The Seed and the Sower

I was sent for the next day. I could then have had a good administrative post for the duration in the Adjutant-General’s department. They told me it was the branch of the service which could best use my experience and training. But resolutely I refused all such suggestions and insisted that I would remain in the ranks unless I could be commissioned in the infantry. Didn’t they know, I asked with a grin, that it was killing not clerking I was after? I had my way and within a few days was back in the club in officer’s uniform, standing round after round of farewell drinks, hearing from everyone both appraisal and approval of my behaviour.

Even my brother, in one of his rare letters, had written on the day war was declared: ‘We’ve just heard the news and by the time this reaches you I expect you’ll have joined up, so I want to hasten to wish you God speed. I can’t, of course, go with you all. Someone has to stay behind and grow food, and I expect it’s right that a bloke like me should be the “someone”. I can only promise you that the thought of what thousands of gallant chaps like you will be doing for the stay-at-homes will make me work harder than ever. I have already thought of a way of bringing new land under the plough that will double, if not treble, our yield. I don’t expect you’ll have time to come all this way to visit us and I am sure it would be wrong for me to press you, but please remember, always, that you’re constantly in our thoughts and prayers. Write when you’ve a moment and God bless you, Ouboet.’

You see? In doing what I’d done I was fulfilling even my brother’s expectations of me. No wonder that, for the moment, I was composed, even content. Yet I never answered the letter. I put it off from day to day and in the end merely sent him a telegram on the day I embarked.

I shall pass over the weeks of training that followed, the detail of embarkation with the first division of infantry and our voyage to the battlefields of North Africa. I do so not because that period is without interest but because it is irrelevant to my story. I am concerned only with betrayal, with the seed of negation within me, with a particular botany both of my own and of the human spirit, and in that connexion I have nothing further to add until I come to my first taste of action. The action was not much of an affair except to me and my battalion. My role in it, moreover, was of my own choosing and execution. For days our Directors of Intelligence had been complaining about the dearth of prisoners to give them information. We were new in the field and took their urging more seriously than we might have done later on. My Colonel seemed profoundly bothered about the whole thing and so I volunteered one night to take out a special patrol and collect the bodies Intelligence wanted.

The offer was accepted gladly and again I was struck by how easily my mind planned and carried out the operation. It was as if I had done it all a thousand times before. That, coupled with my lifetime’s experience in stalking the game of my native land made the task seem elementary and the success a certainty. After observing an advanced post of the enemy for some days, procuring a couple of aerial photographs of it, personally reconnoitring at night the ground between us and it, I crawled one moonless midnight out of our position with a section of seven hand-picked men behind me.

Within half an hour, still undetected, we were close to our target. The tide of a not unpalatable excitement ran high in my blood. I felt rejuvenated, my emotions as fresh and vivid as the day, nearly twenty years before, when I had stalked and killed my first Kudu bull. I halted my patrol and turned on my back to rest making sure we were all in full breath before going in to capture and kill the outpost whose low parapet was looming darkly before us like the outline of the backs of a bunch of ruminating kine. I remarked that the stars too were participating in the venture and trembling on the tips of their toes with excitement. In this strange northern sky they were mostly strangers to me and all appeared in the wrong places but, as if for encouragement, there was my favourite constellation the great hunter Orion gliding smoothly with his Red Indian swing through the black wings on the edge of the Milky Way, unheeding of the clear song and bright twitter of lesser stars on the bright stage before him. I do not think I had ever known a purer or more complete moment than I did then. I mention it because I think now that it was all part of the greater plan to perfect and refine the irony of what had to follow.

All around us the desert, so appropriately a setting for battle in the bankrupt spirit of man, was oddly still. As I lay there the noise of an aeroplane coming fast towards us from behind the enemy lines broke in on the quietude.

‘We’ll go in the moment it’s overhead,’ I whispered to my men. ‘It’ll drown the sound of our movements. But get this clear. You three come first with your knives. You others follow covering with your guns; no shooting if we can help it.’

I turned over. Knife in my right hand I rose softly into position like a runner braced for the starter’s pistol on the edge of the track. Three dark shapes conformed beside me. The plane was flying low and fast towards us. Just before it was overhead I said ‘Now!’ and leapt forward. The enemy position was only a shallow machine-gun pit scraped out of the hard desert rubble. My hand briefly on the parapet I cleared it at the run and landed in the midst of a platoon of sleeping enemy soldiers. My feet barely touched bottom when the aeroplane dropped a landing flare almost immediately overhead. Instantly the shallow pit and its huddle of dusty little men and the desert far and wide around us were illuminated with a bright magnesium glare. The sentry leaning against the bank by the parapet was struggling out of a desperate sleep, terror on his face. In the strange phosphorescent light floating down from above us, I could see every line on his unshaven face. He was a small dark man, his face broad and his eyes wide-open to the horror quaking within him. Something in me hardened instantly at the sight of him, as if he were not a reality of war without but a puppet in a shadow-show against the ecto-plasmic light of my own mind. He raised his rifle, perhaps, to protect himself and he tried to call out, perhaps, that he was surrendering. The sound was strangled in his throat. I have always been exceptionally fast in my physical reaction to situations. Although this takes time in the telling, it all passed off in one continuous movement. I leapt at him and before he was clear of the bank had ducked past his rifle, pinned him against the earth and driven my knife into him beneath his ribs with a swift upward thrust and all my weight and speed behind it. For one infinitesimal fragment of time a terrible stillness fell between us, the sort of stillness no doubt wherein God’s monitors at their listening post at the exit of the world could hear a sparrow fall or even the first faint footstep of evil setting out on its labyrinthine way. In the midst of that stillness I heard his skin squeak at the point of my knife and then snap like elastic. A look like the brush of a crow’s wing passed over his face – and for a moment he reminded me of my own brother. Flashes of visions of my brother, Stompie, the woman crying under the Royal Palm came and went in my mind like children playing hide and seek in the twilight. They vanished just in time. My men were following my own example like automatons, attacking with their knives the terrified men coming out of their sleep with upraised hands. I had to stop them at once. More I feared the fever of killing would upset the four covering us with their guns. Once they opened up there would be no survivors and our chances of getting back to our lines greatly diminished. As I ordered them to stop the landing flare went out and thank God a generous fall of blackness covered us all. We disarmed the seventeen enemy soldiers still alive. We made them take off their boots and marched them in their socks deftly back to our lines. My men went behind purring like kittens with their triumph. I went like someone profoundly preoccupied walking unaware with one foot on a pavement, the other in a gutter; one mind content with my men in that moment; another hopeless and strangely defeated in another epoch of time. In that time-gutter of my own, the prisoners in front of me seemed freer than I, I, a prisoner of myself and my own gaoler. Was this war waged in a cause of which I had had such ardent expectations, to show itself in my first encounter not to be the battlefield I sought? Would it not enable me to do the killing I needed? Was it about to cheat me merely into murdering enemy proxies of my own brother, and be but another turn of the same meaningless screw?

Back in our lines the Colonel came out to congratulate us on the success of the venture but for the first time I found praise hard to swallow. I was nearly rude to him. When my brother officers wanted to celebrate my first mention in despatches I could hardly force myself to drink with them.

And so it went on. I got better and better at killing. In particular I was so good at the kind of raid I have described that I was taken away from my battalion and set to plan and lead raids further and deeper behind the enemy lines. I came back each time impatient of offers of leave and rest, asking only to be kept active and employed. I volunteered for every difficult and hazardous operation. For more than a year I was continuously engaged either on operations against the enemy or busy preparing them. I gave myself no time for anything except war, hoping thereby to escape from my shadows, but they were too adroit for me. After waking, in the midst of battle, in the faces of men fixing their bayonets behind a sand dune, in the mindless sound of the cry as they charged, in the sight of the enemy, caught in our concealed fire, wheeling like springbok, or at the sight of a peasant woman sitting with her child by the smouldering ruin of her home, right through the gateway of my deepest sleep and in the heart of my most tender dreams the shadows followed deftly swishing and fluttering their long skirts as they passed. I do not know where it would have ended if, despite all my resistances, I had not been suddenly ordered out of the desert and sent on a special mission to Palestine.

5 ‘The Day Far Spent’

I HAVE OFTEN been overawed in the silences of a sleepless night by the thought of the precision with which chance and circumstance work in human lives. They will contrive, for instance, that a person such as a Maori I knew should be born on the other side of the world just in time to meet a German bullet in his forehead thirty years later in a Libyan desert, while I, who was leading him, was delivered with as nice a calculation. But of the many imposing expositions I have witnessed of the working of these precision instruments of life none struck me as so subtle as those which took me to Palestine. I went against my will and yet no assignment could have fitted more neatly into the jig-saw pattern of my desperation than this posting to Palestine. I found myself stationed at a monastery called Imwash. The monks had moved out only a few days before to their parent monastery a mile or so back at a place called Latrun. There was still a smell as of frankincense and myrrh from their centuries of occupation hanging about the cool corridors and the grey stone halls when I moved in with my band of cut-throats.

For some weeks I and other men younger than I but with even older faces, taught these desperate characters the kind of killing and clandestine warfare in which we had become specialists. They were a strange lot, all with their own idea and aptitude for killing. For instance the best shot among them was a boy with a squint and a contortionist’s body who had had a Jewish father and an Arab mother and who aimed his gun with his right eye from his left shoulder. In him, as in them all, the normal proportions seemed inverted with a macabre logic to serve all the better their mission of death. In the mornings I marched them out and taught them how to handle explosives, lay booby traps, set time-fuses and delayed action bombs, together with unarmed combat and other tricks of silent killing. In the afternoons I lectured them out of my experience and tried to make their imaginations at home in the background against which they would have to do their work. At night I would take them out into the hills behind the monastery and play at stalking human game in the deep gullies, wadis, orchards of olives and fig trees on their terraced slopes. Usually between lectures and night manoeuvres I would march them out before sunset to watch the time-fuses and delayed charges that we had set in the morning, explode. The dust of the explosions would hang golden between us and the sinking sun in the still air. I had always thought our African high-veld light was the purest in the world. I was wrong. There is nothing so lovely as the autumnal evening light in Palestine. I remember on the first evening standing there apart from my soldiers looking beyond the dust to the olive trees, figs, vineyards and slender cypresses, feeling the explosions still reeling in my senses, and thinking that this was a strange way to treat a holy land. Once the feeling was sharpened almost unendurably by the sight of a lone gazelle, one of the loveliest of the lean buck of the Palestinian hills, startled by the sounds and leaping high on a crest of purple hill, just as Stompie had once done in the great plain behind the prehistoric hills at home. Oh, it was ever-present, this prick of memory which had been tempered like a surgeon’s needle in the general nightmare of betrayal in my being. I would be grateful, then, for the odd charge which had not exploded and the duty which compelled me to go and examine it, because, as Commanding Officer, it was I who had to execute this most dangerous of all tasks in our training mission.

