THE Chinese were furious! Two of the soldiers leapt on me and dragged me outside—there was no question of making my own way out. The officer and the remaining soldier ransacked the hut, throwing everything into the courtyards, until the living-room, the kitchen, and the tool-shed were completely stripped of their contents. The paving stones outside were littered with articles of ragged clothing, broken cooking pots, tools, shoes, mats. The old caretaker had been ejected at the outset, when she was savagely kicked by the third soldier. Moaning, she now lay on the stones, half-covered by the pitiful contents of her house. Satisfied that there was nothing more to find inside, the officer returned to the courtyard to deal with me. Seizing a piece of rope from amongst the articles about him, he made a noose which he placed round my neck, and bound my hands up in the small of my back with the running end. This device permitted me to ease my hands down a trifle at the expense of my neck, or loosen the rope from my neck at the expense of my wrists. It was a very effective device. He now began to shout at me, waving his pistol—the Mauser type—in my face. I observed that it was cocked, that the safety catch was off, and that he was exceptionally careless where his trigger finger lay. As I made no response, he led me into the lower courtyard, right under the wood-shed in which Fox and Graham were now doubtless listening with close attention. It was quite useless for them to try to assist me and I decided to give them what little warning I could. When I was next addressed, I said in as clear a voice as possible:
“There is no one here but me. I am the only one here.”
The answer to this—principally, I believe, because he was exasperated beyond measure at being unable to understand me, any more than I could understand him—was a welt on the jaw that knocked me down on the paving stones. I was assisted to my feet by a kick from one of the guards. We climbed back up the path that led away from the monastery, and there, by a lean-to shed, I was made to kneel down and addressed again. A short silence ensued, only broken when one of the guards fired a burp-gun right behind my head. I was afraid that Fox and Graham, hearing that, would presume that I had been disposed of. I decided to keep talking if we passed that way again, in the hope that they would still be there.
My hopes were realized rather quickly. Tired of making no progress, my captors marched me back through the courtyards to the path leading to the road and bridge. I managed to say a few words as we passed the wood-shed and felt much easier in my mind once I had accomplished this. The officer gave an order to the guards and they made me double down the stony track.
There was one real snag in this: I had left my boots in the temple.
To my surprise, I was taken back to “Mother Reilly’s” village—in fact, to a bunker dug into the hill right behind her house. The village was packed with Chinese troops, and seemed to be a Company Headquarters. The Company Commander was very stern when he saw me outside, and struck me several times across the face with the flat of his hand. However, when we got inside the bunker, he, himself, undid my bonds, patted me on the shoulder and bade me sit down. Throughout the night and next morning, I noticed that whenever we were alone together, or merely with his orderly, he was considerate. Only when others of his officers and men were present did he behave badly, shouting or threatening me with his pistol.
I was not sorry to leave them at mid-morning the next day. I had rested a little during the night, after realizing that my immediate escape opportunities were exceptionally poor; and I was now anxious to be away from this area, where there was a considerable number of soldiers. I hoped, too, to get food elsewhere. After two days of good meals, I did not want to lose my strength again.
A long and tiring march took up the remainder of the day. We journeyed from the Company to the Battalion Headquarters, from there to the Regimental Command Post, and so on. The terse grunts of my guards, the staring crowd of Oriental bumpkins, the heat of the day, and the fact that we lost our way at least once in every mile, all served to intensify the discomfort caused me by my blistered and cut feet. By the time we arrived at the Divisional Headquarters, I was in no mood to be civil to the first English-speaking Chinese that I had met. We parted on bad terms as I set off an hour later for Army Headquarters. I recall that he shouted after me that the victorious Chinese armies would invade Japan within a month. I was too tired to think of a suitably rude reply.
The Chinese Communist Forces do not possess that military formation we call a Corps. Thus I was evacuated direct from Division to Army control. The latter headquarters was about six miles further back. We managed to find it without losing our way more than twice; the guards who escorted me came from the Divisional Headquarters. After seeking the exact village uncertainly during the last half-hour of the trip, we were finally successful. I was searched, given some water, and led away to a small house round which there seemed to be eight sentries. Opening the door, I began to stumble my way across a floor covered with sleeping bodies.
“Who’s that?” said a voice.
I identified myself.
“This is Kinne, sir, of the Northumberland Fusiliers. Can you find your way over?”
Thus began my association with a very remarkable young soldier.
The following morning, Kinne and I were able to take a look at one another, and continue the conversation we had had on the previous night.
