Nanking Page #6

by Japanese soldiers with bayonets fixed.

I tried for hours to prevent the Japanese

from marching these men out for execution.

But I failed.

By the light of our headlights,

we watched them march away to their doom.

Not a whimper came from the entire throng.

Our own hearts were lead.

MILLS McCALLUM:
During this time,

we really felt

that we were contending

with the powers of evil.

This memory will remain with me forever.

We could do nothing to avert this tragedy.

Japanese 6th Brigade Operation Order 138.

" Since the defeated enemy soldiers

are believed to be in plain clothes,

"you must arrest any person

who is suspected of being so.

"Regard every adult man up to middle age

as a plain-clothes soldier."

There is no system.

Soldiers seize anyone they suspect.

Calluses on hands

are proof the man is a soldier.

Rickshaw coolies, carpenters,

and other laborers are frequently taken.

I took moving pictures of a group

of about 70 or so Chinese men

being gathered on the road.

And in the picture, the women are kneeling

before the Japanese,

begging for their menfolk.

How many thousands

were mown down by guns? Or bayoneted?

We shall probably never know.

But in many cases,

oil was thrown over the bodies,

and they were burned.

Charred bones tell the story

of many of those tragedies.

Some Japanese soldiers

were fierce and unreasonable.

And many of them

had their bayonets ready for use.

And on not a few of them,

I saw fresh bloodstains.

There seems to be no stop

to the ferocity of the brutes.

At first I tried to be pleasant to them,

to avoid arousing their ire.

But the smile has gradually worn off,

and my stare

is fully as cool and fishy as theirs.

A colonel and his staff called at my office,

and spent an hour trying to discover

where all the additional

disarmed soldiers were.

They insisted that they were hiding

within the Zone,

and that we were responsible

for concealing them.

Miss Vautrin ran to us,

and begged us to claim someone.

She told us if we claimed a man,

we would save a life.

As long as you had a relative,

the Japanese would assume

you were not a soldier.

There were two or three thousand

young men, some soldiers, some not.

We each claimed someone.

All day, I watched her running back

and forth across Ginling in this work.

Sometimes, one gets weary of spirit.

There is so much suffering.

So many in such difficult

and impossible circumstances,

it makes one hopeless.

And when will it end?

I can see little indication of God

in the tremendous wave of cruelty and greed

that has engulfed a big piece of our world.

I wish Emperor Hirohito

could see the mangled bodies

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