It wasn’t long before the radio was telling them what had been happening here. Japanese bombers had attacked the Kai Tak airfield on the Kowloon peninsula just back of the great hotel in which the Saturday night dance had been held. That dance had been for the benefit of the British-Chinese bomber force—and now there was no such force, at least not in the Hongkong territory. The radio didn’t say that, for they wouldn’t give any information to the enemy; they just said that bombs had been dropped, never what had been hit.
That was the way in this modern war; the first move of every enemy was to paralyze his opponent’s means of attack. Never again would there be a declaration of war, and always the first target would be the enemy’s airfields. In this case the Japanese had a field at Canton, and the distance was seventy-three miles; they would fly back and get another load, and they would keep that up all day long; you could pretty nearly figure when you would be hearing more of those “crumping” sounds. Regularly, for the next eighteen days the Japanese planes came at two or three-hour intervals. Since night bombing wasn’t accurate, they would, let everybody have a night’s rest, and come again at dawn, fog and storms permitting.
After Lanny had listened to the second relay, he said to his friendly host: “I hate to say it, Mr. Foo, but if the British have no way to oppose this enemy air force, your splendid city will not be able to hold out very long. It was command of the air that enabled Franco to destroy the Spanish republic; it was command of the air which enabled Hitler to destroy first the Dutch and Belgian Armies, and then the French; it has been a slender margin of air power which has enabled the British to hold out against him.”
In past times it had been the practice of kings to chop off the heads of heralds who brought bad news; but this wise old Chinese was a modern man and knew a fact when it was set before him. He said: “It is bad, but it not destroy China. Canton and Shanghai stand it, we stand it too.”
Lanny was interested in the reaction of the others to this accumulation of tragedy. Said the woman doctor: “If there is going to be a siege, I can be just as useful here as at home, so there doesn’t seem much sense in moving.” She said it in her quiet matter-of-fact way—it was obviously so, and no false heroics.
Laurel Creston, who hadn’t been brought up to face wholesale pain and sorrow, looked at this girl who was so plain and unprepossessing, and who wore spectacles. Laurel forced herself to smile. “What shall we do, Lanny, stay and see if there is anything to astrology?”
He, the magnificent male, the charmer, the much-desired, couldn’t fail to meet a challenge like that. “Let’s stick it out for a while,” he replied. “Whatever happens to me, I’ll say it was telepathy or clairvoyance. I’ll never admit that the stars had anything to do with it!”
24
Supped Full with Horrors
I
The Japanese air force did not confine their efforts to the Kai Tak airfield. They bombed oil depots, arsenals, and barracks, and of course vessels in the harbor; they blasted and sank the Clipper which was loading up for a flight to Manila; incidentally they dropped a bomb squarely in the middle of the Central Market and killed or wounded some eight hundred Chinese. When this news came over the radio, Althea said it was time for her to go and help. Mr. Foo said he would send her in his car.
Laurel suggested: “Perhaps they would take me as a nurse. I will go and offer.” Lanny might have said: “I am doing important work for my government and have been forbidden to take unnecessary risks.” Possibly it was his duty to say that; but instead he asked: “Do you suppose they would let me drive an ambulance?”
It wasn’t so hard for the doctor, because she had been trained for this sort of thing from childhood. But what training the other two had got they had had to give themselves; all they had got from the world was to have good manners, to be properly dressed, and to have what they asked for and do what pleased them. It took considerable moral effort to step into that limousine and be driven to what they knew would be scenes of terror. Bombs were falling as they drove, and there were other sounds which Lanny recognized as gunfire. The enemy ground forces were attacking all around the perimeter of the “New Territories,” a matter of some fifty miles, and that was far too great a front to be held by the few regiments of British and Indian troops on hand. The Japs would know how many there were, but Lanny couldn’t be sure, so he said nothing. He braced himself for whatever ordeal might come, to himself and to these high-spirited women.
The doctor was the only one among them who possessed belongings, hers having been brought off the yacht. She now wore a surgeon’s white coat and carried her kit. When she reported at headquarters, they told her where to go, and that was all there was to it. Laurel said: “May I help her?” and they answered: “Surely.” Lanny said: “I thought maybe I might drive an ambulance; I have driven a car several hundred thousand miles in my life.” They told him to go along.
Within half an hour they were at the Jockey Club, which had been the center of Hongkong social life, and now had been cleared out and turned into an emergency hospital. In a few minutes Althea was performing an operation upon a Chinese woman whose leg had been blown off and tied with a tourniquet. Laurel, who had never even seen an operation before, was instructed how to administer the anesthetic; she began her new career by taking one glance at the chunk of raw and bloody meat, and then fainting. When she came to she wept with embarrassment, and proceeded to grit her teeth and do what she was told.
