Half a mile further on, they found Murphy’s body lying in a clearing with the corpses of two Japanese soldiers. The blood was still sticky, and flies buzzed over them.

  ‘Spud went in my place,’ Quinn told Hubbard.

  ‘Meaning if you hadn’t let him go instead of you, Spud might still be alive and it might be you lying there?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. Spud always was a bit of a drongo. Frankly I’m surprised he lasted this long—’ Quinn broke off. ‘You hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  The two of them listened to the cicadas, Quinn pointing his rifle back up the trail. ‘Thought I heard voices.’

  ‘Aussies or Japs?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell.’

  Another snatch of distant voices wafted up the trail towards them. Quinn signalled Hubbard for silence, and the two of them ducked into the undergrowth at the side of the clearing. Before half a minute had passed, the snatches of voices became a continuous dialogue, and after another half a minute Quinn had identified the language as English.

  Shapiro and Boyd entered the clearing. ‘It’s Spud,’ said Shapiro, crouching by the corpse.

  ‘They can hear you two gabbing all the way in Singapore Town,’ Quinn said as he and Hubbard stepped out of the bushes. Shapiro aimed his rifle; Boyd dropped his. Red-faced, he retrieved it. Quinn pretended not to have noticed.

  ‘What happened here?’ asked Shapiro.

  ‘Don’t ask me, they were like that when we got here.’

  They marched on for another half an hour before Quinn called a halt in another clearing. He unscrewed the cap from his water bottle and took a short pull. Better to conserve it: he did not have much left and had no idea how long it would be before he could refill it. ‘We’ll rest here for ten minutes, try to get our second wind,’ he told his three companions. ‘Cyril, sit yourself down by that tree where you can watch the trail.’

  ‘What for?’

  Quinn exchanged glances with Hubbard, who rolled his eyes. Rookies could be hard work sometimes.

  ‘So you can watch the trail,’ Quinn explained patiently. ‘I don’t want any bloody Japs coming up behind us and catching us napping. What the hell are you doing?’ he added furiously, seeing Boyd had lit a cigarette.

  Boyd looked bewildered. ‘What am I—?’ he began, the cigarette dancing up and down at the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

  ‘Put that bloody fag out! This is no time for a smoko!’

  ‘Bluey!’ hissed Hubbard. ‘Japs!’

  ‘Shit! Off the trail, all of you.’

  Boyd started to plunge into the sago bushes on one side of the trail. Quinn caught him by the arm, pulling him back and dragging him into the bushes on the same side as Hubbard and Shapiro. The four of them squirmed as far back as they could get under a patch of sago bushes, and Quinn eased back the cocking handle of his Thompson, wincing at the click it made. A few moments later, the crepe-soled boots of half a dozen Japanese soldiers came into view. One of them shouted an order and the six of them halted, easing off their packs. Quinn reflected how it was funny that a gasp of relief was unmistakable in any language. One of them said several sentences. There was something pompous in the way he spoke that made Quinn think he must be an officer. A pompous bastard was the same in any language, too.

  Another Japanese said something, and they all laughed.

  Quinn glanced at Boyd, lying beside him, sweat running down a grimy face striped with shadows from the fronds of the sago bushes above them. He opened his mouth to whisper a question. Quinn silenced him with a finger to his own lips, glaring daggers at him.

  Another Japanese was saying something, speaking without the relaxed tone that had characterised their voices up until now. Peering up between the fronds of sago hanging above them, Quinn saw the speaker had found Boyd’s partly smoked cigarette and was showing it to his comrades.

  The officer snapped out terse orders and the Japanese fixed long-bladed bayonets to the muzzles of their rifles. They began searching the undergrowth on either side of the trail.

  Turning to the other side, Quinn locked glances with Hubbard. His friend nodded with world-weary resignation, patting his own Thompson to indicate he was ready.

  As a Japanese bayonet swept through the sago fronds towards him, Quinn fired a long burst into the clearing, sweeping the barrel of his Thompson back and forth. Shapiro also fired. The Japanese screamed. The officer managed to squeeze off a couple of pistol shots before Quinn cut him down.