One evening, so still and clear that the light standing brimful between the hills around us was like crystal water and the slight air of evening sent a faint but rhythmical tremble through it like the tail of a fish in a clear mountain pool, I was counting the explosions, thus, and felt almost relieved to find that one had failed. I was closing in on it fast when it went off and a rock the size of a rugger ball just missed my head. As the dust and shock cleared from my eyes I saw sitting on a boulder some two hundred yards away a civilian who had no business to be there at all. I went over to him quickly. He was a monk but despite his priest’s clothes I spoke to him sternly, so relieved was I to find an outlet for the mixed emotions of shock and chagrin within me. He was a tall, middle-aged man with a slight stoop, yellow hair that was closely cropped and a pair of fine blue eyes in a wide forehead. He was heavily bearded as well and as a result the only light in his face came from his eyes and brow.

He listened to me patiently and at the end said in English with a German accent: ‘I am sorry if I have done anything wrong, sir, and give you concern. But for many years now long before our superiors in Jerusalem handed over our monastery to the military for “thirty pieces of silver” I have come here every evening to look both at it and the view. You need not be afraid I’ll do anything stupid. I know all about explosives. I too have been a service man once. But I’ll not come here again if you forbid it.’

With that he turned as if to go to where the greater monastery sat snugly a mile away below a hill securely tucked in behind screens of flickering cypress, glistening olive trees and wide autumnal vineyards of gold. However, his manner had made such an impression on me that I asked in a more conciliatory tone: ‘You say you have been a service man too? How, when and where?’

He turned round at once and said slowly: ‘I was a German submarine officer in the ’14–’18 war.’

‘And in this?’ I asked beginning again to feel aggressive.

But he was impervious to the change of tone and said, ‘I became a monk in 1919 and have been here in the Holy Land ever since.’

He paused and we stood there looking at each other.

He broke out of the silence first and asked: ‘Do you think you could possibly tell me how the war is going?’

I started, willingly enough, to give him the latest war news without realizing that I was on the wrong track.

He interrupted me again, saying: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that war. I meant your war.’

‘And your country’s too,’ I answered sharply, thinking that, like many Germans, he was disclaiming responsibility for it.

‘Forgive me,’ he answered quietly, ‘if I have presumed too much on a priest’s privilege and intruded into your private affairs. But I thought I recognized a look on your face that I seemed to remember on my own in 1917 . . .’ He paused. ‘It was then that I first realized that the war I was fighting was in me long before it was in the world without. I realized that I was fighting it in a – ach! was heisst es – a secondary dimension of reality.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I said uncomfortably, not at all prepared to continue such a disturbing line of conversation with a stranger even though the stranger were a priest. So I went on instead to say: ‘Look, if you’ve been coming here every evening, don’t let us break the habit. I can easily arrange for my men to practise these explosions at a safer distance.’

At that a new expression came into his sombre eyes. He thanked me saying he would appreciate greatly such permission and begged me to allow him to explain why he so valued coming there in the evening. For twenty years, he told me, he had been coming here because this dip in the land where we practised our combats was, for him, the most hallowed ground in Palestine. It was there, he said, that Christ first revealed Himself to His disciples after the Resurrection. He waved his hands, now almost transparently white from the many years of concealment in his monk’s sleeves, at the land below us. The sun was just going down and the shadows were already running deep like flowing water in the waddies. He said that there exactly where the monastery stood the disciples, some as stunned by their private hesitations and evasions during those critical hours between Christ’s apprehension and His crucifixion as by the crucifixion itself, and all like sheep at nightfall in a world of wolves without a shepherd, were gathered fearfully together. Then suddenly He came out of a sunset sky and appeared before his anguished followers.

They did not recognize Him, but out of their own deep hurt, and in their fear welcoming any addition to their numbers, they made him welcome, saying, ‘Abide with us, for the day is far spent.’

Here there was a pause and then my companion went on to say that as for himself, he came there every night to relive that hour. He came to remind himself of his own evasions and failure to recognize the Resurrected One during the day and to wait until he was ready to fall on his own knees for pardon of his daily acts of unbelief.

‘But how do you know that this was the place?’ I asked abruptly.

The great bell had suddenly begun tolling the dark hour in the monastery and I rather shot the question at him because I felt that the emotion roused in me by his tale and the manner of his telling it would disturb me unless I clung to what were still to me the main facts of life.

‘The first pilgrims discovered it and marked the place,’ he replied. ‘The crusaders followed to build this their first church and monastery on the designated spot, exactly where you now do your work.’

His words again made me uncomfortable. His capacity for disconcerting me seemed unfailing yet I wanted him to say more. However, he excused himself gently, asking if I had not heard the bell? That was his call to duty as I had mine over there. He pointed to where my men huddled restless on the slope. If I liked, he concluded, we could meet again any evening I chose, in the same place, for now that I had been so good as to give him permission, he would keep up the custom. And with that he walked, still with a marked seaman’s roll under his monk’s habit, into the growing dark, the bell tolling all the time and shaking the brown air with wave upon wave of urgent sound.

But I did not see him again. I woke the next morning with one of my periodical recurrences of malaria, the worst I had experienced since I left the bush-veld. We had no doctor attached to my staff for we were only a small oddly select unit, an aristocracy, if you like, of killers, nor would I allow my adjutant to telephone to Jerusalem for one. I had had malaria so often in the past that I felt I knew better than any doctor what to do. I promptly dosed myself with quinine, got my batman to pile my bed high with rugs and greatcoats and settled down to wait confidently for my ague to stop and the sweat to burst out and break the fever. But as the day wore on it soon became evident that this was no ordinary attack. The ague got worse, my temperature rose and no sweat relieved the fever.

In the afternoon an age of ice seemed to have entered my blood and to be rattling my bones. When I am really ill, my instinct is for life, and not man, to nurse me. When I come to die I hope it may be in the open, face to face with sky and stars and so I may be able to commit my spirit without reserve to its keeper, the wind.

So now with the help of my batman I struggled out into the open to lie under the sky facing the lee of the slope where the monk and I had met the evening before. There at last I felt my fever had room to spread its wings. For that is what fever needs. Fever is Time grown strange wings, the mind feathered to range great distances between an anguished brittle moment in the present and one’s first drop into being. Hardly was I laid in the open than such consciousness as I had took flight. I forgot my aching and my shivering vanished and I just went with a single overwhelming thought swiftly backwards until I came to the moment where once a great darkness had gathered over the land on which I lay. I could feel the earth heave itself in agony beneath my ear, hear the temple rent with a lightning sound to be followed by a terrible silence wherein the only murmur was the blood hissing in my ear like an angry sea among the rocks. The silence became so frightening, so full of the nothingness of which I have spoken, that I could endure it no longer and flung myself up in my bed to look for something to fill it.

I saw the sun setting and realized my fever had brought me out at the moment where a little huddle of stricken followers were preparing for the night on the place where the monastery, my future workshop of war, was to be built. Then, in the focus of my fever, I saw first the huddle of men and then He Himself, coming down a footpath winding through figs and sparkling olives just as the monk had described it to me. The sunset was like a halo around His head. And yet now that He had come the occasion was so ordinary that I was not surprised that He was not recognized. How hard to learn that our own brief wonder is not worked in heaven but in the grains of sand at our feet; that miracle is not in the stars but in the fearful flesh and blood piled on the moon-bone beneath our own shrinking skin. The men now huddled about Him could not see the miracle for, in their fear, they were looking too far or too high.

Then I heard one of them, dark with bereavement like a crow at nightfall, say to Him: ‘Abide with us for the day is far spent, brother.’

But his tone implied no recognition.

As I watched it all, His presence crackling like a fire within my senses, I began to understand more fully their failure in recognition. He was the same: but He was translated. The perishable script of Himself was left in the archives somewhere around Gethsemane, and only the translation was now present. He had been rendered into a new idiom which could not yet be read. It was therefore no surprise to me that instead of answering the invitation directly, he asked instead with some suddeness. ‘But why are you not all here?’

‘Indeed, we are all here,’ one of them replied.

He shook His head decisively, answering, ‘Judas is not here.’

The amazement on their faces was great partly, perhaps, because of the implication in tone that He wished Judas to be there; and also, perhaps, because He evidently did not seem to know of Judas’s fate which was by now common knowledge throughout the land.

Then, in my fever, I saw one of them stand slowly to his feet and answer, ‘But surely . . . Master . . . you know Judas is dead. He hanged himself.’

Both by his action, words and tone I knew that at last revelation had come to that questioner.

At this the Resurrected One turned His back on the speaker and spoke out clearly yet with anguish. ‘This cannot be true. If I fail in this I fail in all else besides.’ He looked up. ‘Father this life which You have set beyond men needs Judas just as it needs Me. His deed, too, is redeemed in the love which exacted it of him.’

Saying this He half-turned again and I was able to see that His eyes were entirely without light.

While the others huddled together still dazed by revelation I got up unhesitatingly and, shivering, I went and knelt at His feet, saying, ‘There are many rumours in Jerusalem and Rome that are not true. See, I am Judas . . . I am alive and I am here.’

As I spoke the light came back into His face and leaning forward He took both my hands in His and helped my fever-shaken body to its feet. Then, looking upwards, He exclaimed, ‘Thank you, Father. Now at last we can both be free.’

‘But I’m not free,’ I hastened to add. ‘I had a brother once and I betrayed him –’

‘Go to your brother,’ He said at once, ‘and make your peace with him even as I have had to do with my need of you.’

At that I felt the sweat break out on my skin and run down my body like tropical rain. I began slowly to grow warm again and I could hear the cool wind of an autumn nightfall stirring down the slope and through the leaves. For long I had feared the voice of the wind, but now I was grateful for the sound. It was almost dark and the stars were dropping their light like tears of compassion upon the night. Amazed, I looked around me. There were no people to be seen. I was quite alone yet for the first time in many years I did not feel lonely. I stretched back into my blankets and lay down watching the stars go down behind the hill between Imwash and Bethlehem. I don’t think I slept at all and yet it was the shortest night I have ever known. The day came so swiftly that night could have been the mere shadow of a cloud passing across the sun. My own darkness had been overtaken at last.

When morning came I knew clearly what I was going to do. I felt like a ship long becalmed reeling in the wind that had at last found its sails. I was going at once to my brother. War and the clash of the world’s armies seemed insignificant in comparison with that slight deed. For the first time I feared lest I be killed before I could accomplish it. Death, I now understood, was a moment of supreme truth that one could only meet with equal truth. I prayed that I should not carry this secret, this lie of my betrayal with me into death.

