The Eurasian in the white shirt came up to me. His face had the same passivity of the Japanese. No doubt he realized that once the Kuomintang forces arrived his own life would be over, like those of the fifty people lying on the stadium grass.
‘You’re all right?’ he asked me. After a pause, he nodded at the Japanese officer. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘You can drive a truck?’
‘Yes…’ The presence of the armed Japanese made any other answer pointless. In fact I had not driven any vehicle since the outbreak of war, and before that only my father’s Plymouth car.
‘Of course we can.’ The garage owner had pulled himself together and joined us. He looked back at our four companions, who were now separated from us by the tract of corpses. ‘We can both drive, I’m an experienced mechanic. Who are all those people? What happened to them?’
‘We need two drivers,’ the interpreter said. ‘You know the Protestant cemetery at Soochow?’
‘No, but we can find it.’
‘That’s good. It’s only sixty miles, four hours, then you can go free. You take these people to the Protestant cemetery.’
‘All right.’ The garage owner had again held my shoulder, this time to prevent me changing my mind, though I already had no intention of doing so. ‘But who are they all?’
The interpreter seemed to have lost interest. Already the Japanese soldiers were lowering the tail-gates of the trucks. ‘Various things,’ he said, patting his white shirt. ‘Some illnesses, the American planes..
An hour later we had loaded the fifty corpses on to the two trucks and after a trial circuit of the stadium had set off in the direction of Soochow.
Looking back on those first few hours of freedom as we drove together across the empty landscape fifteen miles to the south-east of Shanghai, I am struck by the extent to which we had already forgotten the passengers whose destination had made that freedom possible. Of course neither Hodson, the garage owner, nor myself had the slightest intention of driving to Soochow. As I could see from his manner as the six of us loaded the last of the corpses on to his truck, his one ambition was to turn right on the first road to Shanghai and abandon the truck and its contents in a side street — or, conceivably, given a sudden access of humanity, outside the Swiss embassy. In fact, my chief fear was that Hodson might leave me to be picked up by a Japanese patrol before I had mastered the truck’s heavy steering and gear-box.
Luckily we had all been so exhausted by the effort of loading the bodies that the Japanese had not noticed my fumbling efforts to start and control the truck, and within half an hour I was able to keep a steady fifty yards behind Hodson. Both vehicles were plastered with military stickers pasted to the windshields and fenders, presumably assuring our passage through whatever Japanese units we might meet. Twice we passed a platoon sitting with its packs and rifles on the railway line, waiting for a train that would never come, but otherwise the landscape was deserted, not a single Chinese visible. Circumspectly, though, Hodson followed the route to Soochow marked on the road-map given to us by the Eurasian interpreter.
For myself, I was content to make this circuit of Shanghai, as I had no wish to drive the truck with its cargo of corpses through the centre of the city on my way to my parents’ camp. Once I had cleared the western suburbs of the city I would turn north off the Soochow road, hand the vehicle over to the first allied command post — our new-found freedom had convinced me that the war would finally be over by the afternoon and complete the short journey to my parents’ camp on foot.
The prospect of seeing them, after all these years, within literally a few hours made me feel light-headed. During the three days in the gendarmerie barracks we had been given almost nothing to eat, and I now picked at the boiled rice in the wicker basket on the seat beside me. Even the sight of the corpses whose feet and faces were shaking loose beneath the tarpaulin of Hodson’s truck did nothing to spoil my appetite. As I had lifted the bodies on to the two trucks I had immediately noticed how wellfleshed most of them were, far better fed than any of us had been in our camp. Presumably they had been imprisoned in some special internment centre, and had unluckily fallen foul of the American air-attacks.