  When both of them had emptied their magazines, silence fell over the clearing again. Quinn hurriedly clipped a fresh magazine to his Thompson. Rising to his feet, gun at the ready, he stepped back into the clearing, counting corpses.

  ‘We get ’em all?’ asked Shapiro.

  ‘Reckon so,’ said Quinn.

  ‘Mother! No!’ sobbed Boyd. He was crouching over the corpse of Quinn’s comrade. A bullet had gone clean through Hubbard’s forehead.

  ‘Take a good look, kid,’ drawled Quinn, struggling to contain his anger. ‘He’s dead… because you didn’t have sense enough not to light a cigarette, and when I told you to put it out, you didn’t have sense not to throw it down on the trail.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bluey. I didn’t mean for…’ Tears spilling down his cheeks, Boyd gestured helplessly at Hubbard’s corpse.

  ‘Don’t tell us, kid,’ growled Shapiro. ‘Tell his girl back in Sydney. Tell his parents.’

  ‘Yeah, well, bitching about it won’t bring him back,’ said Quinn. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

  * * *

  When someone woke Torrance by shaking his shoulder, it took him a moment to remember where he was. The earthy smell of the slit trench, the dampness that had seeped through his khaki drills soon reminded him. All around them, hundreds of frogs croaked incessantly in the night.

  ‘That you, Smiler?’ he asked, instinctively speaking no louder than a murmur.

  ‘Aye.’ MacRae likewise kept his voice low. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘That noise.’

  Torrance shook his head. ‘What did it sound like?’

  ‘Like Japs creeping around in the undergrowth!’ MacRae muttered.

  Torrance rose to his feet so he could look over the trench’s parapet. He and MacRae had dug it amongst the rows of trees on a rubber plantation, where it overlooked the Bukit Timah Road somewhere south of Bukit Panjang. Beneath the canopy of trees all was darkness, but even though it was night, there was just enough orange light cast by the oil tanks ablaze at Woodlands for him to make out the road and the railway line beyond quite clearly.

  Standing beside him in the trench, MacRae was nothing more than a shadow, the whites of his eyes gleaming in a face blackened by the soot-laden rain that had fallen throughout the previous night. That morning, dawn had risen to reveal the whole battalion looking like a shift of miners emerging from a colliery.

  Unslinging his Thompson, Torrance drew back the cocking handle. Levelling the sub-machine gun over the parapet, he pushed the safety catch forward.

  Something snapped in the darkness somewhere up ahead, no more than a few dozen feet away. Feeling his stomach lurch, Torrance tensed, turning the sub-machine gun’s muzzle towards the sound. MacRae had not been imagining things: there was someone out there. Torrance wondered if Rossi and the others were awake. Perhaps he should send MacRae to rouse them? He did not much fancy the idea of being left a
lone in the slit trench while there were Japanese soldiers creeping around in the night; and besides, he sensed it was too late for that.

  He saw a shadow flit wraith-like through a shaft of orange light. A moment later it was gone, swallowed up again by the darkness; if Torrance had blinked, he would have missed it. Feeling the hairs prickle on the back of his neck, he cradled the butt of his Thompson against his shoulder.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he murmured softly.

  ‘Aye,’ breathed MacRae.

  All at once, as if on a given signal, the frogs stopped croaking. It was eerie: Torrance would have guessed something had startled them, but he and his comrades could blunder about in the darkness without the frogs paying the least attention to them, so he doubted any Japanese creeping about in the darkness would alarm them unduly.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he challenged the darkness. ‘I can see you! Come forward with your hands up, or I’ll fill you so full of lead they’ll be able to roof a church with you!’

  ‘Don’t shoot, mate!’ said a voice with an Australian accent strong enough to render what he said next entirely redundant. ‘We’re Australian!’

  ‘All right,’ Torrance called back. ‘Come forward with your hands up. Let’s have a butcher’s at you!’

  Half a dozen silhouettes coalesced out of the darkness, some wearing Brodie helmets, others hatless.

