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Reveille was called with a shiny, curved ship’s whistle, or ‘bosun’s pipe’, that Les Barker wore on a lanyard around his neck next to his .455 Webley revolver. Small and slight as he was, the cheery young leading seaman was taking turns with David Legge in carrying their section’s heavy and cumbersome Bren gun, complete with bipod mounting and ammunition. The march facing them today was a challenge for anyone, even without any extra load. The plan was to get over the mountains by dusk in order to get past the main Japaneseheld town of Danshui under cover of darkness that same night. There must be no appreciable pause on the way that would allow news or rumours of their approach to get through ahead of them. The men tumbled out of the temple for an orgy of washing and tooth-brushing round the well. A few even attempted a shave, having packed razors in their gas-mask bags. But most were by now growing unruly beards, of the sort that helped make foreigners appear even more fearsome to the average Chinese than they did already. These particular barbarians were considered worst of all. After all, it was the British, and specifically the British navy, who had waged the Opium War one hundred years before, seizing Hong Kong and beginning an era of decline and humiliation for China that had yet to end. Apart from the inevitable staring crowd, however, it was almost as if the presence of fifty-odd British sailors in the village temple was an everyday occurrence. More buckets of rice and tea were brought to go with their tinned sausages for breakfast, and by 8 a.m. they were on their way. Admiral Chan had procured a second sedan chair for his injured friend, MacDougall, who had so far struggled along gamely on foot. The villagers had also made a pair of rustic crutches for the times when Chan insisted on walking. There was a reinforced escort of some thirty guerrillas, most of whom went on ahead as scouts. And a number of villagers, both male and female, were employed to carry provisions and kitbags. This they did in the traditional manner, in two baskets hanging from either end of a pole across the carrier’s shoulders. 20 Through Japanese Lines 27 December, 6 a.m. Through Japanese Lines 153 The weather was still sunny and spirits were high as they strung out along the raised paths through the paddy fields. It was beautiful walking country, the surrounding hillsides dotted with clumps of bamboo along the streams, lychee orchards and pink and red clusters of oleander and hibiscus. A shiny, blue-black water buffalo stood and stared at them, a small boy in a pointed bamboo hat perched on its massive neck. An old woman jog-trotted past beneath a towering burden of firewood. The rice paddies—flooded in summer for the harvest—were now dry, but they noticed that many fields had been left uncultivated. The war that had been going on for so long in China was never far away. In some villages, they were welcomed by women and children and were told the men were all off fighting the Japanese—either with the guerrillas or the Kuomintang army. In others, rows of houses lay in charred ruins, showing what happened when the enemy came to visit. Generally, they were told, the Japanese stayed on the other side of the mountains, content to hold onto the main roads and other communication lines—the very ones the escape party hoped to cross that night. Round here, as in most of China, the only communication lines were the ribbon-like footways they were now walking on, made of low walls of mud running from one rice field to the next. Perhaps that was why Japan was finding this such a difficult country to conquer. A few hours’ steady going saw them well into the hills, a twisting trail visible ahead of them as it wound over the first range. They were soon pouring with sweat—‘like a team of hard-driven dray horses’, groaned Kennedy. ‘However, any inclination to take extra stops was dispelled by the sight of Lieutenant Pethick with a growth of white stubble showing up on his bright red face, or Commander Montague, over sixty, purple but plodding grimly on.’ Once again, packs that had earlier been carefully rearranged became too heavy. Something had to be done to speed up...

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