Through the unit's interpreter, Mr. Hajime Toba, 27, a member of the Shanghai Ex-servicemen's Association, the children then told their sad tale.
Their father, they said, was employed in Shanghai. When Japanese guns began to shell Nanking and the fear-crazed populace began to fight its way out of the city, the boys mother, in stark terror, hanged herself.
When the boys found her, she was already a cold corpse. They remained with their dead mother for hours, before the Japanese soldiers came upon the group.
Touched, the soldiers attached the boys,—one of them 16, the other nine years old—to the unit, as messengers. In subsequent weeks, Interpreter Toba came to know and like the boys.
When he left Nanking for Shanghai on January 7, he took the boys with him in the hope of re-uniting them with their father,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.