BATTLE PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR
“IT WAS ON A BOMBER RUN that Rico and I cracked up near a hospital in China—a small outpost hospital—and discovered that Concha was assigned to it. Christ, we didn’t even know she was out of the states . . .
“We bailed out and no one was hurt except Rico, who had stayed behind to shoot out the bombsight and set the ship afire. He tore a shoulder pretty bad, but he clamped the cut himself. By twos and threes the Chinese took us to the hospital, where they assured us Concha would smuggle us back to HQ. Seems she’d been doing this for months . . .
“We arrived at the same time the Japs captured the hospital and surrounding town. Rico had cautioned us before we bailed out to destroy our insignia and not to admit to being officers, so the Japs would think us privates and not try to pump us. However, the Japs seem to base seniority on age, so Rico and I, not being in our twenties, were stuck—as well as a fifty-year-old sergeant, who they thought must be a general: he was tortured, and when he wouldn’t talk—because he didn’t know anything—they cut his head off, to scare the rest of us.
“Rico raged and cursed when he was tortured, but appeared more angry than hurt. I wish I could say as much for myself . . .
“Concha, I guess, didn’t know what to expect . . . she was only thinking of her patients. This was a general hospital, and among other things she had women in labor, and some who had just delivered. The Japs explained, through a Chinese doctor. that they were going to take over the hospital for billets . . .
“They started evacuating the patients at sword point. One of the privates threw a baby up and caught it through the belly on his bayonet; Concha didn’t move, but when the C.O. laughed, she lost her head and struck him. It wasn’t a ladylike slap, but, well, you know Concha—she just rifled one off the floor and planted it on him, and he went down for the count. It was beautiful . . . but we all knew she would suffer for it. At his command, they grabbed her, yanked her back and forth among them, until we couldn’t always keep sight of her. When the crowd thinned out she was naked, her skin in ribbons, her long hair hanging down—and several handfuls trailed from many hands. Her knuckles were bleeding, her eyes flashed, her head was up and she was mad clear through. I was proud of her. She had given a good account, too, being outnumbered—had blacked several eyes, and quite a few men had lumps appearing on their jaws.
“The Chinese doctor groaned aloud when he heard the C.O. say that he would rape her first, and then the others could have her. He explained that she was in for a bad time, she was such a small woman . . .
“We were invited to watch, with our hands tied behind our backs. They threw her to the ground and when they twisted her legs behind her shoulders, and her hips came out of joint or broke, Rico yelled curses and tore at his bonds until his wrists were bleeding. The officer, of course, couldn’t get into her and he seemed to be in a hurry. He gave a command and a soldier jammed his rifle barrel into her three or four times until he broke through . . . She blacked out at the first jab . . .
“He raped her then . . . some of us declined the invitation to look and closed our eyes and turned our heads—but they went around our circle and cut off a few pairs of eyelids.”
(MOBY-DICK: “That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun . . .”
Carl . . . from notes made during and after his captivity, and secreted in his duffle, until finally, in a backhanded gesture—placing them where I and no one else would discover them—he let them fall into my hands.
Early in the war, he had tried to enlist in the Air Force, but, for some reason, had been turned down. Cabling Rico—the only survivor of the Spanish brothers—in Havana, he arranged to meet him in England: he assumed the pose of some sort of civilian technician, and managed to hitchhike on military craft, in a matter of only a few hours, from Indianapolis to London. Together, Carl and Rico enlisted in the RAF.
For months we heard nothing—until a card came from Concha: she was trying to trace Rico through Carl, and Carl through me. I didn’t know until years after, when I read Carl’s notes, that, with my reply, she had headed for London, and, with her medical training—she had specialized in surgery—had been taken into the British Army, and given an assignment in China.
There were others who made notes—the Chinese doctor, Concha’s adjutant, was one—and these I found with Carl’s:
“I once asked Concha where she had gained her knowledge and technique in gunshot wounds (she was too young for the first war) and she told me that she had had ample experience during the various revolutions in Cuba. (In one of these, her father and twin brothers were army officers, and she fought with the students against them—as I believe she fought against her father in Spain. When her father and Rico’s twin were killed, she may have suffered more than any of us realize . . .
“Her surgery was remarkable, I’ve never seen anyone, even a man, more deft and sure. Her reactions were quick, her decisions rapid and accurate, her reflexes amazing. The Japs have ruined her hands, they now shake badly.
“Our captors could never be still for long; they chose projects and then suddenly dropped them for no apparent reason. When they attacked Carl, though, they stayed with the idea until it is a miracle he wasn’t killed. They fought over him, dragged him around by his hair (his hands were bound together over his head) and all the time the whip never ceased lashing his back. His mouth was bleeding; blood came from his nose in spurts and bubbles. His knees were raw from being dragged back and forth over the sand and gravel; when one tired of the whip, another took over. They broke his teeth and ribs, and when he evacuated, they dragged him about in it. His pleading was pitiful, it was what might have been expected from a woman, in extreme pain and fear . . .