From him, I learnt some of the details of the heavy fighting that had taken place on our right. The Rifles and the Fusiliers had fought a most difficult rearguard action on the road parallel to ours and had lost a considerable number of men. Kinne’s Commanding Officer, Colonel Foster, had been one of those killed.
To my surprise, I found that Morales, the Puerto Rican, was with Kinne—he had been picked up by Chinese two days after our escape, having sprained his ankle on the hill. These two had been in the village for about eight days, prior to my arrival. I began to question them on the nature of the treatment since their arrival.
It seemed that the local Headquarters possessed a prisoner-of-war political unit, whose task was military interrogation and political indoctrination. The twelve ROKs who were held here with us were subjected daily to political lectures by a Korean-speaking Chinese. Kinne and Morales had had a mild political talk from the principal English-speaker—a man named Chen—but his real business with them had been a form of military interrogation. Strangely, they had not been asked the sort of questions that would provide the enemy with immediately useful information: the interrogator sought opinions rather than facts. For example, Chen had asked Kinne:
“Who was your company commander? What was your opinion of him? Did the troops under his command like him—if so, why? What did you think about before capture? Had you ever heard of the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers? What did you and your comrades think of the Chinese?”
Very properly, Kinne had refused to answer these questions, and had now been given two days to re-consider his decision. What would happen at the end of this time, if he continued to refuse, remained to be seen. The day passed without my seeing anyone who spoke English, and my requests for medical attention—even dressings—for my feet were ignored. At sundown, we all trooped into the courtyard of a Korean house to be fed on kaoliang—a kind of coarse barley—and beef stew. Kinne informed me that this rich addition to our fare was due to the fact that an F80 had strafed the village on the previous day, killing an ox in the process. It was this beast that we now enjoyed.
“I hope that F80 comes back, to-morrow,” said Kinne. “We’ll be eating beef for a month if they can hit the barn with the cows in.”
I was going to my first proper interrogation. Walking ahead of the guard, I was taken up the side of the hill to a deep bunker. It seemed very dark inside after the sunlight and it was several minutes before I could adjust my eyes. At the far end, a man was sitting cross-legged on a mat. His brown eyes were not almond-shaped, but large and round. He had a pleasant face with a dark jowl, surprisingly heavy for a Chinese. His jet black hair was neatly cut in our own style, and parted on the left hand side.
“Sit down,” he said, “I wish to talk to you: my name is Chen.”
In reply to his questions, I gave him my number, rank and name. After pressing me for more for some little time, he said:
“Very well: I will not ask you for military information. We know you are one of the Adjutants. I have all the information I want.” He paused and looked at some papers in front of him. “All I want you to tell me,” he continued, “is your opinion of the Brigadier-General in command of your Brigade. What is his character? Is he best at attacking or defending? What do his superiors think of him in your Army?”
I protested that these were not questions that I could answer; that they were absolutely military questions. He attempted to refute this statement. Finally, thinking, perhaps, that I was fearful of discovery, he said:
“Do not worry. If you think these are secret things, we shall not give you away. Only the two of us will know that you have told me.”
The argument continued for a short time, but ended when I refused to speak to him. After a long silence he said:
“The whole of your attitude to my questions is quite wrong. Let me explain to you how it is wrong—and why. When you understand this, you will be ready to co-operate with us, I am sure.”
He began to explain how the capitalist states, fearful of imminent destruction by the oppressed working-people in the world, had engineered a war in Korea to whip up feeling against the “democratic” states of the Cominform block. It seemed that I was merely a pawn in the game; a pawn that might have lost its life, but for the fact that, by good fortune, I had been “liberated” from capitalist control, and was now in the hands of a truly democratic and humanitarian government.
He spoke excellent English with a slight American accent. It was plain, too, that he was speaking with the utmost sincerity—he really believed every word of the many fallacious premises he advanced. He continued this talk until it was dark, and then sent me back for my meal.
“We will go on again to-morrow,” he said. “There is a great deal for you to learn.”
I was recalled to the bunker on the following morning, when the lecture was resumed. We paused at noon for an hour. I took the opportunity of showing him my feet which were beginning to fester, and he was most considerate.
“We will send for the doctor,” he said. “He will cure your trouble.”
The doctor turned out to be a poker-faced man who wore a gauze mask throughout his ministrations to avoid breathing germs on to my feet, but seemed to overlook the fact that his hands were filthy. However, I was grateful to have dressings in place of the rags I had bound my wounds with. I was beginning to be thankful for small mercies. My physical needs cared for, I returned to the bunker to receive spiritual food.
