IT was a miserable little prison camp, part of the unworked coal-mining settlement of Kang-dong, and known formerly by prisoners as “The Caves.” In 1950 and until the summer of 1951, many United Nations prisoners had been crowded into old tunnels in the hillsides round about, often drenched by the water that ran in from underground streams. The numbers of men who had died in these black holes in the ground will never be known exactly. In cross-checking to find our friends, we accounted for over two hundred and fifty deaths; but this is not the total figure.
Of all the many stories of gallantry and selflessness on the part of prisoners in these caves, I will recount only one here: a story that was told us later by men who had formed part of it; a story which provided us with inspiration to continue resistance to our captors during the most difficult moments. Terry—the last remaining platoon commander of ‘A’ Company—was taken to “The Caves” in the summer of 1951. He had been a member of a column of seriously wounded captives which had marched slowly north from the Imjin River some little time after the two main columns had set off. Though he was in great pain from a wound in his leg and a terrible head injury, Terry set a splendid example on the march, caring, as best he could, for other serious casualties with him. By the time they reached “The Caves”, the condition of many prisoners had deteriorated dangerously; for they had had no medical attention of any sort en route and many still wore the dressings, by now ragged and filthy, placed on their wounds by our own medical staffs before capture.
Terry, and Sergeant Hoper of the Machine-gun Platoon, were placed with a number of others from the column in a cave already crowded with Koreans—themselves dying of starvation and disease. Except when their two daily meals of boiled maize were handed through the opening, they sat in almost total darkness. A subterranean stream ran through the cave to add to their discomfort, and, in these conditions, it was often difficult to distinguish the dead from the dying. One day, a North Korean colonel visited them to put forward a proposition.
“We realize,” he said, “that your conditions here are uncomfortable. We sympathize. I, myself, am powerless to help you—unless you are prepared to help us. If you care to join the Peace Movement to fight American aggression in Korea, we can take you to a proper camp where, in addition to better rations and improved accommodation, your wounds will be cared for by a surgeon.”
Our men refused this offer, individually. But Terry, seeing their condition, their numbers dwindling, came to a decision on which he acted the next morning. He drew Sergeant Hoper to one side and said:
“I have thought this business over and have decided that you must go over to the ‘Peace-Fighters’ Camp. Most of you will die if you stay here. Go over, do as little as you can; and remember always that you are British soldiers.”
“What about you, sir?” asked Hoper.
“It is different for me,” said Terry. “I am an officer; I cannot go. But I order you to go and to take our men with you.”
Terry remained firm in his decision; and when the North Korean colonel returned, as they had guessed he would, Sergeant Hoper and his party left “The Caves” with a group of American soldiers. The colonel pressed Terry to accompany them, advising him that he would not accept a final refusal just then but would return later.
He returned four times. Armed with promises of an operation on Terry’s wounds by a surgeon, and of a special diet of eggs, milk and meat in place of the boiled maize, he failed each time.
Terry was a young subaltern, not long out of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Yet, irrespective of his service and youth, he was, he saw clearly, an officer representing the British Commonwealth in enemy country: by his actions, the Commonwealth’s reputation would be judged. Quite simply, he was given a choice: life, and agreement to reject, at least outwardly, the principles for which he was fighting in Korea; or a steadfast adherence to those principles—and death. Coolly, loyally, like the gallant officer he was, Terry chose death. And so he died.
Things were improved now: the caves were empty. We were in the quarters once occupied by the miners under the Japanese; quarters long since fallen into disrepair, and quite inadequate for the severe winter temperatures which were yet to come. Already, in November, the cold kept us awake at night, though the rooms were overcrowded. The food was poor: three meals a day of mixed corn and rice—very little rice—or a bowl of fresh, watery rice as an alternative, and a half bowl of thin cabbage or diacon soup. Occasionally—a recent innovation—there would be a small issue of the strong Korean tobacco, sufficient to make two or three cigarettes per man; but there was only one such issue during my stay. Yet, in spite of the poverty of our standard of living, Kang-dong Camp was a palace to me—a palace filled with the good things of life! After the Interrogation Centre and, more recently, the inside of Pyongyang jail, to have three meals a day, to be given a few grains of tobacco, above all, to be able to sit outside in the sun and talk with one’s own kind, were luxuries indeed.
