A Choice of Evils

by Meira Chand

  ‘Dai Gen-sui Heika, Banzai.’ To the Emperor, Supreme Military Commander, ten thousand years of life.

  He waited for the swell of voices to return his cheer. Almost immediately a sudden roar surged about him, until he felt at one with his army. He could hear the cheer curling back down the wide boulevard, into the town. As it died he waited for silence, into which to set off the next cheer. He inhaled again, preparing to release his cry anew and heard a sound like the squawking of geese. General Matsui looked sharply about but saw only the faces of his army, reddened by drink, mouths open in laughter, eyes glazed in drunken stupor. He stared in disbelief.

  ‘Banzai.’ Twice more he led the cheer and heard the drunken tattered echo of the sound die away. The Japan National Broadcasting Company recorded each disastrous cheer. On his horse Matsui shifted in consternation. He had no time for reflection, for already there was the order to move forward. General Matsui led his procession along the cleared route to the north of the town and the Metropolitan Hotel. The roads and the cheering men did not lift him out of himself as usual. His jaw set tightly upon his rage. He sensed already there might be little to rejoice about.

  A night of feasting had been arranged at the Metropolitan. Food had been flown in and prepared in abundance. Drink flowed copiously. At the table sat General Nakajima and Colonel Muto, Asaka’s main commanders in the town. Prince Asaka’s headquarters were thirty miles from Nanking, and he had appointed General Nakajima in charge of the maintenance of public peace in the town. Colonel Muto had been charged by Prince Asaka with the billeting of troops in the Nanking area.

  Matsui drank less than usual, and listened more. He heard new details of the Muto-Nakajima administration in Nanking. It seemed Nakajima had chosen to bring to Nanking no more than fourteen military policemen to supervise an army of eighty thousand soldiers. He heard jokes about the excellence of these policemen in supervising looting and standing guard while soldiers raped women. He listed to Colonel Muto’s drunken claim that billets outside the city were inadequate, and that he had no choice but to order troops to enter town and bed down where they wished. Senior officers and colonels, Matsui was told, now had harems, culled from Nanking’s most beautiful and cultured women.

  Some fruits of victory must be allowed a conquering army. Matsui knew this. Ugly incidents always occurred. But the tales he now heard defied imagination. This was not as he had commanded; all his orders had been ignored. He stood up suddenly in rage and called an end to the banquet, ordering instead a staff conference.

  A further room was found at the Metropolitan and General Matsui’s senior staff assembled before him. Matsui could not contain his fury. He spoke again about the shame of Japan before the world and the danger of antagonising foreign powers and inviting their intervention. He stormed at Muto and Nakajima. Muto pleaded that divisional encampments on the banks of the Yangtze were inadequate due to a shortage of water. Matsui pointed out that already in town troops subsisted on water from the Yangtze, boiled and filtered and carried into town for them by coolies. They could do the same outside the walls. Bomb damage to the Nanking municipal water plant was slight. Why was the city water not already turned on, or the electricity? General Matsui next turned upon Nakajima, chief culprit for the immediate disorder. What excuse did Nakajima have with planes at his disposal for transporting army personnel from Japan as he wished, not to install an adequate number of MPs?

  ‘Move all unnecessary troops from the city,’ he ordered General Nakajima. ‘Find troop accommodation outside the city,’ he ordered Colonel Muto.

  Matsui slept badly and awoke in depression. He stood for so long looking out of the window at the ruined city that an aide enquired if all was well. General Matsui’s voice was sad.

  ‘I now realise that we have unknowingly wrought the most grievous effect upon this city. When I think of the feelings and sentiments of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanking, and of the future of the two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. I am very lonely and will never be able to rejoice in this victory.’

  The day ahead was busy, but General Matsui now dreaded what more he might see. Sadness pervaded his thoughts and words. He wished Nanking to know that one Japanese at least could share their pain. He built his day around it. In the morning at a press conference he was dutybound to trumpet official Tokyo policy, but at the end he added his own address.

