Dr. M. S. Bates

CHAPTER III

PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE

Towards the end of December the Japanese authorities made known their intention of carrying out the registration of all the thirty thousand odd refugees concentrated at the University of Nanking, an American missionary institution founded fifty years ago. The registration was made of all residents in the city. The following account of what happened was written by a foreign member of the University faculty on January 25 from a draft of information prepared on December 31 and notes made on January 3:

Registration was begun on December 20 in the main compound, occupied mainly by women. To the relatively small number of men there, the military authorities added more than two thousand from the new Library. Out of the total of about three thousand men massed together on the tennis courts below Swazey Hall, between two and three hundred stepped out in answer to a half-hour of haranguing to this- effect: "All who have been soldiers or who have performed compulsory labor (fu juh) pass to the rear. Your lives will be spared, and you will be given work if you thus voluntarily come forth. If you do not, and upon inspection you are discovered, you will be shot." Short speeches were repeated many times over by Chinese under the instructions of Japanese officers. They were Chinese who wished to save as many of their people as possible from the fate that others had met as former soldiers or as men accused wrongfully of being former soldiers. The speeches were clearly and thoroughly heard by Mr. H. L. Sone, Mr. Charles H. Riggs, and myself, as well as by many Chinese members of the University staff. It was thought by some Chinese that certain men who stepped out were influenced by fear or by misunderstanding of the term for compulsory labor. Assuredly, a fair number of them had never been soldiers.

　　The actual conduct of the registration was in the hands of officers whom we later came to know as relatively considerate and reasonable, though that is no praise for, nor exemption from, the responsibility they must bear for the actions of their men in open daylight and in public view, even during the process of registration while the officers were present. At the outset that morning, the chief officer asked my permission to conduct the registration on American property, a deference most startling in the experience of Japanese occupation. Moreover, he and others took especial pains to avoid causing unnecessary fear at the beginning, and I am inclined to credit them with sincerity of intention. Again, although the soldiers sorted out for examination nearly one thousand from the remaining men, including those who had not stepped out, the officers permitted all but one of these thousand to be released for registration upon the casual 'guarantees' given by various Chinese as the line was marched by for individual inspection: and that one was let go upon the joint representations of Mr. Sone and myself. Furthermore, officers before noon asked that we provide two meals of rice for each of the two to three hundred "volunteers" to be replaced by rice from military stores. Even the common soldiers acting as guards were fairly kind, and gave out more cigarettes than blows. In the afternoon the men reported individually their names and occupations, which were written down.

Meanwhile another element had been introduced. Two additional officers, with higher status at least for this particular job, came in. One of them was violent in his dissatisfaction with what had been done. This man had shown gross roughness and stupidity during a visit to the University on the previous day, and we were often to encounter his evil doings; and coarse methods as head of the military police for this district. Toward five o'clock in the afternoon, the two or three hundred men who had stepped out were taken away in two groups by military police. One of them in retrospect declared that he was beginning to be suspicious of the unusual courtesy of some of the friendly guards.

Next morning a man with five bayonet wounds came to the University Hospital. On two occasions before this man declared with fair clarity that he had been a refugee in the library of the University. He stated that he had been picked up by the Japanese on the street and added to a group that had come from the tennis courts mentioned above. That evening, he said, somewhere to the west, about 130 Japanese soldiers had killed most of five hundred similar captives with bayonet thrusts. When he regained consciousness he found that the Japanese had gone, and managed to crawl away during the night. He was not familiar with this part of Nanking, and was vague as to places.

On the morning of the 27th another man was brought to me. He said that he was one of thirty or forty who had escaped the death met by most of the two hundred or three hundred taken away the previous evening. The man desired help for himself and one or more companions in the registration then continuing, but since I was surrounded by military police at the time, I had to tell him that registration was that day limited to women, and that it was best not to speak further at the moment. Three times later I inquired for this group, but I heard nothing more of them.

In the course of the same day and the next (27th and 28th) I heard and checked apparently circumstantial reports that part of the men taken away had been bound in groups of five and ten, to be passed successively from a first room of a large house into a second room or court where there was a big fire. As each group went forward, groans and cries could be heard by the remainder, but no shots. Some twenty remaining from an original sixty broke away in desperation through a back wall and made their escape. Part of the detachment brought from the University were said to have been saved by the pleas of priests living in the neighborhood (Wu T'ai Shan, clearly specified in all this group of indirect reports, which came in part from Buddhists). A similar story had been heard by Mr. Riggs early in the evening of the 26th, conjecturally too soon to come from the same incident. This confusion or complexity of reports was discouraging, and several attempts at further inquiry met with little result while other duties and problems pressed upon us each day.

On the 31st, two men gave a request for aid, with their story, to a trusted assistant of the Library refugee camp, who offered to bring them to me for confirmation if desired. One frankly declared that he had been a soldier, thus creating some presumption in favor of his truthfulness. They declared that the two hundred-three hundred men from the University were split up into various groups. They themselves were taken first to Wu T'ai Shan, then to the bank of the canal outside Han Hisi Men where a machine gun was turned upon them. They fell, one of them wounded, among the dead men and smeared with their blood.

