Forgiveness (14 page)

In Ralph’s mouth was the metallic taste of fear. It was as if he had eaten nails. Three guards emerged from the bush. One was doing up his zipper. The fourth was walking past the dead Canadians, inspecting them with disconcerting familiarity.

“Fuck,” one of the captives whispered. Another was breathing heavily. Panic was setting in. Ralph flashed a cold stare down the line. He said nothing but the look meant,
Easy, boys. Let’s not lose our heads here.

“Up!” the guard yelled once he’d closed his zipper. The fourth
guard sauntered over, his eyes as dead as the fallen Canadians. The seven men all watched his bayonet. It was clean as a whistle. His pant leg, however, was caked in blood. He slowly walked over to the man at the end of the line. No one looked at his face. He moved on to the second, the third, and the fourth. The fifth man was the wounded one. The guard stood beside him for an eternity. The man kept his head down and his hand shook as he gripped his wounded arm. Ralph—who was standing next to him—closed his eyes and offered a prayer. The Japanese soldier spit and moved on—past Ralph and the seventh Canadian.

“Move!” he yelled. The march continued. A minor miracle.

By nightfall, they reached their destination. As they crested a large hill, they saw a mass of men making their way into a large structure like a coliseum. It was too dark to know for sure, but Ralph thought he had seen it before. As they made their way down towards it, the structure came into focus.

They entered, the bright yellow and red lights still shining brightly announcing the Happy Valley Race Track. The irony was painful.

A stench hit the seven men as they reached the bleachers and the track revealed itself. Men were laid out everywhere. Some were dead, some still alive. Ralph’s eyes searched in vain for a medical station, a water line, or a mess hall. The lead guard just motioned with his rifle butt for them to move down the stairs onto the track. They made their way onto the field, stepping gingerly around the bodies, living and dead. Still bound, they had to be careful not to trip and send their whole line sprawling.

Each face they saw offered a dreadful story of defeat, terror, or death. Mostly the men were numb. Sheer exhaustion had dampened their ability to feel, to think, or to act. Without saying a word, the seven men found a clearing large enough for all of them. They lay down in unison. Ralph stared at the sky. It was a cloudy humid night. He offered a Merry Christmas to no one in particular.

As night fell in the Happy Valley Race Track, the war seemed to be over. But the men’s battle was just beginning.

Boxing Day brought little reprieve. Ralph awoke to a shot of pain up his left side. One of the men in the middle of the sleeping pack rolled over in his sleep and the three men to his left paid the price. They writhed in pain as the barbed wire dug deeper into their wrists.

Some of the prisoners were marched to the streets surrounding Happy Valley Race Track and ordered to clean up the bodies. They were given matches and told to build a fire. The bodies betrayed their brutal demise, wrists tied, eyes gouged, ears sliced off. These men had died in the worst of ways. As the fire grew around them, the scarred bodies returned to the fetal position. They hissed, blackened, and burned.

Amid death, there were unexpected tales of survival. One man came in on a stretcher with maggots falling out of a gaping hole in his face. He had been captured, tied up, shot several times, and left for dead in a ditch. Another poor soul was carried in by a fellow Canadian soldier. He was unable to walk because his private parts had been mutilated by Japanese bayonets. That these men had survived without medical attention for days on end was simply miraculous. The search parties that found them spread the stories; they were rays of hope. If those guys could survive, anyone could.

Then came the news: the Canadians were to be at the western exit at eight o’clock that night, ready to ship out to North Point Camp. All hope ended there.

The men were loaded onto cargo trucks. Canvas enclosed the entire cabin, leaving them in pitch black. Ralph closed his eyes and let his utter exhaustion sweep him away. He awoke to a sudden stop that slammed him into the fellow sleeping beside him. Moments later, the back door dropped open.

“Out!” was the order.

Ralph got to his feet, back hunched. He was not sure if he’d slept for twenty minutes or twenty hours. The sunlight burned his eyes as he jumped off the truck. He put his hand up, blocking his face. He took five steps past a barbed wire fence.

“Ralphie!”

The voice was unmistakable. Ralph opened his eyes, glad he could blame the tears on the hot sun.

