Horror in Paradise (7 page)

The emaciated men now began to act with an incredible deadly efficiency. They called to the guards who, unsuspectingly, opened the doors and looked in. They were seized by the throat by powerful hands and strangled. Their bodies were thrown into the barracks and the ninety-eight began to move across Wake.

With an eerie quality, almost a ghostliness, they flitted past the innumerable dugouts and posts. When a Japanese head did appear and question them, the closest man would simply reach out, and with a strength of desperation, choke the questioner to death. In an area which was so crowded with persons, the passage of skilled and trained Marines would have been a miracle. Also, every Japanese on the island had become sensitive to even the smallest sound in the coral: it might be a rat or a land crab. Contrary to popular belief, starving men do not sleep a deep exhausted sleep. They sleep lightly, restlessly, nervously. But the ninety-eight filtered past dugouts, around command posts, past sentries, by a manned radar station, and finally came to the last pillbox which overlooked the channel between Wake and Wilkes. Quietly, without a word, they made a vicious silent assault on the pillbox. They captured it and killed every occupant without raising an alarm. Then they waited, gazing out over the ocean with utter confidence for the arrival of the dawn and the American task force.

Dawn came, pink and soft, and then passed into the brassy light of early morning. The sea was empty. Still the ninety-eight did not lose confidence. No one panicked. No one proposed doing anything except precisely what they were doing.

It was at this moment that the Japanese discovered what had happened. They quickly organized several companies into search parties, fully armed and carrying hand grenades. They searched Peale and found nothing. Then they started, in a line abreast, to sweep down Wake. They searched every dugout, every shell hole, behind every rock. As the Japanese skirmish line got to the narrow end of Wake, it grew denser and denser. The Americans waited unperturbed. Between them they had six guns and a small amount of ammunition. They looked out to sea calmly, and then back at the approaching Japanese. There was no hysteria, no whining, no defection.

The ninety-eight prepared to resist the hundreds of fully armed Japanese. They fought with their six guns, rocks, sticks, and some with their bare hands. It was short, bloody, and final. In a half hour, fifty of the ninety-eight had been killed.

The forty-eight Americans that were left stood in the welter of blood and bits of flesh, dazed by the explosion of hand grenades, but curiously calm. As the Japanese surrounded them they still looked out over the ocean, still hopeful that deliverance would come.

It did not. Prodded by bayonets and rifle butts, the remaining forty-eight formed two lines and marched back up Wake. They were taken to the north shore. There they were given shovels and ordered to dig their collective grave. They did this calmly and without protest or remorse. Occasionally one of the Americans would stand up, wipe sweat from his forehead, and gaze confidently out at the horizon. The Japanese watched in puzzlement as the Americans quietly went about their last mortal task. When the grave was dug, the Japanese were still suspicious. They bound the Americans hand and foot and then backed cautiously away from them. The Americans gazed impassively at the Japanese, uncomprehending. Then they looked again at the blue encircling Pacific, scanned it as they had scanned it for years. They smiled at one another with confidence, sharing some secret which was denied their captors. They had passed some psychological point of no return and now were ready for whatever consequences followed.

At a command from a Japanese officer, machine guns began to chatter and rifles to crack. The forty-eight were smashed back into the grave by a solid hail of bullets. A few moments later not one of them was alive. The Japanese covered them over with sand and coral.

In 1946, Admiral Sakaibara and Lieutenant Commander Tachibana and fourteen others were sentenced to hang by the military commission which was convened on Kwajalein to investigate the circumstances of the deaths of the ninety-eight.

This was done.

Clifford Gessler

Born in Milton Junction, Wisconsin, in 1893, Clifford Gessler, journalist and poet, served from 1924 to 1934 as telegraph and literary editor of the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Seeking a change, he joined the Mangarevan Expedition of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum and in 1934 sailed to the Tuamotu group on the ninety-foot sampan
Islander.
He and Kenneth P. Emory (“Keneti”) were the only outsiders on the atoll of Tepuka Maruia (the place of the puka tree) from May 15 to July 29, 1934, and closely shared the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants. Two uncanny selections are taken from his 1937 volume,
Road My Body Goes.

Gessler then went on the cutter
Tiare Tahiti,
by way of Vahitahi and several other islands, to Papeete, where he spent some time as a penniless beachcomber. His later adventures, wandering among the Tuamotu, Austral, and Society groups, are told in
The Leaning Wind (1943).

SOME time in the night of our first day on the island, I was awakened by a sound as of pebbles thrown against the side of the house. It was not a loud sound, but a definite one, and the pauses between were as of someone listening.

My first thought was that an early-rising pig or chicken had wandered against the house, but the beam of an electric torch, flashed into the darkness, revealed no living thing.

“Somebody is playing tricks,” I concluded, though in view of the absence of cover for such a trickster to hide near the house, and the known reluctance of Tuamotuans to venture out at night without a light, this explanation was slightly lame.

“It was without doubt a spirit,” said our neighbors next morning.

Such stone-throwing ghosts are common in the Tuamotu, the more so in the “civilized” iron-roofed islands where they can make more noise. All the islands are haunted; the imagination of the Polynesian has peopled his darkness, often with shapes of fear. The spirits of the newly dead wander abroad, seeking literally whom they may devour. This latter propensity of the nocturnal apparitions was less emphasized at Tepuka, and there may have been some connection of this omission with the contention, plausible enough, of the people of that island that they had never been cannibals. On the former man-eating islands, such as Vahitahi and Hao, it is a natural transition, as Stevenson pointed out long ago, from the eating of the dead by the living to the eating of the living by the dead, and a certain kind of spirit is therefore as greatly feared as the werewolves and vampires of medieval Europe. Nevertheless, the haunted darkness of the coconut groves was regarded with extreme caution by our friends and neighbors; nor would they sleep at night without a light in the house: a dim and smoky lantern, turned low, or if, as often happened, oil failed, a wedge of copra burning, propped upon a stone.