My resourcefulness which I had thrown so wholeheartedly into destruction was now diverted towards quite another course of action. Before breakfast I had summoned a doctor from Jerusalem. That same day I had his order for a month’s convalescent leave in my pocket. Though everyone declared it impossible, I managed to get from Palestine to Egypt and from Egypt, with the help of old friends in the South African Air Force, by stages to my home.

Barely a fortnight later I got out of a train one morning at the little railway siding near my brother’s home. Everyone stared hard at my uniform which they found as difficult to recognize as they did me. I managed to hire an old car for the day because that was all the time I could allow myself if I were to be back before my leave expired, and I drove to my brother’s farm. During all this period I scarcely had eyes for the outside world at all but now even I could not help noticing how dry was the world. There was no grass left on the veld and the scrub was twisted and burnt black in the sun’s fire; sheep and cattle were so thin that their ribs and bones seemed about to pierce their taut skins. Vultures, crows and buzzards circled the sky wherever some drought-stricken creature lay and wherever I got out of the car to open a gate the smell of death assailed my nose. Yet despite the tragedy of the thirsty land and the half-starved animals, as the morning wore on and I passed through great grey plains between shimmering blue hills and came nearer to my brother’s home, a strange excitement began to rise in me. In the north-west, where our rains come from, I saw the snow peaks of a range of thunder-clouds mounting in the sky but by the time I got to my brother’s home they were turning black. Almost in their shadow I drove up an avenue of trembling poplars grown tall and broad since my last visit, drew up sharply before the wide stoep, jumped out and ran up the steps. Before I could knock, the front door opened and my brother’s wife came out.

I had never known her well but I remarked what an austere spirit their joint struggle with the difficult earth had made of her. She recognized me immediately yet in the very act of recognition her expression hardened in a way that was not promising. She did not even offer me her cheek to kiss but held out a cool hand and then managed to collect herself to explain: ‘This is a surprise. Come in and I’ll go and call your brother. He’ll be amazed to see you! Why didn’t you send us word you were coming?’

‘That’s a long story,’ I said quickly, ‘and I can explain later. But where is he? I’ll go and find him.’

‘Then I’ll go on seeing to the dinner,’ she answered not without relief. ‘He’s in the garden at the back, leading the last of our water to the trees and vegetables. We’ve had a terrible time, as you’ve noticed I expect. No rain for a year. Sheep and cattle dying and all this lovely garden practically dead.’ She looked at me as if I’d been away enjoying myself somewhere instead of fighting a war.

‘It must have been terrible,’ I agreed at once. ‘But it looks as if the rain is on its way at last.’

‘It has come up like this a dozen times recently only to be blown away by evening,’ she answered grimly.

I left her on that note and went to look for my brother. I found him in the centre of the garden leading a trickle of water with infinite patience and care from one parched, withering tree to the other. I saw him before he saw me. Of course he looked older, more bent, in fact almost twisted like one of the indigenous thorn-trees of our thirsty land. Indeed, he appeared to be so much a part of the earth that he might have grown out of it. I noticed the hump on his back was more pronounced than before but at that moment he heard me and turned round with the disconcerting adroitness so unexpected in one with so awkward a frame. He saw me and went still with shock. His dark eyes looked into my blue ones and I saw their light was still imprisoned in a moment far back in time. How well I knew it and how clearly I understood it now that I was free. Had I not learnt lately that death is not something that happens at the end of our life? It is imprisonment in one moment of time, confinement in one sharp uncompromising deed or aspect or ourselves. Death is exclusion from renewal of our present-day selves. Neither heaven nor hell are hereafter. Hell is time arrested within and refusing to join in the movement of wind and stars. Heaven is the boulder rock unrolled to let new life out: it is man restored to all four of his seasons rounding for eternity.

So I went up to my brother, and putting both hands on his shoulders said: ‘It’s good to see you again, Ouboet – and still growing things.’

He stammered: ‘Ouboet, I wish I’d known you were coming. I’d have liked to be there to meet you. But come on up to the house. You must be tired. Can you stay long?’

‘No, Ou Boetie,’ I said and explained quickly, ‘I’ve no right in a sense to be here at all. It’s taken me a fortnight to get here, and I’ll be lucky to be back to the front in time if I’m not to get into serious trouble. So I’m going back in a few hours to catch the night train north. I’ve been hitch-hiking my way by air down here. I’ve come here just to see you and spend these few hours with you.’

‘Really, Ouboet?’ he said as if he could not believe his ears: ‘Is that really so?’

‘Of course,’ I told him tightening my grip on his shoulders and feeling I had no time even to go through the conventional motions of such a meeting. So I went straight to the heart of the matter and told him I had come to tell him of a great wrong I had once done him and to ask his forgiveness.

‘Oh, but surely, Ouboet,’ he began to protest, but more out of habit than real feeling I was sure. So I interrupted him, begging him to listen and went on, without pause or evasion, to tell him the story of my betrayal as I saw it.

He listened without interruption and with growing intensity. A hush seemed to have fallen over the fast-approaching storm and not even a mutter of distant thunder broke through the stillness of the parched garden.

When I had finished he turned and stared at me and I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

‘Ouboet,’ he said in a voice I had not heard since one of our moments of reconciliation when we slept as children under the stars. ‘You mean, you – you’ve come all this way, spent the only leave you’ve ever taken since the war began, just to come and tell me this?’

I nodded, too upset to speak. Also suddenly I was now afraid that what I’d said seemed too little for so much. I looked away to where beyond the withered orchards the dark clouds were uncurling ponderously in the diminishing blue wondering what I would do if he, too, should find my words wanting.

Then I felt my hands taken in rough ploughman’s fingers. ‘Ouboet, you’ve done many fine things,’ he said gently, ‘but never a braver than you’ve done today.’ He paused. ‘I’ve been afraid of this all along, but I only knew it for certain that day when you shot Stompic.’

He broke off, and I stared at him.

‘You knew?’

He nodded. ‘But now we’re free of it all, thanks to you.’

I realized, with amazement, that further words were unnecessary between us. Then I heard my brother with characteristic solicitude saying quickly, ‘But you look dead beat. Let’s get back to the house. You go on ahead. I just want to turn off the water. Can’t afford to waste a drop.’

At his words physical fatigue flooded me and yet somehow became part of a new warmth produced by the release of the old tenderness between us.

My brother’s wife was waiting for me below the stoep, curiosity and anxiety joined in her tense expression. But before either she or I could speak I heard my brother begin to sing in the garden as I had not heard him sing since childhood. He sang the verse I knew which was of his own composition:

Ride, ride through the day,

Ride through the moonlight,

Ride, ride through the night,

For far in the distance burns the fire,

For someone who has waited long.

Then he started a second stanza, which was new to me:

I rode all through the day,

I rode through the moonlight,

I rode all through the night

To the fire in the distance burning

And beside the fire found

He who had waited for so long.

I was deeply moved by the song and the woman standing by my side also reacted almost violently. ‘Dear heaven,’ she exclaimed. ‘D’you know ever since we’ve been married he’s never sung a note? I’d never have believed he could ever sing like that again.’

At that moment the thunder rumbled deep and long from end to end of the hills in the great plain. It was as if heaven itself had spoken. When the sound died away in the silence that followed we could hear only the wind moaning in the distance. My brother’s wife looked at me, her face suddenly grown soft as a young girl’s. ‘I’m glad you came,’ she said quickly. ‘But come in and rest. I am so glad I happen to have got a rather nice meal today and I believe you’ve brought us luck. I believe it is going to rain at last.’

We turned and looked at the sky above the garden. There could be no more doubt. The cavalry of the great army of cloud was rounding up the last stray bits of blue. Thunder rang out again and again loud and long and the lonely hills at the end of the plain went white with the advance mist of the storm. Then we saw the rain itself come up fast, rushing with a sound like that of the great wind of the first spirit of life once more taking up its quest on the parched and long-rejected earth upon which we stood.

6 The Sowing of the Seed

‘THE QUESTIONS PUT in my mind by this disturbing document,’ Lawrence said to me when we were alone again in the afternoon, ‘come so fast that I hardly know where to begin. But the first one is: did Celliers go back to the war? I gather from this account that he felt bound not to overstay his leave. But surely such a – a revelation must have made a difference to him?’

‘It did and it didn’t,’ I told him. ‘In a way he seemed to go on as before.’

‘That surprises me. It suggests a compromise – can you explain it?’ Lawrence looked close to disappointment so I hastened to tell him what I could.

It was not much really. I felt convinced that Celliers had meant to write more about his life but was prevented from doing so for reasons which would soon be clear. I could not say for certain in what state he was on his return from leave because by the time he got back to North Africa, the Japanese had struck in South East Asia and I was on my way to a job in Burma. In fact I had not seen him again until the Kempeitai, the powerful Japanese secret police, had brought him, barely alive, into my prison in Java.

‘Was that the camp under the notorious Yonoi?’ Lawrence asked quickly.

Yes, I told him, it was. One afternoon I’d happened to be standing near the prison gates when the Japanese had pushed Celliers, barely alive, into the prison without ceremony or warning. I had known from the behaviour of the Korean sentries who, to our regret, had replaced the Japanese ones, that something unusual was going on. As Lawrence well knew this was an uncomfortable feeling to have anywhere in prison but never so bad as under the unpredictable Yonoi. I had no idea of course of the reason for it. But I’d been on the alert because I’d discovered that when one had feelings of that sort sometimes doing something quickly and at the right moment could help to ward off disaster.

‘I know. Timing was all important,’ Lawrence agreed with me quickly. ‘But how difficult it was to make some of our chaps see it.’

I went on to tell Lawrence that I’d been standing there at the gates on watch when suddenly they had opened. I’d half expected a company of infantry to come rushing in on one of their prison searches but it had been just a solitary, tall, broad-shouldered figure, which had been pushed in through the doors in a torn jungle-green uniform, with an untidy head of long hair which, after our cropped heads, looked lush to the point of obscenity. He carried an empty shoulder-pack dangling in one hand and a field flash on his hip, while he tried to walk upright without the help of two Kempeitai privates at his side. Even the sentries were surprised. They had seen comings and goings of secret police cars and concluded that something far bigger than the release of a prisoner from secret confinement was contemplated. And in a sense they had been right for I discovered afterwards that that day we were to have been summoned to attend Cellier’s execution but that largely due to Yonoi’s intervention he had been reprieved at the last moment.

‘Yonoi intervened!’ Lawrence exclaimed incredulously. He half-whistled and then asked what seemed the most inconsequent of questions: ‘Celliers was very fair in colouring, wasn’t he?’

‘I said “Yes” and then asked: “Why?”’

