Yet for some reason they had all gone. As I walked back from the factory perimeter my companions were discussing the best route across the paddy-fields to Shanghai. They had ransacked several of the houses and were now sitting on the piles of broken crockery with bottles of rice beer. I remembered the rumours we had heard that before they surrendered the Japanese planned to slaughter their civilian prisoners.
I looked back along the road to the camp, aware of its curious confusion of vulnerability and security. The water-tower and three-storey concrete blocks seemed to rise from the lines of burial mounds. The camp had been a Chinese middle school. We had arrived after dark, and I had never seen it from the outside before, just as I had never physically entered the empty landscape surrounding the camp which had been an intimate part of my life all these years.
I listened to my companions’ increasingly random discussion. Apart from the consultant engineer and the garage owner, there were two Australian seamen and a hotel barman. Already I was certain that they had no idea of the hazards facing them, and that as long as I remained with them I would never reach my parents. Their one intention was to get drunk in as many as possible of the dozens of villages between here and Shanghai.
Five minutes after I left them, however, as I walked back along the road to the camp, I heard the sounds of a Japanese military truck coming behind me from the village. Armed soldiers of the gendarmerie leaned on the cabin above the driver, guarding my five former companions who sat on the floor on either side of the tail-gate. Their faces had an ashen and toneless look, like those of men woken abruptly from sleep. Alone of them, an Australian seaman glanced up from his bound wrists and stared at me, as if failing to recognize who I was.
I continued to walk towards the camp, but the truck stopped in front of me. None of the soldiers spoke or even beckoned me to climb aboard, and already I knew that we were not being given a lift back to the camp.
Without thinking, I had a sudden presentiment of death, not of my own but of everyone else around me.
For the next three days we were held in the gendarmerie barracks attached to the military airfield, where some hundred or so allied aircrew shot down during the air attacks on Shanghai had been concentrated in an attempt to dissuade the American bombers from strafing the hangars and runways. To my relief, we were not mistreated. The Japanese sat around listlessly, no longer interested in us and gazing up in a melancholy way at the American aircraft which endlessly crossed the sky. Already supplies were being parachuted into our camp. From the window of our cell we could see the coloured canopies falling past the water-tower.
Clearly the war was over, and when a gendarmerie sergeant released us from the cell and ordered us into the barracks square I took for granted that we were about to be turned loose at the airfield gates. Instead, we were put aboard the same truck that had brought us here and driven under guard to the nearby railway station that served as a military depot on the ShanghaiNanking line.
The first to jump down from the truck, I looked around at the ruined station buildings, well aware that the last train had stopped here some two months beforehand. Apart from the aircraft overhead, the landscape remained as deserted as it had been on the day of our abortive escape. On all sides was the debris of war — rusting trucks, a paddy-field used as a dump for worn-out tyres, a line of tank ditches half-filled with water that ran towards a small football stadium set back from the road, a blockhouse covered with leaking sandbags built at the entrance to the station. But the Chinese had gone, vacating the landscape as if at last deciding to leave us to our own resources, to whatever pointless end we cared to make.
‘It looks as if we’re going to play soccer,’ one of the Australian seamen called back to the others as he and I followed the three guards towards the stadium.
‘Some stunt for the Red Cross,’ someone else commented. ‘Afterwards, make sure they take us back to the camp.’
But already I could see into the stadium, and had realized that whatever else took place, we would not be playing football. We climbed the concrete entrance tunnel into the ground, a circle of yellowing grass in the centre of which two trucks were parked. Sections of the empty stand had been used by the Japanese as a warehouse, and several soldiers patrolled the seats high above us, guarding what seemed to be a pile of looted furniture. A party of smartly uniformed military stood by the two trucks, waiting for us to approach. At their head was a young Eurasian interpreter in a white shirt.
