Chapter 875: Tropical Rainforest

“Nakamura-kun, what do you think has happened to us in this war?” a soldier, who had formerly belonged to a Japanese armored unit, asked his comrade beside him. He and the man named Nakamura had been driving a tank on the road to Imphal. But that tank had broken down halfway due to engine failure and had ultimately been abandoned. And the two of them had become infantrymen without weapons.

Compared to the soldier who spoke, Koike, who was a tank commander, Nakamura appeared more composed. The officer’s sword he treasured was slung at his waist, and his eyes were fixed on the main body of the Japanese army marching ceaselessly in the distance. Many were already in rags. Most of the soldiers, in their rout, had even abandoned their rifles on the side of the road.

At first, when they had started abandoning their rifles, the sergeants major and officers had come over to curse and scold them. But later, when everyone was too exhausted to even walk forward, abandoning their rifles and ammunition had become a commonplace occurrence for these starving and dazed Japanese soldiers, and no one pursued the matter any longer.

Having lost his tank, Nakamura was not in a good mood. He sighed, shook his head helplessly, and said to his comrade Koike, “Koike-kun, you can’t win a war on an empty stomach. The thing I want to do most right now is to have a sip of sake, and then a full meal with eel and miso soup.”

“Gulp.” Hearing someone mention so much good food, Koike suddenly felt his saliva welling up like a spring. He swallowed and then, looking at his superior, said, “Nakamura-kun, don’t say any more. I’m really craving something decent to eat.”

The supply for the Japanese tank units in the early stages had been relatively timely. At least they had carried a good amount of fuel. So, while most of the infantry were starving, Nakamura and Koike still had a good amount of food left. But a few days ago, their good days had also come to an end. They could no longer find any decent food.

The Type 95 light tank was a type of tank that the Japanese army had deployed in large numbers in Southeast Asia, and it was also the tank that Nakamura and his crew had driven before. This tank had a very distinctive shape, with its turret offset to the left and its hull also extremely irregular.

Originally, Nakamura had another subordinate named Yoshitake. But this poor fellow had died on the cruel battlefield in a subsequent attack, and so a trio had become a duo, routed on the road of escape. The two of them had relied on each other and had barely managed to survive. But they were now surrounded by unfamiliar units. Those familiar faces had all disappeared into the dense jungle.

“This defeat is entirely because the commanders are only thinking about pleasing those people at high command all day,” Nakamura said, looking at another soldier who had just collapsed from hunger on the side of the road. He complained, “That idiot Mutaguchi! Bakayaro.”

Koike sneered and, pointing to the marching infantry comrades over there, said to Nakamura with great disdain, “Those guys in the infantry say that that idiot Mutaguchi only has three things he likes.”

“Oh? What three things?” Nakamura asked Koike, his voice breathless from the exertion of marching forward, one hand on his officer’s sword, the other on a nearby tree.

“The three things that guy Mutaguchi likes most are, one, medals, two, women, and three, news reporters,” Koike said, imitating a dialect from who knows where to his superior, Nakamura. After he had finished, the two of them laughed with a sense of relief.

There weren’t many ways for the two of them to vent the despair in their hearts now. Making fun of the incompetent Lieutenant General Mutaguchi was one of the more effective methods. They liked to call Mutaguchi an idiot, a fool, a moron, a bastard—of course, the pronunciation of all these words in Japanese was “baka.”

“Baka!” Nakamura said this one word of summary to Koike with a smile still on his face, and then the two of them continued to walk forward. They were a little better off than the Japanese infantry around them, who looked like resurrected vengeful spirits. At least the clothes on their bodies were still enough to show their identity as Japanese soldiers.

Before his words had even faded, a gunshot rang out in the distance. The crisp sound echoed through the valley and the woods, melodious and terrifying. Nakamura was clearly taken aback when he heard the gunshot. He then looked at Koike beside him with a look of terror, and his eyes swept towards the already panicking infantry battalion in the distance.

Heaven only knew how long it had been since they had heard a gunshot. Ever since those British bastards at Imphal had fired fiercely at them with their machine guns, the bullets flying over their heads, the tracer rounds screaming in a straight line, hitting the soldiers around them, the feeling of the world spinning had lasted from the beginning of the attack until the retreat.

That was a memory akin to despair. All the Japanese soldiers who had been through the battle for Imphal probably did not want to recall this terrible time. The sound of gunfire at that time seemed to be incessant, and every shot would take away a life that was already fragile.