He smiled one of his grave smiles. ‘I’ll explain when the right moment comes,’ he assured me. ‘But I think you’ve given me the key to something that the enigmatic Yonoi once asked me to do. Yes. I saw Yonoi myself on a later occasion. But you’d left the island by then – Go on!’

I told him I hadn’t recognized Celliers at once, though he was greatly changed. The change of course was partly due to the fact that he had been tortured by his captors, kept starved in darkness for months, and inadequately doctored for acute dysentery and malaria. Indeed, knowing nothing of his inner history as we now knew it, I put the whole change down to that. However, I was wrong. But to return to that afternoon: Celliers, weak as he was, recognized me and called out my name. Before I could respond the corporal of the guard shook his hand imperiously at me and shouted rudely: ‘Kura! Lakas! You there! Quick, come here!’

Of course I went at once to be hit across the face with the back of the guard’s hand. Korean guards in front of the secret police had to be more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. But suddenly there was a loud bellow behind me. Yonoi had appeared unobtrusively through a side gate and, seeing what was happening, had shouted to stop it.

‘I can see him doing it,’ Lawrence said. ‘He was always a great stickler for discipline. He disapproved of punishment unless ordered by himself.’

‘On this occasion he went much farther,’ I told Lawrence. ‘He told the corporal to stand to attention while he gave him a terrible beating about the head and face with his cane, that piece of Javanese rottang he always carried, remember?’

Just then, I am certain we both had Yonoi’s face vividly before us. He was a striking person we both agreed, perhaps the most handsome Japanese we had ever seen. He had an ascetic, almost a priestlike face, round head and an aquiline nose. His eyes were well spaced and though slanted in the manner of his race, were brilliantly compelling. He was also taller than most, and straightly made. He was the tidiest Japanese officer I have ever known too, his uniform always well cut and spotless and his jackboots polished and shining. He carried himself with a conscious air of distinction which most of us put down to vanity but which, I now said to Lawrence, may have been concerned with some special notion of honour that was inaccessible to us?

Lawrence nodded his head in agreement, remarking that one understood nothing about Yonoi and his people unless one had some intimation of the deep moon-honour always beckoning them in the great darkness that surrounded their overcrowded little lives. That was one of the things which had made life so difficult for us as prisoners of war. We were separated from our captors by many things, not the least of them being different conceptions of honour. In Yonoi’s code it was the abandonment of all honour for a soldier to be taken prisoner alive – But he was digressing, Lawrence said, and begged me to continue.

It took Yonoi some while to recover his self-control after beating the guard. His face had gone white and he stood muttering sounds that came not from his tongue or throat but, rather like a ventriloquist’s, straight from within his stomach. The Korean clearly expected the beating to begin again at any moment though the blood was flowing from his nose, ears and forehead. He just succeeded in standing upright and finally Yonoi turned his back on him and spoke to me. He was the only prison commander I knew who would try his tongue at English.

‘You! Officer!’ he asserted, speaking the words with difficulty and with great pauses for recollection and application between each. Then he pointed to where Celliers was swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘That person also officer. . . . That officer very weak. . . . Take good care! Make well! Lakas! Quick!’

He watched me with narrowed eyes as I went to Celliers. Not until I had Celliers firmly by the arm did he turn to go back into the guard room where he began a loud reprimand to the entire guard. He was still at it as I helped Celliers towards the crowded cantonments we had converted into a hospital. As usual, when there was evidence of ‘a hate’ about, my fellow-prisoners had all withdrawn out of sight into their barracks. I could hear their tense whispers behind the thin bamboo walls discussing what might come out of this row at the gate where Yonoi still growled like some angry animal.

‘Well, Straffer,’ I said, trying to conceal my shock at the change in his appearance. ‘This is a surprise! You look all in – but we’ll soon take care of that. We’ve got one or two first-class doctors in camp with us. Not too badly off for medicine either. And from time to time we can buy food for the sick from the Chinese merchants outside. We’ll soon get you well!’

A slight smile played over his haggard, sun-creased face. ‘Lucky to be here at all. Thought I was going to have my head cut off today – in fact I was taken out this morning to be executed in public. But for some reason they didn’t fulfil either my expectations or their intentions.’

It was said with a free gaiety that at any time would have been remarkable. I remember that it occurred to me that the old ‘Straffer’ Celliers I had known in the Western Desert wouldn’t have reacted in quite the same way. Part of him might even have resented such an order of release.

However, at that time I had no idea how deep the change in him went so I remarked amazed: ‘But how did you get away with it? They’ve executed quite a few of us recently. How did you do it?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he answered, smiling again. ‘I think they let me off because they liked the look of me.’

‘He said that?’ Lawrence exclaimed.

‘And quite without bitterness,’ I replied.

‘Well, in view of this’ – Lawrence tapped the yellow manuscript on his knees with a long finger – ‘You must have thought that interesting?’

‘But I hadn’t read the manuscript then,’ I said. ‘All I thought at the time, if I thought anything, was that the new “Straffer”, in the last analysis, was just as relieved to escape death as any of us.’

I concluded by telling Celliers that one day he must tell me what really happened, for he was not in a condition for it at that moment. Lawrence would know from his own experience what Celliers’s physical state must have been like after prolonged confinement and torture – so I’d skip the details. But our doctors were amazed that he should be still alive and without permanent injury to his system. But physical well-being seemed to be Celliers’s particular speciality.

With care and a liberal ration of our hospital fare which we were still allowed in those early days to buy from the Chinese for our invalids, he recovered. I saw him regularly since Yonoi asked after him daily when I went to his headquarters to report. That a prison commander should take such a close interest in a prisoner had never happened before and it made a great impression on me. I just couldn’t understand it. I was increasingly confounded when the doctor reported to me that from time to time Yonoi would appear without warning in the open entrance of the hospital cantonment. He would stand there looking at the corner where Straffer lay, taking no notice of anyone else. He would just stand there staring at Straffer as if – as one Australian doctor put it to me – they were two of a kind. The doctor added: ‘Made me uncomfortable. Something not quite healthy about it.’

The strange thing was that Yonoi’s interest never brought him to speak to Straffer on any occasion. After standing there for some time he would summon the doctor in charge and say: ‘Officer there: make well!’ Finishing in that expressive Malay word: ‘Lakas! quick!’

It seemed that Yonoi’s spirit, too, was in a hurry of its own.

But to return to Celliers’s story . . . I learnt from him in the days that followed that something of significance had happened to him which had sent him hurrying home on leave to South Africa. Celliers told me that for a time he had had a terrible struggle with himself to know what to do about the war. He had thought out many plans and had even thought of transferring to a Red Cross unit. But in the end he had rejected all these solutions. He had felt that a person with a history such as his could not suddenly contract out of a situation which he had helped to bring about, and seek some specially privileged solution of the spirit. He was convinced that we were all accessories to the fact of war, and that once war had become a fact we could not avoid our own role in it. I remembered a phrase he had often repeated in our discussions in hospital. None of us, he claimed, were pure enough to claim a special solution for ourselves out of ‘our own human and time context’. We could none of us afford, without fatal excess of spirit, to by-pass any of the stages through which life itself was forced to go. The spirit’s battle for life was so important that one had to accept the challenge on whichever level it was presented, no matter how exalted or how humble or horrible. One had even to respect the need of the spirit for death in certain living issues and just take what decency and proportion one could lay claim to into the killing. Celliers made no pretence of thinking that this was the final answer but that was as far, he said, as he could carry it at the moment.

‘Dear God!’ Lawrence interrupted here, shaking his head sadly. ‘Haven’t we all covered the same ground ourselves? But is that all there can ever be to it?’

I went on to tell him that by the time Celliers had returned to North Africa the Japanese had overrun Burma and Malaya; Singapore had fallen, and Java and Sumatra had surrendered almost without a fight. The future everywhere looked black. Then a gloomy Headquarters at Cairo had asked Celliers since he spoke Dutch whether he would be prepared to jump by parachute with a small select band into Java to keep up a ‘nuisance’ guerrilla warfare against the Japanese? He had agreed and some months later he and four companions were parachuted into a remote valley in Bantam. He was reticent about what had followed. Of course we didn’t have much chance to talk because he was not with us very long, and the experience also, I suspected, was very close and painful: it had been the reason for his long secret confinement and torture. The wound of the memory was still so fresh that any question tended to set it bleeding again. Still, he did unbend to me enough for me to gather that his mission had been a total failure.

All along it had been founded on the assumption that the peoples of the Sunda lands in Java would cooperate with him against the Japanese. In fact, not only did they keep him at a sullen distance but both his specialists were brutally murdered. The promise of the General Staff that support and supplies were to be sent by submarine was never kept. Even Celliers’s radio signals were never acknowledged though for two months he tried to call both Colombo and Delhi at the agreed hour on the prearranged wave-lengths. He admitted all this without any special emotion: he appeared to have made his peace with it long since. He had had in all only one serious brush with the Japanese.

One day he had made contact with a platoon of Ambonese infantry wandering in deep jungle. Lawrence would remember those sturdy native soldiers from the island of Ambon for we had had many of them in prison with us. They were the finest of all the soldiers in the old Netherlands East Indies Army, devout Christians, and born mercenaries in the best sense of the word. They and the Menadonese, so akin to them, were almost the only Colonial troops there who had seen action. This particular platoon were on patrol in West Bantam when the frantic surrender came. Their Dutch officer had left them in charge of a sergeant-major and gone out for news of the surrender. He had never returned and the Ambonese made no secret of the fact that they believed he had deserted them to put on civilian clothes to escape internment. They had no clear idea of what would become of them but had instinctively remained together avoiding the Japanese. They had made straight for the wildest part of Bantam, getting rice from the peasants, and each night as the darkness fell they sang their sombre Dutch hymns. To meet Celliers, an officer who spoke Dutch even though he was in British uniform, seemed to them a direct answer from God to their prayers. They attached themselves instantly to him with a willingness that stirred him profoundly. Their supplies were almost vanished, their money and field medicines gone, and Celliers’s small party were even worse off.

Realizing that they could not hold out for long in such a way Celliers suggested that they ambush one of the Japanese convoys which ran supplies regularly from the roadstead at Palaboehanratoe^fn1 to the highway’s junction at Soekaboemi.^fn2 They did so promptly but with mixed results. They got the supplies, money and ammunition they needed, but the Japanese escort made such a valiant stand that three of the Ambonese and one of Celliers’s officers were killed. Another was so badly wounded that rather than abandon him to the enemy, Celliers killed him himself with a lethal dose of morphia.