As we walked towards them we looked down at the ground at our feet. Stretched out on the frayed grass were some fifty corpses, laid out in neat rows as if arranged with great care and devotion. All were fully dressed and lay with their feet towards us, arms at their sides, and I could see from the bright pallor of their faces that these people, whoever they were, had only recently died. I paused by a young nun wearing a full habit and wimple whose broad mouth had only just begun to take on its death grimace. Around her, like the members of her flock, were three children, heads to one side as if they had fallen asleep before death.
Watched by the Japanese soldiers and the young interpreter, and by the sentries guarding the furniture in the stands, we walked slowly past the corpses. Apart from two middle-aged Chinese, a man and a woman lying next to each other who might have been husband and wife, all were European and American, and from the worn state of their shoes and clothing seemed to be internees like ourselves. I passed a large ruddy-haired man in brown shorts with a gun-shot wound in his chest, and an elderly woman in a print dress who had been shot in the jaw, but at first sight none of the other bodies revealed any signs of violence.
Twenty feet ahead of me one of the Japanese soldiers by the trucks had moved his rifle. Behind me my companions stepped back involuntarily. The garage owner stumbled against me, for a moment holding my shoulder. I listened to the sound of an American aircraft overhead, the noise of its engine magnified by the concrete bowl of the stadium. It seemed insane that we would be shot here ten days after the war had ended in full view of our rescuers, but already I was convinced that we would not die. Yet again I had that same presentiment of death I had inexplicably felt before our arrest.
One of the Japanese officers, wearing full uniform under a short rain-cape, spoke briefly. I noticed that he was standing beside a small card-table on which rested two wicker baskets containing bottles of saki and parcels of boiled rice wrapped in leaves. For some bizarre reason I assumed that he was about to give me a prize.
The Eurasian in the white shirt came up to me. His face had the same passivity of the Japanese. No doubt he realized that once the Kuomintang forces arrived his own life would be over, like those of the fifty people lying on the stadium grass.
‘You’re all right?’ he asked me. After a pause, he nodded at the Japanese officer. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘You can drive a truck?’
‘Yes…’ The presence of the armed Japanese made any other answer pointless. In fact I had not driven any vehicle since the outbreak of war, and before that only my father’s Plymouth car.
‘Of course we can.’ The garage owner had pulled himself together and joined us. He looked back at our four companions, who were now separated from us by the tract of corpses. ‘We can both drive, I’m an experienced mechanic. Who are all those people? What happened to them?’
‘We need two drivers,’ the interpreter said. ‘You know the Protestant cemetery at Soochow?’
‘No, but we can find it.’
‘That’s good. It’s only sixty miles, four hours, then you can go free. You take these people to the Protestant cemetery.’
‘All right.’ The garage owner had again held my shoulder, this time to prevent me changing my mind, though I already had no intention of doing so. ‘But who are they all?’
The interpreter seemed to have lost interest. Already the Japanese soldiers were lowering the tail-gates of the trucks. ‘Various things,’ he said, patting his white shirt. ‘Some illnesses, the American planes..
An hour later we had loaded the fifty corpses on to the two trucks and after a trial circuit of the stadium had set off in the direction of Soochow.
Looking back on those first few hours of freedom as we drove together across the empty landscape fifteen miles to the south-east of Shanghai, I am struck by the extent to which we had already forgotten the passengers whose destination had made that freedom possible. Of course neither Hodson, the garage owner, nor myself had the slightest intention of driving to Soochow. As I could see from his manner as the six of us loaded the last of the corpses on to his truck, his one ambition was to turn right on the first road to Shanghai and abandon the truck and its contents in a side street — or, conceivably, given a sudden access of humanity, outside the Swiss embassy. In fact, my chief fear was that Hodson might leave me to be picked up by a Japanese patrol before I had mastered the truck’s heavy steering and gear-box.
Luckily we had all been so exhausted by the effort of loading the bodies that the Japanese had not noticed my fumbling efforts to start and control the truck, and within half an hour I was able to keep a steady fifty yards behind
