Tears in the Darkness (32 page)

The guard laughed.
kii j
dan,
he came back. “Big joke.”
⁵⁵

 

FEET BLISTERED,
muscles worn from walking, most men sought sleep right away, but a few, dysphoric from hunger and thirst, wandered aimlessly about the compound calling for food and water and trampling the recumbent comrades at their feet.

“Bastard!” the trodden would yell. “Watch where you're walking, you son of a bitch.”

Here and there others huddled in small circles talking in whispers about what they'd witnessed on that day's march: the sergeant crushed by a tank, the colonel bayonetted belly to back.

The nights were cool, and in their clammy, sweat-soaked rags the men shook and shivered. “Bone weary,” Bernard FitzPatrick “fell into sleep as into a coma.” The sick and injured, meanwhile, lay there babbling or hallucinating, flies grazing the length of them and feeding on their wounds. Most men moaned in their sleep, a night song of torment that continued till dawn when guards came rushing into the compound swinging their wooden spirit sticks and kicking the men awake with their hobnail boots to resume what Ray Hunt had come to see as the “man-killing march.”
⁵⁶

“Bang
! Bang
!”
the guards shouted. Get up! “Count off.”

Getting to their feet, they ached. The damp ground left Ed Dyess so stiff his leg muscles had “set like concrete” and he could hardly straighten himself to stand.

Looking around and taking stock, the men who survived the night began to count those who had not—ten, fifteen, thirty. (Dying in their sleep, the survivors agreed, was the only kindness any of them were likely to get.) Dead from dysentery, exhaustion, dehydration, and malaria,
the bodies lay in heaps. Flies, roundworms, and maggots picked at their eyes and crawled in and out of their mouths and noses.

“Oh God,” said Lester Tenney, shuddering at the sight, “please have mercy on their poor souls.”
⁵⁷

 

IN MANY COMPOUNDS
the Japanese left the bodies where they were, and it wasn't long before they started to decompose. By the time the next group of prisoners arrived, the reek of these rotting grotesques had mingled with the stench from the swamped latrines, and the compounds became unbearable.

“For sure, I'm [going to] go mad,” Richard Gordon thought.
⁵⁸

In other pens the prisoners were ordered to bury their dead, but as the gravediggers started to collect the inert figures from the muck, they discovered that many were still drawing breath, men too wasted to move or speak, the near dead, blank faced and empty eyed, unconscious and slipping away.

At a compound in Orani, a burial detail came upon three of these comatose souls and started to carry them to a nearby shed, a makeshift infirmary. A Japanese sergeant, standing next to a row of freshly dug graves, halted the litters, tipped the stretchers into the open holes, and ordered the prisoners digging the holes to bury these men along with the dead. Suddenly, one of unconscious men came to his senses, and when he realized what was happening to him, he reached up, grabbed the edge of hole with both hands, and pulled himself to his feet. One of the guards barked an order at one of the gravediggers, a Filipino, but the digger just stood there. Angry now, the guards put their bayonets to the Filipino's throat, then, as Ed Dyess watched, the Filipino “brought his shovel down upon the head” of the man in the hole. The man toppled “backward to the bottom of the grave,” indifferent now to the dirt the diggers were throwing on top of him.
⁵⁹

Captain Burt Bank of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was forced to bury a man alive, and so was Robert Levering. Bernard FitzPatrick watched two Americans inter an unconscious friend, and Murray Sneddon looked on as two of his comrades were forced to drag a delirious Filipino into a grave.

In Lester Tenney's group, when two diggers refused to bury a malarial comrade alive, a guard shot one of them, then ordered the other man to bury the malaria patient together along with the man who'd just been
shot. When he felt the dirt hit him, the sick man started screaming. Lester Tenney watched all this as long as he could, then he hid his face in his hands and threw up on himself. “Is this what I'm staying alive for?” he thought.
⁶⁰

 

NORTH AGAIN.
Always north. No sense of time, no sense of place, no sense of purpose. On the road all that mattered was to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, left, right, left, until the guard yelled
Yosu!
“Stop!”

Even the strongest and most fit among them felt enfeebled, and as they marched from Balanga north to Orani, they stumbled along, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, the columns yawing to and fro in unison, automatons in slow step.

By midmorning the sun was on them again, baking their brains and filling their eyes with an aura. It was like “looking through a fog,” they said, or a veil of tears.

