Free The Last Mandarin by Stephen Becker

Monday 13 December 1937. The Japanese armies had successfully completed one of the most brilliant campaigns of modern warfare. But the men were bitter to hear that resistance had ceased. The rifle was loaded and cocked, the finger on the trigger; peace was too much to bear. Victory alone was not enough; some historic accumulation of repressed savagery demanded slaughter. A city of one million, and no one to be found who would resist! More: the foreigners—a handful, righteous, tireless, arrogant even—had designated a Safety Zone, as if their embassies and universities and missions were holy places not to be defiled by rude Japanese. The major said to pay no attention.
    Anyone running in the street was shot or bayoneted. Small fires persisted. The city smoldered.
    In squads and platoons the Japanese patrolled. They sought the mark of the military hatband, and on the hands the rifleman’s calluses. Firing squads were formed and re-formed. The crackle of rifle fire was incessant, resistance or no resistance.
    Also they drank. They smashed wine shops. They found rice wine, and the stronger kao-liang wine, red wine and white made by the foreign fathers, whiskey and gin and brandy. Kanamori remembered much local brandy, plum brandy and even banana brandy, They did not drink to stupefaction, nor stagger and fall; they drank to exhilaration, and their strength grew. Tireless and lawless and heartless, they roamed and swaggered.
    They bashed in doors at random. Families huddled. They shot the men and raped the women. They raped girls of ten and grandmothers of seventy. Akata raped a dumb girl. She rasped and shrieked “Knee khee khee khee,” and at last only a bubbling gurgle. In one house they shot the owner and a man kneeling for mercy behind him. The wife struck Tateno; he bayoneted her. There were two daughters about fifteen, and the men stripped them. A grandmother emerged and hobbled on bound feet to embrace the girls. One of them had a pimple on her face, high on the cheekbone, beside the eye. Kanamori saw that pimple for years. They shot the grandmother. They raped the girls turn and turn about. Kyose found a bamboo flute and raped one with that. Then he blew a tune on the flute. The younger girl screamed and screamed; they stabbed her. Then they were hungry. They left the girls, probably dead.
    In the street they found civilians milling, darting, seeking shelter. Some they shot; from some they took wristwatches, fountain pens, jewelry. One day Kanamori took charge of forty Chinese soldiers now claiming to be coolies. He roped them together, doused them with gasoline and set fire to them. Good sport. Bayonet practice, too; they nailed men to wooden doors by the hands and feet for bayonet drill. They prodded fifty women onto trucks and drove them to a factory yard—a large pottery—where they performed a festival of rape in the open air. And from the Judicial Yüan where three hundred disarmed policemen awaited orders, Kanamori marched them to the West Gate. The policemen were ordered to sit inside the gate, hands on heads. Outside the gate a steep slope dropped off to the canal. The police were divided into groups of one hundred. Outside the gate machine guns were positioned for crossfire. The policemen were forced through the gate at a trot and taken in the crossfire. They tumbled into the canal. Those who did not tumble were bayoneted. Next some thousand male civilians were taken to Hsia Kuan on the bank of the Yangtze. They were seated facing a battery of machine guns at forty meters. After an hour a major arrived and ordered the gunners to open fire.
    Families tried to cross the river in small boats. Kimaya of the 9th, an acquaintance of Kanamori, commanded a small motor launch and intercepted them. One time his squad took a boat and raped some daughters before the whole family. A brother attacked the squad and was dumped overboard; they paused to watch him thrash and drown. Then they ordered