“Ralphie, jeez, I thought you were a goner. A goner for sure!” Deighton said as he hugged his friend.

The sight of transport trucks rolling into North Point’s main entrance was the only thing that could put a smile on the POWs’ faces. As Ralph looked around, his stomach sank. He saw garbage strewn everywhere in the parade square. Body parts, just limbs and torsos, were piled up at the other end of the camp. As the smell of rotting flesh hit him, he doubled over and threw up.

“I know. The smell is terrible. They hope to have it dealt with this week.” Deighton was apologizing as if it were a messy living room. “Come on. I’ve been saving you a spot to sleep.”

They made their way through the camp. Deighton explained the layout as they walked.

“We don’t have any toilets, so see there where that man is climbing up on that wall?” Deighton pointed to a stone wall to the far south end. “That’s our toilet. You just do your business right over the wall into the water. That’s where the smell is coming from. There must be a hundred dead Chinese just floating in that water. It’s terrible, Ralphie, they are all bloated and shot up. Lots of cattle in there too. The wounded guys tie themselves to that wall before they go so they don’t fall. If you fall in, there is no coming back.”

The two of them made their way past a long building made of cinderblock.

“That’s the mess hall. But it is shit,” he said in a hushed tone. “They are feeding us just mouldy rice. More maggots than rice, really. The only meat I have seen since I got here is half a fucking fish head. A
fish head.
I got one cheek and one eyeball—the rest just bone and skin. Eat what you can, Ralphie. It’s bad here. Real bad.” The end of the mess hall opened to a dirt square with a series of huts along the north perimeter. Ralph followed Deighton into one of the huts.

“There are no beds. My spot is over there.” Deighton pointed.

Ralph took three steps into the hut and felt two drops: one on his shoulder, one on his head. He thought it odd that there was a leak in the roof; it had not rained in the past few days. The raindrop on his shirt moved. He wiped his shoulder and his head. A few men down the way chuckled.

Ralph looked up. The ceiling was alive.

“Bedbugs. They are the scourge of North Point,” Deighton said. “Well, them and the lice.”

Deighton took off his shirt. Red spots covered his torso. “Look at the seams of my shirt.”

Ralph focused in the hazy light of the hut. He took a closer look and then snapped his head back when he saw a dozen bugs scatter on his friend’s shirt as they were exposed. At this, even Deighton laughed.

“Can’t do a damn thing about ’em, Ralph. They are even rewarding us with smokes if we catch these bloody things. It’s no use. We just can’t beat these little buggers.”

Ralph didn’t have a pack to throw down, so he sat down on the makeshift bedding to inspect it. It was held together by a thick canvas, but large holes exposed coconut shells, the hair sticking out like a ragged scalp.

He and Deighton went out for a walk around the parade square in the middle of the camp. It was the only thing they could do, though they had to be careful to conserve energy. Deighton had been in the camp for three days and had lost a pound a day.

The officers fared far better. They had their own cabin and were offered real food and American cigarettes. Coffee, even. As the officers finished their smokes, they’d casually flick the butts to the ground, just as they would have done before the war. But their men would scramble on the ground for them. Ralph wondered, if it was this bad on day three, where would they be in a month?

As dinner time rolled around there were rumours of meat. The men made their way into the mess hall, just an open room with a few tables. The kitchen consisted of three kettles and a transport
truck hubcap that had been scavenged off the adjacent road. There was one large rice pot and no plates. The men lined up for one scoop of mouldy rice custard and a slice of rancid whale meat. No one knew if they were better off eating it or leaving it.

There were no seats. Ralph and Deighton found an empty corner against the wall and slid down onto their backsides, careful not to drop any food.

“Bon appétit, Garbage Can,” Deighton said, shooting Ralph a sly smile. The familiarity almost brought Ralph to tears for the second time that day.

They ate in silence. The food tasted terrible. When they were done, they made their way back to their hut. The Japanese guards counted them off to make sure nobody had escaped, and then it was lights-out. Ralph dropped onto his bedding. He could feel it crawling. His stomach was in one big empty knot. He felt demonstrably weaker and he had only been on the grounds of North Point for fifteen hours.

