Tears in the Darkness (30 page)

 

BEN STEELE
was drying up. His tongue was swollen and he felt himself gagging on it.

He looked at the sun. Not a prairie sun, he thought. This one was hotter, less forgiving. No trees, no buildings, no shade.

He stripped off his T-shirt and draped it over his head. Somewhere north of Cabcaben he got his first sun treatment in an assembly area. Must have been more than two thousand men sitting in that damn field.

Why the hell were the Japs doing that? Didn't make any sense. Mean bunch of bastards.

Back on the road he was choking again. Man next to him had some water.

“Hey, gimme a drink, will ya?” Ben Steele said.

The man kept walking.

“Come on buddy, I'm in bad shape. Whadaya say?”

“Here,” the man said, relenting. “Don't take it all, you understand?”

Farther on, walking in the first rank at the head of a column, Ben Steele caught a glimpse of something at the side of the road. A half-gallon tin can . . . and it was half filled with water! An offering from one of the locals, he guessed.

Now he was the one with a drink, and other men began to pull at his sleeve and implore him.

“Water! Come on, water!”

When the can was empty, he would dip it in a rice paddy, a wallow, a drainage ditch.

He didn't share with everyone, just those he couldn't ignore.

“Gimme some water, dear God, please!”

“Here,” he'd say, “don't take all of it.”

 

THEY
'
D BEEN WARNED.
Interpreters had addressed the columns: “You must maintain your organization. You must keep your position. No break, no break without Japanese permission.”
²⁹

But at almost every artesian well along the way, some soldier insane with thirst would break formation and run for the pipe. Sometimes a
guard would raise his rifle and drop the miscreant on the run, and sometimes he would wait and put a bullet in the prisoner just as the man reached the pipe and was bending down to the clear bubbling water.

When the men in Sidney Stewart's column came upon “a cool mountain stream,” their guards shouted for the formation to stop. Stewart took a deep breath. The ground along the riverbank “smelled mossy and wonderful” and the water looked “so dear, so cool, so delicious.”

“If only I could throw myself down into the water and lie there feeling it rush over my body,” he thought.

The prisoners waited for the guards to tell them to drink, “waited and waited.” After a time one man could wait no longer. He ran from the ranks, plunged his face into the stream, and in an instant a Japanese sergeant was standing over him, unsheathing his sword. What happened next happened so fast that Stewart caught it only in flashes—the sword clearing its sheath, the sound of a blade descending (“a quick ugly swish”), the head rolling down the bank into the stream, bloodying the water that hundreds of men were waiting to drink.
³⁰

North of Cabcaben, the Old National Road had been part of the battlefield, and the land on either side of the road, once lush with nipa palms and shady narras, had become a waste of black stumps and brown bomb craters. Littering this charred landscape were the incinerated hulls of tanks, smashed trucks, and twisted cannon, America's matériel “advantage” now a melancholy reminder of America's worst defeat.

Dead men and animals littered the field as well. More often than not, the corpses lay where they fell, marking their last stand. (During a rest John Olson happened to glance at an embankment and saw the body of a Philippine Scout, helmet still on, frozen in the act of climbing through a bush. Whatever had killed the soldier had caught him in midstep, and there he stood, “in suspended animation,” Olson thought, one hand holding on to the bush the other reaching through it to clear the way.) A number of these remains were floating in the rivers and streams or lying half submerged on the banks, decomposing rapidly in the heat and defiling the water.
³¹

Still, men stopped and drank, drank with the dead. Even water polluted by a corpse was better than no water at all. The bodies reeked and were so bloated their skin was beginning to split, but Zoeth Skinner drank his fill, and so did Robert Levering and James Gautier and Preston
John Hubbard. They held their noses and looked away from the grotesques floating nearby, swollen black from lying in the sun, and they drank that awful effluent by the canteen and bucket full. James Gautier forced himself to stick his head back into the water for a second drink. “Lord,” he prayed, “keep me from getting sick.”