We sat there for nine hours; I thought Chen would never tire. Late in the afternoon, six young Chinese were brought in—apprentice-commisars, as I later discovered—sitting themselves along either side wall of the bunker to listen to the words which would convert the dupe of the capitalists. I sat with my back to the entrance; the others, at ninety degrees to me on either side, gazed at Chen seated with his back to the rear wall. I began to feel as if we were all listening to some interminable after-dinner speaker; one of those men who can neither retain the interest of his audience, nor bring himself to sit down. I was able to stand it until he came to the subject of the British Commonwealth and, particularly, the United Kingdom. After he had spoken of the oppression of our people and the conditions of slave-labour that abounded throughout British industry, I could take no more. A great flood of words burst from me, which no protest of his could dam. I assured him that we did not believe every word published in the newspapers that we read—not even those who read the London Daily Worker, which was sold freely on the streets and in the factories for the comparatively few who would buy it. I reminded him that we had no political prisoners; and that offences for which we had given light terms of imprisonment to Mr. Willie Gallacher and his comrades, carried the death sentence in the U.S.S.R. I said a great deal more and I fear I spoke with a good deal of passion, so that before I realized it we were in the midst of a heated argument. By the time they allowed me to go back to the hut that I shared with Kinne and the other prisoners, the argument had arrived by a very devious route—as arguments will—at the Theory of Surplus Value!
I walked back through the darkness with my guards, calling myself all sorts of a fool. By design or accident, I had been drawn into an argument with my interrogators from which I should have remained aloof. Little did I know what the consequences of that midnight argument were to be.
Two days later, Chen sent Kinne and Morales away. He told me that I was unable to concentrate whilst they were there to give me companionship—that I would not begin to understand what he was trying to teach me while I could discuss superficial subjects with them. I must confess that I missed their company sadly. As a prisoner-of-war, in these circumstances, one did not know when one would see one’s own kind again. I settled down to the routine of rising at dawn, spending the day in a bunker by myself, and listening each evening to Chen expounding his theories, against a background of the revolution in China or the Stock Market in New York: I preferred the hours of solitude. Three more days passed. I had resigned myself to going on in this way indefinitely when, a little before the normal hour for our second meal of the day—our second and last, usually taken in the twilight—Chen came hurrying down to my bunker to warn me that I was moving.
“It is with great regret that I see you go,” he said. “I have every confidence that I should have convinced you of the truth before I had finished; you are politically conscious, without a doubt.”
He sat with me while I ate my bowl of kaoliang—the beef had long since run out—making a final attempt to convert me by recounting his poverty-stricken youth as a student in Shanghai. As he touched with skill and sincerity upon each incident of his wretched early life, I watched his face. I have said that it was a pleasant face; it was more than that: it was a face filled with a sensitivity that must have rendered his many sufferings more acute. I realized to the full why he was such an ardent proselytiser, as more and more of his background appeared: he was an idealist, determined that he would convert the unenlightened, whether they liked it or not; for he knew what was good for them, better than they did themselves.
I was marched off in my stockinged feet once again. Chen’s village disappeared below me, the remainder of a long climb up the stony path lay ahead. Accompanied by a non-commissioned officer and two guards, I was leaving for a prison camp in the north. Just before I left him, Chen seemed to reach a decision that he would tell me why I was being expelled so suddenly from school: the last of the prisoner columns was setting-out and I must join it. To miss this opportunity, Chen said, would be fatal. Ever mindful of my welfare, the Chinese authorities did not want to see me kept in the forward areas until the next column was formed; waiting there I might be recaptured by the Americans—my mortal enemies! When I protested that I was very willing to take this risk, he shook his head and remarked that I seemed incapable of understanding. Aside from the intellectual benefits awaiting me in the north, the material comforts must not be overlooked: good beds; eggs, butter, milk—to supplement our meat ration; all the tobacco we needed.
He really believed it all.
Our progress was slow; my left foot was now very swollen and causing me great pain. I felt better when, reaching a village in the next valley, we were joined by two more guards leading Kinne and Morales. They had not had a particularly happy time, for the guards had refused them water during the hot days: they had been lodged in a tiny, airless room, which had caused them to sweat heavily. I felt rather ashamed that my burden had been merely one of exasperation.
The guard commander was an elderly, bearded man who obviously wished to get us to the hand-over point as speedily as possible. I was in such pain, however, that I was unable to keep up with the other two, neither of whom were permitted to assist me at the outset. Little by little, the guard commander began to understand that I really was in difficulty. First, he allowed Kinne to drop back and give me the support of his arm and shoulder. Next, he got one of the guards to produce some rags from his pack to bind my feet. Finally, some hours after we left Kinne’s village, he departed into the night to return with a pair of Chinese canvas and rubber half-boots into which I eased my bruised and swollen feet. It was, at least, a change for the better: I did not have to avoid every stone on the path.
