(8 of 8)
Although his health is regarded as basically sound for so old a man, Rhee is ailing. One afternoon last week, while posing for a photographer, he suddenly broke out into a sweat, clutched his side and swayed slightly. Aides helped him to his bedroom, called an army surgeon. The diagnosis: gastritis. A graver impairment of his energy is his chronic insomnia, which often allows him only two or three hours sleep at night.
March North. Last week devastated Seoul celebrated Sam Il Day, the anniversary of the Korean Declaration of Independence drawn 34 years ago in Seoul. On the night before, tramcars festooned with hundreds of electric light bulbs rocked along the main streets. From City Hall thousands of students in Japanese-style student uniforms marched singing and chanting in a torchlight parade down the main thoroughfares to the pavilion in Pagoda Park, where Korean patriots had defiantly proclaimed their demands to the Japanese occupiers. The student columns, marched in good order and high spirits.
Their smoky, orange-red torches of bamboo and pitch balls reflected off the somber, jagged ruins, dusty brick and grimy concrete of windowless, crumbling buildings along the line of march. It said much for a stouthearted people, the pride they had found in their new, battle-tested armies and the unity they had found in their common peril, that they could celebrate amidst such desolation.
Next morning 20,000 citizens crowded into Capitol Plaza to hear the Sam Il Day speeches. Armed national police, on the watch for assassins, faced alternately towards and away from the crowd, while plainclothesmen peeped out from behind the pillars of the Capitol building. Illness kept President Syngman Rhee confined to his house. But over the speaker's platform a huge muslin banner proclaimed his defiant message:
MARCH NORTH—UNIFY THE COUNTRY WITH THE SPIRIT OF SAM IL.
Marching north over the bleak, desolate, road to Munsan that night, in the true spirit of independence, but with no designs of conquest, was the widow Ahn Nam-chang and her little family. It was the first full moon of the lunar new year and, in accordance with age-old custom, peasant folk were cracking open the hard little Korean walnuts to foretell the future. No matter that Korea lay devastated by war, there was still a future. If the kernels came out whole, that was a good omen. On the other hand, if they came out broken, that was bad, but not hopeless.