“When finally they tired of him, only Rico and I would touch him—the others turned away. We tried to clean him as best we could, but we had nothing to work with. Rico got some putrid water from a ditch, and we threw it over his buttocks. He was in a great deal of pain for some time—broken teeth and ribs, abrasions on his legs, his back practically flayed. And all the time he tried to explain himself, weeping and pleading incoherently. I don’t know what I pitied more, his condition of mind or body. He finally fell into an exhausted sleep. I think Rico was disgusted with him, but he has a big heart and like me was more charitable, because we felt pity at having had to watch—and we were forced to watch. Neither of us, after all, knew how we would react in his position. The Japs are past masters at reducing human beings . . .”
(Melville—1850—admits the East on board:
“With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.”
“For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn . . .
“. . . while the subordinate phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last . . . He has such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days, still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations . . .”
Carl:
“There was one tree in the yard and in it they hung by the wrists the women who were about to deliver; they tied strips of sheets between their legs, and left them hanging until they died. Those whose kids they had murdered just wandered around crying while their breasts swelled with milk, until some of them burst.
“They gave us nothing to drink and we were fed only salt pork, fish heads, and rice.”
(Columbus—who had set out in search of Cipango—sends a message back to the Sovereigns:
“. . . the greatest necessity we feel here at the present time is for wines and it is what we desire most to have . . . It is necessary that each time a caravel comes here, fresh meat shall be sent, and even more than that, lambs and little ewe lambs, more females than males, and some little yearling calves, male and female . . .”
“Thirst became an agony, until one man went berserk and grabbed a Chinese woman and started sucking her breast. She screamed and fought at first, until she realized that the pressure in her breasts was being relieved, and in a moment each of us had a woman, or half of one . . .
“The Japs laughed and capered around . . . they weren’t missing a trick. Mike, I wielded a whip on some of our own men, to save myself. I went down on my knees to those little brown bastards and did as they told me. I must have taken down a hundred of them . . .”
(Columbus:
“Thus, as I have already said, I saw no cannibals, nor did I hear of any, except in a certain island called Charis, which is the second from Española, on the side towards India, where dwell a people who are considered by the neighboring islanders as most ferocious: and these feed upon human flesh.”
(and elsewhere:
“The boys that they take they castrate; as we cause castration; because they become fatter for eating; and the mature men also, when they take them they kill them and they eat them: and they eat the intestines fresh and the extreme members of the body . . .”
Carl:
“Believe me, Mike, it was the warm milk—the horror of those days and nights, and the affection I had for him. He had been through so much, and when they shot the aphrodisiac into him and we heard what they intended, the Chinese doctor groaned again.
“Night fell, and Rico had thrown his beaten body off Concha’s a hundred times, and each time they threw him on her he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t appear to be afraid, even when some of the boys shouted at him to take her, that he couldn’t fight that drug. He shook like the ague, and kept his jaws clamped tight; his eyes burned, and he was so close to breaking that we all wondered how he held out. The Japs finally tired of that game and went inside for chow, and Rick stumbled off by himself . . .
“It was dark, and when I found him he was lying on his back, his arms rigid at his sides, the bloody nail-less fingers clenched. I ran my hands over his sweat-slick body . . .
“I had to hold his hips with both arms, he pitched so violently . . . I could feel my mouth tearing and my jaws breaking . . .”
(Ishmael, in MOBY-DICK—embedded with a cannibal:
“I looked at the grand and glorious fellow . . .”
“Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn to him.”
“For though I tried to move his arm—unlock his bridegroom clasp—yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part us . . .”
(Melville, elsewhere:
“The Anglo-Saxons—lacking grace
To win the love of any race;
Hated by myriads dispossessed
. . . —the Indians East and West.”
(and
“Asia shall stop her at the least,
That old inertness of the East.”
“Did you ever see a man die, Mike? The Japs made me beat Curley—one of our own boys—to death, and I guess that’s when I really lost my mind: I can’t help it, it was a wonderful sensation . . . they had kicked in his face first, until we couldn’t understand a word he said, but he pleaded and whimpered, and his wild, pain-racked eyes stared at me . . .
“Among the prisoners was a missionary family, who had a little girl about ten years old, fat, blue-eyed and blonde. The Japs thought it would hurt the parents more if they tortured the child, so they decided to rape her. They used a sword point to make her big enough . . . Dozens of them took her . . . she lay in a pool of blood, cried all the time, and never lost consciousness. We were all driven crazy—I doubt if any one had ever said an unkind word to her in her life, she just didn’t know what it was all about.
“After chow the Japs came back and decided to have more game with her. Rico didn’t have a square inch of skin on him that hadn’t been torn or burned, and he couldn’t get on his feet, but he crawled over to her, spoke to her quietly, and put his hands—burned and bleeding—on her neck. He put his head down on his arms . . . and in seconds, she was dead. The Chinese doctor felt her pulse, and then gently released Rico’s hands . . .
“The Japs never could stand being frustrated, they almost killed Rico for that gesture . . . I don’t know how he survived it. Blood trickled down his chin where he bit through his lip, and when they left him, he shook uncontrollably . . .”