The night of the new moon

I thought instantly then that the poem had come to me at that moment because alone in a Japanese tramp steamer, barely nineteen and on my way back from Japan to Africa in 1926, I had first read this poem on a moonlit sea off Java, and had been inexpressibly touched by it. I realized however, a second later, it had done so even more because it introduces a series of poems that make up one of the greatest and most uncompromising manifestos of life written in my generation under the title: ‘Look! We have come through!’

‘A remarkable thought’

Men think by fits and starts.

And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

A. E. HOUSMAN

I TRIED TO compress the quintessence of all this into the ten minutes I had with the shrivelled little Japanese doctor in the television studio in America that evening. I tried to stress how certain I was that if the atom bombs had not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war would have dragged on, the Japanese would have fought as they had fought everywhere else to the bitter end, from island to island, and so on to the last, in the islands of Japan proper. I told him that I believed this because those two terrible bombs must have seemed as supernatural to the Japanese as they had seemed to me when I first heard of them in the darkness and the danger of our own prison. Somewhere in the unconscious minds of the Japanese people, I argued with the eloquence of an absolute conviction, it must have looked as if their Sun Goddess Ama-Terasu herself had hurled fragments of her sun at Japan to shatter it out of its suicidal course and show it in incontrovertible fashion that it had to stop and mend its ways. After all, had not they themselves described the flash which preceded the first mushroom cloud at Hiroshima: ‘Brighter than a thousand suns’?

I told him how certain I was that the Emperor could never have gathered round himself sufficient influential voices to make the party of peace win the day, and that he himself might have been assassinated, as he very nearly was, by some of the more fanatical and younger Japanese officers. The war would have dragged on and apart from many many more Japanese dead, hundreds and thousands of Americans and their allies would have died as well. Above all for me, selfish as it may sound, there was the certain knowledge that if the bomb had not been dropped and the Emperor had not been able to intervene, Field-Marshal Terauchi would have fought on and hundreds of thousands of prisoners in his power would have been killed. Even had we not been deliberately massacred, we were near our physical end through lack of food. The war had only to drag on some months longer for most of us to have perished. But quite apart from the death through starvation which threatened us there was, most important for me, this question of a deliberate massacre.

The date for this was to be co-ordinated with the day on which the Allied invasion began in the South-East Asia theatre of war that was under Terauchi’s command. We knew now that this invasion, by forces under command of Lord Mountbatten, was planned and ready to begin on 6 September, that is to say, within three weeks of the Japanese capitulation. As far as the many hundreds of thousands of prisoners and internees in South-East Asia were concerned, therefore, death by all counts had been a near miss. There would have been no miss at all if it had not been for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I would not be there to speak to him.

I admitted that he could, perhaps, still suspect this part of my reasoning. I could imagine that he might accept more readily an hypothesis that if the war had gone on longer the military casualties would have been many hundreds of thousands greater and that, as far as we in prison were concerned, whether we would have lived or not was purely conjecture, and death by deliberate killing far from a certainty. Indeed he may well have thought that all I had told him about myself and my fellow-prisoners in Java was just part of a natural fear created by the strains of years of imprisonment. In that connection, I hoped he would believe me, when I told him that, when I went back to active service and joined the staff of Lord Mountbatten, I discussed this aspect of our imprisonment fully with Lord Mountbatten’s Director of Military Intelligence, an experienced officer called General Penney, whom I had known well. He had been my tutor at a staff-college and I had worked closely with him on an urgent mission on which he and I were sent by Lord Mountbatten to the War Cabinet in London.

General Penney had assured me that, among the staff records captured at Terauchi’s headquarters, evidence was found of plans to kill all prisoners and internees when the invasion of South-East Asia began in earnest. I begged the doctor, therefore, to accept that, terrible as the dropping of the two atom bombs had been, his wife and the many thousands who died with her had died in order to save the lives of many hundreds of thousands more. I had tried to speak to him in this way not only for myself but for thousands thus saved, and would like him to know how we would be forever in his wife’s debt as well as that of her fellow-victims.

Those of us who had survived like him and myself could only discharge our debt by looking as deeply and as honestly as we could into the various contributions we had made to this disaster. The war and the bomb, after all, had started in ourselves before they struck in the world without, and we had to look as never before into our own small individual lives and the context of our various nations. We who were saved seemed to me charged by life itself to live in such a way now that no atom bomb could ever be dropped again, and war need never again be called in, as it had been throughout recorded history, as the terrible healer of one-sidedness and loss of soul in man. Could I through him thus presume to acknowledge my debt of life to his wife and beg him to believe she had not died in vain?

Whether I had helped him by my story, and whether he agreed with my conclusions, I could not tell for certain. All I know is that at the end of our television discussion, before we left on our separate ways, he bowed to me as the Japanese general and his officers on that fateful August day had done.

Hissing between his teeth as the old-fashioned Japanese used to do when moved, he came out of his bow to say: ‘Would you please be so kind as to allow me to thank you for a remarkable thought.’

