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was tittering to himself. He was impatient to go home, and I could see his jarred eyes hidden behind his fringe. He turned his back on his mother, but the dead battlefield surrounded him on every side. Deliberately scuffing his polished shoes, he kicked the cartridge cases at the sleeping soldiers.
    I cupped my hands over my ears, trying to catch the sound that would wake them.

2
    ESCAPE ATTEMPTS
    All day rumours had swept Lunghua that there would soon be an escape from the camp. Shivering on the steps of the children’s hut, I waited for Sergeant Nagata to complete the third of the day’s emergency roll calls. Usually at the first hint of an escape attempt, the Japanese sentries would close the gates with a set of heavy padlocks—a symbolic gesture, as David Hunter’s father remarked, since anyone planning to escape from Lunghua hardly intended to walk through the front gates. It was far easier to step through the perimeter wire, as I and the older children did every day, hunting for a lost tennis ball or setting useless bird traps for the American sailors.
    Symbolic or not, the gesture served a practical purpose, like so much of Japanese ceremony. Closing the gates was a sign to any Chinese collaborators in the surrounding countryside that a security alert was under way and told the few informers within the camp—always the last to know what was going on—to keep their eyes open.
    However, the gates hung slackly from their rotting posts, and the sentries stamped their ragged boots on the cold earth, even more bored than ever. Almost all the Japanese soldiers, like Private Kimura, were the sons of peasant farmers, so poor that they regarded Lunghua, with its two thousand prisoners and its unlimited stocks of cricket bats and tennis rackets, as a haven of affluence. The unheated cement dormitories at least received an erratic supply of electric power, an unimagined luxury for the Japanese peasant.
    I whistled through my fingers, trying to attract Kimura’s attention, but he ignored me and gazed at the Chinese beggars waiting patiently outside the gates for the scraps that never came. As if depressed by the untended paddy fields, Kimura frowned at the steam that rose from his broad nostrils. I imagined him thinking of his mother and father tending their modest crops in a remote corner of Hokkaido. Neither of us had seen our parents during the years of the war, though in many ways Kimura was more alone than I was. In the panic after the Japanese seizure of the International Settlement I had been separated from my mother and father when we left our hotel on the Bund. Nonetheless, I was confident that I would see them again, even if their faces had begun to fade in my mind. But Kimura would almost certainly die here, among these empty rice fields, when the Japanese made their last stand against the Americans at the mouth of the Yangtze.
    I lined my fingers on his shaven head, as if aiming Sergeant Nagata’s Mauser pistol, and snapped my thumb.
    â€œJamie, I heard that.” A tall, fourteen-year-old English girl, Peggy Gardner, joined me at the doorway, her thin shoulders hunched against the cold. She nudged me with a bony elbow, as if to make me miss my aim. “Who did you shoot?”
    â€œPrivate Kimura.”
    â€œYou shot him yesterday.” Peggy shook her head over this, her face grave but forgiving, a favourite pose. “Private Kimura is your friend.”
    â€œI shoot my friends, too.” Friends, surprisingly, made even more tempting targets than enemies. “Besides, Private Kimura isn’t really my friend.”
    â€œNot half. Mrs. Dwight thinks you’re an informer. Why do you have to shoot everyone?”
    Sergeant Nagata emerged from D Block, scowling over his roster board, the British block commander behind him. Peggy pushed me against the door and forced my hands into my back. Glaring suspiciously at every blade of grass, Sergeant Nagata would not