As for Lanny, he explained that he could drive but couldn’t lift weights or jump about, on account of his recently damaged legs; also, he didn’t know where anything was in Hongkong, except the big hotels and the American Club. They gave him a Chinese who spoke English of a sort, and a truck, which the British call a lorry. It was his duty to drive as fast as possible to places where the bomb blasts were reported, and there to make the best guess he could as to which persons had a chance to live long enough to reach the dressing station. He would use the authority conferred by his Anglo-Saxon features and good clothes to command some of the spectators to load the wounded into the truck, and the Chinese would translate his orders and perhaps make them more emphatic. If Lanny was too liberal in his estimate as to the life expectancy of people without hands, or feet, or faces, the doctors would correct him and he would do better next time. He would drive, tooting his horn vigorously, and trying not to make more casualties on the way. He would hear the shriek of planes power-diving over his head, and each time would say to himself: “You will die in Hongkong!”
II
This attack had been foreseen many years, and the British authorities had built air-raid shelters. When enemy planes were sighted and the wavering sirens blew, the people on the streets, regardless of race, creed, or color, would dive into the nearest tunnel and the streets would be clear. All except the drivers of ambulances and military vehicles; they were supposed to continue and take their chances. Now and then, caught in a traffic jam, Lanny would have a chance to look op and see the black bombers and the poisonous “eggs” dropping from them.
They were bombing only “military objectives,” for reason that they felt sure of taking the city; but their bombing was often inaccurate, and in the course of the next few days Lanny witnessed many dreadful sights, such as he had got used to in the victim cities of Nazi-Fascism in Britain and on the Continent. The shells were of the fragmentation variety, intended to kill people rather than to wreck blocks of houses; he saw human beings blasted and blackened by bombs, blown through doors and windows, buried under debris, suffering unimaginably dreadful wounds. He had many hard decisions to make: he had been told to favor the white people, and he had to tell himself that this was a necessary decision, because they were in charge of affairs and possessed the knowledge of how to run them. But it made him rather sick to listen to the scoldings of stout ladies in the fashionable hotels, objecting to the Chinese mob crowding in upon them during air raids.
When the blessed relief of darkness came, Lanny would
have dinner with his two women friends, and twice the blessed old Chinese came, bringing some delicacy and begging them to come to his home and spend the night. They were pale and exhausted, living on their nerves; but there was always more work to be done, and they would insist on doing it. The place was now full of wounded soldiers: English, Scottish, Canadian boys, also Indian Gurkhas. A life hung upon your efforts, and how could you turn your back? Althea was relentless with herself, and Laurel would die before she would show herself weaker. Telephone calls would come, and Lanny would climb into his lorry, even though he was a bit dizzy.
Here and there they picked up items of news and traded them with one another. In the first day’s air raid, the Japs had knocked out all but five of the planes at Kai Tak; these five had been dragged out by the crews from the burning hangars and towed by tractors away from the field. Quite an adventure story: where street signs or other obstructions barred the way they had been flattened by the tractors, and the planes had been dragged into rice fields and camouflaged with care. There was still a small strip of the airfield that was usable, and when darkness came the planes were brought back and flown away to Chungking with important passengers. They came back for three successive nights, and the enemy wasn’t able to get them.
Who were these passengers? Madame Sun was one, Lanny learned; others were persons who had influence, and could persuade the British authorities that they were important. An American art expert would hardly have rated; but if he had presented himself as the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft; a powerful factor in lend-lease, he might have got by. And surely the niece of Reverdy Holdenhurst, who had dined at Government House only last Saturday evening! But Laurel put her foot down; she wouldn’t go, at least not while Althea stuck it out. She thought that Lanny ought to go, because of the importance of his work; but Lanny said: “I am surely not leaving you.”
III
The Japanese troops pressed the fight all around the perimeter. They had been especially trained for this campaign, and of course they had had spies all over the place. Traitor Chinese led them by paths through the hills, and they showed up behind the pillboxes which were supposed to stop them. It was as Lanny had foretold to Mr. Foo—their planes machine-gunned the British in the trenches and bombed the supply depots behind the lines. Once more it was proved that armies on the ground cannot operate unless there is air power overhead to protect them. In three days the Japs had broken into Kowloon—and then there were dreadful scenes, for the Chinese masses began looting ahead of the advance, and the whites were helpless to protect themselves.
The greatest weakness of this Gibraltar of the Far East was its water supply. The reservoirs in which water was collected were conspicuous and the enemy did not fail to bomb the outlets. Pretty soon there was not enough water to put out fires, and it became evident that there wasn’t going to be enough to keep a million and a half human beings alive. The Japs brought heavy guns into Kowloon, and from then on the people of this island knew what a military siege really was. The shells poured in by night as well as by day, three every minute; and whatever target the enemy aimed at he hit. The agents of the puppet Chinese government which had been set up in Nanking were everywhere. They would climb to a roof and signal the Japs on the distant hills, and then they would dive down into the crowd and there was no way to find them. A few minutes later would come the shells. So the naval dockyards were blasted, the power plant, the radio masts on the “Peak.”
