Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath

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Three months after entering the Bilibid hospital ward, Ben Steele wasn’t well yet, but at least he was on the mend. The American POW in the Philippines had twice been read his last rites, but now the beriberi was under control and his malaria was in slow remission. He had survived the Bataan death march and months of work detail that had left him exposed to the elements, tropical insects, and the cruelty of his captors.

Christmas was coming, Christmas 1943, his second in Bilibid Prison. Services were scheduled in the chapel in the compound and the ambulatory planned to serenade the invalids with carols. Maybe Santa would deliver a Red Cross treat or two.

For weeks the doctors had been discharging men from the hospital, sending them to Cabanatuan. Some of the men in Bilibid were so desperate to stay in the hospital they were buying stool samples from comrades with dysentery and passing them off as their own. Ben Steele just sat and waited and sketched.

Sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a makeshift drawing board in his lap, he usually attracted an audience. One day a short, gruff Japanese sergeant, a man the prisoners called Captain Bligh, sat down next to him. For a moment, Ben Steele worried he’d made trouble for himself.

The sergeant was pointing to the drawing—a generic sketch of a Japanese guard—and going on and on, yammering about something. Finally someone summoned an interpreter. Seemed the artist had misdrawn the guard’s leggings, and the sergeant was trying to get him to do it right.

His drawings were getting better, the subject matter more varied—portraits, prison scenes, landscapes. Meanwhile, some of the officers approached him with a secret project. The cruelty they’d all suffered was criminal, they said, and no one was “taking any photographs of this stuff,” so maybe he should start drawing it, create a record of atrocities for the reckoning that was sure to follow the war. He’d never thought of art as documentary, as an accounting. To him a drawing should aim to capture the raw energy of the world, the mysterious force of life. Like someone looking at a well-drawn picture of a horse and feeling the animal under him, feeling its muscles, its natural aversion to having anything on its back. That was the kind of art he wanted to create.

Still, he understood. In their secret diaries and reports, a number of American officers had already started a chronicle of the enemy’s misdeeds. Now, here was a young artist who could help record that malfeasance, a man who could make his comrades’ misery come alive.

So with an eye out for the guards, he started drawing scenes of suffering, scenes he remembered. He drew men on the long march off Bataan falling to their knees and begging for water; he drew the Japanese guards who answered those entreaties with a bullet or bayonet. He drew the daily death parade and burial details at O’Donnell. He drew the rocky hell of Tayabas Road.

This was dangerous business, and everyone knew it. As soon as each drawing was finished, Ben Steele would give it to Father Duffy, who would hide the young artist’s growing body of work in the false bottom of his Mass kit.

Ben Steele produced more than fifty such scenes and, from time to time, kept sketching his West as well. He drew every day, drew his pencils down to the nub. Rather than sharpen them and waste precious lead, he carefully picked the wood away from the core until, at the end, he was left holding nothing but a short rod of lead between his fingertips.

At some point during all this drawing, he got the idea that “this is what I want to do when I get home, go to art school.” Art, after all, had saved him, sustained him. It distracted him from his constant hunger and gave shape to his days. To almost everyone else in prison, the sameness of the days produced a numbing apathy. They woke to the bell, stood bango¯, ate lugao, went to bed. Then they got up and did the same thing all over again, day after leaden day. Ben Steele got up and started to draw.

For more: http://www.tearsinthedarkness.com/

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