 

BY THE THIRD DAY
of the march, men were regularly dropping to the road or staggering out of formation—men with fever, men with dysentery, men too weak to go on. Now, however, instead of rushing up to dispatch the dropouts, the guards on the flanks started to ignore them.

“Why?” Sidney Stewart asked himself. “Why are they leaving them when they had killed them before?”

The answer was soon apparent. Stewart heard the report of a rifle behind him, at the very back of his column, then he heard another shot, and a third.

In other columns prisoners began to notice the same thing. Soon the men marching at the rear of those formations confirmed what their comrades were beginning to suspect—some of the guards had formed “cleanup” crews, or, as the marchers took to calling them, “buzzard squads.”

“Oh, God, I've got to keep going,” Stewart thought. “I can't die like that.”
³²

By that point, the Old National Road was lined with fresh corpses. Hundreds of dead, sprawled on the shoulders, strewn in the drainage ditches.

First Lieutenant Ed Thomas of Grand Rapids, Michigan, caught sight of his captain and company commander lying in a ditch, dead from a bayonet wound. “His marching days are over,” Thomas thought. And Bernard FitzPatrick kept passing corpses clad in faded blue hospital pajamas, Filipinos mostly, the cripples and amputees who had left their beds in the field hospital after the Japanese had assured them they were free to walk home.
³³

In the heat the bodies began to rot, and it wasn't long before great swarms of flies were feasting on them. During the day dogs and pigs joined the flies, and at night the smell of death lured large carnivorous lizards down from the hills, but it was the crows that commanded the carrion, crows standing wing to wing on the bloated bodies, tearing at
the flesh, crows roosting patiently on the wire fences along the road or, as Private Wince “Tennessee” Solsbee noticed, always circling overhead, waiting for their next meal to drop.

“Y'all go away, big birds,” he said. “I'm not fixin' to die yet.”
³⁴

The bodies also attracted the attention of Japanese tank and truck drivers.

Murray Sneddon of Glendale, California, watched a convoy of trucks bear down on two bodies in the middle of the road. The first truck struck the first body with its right front wheel and left an imprint on the corpse. The trailing trucks followed the same line, and after they had passed, all that was left were two silhouettes in the dirt, outlines that hardly looked like men. It won't be long, Sneddon thought, before those bodies will be “nothing more than . . . oil spots.”
³⁵

Richard Gordon stood horrified as a column of tanks crushed an American sergeant who had fallen asleep on the shoulder, and Brown Davidson came upon remains that had been run over so often, all that was left intact was a hand lying nearby. To Ray Hunt of St. Louis the remains on the road looked like “wet sacks.” Major John Coleman of Wellington, Texas, thought them swatches of cloth, khaki cloth, until he stepped on one and slipped. “Good God,” said Marine Private Irwin Scott of Dallas, “we're marching on our own men.”
³⁶

 

BEN STEELE
believed in God, but he did not think of himself as a man of faith, a religious man.

Back home he rarely spent Sundays in a pew and never wandered out to the prairie to listen to the tub-thumping evangelists call the Holy Spirit into their tents.

The Holy Spirit, he noticed, was nowhere in evidence on the Old National Road. How many of the men begging for a drink had gone to their deaths with the words “Please, God!” still on their lips?

He wasn't angry at the Lord. He was just being realistic. Faith wasn't going to feed him or slake his thirst. He had to focus on the next wallow or well or that guard, the one up ahead there raising his rifle and aiming at a Filipino who had broken ranks and was running to a stand of sugarcane. (The bullet caught the poor kid in the back and sent him sprawling, and the guard, over him now, was pulling the trigger again.)

Ben Steele thought, “Okay, this may happen to me, but all these
other guys are alive and I'm not any worse off than they are, so I'm going to hang in there as long as I can. If there's going to be anybody left alive from this, I'm going to be one of them.”

