PACIFIC NOTEBOOK

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 80, 11 June 1943, Page 2

PACIFIC NOTEBOOK

By Robin Wilier

Guadalcanal. I saw her first as siie Jay between cool white sheets, on a sailor's cot on Guadalcanal. Her almond eyes were closed in the placid, silent sleep of any child. Looking at her, you would have found it .hard to believe that she had known more hoi ror in a lew weeks, of her jive short years than you or 1 might know in a lifetime. Haul to believe, that is, if vou disregarded the bandages swathed around her neck and her upper arms and ij you did not know about the ugly bruise and. the vicious slashes that lay beneath the dressings. The wounds which this live year old Chinese girl bore in tight-lipped silence had been made by the butt and bayonet of a Japanese soldier's rifle. i Friendly natives brought the litL:e girl inLo tlie American lines from the island of Malaita, north of Guadalcanal", a smaii Chinese colony had lived in traditionally peaceful pursuits before the war. j The thin, fearful, but still beauti- | fill child was placed in the care of ' a. navy chaplain, who took me to. see her and whispered above: her ! sleeping I'ornr as much of her tragic i story as lie had been able to piece together.

The Japanese, it seems, had killed her father summarily, and then attacked both the child and her mother, finally leaving them to renegade natives at whose hands, the mother died. This was easy to believe both of the Japanese and of Malaita itself—an island notorious in tiie Pacific for its history of murder and cannibalism and for the I untamed "bad boys" who stiil exist i in its native, population. j battle-hardened American sailors who lived in the coconut grove camp where the Chinese giri was brought nicknamed her Patsy Lee'. I hey looked at her with wonder and pity in their eyes, and swore softly when they heard her story. A lot of them had little children themselves. Patsy Lee was bad propaganda for Japan. All the horror of her experience may never be known to anyone but Patsy Lee. We could only guess at it in the. wall of fearful silence she built around herself. The navy chaplain, who had done mission work in China and knew'a handful of Chinese 1 dialects, could draw no response

from her