Knowing that the Japanese would retaliate quickly and in great strength, Celliers now withdrew with his party to the west. Alone now with his staunch, hymn-singing yellow soldiers, he went deeper into that dense silent jungle of the southern Sunda land guarded by giant and reeking volcanoes lazily blowing fumes like cigar smoke into the faces of the great white thunder-clouds striding the high sky above them. Each day the increase of air activity and the way in which the peasants shrank from them while even the children at their approach disappeared swiftly into their elongated houses of bamboo and straw mounted on stilts above the flashing paddy water, warned Celliers that agents of powerful enemy forces determined on retribution, were in the vicinity.

One evening they had made camp on a mountain top on the edge of a lovely valley many roadless miles from any known centre of Sundanese life. The mountain was called Djaja Sempoer: ‘Peak of the Arrow’; the valley Lebaksembada: ‘That which is well made.’ Celliers was confident that they could indefinitely play hide-and-seek with the Japanese in the immense jungle and primeval forests which rolled in great waves through valleys and over volcanic tops like green ocean water driven before a typhoon. The Ambonese soldiers were gathering round an old warrant officer who was also their lay-preacher for the evening service. The sun was setting and Celliers remembered how tender was its light on the broken-off summit of the formidable volcano of Krakatoa just visible in the Sunda Straits far to the west. He was watching it, deep in thought, when the Ambonese began to sing in Dutch: ‘Blyft met my Oh Heer!’: ‘Abide with me, Oh Lord!’

Instantly Celliers had been taken far back in memory to the hills in Palestine and, in a moment of revelation, he had seen what he called his ‘betrayal’ in other terms. As now I told Lawrence I could still remember the exact words that he had used: ‘Listening to those simple Christian souls singing among the pagan woods,’ he had said, ‘I knew then that I had not been obedient to my own awareness of life.’

‘My God!’ Lawrence exclaimed, stirred for a moment out of his role as tense listener.

Yes, I emphasized, that was what he’d said, and later in hospital Celliers had explained to me that he had come to realize that life had no meaning unless one was obedient to one’s awareness of it. He attributed the sense of meaninglessness which had afflicted his world before the war to just that fact: it had been disobedient to its own greater awareness. I asked him what ‘awareness’ had meant to him as he sat there in the sunset hour on the Peak of the Arrow? He’d replied it was easier to say what it was not, rather than what it was! It was certainly not merely cerebral effort or achievement. It was not what we called knowledge, for, as he saw it, our knowledge tended to pin us down, to imprison us in what should be no more than a frontier position. What he meant by ‘awareness’ was perhaps a sense of the as yet unimagined wholeness of life; a recognition that one could live freely only on the frontiers of one’s being where the known was still contained in the infinite unknown, and where there could be a continual crossing and re-crossing of tentative borders, like lone hunters returning from perilous sojourns in great forests. It was, to put it pictorially, he said, a way of living not only by moonlight or sunlight, but also by starlight. He spoke with great feeling and said that as his men had been hymn-singing there on the mountain top he had realized that from henceforth he must learn above all to love the necessity of search for a greater wholeness in life. His tragedy, as of many of his generation, was that they had not been helped to think of love in its truly heroic sense. He, as they, were condemned by what he called the ‘betrayal of the natural brother in their lives’, and could see little in the world around them beyond the hatred caused by their own rejections.

Here Lawrence pressed me hard to recall everything I could of the conversation, and I became rather embarrassed. At the time when Celliers was talking to me there was a lot that I hadn’t understood as I felt I did now. But to try and explain it all to Lawrence made me feel extremely uncomfortable. My whole upbringing and tradition were against so naked a conversation. I think, towards the end, Celliers himself had sensed something of my unspoken reservations, for he had concluded rather abruptly by saying that, as he saw it, he felt the first necessity in life was to make the universal specific, the general particular, the collective individual, and what was unconscious in us conscious.

He had then returned to the progression of his story. He told me that it was just at that moment, on that evening on the mountain when he had felt himself to be striding across the frontiers of his own understanding, that he had heard the Ambonese singing suddenly break off.

The Ambonese had rushed for their carbines as a man from the valley below appeared cringing and terrified on the edge of their clearing covered with giant-ferns. He was one of a group of simple peasants who had never been out of their valley and who had sold some of their rice to Celliers some days before. He was now in a terrible state, for he had been badly beaten up. His chest was heaving so that he could hardly speak, and sweat mingled with the blood that ran down his coffee-coloured skin from wounds reopened by his exertions. He fell at Celliers’s feet sobbing in broken Malay over and over again: ‘Tuan besar, Great Lord, please do not shoot me. Tuan Lord, I could not help it. Tuan, please do not kill me!’ Only then did he dare deliver a letter that he carried in his hand.

The Ambonese surrounded them in a tight ring to listen intently while Celliers read the letter aloud. It was from the Japanese Colonel commanding the troops in the valleys below. It told Celliers curtly that the Japanese gave him until noon the next day to surrender. If he had not done so by then the entire village at the foot of the mountain would be shot for their treachery in supplying him and his men with rice. But if he surrendered the village would be pardoned and he would stand his trial before a military court. That was all. But Celliers knew enough about the enemy to realize they were not bluffing.

To his relief he found the decision at once: here was at least one universal he could make specific. He told the Ambonese as gently as he could that he would have to go down with the man of the valley to surrender. Some of them, in tears, begged him not to go. But he stood firm in his decision, asking them moreover to shed their uniforms, bury their arms and mingle with the indigenous population as they easily could, without discovery, until the end of the war. At that, Celliers told me, they looked terribly disillusioned. He said the hardest thing to endure that evening was the look of reproach in the eyes of his staunch little band of yellow soldiers. However, he collected his few belongings and turned to go down the mountain and into the valley below, already filled with enemy troops and brimming over with the shadows of the night.

After he had left the Ambonese, they started their hymn-singing again with even greater ardour than ever before, no doubt to overcome the feeling of loss and abandonment. He said there was a note of despair in the last strains of the hymn pursuing him down the slopes as if not only the night but the whole imposing structure of a proud epoch were crashing down on the peaks above. So deep was this impression that when the singing finally was overcome by distance and the silence taken over by the hysterical chatter of nervous apes in the lofty tree-tops around him, this new noise sounded like a welcome of devils to some newcomer in hell.

After that, there was little to tell about his capture. The peasants were not massacred and he was carried off to prison.

His Japanese captors were convinced that he was the forerunner of a greater invasion and knew its time and place, so for weeks before the trial he was tortured for information which, fortunately, he did not possess. Finally he was brought up for trial on the charge of ‘Wagamamma’ – Lawrence would recognize the charge as the worst crime of which a soldier could be guilty in Japanese eyes – ‘the spirit of wilfulness’. And there in court among Celliers’s five judges sat Yonoi.

The moment Yonoi’s eyes fell on him, Celliers noticed a look of interest, quickly transformed into something akin to alarm, appearing on his handsome face. The other judges too, stared at him hard and long though not so strangely as Yonoi. Celliers was certain they had formed a picture of him in their minds which he contradicted. They had already condemned him in their minds from the Kempeitai record of his behaviour in jungle and prison as a foreign devil, evil enough to show a spirit of wilfulness and disobedience to the army of their Exalted Descendant of a Sun-goddess. But from the start Yonoi in particular and the judges in general were disconcerted because his appearance instantly predisposed them into liking him.

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Lawrence broke in here. ‘In dealing with peoples whose language one cannot speak one’s physical appearance can be all important. And the Japanese have a natural eye for beauty of all kinds. I can see clearly how a fellow of” Straffer’s” looks would have set their imaginations in motion.’

As the day went on Celliers saw the signs of the conflict in the minds of his judges become more apparent. After that first hard stare they tried not to look at him again. They put their questions and listened to his answers with their eyes focused on some point just over his shoulders. All day long he watched this intangible struggle between seeing and not seeing struggling for mastery in their imaginations.

This was something I understood fully directly Celliers told me of it. I had learnt from bitter experience that immediately the Japanese showed a sudden reluctance to meet our eyes in the course of our daily contacts we knew that they were taking precautions to ensure that not a single glimpse of one’s obvious and defenceless humanity should slip through their defences and contradict the caricature some demoniac a priori image had made of us within them. The nearer the storm came the more intense the working of this mechanism became. I had seen its most striking manifestation in the eyes of a Japanese officer who, with a condemned Ambonese soldier before him, had had to lean forward and brush the long black hair from the back of the neck over the head and eyes of the condemned man before he could draw his sword and cut off the man’s head. Before the blow fell he had been compelled to look straight ahead over the doomed head seeing neither it nor us who stood, raggedly, in a long line in front of him. But the blow having fallen he was then free, if one could use such a word for so enslaved a state, to look us all once more in the face without danger of seeing us for what we were and certain only of finding in us confirmation of the terrible image which had provoked him from within.

All the same I was amazed that Celliers, whose first experience of the Japanese this was, could be so alive to such a subtle point. But when I told him this his answer immediately satisfied me. He had been a lawyer himself for many years in Africa, he informed me, and had often noticed, particularly when dealing with a black offender who was probably abysmally ignorant of the code, customs, laws and languages of the court, how often the judges would stare past such a man with exactly the same look as if to concentrate on the cold concept of justice entrusted to their keeping rather than on the frail flesh and blood arguing with such dumb eloquence against the sentence they were about to pronounce. Oh yes, Celliers assured me, he knew the look well! Ironically he had never really understood it until that day when it was he who was standing on trial for his life. He said that it was then too that for the first time he realized the significance of a greeting that many primitive black people in Africa give each other in passing. A stranger will call out: ‘I see you, child of a black mother, I see you.’ The other will reply: ‘Aye, I see you too, son of a black father, I see you.’ He realized then, that they greeted one another in that way because instinct told them there was reassurance for flesh and blood in truly seeing and being seen as such. The mere recollection of the greeting for him, on that fateful day, was so sweet that his eyes had smarted with it.

In that mood he had observed that most of Yonoi’s colleagues succeeded in their efforts to avoid his eye, but fortunately for him, Yonoi did not. I asked why Celliers thought Yonoi had failed where the others succeeded. He had paused a long time before answering and then said slowly: ‘I guess Yonoi and I were birds of a feather caught in the same trap of our own bright plumage. He too was a fugitive from his own, inner law – just as I was.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Talk about loyalty to the old school tie. It’s not a patch on the loyalty of the old Borstal knot.’

As the day of the trial wore on, Celliers remarked how the handsome Yonoi was less and less able to resist looking at him with unguarded eyes. When finally the moment came for sentence (and Celliers had no doubt it would be one of death) Yonoi had found the courage to seize on some hair-splitting legality for a mitigation of sentence and to argue it with queer persistence and adroitness. Celliers explained to me here that the charge of’ wilfulness’ against him rested on the fact that he had gone on fighting after the superior officers on the Central Allied Command in Java had agreed to surrender unconditionally. However, Yonoi argued his special point now with such skill that finally the judge’s president gave him permission to put some questions to the prisoner. For the first time Celliers heard his clipped, slow, implacable English:

‘You!’ Yonoi said: ‘You – you say you ordered come by parachute Java. Who ordered?’

