Pearl Harbour - A novel of December 8th Read Online Free PDF Page B

wild screams, charged at the poles of their opponents. The boys who were now obviously the defenders braced for the onslaught. Some even climbed on the shoulders of others, ringing the pole adorned with the pennant.
    At nearly the same instant, the offensive charges of both sides collided with the defenders.
    There was no strategy here. No feints, no flanking maneuvers, no organized squads moving to left or right, no diversions, just a head-on assault. The charges on both sides swarmed up onto the defenders.
    And James could see there were no rules. Kicks, punches, judo throws, karate blows were the order of the day. Cadets with bloody faces staggered out of the attack even as their comrades, wild with excitement, pressed in. Cadets standing on the shoulders of others leapt into the air, crashing down into the wild melee.
    The assault on the east side of the field surged up around the pole, shoving aside the defenders, kicking and punching. The flagpole started to waver back and forth as the attackers bodily- tried to tear the pole out of the ground and bring it down.
    But then, on the west side of the field, the charge pressed in with wild screams, some of the cadets wearing headbands at the back of the seething mass, shouldering those who showed the slightest reluctance into the fight.
    Seconds later the flag atop the pole on the west was snatched down, the cadet who grabbed it waving it wildly while balanced atop the shoulders of a comrade.
    Whistles echoed and, amazingly for James, within seconds the fight was over. Cadets first coming to attention, bowing to their opponents, then as one extending helping hands to those who were collapsed on the ground, too injured to move, or who had been trampled under in the battle. There was even some backslapping between the opposing sides, leaders of the two teams shaking hands.
    “My God,” James whispered, “if that had been how we played Army-Navy games back in my day, every cadet in the stadium would have swarmed down on the field for one helluva donnybrook.”
    Cecil chuckled loudly. “Definitely not a proper game of cricket.”
    James looked over at his friend and back to the playing field, where victors and losers, all of them filthy, more than a few limping or having to be carried, began to form up, stretcher bearers loading up four boys who were not moving.
    Cricket versus this, he wondered. A glimpse of national character, of how we fight wars?
    “I’ve had boys show up in my English class a couple of hours after one of these, broken arm in a sling, eyes swollen half shut, and not a murmur of complaint, though I could tell the lads were in agony. My first week here, I tried to excuse one of them from class, told him to go to his barracks and rest, and he filled up with tears.
    “It wasn’t tears of pain. I had humiliated him in front of his comrades, implied he didn’t have the guts to take it. A lesson about them I never forgot, and a mistake I never repeated.
    “You know about their swim test?”
    James shook his head.
    “Every summer the entire academy camps out on an island for several weeks,” and he motioned across the bay, “wearing nothing but loincloths. The poor beggars get burned as black as an Indian and live just as primitively. On the last day they swim back here, and James, it’s a ten-mile swim. Good lord man, that’s half the distance of the Channel in water just as cold.”
    “They go off in teams of a hundred. It’s considered a disgrace to leave a comrade behind. Many of these lads have just come from villages inland, and until they go to the island for the summer camp have never swum a stroke in their life; but they go like all the others.”
    “Ten miles, I tell you. They have sampans out there with officers on board to pull in someone who is obviously drowning, but if he is pulled in, that’s it. Pardon the pun, but he is washed out. Every year a couple of them die. They just quietly go under without a word, not wishing to shame