Tears in the Darkness (41 page)

They drove for hours along the western shore of Laguna de Bay, then stopped for the night at a lime kiln outside San Pablo. The next afternoon they boarded railroad flatcars, heading south and east, across the neck of land that connects the main part of Luzon island to the wild uplands and jungle wastes of the rugged Bicol peninsula.

The train rolled slowly through the lush countryside, across the day and into a bright moonlit night, a good night, Louis Kolger thought, to escape.

“That guard is going to be nodding off and I'm going to jump this train,” he told himself. He watched and waited, one hour, two, three. Then he felt his eyes get heavy. Suddenly it was morning and the guard he'd been watching was yelling for the prisoners to get off the train.

They had been traveling for almost three days. Half the men appeared weaker than when they started. And now, the Japanese were ordering them to start walking.

Five men were so sick their comrades had to carry them on litters fashioned from old doors. Other men, meanwhile, were made to shoulder sacks of rice and crates of canned goods. And the guards ordered a score of prisoners to carry their bulky packs and heavy equipment.

The prisoners had no idea where they were, no idea where they were going. Just before they got off the train, one of the men had seen a road sign for the town of Calauag. Calauag? That was in southeastern Luzon off the main part of the big island, more than 155 miles from Manila on the way to nowhere.

 

BEN STEELE
had a temperature of 103° (the navy doctors at the school would have held him back had it been two degrees higher). Walking north on a winding one-lane dirt-and-gravel road through the thickly wooded jungle of southern Luzon, he could feel his temperature spiking, his temples throbbing, his face burning with fever.

They walked through the afternoon and into the night. The moon came up and turned the jungle silver, a place of dark shapes and shadows. They were in hill country, that much they could tell. Up one slope, down the next, then up another. Waves of hills.

Ben Steele was tired and so were the others. They kept switching off on the litters, stopping to adjust their Japanese packs. No one said much. Most of them were too weary to talk, too sick. The guards, for the most part, let them be, content with the pace, tolerant of the frequent stops.

Five miles, ten, fifteen. The sky was turning from silver to steel blue then gray as banks of monsoon clouds rolled in from the south.

They had forded a number of rivers and creeks and now they came to another, spanned by a small wooden bridge. Crossing the bridge the guards turned the column left, parallel to the river, then down through the underbrush to the riverbank and downstream another two hundred yards to a large, flat point bar of rocks at a bend in the river below the bridge.

The rock bar was wide and long. It ballooned out from the shore some 30 feet into the river and stretched roughly 125 feet along the shore. Behind the rock bar was a dirt and grass embankment, the beginning of the dark green jungle. All along the river, a wall of trees leaned out ominously over the water.

The weary and bedraggled group put their loads down on the rocks and looked around. There was nothing there. No bamboo buildings, no nipa shacks, no canvas tents. Nothing but the rocks under their feet, the shallow, slow-moving river at their front, the deep green jungle at their backs.

“Is this the end of the trail?” someone said.

“Where are we going?” another man shouted. “What the hell is going on?”

Ben Steele thought, “This must be just a place to stay overnight, a campsite. We're going to move on to another place.”

Then the gray sky turned black and it started to pour.

“There's nowhere to get out of the rain,” Ben Steele thought. “This isn't good.”

 

THE RUGGED RAIN-SWEPT BICOT PENINSUTA
is really a jumble of sub-peninsulas, isthmuses, and islands—volcanic derelicts that spread out eastward from Luzon's southern end. In every season tropical storms soak Bicol's sharp peaks and rocky hills, and in the years leading up to the war, the tropical rain forest was tall and thick, a place Joseph Conrad would have called “a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black,” baked by a “fierce” sun that made its wild groves “glisten and drip with steam.”
²

To be sure, there were towns and villages in Bicol, occupied mostly by migrants from Luzon's crowded cities, but there weren't many of them, and since much of the terrain was inhospitable and uninhabitable, the majority of locals lived on less than 10 percent of the land, farmers and foresters, most of them, leaving the rest of the peninsula a silent and teeming wilderness.

The Japanese had arrived on the peninsula during their second landing, coming ashore at points between Atimonan and the southern city of Legaspi, the terminus of the Manila railroad. The peninsula was important to them; there were iron mines in the area and some of the interior plains were suitable for airfields. The problem was the roads. Most were seasonal. Route 1G, for example, from Calauag north along Bicol's westernmost shoreline, seemed to stop in the middle of the jungle a mile or so north of the Basiad River.

Most of the Japanese heavy equipment, bulldozers and earth movers, were tied up elsewhere on Luzon repairing and extending airfields, so
any clearing of jungle, any taking off hills and filling depressions—the work of road building—would have to be done with pick and shovel. “Work for captives, work for prisoners of war. And so on May 21, a clerk in the Japanese military bureaucracy in Manila sent a requisition to the Japanese headquarters building at Camp O'Donnell asking for three hundred prisoner-laborers to build a section of road that would link Route 1G out of Calauag—the Old Tayabas Road—to the highway coming up from Legaspi. Three hundred men to hack at jungle roots and fill wheelbarrows with jungle mud and make a road through the wilderness.

 

THE MEN
slept on rocks that night, and the next day guards issued picks and shovels and wheelbarrows, then marched them into the jungle to work.

