There follows a long interrogation in one of the huts. The lieutenant has many questions, and asks most of them more than once. When he repeats a question for the fifth or thirteenth time, he adopts a grand magnanimity, as if giving Goto Dengo the opportunity to retract his earlier lies. Goto Dengo tries to ignore the screams of the bayoneted men and the raped women, and concentrate on giving the same answer each time without variation.
'You surrendered to these savages?'
'I was incapacitated and helpless. They found me in this condition.'
'What efforts did you make to escape?'
'I have been building my strength and learning from them how to survive in the jungle-what foods I can eat.
'For six months?'
'Pardon me, sir?' He hasn't heard this question before.
'Your convoy was sunk six months ago.'
'Impossible.'
The lieutenant steps forward and slaps him across the face. Goto Dengo feels nothing but tries to cringe anyway, so as not to humiliate the man.
'Your convoy was coming to reinforce our division!' bellows the lieutenant. 'You dare to question me?'
'I humbly apologize, sir!'
'Your failure to arrive forced us to make a retrograde maneuver![18] We are marching overland to rendezvous with our forces at Wewak!'
'So, you are-the advance guard for the division?' Goto Dengo has seen perhaps two dozen men, a couple of squads at most.
'We are the division,' the lieutenant says matter-of-factly. 'So, again, you surrendered to these savages?'
When they march out the following morning, no one remains alive in the village; all of them have been used for bayonet practice or shot while trying to run away.
He is a prisoner. The lieutenant had decided to execute him for the crime of having surrendered to the enemy, and was in the act of drawing his sword when one of the sergeants prevailed upon him to wait for a while. Impossible as it might seem, Goto Dengo is in far better physical condition than any of the others and therefore useful as a pack animal. He can always be properly executed in front of a large audience when they reach a larger outpost. So he marches in the middle of the group now, unfettered, the jungle serving the purpose of chains and bars. They have loaded him down with the one remaining Nambu light machine gun, which is too heavy for anyone else to carry, and too powerful for them to fire; any man who pulled the trigger on this thing would be shaken to pieces by it, the jungle-rotted flesh scattering from jittering bones.
After a few days have gone by, Goto Dengo requests permission to learn how to operate the Nambu. The lieutenant's reply is to beat him up-though he does not have the strength to beat anyone up properly-so Goto Dengo has to help him, crying out and doubling over when the lieutenant thinks he has landed a telling blow.
Every couple of days, when the sun comes up in the morning, this or that soldier is found to have more bugs on him than any of the others. This means that he is dead. Lacking shovels or the strength to dig, they leave him where he lies and march onward. Sometimes they get lost, march back over the same territory, and find these corpses all swollen and black; when they begin to smell rotting human flesh, they know that they have just wasted a day's effort. But in general they are gaining altitude now, and it is cooler. Ahead of them, their route is blocked by a ridge of snow-capped peaks that runs directly to the sea. According to the lieutenant's maps, they will have to climb up one side of it and down the other in order to reach Nipponese-controlled territory.
The birds and plants are different up here. One day, while the lieutenant is urinating against a tree, the foliage shakes and an enormous bird runs out. It looks vaguely like an ostrich, but more compact and more colorful. It has a red neck, and a cobalt-blue head with a giant helmetlike bone sticking out of the top of its skull, like the nose of an artillery shell. It prances straight up to the lieutenant and kicks him a couple of times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends his long neck down, shrieks in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head-bone as a kind of battering-ram to clear a path through the brush.
Even if the men were not dying on their feet, they would be too startled to raise their weapons and take a shot at it. They laugh giddily. Goto Dengo laughs until he cries. The bird must have delivered a powerful kick, though, because the lieutenant lies there for a long time, clutching his stomach.
Finally one of the sergeants regains his composure and walks over to help the poor man. As he draws closer, he suddenly turns around to face the rest of the group. His face has gone slack.
Blood is fountaining out of a couple of deep stab wounds in the lieutenant's belly, and his body is already going limp when the rest of the group gathers around him. They sit and watch until they are pretty sure he is dead, and then they march onwards. That evening, the sergeant shows Goto Dengo how to disassemble and clean the Nambu light machine gun.
They are down to nineteen. But it seems as though all of the men who were susceptible to dying in this place have now died, because they go for two, three, five, seven days without losing any more. This is in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they are climbing up into the mountains. It is brutal work, especially for the heavily laden Goto Dengo. But the cold air seems to clear up their jungle rot and quench the ravenous internal fires of malaria.
One day they break their march early at the edge of a snowfield, and the sergeant orders double rations for everyone. Black stone peaks rise above them, with an icy saddle in between. They sleep huddled together, which does not prevent some of them waking up with frostbitten toes. They eat most of what remains of their food supply and then set out towards the pass.
The pass turns out to be almost disappointingly easy; the slope is so gentle that they're not really aware that they've reached the summit until they notice that the snow is sloping downwards beneath their feet. They are above the clouds, and the clouds cover the world.
The gentle slope stops abruptly at the edge of a cliff that drops almost vertically at least a thousand feet down-then it passes through the cloud layer, so there's no way of knowing its true height. They find the memory of a trail traversing the slope. It seems to head down more frequently than it heads up and so they follow it. It is new and exciting at first, but then it grows just as brutally monotonous as every other landscape where soldiers have ever marched. As the hours go by, the snow gets patchier, the clouds get closer. One of the men falls asleep on his feet, stumbles, and tumbles end-over-end down the slope, occasionally bounding into free fall for several seconds. By the time he vanishes through the cloud layer, he's too far away to see.
Finally the eighteen descend into a clammy mist. Each sees the one in front of him only when very close, and then only as a grey, blurred form, like an ice demon in a childhood nightmare. The landscape has become jagged and dangerous and the lead man has to grope along practically on hands and knees.
They are working their way around a protruding rib of fog-slicked stone when the lead man suddenly cries out: 'Enemy!'
Some of the eighteen actually laugh, thinking it is a joke.
Goto Dengo distinctly hears a man speaking English, with an Australian accent. The man says, 'Fuck 'em.'
Then a noise starts up that seems powerful enough to split the mountain in half. He actually thinks it is a rock avalanche for awhile until his ears adjust, and he realizes that it is a weapon: something big, and fully automatic. The Australians are firing at them.
They try to retreat, but they can only move a few steps every minute. Meanwhile, thick lead slugs are hurtling through the fog all around them, splintering against the rock, sending stone shards into their necks and faces. 'The Nambu!' someone shouts. 'Get the Nambu!' But Goto Dengo can't fire the Nambu until he finds a decent place to stand.
Finally he gets to a ledge about the size of a large book, and unslings the weapons. But all he can see is fog.
