Tears in the Darkness (46 page)

One day, one of the prisoners who occasionally wandered over to watch (the “artist” from Montana had become something of an attraction) started going on about “angles” and “edges” and “lines of convergence.” Ben Steele asked the man what he was talking about. “Perspective,” the man said. He was an engineer, and like all engineers he'd been trained as a draftsman. Every sketch, he said, needed depth and distance, and the way to create the feeling of depth was to find a drawing's “vanishing point.”

Okay, vanishing point. What was that?

By mid-December Ben Steele was able to stand and take a few steps. Pretty soon he could make his way across the compound to the ward where the engineers slept. Every few days he took another lesson in “picture planes” and “eye level.” His teachers were patient. They explained that all the lines in a sketch should run to a point of convergence, the point where the lines vanish from sight. Vanishing point, they told him, was the secret to creating perspective, and perspective was the magic he was looking for.

He practiced every day. One day, sitting cross-legged on his new bunk, a sleeping platform fashioned from scraps of wood, he decided to draw the interior of Ward 11. The ward was an L-shaped building with plenty of angles and vanishing points. He drew them all, every pillar, crossbeam, joist, rafter, and brace. And afterward, sitting back and looking at what he'd wrought, he thought, “Hell, everything worked! Worked beautifully.” It was like, well, “a revelation.”

He kept at it, one sketch after another, convinced that it was art (along with a timely duck egg, many cups of mongo beans, and doses of quinine,
carbasone, emetine, and sulfa powder) that had saved him. Here, he thought, was “a way to put all this other misery aside.” All he had to do was take up a pencil and start to draw, draw his way around his disease, past the guards, over the wall, and across an ocean home.

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” December 6
] Some lousy rumors got abroad today—of no value whatsoever. Usual hooey . . . They are the same rumors [we] have heard a dozen times before, and each time proven childish banter. But each time hope springs in the human breast that “this time, it may be right.”
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“The hope of ultimate release” is “part of the will to live,” wrote Terrence Des Pres, a chronicler of survival. And every day in Bilibid, every single day, this particular hope got a boost from rumor.
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Every prison, barbed-wire pen, and work site in the islands had a rumor mill. The grist for these grinders came from any number of radios hidden in Filipino homes and tuned either to KGEI in San Francisco or other distant English-language stations. Civilians with news would throw messages wrapped around rocks over Bilibid's outer wall. Merchants allowed to trade with the prisoners, Filipino clergy visiting Bilibid, and other interlopers also passed along the latest bruit and buzz. Occasionally this “news” had some truth to it, but the mongers in Bilibid who purveyed scuttlebutt could not resist the temptation to embellish it. Many men, desperate for the least bit of light, hung on every word of this nonsense. Tom Hayes, Bilibid's resident cynic, listened and laughed.

The dope is “Big things to happen in Luzon in a matter of hours,” implying arrival of an American Force. Of course that is plain unadulterated hooey . . . To bed before I begin to think.

Scuttlebutt began to flow about hearing bombings about midnight last night . . . If the [rumors] keep on as they have in the past few days they will have MacArthur calling up from the Manila Hotel and inviting us to lunch in about a week.

The last wild rumor of the day comes in that Wall Street bets 2 to 1 the war will end in November, Lloyd['s of London] bets 29 to 1 it will end in December.

Gobs of rumors . . . Formosa has fallen and Hirohito is asking Roosevelt to permit Tokyo to be an open city. My! My! [Or] Hirohito has
requested that Roosevelt keep Tokyo an open city and Roosevelt is supposed to have replied “Get out of Manila.”
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Just beyond their ken, of course, the actualities of war were playing out across two oceans. For the first six months of 1942, the Tripartite Pact countries, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the so-called Axis powers, had pushed the Allies, the Americans, British, French, and Dutch, off their colonial possessions and out of their overseas bases. Allied losses were heavy: 894 ships sunk and more than 192,600 American, British, and Dutch soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen captured (along with at least another 100,000 native troops under their command).