  ‘Which mob are you?’ asked Torrance.

  ‘Second Twenty-Sixth,’ said one Aussie. ‘What’s left of it.’

  ‘We’re headed back to Singapore Town,’ said another. ‘You’ll come with us if you’ve any sense. There’s Japs right behind us! Bloody thousands of ’em.’

  Cochrane loomed out of the darkness. ‘Who’s this lot?’

  ‘Diggers, Sar’nt. They reckon they’re the sole survivors of the Second Twenty-Sixth Australian Infantry.’

  The sergeant produced a torch and shone the beam into each man’s face just long enough to satisfy himself they were Westerners, before flicking it off again. Beneath the mud and grime that coated their faces, they all look appallingly young.

  Cochrane gestured in the direction the Australians had come from. ‘What’s going on down there?’

  ‘It’s a right bloody dog’s breakfast, mate. All I can say is, if what hit us the night before last was just a diversion, God help the poor bastards on the north-east side. Are you blokes the reinforcements we were promised?’

  Cochrane shook his head. ‘Our job is to haud the Japs until the reinforcements get here frae the north-east coast.’

  ‘Well, don’t wait too long, will ya? I bet the bloody brass are still sitting on their dates, waiting for the main attack to land on the north-east coast, while the Japs establish their foothold here on the west side.’

  ‘Blanco, show this lot the way to company HQ.’

  ‘Yes, Sar’nt.’ Company HQ would direct the Australians to battalion HQ, battalion would pass them on to brigade, brigade would pass them up to division and division would send them back to where their own division was rallying, if there was anything left of it, and anyone could find it.

  ‘The rest of you get back in your foxholes,’ ordered Cochrane.

  ‘Blanco’ White led the Australians away, Cochrane returned to his own position and Torrance and MacRae jumped back down into their rifle slit.

  ‘D’ye reckon they were telling the truth?’ asked MacRae. ‘About there being thousands of Japs, I mean.’

  ‘You’re not gonna take the word of a few windy rookies for that, are you? You know how it is: when you’ve got the wind up, every tree and bush looks like a Jap.’

  A mosquito whined in the darkness close to Torrance’s right ear. It went away, came back, and then fell silent. He braced himself for the sting, but it never came. Instead, the whine returned, quickly fading as the mosquito headed off in search of other prey. Like it was turning its nose up at Torrance. What’s the matter? he wondered. Cockney blood not good enough for yer?

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ someone called in the darkness. ‘Come on over! Bring cigarettes and chocolate.’

  Torrance felt his blood run cold. The speaker’s English was good, but not that good. He let his left hand drift to the haft of the sword bayonet scabbarded on his webbing. You come over here, Tojo, he thought sourly. I’ll give you cigarettes and chocolate!

  ‘That was a Jap!’ hissed MacRae.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Come out and show yourself!’ called the voice, a little impatient now. ‘The war is over! English and Japan mans all friends now!’

  My arse! Torrance listened to the incessant drip of the rain running off the fronds at the tops of the rubber trees.

  ‘Tomorrow you die!’ The Japanese had lost patience now, giving up all hope of passing himself off as English by signing off with the traditional late-night greeting Torrance had heard too often in the past to be frightened by it now. Didn’t they tell you, Tojo? Tomorrow never comes…

  ‘Wait here,’ he murmured to MacRae. ‘I’ll alert Sergeant Cochrane.’

  ‘You’d better bloody come back!’ snarled MacRae.

  Torrance climbed out of the trench and made his way through the darkness. It was pitch-black beneath the trees and Torrance had to move with his arms stretched out in front of him to avoid walking into any tree trunks, blundering about like Boris Karloff. He had gone about fifty yards before he began to sense something was wrong. He should have reached the slit trench where the lieutenant had set up platoon headquarters by now. Had he missed it in the darkness?

  He heard a sound: a rifle butt knocking against a water bottle. Someone moving between the rows of rigidly arrayed rubber trees behind him, only a few feet away, close enough for Torrance to smell him. Not the reassuring stink of sweat, tobacco, McEwan’s Blue Label and Brylcreem that would have told him it was a comrade. A smell of fish and garlic and something spicy.

