Dragon of the Mangrooves (20 page)

Then he stuffed his uniforms, smeared with dust and dirt, into a haversack.

After he had packed his mess kit with the inner tray containing Hirono’s finger bone, his canteen, and his ammunition boots, he painstakingly tied the swollen haversack to the bamboo pole with a hempen cord. As the finishing touch, he attached his bayonet and a rubber pouch, keeping three precious grenades inside, to the belt of his fundoshi. Now all was ready. He inhaled deeply. The air filling his lungs was damp and smelled of saltwater. Nevertheless, it felt somewhat bracing.

Abruptly a stifling holler was heard from their right. “Fifth Platoon! Where is Fifth Platoon?”

One gaunt soldier threaded through the tree trunks and came running toward them. Tomita promptly responded, “Here we are! I’m the acting commander.”

Tomita eagerly threw his arm about and shook his white sash with another hand. The soldier could be an orderly dispatched belatedly by the company HQ.

He came up to Tomita and said, “I pass on an order from the company commander! All the Machine Gun Company should cross the creek and shift to Lamu by breaking through all the marshes in the opposite bank. If needed, all are allowed to occupy positions at Leikdaung Island on the way, assemble there, and destroy the pursuing enemy. Over!”

Although the wording sounded ridiculous, this meant that the crossing operation had gone into action. Kasuga swallowed his saliva and waited for instructions. He was in the middle of the tropics; nonetheless, the night air touching his naked body was so cold that he got goose bumps.

Tomita said seriously, “Hey, men! You fought well up to now. Though it ended up a retreat to our regret, you have nothing to feel ashamed of. Swim to the mainland, no matter what. Let’s go!”

Tomita had already gotten naked, save for his fundoshi. He put his pistol, tucked in a rubber pouch, on his head, wrapped a rag over his head and cheeks, and tied it up under his chin, which looked weird. With Tomita in the lead, every soldier stepped into the water without a word. Kasuga also followed. When his thigh soaked in the viscid saltwater, he felt the festering wound reopen. It should have been excruciatingly painful, but, strangely, no pain struck him; his senses had been paralyzed at the border between life and death.

As the water reached his throat, his feet automatically left the mud on the bottom. He clung to the bamboo pole and gave himself to the flow of Myinkhon Creek. The bank was already one hundred meters far behind when he looked back. He could vaguely see many figures of soldiers, going this way and that. A confused air hung over the waterside.

“Look sharp! Why don’t you swim properly?”

Urged by Tomita in a low voice, Kasuga started kicking the water. Then the throbbing pain of his thigh returned. Uncanny things, indistinguishable between seaweed and fish, sometimes touched his bare skin, making him shudder every time. He wanted to get out of the water as soon as possible.

Seventh Company was going ahead. He could see a group swimming skillfully with overhand strokes. Their spearhead had already melted away into the silent darkness toward the continent far in the distance. Kasuga thought some swimming experts in the vanguard were probably leading the whole company.

Suddenly, a stifling scream went up from the darkness.

It wasn’t as loud as it was deep and piercing. The grievous voice sounded like a cry for help. Kasuga and others in their column stopped swimming instinctively.

Someone had called out carelessly in the middle of the secret operation, breaking through enemy lines. It was unthinkably absurd behavior. An accusing voice slipped from someone’s lips on their right. “Oh, shit! What a stupid guy!”

“Did something serious happen to someone in the Seventh?” Kasuga asked himself. But the following event didn’t give him even a moment to think it about.

A whistle was heard from nowhere apparent, then a dazzling light quite unexpectedly flashed on in the left—an enemy searchlight, no doubt. A gunboat had been lurking somewhere in the creek. The white shaft of light immediately started scanning the area, and a great number of heads of Japanese soldiers emerged on the surface, as black as India ink.

“Sarge!” Kasuga uttered out of fear.

The staccato of a machine gun began roaring on his left, accompanied by the low-pitched exhaust. Tomita immediately warned his men in an unexpectedly louder voice than usual; even he seemed flustered. “They spotted us. They’ll kill us for sure if we keep swimming. Go back to the island! Then if you make it, dive inside as deep as you can. Don’t dawdle at the edge, or you’ll get riddled!”

