Naked Earth (39 page)

“No, this truck’s being repaired,” somebody called out above the confused clamor. “This is a wrecked truck.”

A
kan-pu
ran up shouting to the mechanics to put out the light. Then he switched to pidgin Korean. It did not get him anywhere. The men went on working, probing about with their flashlights.

“Sure, they’re North Koreans,” the
kan-pu
fumed. “That’s what they always do—get the repair men out here before us. On our trucks with government certificates and everything. Repair them and just drive them away. Gets us into an awful hole—you can account for wrecked trucks but how do you account for the ones that just disappear?”

Those of the soldiers who did not catch what he said were still cursing the drivers. “I’d give anything not to have the trucks along! Always them that get the planes on us.”

Then a faint shout rose among the men as a plane came straight at them out of nowhere, a small plane flying lower than usual. The high hills here were usually in the way, especially at night.

The flares it dropped descended slowly, one after the other. The men scattered, spilling over the slope down the side of the road. Liu fell face downward in the stinking water of the paddies. The vehicles had to stay where they were in the middle of the road, awaiting their fate. The two Party members assigned to each vehicle saw to it that the driver carried out his co-existence or co-destruction pact with his vehicle.

Out of the stillness a
kan-pu
called out, “All right, you men. Let’s get going.” Liu lifted his head and heard the plane zoom away. Not a jet, he recognized with relief. Just an observation plane. They often went away after dropping flares. They did a lot of things he did not try to understand, like retreating all this way down south when they had apparently been winning the war.

The big green pearly lamps hung suspended in mid-air, scarcely seeming to fall, tear-like in their transparency against the pale lit-up sky. Until now he had been too tense to realize how nice it was lying down. He let his head drop back on his arms and heard his breath bubbling in the water. In his sudden exhaustion he did not mind the filth, feeling like a small boy sucking up orange juice through a straw and ejecting it back into the glass to make it last. A moment later he was up and staggering back to the road.

The short rest had finished him. He joggled along, a looseknit bundle, consisting of just his pack and his various aches and sores, about to fall apart. It seemed to him a long time but they could not have gone ahead for fifteen minutes when it happened.

The first plane was upon them ahead of its sound so that the first warning was the spurts of dirt raised by machine-gun bullets. Men dropped all around him. Liu joined the rush for the field. The cartdrivers and grooms and artillery men struggled to pull the carts and big guns as much to the side of the road as was possible.

There was a tearing howl of sound as the jet screamed up again and almost instantaneously a second plane dove on them, with the terrifying cry of metal in pain. The Party members guarding the trucks were yelling above the loud yammer of machine guns, “
Ch’ung ah! Ch’ung ah!
Rush it! Rush it!” urging the drivers to swerve off the road and make a dash for safety outside the illuminated area. More flares had been dropped by more planes—so many of them that the pulsing hum overhead sounded very odd. The flares hung in the air forming an ellipse, covering an area of at least five or six miles. They burst into greenish blue chrysanthemums of light. The desolation of churned and pitted earth with a few charred trees was lit up brighter than day. It was a strange dawn on another planet.

A truck drove into the shrieking crowd and overturned, crashing into a gully. The screams of the fleeing men sounded almost exhilarated as though they were running for cover in a sudden shower. Another plane, diving with its machine-gun fire thudding into the tangled heap, was answered by scattered rifle shots. Shooting was permitted during air-attacks. Another truck rushed by and more shots banged out after it. The men hated the trucks and in this confusion anything went.

Liu lay in a gully, his head against a boulder. The whirling buzz of a circling plane drilled painfully deep into him. Then the bomb fell thundering.

In the complete blackout he had enforced within himself, it took him a moment to make up his mind he was not dead. He opened his eyes. A rain of dust and earth was still falling, slithering over him. The quivering wails and groans of the wounded sounded like they were less than ten yards away.