All these men—my comrades in the camp—had been collected from many different places: isolated headquarters and units, prisons and Interrogation Centres over a fifty-mile radius round Pyongyang, including the notorious “Pak’s Palace” where the methods employed by the chief interrogator, Major Pak of the North Korean Army, had led to many deaths. All our own officers had been brought down from a Chinese camp on the Yalu River to Pak’s Palace for interrogation by the North Korean Army. Mr. Day—a Quartermaster-Sergeant-Instructor of the Royal Marine Commando—Corporal Peskett, and four Marines had been captured on the east coast near Wonsan, and had drifted slowly towards Pyongyang and the hospitality offered by Pak. Colonel Mac, a red-bearded American pilot, had been held in solitary confinement for many months before being brought into an interrogation centre. Mike had joined him there on leaving me just north of Pyongyang. Fabian and Jaquette were two members of the renowned French Battalion, who had suffered many privations during the months spent under interrogation in Pyongyang. There was not one man fit for a long march when, a few days after my arrival, we were taken out and searched, before setting off on the road to the Yalu River two hundred miles away. The few articles of padded clothing which had been distributed amongst us were removed, in spite of our protests, and many airmen left to endure the November winds in summer flying kit.
Our escorts were all officers! Second lieutenants carried burp-guns, the lieutenant in charge a pistol. We set off in the afternoon, carrying our special rations of rice and melki—little fish like whitebait that are caught off the east coast of Korea—which had probably been given to us to keep us fit for the march. In the rear of the column came a cart, on which sat Tom, a sick American called Harold, who was only semi-conscious most of the time, and Madden, an Australian soldier who was so thin that he looked like a skeleton covered with a little skin. I was very worried about Ronnie, who still had every sign of beri-beri. Henry, too, and many of the Americans caused us concern because of their dysentery. There was a little medicine available: aspirins. A fat girl-soldier accompanied the column, as medical orderly to issue the aspirins to those who were very sick; but there were always too many sick men for the ration of aspirins available. As the march continued I realized that my strength had been so sapped by my experiences in the jail at Pyongyang that I could not continue to walk. Placed on the cart, my condition continued to deteriorate: I found to my horror that the relapsing fever I had thrown off in Munha-ri during the summer months had returned.
The remainder of the march was a nightmare. Each night our cart would reach the billeting area long after the marching column, having been held back by the escorts, who stopped to eat in restaurants along the way. The result of this dawdling was that they frequently missed the way, and would leave us in the biting wind while they searched for the village concerned. Lying in the wind outside a restaurant, while they ate, in the daytime was bad enough; at night it was appalling. Our clothes were all ragged, and quite inadequate even for this stage of the winter. Spike and the others tried to give us portions of their own clothing and the few blankets available, but we could not accept all that was offered; to have done so would have caused them to fall sick themselves. Harold died on the second day of the march, after lying for two hours in a ditch outside a house in which the escorts were disporting themselves. A few nights later, Ronnie and I each fell into a coma, from which only I emerged alive. In the light of a candle stub begged of our guards, Spike, Mr. Day and Corporal Peskett worked hard to revive our chilled bodies. But Ronnie had died during the last minutes of the journey through the night. We were to miss him sadly.