Kasuga changed directions as he was told. He faced the bank, held tightly to the bamboo pole, and kicked the water frantically. Then another crack went up from behind, sounding like a high-pitched drum beat. He looked back and saw an object emitting blue light and wafting overhead. Bathed in the bright light of the parachute flare, an enemy barge, like the one he had witnessed two days before spitting countless streaks of fire indiscriminately in the middle of the creek, revealed itself. Agonizing screams of Japanese soldiers went up, mixed with the incessant clamor of the heavy machine gun roaring and the whistle shrieking.

Where in the world did the silence go? Now everything was maddening.

Almost panicked, Kasuga swam toward the bank for his life. He didn’t know when he had made it; he had been scuttling on all fours on the mud near a big tree when he noticed.

Already the creek was out of his view. But the enemy was raking through the area along the edge, as Tomita had said, and many streaks of colorfully sparkling tracers pierced the mangrove from behind. They were beautiful, but countless invisible bullets surely preceded each spark tail. Of course, everything would be over if any of them hit him.

“Come here, Mister Kasuga!”

It was the voice of First Class Private Tada. Straining his eyes, Kasuga managed to find two figures looming in front of the big tree. They were Tomita and Tada. Both were squatting and beckoning to him. Kayama, the ammo bearer, wasn’t with them. That fat, slow-footed soldier had likely gotten lost or killed already. Kasuga sidled up to them as fast as his legs could carry him. Having timed the enemy fire, the three ran further inland by using the trunks and roots of big trees as their cover.

Finally they made a clean escape deep into the sea of foliage, seemingly safe for the time being. Everyone had been too tired to speak when the tumult of war finally settled down. They didn’t see any other friends there, and they had no way to find anyone in the darkness.

“We lost the unit. We can do nothing but to wait here for daybreak,” Tomita said.

Then Kasuga was seized by deadly drowsiness. He pulled a dripping wet jacket out of his haversack, slipped it on, and lay down on the ground with his head pillowed on entangled, muddy roots. His energies were almost used up by the battle, which had lasted nearly a month.

“How wasteful it is to use what little strength I have left not in escape or combat, but in pulling back to the starting place!” Kasuga told himself. He fell into a deep sleep, despite being as wet as a drowned rat.

Kasuga had the dream of the dragon coming out of the water fountain at the Hachiman shrine again. As usual, he couldn’t move in front of the statue, which was wriggling to substantiate itself.

This time the dragon with the golden eyes began spurting fire from its mouth after it had come alive. He saw flares between the rows of sharp-pointed teeth wriggle and whirl lively, as if each were an animal itself. Suddenly one of those came at him across the air. Twining itself around his legs while he stood there in a daze, the flare rushed up to his head. He resigned himself to his fate and felt the fire scorching his whole body mercilessly.

Then he was released from the old dream and woke up. The mangrove where he lay was gloomy, even in the daylight. But still, he noticed several sunrays coming down almost vertically through the dense tree crowns. These bright patches mottled the mud on the ground, and a thin column of vapor rose from each spot.

He had apparently slept until nearly high noon. Gasping in stifling mugginess, he raised his upper body and found himself covered with sticky sweat. This tropical heat had likely caused his nightmares. Even so, he wondered why he had the same dream every so often. He supposed it might mean something important.

Then Kasuga put his lips to a hole drilled on his bamboo pole. The water inside was unexpectedly cool enough to moisten his throat, which revived him slightly.

Tomita and Tada had already awakened. Both men were so dirty that they looked like mud dolls. But Tomita worked to keep morale high. He had searched the area and had already found no less than twenty stray soldiers.

After the terrible confusion, the operation had ended in a miserable failure.

Numerous soldiers had probably been killed. Of course, some could have broken through the enemy patrol line and reached the continent. But most probably had no option but to pull back to the island like they did.