Then the entire unit had begun to retreat, and the sound of gunfire had gradually thinned. In the beginning, the British had even sent troops in pursuit, but after the Japanese had fled day and night and had entered the desolate mountains, the British had not followed. And so, all the Japanese units had naturally transitioned from a state of combat to a state of tedious marching.

Then they could hear the howls of wild beasts, the singing of birds, the hysterical cries of the wounded, and the sound of flowing spring water. Of course, the Japanese soldiers could also hear the sound of soldiers slipping off cliffs and falling to their deaths, and the sound of soldiers fainting from hunger and dying on the ground… In short, there were too many sounds in this forest. The only thing that was rare was the sound of gunfire.

But now, the familiar sound of gunfire had rung out again, and after one shot, a second followed. This was not the sound of hunting, because the troops in front had already plundered this rainforest, and there would be no large animals left that required a gun to deal with.

The sound of gunfire became denser. In the midst of the dense gunfire, Nakamura once again recalled the experience he feared most. On the battlefield, he had been sent scurrying by the British machine guns and had finally fallen to the ground. He had looked up and had just happened to see his subordinate Yoshitake, who had lost his way, being turned into a sieve by the bullets—the bullets had first pierced Yoshitake’s eye, then had blown off his chin, and then his body…

Nakamura, his face pale, did not dare to continue to recall. He wiped his face with his hand, as if wanting to wipe away the blood that Yoshitake had splattered on his face that day. He looked at Koike and then ordered in a slightly trembling voice, “Quick, take cover! It’s an enemy attack!”

“Enemy attack!” Before the two of them could find a suitable cover, the infantry in front began to shout. From the mountainside on one side, countless plants seemed to have come to life, swaying as if they were about to come alive. If one looked carefully for a while, they would discover that these living plants were actually soldiers with camouflage on their heads.

A bullet swept through the dense tree trunks and the leaves on them, hitting a Japanese soldier who had even forgotten to lie down. Blood splattered everywhere, and the hit soldier fell backward, knocking over another Japanese soldier who was already as pale as a sheet and as thin as a rail.

The hit soldier was not able to get up again, that was obvious. But the Japanese soldier who had been knocked over also lay there, staring blankly, with no intention of struggling to get up—they were both dead, one killed in action, one from starvation.

“For His Majesty the Emperor! For the Great Japanese Imperial Army! Return fire!” a starving and dizzy infantry sergeant major shouted, drawing his officer’s sword and pointing at the mountainside, giving the order to counter-attack in his loudest voice. But only a few of the Japanese soldiers raised their Type 38 rifles.

The die-hard Japanese soldiers who dared to fight to the death had mostly been used as cannon fodder and left at Imphal. The remaining strong main force, because they had marched faster, had run ahead. The people here now were mostly the pitiful souls who were destined to starve to death on the road, mostly ordinary Japanese civilians who were desperately trying to stay alive.

“It’s the Chinese!” a Japanese soldier in the crowd said. He had seen the unique way the Chinese Expeditionary Force wrapped their puttees, and he had also seen their American-style military uniforms. Of course, he had also seen the faces that were, like his own, composed of yellow skin and black eyes.

“It’s the Chinese army!” Hearing the infantryman’s shout, Nakamura quietly changed his term for the Chinese soldiers, replacing the very disrespectful word “Shina” with the more roundabout “Chinese.” He leaned against a tree, dodging the fire from the Chinese army on one side, and watched as his Japanese comrades fell in swathes, feeling no sense of sorrow.

Perhaps after such a terrible retreat, even death can be considered a kind of release? Nakamura thought to himself with a sense of dejection. He looked at his good friend Koike beside him and said helplessly, “Koike-kun, when the Chinese army comes over in a little while, just surrender.”

As he spoke, the Japanese sergeant major, who was not far away and had just been waving his officer’s sword and ordering his troops to return fire, had now been hit by a bullet and was lying in a puddle of mud. Some of the Japanese soldiers were fleeing to both sides, while others were running in the opposite direction from which the Chinese Expeditionary Force was charging. They pushed aside the large leaves that were blocking their way and crashed through the tropical rainforest without any sense of direction.

To get lost here generally had only one outcome: to die in this uninhabited place, to close one’s eyes in some corner and to rot and become a part of nature. So to leave the main force was not a good solution, but in this situation, it was the choice of the majority in their panic.

To leave this place, to flee from this area where the Chinese army was present, had become the common thought of all the Japanese soldiers present.

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