  ‘I personally feel sorry for the tragedies of the people, but the army must continue unless China repents. Now, in the winter, the season gives time to reflect. I offer my sympathy, with deep emotion, to a million innocent people.’

  He demanded the day keep pace with his mood, insisting on visiting Sun Yat-sen’s tomb, and invoking once more that past friendship. At Nanking City Airport a memorial service for the Japanese dead had been arranged. Now General Matsui demanded that a similar service for dead Chinese warriors be conducted after the Japanese one. His mind was still full of the previous morning and his visit to Sun Yat-sen’s tomb. He asked for paper and a brush and as the service meandered, composed a poem to the soul of his friend.

  In the gold-purple tomb

  was he present or absent

  the departed spirit

  my friend of former years

  in the ghastly

  field-colours of the dusk?

  Memories of past meetings

  on the battlefield

  came back to pierce my heart

  as I sat, head bowed,

  astride my war horse

  under the Mountain Gate.

  At last the service drew to an end and Matsui prepared to honour the Chinese warriors. Before he could begin Prince Asaka came up, and explained that already the schedule was delayed. The service would be better, Asaka explained, if held some other time when due respect to the Chinese dead could be offered. This was the last straw for Matsui. He turned upon Asaka.

  ‘Everything has been lost in one moment through the brutalities of your soldiers,’ he roared.

  The following day Colonel Muto reported smoothly that he could find no facilities for troops outside Nanking. General Matsui, feeling now like a pawn in a game of chess, decided to show his stength. He had powers as commander of the Central Chinese Theatre that on occasions could be called upon. Now he had been pushed to the wall. He ordered operational commands that sent three of the four divisions in Nanking out on new campaigns across the Yangtze or back towards the coast. Only General Nakajima’s notorious 16th regiment was untouchable. It was assigned to Nanking by Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo, by order of the Emperor.

  ‘I wish to inspect the whole of Nanking,’ he demanded. ‘We must go to the observatory on Chinling Hill.’ As he had only hours left in the city, it was thought best to humour him. In the observatory Matsui demanded they turn their field glasses upon one another.

  ‘Let us look at ourselves,’ he ordered and watched until the men stared into each other’s faces at close range.

  ‘Are we human beings not a curious race?’ he enquired.

  He swung his glasses out over Nanking. The scarred city spread out below, crushed beyond all recognition. Matsui studied the town for a long while.

  ‘If General Chiang Kai-shek had been patient for a few years longer and avoided hostilities, Japan would have understood the disadvantage of trying to solve the issue between our two countries by the use of arms.’ He put down his glasses abruptly and turned towards the door.

  ‘I wish to talk with the refugees before I leave. I wish them to know how I feel. See it is arranged,’ General Matsui ordered.

  By the afternoon a suitable group had been rounded up and threatened with their lives. General Matsui walked amongst them with tears in his eyes, offering comfort and reassurance. The refugees stood silently, eyes vacant. General Matsui’s words on Asian brotherhood they appeared not to comprehend. Photographs were taken. Soon, senior officers shepherded Matsui towards the open door of his car and drove him back to his hotel.

  The next day a des
troyer took him downriver to Shanghai. Although the itinerary of this journey had been previously arranged, General Matsui had the feeling he had been removed, like a troubling thorn, from the area of his command. He had been powerless to avert a tragedy that he knew already was of historic proportions.

  19

  A Change of Sides

  The moon’s gleam across the distant river stopped Akira. He stood atop Nanking’s wall before the moon’s oily path, spread like a skin upon the water. Now, in his village, the first snow would have fallen. Persimmons and radishes hung drying before each house to supply the winter months ahead. Persimmon. His mouth watered. In late autumn the fruit clung to bare branches, flaming against the drab land. The last colour before the winter.

