by Masuji Ibuse
As they went up the hill leading to the station, his throat became so painful from thirst that he called to an old woman standing in the entrance of a farmhouse on the righthand side of the road: “Excuse me, but could I have some water, please?” She went inside with no sign of repugnance at his swollen face and raw-burned lips, muttering and nodding to herself as she went. “Poor man!” he heard her say. “How thirsty he must be! Yes, of course…” From the unfloored area inside, she brought a large cup on a tray. It was not water, but cold strong tea.
The events following his boarding the train at Hesaka Station were described in his account as follows:
With great difficulty, I got a seat in the rearmost car of the special troop train. It was a train of the same Geibi Line that ran through my home in the country, and I had traveled back and forth on it a number of times during my middle school days. The sound of its whistle cheered me immensely. Somehow, I felt I could not possibly die now that I had heard that well-remembered sound from the past. The emotion that flooded me at the prospect of a time free from the sleeplessness, strain, and apprehension of the past three days made the three-hour journey seem excessively long and the train excessively tardy. My body felt on fire with fever. Tension tends to let up suddenly, yielding to the feeling of sliding irresistibly downward, down into the depths. My consciousness grew vague. At each station, the train jerked violently, as though encouraging me to pull myself together. At every one, middle-aged or elderly women wearing the sashes of the Women’s Defense Association doled out tea and pickled sour plums. Even though my lips and the inside of my mouth were so swollen, the plums tasted good. The women were unrestrained in their expressions of sympathy. “How dreadful!” said one. “How awful for you,” exclaimed another. Some of the younger ones were in tears. All of them, I am sure, had sons or husbands on active service. One old woman, even, burst into helpless sobbing. It was my first contact with feminine emotion since joining up, and it reminded me of a poem by the Chinese poet Li Po that I had learned thirty years earlier at middle school. For the first time, I realized that it was not just a piece of skillful description, but a work of intense emotion. In our car alone, two soldiers were already still and cold. I was worrying about my wife and children. As for my nephew, I felt I must resign myself to the worst.
We stopped at the station for Miyoshi, where I had gone to middle school. I was practicing opening my left eye without using my fingers when the sight of a girl I knew, standing on the platform, made me catch my breath in surprise. She had been a ward of an aunt of mine at Shōbara ever since she was small. Since she could hardly be expected to recognize me in my present sadly altered state, I called to attract her attention. She had left school by now, I found, and was doing war work at the station. I told her, in briefest outline, how she came to see me as a soldier in such a pitiful plight. Right away, she contacted Shōbara Station over the station telephone, and got permission from the Shōbara and Miyoshi stationmasters to come with me on the train.
All this had been possible because the train had stopped so long at the station. However one looked at it, it was the most extraordinary coincidence. Thanks to the meeting, I should soon be able to contact my relatives and friends. The thought cheered me inestimably. The tension gripping me must have relaxed without my realizing it, for, strange to say, my condition suddenly took a turn for the worse and I began to shake violently from head to foot.
At Shōbara Station, the girl from my relatives went off to contact my aunt. From there, they would certainly contact my own home, which lay some way outside the town. The place to which we broken-down soldiers were taken in the meantime, riding in a charcoal-driven bus through the evening twilight, proved to be not a hospital, but a classroom on the floor of an elementary school—no different, in fact, from the national elementary school at Hesaka. By the time I had found a space in the crush and lain down, I was barely aware of where I was, and was in the grip of a violent chill and shivering fit. By dark, my fever had grown worse and I had lost the power of speech. If I tried to talk, nothing came out.
I remember dimly that there was one air raid warning that night….In all, I have lost consciousness three times in my life. Once was when I blacked out immediately after the bomb fell. The second time was that evening when, after long jolting in the train, I arrived at the Shōbara national elementary school. The third time was a period of a few days in early September, when I hovered between life and death following the onset of the radiation sickness. An invalid on the brink of death, I was unaware, in my half-conscious state, of what was going on about me, and very frequently could not even take note of my own symptoms at all clearly.
On the morning of August 9, the fever that had persisted all night abated somewhat and I noticed the signs of returning interest in things about me. The fever was the type that accompanies septicemia—a suppurative fever, one might call it. That day, a medical officer came round to see us and gave instructions on our treatment to an orderly. It was the first time that a medical officer had examined us since the bomb fell. Yet he did not even use his stethoscope.