We travelled throughout the night, resting at dawn in the nearest village we could find. This was to be our schedule for the next four days and nights, though the guards were changed after forty-eight hours. Marching back across the Imjin River, it became clear that this was the way in which the Chinese lines-of-communication existed: sleep by day; work by night. Our supremacy in the air permitted no other course.
About two hours after we had set out on the fourth night, we halted in a village street to drop off a group of nine ROK prisoners that we had picked up en route three days before. Once they had gone, we were marched back along the road for half a mile, and then led along a fresh track to a smaller village lying at the foot of a steep hill slope. There were the usual long conversations between our guards and those in the village, as they identified themselves; and the usual ceremony of handing over the scraps of paper that accompanied us from guard to guard, with a great deal of discussion and explanation. I always longed to tell the consignors to let the consignees read what the paper said for themselves: I began to wonder if Chinese could be the most ambiguous tongue in the world.
A Chinese with huge horn-rimmed spectacles had now joined our party, all of us standing before the veranda of a Korean house. He mumbled a few words of English rather shame-facedly—words that made no sense at all when joined together. An attempt to repeat these was interrupted by another voice, asking us our names in better English: a voice belonging to a podgy, pig-faced young Chinese, who had come up from the track. He began a long speech about obeying the rules and regulations of the guards under whom we were now placed, when I reminded him that it was late, we were tired, and that I had a poisoned foot.
I have a carrying voice, and for once it carried to good effect. In a room of the nearby veranda, some one had heard me speaking and called my name, adding:
“Is that you?”
I knew at once that it was the Colonel.
It was another of those strange reunions where one was happy to find friends alive and reasonably well, but troubled to see them prisoners-of-war: a bitter-sweet meeting.
I was separated from Kinne and Morales, who were taken off to another room as I joined the Colonel. On entering the tiny room in which he was lodged, I found Denis, and a ROK interpreter, all obviously awakened from sleep by my arrival. We spent about half an hour telling our stories of recapture, and exchanged what little news we had of the fighting. It appeared that Sam’s column had marched north some days before, having dropped off Bob at the Imjin River with those wounded who were absolutely unable to get to their feet. They had had no news of D Company’s success; and they had seen nothing of Privates Fox and Graham, whom I had left in the monastery. Bob was now with a group of other officers in the same house as ourselves; while round the corner of the mountain, concentrated in an adjacent group of houses, were about three hundred other ranks, about half of whom were Glosters—the remainder being made up of men from the Rifles, Fifth Fusiliers, Gunners, Eighth Hussars, and Sappers. We were all tired and decided to continue our talk the next day. There was one final exchange for the night, however. The Colonel’s voice came quietly out of the darkness as we were dozing off on the board floor.
“Are you lousy?” he asked me.
“No, sir.”
“Well, I’m sorry to say that you will be; Denis and I have been for several days!”
On the following morning the sun and blue sky were continually overcast with long, grey clouds. Breakfast consisted of kaoliang, and a minute portion of semi-cooked bean shoots. We had no proper mess kit; so we were fortunate in having old food tins, scoured out with sand; others had to make do with plates made from pieces of rag. After we had eaten, I was helped down the track leading to an open dug-out in a nearby hillside. Here all the officer-prisoners spent the hours of daylight, except for the Colonel, Denis, and the ROK, who were kept by themselves under close guard. Once separated from them that morning, I was not permitted to approach them or attempt to communicate with them in any way, except on two occasions when shortage of billets forced the guards to put us together. It had not taken the Chinese very long to realize that the Colonel and Denis wielded a great deal of influence with the remainder of the prisoners—an influence very naturally unacceptable to our captors.
