Free And Fire Falls by Peter Watt

resettlement of our patients.’
    Diane laid the sleeping infant on a mattress on the floor. She needed to stretch her legs, so she stepped outside the hospital into the grounds. Immediately she experienced a shudder of fear. Standing only yards away were two grim-faced Japanese soldiers with long bayonets fixed to the ends of their rifles. It was the first time she had seen the enemy in person, and the shock of their presence made her feel giddy.
    One of the soldiers took a step towards her and brandished his rifle at her, indicating that she should return to the hospital. He looked angry and Diane turned to walk inside. She had to accept that she was a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army. Her fate was in their hands. But what was worse than capture by the enemy was not knowing whether Cyril had been able to get Patrick safely out of Malaya.
    *
    Corporal Welsh of the British army signal corps remembered the fire and brimstone sermons preached from the pulpit of his local church in England. Now he was living in the real hell as Japanese aerial bombs and artillery shells tore at the city of Singapore. The noise was deafening and the earth shook as if racked by an earthquake. Corporal Welsh was twenty-three years old and he doubted he would live to see twenty-four.
    He huddled over his radio set, earphones firmly attached to his head, and tried to concentrate amidst the chaos of the office he shared with high-ranking army and air force officers who were bawling orders to destroy all military papers. Corporal Welsh had been assigned the task of scanning the frequencies used by the Japanese and was to log the amount of radio chatter for the intelligence section to analyse. It did not matter that he could not understand what was being transmitted; his skill was identifying the ‘fist’ of the user. His hard-won experience had taught him to tune in to the idiosyncrasies of individual Morse transmitters, identifiable by the way they used the dots and dashes.
    Rumours circulated that General Percival, the commanding officer of all forces in Malaya, was already negotiating a ceasefire with the seemingly unstoppable Imperial Japanese Army. However, Corporal Welsh was a mere signaller and whether or not they were about to surrender did not affect his dedication to the task of monitoring the radio signals. He was listening to a Morse signal clattering through his headset, and he could tell that the signal originated a very short distance away. The short and long beeps told him it was a Japanese coded transmission; he recognised the sending hand from previous messages sent in the past few days as the Japanese advanced down the Malay Peninsula.
    ‘Sir, I’m getting that transmission again,’ he called to a harried signals corps lieutenant overseeing the destruction of British code books.
    ‘I’m just a little busy at the moment, Welsh,’ the junior officer said in his cultured Oxford accent. ‘You see what you can do about it.’
    Just then an artillery shell exploded outside, bringing down the side of the building and scattering shrapnel throughout the communications room. Corporal Welsh was flung across the room by the blast, his headset still attached but ripped from the radio set. He lay crumpled as masonry dust filled the room like smoke. He could vaguely hear someone screaming and tried to gather his thoughts. He realised that the door to hell had opened but death had not yet stepped through to take him. He was alive, albeit battered and bruised.
    Welsh staggered to his feet. He could see the young officer kneeling, grasping his entrails which spilled out in front of him; a large piece of shell casing metal had torn his stomach open. Another soldier lay dead just feet away without a mark on him; the shockwave of the explosion had caused massive internal trauma as lethal as the effects of flying shrapnel. Other men in the communications room appeared dead or seriously wounded and Corporal Welsh was confused as to what he