“Not really,” I shrugged. “We would like to borrow one of your trucks. We have to take supplies to the Urakami Hospital.”
“Out of the question,” the officer snapped. His eyes twitched at the girl, who was still sitting in his cab.
“Why is that?”
“These trucks are for training purposes only. Besides, we have no fuel.”
I was trying to keep a lid on my bristling anger. Just how many times had I been crossed by these half-wits, these blinkered Army officers who had been programmed like robots to do nothing but obey orders?
“As you must know, half of Nagasaki has been destroyed,” I said. “This very minute, there are thousands of people who are dying in the Urakami Valley. They need food and medicine – and I need your truck to deliver it to them.”
“That cannot be permitted,” he said. “You may not have the truck and even if you could have it, there’s no fuel.”
I remember drumming my fingers against my thigh as I tried to stay calm. I deliberately paused before speaking. “May I take a truck if I find some fuel?”
“You will not find any fuel. There’s no fuel to be had. And you cannot have the truck. That is not permitted.”
“Do you have any idea what has happened? There is nothing left of the city. And you are telling me that I cannot borrow the truck?”
“These trucks may not be used for anything except drivertraining.” His eyes snapped at the girl. “Get down from that cab this instant! You are on army property! Get down from the cab and get out of this compound!”
There was so much I could have said, but much good it would have done me. I tried another tack. “Why not come with us? Why not see what has happened? They are dying in the streets. They need help.”
“My orders are to stay here.”
“What? To look after two rusting trucks?”
“Get out of this compound now!”
It is difficult to describe my overwhelming sense of impotence in dealing with all things army. Perhaps I might even have been sufficiently goaded to hit him. I was certainly close to it. It felt like the entire nation had undergone a communal brainwash, as every flicker of independent thought had been excised to be replaced with knee-jerk patriotism.
I was seething over all these thoughts and more when help came from a most unexpected quarter. “What’s the problem?”
I looked over and there standing in the sunlight just outside the shed was the diminutive form of the quartermaster, very dapper in cap and full uniform. “What’s happening?” he asked again.
“This man and this girl, they are attempting to commandeer an official army training vehicle. Sir!” spluttered the officer.
“Very good. That is precisely what I suggested. Why are you not helping them?”
“It’s against regulations. Sir!”
In an instant, the quartermaster’s icy suave manner changed to thundering rage. “Be damned to your regulations! If you don’t have that truck moving in 15 minutes, you’ll be on a charge.”
“But – but there’s no fuel. Sir.”
“Of course you have fuel hidden away somewhere. Do you take me for an idiot?”
“But –”
The officer looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes is all I’m giving you. Off you go.”
“I –”
“Trot on.”
The officer was in an agony of indecision, looking from the officer to the truck. “Yes Sir,” he said as he darted out of the shed.
The quartermaster watched as the man scurried off to a ramshackle outbuilding, before turning to me. “I should have come with you in the first place,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I could not believe it. An officer, a senior officer, apologising to me. “Thank you.”
“How I hate these damnable officers. They live their lives by the rule-books, forgetting that first and foremost they are human beings.”
“Do you think he will have any fuel?”
“I have learned a little from ten years as a quartermaster. You always keep back a few of the essentials. What if a passing General were to visit?”
“Is that true?”
“Everyone does it. That young officer will have his own personal stash squirreled away round the back. They usually sell it on the side.”
By now the girl was hanging out of the door and staring awestruck at her new hero. “Would you like to come with us to the hospital?” she asked.
“I have to stay,” he chuckled. “Though I’m sure you’ll be more than resourceful enough without me.”
We heard a low rumble and looked over to see the sweating officer trundling over with a large blue barrel.
“Well done,” said the quartermaster briskly. “I knew you might be able to find the fuel somewhere.”
“Yes Sir,” said the officer. “I siphoned it off from one of the cars.”
“Believe that and you’ll believe anything,” the quartermaster said with a laugh as he tossed a sweet up to the girl. He turned back to the soldier. “Fill it up and one of the tyres needs more air. And hurry. You only have ten minutes.”
