Naked Earth (38 page)

Going back he had difficulty finding his cave. It faced a leek patch across the path and he remembered that the leeks had grown high and were brilliant green and glossy. Apparently in the course of the afternoon all of it had been pulled out by the troops.

The Deputy Instructor was having his supper. His orderly had cooked him a helmetful of
mien-ko-ta
, a pasty gruel made of small lumps of flour. He offered Liu some of it and said, “How about getting up some
k’uai pao
, quick news reports? You’ve studied the latest communiqués, haven’t you? Make sure the
k’uai pao
follow the line. Got to broadcast it and drum it in.”

“Yes, I’ve been working on them,” Liu answered. “It’s a pity that on a night march the Objective Environment rules out all the usual media—you can’t see posters or blackboards or anything like that.”

“That’s no way to talk, Comrade Liu. Mustn’t Bow Your Head to Difficulties.” The Deputy Instructor seemed to have awakened, bristling. Sleep had not improved his mood. Liu wished he could offer him a cigarette.

“Yes,” he said quickly. “I was thinking of making up some jingles—fit them to well-known tunes—”

“Sure. Make them sing. Get them to bandy songs back and forth. Livens up the troops. You know the slogan: ‘Cultural entertainment well done, and the war of the hearts we’ve won!’”

He went on talking in that strain. Liu was grateful to hear the whistle that told them to get started. He had his pack ready and his water can filled. They scrambled downhill to the road.

THE WIDE
dirt road got more crowded with men and vehicles as they went along. Trucks, horse-carts, mule-carts, and big guns wheeled along clanking. Troops from several different units jostled their way along the sides. The carts were piled high in huge pyramids. Silhouetted in the dusk, they were black hillocks moving painfully on crunching wooden wheels.

“
Ken shang! Ken shang!
Follow up! Follow up!” the men kept whispering tensely down the files.

Every day the enemy planes left big bomb craters in the road that had to be quickly filled. Gangs of ragged Chinese laborers mobilized from Manchuria under the new slogan of “Freewill united with compulsion” maneuvered their way through the crowd balancing flat-poles on their shoulders, a basket of stones strung on each end of the pole. All aquiver with their dancing loads they sang out. “
Chieh kuang!
Excuse me!
Chieh kuang
, comrade!”

Somber Koreans, all in white with tiny top hats of black gauze sitting toylike on their heads, slid along among them uttering little cries of caution, bearing A-frames, the jeeps of Korea. A man carried one of these yokes by thrusting his neck through the top half of the A. The lower half of the wooden frame was laden with supplies.

“
Ma ti!
Who’re they wearing mourning for?” A soldier looked at the white-garbed Koreans and spat to protect himself from the inauspicious sight. “Gives you the willies. Who’d have known we’d ever get into such a creepy place!”

Liu hurried along the edge of the crowd bawling through his cardboard trumpet, “Latest communiqué—latest communiqué: Guard against straggling. Mustn’t ever lose touch with your unit. Comrades who have fallen behind may be murdered by enemy agents. So don’t lose touch with your unit!

“The things cast off by American imperialists are poisoned. Don’t ever eat them. And don’t pick them up. The American imperialists bury a bomb under a wrist-watch or a fountain pen. A warrior of the 37th Section picked up a pen. He got four fingers blown off. A
kan-pu
of the 75th Section picked up a tin. The whole squad was poisoned.”

“
Kuo k’ou la! Kuo k’ou la!
We’re crossing a ditch! Crossing a ditch!” a man shouted. The long line of soldiers he led, victims of nightblindness, stumbled along holding on to each other. Many of them leaned weakly on sticks like famine refugees. The legs of some were bandaged where they had fallen and hurt themselves.

An occasional sputter of machine guns could be heard in the distance. The boom of big guns came at shorter intervals. Now and then there was a roar that set the ground moving softly under their feet.

“Hey, who’s that smoking!”

A little red eye of light winked dark and lost itself in the crowd.

“Who’s smoking?” a babel of voices demanded. “Enemy agent!”

“Who’s been smoking?” The Political Instructor clattered up on his horse.

Of course it would be an old warrior. No new warrior would ever dare violate a rule, with enough people picking on him as it was.

