Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [109]
She was teaching again, instructing the young, running air raid drills, she was a shis, a woman getting by in a man’s world, but a man’s world was for getting killed in: a boy was safe only until the qualifying birthday, then came military service. She had become one of a grim sisterhood of women whose sons were of an age to take their place in the firing line.
She knew what an American soldier looked like: steel helmet, gun and bayonet, the snarling caricature of the propaganda posters. But she had not learned to hate the enemy: behind the gun, beneath the helmet what she saw was a child with blue eyes. She told herself he would be safer as an American soldier; Henry’s books had taught her how the West valued human life; the army would care about its men. A Japanese soldier did not exist as an individual, simply as part of a patriotic force. But any soldier’s fate was finely balanced: death or survival, the choice not his to make.
Where would he be sent to face warfare? If he survived, would she see him one day, walking up the path from the harbour, golden and American, like his father?
51
Trundled in boxcars from one combat zone to another, expendable pawns, with new recruits arriving daily to step into dead men’s shoes, Nisei GIs were not long-lived.
Now, heading north-west on foot, they seemed always to be climbing, clawing their way through a landscape rising before them like an endless cliff, slogging through France.
He was learning that maps are instruments of time. It took three days to cross a river, storm a hill. It took a week to battle their way to and claim the dot on the map which was once a town and was now a place of ruins.
They took La Bruyères, street by street, house by house, room by room. Booby-trapped doors, snipers, mines, the smoke and screech of mortars, crack of gunfire. Men fell as they advanced, gaining a yard, losing it . . . When at nightfall they collapsed, exhausted, Joe saw how many had been lost; some who had become friends lying in the mud alongside fallen Germans, uniforms indistinguishable, caked with clay, dark with blood.
They squatted and slumped, the limping remnants of the 100th and the 442nd snatching a breathing space. The hutmates of Tule were scattered: Kazuo could be at the bottom of a ditch somewhere along the way; Ichir was in a field hospital the last time Joe heard.
Pausing to gulp water or chew a soggy chocolate bar, the men swapped bleak jokes, checking the current acceptable level of ‘vacation wound’, an injury bad enough to get a man away from the front.
‘How about death?’
‘Death could be good. No way you’ll get ordered to advance if you’re dead.’
But the gold braid had ways of trumping the blackest joke. Dragging themselves to attention, the men got the message: a battalion of Texas Guard was trapped in the forest nine miles to the east, without food and water, surrounded by Germans.
The general’s words were read out, loud and clear.
‘Two previous rescue attempts have failed.’ Then the punch-line. The battalion was to be rescued, ‘at all costs’.
At all costs?
Otishi murmured, ‘When a Spartan soldier was issued with a shield he was ordered to come back with it or on it.’
Joe glanced around. ‘No shields.’
‘Same order.’
It took five days and eight hundred casualties to rescue two hundred and eleven men.
The Germans were dug in, camouflaged, waiting. The 442nd hacked its way through frozen undergrowth thick as jungle; machine-gun