‘I received my orders from the Commander-in-Chief India,’ Celliers answered.

Pausing only to translate to his fellow judges Yonoi went on:

‘You not ordered by General in Java?’

‘How could I have been?’ Celliers asked. ‘I came from Cairo to Colombo and flew from Colombo to Java two months after the surrender. I’ve never even seen the Commander-in-Chief of Java or had any communication with his officers.’

As he spoke Celliers saw a flash of satisfaction in Yonoi’s brilliant eyes. Yonoi turned to his judges to suggest with tact and passion that the charge of’ wilfulness’ could not be held because Celliers had obeyed, as any soldier must, the orders of his own Commander-in-Chief in India, who was still fighting. He had not received any orders whatsoever from the General who had surrendered in Java. This by no means pleased the judges though it did influence them. They overruled Yonoi in that they found Celliers guilty but agreed with him to the extent that they postponed sentence, presumably in order to consult a higher authority.

After the trial Celliers lay for weeks alone in his cell in semi-darkness, but he had a feeling that the doubt raised by Yonoi and the postponement of sentence had somehow let loose forces which were fighting staunchly on his side. I myself had noticed in prison that if ever something came between our jailers and their spontaneous impulse to act they seemed incapable of concentrating on their resolve for long, and once they had hesitated the resolve tended to go by default. Time and again Celliers was told that he was to be executed, and taken out of his cell to see other unknown condemned men and women executed, yet he never believed it was going to happen to him until the evening of his release.

That day the Secret Police had removed him roughly from his cell, taken him to the guard room where the Kempeitai officer who supervised executions and Yonoi sat side by side. Yonoi again gave him that strange, intense look but said nothing. The Kempeitai officer opened his file and put some questions to him through an interpreter. That done the sergeant closed the file and looked at Yonoi. Yonoi, deeply preoccupied, nodded and continued to stare sombrely at Celliers. There was something new in that look, Celliers said, yet when his guards threw him back in his cell with a laugh, saying in Malay: ‘Tomorrow you die!’ he really believed it.

His reaction then, he told me, was really one of relief: relief that uncertainty was at an end and that his physical suffering would soon be over, but mostly relief that there could now be no further betrayal between him and his end. But, he told me with a smile, he had discovered that the human heart had its own dearest wishes even in regard to death. He found there was only one way in which he wanted to die. He had seen so many people executed, strangled, hanged, decapitated, beaten, starved to death, drowned and bayoneted. He wanted none of these ways of dying. He longed, with a passion he had never experienced before, to be shot with his eyes wide open to the natural and beautiful reality of day left to him. Once he reached that conclusion, he was concerned only with trying to persuade his executioners to gratify his final passion.

Instantly he thought of Yonoi. Yonoi, obviously, would have a great deal to do with Celliers’s execution. As a last wish he would ask to see Yonoi and appeal to him. Somehow he was convinced that such an appeal would not fail: and after that he was at peace.

For a while he lay awake on the damp floor of his cell listening to the great nightly thunderstorm coming up. His cell at moments was so filled with lightning that it stood like a solid cube of gold against the purple Javanese night. He thought he had never seen light more beautiful nor heard sound more wonderful. When at last the rain fell and joined with the other storm sounds they brought him great comfort reminding him that, on the last tide, the abiding answer was not with man but with life; the true ‘power and the glory’ were beyond all the comings and goings of man, no matter how imperious and impressive. Then he fell asleep and had to be shaken by his jailers as the dawn broke.

However, the guards were gentler with him than they had ever been which only confirmed his conviction that he was about to die. Determined to love even this last necessity, he asked for permission to wash and shave before his execution, and one of the guards went and fetched him a bowl of lukewarm water and gave him a meagre piece of soap. He went up into the Kempeitai guard room clean and refreshed. The officer-executioner of the evening before was already there with both guard and interpreter. He gave Celliers a quick professional appraisal, his eyes lingering on the prisoner’s neck.

‘Do you know,’ he asked Celliers through the sleepy interpreter, ‘what I think of when I see you?’

‘I regret I have no idea,’ Celliers replied.

‘I look at your neck, its length and its strength and the way it fits to your head and shoulders . . . and I think how best to cut through it with one blow of my sword!’ He said it all merrily, laughing at the end as if it were a great joke.

To his own amazement Celliers found himself jerked out of the serene composure of the night by the gratuitous cruelty of the joke. The old ‘Straffer’ flared again and he said quickly: ‘And d’you know what I think as I look at you? I think how pretty a hangman’s noose is going to look round your neck when you’ve lost the war.’

But the moment he said it he felt deeply sad that he had been jerked out of his previous serenity.

Meanwhile the counter-attack had been so unexpected that the laughter withered instantly on all Kempeitai lips. The officer gasped and then furiously leaped forward and knocked Celliers down. As he fell Celliers thought: ‘That’s torn it: there goes my last hope of being shot.’

According to the Japanese pattern, all the others in the room should, at that moment, have joined in the beating-up of Celliers. But at that instant the Commander of the prison arrived. Everyone was forced to jump to attention and bow while Celliers himself tried to stand upright. He was left like that for hours, tottering on his feet, while all kinds of officers and officials came and went. One moment it seemed certain that he was about to be killed; the next that the end was still not in sight. At about eleven Yonoi appeared hurrying through the guard room and gave Celliers the same sombre glance before he disappeared into the Commandant’s office. There followed another interminable wait and then the guard who had lent him his cake of soap whispered that Yonoi had asked formally that Celliers should be released to come and take over command of the prisoners in his camp. Yonoi claimed that none of the officers among his prisoners knew how to keep their own men properly in hand. He argued that only a person of Celliers’s quality could impose the discipline needed.

When Celliers told me this, I had suggested at once that perhaps this could explain Yonoi’s interest in him? But Lawrence now said instantly that he thought it to be only a rationalization of a more compelling identification with Celliers. Nonetheless Yonoi really had frequently made it clear to us how unworthy he found our ways in prison. I myself had been conscious that what we needed was a single inspired command, and Yonoi’s rebukes had become harsher as well as harder to bear just before Celliers’s appearance among us. Looking back I have no doubt that he intended to insist that Celliers should be given command over us all, using the argument he had put forward on that vital morning of the interrogation. However, the Kempeitai, who had already hesitated too long to be truly concentrated on the issue, gave way instantly. Yonoi emerged from the Commandant’s office to hurry past Celliers without the expected glance.

This, far from reassuring Celliers made him feel completely hopeless. But he was wrong. Some hours later he was released into our midst, and pushed unceremoniously through the prison gates in the way I have described.

For the first few days in our improvised hospital Celliers slept most of the time, seeming to take his medicine, food and injections without waking. But when he did wake he seemed set on the way to a quick recovery. He would have liked to get up at once to join the rest of us but the doctors insisted that he should stay in hospital for at least another fortnight. He accepted the ruling with good grace and thereafter spent most of his days writing on the sheets of toilet paper with which we supplied him.

All this time Yonoi’s inquiries after Celliers became ever more impatient. It became no longer a tense question of: ‘Sick officer? Health, how?’ but more irritably: ‘Sick officer not well? Why? Why not well? Lakas! Quick! Lakas!’ One evening towards the end of Celliers’s hospital term he was so angry when I reported Celliers as still unfit for prison duty that I thought he was going to hit me. He stood in front of me with a quick intake of breath, hissing between his teeth and rocking his head from side to side. A strange ventriloquist’s growl began to rise in his stomach until he screamed: ‘Officer not well because your spirit bad! All prisoners spirits bad! Spirit so bad nothing grows in prison gardens! All, all, very, very bad.’

He went on like this for a while but he did not hit me. Instead he confined the entire prison camp to its quarters without food or water for twenty-four hours in order that it could reflect on its evil spirit and purify its thinking.

We ended the twenty-four hours in an atmosphere which had sharply deteriorated. The general theory was that we were about to be moved to another camp, an event which always set the nerves of our hosts on edge, involving as it did inspections by higher authorities and a thousand and one other extra administrative chores. Since all moves were preceded by an intensive search of the camp, we took the customary precaution of burying our own essential records under the barrack pavement at night. Celliers’s autobiography, which Lawrence now had on his knees, was buried with the hospital records by the doctors. But even before Celliers came out of his prison-hospital two days later it was evident to me that something more sinister than just a move from one camp to another was involved.

To my dismay, one morning when I went to Yonoi’s headquarters to report, I found that even the friendly staff corporal was incapable of looking me in the eyes. Yonoi himself did not look at us once while he listened to the report, and disdained even to answer our humble requests. Soon the same incapacity for seeing us spread to the Korean sentries. That day and all the next the curious unseeing mechanism gathered momentum until it seemed to me as if Yonoi were moving like a medium fixed in a trance and the sentries goose-stepping between our prison-gate and their quarters like figures walking in their sleep with nightmare exaggerations.

We ourselves became affected with the state of mind of those who had us so absolutely in their power. The youngest among my troops, I noticed, would experience a need to take the nearest friend by the arm as if for reassurance that our prison reality was not an illusion of the insane. Indeed suddenly everything was so terrifyingly unreal and our daily round of circumscribed living so pointless that it needed a determined effort of will to keep our men clean, circumspect and active. Hungry as we all were, many suddenly found their appetites gone, and the very air standing so bright and deep above our opaque walls seemed to go sullen with a charge of new thunder.

That evening our doctors released Celliers from hospital because they felt his condition no longer justified them running any risks with Yonoi’s growing impatience. I had no doubt that whatever was about to happen would happen soon and that nothing we could do would prevent it. That I was not alone in my feeling was evident from the unusual quiet among all ranks in prison. Everyone spoke in a subdued voice as if knowing that we were entering some avalanche country of the spirit where the slightest excess of sound could precipitate a deadly slide of snow and rock on all in the dark valley below.

After our evening rice I walked slowly with Celliers many times around our prison camp. I had already experienced many beautiful evenings in Java but none more beautiful than this. The sun was just going down and beyond our prison walls in the centre of the great plain below our prison camp the tide of purple light was creeping like deep seawater drawn by the moon up the slopes of the great Mountain of Malabar. Its crown, so like the ramparts of the great Crusader Fortress of Craques Chevalier which Celliers had seen on the edge of the Holy Land, was blazing with light. The sky itself was a deep emerald ocean wherein an immense thunder cloud was bearing down on the mountain, a very dreadnought of war, sails all set and swollen with the wind that drives so high over the becalmed earth of Java fragrant with the sandalwood and spice of the outer islands and smooth as silk with streamlined light. The dark base of the cloud itself shuddered with its burden of thunder like a hull with the shock of seas breaking over the prow, and the lightning flashed among the golden sails with the constancy of a signaller’s lamp. Just beyond our prison walls the dark spathodias which lined the invisible roads outside were in full bloom and their scarlet flowers flickered like flames of fire from the tremble which the distant broadsides of lightning and thunder though inaudible to us imparted to the sensitive air.