Ralph woke up the next day covered in bites from head to toe. He opened his shirt and peeled the seams back—there were the lice, nestled in.

The men gathered in the parade square to be counted off and get some physical activity. The mess hall was serving more slop: mouldy rice and a three-inch square of bread.

But at least the routine of Ralph’s new life had begun. In a strange way, he felt comforted by it. His clock was reset to army time. It beat the chaos of battle. Lice beat bullets. Sleep beat marching.

The second week that Ralph was at North Point, the men were awoken in the middle of the night by an alarm over the camp’s speaker. Everyone thought at first it was an air raid alarm. A Japanese guard kicked their door in. He slowly walked the hall. He was counting.

“Out!” he ordered.

The men lined up in the parade square as they did every morning and evening. They were counted. They were counted again.
And again. And again. Whispers down the line made it clear Sergeant Payne and a few others were missing. They had hopped the fence and disappeared into the water basin. The men they’d left behind spent all night in the pouring rain being counted.

Those who had tried to escape didn’t make it far. After six hours, as dawn was breaking, five gunshots rang out from behind the mess hall.

As the remaining men made their way through the line for their morning serving of rice stew, the cooks noticed there were five fewer men from the Winnipeg Grenadiers.

A commanding officer approached Ralph’s table. He spoke to the men, passing word down that the Japanese had instituted a new plan. Each man would be assigned to a group of ten. Should any man within the ten attempt to escape, the nine others would be summarily executed.

This rule, and the fact that there really was nowhere for a tall white soldier to hide on the island of Hong Kong, largely put an end to any further escape attempts. The men had seen too many pointless deaths. Nobody wanted nine more on their conscience.

Everyone at North Point was dying. The Japanese authorities were withholding adequate food and necessary medicine. They forced the men to grovel in filth, to wade in bare feet into human excrement to relieve themselves. Men were aging days by the minute, weeks by the hour. The days dragged on. The only thing that happened quickly was weight loss.

Daily scenes of violence ate away at their souls. Starving Chinese beggars would risk death to approach the fence line in hopes of selling an orange or a pair of sandals. Ralph saw one boy, maybe eight or nine, approach the fence with what looked like a dirty blanket. He held it out to two prisoners as they walked along the well-worn path around the parade square. The soldiers tried to shoo him away before the tower guard saw him. He raised the blanket
as they passed him, trying to speak. His tiny voice was drowned out by gunfire. Ralph ducked. When he looked up again, the boy was slumped on top of his blanket. A few minutes later, an elderly Chinese lady came running towards him, howling. She pulled the dead boy away on the bloodied blanket.

Some men could not accept the new reality. Ralph feared that his buddy Deighton was one of them. Bedbugs were
not
falling onto their heads from the ceiling, they were
not
eating maggots and rice, they had
not
lost twenty pounds in a few short weeks. They were
not
POWs. They were
not
dying. They could not transition into survival mode.

Ralph knew self-preservation cold. It was the only gift his father had ever given him. From the moment he was captured, survival was the only thing on his mind. He took no unnecessary risks. He kept his head down and ate everything and anything that was put in front of him.

No one was spared. By the summer of 1942, Ralph, like the rest of the men, was wasting away. Their skin stuck to their bones; their faces were drawn and gaunt. The weakened men could not ward off the terrible diseases that lurked in the filth and grime around them. By summer, the worst enemy was not hunger or their Japanese captors—it was dysentery and diphtheria.

Sleep was impossible. Most of the men had long since stopped sleeping in their infested beds, opting to huddle together in groups of six or seven on the cold concrete floor. The bedbugs would still get them, but the lice bit less on the floor. The men’s feet radiated pain all night. They called it electric feet. Ralph tried soaking his feet in cold water for some relief but the shooting pain would always be back before he made his way from the front of the hut to his group of companions on the floor. The shooting pain was so bad the men felt like they were being electrocuted from the toes up.

One day Deighton held his spoon to his mouth, stared at the milky white slop, closed his eyes tight, and forced it in. Two slow bites was all he could handle. His gag reflex kicked in and the rice
dropped onto his lap. It was his fourth try. He choked and dry-heaved. He would have vomited, but there was nothing in his stomach to throw up.