Then, in May, as General Wainwright was surrendering to the Japanese on Corregidor, the American Navy, steaming in the waters between Australia and New Guinea, won a strategic victory at the battle of the Coral Sea, the first serious challenge to Japanese advances in the Pacific. In Europe, meanwhile, the British increased their air raids over Germany, and a thousand Royal Air Force bombers raided Cologne.

In June, Germany and the Axis rolled over the British in North Africa, but in the Pacific at the sea battle of Midway, a tiny atoll held by the Americans, the American Pacific Fleet sank four Japanese aircraft carriers in a dramatic victory.

The next month the Japanese consolidated their position on New Guinea, but again the Americans were able to mount an offensive and bomb Japanese possessions in the Solomon Islands, including Guadalcanal.

In August, the Allies suffered a setback as six thousand British and Canadian troops tried to conduct a surprise raid on Dieppe in occupied France; half were slaughtered and the survivors were lucky to escape. Meanwhile, U.S. Marines in the Pacific landed on Guadalcanal, built an airfield, and held it.

The year ended with the Japanese being beaten and pushed back in the South Pacific. On New Guinea and Guadalcanal,
hohei
fell in great numbers.

[
Hayes, “Notebook,” January 2, 1943].
Thirty eight Jap bombers went over today. Couldn't tell from our site, of course, whether they were coming in or going out. Probably for the south. Cold in the early mornings now.
We stand bango long before day break . . . I am reminded that this is 1943, and as I recall, the year Mr. Churchill had decided upon as when Britain would make her offensive.

The greens, the water lilies and pechay [Chinese cabbage] are still shoveled out of a truck on delivery to our galley. And they still stink and are cluttered and mixed with egg shells and other debris that plainly tell its source as being some slop chute or hotel garbage barrel. It makes no difference if we refer to it as “greens in the garbage” or “garbage in the greens” it is still garbage, but they are still greens—and we eat it.
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They had been prisoners of war, most of them, for more than half a year now, and like all convicts across time, they had come to accept what Dostoevsky called the “drab, sour and sullen aspect” of life behind bars and barbed wire. They lived on hope because hope was all they had. And they sat around all day speculating about the date of their deliverance and composing anapestic epigrams to cheer themselves.
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We'll be free in '43

Mother's door in '44

Men lost hope, of course. In the squalor of prison life and throes of disease, a number of the sick just gave up. Irwin Scott could see it in their eyes, “dull eyes,” he and other patients used to call it, eyes that went “blank.”
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“It's like you can look right through them,” Scotty thought, “and you know they are going to die.”

So Scott and some of his comrades tried to cheer the cheerless, sit and talk with them, tell them anything—MacArthur has landed on Mindanao and will be in Manila in a week!—“all kinds of lies” just to get their comrades to continue. All the talk “seldom did a damn bit of good,” however. Once a man had lost his will to live, he usually surrendered his life. “Three days,” Scott discovered. “Every damn one of them dies in three days.”

Friends never let friends die alone. Steve Kramerich's Air Corps buddy Kenny O'Donald was debilitated by dysentery and could not shake the disease. And when O'Donald died in the Isolation Ward, Kramerich was sitting at his side.

“He looks like a hide stretched over a skeleton,” Steve Kramerich thought. “If his mother and father could see him, they would never stop crying.”
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SOMETIMES
camaraderie is based on compassion, one man seeing his suffering, or abject loneliness, in another.