As soon as the instructor had ridden on ahead the old warrior broke into a stream of muttered obscenities in an effort to retrieve his lost face.

“All right, all right,” said another old warrior. “Stop saying things with no standpoint.”

“Go ahead and shoot me!” the man said loudly with the officer out of earshot. “Didn’t get my hand blown off picking up the butt, and here I’m going to get shot smoking it.
Ma na pi!
Takes more than that to scare your dad. Your dad has fought in the Resistance, and he fought in the Civil War. And he didn’t get killed. About time I did, I suppose. Well, I’d sooner die here than elsewhere, with so many great grandsons wearing mourning for me.” He sniggered, giving the Koreans a glance from the corner of his eyes. “Makes a fine showing.”

Liu tried to get them to sing, feeling like an officious organizer of games.

“That cigarette’ll get the airplanes upon us in a minute. It’s cleared up now,” somebody said.

The night was warm. With unburied dead everywhere there was a sweetish foulness in the clammy breeze.

Ahead of them the cartdrivers were yelling frantically, “Hey, make room! Make room!” A man shouted, his angry voice jolted by punctuating blows between sentences, “
Ma ti! T’o ssu kou!
It’s like dragging a dead dog! Come on—walk! Walk for me! When the planes come throwing flares you run faster than anybody else.—
Ma ti! T’o ssu kou! T’o ssu kou!
”

When Liu came up close he saw that it was a
kan-pu
beating and kicking a soldier who was rolling about on the ground, his arms around his head, weeping. They were not from his unit.

“Two big eyes wide open and he can’t see, he says,” raged the
kan-pu
. “Just pretending! Nightblindness be blowed. Just America-fear.”

Liu felt impelled to say something although he had no right to. Even if these two belonged to his outfit all he could do was to bring up the matter in unit meetings. To butt in right now would be bad for Political Influence. But he had heard that some of these nightblind cases had shot or hanged themselves because they could not stand the long marches in total blackness. Too many of the troops were getting nightblindness from malnutrition. Then they got seriously ill with the terrific strain on mind and body. The hikes were much more tiring when you could not see where you were going.

“Don’t hit him any more, District Corps Commander.” The other blinded men had been standing around silent but one of them finally spoke up timidly. “He’s in bad shape, he is, I’ll carry his pack for him.”

So this
kan-pu
was only in charge of a Corps Under Instruction, a bunch of schoolboys. Even then he outranked Liu. Unconsciously Liu tried to tuck his cardboard trumpet out of sight as he pushed past them without saying a word. The trumpet would have betrayed his lowly station at once.

“
Chieh kuang
, comrade! Please get a move on,’” a cartdriver cried exasperatedly from his high perch. “You’re in the way.”

“Less than twenty left out of a corps of forty-two,” the
kan-pu
shouted up at him as if to the world at large, giving the boy another kick. “If I don’t drag these snivelling babies along, every single one of them’ll drop behind.”

The cartdriver swore at his mule and whipped it hard. “
Ma ti
, how is it you’re such a rotten egg? I’ll learn you to be such a rotten egg! I’ll learn you!”

The mule bounced and kicked under the whistling blows. The cart lurched forward into the protesting crowd. “Hey, careful! Careful!” somebody called out, half laughing. They all knew whom the driver’s words were aimed at.

Scarlet flashes of tracer bullets chasing each other down from the nearest ridge dipped into the dark before they reached the marching men. Liu ducked at the clatter of the hidden machine gun. So there are spies about, he thought, enemy Korean guerrillas. The shots seemed very near. But at night everything always looked so much closer.

By now he had given up all pretense of educating the men while they marched. It was all he could do to keep up the pace, staggering under his fifty-catty pack over ruts and holes. Many of the teen-agers from army
kan-pu
schools had emptied their flour pouches to lighten their loads. Parts of the road were white with flour.

“Like chalk marks,” an old warrior grumbled. “They’re scared that the airplanes won’t see us.”

Droves of enemy planes thrummed an unseen path across the cloudy night sky as they did all the time, seemingly oblivious to what went on down below. But the men listened to the rise and fall of the drone as if it was the snores of great sleeping beasts.