All the men whom Tomita picked up belonged to Fifth Company. Having

lost their unit as well, they had been wandering the mangrove since the day broke. There was a probationary officer among them. But this man who out-ranked all was no more than a fledgling, a student-turned-reserve-officer with no experience of actual warfare. Such a man must have had enough, having been thrown into the harsh crossing operation on the spur of the moment. He developed a mental disorder and seemed of no use as a commander. So a veteran sergeant, whose wiry and firm body reminded Kasuga of a steel bar, led the group instead. Those who were there then decided to try crossing the creek independently that night again, following discussions between Tomita and this sergeant.

The enemy would be patrolling there, as always. Everyone could tell the way was perilous enough. Nevertheless, they concluded the bungle of the massive mobilization all at once had caused the failure the previous night and assumed they could made it if they did it in small groups.

At first, Sergeant Steel Bar of Fifth Company insisted they should join up with Sixth Company and wage a guerilla war. But Tomita rejected it flatly, saying,

“What will you do if the enemy lands at Taungup? We’ll lose all the places we could even to shift to anymore. We’ll be isolated and deserted on all sides. In the first place, the regiment commander himself is urging us to get away from the island and come back.” Tomita was sticking to the evacuation plan, no matter what.

While the two sergeants argued, Kasuga toyed with a thought from the previous night’s events. One man accidentally let out a sound, and that caused the exposure of everyone. Was someone drowning from exhaustion on the way across? He closed his eyes and remembered the figures of the Seventh Company soldiers swimming with steady, powerful strokes. Many of the Second Battalion came from fishing villages, so they had a lot of good swimmers. Those who took on the vanguard should have been even better. Could they really have drowned so easily?

Then the puddle of jellied blood he had seen three days before crossed his mind, followed by the image of the white amputated leg—the remains of First Lieutenant Kishimoto, most likely. Those countless gashes on it must have been teeth marks. Further, the golden eye and the distinctive stench, like a mixture of mud with carrion, returned to him. The pitiful soldier might have suffered the same fate as Kishimoto.

The same terror he had felt in the mangrove at dusk struck him again. Kasuga believed everything was happening as he had feared. But the inference was too gruesome to accept easily, even though he drew it himself. In the middle of the sweltering and scorching heat, he couldn’t stop shivering.

Kasuga worried about food as well. In his haversack, he had kept nothing to eat except for several pieces of soggy, stale hardtack and about one liter of rice trans-ferred from the hollow of the bamboo. It seemed almost impossible for him to stretch those out for a week. Unable to put up with the heat, he had consumed all the water in the bamboo during the day. Now he had only a canteen-full of water left. The bamboo was empty. Nonetheless, he couldn’t discard it, since he learned from the experience the night before that he had to rely on its buoyancy to swim across that vast stretch of water.

Kasuga crawled between the entangled prop roots on his hands and knees, and caught a mudskipper and a crab in the early afternoon to save provisions. He dared to eat them raw, but both were too salty to be considered edible.

His shrapnel wound showed little improvement. The wound didn’t close a bit, and a considerable amount of pus was accumulating in it. He was worried it might get infested with maggots if things continued this way. But he had nothing to tend it with, because he had already run out of bandages.

Worse yet, he felt weak and sluggish; he might have had a relapse of malaria.

He couldn’t understand why he was gasping for breath in such a gloomy place.

Before he knew it, he was no longer concerned with his own resolution at the time of enrollment, or with the purpose of the holy war. His ability to think clearly was fading. So except for instinctive and momentary matters, nothing stimulated his brain now.

Tomita encouraged him, saying, “Kasu, don’t worry about food. I’ll hunt monkeys with my handgun when we really need it. But everything will be good after we get to the continent safely. You can even have your wound treated if only we can make it to Taungup. Anyway, concentrate on swimming in one piece now.”

Eating monkeys didn’t appeal much to Kasuga. But he smiled feebly and gave a vague nod.

On the other side, Tomita had devoted himself entirely to the escape. He had been scouting along the bank the whole day to find a suitable starting point. He thought it wouldn’t be very smart to leave the shore that night from the same point as the day before. That kind of vigor, never shown by Tomita previously, was so impressive that Kasuga wondered where his leader had kept such strength in reserve.

According to his survey, a confluence of Myinkhon Creek and a brooklet from Yanthitgyi lay about four kilometers south of the starting point of the day before.