I stared at the quartermaster, and for the first time noticed the gallantry awards on his chest. They were almost hidden by his empty sleeve. He was gazing quietly out at the green hills on the horizon – and it was he, another unknown just like my sage at the Hijiyama Hospital, who gave me my last, and perhaps my most important lesson, of the war.
He spoke so quietly that I had to move closer to hear him. “In these troubled times,” he said. “It’s most important to do what you know to be right. For four years, we have believed that pride in our country and strict adherence to orders will win the war. That is palpably not the case. So all that we have left is our own wisdom and those few that possess it must have the courage to use it. Do you hear me?”
“I do.”
“The army’s day is over and it will be finished for many years. If we are ever again to become a great nation, we will need industry, which we have in abundance, and we will need wisdom, which has become a rare commodity indeed in this war.”
He turned to me, and smiled. “I hope that your arm gets better. But -” and here he gestured at his empty sleeve, “you can prosper very well on one arm alone. I’ll see you back at the depot.”
It was in this way that the truck was filled with fuel, food and anything else that could be hoisted on board. And, after a farewell salute from the man whom I only ever knew as the quartermaster, we bumped our way back to the hospital, bouncing over the rubble and the ruins. There was never any need for the girl to change gear, as we never made it out of first.
Over the next few days, the girl and I paid several more visits to the depot, which felt like a little island of sanity in that ocean of madness that was the war-machine of the Imperial Army.
And what, meanwhile, of the Imperial war effort? As the Yankees prepared themselves to carpet the whole of Japan with A-bombs, what was occurring in the War Cabinet? By now, the Big Six were fully apprised of this new weapon that had been unleashed against us – the B-29s were now not dropping bombs but leaflets.
In perfect Japanese they explained: ‘A single atomic bomb has as great an explosive power as all the bombs that would be carried by 2,000 B29s. You should carefully consider this fearful fact, and we assure you, in the name of God, that it is absolutely true.’
But among the Big Six there were still men who wanted to continue the war. They described the homeland battle as being like a beautiful orchid, which blooms and then is cut down. It was clinical insanity of the first order – but it was this madness that got us into the war in the first place.
In the end, it was the Emperor himself who insisted on ending the war, though it was some days yet before the surrender could be processed through Japan’s immense bureaucratic machine. The Emperor, like my quartermaster, was doing what he knew to be right, rather than adhering to the age-old Samurai tradition that we fight to the last man. It is one of many reasons why I have always admired our seemingly effete leader. But I am biased. I am fully aware that were it not for the Emperor’s timely intervention, I would have been shot dead in the very last minute of the battle.
When we were not ferrying back more supplies to the hospital, we were tending the sick, and nursing the boy as well as the woman we had brought along. We snatched what sleep we could.
It was not that I had forgotten my old friend Shinzo. I had been concerned about him from the very first. But it was chaos at the hospital and there was barely even a moment to draw breath, let alone wonder what had happened to Shinzo. I was hoping, of course, that he had been so delayed at that railway station on the morning of 9th August that he had not managed to get anywhere near Nagasaki.
That is my only excuse for why it took me a full four days to make the trip to Shinzo’s home. It was a pretty little bungalow situated hard by to the Cathedral in the Urakami Valley. That was why I had not bothered to go there.
It was the chickens which saved her.
How could a chicken possibly save the life of a human being? Can it tend a human? Can a chicken provide food or water? What on earth can a chicken do to save a human life? Well all in due course. But I assure you it is neither a joke, nor an exaggeration: Sakae’s life was saved by the chickens. Since that time, and in homage to their great service, we neither of us have ever touched even a single mouthful of chicken meat.
In the four days since the bomb had been dropped, the ruins of Nagasaki had taken on this grey uniformity, with houses crushed into so many million tiny pebbles, as if they had been pulped through a fine sieve.
At that time, I did not believe that I was on any sort of mercy mission. It was more of a pilgrimage to what had been the one-time home of my friend. I was unable to conceive how anyone so close to the epicentre could have survived the bomb.