By now it was relatively quiet except for the howling fury of swooping planes and chattering machine guns. The man beside Liu had the hem of his blouse thrown over his head. Liu could hear his muffled sobs. Some of the schoolboys were all piled up in a heap for protection. Others kept crawling about, always feeling that it was not safe where they were.

There was a new sound, a stream of broad thick slapping sounds, heavy, less rapid, less sure and smooth than machine guns. Liu raised his head and saw that an anti-aircraft gun had been set up in the watercourse just off the road. The crew dropped flat as a plane dove on the gun, then leaped up to load shells and fire at the next plane. A hit! Caught in the merciless web of the search lights, the silvery-blue jet spurted into an arrow of flame and slanted toward the ground. Half a mile away it crashed into a mushroom of yellow-red flame and black smoke.

Before they could cheer, another plane dove to avenge its mate. Liu heard the zip of rockets and buried his head in his arms. When the crackle of explosions stopped, he raised his head again. Under the light of the flares he could see that the gun was out of action, half turned from its carriage. One man on the gun still twitched his legs where he lay; the rest of the crew had been tossed into contorted positions that showed all too plainly that they were dead.

Bombs were dropping farther down the road. But now the grating buzz of a circling plane was again boring into him, concentrated, like a dentist’s drill. Then came the complete blank of anticipation before the deafening boom. Somebody seemed to have tumbled over him. Then he knew that he had been hit. The realization bumped heavily against his ribs. He was dazed and couldn’t tell where, but the pain began to saw away heavily at his dulled consciousness.

He had no idea how long the bombardment lasted. Time seemed to have stopped for him several times when he screamed loud enough. Then the eternal yowling swish of planes and rumbling and sweeping rat-tat-tat went on again.

Once he opened his eyes to find a face on the ground looking vaguely at him, one check pressed against the earth. The spotty young face was a thin oval with fine regular features. But it was just a face. Back of the ears there was nothing. It must be that the blast of a bomb had flung the youth into the gully. All that was left of his body was the blood-smeared gray skeleton, armless with just the left ribs and hip and leg bones. The narrowness and continuity gave him an elongated, crawling look. And his lips were slightly parted as if in a half smile. Liu could not help thinking of these old stories about snakes with human heads, beautiful and smiling. He tried not to look at it.

It was close to dawn when the planes finally stopped coming. Immediately an uproar broke out. “Forty-eighth section! Over here! Over here!” “Platoon Commander Chu, the Deputy Instructor is wounded!” “This way, Thirty-ninth Section! Where are the others? Where’s the Instructor?” These were the ones who had emerged unscathed. There was a glad ring in their keyed-up shouts. They made more noise than hawkers at a country fair. To Liu, lying there listening to it, all the noise and gaiety were so exclusive he could not stand it.

A wounded man shrieked and then, all in the same breath, bawled out, “Anybody tell me again that the enemy’s a paper tiger, I’ll
f
—– his ancestors!”

“I knew I was going to get it this time,” another man said. “
Ma ti
, this war is certainly not the same as the Civil War! Never saw so many planes in all my life. And where are our planes? You see pictures of so many planes flying over Peking for Mao Tse-tung. Why can’t he spare us a few here? Just get us out here to
sung ssu
, send us to our death, that’s all.”

The
kan-pu
bustled about herding the soldiers together and salvaging the supplies in the vehicles. They told the wounded to wait quietly for the stretchers. When one of the wounded men started to call Mao names and professed dishonorable intentions toward the great man’s mother, a
kan-pu
stopped and said to him, “This comrade here—you mustn’t say things with no principle. It’s an honor to
kua ts’ai
, wear the red sash. You just have to be patient and wait for the stretcher.”

“
Ma ti
, nothing but a whole load of face-towels,” a man said disgustedly. They were swarming all over the wrecked trucks grabbing what they could. “What’s in there? Looks like tins.”

“Hey, what have you got there?”

“Don’t tell me there’s nothing but cotton wool in this one!”

Soon order was restored. Liu could not see the road from where he lay but he heard them marching off with what was left of the rumbling carts. It was dawn. The brush-like poplars up on the hill across the road were still smoking.