By the time we reached the village one march from Chiang-song—our immediate destination twenty-three miles distant—three more had joined our cart: Henry, Ace, an Air Force lieutenant, and Dick, an American rifle platoon commander captured almost a year previously; all were weakened to the point of absolute exhaustion by dysentery. With these additions, the sick cart carried only those completely incapable of walking and many men had to be literally carried between their comrades for long distances each day. Fortunately, the ration bags were now much lighter, though their contents had been changed miles back along the road. The Lieutenant of the escort had sold our rice at villages as we marched, receiving cash and a like weight of maize and a little barley in return. The substitute for the melki was cabbage at each halt—a very little cabbage: perhaps one leaf between thirty men.
The sick remained almost two nights in this village. It had snowed during the first night, and our guards decided to stop a truck to carry us to Chiang-song. Late on the second night, in a snow-storm, we were dragged down to the cross-roads and thrown aboard. Henry was now quite unconscious, and died during the journey through the night. I would not, could not, believe that he was dead, though his body lay in the ditch right by me, cold and lifeless. Yet my thoughts had to turn from him: I had no shoes and my feet were beginning to freeze.
It was Tom, of course, who remonstrated with our North Korean escorts. Knowing that we could not escape, two of them went into the warmth of a house, while the third departed into the centre of the town to find a billet for the night. Tom demanded shelter and got it, caring for us as he had done so splendidly throughout that terrible journey. Though he was not sick, he was weak from his past privations and, above all, he had only one leg. How he managed to look after as many as seven sick men at one time I do not know. Only his great strength of character and courage made this possible.
The guards accommodated themselves in what passes for an hotel in North Korea and ate their fill on arrival. We were dumped in a disused corner and left supperless. We fed on the following afternoon only because Tom had been given a little money derived from the sale of a concealed watch—the property of a Texan pilot, who had earlier given half the proceeds to Tom for emergencies amongst the sick party. The hotel proprietor sold us the scraps that were left from the mid-day meal, and some of our party were able to eat a little cold rice and luke-warm soup. I could hardly face even the soup, though Tom rightly insisted that I eat a few mouth-fuls. We had just finished the meal when the senior second-lieutenant told us to come out to continue the journey.
I remember very little of what followed. I recall seeing a column of Europeans march past in blue uniforms, as we crawled out to a Chinese pony-cart a little way up the street. There were some friendly cries from the column—fellow captives—but I could not make sense of them. We drove on through the early dusk in a bitter wind, our cramped bodies packed tightly on the cart. When we stopped and Tom alighted, we were chilled to the bone, two of us quite unable to move. A voice in English said:
“What are your names?”
Ace, who was left with me, answered a little before me. I felt myself lifted up on to the back of a broad Chinese, who took me down a path between mud huts to a courtyard. There was an open door and a floor covered with blankets. Tom was there, and Madden, the Australian. Dick was sitting by the glowing charcoal in a tiny brazier. Ace joined me on the blankets. Five of us were left of the eight men who had been unable to march.
A Chinese face appeared in the doorway; spectacles gleamed in the light of a flashlamp.
“You are lucky to have come this day,” said a voice. “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.”
The days that followed were filled with tragedy and setbacks along the road to recovery. We had arrived at a hospital; by which I mean a collection of mud huts in a Korean village, the floors covered with rice-straw mats and the walls papered with old copies of The Shanghai News. With two exceptions, the nurses and orderlies spat on the floor, rubbing the mucus in with their feet; they attended us with hands that were washed at the most twice in a day. The rooms filled with smoke whenever the fires were ht beneath the floors to drive out the bitter cold. Yet there were compensations. Two of the nurses—Chinese girls—had been trained at a European hospital in Shanghai. They were devoted to their profession, and gave us their best without caring whether we were friend or foe. Similarly, two of the doctors were sincerely concerned with making us well. We were provided with clean, lice-free clothing and the blue, cotton, padded uniforms and quilts that the Chinese had issued throughout the camps that winter. And, at last, we were fed food fit for human beings: rice, white bread, and a little meat each day; or bean curd, potatoes, occasionally onions, and—especially welcome to the British patients—a bowl of green leaf tea every other day. For the dangerously ill patients there were eggs and powdered milk. There were even medicines—penicillin, sulfa compositions, vitamin compounds, and so on in small quantities. But we were so sick, so weak, that it seemed as if these good things had come too late—except for Tom; and he was soon sent away along the road to the east.