Shinzo’s wife, that homely woman whom he had adored so much, was now presumably dead; and Shinzo, with luck, was mourning his wife from the safe-haven of a village some many miles from Nagasaki.
I was awfully, tragically, wrong on both counts.
The only fortunate thing was that, for the first time in four days, the girl had not accompanied me. It was not a sight for a child’s eyes.
Shinzo’s house, as I had expected, had been wiped flat by the bomb – though it had not been burned. By some miracle it had escaped the firestorm.
And there, lying in that small front garden, were Shinzo and his wife, with faces down in the grass and their arms almost casually slung round each other’s waists. Their injuries were shocking.
Shinzo’s back and half of his face had been cruelly ripped away and since it is not an image that I wish to dwell on, I will leave it at that. He was quite dead and had been dead for some time.
Sakae, lying by his side, so close that their legs were touching, had had her shirt ripped clean away. The skin had been flayed off her back to reveal raw flesh. I stooped beside them both, laid a hand on their heads in memory of what we had once shared – and it was only as I laid my hand on Sakae’s cheek that I realised it was still warm. At first I thought that it was the sun warming her flesh. But when I pressed my ear to her lips, I could just discern the very faintest breath. She was alive – the woman was alive! My heart bounded with astonishment.
How I ran back to the hospital. I flew over to the truck and within minutes was roaring back to Shinzo’s home. I am afraid I had to leave my old friend where he lay in the garden. Later, I would have the time to give him a fitting send off. But while there was even a chance of saving his wife, all my energies were focused on her.
I revved the engine and reversed the truck straight over Shinzo’s home and into the garden. There were four or five scrawny chickens that had been rooting around in the ruins and they squawked out of the way as the truck trundled towards them.
Sakae moaned as I picked her up. It was the first noise that I had heard from her. I placed her onto a blanket in the back of the truck. My whole body was trembling, I was in such a fever of impatience to get her back to the hospital. Yet for all my haste, I was nursing the truck back over the ruined roads, trying to stop it pitching too violently from side to side.
The girl was waiting by the hospital gate.
“I have Shinzo’s wife!” I yelled, as I jumped down from the cab. “She’s still alive.” I was already pulling Sakae out of the back of the truck.
“And Shinzo?” she asked.
“He’s... ” I paused in mid-tug, for a moment taken aback. “He’s dead. I’m very sorry.”
The girl was so shocked she had to bite her lip. I suppose both of us had believed that sooner or later our fine friend Shinzo would roll back into our lives. And in two short words, I had put paid to all those visions of a glorious reunion.
Perhaps the girl was still in shock, or perhaps she realised the urgency of the situation, but either way she did not waste her breath on words. “Get the doctor please,” I had asked, and in a moment she had flown off to find Kinoshita.
The doctor came hurrying over and felt Sakae’s weak pulse. “She needs water,” he said. “I will apply zinc oxide and bandages.”
I fetched a pitcher of water from the little indoor well and dabbed it at her mouth. Her lips moved imperceptibly, opening a fraction, as if to allow more water in. I soaked a cloth and squeezed a trickle into her mouth.
“Where did you find her?” said the doctor, as he cleaned her back. “Is she a friend?”
“She married my best friend. I found them both lying in their garden.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kinoshita, as he snipped away steadily at a flapping piece of skin that had crisped brown in the sun. “It’s very odd,” he said. “There are no maggots.” I had not appreciated the point. But as I studied Sakae’s back, I saw that the doctor was right. It was now a full four days since Fat Boy had been dropped – and almost every injury that we had dealt with had been teeming with maggots. Even the victims who had been with us from the first were not immune to those loathsome white maggots.
They only took two days to spawn into wriggling parasites. A wound might have been cleaned and bandaged, and then three days later, out they would come, working their way out at the edges. Then when you stripped the layers back, the entire suppurating wound would be a white mass of pus and maggots. Just the very sight of a maggot still makes me want to retch.