The heat left them dull witted, etherized. Men would find themselves passing through this town or that with no sense, no memory at all, of how they had gotten there. And these blackouts, these stupors, frightened them. Were they just sunstruck, hallucinating from the heat, or did the spells of catatonia suggest something much more serious?
⁶¹

They dream-walked, many of them. Murray Sneddon shut his eyes and imagined himself on “a clean mattress with snow-white sheets.” Many a man envisioned a waterfall spilling over rocks or a cool green valley filled with wildflowers and meadowlarks.
⁶²

Such drift was dangerous. A few cataleptics came to at the point of a Japanese bayonet. So some of the men played mind games to keep awake. Ernie Miller pictured a calendar and started checking off the days. January 1, 1942, January 2, always pausing to reflect on the holidays or days with special meaning. By the time he got to September 1, the sun was setting and that day's walking was done. Lester Tenney concentrated on the image of his wife, Laura (he still had that photo tucked in his sock). Robert Levering had grown up on a farm in Ohio, and as he walked the blistering road, he imagined himself a boy again, following behind a plow, his bare feet enfolded “in the fresh, cool furrows.”
⁶³

 

BEN STEELE
would not allow himself to drift.

This was no nightmare with bugbears chasing him up the road. The
beatings, shootings, and stabbings were real, and he knew he wasn't going to wake from them.

Here was a blond-haired boy half collapsed on the shoulder, desperately trying to push himself to his knees, and here came a Jap to finish him. The boy groaned, that's all, just groaned as the bastard stuck him in the back.

Turn away, Ben Steele thought. Turn away from the horror and hurt of it. Just another corpse by the side of the road.

No room for loathing or hate. A Jap spits in your face, so what? To hell with the bastard. Just keep walking, he told himself. “Make the best of it.”

Men were still clawing at him for water, but by the time he had reached Balanga, walked some thirty miles, he'd become selfish with his can.

Sure, he could sympathize with a guy and want to help him, but he'd been carrying that water all day, careful not to spill a drop of it, and the can held only enough to last a couple of hours.

“It's survival of the fittest,” he thought. “You gotta look out for yourself.”

 

WHEN WAR CAME
to Bataan, the
tao,
the local people, at first fled and scattered. Some wanted to stay close to their herds and crops and hid in the fields and fishponds until the shooting stopped and they could return to what was left of their homes. Thousands of others abandoned their barrios and fled south down the Old National Road to an “evacuation center” that the Americanos had set up at Mariveles. The rest of the people, townsfolk, most of them, packed what they could carry and headed for the hills. A few had a rough idea where they were going, but by and large the rugged hill country was terra incognita, and they soon became lost.
⁶⁴

“The Japanese are there, walk this way.”

“No, compadres, you will run into the
Hapón
if you go that way.”

So they just kept hiking, kept climbing into the wooded hills, until they were sure they were safe. They built lean-tos or sought shelter in caves and under outcroppings. In the morning half-light they came out of hiding to cook a meal over a campfire, then slipped back into their warrens until dark when they could emerge again and sit together in a circle, staring at the stars and the explosions that were lighting up the night.

In the hills they had little to eat—banana stalks and papaya leaves cut into strips and boiled, and rice, dirty rice, they made into
lugao,
a kind of watery gruel. They got sick in the hills, dysentery at first, then malaria. The little ones suffered the most. At first they were colicky, then listless, then still, very still. Their parents cried over the bodies (quietly), said prayers, wrapped them in rags, and buried them there. No funeral Mass, no burning incense, no stone to mark the grave.
Bahalâ na,
they told themselves, come what may they would leave it to God.

The thousands of refugees who had fled south to the evacuation center at Mariveles fared no better. Their crowded camp was in the open and they were bombed by the Japanese. So many were killed (how many no one could say), it took four days to gather the dead. After surrender the Japanese ordered the refugees out. Go home, they said. Walk north, north up the Old National Road.

The road was crowded. Long columns of prisoners,
sundalos,
on one side, a steady stream of refugees on the other. The parade of people was so long, Rosalina Cruz could not see either its beginning or end.

Ay! Susmariosep!
Oh, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, she said, crossing herself. There were so many of them.

When war came to her home on Bataan, Rosalina Almario Cruz was sixteen years old and pregnant. She and her young husband lived with her family (her father, mother, brother, and five sisters) in Bagac, a seaside town on Bataan's west coast. Her father and husband were away when the shooting started and were cut off from home, so Rosalina's mother, following the lead of her neighbors, took her family into the hills, then a few weeks later led them south to the evacuation center. Now they were walking north toward Orani, thirty-three miles up the Old National Road, there to find a boat that might take them to Manila and the rest of their kin.