  Five

  Wednesday 0400 – 1000

  Torrance did not dare turn, terrified the slightest movement would disturb the leaves beneath his feet. He eased his bayonet from its sheath, hoping the polished blade would not glint in the darkness, reflecting the orange glow of the firelight.

  Someone bumped into him. He was too petrified to be startled, otherwise he would have jumped as high as the top of the rubber tree he leaned against.

  ‘Sumimasen!’ muttered the man who had bumped into him, then moved on without further comment. Torrance had no idea what it meant, only that it was not English, and from the context and the tone in which it was spoken, he could only guess it was Japanese for ‘excuse me’. The silly bastard had taken him for one of his own comrades! Torrance was too relieved to have gotten away with it to care that he had passed up a perfect opportunity to kill another Japanese: grab the man from behind with a windpipe-choking arm locked across his neck while driving the blade of his bayonet into one of the sod’s kidneys.

  He could see them now, four black shadows faintly silhouetted against the orange-tinged darkness between him and the road, and was glad he had not tried to kill one, for if he had, the other three would certainly have found him and killed him.

  The shadows melted into the darkness once again. Realising he was alone, and that somewhere along the line he had forgotten to keep breathing, he drew in a ragged gasp now, trying to keep his breaths shallow and silent, for all that his heaving chest wanted to gulp air into his oxygen-starved lungs.

  He waited five minutes, until his heart had stopped racing, and he was satisfied there were no more Japanese within the immediate vicinity, then moved off. Almost at once he fell into a slit trench. He lay there, dazed and winded, but somehow managed to resist the temptation to cry out. No voice – English or Japanese – challenged him from the darkness. He picked himself up, looked through the trees to the roadway below. The view was familiar: this was the platoon headquarters trench, he was sure of it. Mostly sure, anyway. But it had been abandoned.

  He crept back through the darkness to his own trench. ‘They�
��ve pulled out and left us!’ he whispered to MacRae.

  There was no reply. MacRae had gone, too.

  Shit, thought Torrance. The whole bleedin’ platoon’s pulled out and left me behind!

  Climbing out of the trench again, he headed off through the trees. Before he had gone twenty yards he heard footsteps patter amongst the slimy leaves and mud, and someone thudded against the other side of the bole of the rubber tree he was leaning against. Torrance caught a whiff of Old Spice. ‘Password?’ he hissed, just to be on the safe side.

  ‘“Argyll”,’ Rossi replied softly. ‘Is that ye, Slugger?’

  ‘Yeah. Where is everyone?’

  ‘Pulled out. Orders are to fall back to the Dairy Farm.’

  Moving as silently as the leaves strewn on the ground would permit, the two of them moved off through the darkness. After a couple of hundred yards, they came to a gap in the trees and saw tarmac ahead in the crepuscular gloom: Dairy Farm Road. They turned left, staying under the trees as they headed away from the Bukit Timah Road.

  Where the rubber ended, piebald cows grazed on the greensward that stretched to where some modern-looking farm buildings stood perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Sticking to the shadows in the lee of the wall at the south side of the meadow, they advanced cautiously until the voice of a marine sentry challenged them. When they had identified themselves, they were escorted to the farmyard of the dairy, where they found the rest of the section – Gibson, MacRae, White and two others – already waiting. Only one man of his section was missing.

  ‘Where’s Dunbar?’ asked Torrance. The others all shrugged. ‘We’ll give him five minutes,’ decided Torrance, glancing at his watch and lighting a cigarette.

  ‘You think we can push the Japs back across the straits?’ asked Rossi.

  Torrance shook his head. ‘There’s too many of them. It’s only a matter of time now.’ He did not care any more. Just so long as they were kept out of Singapore Town until the Hsiu T’ung sailed on Friday evening. Surely they could hold the Japanese back for another three days? He reached up to touch the envelope containing his tickets through the fabric of his shirt pocket to reassure himself they were still safe.