Our friends, however, were not alarmed on our behalf. It seemed, or so I understood, that the pebble-tossing spirits were not especially harmful. The visitation of the night might be interpreted as a favorable omen rather than otherwise, signifying that the island spirits recognized our presence and were making us welcome. Moreover, the white man usually is immune from the attacks of the powers of Polynesian darkness. How else explain his recklessness in violating native custom, in sleeping without a light, in eating under a roof, in transgressing any number of prohibitions that have grown up in the half-light of remembered experience in these haunted lands?

I had occasion to observe this fear of the beings of darkness later when at her request I accompanied the daughter of Maru on an errand to the house of a relative, somewhat remote from the main village. Temata led me along the road that leads to the cemetery, but struck away from it into the forest before we reached that point. She was taking no unnecessary chances.

Among the trees, however, she showed increasing alarm. Every large bush, every oddly shaped shadow, caused her to clutch at me in fear. In the gloomiest portion of the wood, an ominous shape appeared suddenly out of the blackness and lurched across our path—a figure of more than human size, it seemed, and of scarcely human shape, with a great antlered head nodding through the gloom.

My companion, in terror, buried her face in my shoulder; I could feel her whole body quivering with fright.

“Let there be life!” said the apparition, and Temata burst out laughing with relief She had recognized the voice of one of her own living relatives.

Our “ghost” was only an honest citizen of Tepuka who had been bold enough, or forced by necessity, to go out at night alone, and the oddity of shape was merely the effect, in the darkness, of the burden he carried on his shoulders.

On the way back, as we hurried over the stony paths that her bare feet knew so well and mine so poorly, I told her that she was safe with me, for the spirits had no power over a white man. She seemed to accept this, but I think she remembered it, not without a trace of malice, at a later time, when, the spirits having apparently punished me for some trespass, she said, “It serves you right!”

Others told us that the dead rise at night and walk about the village, “in their habit as they lived,” indistinguishable from the living, except as they are recognized for individuals who have long since departed this world. For that reason, the road that leads past the small and relatively new cemetery of Tepuka is avoided at night. Nor, we gathered, is this return confined to the dead there interred, whose demise scarcely can antedate the last hurricane. The more ancient dead, it seems, arise from the sea and visit the scenes of their former life.

Surrounded by an atmosphere of such beliefs, one easily slips into the feeling that, after all, anything might be possible. In a spirit half serious, half humorous, I walked out, on a fine evening, down the forbidden street. Far to the left, toward the lagoon shore, lights gleamed through the trees from the houses clustered there. A brighter light moved a torch fisherman, probably, emboldened by hunger to venture abroad at night. If so, he was the only torch fisherman I saw in my time on the island. The early moon cast dense black shadows on the white sand of the road; the forest on either side was dark, and its clumps of pandanus and toumefortia resembled not at all their daylight aspect. It was easy to understand how the mind of the native could populate that darkness with menacing shapes.

The cemetery, however, looked harmless enough: a bare, low-walled quadrangle, lately weeded and swept, in which the few graves, with their wooden crosses, their withered wreaths, seemed lost and lonely in the expanse of moonlight. I walked slowly past; no vampire figure arose. At the end of the road, I sat for a while on the stone curbing, looking out at the sea which rustled softly on the reef. It was a peaceful spot: one could be alone here with the sea and sky, the hard clean stony land, and whatever spirits might be awake.

The evening meeting would be over by now; the dance would be beginning at the house of Maukiri. I walked back slowly through the sand of the road, pausing to sit for a few minutes on the cemetery wall. Perhaps it was the moonlight, perhaps my Western unbelief—but the enclosure of the dead gave up no visible spirit, emitted no ghostly sound. I was to remember, with a question, that moonlight vigil when, long afterward, the
tahunga
shook his head, saying, “You have walked too near a grave.” But that evening, as I slid down from the wall and continued my way toward the lighted houses, I thought only of Walter de la Mare’s traveler who knocked at the moonlit door, and nobody answered; how, as he turned to go, “Tell them I came,” he said, and how “the silence surged softly backward, when the plunging hoofs were gone.”

I HAD begun to think that the Dangerous Islands—with the exception of Reao—were a more healthful environment than many more civilized places.

And then, it seems, I walked too near a grave!

It started with that tiny eruption, like a heat blister, on the back of the little finger of my left hand. We never could trace the source of it to any known injury. Perhaps a sliver from a mat; one of the small thorns that arm the edges of pandanus leaves; these are but random guesses. Perhaps some decaying sea growth in the partly enclosed warm water of the lagoon, where we swam, generated a poison. Now my whole body was afire with it.

On my return from Tepoto, Keneti and I opened the infected area with a sterilized pair of scissors and treated it with such medicines as we had. Next day the entire hand was swollen as far as the wrist, and the finger itself was larger than a thumb.

Keneti was plainly worried.

“We’re not getting anywhere with this. If the
Vaite
were here I’d send you back to Papeete aboard her. I’d be afraid to risk you on the
Tiare Tahiti;
we couldn’t treat the wound properly, and it would be hard to keep sea water out of it. All the natives say sea water is bad for these things.”

But the
Vaite
was far away. There was no available contact with civilization; no communication. Even had there been a ship available, I might have reached hospitals and physicians too late. We must depend on our own meager resources, and those of the natives.

The natives! There was a thought.

“We’re just groping around in the dark, trying to treat this infection with civilized remedies,” Keneti concluded. “Our treatment not only isn’t curing it; it seems to be making it worse.