My injuries consisted almost entirely of burns, on my head, face, neck, wrists, fingers, and even the lobes of my ears. The skin was peeling off my wrists; my back, they told me, was like a piece of raw beef, with the ribs all but poking through. The cause, as I learned later, was exposure to a momentary radiation of several thousand degrees. The bomb, indeed, had been of a power beyond the mind of man to conceive.
The orderly applied a liquid resembling picric acid to my burns, and covered the part that touched the floor when I lay down with a piece of antiseptic gauze one foot square. That was the sum of his treatment, and he promptly went on to deal with the next patient. Since they were dealing with a whole trainload of patients, some hundreds in number, one could hardly afford to complain if the treatment was rather rough-and-ready.
The next day, August 10, when the orderly stripped the gauze from my back, I could not help crying out. The heat and weight of my body, and its secretions, had made it stick fast to the burns all over. He stripped it off from below, in an upward direction, and as he did so the pain made me unconsciously lift my body with it. But even seated on my heels, with my hands resting on the floor at my sides, I could only raise myself so far. When the limit had been reached, my body sank down, to rest on my buttocks once more. Then the gauze came off, willy-nilly.
Ignoring the blood that came spattering down, the orderly brushed my back with the medicine, covered it with gauze, applied more of the liquid to my head, face, neck, and upper arms, to the backs of my hands, my wrists, and my fingers, then passed on immediately to the next patient. Even I, who pride myself on being able to endure a lot, was appalled at the treatment we received. As at Hesaka, the patients were dying off and being carried out in steady succession. Here too, members of the Women’s Defense Association had come to help, attending to bedpans and such matters, but the penetrating odor seemed to be getting them down rather.
In the afternoon, I was aroused by a voice calling, “Attention there! Is Iwatake of the medical reserve here? Iwatake?” It was followed by another voice, shrill, a woman’s voice: “Hiroshi! Are you here, Hiroshi? Hiroshi?” It was my wife. I tried to answer, but my lips were too swollen for me to get anything out. I managed, painfully, to raise my left arm a fraction….
She had been to the ruins of the army hospital in Hiroshima to look for me: hearing I had gone to Hesaka, she had gone to the national elementary school there, then, learning that I had been transferred to Shōbara, she had come on after me. When she finally found me, my face was so altered that even she did not recognize it….
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Along with this account came a record of Mrs. Iwatake’s recollections of the same period. Somebody had obviously gone to question her about Iwatake’s miraculous recovery, and had taken her replies down in shorthand. It promised to be useful for reference in treating Yasuko.
“I was living in the country away from th
e raids at the time,” (the account ran) “and was staying at the Hosokawa Clinic in Yuda, outside Fukuyama. Hiroshi my husband was serving in the medical reserve with the Second Hiroshima Unit, and our nephew, who was in my husband’s charge, was attending the First Middle School in Hiroshima. Dr. Hosokawa in Yuda is my elder brother.
“August 7 was the night of the air raid on Fukushima. From the next morning on, the Fukuen and Igasa lines connecting with Fukuyama were both out of action, so early on the morning of the ninth my brother took me from Yuda to Fukuyama on the back of his bicycle. From there on, I went on foot to Kusado. From Kusado I went to Tomonotsu, then from Tomonotsu by bus to Matsunaga, this side of Onomichi, where I got a train, arriving in Hiroshima after dusk. It’s strange I should have followed that particular route—Kusado, Tomonotsu, Matsunaga, Onomichi, and on to Hiroshima—a historic route, the one that some of the defeated Taira clan, and later on Ashikaga Takauji, are supposed to have taken in the old days when they were fleeing overland to reach the western sea.
“There were tents up in front of Hiroshima Station, and I went into one to wait till the morning. There was a soldier on guard, and a lot of people who seemed to have been caught without anywhere to spend the night. Before I left Yuda, my brother had tried to stop me from going—it was useless, he said—but I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that my husband was still alive. So I filled a medicine bottle with saké—my husband likes a drink—and put it in my rucksack. Then I borrowed a Red Cross armband from my brother, to make it look as though I was an army nurse or something, and set off. Without an armband, no woman was allowed into Hiroshima. I was wearing cotton breeches, with sandals on my feet.