The going down of the sun, the purposeful advance of the cloud and the stirring of those flowers among the dark leaves filled the evening with a great feeling of eventfulness and somehow stressed our own cast-iron exclusion from the normal rhythm of things. As it grew dark the bats one by one dropped headlong from their sunless attics in the dark trees and instantly began to beat about the dying day in their flight from one black hole to another. Soon they were joined by the Titans of their world, the flying foxes, and together they emitted sub-sonic shrieks of alarm that were like tears of taut silk in the throbbing silences. They made the evening feel ugly, bewitched and old, and I was relieved when Celliers drew my attention to the evening star which was hanging so large and bright in the faded track of the sun that it looked as if it might fall from sheer weight out of the shuddering sky.

‘It’s odd,’ Celliers was saying. ‘How that star seems to follow me around. You should have seen it as I saw it in a winter sky over the high veld of Africa or one night over the hills before Bethlehem. I spotted it even in full daylight from the jungles of Bantam – but I’ve never seen it more lovely than now. There’s light enough in it tonight to fill both one’s hands to overflowing. He broke off to peer down towards the ground at our feet where the earth was still wet and glistening from a heavy downpour in the afternoon. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed, his voice young with astonishment. ‘It throws a shadow as well. Look just behind you in the wet. There’s your star shadow following you faithfully around. How strange that even a star should have a shadow.’

‘Look, Straffer,’ I changed the subject abruptly because Celliers’s voice lately seemed to me to have too much of an undertone of fate in it. ‘You know, of course, you might be landed with the command of us all at any moment now?’

‘I guessed so,’ he answered. ‘But I’ll try to get out of it, unless you all wish it? What about the other senior officers if Yonoi insists on my taking over?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘We’re not a united bunch at all as you may have noticed. You’ve joined us at a very critical moment. I’m pretty certain something frightful is about to happen and in the circumstances everyone may forget their differences and be ready to accept a new command.’

‘You say something frightful is about to happen?’ Celliers stopped in his stride, turned quickly to face me and asked: ‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I’ve no idea. I’m not even certain that what I fear is about to happen to us. All I know is that we can do nothing to stop it coming – and that when it comes you may find yourself charged unfairly with the responsibility of dealing with it.’

I spoke for once straight out of my feelings and to my amazement Celliers, for the first time since I had known him, gave me the impression that I had really succeeded in getting close to him. He took me affectionately by the arm and looked intently at me.

‘Of course,’ Lawrence interrupted me. ‘I can guess why, can’t you?’

I shook my head and he hurried on to say: ‘But surely it was because you were speaking out of your own experience, your own suffering, and so beginning to speak the “idiom” he had learnt? If only we could all re-learn to speak out of our common suffering and need we too would be surprised to find how close we are to one another.’

Lawrence’s interjection threw much light on the turmoil of feelings that had assailed me that evening when Celliers and I stood there arm-in-arm in prison with our star-shadows beside us in the night. I could still hear Celliers saying gently: ‘I wouldn’t worry about the unfairness of what I might be asked to do, though I am most grateful for your concern. There are situations where personal “fairness” and unfairness” are utterly irrelevant. And this may well be one of them. But please tell me – if you’ll forgive so heretical a question – why you are so certain something unpleasant is about to happen?’

He used the word ‘heretical’ with an intimate teasing note. I told him that the ‘unseeing’ mechanism of the Japanese was once more at work in our midst. I was just finishing my explanation when a series of commands were shouted aloud to the sentries at the main gate.

‘You hear that?’ I asked Celliers. ‘Well, if you knew those sounds as well as I do you’ll realize they’re not normal. The guard is changing over as it does every night at this hour. But the voice of command is different. It’s taut with tension, charged with the thing which is building up in them all, just like that thunderstorm beyond the mountain.’

‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘And I’m afraid I agree with you. I recognize the atmosphere before an execution. We’ll just have to wait until it comes and if it does and I have to take charge, I promise you I’ll do so without hesitation. Thereafter we can think again . . .’

We stood there silent. In one of the hedgerows the fireflies began to come out like showers of sparks shaken by some fire deep in the earth. Again those strange solar-plexus noises of the guard at the gate broke on the night. The last light of day was gone and only the stars and the sweep of distant lightning was left to trouble the dark. The wet earth at our feet now was like an antique mirror and we stood with our feet among the stars.

Once more Celliers remarked quietly: ‘You know I can’t get over a star, so steeped in the night as that one there, throwing a shadow.’

Then arm-in-arm we went on slowly to complete our last round of the prison.

The trouble started the next day soon after our morning meal of thin tapioca gruel. I had just given Celliers a hat which had belonged to an officer executed a month before. What was more I had persuaded an Australian soldier who had brought it as a souvenir from the Western Desert, to part with the metal springbok head that South African soldiers wore on their caps, and I had fitted this to the hat. The badge was slightly damaged, the tip of one horn being broken but so slightly that it was hardly noticeable. Yet Celliers spotted the damage at once. At the time I thought it was just another proof of his alert senses. Now I realized, of course, just as Lawrence did, that there was more to it than that. As he stared at the badge I have no doubt that he was thinking of Stompie. Indeed, after thanking me warmly, I seemed to remember him muttering something about ‘most strange . . .’ However, at that moment the orderly of the day came up to me at the double to say Yonoi wanted all camp commanders immediately at his headquarters.

Soon we were standing in a row, the English, American, Australian, Dutch, Chinese, Ambonese and Menadonese section commanders, in front of Yonoi’s desk. The clerk at the table in the corner, the sentry at the door and the warrant officer in charge, had none of them looked at us once since our arrival. Yonoi himself stood at the window, his back to us, silent for close on fifteen minutes, the ticking of the clock in the office so loud in the unnatural stillness that it sounded like a dentist’s hammer tapping on the teeth in my head. When at last Yonoi broke the silence he did so with his back to us, speaking through an interpreter, always a bad sign because it suggested that a process of not-hearing was joining the one of not-seeing.

‘So!’ he said, ‘there are no armourers, gun-smiths or armament experts among the four thousand prisoners which the Imperial Japanese Army has been gracious enough to spare?’

He was referring to an order he had passed on to us from Army Command some weeks before telling us to render a full list of officers and men within these categories. The demand had struck dismay in the camp because it could only mean that the Japanese wanted to use men so qualified to help in their war effort. They had no right under international law to make such a request. Yet everyone knew from bitter experience that refusal to make a return would have appalling consequences for the men in our charge. Nonetheless some of us wanted to tell Yonoi politely but firmly that the order was illegal and that we could not comply. Others felt that we should tell a lie and say we had no armourers amongst us. For long hours the senior officers of all nationalities had debated the issue until it became clear that no agreement could be reached. Finally, by a majority vote, it had been decided to make a false return. And now the lying bird was coming back to its terrible roost in our midst.

I have said before that we lacked real leadership and I never felt it more as I looked at the silent row of anxious vacant faces of the officers beside me. To give him his due, Hicksley-Ellis (whom Lawrence had already described as a foreign cartoonist’s idea of an Englishman with no chin, a rush of teeth to the front, a whispy untidy moustache, pink face and large popping eyes) seemed ready to act. Knowing his infallible knack of irritating Yonoi, I was about to forestall him when Yonoi, his voice barely under control, repeated his question and then, without waiting for an answer, ordered us to parade with all our men within five minutes on the open ground in the prison. We hurried from the building knowing that the worst was about to happen and our only chance of mitigating it was to carry out the order with dispatch and precision. I heard an Ambonese officer say to his Menadonese colleague: ‘Say your prayers quickly, brother, for God alone can help us today.’

We were not yet back in our lines when the bell at the gate of Yonoi’s headquarters started to peal frantically and the buildings outside our prison walls where guards as well as Japanese infantry were housed began to resound with those odd abdominal military commands. We were barely assembled on the parade ground, officers in front of each group of men, when all the gates were thrown open and the Japanese soldiery came running in from all sides. Except for their mortars they were armed in full preparedness for battle. They quickly set up heavy black machine-guns at all four corners of the parade ground, their crews going to earth in firing positions beside them while the rest of the sections began fixing their bayonets. For a moment the sound of the metal snapping into position and the machine-gun crews testing the mechanisms and magazines of their weapons rang out ominously all around us. But once that was done a deep silence fell over the camp.

We stood there thus for an hour, the blazing sun beating down directly upon us, looking at the silent Japanese infantry in firing positions, the black muzzles of their guns sighted on our dense lines and from time to time swinging along the crowded formations as the machine-gunners practised their aim. There was no sign of Yonoi or indeed of any officer in command. Each section must have been carefully briefed beforehand and stood or lay at the ready under command of its N.C.O.s.

Again, stronger than ever, I had a feeling of unreality. The great glittering day opening out around us, the thunder-clouds coming up like explosions from the sea and rolling high over the reeking volcano tops towards us proclaimed the universe to be about its normal business. The birds around us were singing as clearly and urgently as ever. The shining air over the gleaming paddies outside was humming like a guitar string with the burning wings of myriads of dragonflies and water insects. And even in the great tree by the prison gate immediately behind one of the machine-gun sections the flying lizards had begun to glide gracefully down to earth from the branches where they housed to search for food. Only we seemed locked out from that overwhelming sea-swell of life around us and I felt black in my heart that all else should appear so unconcerned at our fate.

So a full hour went by in this fashion. We dared not speak since we knew from experience how easily any sound or movement of body could provoke our jailers on these occasions.

But Celliers who was standing next to me did ask in a whisper: ‘What’s the form now? Do they often do this sort of thing? What started it?’

I managed to tell him that it had never happened quite like this before with so great a show of force, and briefly explained the ostensible cause adding: ‘I’m sorry it’s happened on your first day out. But it’s no good pretending that anything might not happen at any moment. They might even be getting ready to massacre us all.’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw to my amazement something close to a smile on his face. He said in a whisper so confident that I felt the dead heart in me grow warm again. ‘Nonsense. I won’t let them massacre anybody. I think I know just how to stop them.’

‘You know?’ I asked, my voice like that of a stranger in my own ears.

‘I do. But be careful,’ he whispered back, long pauses between each phrase. ‘I don’t like the way that bloke in charge of the machine-gun over there is watching us. His eye has not left my face these past few minutes.’

We remained silent then until, at the end of the first hour, Celliers asked me: ‘I wonder if you can hear it too?’

‘Hear what?’ I asked alarmed by the urgent tone of his question.

