Chapter 239: Escape
The time arrived at exactly seven o’clock in the morning.
The hellish artillery preparation that had lasted for more than an hour finally gradually subsided.
But what enveloped the Japanese army’s positions in Xincounty was not the tranquility of surviving a catastrophe, but a more suffocating, death-like silence.
The originally fairly intact trench system had now turned into sections of broken ditches filled with soil and body parts.
Sturdy machine gun bunkers were bombed to leave only twisted rebar and chunks of cement.
The barbed wire had long disappeared, replaced by huge, pitch-black craters densely packed like countless boils erupting from this land.
In the air lingered thick smoke and the stench of blood so intense it almost solidified, along with a peculiar, nauseating sweet smell unique to burned proteins.
“Beep—beep beep—!”
A piercing bugle call suddenly rang out from behind the Shanxi militia’s positions, shattering the silence!
“General assault begins!”
“Kill…”
Roaring shouts of killing like a tsunami flooded everything in an instant!
Hundreds and thousands of Shanxi militia soldiers in gray uniforms leaped up from their starting positions like a tide.
They held M1 Garand rifles, forming loose yet orderly assault formations, charging toward the Japanese positions that were still emitting wisps of smoke and utterly devastated!
Above their heads, the militia’s machine gun positions fired dense fire suppression nets composed of tracer rounds, firmly suppressing any resistance forces that might raise their heads on the Japanese positions.
……
Nakada Katsuhiko huddled in a foxhole half-collapsed by the bombing, trembling like chaff.
He was just an ordinary private in the 1st Company of the Infantry 32nd Regiment of the 24th Division, and as a mobilization soldier worth only a five-cent stamp, he truly lacked the courage to give his precious life for some Greater East Asia Holy War.
Just two hours ago, his fellow villager Takeuchi Takamasa, who had always taken the best care of him, had died at the machine gun position. The platoon leader Kameda, who had ordered Takeuchi Takamasa to hold the machine gun post, had also died, his leg blown off by a grenade, bleeding to death less than ten meters away.
Then, their positions were shelled again.
When the shelling began, he was stunned by the massive explosions, blood streaming from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and passed out on the spot.
When he woke up again, he found himself buried under the ruins of half a bunker.
With tremendous effort, he crawled out from a pile of warm, sticky mixture of who-knows-whether comrades or soil.
Then, he saw the scene before him.
Platoon Leader Kameda Second Lieutenant, that guy who always had a stern face and liked to whip people with his belt—his upper body was gone, only one leg still in uniform pants, stuck in the soil in a bizarre pose.
His sergeant, the chubby guy who always grinned and showed him photos of his daughter, was now sprawled not far away with a huge, bloody hole in his back, intestines and organs spilled all over the ground, still twitching slightly.
As for the others in the platoon… Nakada Katsuhiko could no longer tell who was who. Everywhere were mutilated, charred black corpses and piles of indistinguishable bloody flesh chunks.
The entire position seemed as if wiped hard by a god with an eraser.
He was the sole survivor of the entire platoon.
At that moment, the roaring shouts of killing from the opposite side, making his soul tremble, came through.
He looked up in terror and saw countless khaki figures swarming toward his position like locusts emerging from the ground, densely packed.
Resist?
Nakada Katsuhiko glanced at the Type 38 rifle in his hand with its bent barrel, then at the slaughterhouse-like position around him, and an uncontrollable, primal biological fear instantly gripped his heart!
To hell with the Empire! To hell with the Emperor!
He only wanted to live!
This single thought filled his mind.
Taking advantage of no one noticing him, the only living thing around, Nakada Katsuhiko scrambled out from the other side of the foxhole. Like a frightened rabbit, he crawled on all fours across the crater- and corpse-filled position, keeping his body as low as possible.
He crossed a small stream dyed red with blood, waded through a scorched field, got his bearings, and then desperately ran toward the faint outline of Xincounty town in the distance.
He became a deserter.
A shameful deserter who, on the collapsing defensive line, abandoned all honor and duty for the sake of survival.
But he didn’t care.
He only wanted to get away from this hell, as far as possible.
………..
Xincounty, this small city in northern Shanxi with only over ten thousand residents in peacetime, had long become dilapidated amid the continuous warfare. Most residents had fled, leaving empty houses and the invaders’ troops wandering the streets.