Zoeth Skinner struck up a friendship with Bobby Robinson, an aging civilian who had been in the Philippines most of his adult life and was a patient with Skinner on Ward 1. Robinson had served during the Spanish-American War and had stayed in the islands, working as the manager at one of Manila's most famous gin mills, the Legaspi Landing. By 1941 he'd survived two Filipina wives, married a third, and had a handful of children of various ages. Despite nearing his dotage (some of the men guessed he was going on seventy), he reenlisted at the beginning of the war, reassumed his old rank as a first sergeant in the 31st Infantry, fought in the battle for Bataan, and made the march off the peninsula, the sixty-six-mile trek that killed men a third his age.
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Skinner liked and admired Robinson; with his gray grizzle and rimless eyeglasses, he looked somehow wise, authentic. Both men were classified as convalescents and had been assigned to light work sorting POW mail at Japanese headquarters. The headquarters was two blocks from the prison, and every morning, as the two walked the route with a guard, they saw Robinson's third wife standing at the curb outside the front gate, holding his youngest child high for him to see. Robinson always stopped to look before moving on, and every morning, Zoeth Skinner noticed steam on the old man's glasses and tears rolling down the old man's cheeks.

 

FOR MONTHS
“the laity” as Tom Hayes liked to call the men on the wards, had been awaiting the arrival of mail from home and food packages from the International Red Cross. Patients working the docks (convalescents strong enough to do manual labor were drafted as stevedores) reported unloading pallets of cartons marked with the Red Cross logo and labeled “Prisoners Parcel” or “For American Prisoners of War.” So where, the men wondered, had those packages got tor

Every occupying army has profited while doing its “duty,” and some of the Americans in Bilibid knew that a certain amount of these “relief
supplies” were going to end up in the pockets of Japanese soldiers or as goods on the local black market. And sure enough, in the early winter of 1942 some of the guards were seen smoking American cigarettes.

“It will be very interesting to see how much of [the shipment] we get,” Hayes wrote in his secret notebooks. “Entire cases are taken by the guards at the pier and of course, every agency handling them gets their cut.”
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Finally, a week after Christmas 1942, the eleven-pound boxes, along with some mail and medical supplies and vitamins, were distributed to the various work sites and prisoner of war pens throughout the islands, and since Bilibid was so close to the docks, the prisoners in the hospital were among the first to get the boxes.

Ben Steele was excited, the whole ward was, guys ripping open their packages, laughing and joking and spreading the contents on their bunks:

 

 

Ben Steele grabbed a chocolate bar. He peeled the wrapper from the end, bit off a corner, and let the candy slowly roll around in his mouth. (Save the rest of the bar, he told himself. No telling when, or if, they'd get another package.)

Then he eyed the margarine. How long had it been since he'd tasted butter? He stuck his finger in the can, smeared a gob on a cracker. God, was that good!

Around him guys were swapping for their favorites.

“Anyone want to trade butter for some coffee?” Ben Steele asked.

And right away he had a taker.

“How about cigarettes?” he asked, “I'm giving cigarettes for spam.”

Everyone knew that these few supplies would not last long. With some prudent self-rationing, they might stretch the contents several weeks and augment their regular daily ration, but after a month or so they would be right back to their cups of verminous rice, spoiled fish, vegetable peelings, and a handful of peanuts in the cup of sewer water they called soup.

Still, Ben Steele was happy. There were plenty of prisoners, Tom Hayes among them, who thought Bilibid a hell on earth, a place of “doubt, depression, disappointment, diversified disease, hunger, hate, heat, pestilence, poor prospects [and] pauperized prisoners.”
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Not Ben Steele. He didn't mind the dank adobe and dim barracks, the foul emanations of his bedfellows, the clock whose hands never moved. He was doing all right. Most of his swelling was gone. The rest was just a matter of time. He was still weak, still sick, and he was hungry all the time—who the hell wasn't?—but, on balance, he thought, “Bilibid is the best damn prison I've been in so far.” Roof over his head, wooden bunk, guards more annoying than anything else. And the doctors, the doctors had brought him back to life. Dr. Lambert still stopped by to check on him, chat with him. Kind of like a father. (“I think I will always worship that man,” he told himself.) All he had to do was get better, then live day to day until the day the war was over. Wait, that was the thing, just wait.
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