Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [214]
Charlie looked at the luminous green face of his wrist watch: it was midnight. From close at hand there came the metallic sound of some insect he had never been able to identify … it resembled the winding-up of a clockwork toy. He was dreamily contemplating this sound and at the same time vowing to keep his eyes open when, like a paralysing blow from the darkness, there came at last the sound for which he had been listening for so long, the first thud of guns from the Hyderabads’ position up the road. The shelling continued. For a while nothing else happened. One, two, three hours passed. He began to nod off again. Suddenly, he woke. The noise of gunfire had ceased. The Japanese were beginning their attack.
47
Not far away from where Charlie waited with the Punjabis, a small, bespectacled figure in battledress sat in the back of a lorry gripping his knees tensely, his rifle locked between them. This was none other than Private Kikuchi and as he sat there in complete darkness he was doing his best to concentrate his thoughts on the heroic example of his uncle, Bugler Kikuchi, who had sounded his bugle with his dying breath. Private Kikuchi knew that in a few minutes, at a sign from his commander, Lieutenant Matsushita, he would have to hurl himself forward with his bayonet at the ready ‘like a blind man unafraid of snakes’, as Matsushita put it. Would he be able to follow Uncle Kikuchi’s immaculate example? Huddled beside him in the lorry as it crept forward without lights he sensed, but could not see, his comrades of the Ando Regiment. Perhaps they too, were wondering what the hours before dawn would bring? Would they even live to see the daylight again? Perhaps they were hoping, if possible, to die gloriously fighting for the Emperor. Certainly, Lieutenant Matsushita would be. He was an officer with strangely burning eyes who had already served in the Imperial Army, mopping up bandits in Manchuria.
Kikuchi was astonished and awed by Lieutenant Matsushita. Every time he met those burning eyes it was as if he received an electric shock. The intensity of feeling in Matsushita, his utter devotion to the Emperor and to his country, had come as a revelation even to Kikuchi who, one might have thought, had little to learn about Japanese National Spirit with such an uncle. Yet there was something that Kikuchi found rather frightening about him at the same time … Sometimes it almost seemed as if he wanted to get not only himself but everyone else killed, too. He would dash forward sometimes with bullets falling about him like a spring shower while he might easily have advanced in relative security by some other route.
To make matters worse (or better, depending how you looked at it) he had taken a particular liking to Kikuchi, either because of his glorious uncle or because he sensed Kikuchi’s fascination with him. On one occasion he had taken Kikuchi aside and shown him some of the medals he had been awarded and which he carried everywhere with him in a little waterproof pouch, even on the most desperate sorties into the jungle. He had allowed Kikuchi to gaze at his Order of the Rising Sun, Fourth Class, at his Decoration of Manchuria, Fourth and Fifth Classes, at his Campaign Medal of the Chinese Incident, at his Campaign Medal of the Manchurian Incident and at several others, including an Order of the Golden Kite, Fifth Class. ‘One day, Kikuchi, you too will have medals like these,’ he had said, his eyes fastened on Kikuchi’s and gripping them tightly as in two glowing chopsticks so that he could not turn away. ‘Or you will be dead,’ he added in a somewhat chilling manner, as an afterthought.
It was not that Kikuchi minded exactly dying for his Emperor if he had to; after all, like his comrades he had left some hair and fingernail clippings behind in Japan for funerary purposes in case the rest of his body did not return. He was not a Kikuchi for nothing! And yet, once or twice, observing Matsushita and his bosom companion,