Camouflage

everyone with damp clothing.
    They lined them up along the side of the road. The officer said one word and in a ragged volley they shot them all.
    In the ringing silence after the shots, the man next to the changeling said, “Shitty water woulda killed ’em anyhow.”
    The changeling nodded and, with the others, began shuffling away from the execution scene. It was having difficulty trying to generalize about human nature.
    Would Americans have done that, with the roles reversed? It seemed inconsistent with what it had observed, except occasionally at the insane asylum, where there were patients unable to see others as human beings.
    After the war, it would have to look into this. That wouldn’t be very hard, since apparently the Japanese were going to win, and everyone would have to learn their language, and be assimilated into their culture.
    Unless they slaughtered all the Americans like animals,as it had just witnessed. Well, it could become a Japanese who’d lost the power of speech. That had worked before.
    They finally got to Balanga, the first town on their route of march. Filipinos lined the road, staring at the Americans, and began throwing food to them—sticks of sugar cane, rice balls, sugar cakes—until suddenly the Japanese started shooting.
    The civilians scattered, running for cover. Two young men took off across a field, which apparently caught someone’s attention. Three of the guards, clustered together, started firing at them, laughing. They kept missing them, either on purpose or from poor marksmanship, but they finally fell.
    The three went out to inspect their handiwork, and evidently the two boys were still alive. They kicked them around and yelled at them, and finally shot them several times point-blank.
    Most of the men watched this tableau in shocked silence. Someone behind the changeling growled “fucking Jap bastards,” and someone else shushed him.
    The changeling tried to interpret what was happening in terms of animal and human behavior, and the little it knew about Japanese culture. If they were trying to scare the Americans with a show of brutality, it wasn’t working well; the ones susceptible to that were already nearly paralyzed with terror. Most of the prisoners by now assumed they were going to die, and were just concentrating on not being next. Each fresh horror seemed to increase the men’s contempt for the Japanese “animals” (as if nonhuman animals ever behaved in such elaborate ways), and also increased their dissatisfaction with their own command, who had surrendered them. Though their defense of Bataan would have been unimpressive, without food, water, gasoline, or ammunition.
    The Japanese behavior revealed vicious contempt, as if the individual Americans had decided to throw down theirarms rather than fight. That was an understandable simplification, for young men so unsophisticated they evidently still thought, after all these days, that the Americans would understand Japanese if they spoke it loudly enough.
    The gulf between the two sides was so large it was as if they were two different species. The changeling wished it had had an opportunity to observe other cultures than American without the complication of war. It resolved to do that when the war was over.
    The Japanese marched them into the middle of town, into a dark hot warehouse building. It was already crowded with prisoners, but the guards pushed them in tighter and tighter, until it was literally impossible to sit or lie down; the men were packed like sardines in a can.
    They smelled worse than sardines, though, with no toilet other than their own clothing. The guards evidently couldn’t stand it after a half hour. They padlocked the door and stood guard outside, while their charges steeped in their own excrement. Many or most of them had some degree of dysentery, and had lost control of their bowel function. Urine baked on skin and the rags of uniforms, and if someone fainted from the stench, or died, he remained standing, just another sardine.
    The changeling was near the padlocked door, and knew it could break it down with little effort. That would probably earn a few people a minute of fresh air before they were shot. If the men had been in a position to vote, they probably would have said “go for it.”
    But it was content to wait and watch, the miasma no more or less pleasant than the sea breeze outside. People stopped talking and concentrated on living another minute, hour, day.
    In