“
Kuo ch’iao la! Kuo ch’iao la!
Crossing a bridge! Crossing a bridge!” the leader of the nightblind men called out.

Everybody braced himself. Bridges were the worst spots. They were the most bombed and since they were much narrower then roads, the traffic jam made it impossible to get through quickly. The planes muttered on overhead without releasing flares. But star shells from the UN artillery were bursting in the sky ahead. Then a flare of some kind exploded in the air close by, and the sky opened and shut five or six times with the dazzling sheet lightning that came from it. In the alternating light Liu felt his heart tightly opening and closing. The trucks were stuck at the bridge, motors purring. The cartdrivers swore as they struggled to keep the tangled overloaded carts from capsizing. A mule brayed as if it was being butchered. Its hindlegs had slipped through a big hole in the bridge and got stuck there. The cartdriver lashed at it like mad, hoping that it might jerk itself up. The big mule struggled and heaved until the crumbling concrete around the hole loosened up and the animal fell through, carrying the cartdriver with it, along with a soldier who had been trying to help. Other men were pushed screaming into the river.

“
Ken shang! Ken shang!
Follow up! Follow up!” the soldiers passed the word along as they made way between the vehicles, everyone keeping his eyes intently fixed on the man in front of him.

Then suddenly there was plenty of room. They were on the road again while the vehicles were still stuck back there. By the star shells Liu saw flashing glimpses of mangled bodies. Nobody bothered moving the corpses off the road after the night air-raids. So many wheels had run over them since then that some were mashed beyond recognition. Wrecked trucks lay on their sides or their backs, wheels in the air like dead bugs.

He barely had time to look around when he was again pushed to the side of the road. The rattling vehicles came up to rejoin them.

Dust-white searchlight beams spanned the sky. Two of them crossed and stayed fixed rather low in the southwest. The troops were heading for that direction. But after marching half the night they did not seem to have made much progress. The giant pale cross hung in exactly the same position where it had waited for them across the river, ominous but unapproachable. Other searchlights swept around lazily. One of them came to rest with its tip just touching a thick pile of gray cloud puffs, making a soft little spot of light. Somehow it looked infinitely tantalizing and fatiguing. It made Liu’s heart itch intolerably to look at it. He was very tired.

The noise and commotion earlier on in the night had died down now. The men lengthened their files, walking farther apart. In the fields down the side of the hill some of the wrecked jeeps and trucks from an air-raid were still burning, secretly it seemed, a small scurrying tongue of flame peeping out now and then like a mouse. And there were still red sparks in the trees and the burned stubble.

“
Kuo k’ou la! Kuo k’ou la!
” cried the leader of the blind. The sound was isolated and sad in the stillness of the night.

Liu was half asleep, walking with a hand on the side of a lumbering cart. He thought he was already dreaming when he first heard the commotion ahead. The road dipped rather suddenly at the next turn. And the star shells had stopped now just when the eye had got used to them, so that it seemed pitch-dark at the treacherous bend. One of the trucks had switched on its headlights.

Everybody was shouting obscenities at the driver. Feelings were running high against the truck-drivers. All of the foot soldiers knew that these men were very much pampered because they were hard to get. The officers were always making allowances for them, expecting them to have picked up bad habits working in the old society. They liked their comfort and hated risking their necks. Two Party members accompanied each driver every hour of the day to see that he did not desert. But the drivers were free to voice their complaints, make reactionary remarks even, and get nothing but a soothing pep talk from one of the
kan-pu
. And they were the only ones in the outfit who ate rice, aside from the Battalion Commander and the Political Instructor.

“Ai! This baked flour is no bloody use,” a man sighed. “Stuffs you up and the next minute you’re hungry again.”

“I heard Chao Yu-kuei picked up a big tin of peanut butter,” somebody else said. “He was the one who picked up the American watch last time. Really
fa yang ts’ ai
’, made an overseas fortune.”

“All I want is one or two piles of shell fragments. Sell the copper when I go home and I’ll have enough to live on all my life,” a third man said.

“Just let me spend two days collecting empty cans and it’ll get me enough to last me for ten years,” said another.

Just when the erring driver had been made to turn off his lights, another truck was discovered with flashlights blinking on and off inside.