“I don’t know my way about Hiroshima at all. I asked a soldier the way to the Second Army Hospital, but he said it was a waste of time to go, as everything in that area was in ruins. Then I asked about the First Hiroshima Middle School. The pupils had all been wiped out, he said, and the place reduced to ashes. It seemed almost certain that our nephew had been killed. So I lay down in the tent to sleep. There was a child there, an orphan who was pining for his parents and wouldn’t go to sleep however much the soldiers fussed at him. I lay beside him and got him off to sleep at last. Around four in the morning I slipped out and made my way to the Second Army Hospital to look for my husband.
“It was a burnt-out waste—no barracks, nothing, only tents. An officer—I don’t remember his name, but he was from the Tokyo area—told me they wouldn’t know anything for a while yet. I was to go home and stay there till I was notified by the army. He found some crystal sugar and some tea for me. I asked about the First Middle School again, to make sure. Yes, it was in ruins, he said. He kept telling me to go home, so I decided to look around for myself. I set off walking upstream along a river that ran nearby. On the banks, I saw some lean-tos made of corrugated iron and straw mats, but all the people inside had black faces, with only their teeth and the edges of their eyes showing white, and they were in rags, like the destitute people you see in old picture-scrolls. Farther on, I came across a group of people lying on the ground groaning, so I called out in a loud voice, ‘Hiroshi, are you here?’ but there was no answer. I listened hard, but all I could hear was groans; they might have been the voices of ghosts….
“What a terrible bomb it must have been, I thought. A passerby I spoke to said yes, it was a ‘special new-type bomb’ that had been dropped. He knew the reception center where soldiers from the army hospital who’d been injured by the bomb had been accommodated, so I asked him to tell me, as I was determined to try anywhere at all likely. There were three reception centers, he said, but I was in such a state that only one of the names stuck in my head. Hesaka. What a coincidence that was! I decided I couldn’t visit them all at once at any rate. I’d go and look at Hesaka first, then keep my ears open to help me find the others. So I only memorized the one name. It’s about six miles from Hiroshima. By the time I arrived in the village after walking there, there was only an hour to noon. I kept to the embankment all the way. As I went, I kept wondering about the officer I had met in the tent in the ruins of the Army Hospital—why hadn’t he told me where the reception centers were?
“At Hesaka, I went round all the farmers’ houses one by one. By the time I reached the national elementary school, where the temporary reception center headquarters was, it was about four p.m. The tents in the school yard, the classrooms, and the corridors as well, were full of injured, but they told me that no list of patients had been made yet. I went round corridors and classrooms and tents calling ‘Hiroshi! Are you here, Hiroshi?’ but there was no answer. Then someone told me that those who weren’t so badly hurt were being accommodated in nearby farmhouses, so I set off again on the round of the farms.
“In the end, I was completely done in. Past shame or caring, I called out to the people in one of the farmhouses to allow me to rest there, and laid myself down on the soothingly cool boards of the veranda. This was about five in the afternoon. I must have slept a good two or three hours, then I went back to the national elementary school. This time, I found the list of people there was ready, and they told me Hiroshi had been transferred to the national elementary school at Shōbara the day before. I was greatly relieved to hear that only the lightly injured had been sent, but my relief didn’t last more than a moment, for somebody else who’d seen them told me they’d looked as though they were on their last legs.
“It was odd, but I felt just as pressed for time whether I thought my husband was only slightly hurt or seriously hurt. On my way to Hesaka Station, for instance, I walked just as fast as I could. The train was just leaving when I got there, but it was full and so slow that when we came at last to change at Shiomachi we found the last Shōbara train had already gone through. There was no help for it, so I spread a newspaper on the platform and sat on it to wait for the morning.
“The man next to me, who came from Fuchū, talked a lot, and it came out in the course of conversation that he knew the Fuchū branch of the Hosokawa Clinic. So I scribbled a note to my brother, telling him that I was on my way to Shōbara and asking him to bring whatever was necessary, and gave it to the man to deliver to the branch clinic. Here was something to be thankful for, at least. It was all most convenient, as the man was taking a Fuchū-bound train, on the Fukuen Line (the Fukuen Line was running except for the area around Fukuyama), while I was getting on the Geibi Line. Shiomachi is the junction.