  It had not been difficult to slip away. From the wall he stared at the mercurial Yangtze. How many bodies did the river hold beneath its silver surface? Were the fish as fat as the dogs in the town from the supply of corpses? Below was the usual drunken caterwauling of the army. He looked back again to the river.

  In his village, whatever the hardship, he had only to sit in the hills under the trees to know who he was. The valley was filled by the neat demarcation of paddies, fields of spinach or radish, and orchards. There was birdsong, and the perfume of pine. Stillness stretched between those hills. This stillness held something he could never grasp, that lifted him out of himself. And yet there was nothing but the patterns of nature before him. Only now did he begin to understand what this power might be. In some way all that was good came from that undisturbed world. The things that renewed him were of it.

  He knew this now because, for the first time, he had entered a place devoid of these things. Here the sun illuminated only darkness. No green remained. No birds now sang. The air was filled with a stench nothing could contain. Within himself too, something had died. For the rest of his life he would be as if disembodied from himself. Only with death could memory cease, and even then he was not sure. What difference in the end was there between those like himself who had killed, and those who had screamed for mercy before him. They were both locked into the same blackness, wrestling with it from different sides. If they lived they could never forget. Madness was all that awaited.

  There was a man in Akira’s unit who had done away with himself. And there were those such as Takahashi who, like a mad animal must be done away with, for everyone’s good. After shooting the man in the pond Akira knew such a fate now awaited him. It was only a question of time.

  He had thought it out clearly. To avoid all shame to his family the only solution was to disappear. He had no wish to die; he saw nothing about him worth dying for. The men in command had hoodwinked the country. And how could the Emperor know what was happening so far from his cloistered palace? Akira walked on along the wall. The patrols he met ignored him. He kept his face to the river and the magical path of light upon it. At last the wall caved away before him. A mass of bombed rubble filled the breach. A short distance from the wall was the river. He began to climb down, feeling his way in the darkness, clinging to dusty, crumbling bricks. The voices of soldiers drifted up from below. His foot slipped and some stones rolled down. He heard a cry.

  ‘It’s nothing. Bits are always rolling down. Even the wind dislodges it,’ somebody yelled. He waited until the men settled again.

  Soon the base of the wall hung sheer beneath him. It offered few footholds and he knew he must jump. It was perhaps twenty feet to the ground and scrub grew about the bottom. He took a breath. There was the rush of air upon his face and then the coarse embrace of the bushes, closing about him like a net. Except for some scratches he was unhurt. The voices of the soldiers still argued loudly; they had not heard him jump.

  He lay unmoving for a while. Slowly, his breath returned. He stared up into the sky. Thin dark clouds were pulled by the wind across the moon, diaphanous as spider’s webs. Behind was nothing but a black emptiness. Stars sparkled coldly. Once, he remembered riding up a village road at New Year on his bicycle. The hard, banked snow either side of the lane gleamed and flashed under the light on the handlebars, like a cave of diamonds. In the same lane in summer, fireflies flitted and glowed, like creatures from another world. Summer was the hunting season. In the hot months everything eased in the village. Food, clothes, shelter were all of less necessity. There was the smell of foliage, and long evenings on the river bank. Briefly, the village softened, flowers bloomed, trees spread. As a child, he remembered, there had been dragonflies, crickets and beetles for the taking. They hunted cicada with blobs of glue on the end of poles, thrusting the insects into cages. Such victims had been easy as compared to the bats. In the evening they twittered above the village and the children ran beneath. Dexterity was needed to claim a bat. A clog must be thrown into the air, clear of the bat but breaking its beam, for the creature to plummet down.

  He closed his eyes; how far now in time and distance he was from that childhood village. Perhaps he would never see it again. Exhaustion filled him. He would have dozed but instead he forced himself up. At daybreak the risk would be great. For the first time then he realised that, with escape, new dangers piled in. He was prey to both sides now. Beyond Nanking he was without the safety military power bestowed. He was not a victor but a deserter, and must live at the whim of those he had conquered. Japanese, Chinese, and even mad dogs might attack him now.

