Through the unit's interpreter, Me. Hajime Toba, 27, a member of the Shanghai Ex-servicemen's Associ tion, the children then told their sad tale.
'Their father, they. said, was employed sri Shanghai. "When Japanese guns began {o shell Nanking and the fear-crazed populace began. to fight its way out' of the city, the boys' mother, in stark terror, hanged her-
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 thet father.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.