Nobody was supposed to use the road in daytime. But Liu heard people passing by in small groups of three or four. He knew they were nightblind cases who, being old warriors, did not have to pay strict attention to certain rules and refused to be threatened or cajoled into marching at night. Hiking comfortably by daylight they could easily catch up with their units before it got dark. Liu listened to them chatting as they went by, sounding just like travellers on a country road on a fine day in early summer. He looked up stupidly at the bright blue sky traced with wisps of white clouds. He wondered again where he had been hit, but the merciful daze still held him in its grasp. Besides, he was afraid to explore with his hand for the wound.

Once a group of them stopped to cut a big piece of flesh off the hind leg of a dead mule. Where the ground dropped away over the side of the road, the corpses and dead horses and mules piled up higher than the road level.

“Mule meat is too tough for my teeth,” said one of the men.

“That’s because you don’t know how to cook it right,” said his companion. “Last time we accepted the advice of the Fourth Field comrades and it turned out very tender. Just put a little urine in the stew. Tastes all right. Good and salty and no queer smell.”

Some of the other wounded called out to them asking about stretchers but received no answer. Liu did not try to speak to them. It would only make him feel that nobody could see or hear him, like a ghost who did not know he was dead and kept rapping futilely, angrily, on the glass that separated him from the living.

He was also afraid to call out. He was feeling weak and faint and he had heard that sometimes they just ran a bayonet through the serious cases.

The gully was steaming hot in the noon sun. He dozed off, lying face downward on the scorching gravel, his cheek pressed against a cramped arm. Then the pain would jerk him back sharply into consciousness. He drank from his water can and managed to get some
ch’ao mien
out of his long pouch. But the pain of the exertion made him vomit and he could not get any of it down. The smiling face several yards away was changing color and beginning to smell.

When night fell there was more firing in the distance and more traffic on the road. But the stretcher-bearers did not turn up. If there were wolves and wild dogs in Korea surely they would be coming, Liu thought, with so many corpses about. It started to drizzle again. In the blackness and the slight rustle of rain it was difficult not to imagine that the smiling face had inched up closer to him. The stench was certainly much stronger now. He fell into a pain-dulled stupor, more like a coma than sleep.

In the morning, in his intervals of consciousness, he noticed that there were no nightblind men travelling on the road. It seemed terribly quiet without them. Later he thought he heard the spatter of machine guns coming from at least two directions. They never did any machine-gunning in daytime, as far as he knew. Unless these were air attacks.

The big guns were steadily going carrump, carrump. The firing increased and drew closer by nightfall but somehow he felt less worried by it.

He had not given up hope of the stretcher-bearers’ coming, knowing how hard it was to find transportation. A delay of several days was not unusual. His only fear was that he would be unconscious when they came and they would miss him, taking him for dead.

That night he saw the flicker of flashlights being turned on and off in the hills. They were searching for the wounded over on the ridge. Then they crossed the road and came down into the field. By now there weren’t many people screaming for stretchers. But he had made it.

All the stretchers were concentrated in a spot at the roadside while they waited for the trucks to come up. They took the weapons and cartridge belts away from everybody but one of the men refused to be disarmed. After two days and a night of great pain and feeling deserted by the world he trusted nothing except his grenade belt.

There was an argument. The
kan-pu
was afraid to use force. “We have orders from above to turn in all your weapons,” he told the man.

“What sort of
t’a ma ti
orders? You nag some more and your dad’ll kill the whole lot of you! I’m through anyway.”

Four trucks came for them. Three soldiers picked him up and swung him into a truck. The road was so bumpy, Liu nearly passed out from the jolting and tumbling. But it felt good to return to the human world. The jolting got worse when the truck suddenly put on speed. The men were sliding about, trying to hold on to the sides of the truck-frame and crying out in dismay. Liu hoisted himself up, turning around with difficulty to look out of the rear opening of the canvas cover. The sky was pale with green flares and he could hear the planes humming overhead above the rattle of the engine.