 

BY THE FOURTH DAY
of the march, they were desperate for something to eat. Ray Hunt's hunger was textbook: The first day he felt empty, barren, vacant; the second day he had sharp pains in his esophagus; the third day he was obsessed with thoughts of food; the fourth day he felt nothing, a sure sign he was starting to starve.
³⁷

The men in James Gautier's column, resting in a field during a change of guard, started digging with their fingers for derelict vegetables—camotes, a native tuber, and radishes. They dug like dogs pawing at the dirt, dug here, dug there, dug so many holes the field “looked like it had been freshly plowed.”
³⁸

Army doctor Paul Ashton of San Francisco was dubious when the men around him got the idea to eat a banana plant and started tearing away the stalk's leaves and outer layers to get at its core. The meat of the plant looked a lot like celery but tasted bitter like tree bark. Worthless, Ashton concluded. Might as well eat cardboard.

Captain Sam Grashio of Spokane, Washington, and his march mates made a meal of some horse feed, oats a Japanese hostler had chucked because they were crawling with weevils.
³⁹

As their formation passed stands of sugarcane, a few of the men around Sergeant Charlie James of New Mexico managed to snatch some stalks from a nearby field. Later James noticed that after he had chewed a hunk of cane and spit it out, the men marching behind him would scoop up the masticated mouthful from the dirt and “chew it again.”
⁴⁰

The Japanese, meanwhile, were feasting on captured American food. A number of Imperial Infantry units were garrisoned along the road between Balanga and Cabcaben, and at intervals they had established what appeared to be food dumps—stacks of crates and boxes bearing American brands.

Ed Dyess's formation stopped across from one such cache, and an aging colonel boldly crossed the road, pointed to the piles of food, and in sign language he asked the guard for something to eat. The guard grinned for a moment, then picked up a can of salmon and smashed the colonel in the face, laying his cheek open to the bone.

Passing through Pilar, Paul Ashton spotted a food dump piled high with cases of Vienna sausage. Wasn't that thoughtful of the rear-echelon boys, he thought. The American Quartermaster Corps had been hoarding all that food during the battle, saving it, as it turned out, “for the Japanese.”
⁴¹

 

THEY LIVED
in their keepers' world now, a world of conformity.
Deru kui wa utareru,
Japanese mothers warned their children, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

Don McAllister was obviously doing something wrong. Each time a convoy passed his column, the Japanese in the trucks tried to hit him or kick him in the head. He seemed to be doing more dodging than most of the men around him and he wondered, “Why are they kicking at me?”

Then his friend Brown Davidson noticed something: circling the crown of McAllister's campaign hat was a bright red braided cord.

“Take that damn thing off your hat,” Davidson said. “It gets their attention.”
⁴²

Private Saturnino Velasco and his pal Corporal Freddy Burgos were also attracting more notice than they wanted. Mestizos, half white and half Filipino, they were conspicuously taller than their countrymen, and the guards had been hammering them.

Velasco was getting the worst of it. He had been a student at Ateneo de Manila University when the war broke out, and to distinguish himself from his classmates he had grown a beard, a thick red beard. Now at every change of the guard, some incensed
hohei
would confront him.

“Kora! Americajin?”

“No! No!” Velasco would say. “Filipino . . . Filipino.”

“Filipino, no beard,” the guard would come back, and Velasco would get another thumping.

Then he got an idea. The next time he saw an angry guard headed his way, he yelled, “Spaniard!”

The guard was suspicious. “You, Spaniard?”

“Yes, yes,” Velasco said, nodding vigorously. “Spaniard, Spaniard.” And he would snap to attention, shout “Viva Franco!” and give the Falangist stiff-armed salute. (He gave this performance several times a day until at length he found an old razor and hacked the rust-red whiskers from his face.)
⁴³

So they learned to dissemble. Men who since birth had been taught to stand out and distinguish themselves now were careful to conform, conceal, sublimate.

“Don't attract attention,” they told one another.

“Keep your head down.”

“Keep your mouth shut.”

“Just keep moving.”

 

BEN STEELE
had a cowboy's constitution and a camp tender's legs (all those Montana mornings running miles after some horse he thought he'd hobbled the night before), and now, as he pushed himself forward, he reminded himself of all those years of hard work on rough ground and found it easier to keep on his feet.