Lanny was sent to bring supplies to the “Battle-Box,” the communications headquarters of the Army. It was sixty feet underground, and supposed to be bombproof. Its location in the heart of the city was a secret closely kept; Lanny had to take an oath not even to mention that he had been there. But evidently the Japs had found out about it, for several shells exploded near, and as Lanny came out, a near-by building was struck and the blast knocked him twenty feet or more and flattened him against a wall. There was a minute or so right there when he thought the astrologer’s prediction had come true.
He was taken to a first-aid station in his own lorry, but all he had to do was to lie still for a while. He had been lucky, but he knew that he couldn’t draw upon that bank forever. The British lines were being forced back all around the semicircle, and now the enemy was landing at night on the island itself. Demands for surrender came, but the British refused, and the censors allowed nothing to go out but optimism. Nevertheless, Lanny made up his mind that the end was coming soon, and he told his two ladies. Mr. Foo came to see them, riding in a rickshaw; he had turned his car over to the government and was staying in town. When he saw how exhausted all three of them were he begged them to come to dinner with him and talk things over; you could still get food in restaurants, although the quantity was strictly rationed.
IV
In a private room of the same Chinese restaurant where Lanny and Laurel had celebrated their arrival in this ill-fated city, the four people sat and discussed their future. For the elderly merchant there was, obviously, but one choice; he would stay with his family, and whatever the conquering “monkey men” handed out to them they would take. But for the three Americans it was different; there was still time to get away. A few were trying it every night; what was happening to them of course could not be known. But the decision must be made. “You go now—or then you don’t go,” said Mr. Foo.
It appeared that the decision depended upon the doctor. Lanny was willing to quit, and they all agreed that he could be considered to have done his duty by the island of Hongkong. Laurel was willing, except that she couldn’t bear to desert Althea. It was this conscientious soul who had the scruples, her professional honor being involved. She could name one patient after another whose life depended upon her; and she didn’t believe that the triumph of the Japanese would make much difference in her ability to help. Even “monkey men” would respect a doctor, and they would need her services, perhaps for their own wounded. For a physician and especially one who was a devout Christian, war was something different from what it was to the ordinary person.
Lanny’s comment was: “Surely you will find plenty of people who need your help in the province of Hunan. Does your Hippocratic oath oblige you to prefer this group over that?”
She replied: “It is just that the situation here is so acute.”
“Yes, but it may very soon be acute in your home province, and you won’t be able to get to it. You will be a prisoner of the Japs, and whatever your services are, they will be performed in a concentration camp.”
“Japs get Hongkong, they soon go north,” broke in the Chinese. “They cut railroad to Hankow, they go through Hunan.”
Laurel said: “Lanny, I think you ought to give Althea at least a hint about your own position.”
“I am under pledge not to talk about that under any circumstances. But I suppose I can say that I am doing some important service for our government. I was told to take a six months’ furlough, and if I count the time I spent in hospital, that is more than half up. I hope to return to duty.”
“Let me add this,” put in the woman writer. “Lanny has never told me his secret, but I have been watching him for the past couple of years and I am pretty sure that I have guessed it. If you help him to escape you may be sure that you have rendered an important service to our country. And don’t forget that our country is now in the war.”
“Am I really needed for your escape?” demanded the doctor. “Mr. Foo can give Lanny a guide who knows some English, and who can be trusted.”
“You know Madame Sun Althea, and you understand her cause. You know how to speak to the Chinese partisans, and tell them what I have just told you. They will do things for you that they would never do for a wealthy stranger—or so they would consider Lanny.”
“You go. Doctor Carroll!” commanded the elderly Chinese. “You go help Chinese people. You don’t let monkey men get you. You remember Nanking!” He spoke for a minute or tw6 in his native language—things perhaps too terrible to say in English—or perhaps h
e didn’t know the words.
So at last the doctor gave way. “I’ll have to leave my kit,” she said. “If I sent for it, they would know I was going away. There are spies everywhere.”
“You come my house, we talk,” said the merchant. At last report the enemy had not got there, and if they did, he declared, he would know how to hide his friends. He would get some sort of conveyance to take them to the place, and he would make all arrangements for their trip. When Lanny tried to thank him, he replied: “You friend Madame Sun.” Evidently that was going to be magic.
V
In this comfortable home they rested, and thought with grief about what might be coming to it. They had seen so many fine buildings, so much of human comfort and convenience, go up in smoke and dust and rubble. Guns were going off all around them, but they were still a mile or two away at the nearest. It wouldn’t take a tank many minutes to cover that distance, but their host assured them that he could put them where the Japs would never find them. He had already discussed the flight with a fisherman, owner of a junk and member of “the Party,” a man who could be trusted. For three hundred American dollars he would stow them away in his hold. “Bad smell!” said the old gentleman, grinning.
They would steal through the East Lamma Channel, and after they got by Hongkong and other islands, they would turn northeastward along the coast. It must be a night of heavy fog, for the Jap Navy was on patrol against just such escapes. They would have a chance of freedom, and if they were captured—well, they would be in the same position as all the other people of the territory.