There were many familiar faces in the dug-out: of the Gunners, Ronnie, Carl (who was wounded), and—surprisingly—Frank, whom I had mistakenly believed dead, and his Sergeant-Major, Askew; of the Glosters, Bob, Spike, Jumbo, Geoff, Mr. Hobbs and Sergeant-Majors Gallagher, Strong, and Ridlington. It seemed that I had only just missed Henry and Guido, who had escaped from the column two days before. And there were many others, made captive in the severe fighting that had gone on to the east of us: John and Sid, of the Fifth Fusiliers; from the Rifles, Paul, Max, Bert, and Peter—the latter wounded in the legs—and Doug, the Doctor of the Eight Hussars, whose half-track had been knocked into a ditch, at an inopportune moment, while he was driving it through an area already occupied by the enemy. With this band of British, were two other officers: Thomas, a young Filipino lieutenant, a veteran of the World War II campaign amongst his own islands; and Byron, an American Marine Air Force Captain. This officer was suffering terribly from burns; his entire face covered by suppurating scab, his hands, one arm, and part of his right leg raw from the burning fuel which had been thrown back into his cockpit after his Corsair was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Bob’s few dressings were almost exhausted and the Chinese had provided him with nothing since the march began. Yet, never once did Byron cry out, either at rest or on the march, as he was led—blind—along the rough hill tracks and rutted roads. I never heard him make a single complaint.
That morning was a happy one for me, although it rained frequently and we were all very hungry. It was happy because I was amongst comrades and, too, because I was able to get medical attention from two doctors in whom I had the greatest confidence. Bob and Doug examined my foot, released a little of the pus that had gathered, and dressed it with clean rags contributed by the members of our group. What worried me most was the fact that they said I must not walk on it. I knew that if I did not resume the march with my friends, my foot would either not get well at all, or keep me out of action for a very long time. In either case, I should not be in a position to escape again. As Bob, Spike, and I were anxious to go together on the next attempt, they decided to help me along as best they could.
We spent two more days in the village—principally, I think, because the Chinese, who had become tired of the slow pace imposed upon the march by the many sick and wounded, expected that a few days rest would refresh the latter sufficiently to continue at greater speed. What we needed, of course, as much, if not more than rest, was proper food and medical attention.
The march became increasingly difficult for me: after forty-eight hours, Bob and Doug decided that they must operate. As usual, we were marching by night and resting by day. At noon on this particular day, Bob gave me what little morphia he had been able to conceal from our captors and made ready the patient by getting Denis to hold me down at the top, Spike in the middle, while he held on to my ankles. The Colonel got up, remarking:
“I’m going outside, so you can swear as much as you like!”
Doug got to work with a Schick razor blade; and I regret to say I swore a great deal.
From then on, Bob and Spike half-carried me throughout the night marches, until we reached the staging area known as the Mining Camp—a little North Korean gold-mining town, whose industry had been utterly destroyed by our aircraft. We arrived about an hour before dawn, to find that the room selected for our stay was so small that only the sick and wounded could he down, while the remainder had to sit in an upright posture. Jammed into this dark chamber, we spent an unpleasant four hours until breakfast time, when the guards opened the doors to permit us to reach the can of kaoliang outside.
At the Mining Camp, Bob had his first and only real success in persuading the guard Company Commander to see reason in respect of the sick and wounded, who had managed to keep up so far, but were now becoming too sick to maintain the pace. His endeavours secured a promise to send us along by transport to the next major halting point; a promise that was kept. With a tall, effeminate Chinese named Su, I set off with one of the two parties of invalids. We lost our way at almost every conceivable point. Kinne, now suffering from dysentery, was almost put in a local prison, when he was caught looking for wireless parts in the rail centre at Sunchon; and Yates, the scout-car driver, ended the march by carrying me over two miles on his shoulders. It was an eventful journey.
The day came, finally, when we limped over a hill into a white-walled village, on the banks of the upper Taedong River, to find the remainder of the column resting again; a rest they really needed, now that the insufficient and poor quality of their diet was beginning to make itself felt. The Chinese told us that we had accomplished half of our journey; we called the village “Half-way House”.
They took a group photograph of our dirty, bearded faces in this village and, later, removed the valuables—rings, watches, pens, and so on—from those who had not lost them at the front. I had been stripped by the North Koreans, except for some money I had hidden in my clothing, so the Chinese removed nothing of mine. They promised they would return the articles on our arrival at the northern prison-camps—a promise they kept with few exceptions—but so many of us had had our property stolen from us at one time or another after capture that we doubted this. Sergeant Sykes of the Machine Guns stamped his watch into the ground, only to find that he was not permitted to do this with his own property. He was bound and placed in solitary confinement, until he agreed to read a self-criticism in front of the entire column concerning his action. It was full of cockney wit, which the Chinese were quite unable to appreciate—they listened very gravely, the interpreters asking various prisoners why they were smiling. I left this peculiar performance with a feeling of distaste; hearing Sergeant Sykes read a criticism of himself aroused in me a feeling of revulsion for the mentality of the authorities who had ordered it—a strange mentality that seemed alien and, in a sense, abnormal. An outlook which, sooner or later, we should clash with inevitably.