“Thanks to this, the Hosokawas were successfully contacted, and my brother, a nurse, and our daughter, who had been evacuated to the Hosokawas with us, arrived at my aunt’s house in Shōbara in the early evening of that day, August 11. My aunt herself was out. Thanks to the call from the girl my husband had met, she knew that he had been transferred to Shōbara, and had gone to his home to let them know. I myself had arrived, though, and was resting and tidying myself up a bit. I went straight to the hospital. Actually, it was the national elementary school building, and when a sergeant or sergeant-major who seemed to be acting as an orderly took us into the classrooms we found that every inch of floor to be seen was covered with injured, just as at Hesaka. I had no idea where my husband was. The soldier who looked like an orderly called ‘Medical Reservist Iwatake! Where are you?’ so I called out too: ‘Hiroshi! Are you here, Hiroshi?’
“Something seemed to grip my chest so that it was difficult to breathe. There was no reply. Then I saw a hand raised feebly, and it dawned on me that it was him. His face was swollen to twice its normal size, and the whole of his right ear was covered with gauze held in place with sticking plaster. He was in pain in his ear. One thing that struck me as strange was that when one patient groaned all the others would start groaning at the same time. It was an uncanny sound—perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but it was for all the world like a chorus of frogs starting up in a paddy field.
“Officially, I suppose, this reception center in the school building would have been called the ‘Temporary Reception Center, Hiroshima First Army Hospital Branc
h.’ The medical treatment and the facilities were inadequate, of course—you could hardly complain in an emergency like that—but the regulations were as strict as in the army. Since the members of the Women’s Defense Association were there to help, there was a ban on the relatives of patients doing anything to look after them. Even so, I could hardly go home and leave my husband there at death’s door, could I? So I tried one of the phrases everybody used during the war—the only important thing, I said, was to get just as many of them better as possible, ‘so that they could be of use to their country.’ It was very forward of me, I thought. But the medical orderly, or whatever he was, didn’t so much as smile. I was in a terrible fret, so I went to see the commander, who had been to the same college as my husband, and persuaded him to have Hiroshi transferred, at his personal order, to a room with only two people in it. This meant that he was receiving the same treatment as a medical officer. Strictly speaking, even though he was in the medical reserve, he was only a second-class private, supposedly still learning. In practice, this ‘promotion’ only lasted an hour or two. A colonel, commander of an infantry unit, who was already in the room he was taken to had encephalitis and was out of his mind, and he passed away before the night was out.
“The next place he was moved to was a tiny room for three patients. The two men there before him were a doctor of medicine from Okayama Prefecture, who had been drafted and was now Second Class Private Nagashima of the Medical Reserve, and a young corporal, a volunteer from Kasaoka in Okayama Prefecture. Nagashima had burns on his face and hands, and was suffering from diarrhea. The young corporal was not burned, but had a great wound in his head.
“The attitude of army people towards civilians was always very precise, but it had its extremely mystifying side as well. This may not have been true of all of them, of course, but I certainly noticed it in some. After my husband was transferred to this room for three, my brother Dr. Hosokawa arrived with a nurse, bringing as much as they could carry in the way of gauze, bandages, Ringer’s solution and glucose for injections, oil for dressing burns, and so on—all of them worth their weight in gold among civilians at the time—and suggested to Lieutenant Hanaki, the army doctor in charge, that they should be allowed to be of some use. The lieutenant looked very sour and gave them a sharp talking-to. The army had its own way of doing things, he said, and he didn’t want civilians bringing in their own stuff. Yet it was this same lieutenant, mark you, who directed the nurse to paint my husband’s burns with some transparent liquid of unidentified origin. One day, after they had put the stuff on, Hiroshi found a cucumber seed sticking to him. The next day, he asked the nurse what the medicine was, and mentioned the seed he’d found on him. ‘What?’ she exclaimed. ‘Was there a seed left? After all the trouble we took straining it!’ That gave the game away, of course: they’d been using cucumber juice as a dressing. My husband couldn’t help smiling, even though his lips were all swollen. In the old days, cucumber juice may quite possibly have been used for burns—as an old wives’ remedy, that is. But anyone with burns on more than one-third of his body dies, they say, unless you keep replacing the liquids in him with Ringer’s solution, glucose, salt solution, or something similar.