He added to that, after a pause, the traditional farewell of the Japanese, which in itself reflects much of their spirit charged so heavily with provision of fate: the Sayonara that just means: ‘If it must be.’

Postscript

The question may well be asked why this story was not told twenty-five years ago. There are two main answers to the question. One is that when I came out of prison in August 1945, I went straight back to active service without even a day’s leave. For close on the eighteen months that followed I was involved in another kind of war, both military and political, in Indonesia. Militarily, it was a desultory and minor war compared with the war which had preceded it but for me at any rate it was often as dangerous and always more unpleasant because, among other things, unlike its predecessor, its objectives were confused and dubious.

When the British forces could at last be withdrawn from Indonesia towards the end of 1946, I was ordered to stay on as military attaché to the British minister in Java. I could not return to Britain until a year later like some kind of military Rip van Winkle, so quickly and completely forgotten was the decade of war, imprisonment and more war to which I belonged. I immediately found myself confronted on my return with another special challenge as personal and, to me, even more important and urgent than the one which had made me go straight from prison to active service. This challenge constituted the second reason that made it impossible for me to give my mind to the theme of this story.

It all arose out of the fact that the most disturbing feature for me of all the years I had spent in Indonesia which I had come to love with almost as great an intensity as my native Africa, was the discovery that a people so intelligent, admirable and efficient as the Dutch, unbelievable as it may now seem, had managed to live in Indonesia for some 350 years without apparently ever suspecting that in the secret hearts of the millions of people they governed well, after a Roman fashion, the greatest desire from the beginning had been to be quit of them and their rule. This aspect of life in Indonesia, this kind of insensitivity of Empire, seemed to me the outstanding example of the cause of all the great and growing European trouble in the Far East.

But far more important and immediate to me was the realization it spread within my own heart that in my native continent of Africa, as I looked back to it under the microscope of the intensest nostalgia which only imprisonment and living daily with a threat of death can produce, this same form of unawareness among its European rulers was even greater than it had been in Indonesia. I had ever since I can remember been opposed to colour prejudice in my own country. I had written, when barely more than a boy, one of the first books on the evil of colour and race prejudices and so was quick to feel as a result of my time in Java that, unless something were done to make the European in British Africa and particularly in my own native South Africa aware of the evils and perils implicit in a similar lack of imagination and insensitivity to the inner needs and desires of the peoples of Africa, even greater disasters faced them there than those they were already experiencing in Asia.

Accordingly, the moment I was free of the special sense of obligation which had made me serve on in Java I felt compelled to do what I could in my own small way to set this right. In spite of tempting offers of promotion and a career of interest in an army for which I had acquired a profound admiration and affection, I resigned from it. In the years that followed I started work in Africa, trying to help prevent a repetition of the amply discredited patterns of history which dominate so large a part of that great continent today.

All this meant that I had neither the freedom of imagination nor the time to give to the aspect of my experience with which this story is concerned. But I doubt whether, even if I had had the time and the mind, I would have written the story as I have written it here much before today. I believe I would have decided against it because, even told as I am certain I would have told it at the moment of Japan’s surrender, without resentment against the Japanese, I would have been afraid that it would have been used just as more atrocity evidence for the punishment which was being inflicted on our enemies for the war and the manner in which they had conducted it.

I myself was utterly opposed to any form of war trials. I refused to collaborate with the officers of the various war crimes tribunals that were set up in the Far East. There seemed to me something unreal, if not utterly false, about a process that made men like the War Crimes Investigators from Europe, who had not suffered under the Japanese, more bitter and vengeful about our suffering than we were ourselves. There seemed in this to be the seeds of the great, classic and fateful evasions in the human spirit which, I believe, both in the collective and in the individual sense, have been responsible for most of the major tragedies of recorded life and time and are increasingly so in the tragedies that confront us in the world today. I refer to the tendencies in men to blame their own misfortunes and those of their cultures on others; to exercise judgement they need for themselves on the lives of others; to search for a villain to explain everything that goes wrong in their private and collective courses. It is easy to be high-minded about the lives of others and afterwards to feel one has been high-minded in one’s own. The whole of history, it seemed, had been bedevilled by this unconscious and instant mechanism of duplicity in the mind of man. As I saw it we had no moral surplus in our own lives for the lives of others. We needed all our moral energies for ourselves and our own societies.

I had been drawn steadily over the years to a conclusion which has become almost a major article of faith. Men, I believed, were their own greatest villain – they themselves were the flies in their own ointment. Villains undoubtedly do exist in the wide world without. But they do so, in a mysterious and significant state of inter-dependence with the profoundest failures and inadequacies in ourselves and our attitudes to life. It is almost as if the villain without is a Siamese twin of all that is wrong within ourselves. The only sure way to rid life of villains, I believed, after years of thinking about it in prison, was to rid ourselves first of the villain within our own individual and native collective contexts. If we could take care of the measure of the failures in ourselves, I was certain that the world on the whole would ultimately take better care of itself.