On the west side of the county town, under a relatively concealed hillside, sat the medical team of the Japanese 24th Division.
Given the scarcity of resources and poverty, as well as the low regard for soldiers’ lives, the Japanese army had always invested very little in medical care.
Take the division as an example: the entire division had only about two to three hundred medical personnel.
At first glance, the number seemed substantial, but once distributed to the regiments, battalions, or even companies below, it was pitifully few.
Unlike field hospitals directly under armies or army groups, which were large-scale, division-level medical teams were much smaller, usually only a few hundred people, mainly responsible for the most urgent preliminary treatment of wounded from the front lines, then transferring the severely wounded to rear field hospitals.
Here was a huge transit station to the rear or to hell.
The core of the medical team was a rudimentary dressing station.
And Haruko was a nurse in this dressing station.
“Ah… ah… it hurts! It hurts so much!”
A young Japanese soldier lay on a makeshift operating table, emitting pained groans. His thigh was slashed open by a shrapnel to the bone, blood soaking through thick gauze and staining the entire trouser leg dark red.
“Please endure it a little, it’ll be done soon.”
Haruko kept comforting the wounded around her. Her voice was very gentle, her face mostly covered by a mask bore a lingering fatigue, with fine beads of sweat condensed on her forehead from excessive focus.
At this moment, she skillfully used forceps to pick up a cotton ball soaked in alcohol, carefully cleaning the blood and dirt around the soldier’s wound.
Even separated by the thick hillside and buildings, the continuous artillery fire from the front lines, like an unending earthquake, was still clearly audible.
Every violent explosion made the ground of the entire dressing station tremble slightly.
The air was filled with a thick, nauseating smell mixed of blood, disinfectant, sweat, and excrement.
Wounded were everywhere around, lying on stretchers or directly on the ground.
Groans, cries, and curses from excruciating pain rose and fell.
Haruko had been working here continuously for over forty-eight hours.
She couldn’t remember how many wounded she had treated or how many bandages she had changed; from nonstop work, her hands had become somewhat red, swollen, and numb.
She had just bandaged the wound for the soldier in front of her and hadn’t yet straightened her aching back when a more chaotic commotion came from the entrance of the dressing station.
“Hurry! Make way! Severely wounded!”
Several medics carried a stretcher, stumbling in. The person on the stretcher was less “person” and more a mass of bloody pulp.
His limbs had all disappeared, his torso bombed beyond recognition, only his chest faintly rising and falling to prove he was still alive.
Immediately after, more wounded surged in.
These people were extremely chaotic, utterly disorganized; many severely wounded had no stretchers, just supported by comrades or dragging their mangled bodies step by step.
Many had tattered uniforms, faces and bodies covered in soot-blackened traces from gunpowder and congealed blood scabs, eyes vacant, full of the terror of surviving catastrophe.
“What’s going on? Why so many wounded all of a sudden?” The medical team’s captain, a middle-aged army doctor, shouted loudly at a medic who had just entered, wearing a red cross armband.
That medic’s face was full of fear, lips trembling nonstop, stammering:
“The positions… the positions… were overrun by the Chinese! All done for! Everyone’s done for!”
This news exploded like a heavy bomb in the entire dressing station!
All nurses and doctors stopped their work, looking incredulously at the wounded surging in like a tide at the entrance.
Haruko was also stunned. She looked at those familiar or unfamiliar young faces, now turned into amputees, and a cold chill shot from her soles straight to the top of her head.
The brutality of war, in this moment, struck her heart in the most direct and cruel way.
She even saw a young soldier who yesterday had smilingly greeted her and said he’d treat her to hometown candies, now lying on the cold ground, arm severed at the shoulder, blood gushing from the massive wound.
That soldier also saw Haruko, his mouth opening and closing as if to say something, but ultimately only emitting “gasp gasp” sounds like a broken bellows.
“Haruko… what are you standing there for! Come help!”
The army doctor’s angry roar snapped her out of her shock.
Haruko bit her lip hard, took a deep breath, suppressed the turmoil in her heart, hurriedly grabbed a new roll of bandages, and rushed toward the amputee soldier…