It was clear they were preparing a roadbed, and some of the men thought maybe this was a temporary job, something they would finish by the end of the day and then move on to someplace else, someplace more permanent and with shelter. But that night the guards led them right back to the rocks, and they knew that this long stretch of river-bank, this point bar of rocks and stones and gravel two hundred yards below the wooden bridge, was where they were going to stay.

There, the river formed an S, with the bridge in the middle. On the lower bend of the S was the rock bar bivouac of the prisoners. On the inside of the upper bend, upstream from the bridge, was the Japanese encampment. The Japanese lived in tents with wood walls and floors, while their bedraggled captives were made to sleep in the open on the rocks. Of all the shocks and jolts they'd suffered since December 8—the bombings, the invasion, the defeat, the march off Bataan, the dunghill that was O'Donnell—this stone shelf in the open at the edge of the jungle was the worst misery of all, the lowest of the legacies that had come from their losing.

Their second night on the rock bar, some of the men started to pry up stones and make a bed in the mud. At least, they reckoned, it was softer than the rocks. Ben Steele, perhaps remembering how he'd slept on the open range encircled by a lariat to keep out the snakes, gathered up loose rocks and built a low stone wall around himself. Soon others were building walls too, but these first urgent attempts to improvise a bit of shelter gave them no comfort. Their mud mattresses leached groundwater
and collected rain, and the men would wake up in a puddle of muck and their own piss, stiff and sore from the early morning chill and from sleeping cramped in a circle of stone.

The mosquitoes found them right away. In the dark the insects swarmed the rocky encampment. To fight them off the men built fires of wet wood and tried to sit in the thick smoke. Then they'd get into their sleeping pits and try to hide their faces in their shirts, shove their hands in their pockets, anything to keep from exposing their skin. (The few who had mosquito nets shared them, a dozen men sleeping with their heads together in a circle, the net stretched across their faces.) In the morning, many a man awoke with a kind of second skin, a black mat of mosquitoes in his scalp, on his face, down his neck.

 

IT RAINED
almost every day, not all day but every day, monsoon rain. Low rolling clouds like billows of smoke, lots of mist, a thick mist that clung to everything, and rain, sheets of pounding rain slapping the leaves and roiling the river. The rain turned the jungle dark, and in the perpetual gloom some men began to believe that they had been forgotten.

Their government had forgotten them, of this they were sure, and it seemed that God had forgotten them, too. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness, and set them down by a river on a bed of stones.

Now the jungle was their enemy too and it showed them even less pity than the Japanese. Their captors were merely indifferent to their fate. They could live or not; the guards didn't care. Nature, however, seemed bent on destroying them—the heat, the wet, the rot and disease. And they were alone, alone and utterly exposed in a world that hissed and snapped and stirred in the dark, shadows of men sleeping on rocks by a bend in a river on a ragged peninsula at the end of the world.

All they had was one another, and as comrades often do, they buddied up, many of them, picked a partner, another man to share camp chores, nurse them through the chills and fever, break the long spells of loneliness. They hoped a partnership might preserve them, but because hope had so often lost its currency among them, and because it was clear to everyone that their chances of surviving in this wilderness were few (men were dying now, and the scent of death had started to mingle with the musty smell of the damp earth), they buddied up for another reason as well. Here at the end of the world they wanted someone to save them from oblivion, a buddy to carry their memory, if it came to it, and comfort their kin.

 

BEN STEELE
buddied up with Dalton Russell, first sergeant to the 7th Matériel Squadron. They had met in training camp in Albuquerque, and although first sergeants and privates were never close, the young cowboy from Montana had taken a liking to his supervisor. Most of the squadron had.

Russell was young for a first sergeant, just twenty-six years old, which made him something of a prodigy in a prewar army of hoary bootlickers. He had graduated with honors from Troy High School, Montgomery County, North Carolina, in 1934, the class valedictorian, lean, dark-haired, and handsome. In those days of Depression and want, even a top student had trouble finding a job, so he joined the Army Air Corps and married Donnie Harrison, a blond, blue-eyed nurse he'd met back home in Denton. He was a good manager of men and rose quickly in rank. Near the age of those under him, he wasn't afraid to get close to his soldiers, or let them know him.

Ben Steele, addled with malaria, didn't know Russell was part of the detail until they got off the train in Calauag and started walking in the moonlight. The first sergeant remembered the young cowboy right away. “You were the only soldier on base who had a horse,” Russell said.

After a couple of days and nights on the rock bar, the two started to stick together and, like some of the others, decided to move back off the rocks and build a bamboo and palm-leaf lean-to against the embankment at the edge of the jungle. Some nights the lean-to would give them comfort; other nights the wind and rain would tear their shack down, forcing them to seek shelter between the buttresses of a towering yakal tree or return to the rocks, living, as Ben Steele liked to say, “like reptiles.”

THEY ATE
what they'd carried in from Calauag—mostly rice and cans of corned beef hash (a dish the Japanese disliked). The beef, however, was too rough on intestinal tracts ravaged by dysentery, and it passed right through them. So they lived on the rice, low-grade rice (unlike the polished white grains the Japanese kept for themselves) that often still had the chaff on it.