One by one, the remainder of the group died. Ace became unconscious on Thanksgiving Day, and died the following afternoon: Madden died a few days later. Dick lingered on until Christmas time, but was too far gone with beri-beri to recover. In the house up near the doctors’ quarters, someone died almost every day; men whose skeleton bodies had been starved or maltreated beyond the point of response to their improved circumstances. When I raised this question with Mr. Li, the hospital interpreter, he informed me with a ready smile that it was due to the American bombing; they had been unable to bring the supplies in. And when I asked him why the services of the International Red Cross to remedy this had been refused, he smiled even more blandly: “That is another matter,” he said, “I must go now; I have other duties.”
Mr. Li was a naval architect by trade; in character, a hypocrite; a professed Marxist who did not love his fellow-men. It was his duty to conduct political lectures and discussion groups for those patients who were fit enough to get up each day. He forbade me to attend these, as he knew that I was priming the men attending them on the questions they should ask and the answers they should give to his questions. He announced publicly that I should not take part in any way. We were always polite to one another: he called me by my rank as well as by my surname; and in return for this courtesy, I called him Mister Li. We had many long political arguments, walking slowly along the shore of the frozen Yalu River inlet by the hospital, or in the hut I occupied. And always, when I asked a question which he was unable to answer without admitting one or another of the many fallacies inherent in Marxism, he would reply:
“That is another matter. I must go now. I have other duties.” And he would smile his bland smile.
My recovery had been a long and difficult struggle. Early on, I had made up my mind that to remain on my bed day after day might be literally fatal. I decided that I had to get up each day, if only for a little while, and walk a few paces. I could hardly stand the first day; it was cold outside and warm within my hut; dressing was a great effort. Yet each day I managed to push myself outside the hut and walk a set number of paces: twenty-five the first day, thirty the next, and so on, increasing my walk by five paces a day. By the spring, I must be fit again to escape. I forced myself to eat the food which, at first, I could not even smell without feeling sick. But by Christmas Day I was a walking patient and able to visit the wards to say a prayer and sing two carols with a small group of die-hards.
I was lucky in having good companions. There was a group of American infantry sergeants who were sterling characters: Hensen, Strong, and Barkovic. The last-named had suffered three operations on his leg without an anaesthetic; and, though often in great pain and constant discomfort, he retained a cheery spirit which helped many of his comrades through dark hours. There was Tremlett from C Company of my own Battalion—captured at the Imjin River battle. And there was Fowler, a young north-country National Serviceman of the Rifles, who had a sharp Geordie country wit and remarkable strength of character. In my own hut I was lucky to have most pleasant companions in five American soldiers, one of whom was a Scottish emigrant, an ex-Glaswegian named John McCracken. He and I passed many a weary day of blizzards or high winds walking up and down Sauchiehall Street in imagination or discussing the respective merits of one or another brand of whisky.
The day came when I was asked to pay my hospital fees. There had been a first demand about two weeks before, when we had been asked to send a New Year’s greeting to Mao Tse Tung and Kim II Sung. I had informed all the patients that we should not do so. Then we were asked to fill in a so-called International Red Cross form in respect of the two doctors and nurses who had Red Cross membership cards. In the faint hope that our names might be delivered to the International Red Cross Committee, I wrote:
“Dr. X and Dr. Y, Nurse A and Nurse B, members of the Chinese Red Cross, have attended me at the Headquarters of Prisoner-of-War Camp No. 3 during the period in which I have been recovering from recurring fever and malnutrition.”
I signed this. I then dictated the same tiling to Sergeant Hensen and got him to include the number, rank, and name of every patient in the hospital. Mr. Li said that it was not sufficient but saw that he would get nothing more after we had argued for about an hour and let it go at that. But I knew then that the time was approaching for a reckoning.