  He walked quickly down the slope below the wall and headed for the river. Soon he found corpses. He began to turn them over with his foot, straining his eyes in the moonlight. They were stiff and rotted and chewed by dogs. Akira retched at the stench, but forced himself to search on in the eerie half-light. At last he found a corpse whose clothes were still in usable order. He took a breath, and began to undress the man.

  Soon the rough padded trousers and jacket were in his hands. The rot of death pervaded them. He took off his own clothes and pulled on the peasant’s rags. Unrolling his puttees he threw them away with his stout military boots, pushing his feet into straw sandals. Then, on second thoughts, he retrieved his boots and put them on again. He did not know what rough ground he might have to cover, straw sandals would not take him far. Not only the cold but the sickening odour of the jacket made his flesh contract. He began to run.

  Now he was vulnerable to the guns at the wall, and no longer a Japanese. He had turned his back upon virtue, dead to his family and all honour. It seemed suddenly appropriate that he wore a dead man’s clothes, thick with that putrid perfume. He could hear the lap of water, and stumbled frequently over bodies. They littered the dark river bank layer upon layer, for these were the execution grounds. He did not know what he looked for. Whenever the clouds cleared the silver path of the moon reappeared, always a distance ahead of him on the water. The river spread out wide as a sea.

  The moon slid free of the clouds again. It seemed he could almost step onto the gleaming trail, shifting and mercurial on the surface of the water. At first he thought the dark mass a short distance away was just another floating body. Then the moon threw up its shape. He struggled towards the remains of a boat. Clinging to it, he pushed it out, hoping the raft would appear to drift by itself upon the current. Every so often he saw groups of soldiers and, once, a whole regiment camped near the walls. He pushed on, willing the clouds to obscure the moon now, praying for darkness.

  The splintered wood did not float well. After a while it began to sink. Each time as he rose spluttering to the surface, the cycle of sinking began again. He paddled on and at last he was free of Nanking’s walls; the city lay behind him. Now there were no troops. Struggling back to the shore, he decided to walk along the river. The dripping padded clothes were heavy upon him and he began to shiver. The wind smelled again of snow. He had lost his boots in the water and now walked barefoot. Stones cut his feet. At one point he stopped to vomit up the foul river water he had swallowed. He must make his way upriver, as had the millions of Chinese before him. Only inland would he be safe. For the first time it struck him, he was alrea
dy thinking like a Chinese. He was running for safety from an army he feared. He would be forever now the hunted and not the hunter.

  After a while exhaustion overcame him, and he crawled under a bush to rest. The dark was impenetrable about him. The future too stretched out, immense as the great river before him. In its belly it held, like the river, dark shapes too terrible to contemplate. He knew only that he did not want to die. He did not want to return to Japan as a pile of ash in a wooden box, wrapped up in a white cloth.

  The train he had taken to his village after release from the military hospital, had been full of those white boxes. Every train across the country carried the same grim cargo to village after village. At each dilapidated country station the scene was always the same. Groups of weather-beaten peasants waited to receive the urn of ashes, bowed silently and carried it away. At one station, he remembered, a great crowd had waited. People had overflowed the platform, silent and unmoving. They stared through the open windows of the train observing Akira’s uniform, and bowed in respect.

  Two priests and a red-capped porter had made their way through the crowd. The porter pushed a hand-cart upon which was a portable altar. In the centre was a photograph of a young man. Incense smoked before the picture, gold metal lotus in tall vases adorned the cart. The conductor had stepped from the train with a white box and placed it upon the altar. The priests began reciting sutras as the crowd on the platform shuffled forward to make obeisance. Soon the train blew its whistle and began to move forward. The scene was left behind. Akira had known then that to live was all he wanted. He crawled out now from under the bush, and began to walk again, shivering in his wet clothes.