Watched by the Japanese soldiers and the young interpreter, and by the sentries guarding the furniture in the stands, we walked slowly past the corpses. Apart from two middle-aged Chinese, a man and a woman lying next to each other who might have been husband and wife, all were European and American, and from the worn state of their shoes and clothing seemed to be internees like ourselves. I passed a large ruddy-haired man in brown shorts with a gun-shot wound in his chest, and an elderly woman in a print dress who had been shot in the jaw, but at first sight none of the other bodies revealed any signs of violence.
Twenty feet ahead of me one of the Japanese soldiers by the trucks had moved his rifle. Behind me my companions stepped back involuntarily. The garage owner stumbled against me, for a moment holding my shoulder. I listened to the sound of an American aircraft overhead, the noise of its engine magnified by the concrete bowl of the stadium. It seemed insane that we would be shot here ten days after the war had ended in full view of our rescuers, but already I was convinced that we would not die. Yet again I had that same presentiment of death I had inexplicably felt before our arrest.
One of the Japanese officers, wearing full uniform under a short rain-cape, spoke briefly. I noticed that he was standing beside a small card-table on which rested two wicker baskets containing bottles of saki and parcels of boiled rice wrapped in leaves. For some bizarre reason I assumed that he was about to give me a prize.
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.
At the same time the absence, with few exceptions, of any wounds or violence suggested one or two unsettling alternatives plague, perhaps, or some sudden epidemic. Steering the truck with one hand and eating my rice with the other, I eased my foot off the heavy accelerator, opening the interval slightly between Hodson and myself. But for all this I was hardly concerned about the bodies. Too many people had already died in and around our camp. The business of loading the corpses into the trucks had placed a certain mental distance between them and myself. Handling all those bodies, pulling on the stiffening arms and legs, pushing their buttocks and shoulders over the tailgates, had been like an extended wrestling match with a party of strangers, a kind of forced intimacy that absolved me from all future contact or obligation.
An hour after leaving the stadium, when we had covered some ten miles, Hodson began to slow down, his truck bumping over the rutted road surface at little more than walking pace. Some half a mile from the river, we had entered a landscape flooded by a slack, brown water. Untended canals and drowned paddies stretched away on all sides, and the road had become little more than a series of narrow causeways. The vanished peasants had built their burial mounds into the shoulders of the road, and the ends of the cheap coffins protruded like drawers from the rain-washed earth, lockers ransacked by the passing war. Across the paddies I could see a boom of scuttled freighters that blocked the river, funnels and bridge-houses emerging from the swollen tide. We passed another abandoned village, and then the green shell of a reconnaissance aircraft shot down by the Americans.
Ten feet in front of me, Hodson’s truck bumped along the roadway, the heads of his corpses nodding vigorously like sleepers assenting in some shared dream. Then Hodson stopped and jumped down from his cabin.
He laid the map across the bonnet of my truck, then pointed along the broad canal we had been following for the past ten minutes. ‘We’ve got to cross this before we reach the main road. Somewhere up ahead there’s a sluice-bridge. It looks too small to have been bombed.’