One sunny morning, I was strolling down towards the frozen shore. I had just seen the better of the two good doctors, who had told me that I should stay in the hospital for about six more weeks. He was concerned about the weakness of my limbs, and the pain I still got from the ribs that the Young Major had cracked with his boots. Though I was restless to rejoin my friends in the Officers’ Camp somewhere to the east, I felt that six more weeks would really improve my condition so that, in spite of the poor diet in the camps, I should be ready to escape when the time came. My thoughts were disturbed by a hail from a little, sharp-eyed Chinese who had evidently been looking for me. He carried a camera in his hand.
“I think you are getting very well,” he said, without bothering to say who he was. I agreed that the condition of my health had improved.
“I think this is due to the skill of the comrades of the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers. I think you are very grateful to them.”
With the memory of Henry and Ronnie, and the many, many others still fresh in my mind, I replied:
“I think that the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteers are merely mending what they have broken.”
But he was not to be put off in this way.
“I think you shall write for us a day-by-day account of your recovery, explaining how each member of the staff has helped you.”
“I’m afraid I cannot do that.”
He might not have heard me.
“Yes, and you shall have some pictures taken with the staff. I shall take some pictures with this camera now. We will find the doctors and the nurses.”
I felt that he had to be told plainly how I felt: I told him. We had a hot argument, both became angry, and finally parted when he told me that he gave me twenty-four hours to think it over. On the following day he returned at about eleven o’clock and asked me how I felt.
I said: “You had my answer yesterday. It is the same answer to-day.”
He looked at me angrily with his bright little brown eyes as we stood in the courtyard outside the door to my hut.
“You are not grateful for all we have done. You do not deserve to get well,” he said.
It may have been the purest coincidence that, on the evening of the same day, I was told that the doctors had changed their mind about my condition: they were going to discharge me the following day. I felt that they might have added, Reason for Discharge: failure to pay hospital fees.
About a week before I left, Sergeant McCracken had a letter from his family. It was his first letter after eight months as a prisoner, and he hugged it to his great chest before opening it. It had taken less than a month to reach him and gave him the glad news that his name had been read out from the list of prisoners-of-war declared by the North Koreans and Chinese. That letter did McCracken more good than a year’s hospital treatment.
The important thing, as far as I was concerned, was that the forms we had filled in on the 18th December, giving—for the umpteenth time—our numbers, ranks, and names, had really been of some use at last. Mr. Li had told us at Christmas time that there was to be an exchange of names, but I had not dared to believe him. For once, he had told us the truth.
This knowledge was a source of great comfort to me, as I said goodbye early one morning to McCracken and climbed on board a truck bound for Pyoktong. It was the 15th January, 1952: the fifteenth day of a New Year that I hoped and prayed would see me a free man again. Even if I was not completely fit, it was a great joy to think that I was going to rejoin so many of my comrades from the Battalion.
Pyoktong is a small town on a southern inlet of the Yalu Paver. Its houses run down one side of a rocky spur jutting out into the clear water; a picturesque little town, when seen from afar, dominated by the old temple above it. In addition to accommodating General Wang Yang Kung, the Commander of the Prisoner-of-War Camps, and his staff, it had been for many months a high-powered interrogation centre and a camp for non-Korean captives. McCracken had spent the greater part of the previous year there, and confirmed the stories I had heard at Kang-dong of the appalling death-rate. Every day during the late spring and early summer, McCracken told me, fifteen to twenty men died; men whose last strength had been used up in fighting for life during the terrible winter of 1950-51 when there had been neither accommodation nor food nor clothing for such temperatures, and the North Koreans and Chinese had refused to permit the International Red Cross to come in with any form of comforts for the prisoners. Those under interrogation who did not answer satisfactorily, or others who resisted or spoke against political indoctrination by the Chinese, suffered the punishment of the “ice-box”—a reinforced concrete hut where the wretched offender was placed in sub-arctic temperatures to “consider” his errors. Sometimes, he did not “reconsider” in time, and was removed to the hill to join in the growing mound of unburied corpses. When spring came, the “ice-box” gave way to the “sweat-box” where errors were “considered” in little hutches in which a man could neither sit nor draw his legs up but lay continuously, night and day, on the ground.