I felt strongly that if war had had any justification at all it was only in the sense that at its end, it should leave victors and vanquished free for a moment from the destructive aspects of their past. Modern war appeared to me as a grim autonomous state of life carrying within itself its own harsh system of reward and punishment for those who waged it. It was as if war today were a bitter form of penance for all our inadequate yesterdays. Once this terrible penance had been paid, my own experience suggested, it re-established men in a brief state of innocence which, if seized with imagination, could enable us to build better than before. To go looking for particular persons and societies to blame and punish at the end of war seemed to me to throw men back into the negative aspects of the past from which they had been trying to escape, and to deprive them of the opportunity they had so bitterly earned in order to begin afresh.

In any case, I did not believe then, as I do not believe now, that you could punish whole peoples or even solitary individuals into being better persons. This seemed a renegade, discredited and utterly archaic concept. It has been tried throughout history. Far from being an instrument of redemption, which is punishment’s only moral justification, it is an increasingly self-defeating weapon in the hands of dangerously one-sided men. I know only that I came out of prison longing passionately – and I am certain my longing was shared by all the thousands of men who had been with me – that the past would be recognized as the past and instantly buried before it spread another form of putrefaction in the spirit of our time. I thought that the only hope for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the peoples who had been our enemies. Forgiveness, my prison experience had taught me, was not mere religious sentimentality; it was as fundamental a law of the human spirit as the law of gravity. If one broke the law of gravity one broke one’s neck; if one broke this law of forgiveness one inflicted a mortal wound on one’s spirit and became once again a member of the chain-gang of mere cause and effect from which life has laboured so long and painfully to escape.

The conduct of thousands of men in war and in prison with me confirmed with an eloquence which is one of my most precious memories of war, that the spirit of man is naturally a forgiving spirit. I was convinced that if the cancellation of the negative past which is forgiveness could take its place, it would automatically be followed by the recognition that men could no longer change the pattern of life for the better by changing their frontiers, their systems and their laws of compulsion of judgement and justice, but only by changing themselves.

I had learnt to fear the Pharisee more than the sinner; judgement and justice almost more than human error. I know judgement and justice had brought us far but that far was not far enough. Only the exercise of the law of forgiveness, the declaration for ever of an unconditional amnesty for all in the warring spirit of men, could carry us on beyond. This alone could be the beginning of real change in life and it could only be by example of patiently living out the change in ourselves that we could hope to change for the better the societies to which we belong. It had become axiomatic for me that we could take nobody and no people further than we had taken ourselves. To the extent to which I felt my own war experience could contribute to such a shift in the imagination of man, I responded as a matter of inner urgency – despite all the other preoccupations that beset me – and very soon after my return from Java, put it as well as I could into a story called ‘A Bar of Shadow’ – a theme I later orchestrated in a longer book called The Seed and the Sower. However, as far as the day-to-day facts of what we had endured under the Japanese were concerned, I preferred to remain silent, because I was convinced that the inevitable use to which they would be put in this literal and two-dimensionally minded age of ours, would work against the whole truth of war and the meaning and consequences it should have for the world.

I would have remained silent even now if it had not been for the fact that I see another kind of one-sidedness being introduced into the thinking of our time, as dangerous as the other one-sidedness that I feared in ourselves at the end of the war. This one-sidedness results from the facts that more and more people see the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki out of context. They tend to see it increasingly as an act of history in which we alone were the villains. I have been amazed to observe how in some extraordinary way my own Japanese friends do not seem to feel that they had done anything themselves to provoke us into inflicting Hiroshima and Nagasaki on them and how strangely incurious they are about their own part in the war. I felt that it was extremely important for them as well as for us to maintain a view of this cataclysmic event as steady as it was whole. I had a feeling almost as if I had been placed in a special position by life to contribute in a small way to what should be the final wholeness of the concept of the history of that moment. Perhaps no particular event in history is fully accounted for until it has been seen also from the point of view of the persons who had a special relationship with it. It is precisely because I am convinced that the thousands of people who were in prison with me, and I in particular, had a special relationship with this terrible moment in time that I felt I had a duty to put my share of it on record.

This sense of duty has become more acute as the time left for me to do so has become less. There was, too, the obvious danger that something essential of the experience would be forgotten. The physical facts and the statistics of what happened to us, were perhaps not imperilled. But what seemed to me to be increasingly in danger were the great imponderables of those years that conceived our experience, gave it its own unique life and clothed the bare bones of facts and statistics of our existence with something precious and irrevocable out of our perishable flesh and blood.

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Copyright © Laurens van der Post 1970

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First published in Great Britain by The Hogarth Press 1970

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Cover

About the Author

Also by Laurens Van Der Post

Dedication

Title Page

Illustrations

Story

‘A Remarkable Thought’

Postscript

Copyright