On the 3rd, of January, an interview was secured with two men among five acquaintances in the Library, who were survivors of the experience of December 26. One of them was; in the first group taken from the University, and confirmed circumstantially the room-find-fire account at Wu T'ai Shan as given above under the date of the 27th and 28th. He estimated that of his group eighty were killed and forty to fifty escaped; one of them, wounded by a bayonet thrust, was in the Library, and could be brought to report the same facts. The second was an unusually intelligent man, clear and specific both in narrative and under cross-questioning. He was taken with the second group to a large house at Wu T'ai Shan opposite a temple (this side has been identified with considerable assurance as one of two buildings on Shanghai Road or an alley from it, across from the American School a short distance to the south). There on the road he was alarmed by noticing Chinese priests and a Japanese priest sorrowfully praying and putting long strips of paper at the entrance to the temple. (Since the report of a Japanese priest in Nanking was an utter novelty, I skeptically asked how he knew that the priest was Japanese. The informant replied that his footgear was cleft for a separate big toe; and later I learned that the informant had lived in Tientsin, where he would naturally acquire such recognition. A few days later I myself saw such a priest on Shanghai Road.) Sensing that the atmosphere was ominous, the man spoke to a guard who had been friendly, indicating his anxiety. The guard silently wrote in the dirt with a stick, ta jen ming ling-"orders from a superior."

The men in the immediate vicinity of my informant (he did not speak of others) were bound with wire, wrist to wrist, in pairs. Thirty or more were taken to Han Chung Men and across the canal, where four or five in desperation broke from the column in the dusk or dark, taking advantage of protecting walls, and found a hiding-place. The man guessed by the moon that it was about one o'clock when he heard despairing cries not far to the north. At day-break he went a little in that direction and saw bodies in rows', bayoneted. Though in great fear, he managed to get past the gate safely and slip back to the Safety Zone.

To the account of this man and his testimony must be added two items. A responsible worker in the Chinese Red Cross requested us to go outside the Han Chung Men to inspect a large number of bodies there. Mr. Kroeger of the International Committee told me that he observed these bodies himself, in the course of an early venture outside the gate; but that they could not be seen from the City Wall. The gate is now closed. Burial gangs report three thousand bodies at the point, left in rows or piles after mass executions. The original informant talked so freely to me because he had a premonition of trouble during registration, which he was about to attempt. On January 1, I believe, he was one of some ten men sorted out by the military police from the men passing before them during the open registration resumed on the University compound. During that week the officers who did the actual work seemed to be under instructions to get about that many men per day, or perhaps to feel that they could satisfy their superiors with nothing less. (Naturally the voluntary admission of previous military service had practically ceased, and the whole procedure of registration had changed greatly from the earlier times.) As usual, I tried to watch these performances with some closeness, and to give a little help so far as the personnel and temper of the military would permit in each shifting hour. Failing in indirect efforts after I observed that this man was among the ten, I searched for a chance and took the best of the officers there with me, claiming (with some stretch for which I hope to be forgiven) that I recognized the man and one other who looked most promising of the remainder, and should like the favor of guaranteeing them. The second was released, but not my acquaintance, for reasons unfathomable; and further efforts brought such a kick-back that I had to desist for fear of injury to others. Death was the probable outcome though not certainly so.

Two other men from the University Library reported indirectly that they escaped from a large body of several hundred who were bayoneted along the canal wall to the north, near to San Chia Ho.

Finally, it should be remembered that this incident is only one of a series of similar acts that had been going on for two weeks, with changes on the main theme of mass1 murder of men accused rightfully or wrongfully of being ex-soldiers. This is not the place to discuss the dictum of international law that the lives of prisoners are to be preserved except under serious military necessity, nor the Japanese setting aside of that law for frankly stated vengeance upon persons accused of having killed in battle comrades of the troops now occupying Nanking. Other incidents involved larger numbers of men than did this one. Evidences from burials indicate that close to forty thousand unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking, of whom some 30 per cent had never been soldiers. My special interest in these circumstances is twofold : first, because of the gross treachery of the terms by which men were made to bring themselves forward to death : second, because of the painfully close connection of our property, personnel, and protegees (refugees) with various stages of this tremendous crime. Also, the total evidence for the methods, place, and time of murder is1 more abundant than for some other cases in which large bodies of men were taken off never to return, but about which we have only scraps of information. It seems a clear conclusion that a large majority of the men taken from the University were murdered the same night, some of them after being mixed with groups collected from other places.

Even in all the brutality of the past weeks, it is still difficult for me to pass those tennis courts. To deal, for a number of days, with officers and soldiers who played varying parts in the drama, having to show smiles and deference for the sake of the welfare of the tens of thousands brought to the University for registration, was torture. One feels that one has become a partner with one's own Christian institution in the murder of two hundred men and so responsible for the wretched dependents if they could be found in all the surrounding sea of misery.

The officers and soldiers? Some of them were humane in comparison with violent gangs that we have faced, and many of them must have wives and children to whom they are kindly.

CONTENTS 目次

Chapter

Foreword (Timperley)

序（ティンパレー）

(洞富雄教授の解説）

Chapter I Nanking's Ordeal (Bates & Magee)

第一章　南京の試煉（ベイツ博士＆マギー牧師）

Chapter II Robbery, Murder and Rape (Magee)

第二章　略奪・殺人・強姦（マギー牧師）

Chapter III Promise and Performance (Bates)

第三章　約束と現実（ベイツ博士）

Chapter IV The Nightmare Continues (Bates)

第四章　悪夢は続く（ベイツ博士）

Chapter V Terror in North China

第五章　華北における暴虐

Chapter VI Cities of Dread

第六章　恐怖の都市

Chapter VII Death From the Air

第七章　空襲による死亡

Chapter VIII Organized Destruction

第八章　組織的な破壊