Having heard all this from the men who had been there, either through the winter, or during the later period when the effects of the winter were becoming daily more evident, I looked at Pyoktong with great interest as we approached by barge across the waters of the inlet, the wheels of our lorry held to its deck in token only by four pieces of rice-straw rope. At the headquarters I was received by an English-speaking Chinese and two girls, who gave me a seat and were very polite while they waited for my documents. One of the girls, little more than a child, began to converse in very good English which she said she had learned in Chunking. She asked me if it was true that conditions of life in Britain were really as bad as she had been told. Were people really starving to death? How could we stand such conditions, such oppression from our Government? Why didn’t we back the Communist Party’s Liberation Movement? I began to tell her that Mr. Harry Pollitt could not get popular support for his Movement—Liberation or otherwise—because people felt that he had nothing better to offer them than they had already; that many suspected he had a good deal less. She could not believe this. With her own eyes she had read details of the hunger of the workers—hunger that her Chinese comrades had known to the full before Liberation and the establishment of the New China under Chairman Mao. Of course, she added modestly, deprecatingly, she was not a true worker but came from the bourgeoisie; but she was trying hard to live it down. Her blushes were swept away by a flush of enthusiasm as she began to tell me of the success they had experienced in solving China’s old, old problem of famine.
“What will your mother and wife do this year in England when the floods spread over your rice paddy?” she asked. “What will your family find to eat?”
Before I could reply to this interesting question, documents arrived; and the young Chinese, after reading them, seemed rather less cordial than before. I was taken away to a hut just outside the main camp and left alone with a small pamphlet that the girl insisted I should read. It was called “One step forward, two steps back,” and was written by the late V.I. Lenin.
Glancing at the title, I had a feeling that V. I. Lenin must have had one or two experiences in common with me.
My hut was unheated but I had a blanket, a padded greatcoat, and my blue padded uniform. I awoke after a comfortable night to find a squat Chinese in the doorway holding an enamel washbowl of kaoliang and diacon soup. He ladled a portion into my two china bowls and shuffled off.
The day passed slowly. I could see but little of my surroundings because the sentry had put a baulk of timber against the door and all observation had to be made through holes in the paper that covered it. By three o’clock in the afternoon I had improved my position, however. The sentry on duty had acceded to my request to be allowed to sit in the sun—the interior of my room was dark and very cold. I sat on the narrow wooden verandah, enjoying the warmth and light, taking this opportunity to see how the land lay.
Sitting there, I was approached by a middle-aged Chinese who asked me my opinion of the progress of the Peace Talks at Kaesong. I replied that, having no news of them, I was unable to form an opinion. He did not rise to this bait but changed the subject to the political pamphlet lying by my side.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
I nodded towards the reception office to which I had been taken on arrival.
“The young lady in there gave it to me,” I said.
“‘Young lady!’” he repeated, horrified. “‘Lady’ is a term like ‘gentleman’ which you use for your ruling classes—your aristocrats. There are no ‘ladies’ in China!”
As he left me to converse with a passing friend, I could not but reflect that, apart from impugning the character of Chinese women-folk, he had probably provided a new variation to a very old music-hall joke.
By now, the guard soldiers had settled down to their afternoon lessons. Further down the street, those who could find a place on a sunny veranda were squatting or sitting in groups of half-a-dozen, clutching elementary readers in their hands. One of their number—more advanced than his fellows—would conduct the class.
“You see,” said the middle-aged Chinese, who had returned, “in the New China, everyone must learn to read and write. This is the new Happy Life.”
“Very commendable,” I observed.
“Not commendable,” he rejoined. “This is a necessary thing, I think. If our people cannot read, how else shall they study the books and newspapers we give them. Talking alone is no good. This is not enough.”
“Perhaps, when they have learnt to read they may also read the books and newspapers that we print,” I said.
He smiled, pityingly.
“Ah, no. Once they have read our words they will know the Truth. Why, then, should they want to see the lies spread by your side?”
He strolled away down the street and turned a corner.
For some time I had been hoping to see some of our own fellows in order to find out what news, if any, they had from Kaesong. I knew it would be difficult, for I was an isolated prisoner, forbidden to communicate with others, as they were forbidden to do with me. At length, three young Europeans passed near to me and, the guards being idle at that moment, we exchanged a few words. It seemed that the third and fourth points on the agenda were still under discussion. The conversation was just developing when what I may only describe as a howl of rage came from the gable end of my hut. A tall Chinese with spectacles in blue-tinted frames, came running towards us in a fury. Pointing down the street, he hissed at three luckless listeners:
“Go back to your company!”
Then he turned to me. He was so angry that he could scarcely speak coherently. How dare I speak to other men without permission! The guard and the guard commander were called; I was flung into my cheerless little room, the door was slammed, two baulks of timber were placed against it, and the sentry glared in every five or ten seconds. I felt that I had probably been sent to bed without any supper.
Much to my surprise, therefore, at about four o’clock, the Chinese mess-orderly returned with another wash-pan of food. I was in the middle of eating this when the man who had received me the previous morning came down with a guard. I was told to pack up at once and when I objected that I had not finished my meal, this was removed from me. The hint was too plain to ignore: I packed up.
The guard took me through the narrow side-streets up to the main road, and then up the hill to the hospital in the old temple. But we had come to the wrong place and had to go back once again to the road below. I climbed on to the truck waiting there. Amongst the crowd of soldiers standing in the back were four Europeans in prison blue. They helped me aboard, and we examined one another in the dusk.
They were all Americans. Phil and I had met before at Kang-dong. His knowledge of Japanese had helped us considerably on the march north, when he had acted as the liaison officer with the North Koreans. Charlie was a Marine pilot, William P. and the other man were infantry platoon commanders from the Reserve. All four were discharged hospital patients. William P. had had a terrible time with beri-beri, contracted after spending months in a small, dark, filthy stable near Sunchon where he had been fed on one bowl of old maize daily. He owed his life to the fact that he had contracted to render safe some unexploded bombs in the area for the Chinese in exchange for rations for himself and two men. The bombs were already perfectly safe, but William P. made a great show of working on these, one at a time—the contract said, “one bomb, one meal,” and he was very hungry. Unfortunately, his scheme only succeeded in saving himself; the other two men were fed too late and died. It was said of William P. that he had remained alive only because he was what the Americans call “ornery”, and I believe they were right.
We drove along the snow and ice-bound roads in the darkness. The moon was waning; only the pale starlight showed us the outlines of hills and valleys, of scattered villages and hamlets along the way. After about an hour we drew up in a village street. The guards indicated that we should alight and led the way over a ploughed field to a large Korean house. This was the receiving point for the camp to which we had been consigned. After filling in our registration forms, we had a meal of cold rice and potatoes—we all protested that we had not eaten, and none more vehemently than I, remembering the bowls that had been snatched away. Then we waited for over three hours, sitting round a stove which smoked abominably. At last, at about half past ten, we were led through a barbed wire fence, searched at a house called “the company headquarters” by two very irritable Chinese who had been awakened to do it, led on into a compound and thrust into a small house.
William P., the other infantry lieutenant and I were put into a room in which there were already three men. They sat up in their blankets, blinking in the dim electric light. I was delighted to see that one of the faces belonged to Anthony, the Intelligence Officer of the Fifth Fusiliers. I realized that my hopes had been fulfilled: I had reached the Camp containing my friends.