‘The music,’ he answered.

Puzzled, I listened more intently than ever. Apart from the normal electro-sonics of that tropical island and the throb of its volcanic heart beating at the temples of the thin-skinned earth of the island there was no sound to be heard.

I told him so but he insisted, saying: ‘There’s the most enchanting music in my ears. It’s all around us. It’s lovely and it’s everywhere.’

Though still a whisper his voice was full of a strange exaltation. I stole a quick glance at his face and the look on it was hardly of this world. I imagined then (and did so until recently I went to Celliers’s home and spoke to his brother’s wife), that the horror piling up around us coming so soon after his suffering in the hands of the secret police was disturbing the balance of his senses. Now I am not so sure. His sister-in-law told me that after comparing times and dates – as Lawrence would know there was a wide difference between Javanese and South African time – she had woken up in the night at that precise moment and noticed her husband was not in bed beside her. Suddenly afraid she had tried to light a candle when he spoke to her out of the dark, saying: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m here by the window.’

She could just make out his dark silhouette against a window glistening faintly like water with star-shine between him and the night. But his voice was uneasy and she asked: ‘Why are you standing there? What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know,’ he had answered. ‘I was woken up in my sleep by a sound of music. Can’t you hear it too? It’s still going on somewhere out there beyond the stars.’

She shook her head but knowing her husband’s gift of strange intuition felt more frightened than ever.

Then, before she could answer, he said again: ‘Dear God in heaven, can’t you hear it? I wonder what it is?’ He had paused and turned. ‘Oh! I’m so afraid for Ouboet suddenly. . . . For the first time I fear for him.’

At that he had put down his head and began crying quietly without a sound of any kind, the tears coming out of him, she said, so effortlessly that it was as if her husband was a vessel overflowing with water. She could not comfort him and they slept no more that night. But for close on a week he went about singing the little tune he had composed in his father’s garden thirty years before, and once he had turned to her and said with quiet certainty: ‘I think Ouboet is in terrible trouble and needs me. I’m singing for him.’ After doing this for close on a week he suddenly stopped and sang that tune no more.

However, knowing nothing of this, I stood there in the full glare of sunlight beside Celliers on that terrible morning uncomforted by his belief that he was listening to a tidal harmony of sounds and voices. I said nothing because I felt he had already suffered enough and if he found comfort, like Joan of Arc, in hearing heavenly voices he deserved to be allowed to cling to it. Nor had I time to say anything for a series of commands had rung out at the gate and the guard was rushing to present arms. Yonoi, followed by his warrant officer, a veteran of the wars in Manchuria and China, together with an interpreter walked in. He barely acknowledged the salute of the sentries and came straight to the centre of the parade ground looking neither to left nor right of him. Once there he turned to face our ranks, placed his supple legs in shining jack-boots wide apart and firm on the ground, his hands clasped behind his back. He was almost directly opposite us and about fifty yards away. I was dismayed to note from the angle of his head that, although he was facing us, his eyes were glancing over our heads.

‘I ordered you,’ he told us through the interpreter, his voice tight and thin like the lash of a whip and the s’s hissing like a serpent on his tongue, ‘to parade all your men. You not only lie to me but are disobedient and wilful as well. You will parade all your men.’

Before I could stop him, Hicksley-Ellis stepped out of the ranks and said: ‘But we are all here.’

Without waiting for the interpreter, Yonoi, his handsome face almost aglitter with the resentment of a whole people and the outrage of a long history, hissed: ‘Come here!’

We watched the tall knock-kneed officer walk awkwardly to within a yard of Yonoi and then stop to stand facing him.

‘I’m afraid that’s done it,’ I whispered out of the corner of my mouth, my heart dark with dismay.

I had barely finished when Yonoi, quite beside himself, shrieked: ‘You! You lie again! I said all, all people! Where are hospital people?’

I thought he was going to draw his sword and stick Hicksley-Ellis there and then but he just slashed him about the head and neck a dozen times with his cane before commanding: ‘Now fetch all, all people!’

The order was instantly repeated by the interpreter. We were forced to get our doctors to move all the sick out of their improvised hospital and on to the parade ground into the most cruel of suns. They had tried to do so in a way most considerate to the sick, the orderlies carrying the worst cases out on stretchers. But Yonoi would have none of that. Incensed with a sense of injury against both us and life he walked down to the doctors and ordered all the sick to their feet. The senior medical officer protested and was immediately knocked senseless for his pains. Yonoi shrieking: ‘You not sick, you lie! You, you all lie. Your spirit bad, very bad. You not sick!’

Fortunately we had no operation cases in hospital that day. Even so it was as bad as it could be. There were men with temperatures close on hundred and five from the fever which took such a heavy toll among a community as consistently under-nourished as we were. They stood swaying like drunkards on their feet and before long several of them fainted and lay moaning on the ground where they had fallen. At first Yonoi tried to prod them to their feet but when they failed to respond he just stamped his feet in disgust and left them lying there for he was eager to get to the climax of his affair with us.

All this time Celliers went on standing beside me as if hardly there, the look of light and height upon his face. He was still, I imagined, listening in to his illusion of cosmic voices and tidal music. But when Yonoi turned to face us for the final account I found that Celliers after all was also with us. He mumbled to me that Yonoi was only behaving the way he was because, like us, he was doing just what was expected of him. Celliers added that confronting Yonoi with the unexpected alone could save Yonoi, his men, and us. To be the mere opposite of what he was would do no good. It would merely mean that we would all drown in our spirits like swimmers locked in one another’s arms.

‘There’s going to be more than just drowning in our spirits,’ I retorted grimly finding this too euphemistic a rendering of the situation. ‘Look! Here it comes!’

Yonoi had summoned Hicksley-Ellis to him in the centre of the parade ground.

‘Ask him?’ Yonoi told the interpreter, ‘how many armourers and armaments officers he has in his group?’

Of course Hicksley-Ellis, as arranged, answered ‘None.’

Then, Yonoi, being what he was, cracked inside. He had Hicksley-Ellis tied with hands behind his back and made to kneel bare-headed on the ground near him. Yonoi then stepped back, drew his sword, raised it flashing in the sun and with his lips to the naked steel said a prayer to it as I had seen other officers do before other executions. The machine-gun crews released their safety catches and all four guns clicked loudly as they rammed the first bullet into the firing breech. Nothing could prevent it coming now, I thought. One by one the heads would fall until someone broke – and even then it would not be the end. This appetite for disaster would have to be fed, and not until it was sated would the devourer in Yonoi and others desist. Whatever we did from now on would be wrong and only make it worse for those who survived the day – if any did.

In my despair I turned openly to Celliers.

Before I could speak he spoke to me in a low and reassuring voice as if he were still hearing the music in his ear. He said: ‘I’m going to stop it now. It’ll be all right. But whatever happens do nothing about me. Remember, nothing. Goodbye.’

I did not have time or mind to take in the significance of that ‘good-bye’, nor recognize it then as a clear indication of his knowledge of what the end was going to be for him for as he spoke he stepped out of the ranks his new hat at a rakish angle on his head and the sun flashing on its mutilated badge. He walked, as Lawrence had already remarked, most beautifully. Without hurry he advanced on Yonoi as if he were going across a paddock at home to do no more than take a high-spirited stallion in hand.

The effect among our prison ranks was startling. No sound broke from us but the atmosphere became unlocked and flowing. I knew that without even looking round. Celliers’s reputation had already spread throughout the camp and hope flared up in our ranks again. Even I, though I had no idea what he could or would do, found a too-sweet excitement going through me as I watched his easy almost nonchalant approach. It was truly wonderful; perfectly timed and executed. Anything faster would have alarmed them. Anything slower given them time to recover. Anything before that moment would have failed for Yonoi and his men still would have been free to rush forward and stop him. But finding themselves abandoned by the conclusion they thought foregone they hesitated and just gaped at Celliers, waiting for Yonoi to give them the lead.

When Yonoi opened his eyes again after his short prayer to the spirit, the Maru of his sword, Celliers was barely fifteen yards away. Amazement like the shock of a head-long collision went through him. Going white in the process he stared in a blank unbelieving way at Celliers. For the first time in days he was compelled, because of the unfathomed identification between Celliers and himself, to see someone outside himself.

Amazement then gave way to consternation and he cried out a command in English that was also a plea: ‘You – officer – go – back, go back, go back!’

But Celliers went on to place himself between Hicksley-Ellis and Yonoi and said something quietly and unhurriedly to Yonoi.

Yonoi appeared not to have heard him. He shrieked again: ‘You – go back, back, back!’ like someone trying to scare a ghost.

Celliers shook his head quietly and went on staring at him steadily as a disarmed hunter might stare a growling lion straight in the face. Perhaps more in terror than in anger, Yonoi raised his sword and knocked Celliers down with the flat of it. The crack on his head rang out like a pistol-shot to be followed by another exhortation to Celliers to go back. Dazed, Celliers struggled to his feet, swayed and half-turned as if to obey – then swung around suddenly. He took a couple of paces back towards Yonoi, put his hands on Yonoi’s arms and embraced him on both cheeks rather like a French general embracing a soldier after a decoration for valour.

The shock of this strange action was unbelievable. I do not know who apart from Yonoi was shocked the most: the Japanese or ourselves.

‘My God, what a bastard!’ an Australian infantry officer behind me exclaimed bitterly.

Here, Lawrence, his face white, interrupted me. ‘Straffer went as far as that –’

I nodded and described how then Celliers had stepped back a pace from Yonoi and stood once more silently facing him. Of course, none of us will ever know what went on in Yonoi’s mind but for the only time I had ever known he, who always had been so quick and in command of all situations, obviously did not know what to do. He looked as if lightning had struck him. His face had lost its colour and was like death with dismay. He trembled on his feet and might have even fallen to the ground if his warrant officer had not acted for him. It was this old veteran of several long wars who now suddenly uttered the anthropoidal yell which always preceded a Japanese bayonet charge, jumped forward and began beating up Celliers. His example was inevitably followed by the N.C.O., Commanders of the Machine-Gun Sections and the Corporal of the Guard. Our prison in the light of the high-noon sailing serene and indifferent overhead was filled with the noises I have only heard in a jungle trying to maul out of existence its fear of the falling night. Most strangely one and all tried to outdo one another in beating up the already half-senseless Celliers.

Yet not so strange, Lawrence commented here, for the whole incident would have become immediately an affair of honour. Did I not realize that Celliers had insulted Yonoi before his men? Did I not remember how kissing between men and women, even in the most natural forms, was regarded by the Japanese as the most obscene of gestures? Did I not remember how Hara censored the few novels we had had in camp by ordering that all the pages with a mention of kisses and kissing should be torn out of the defaulting books? Surely knowing that I could see now how deeply Yonoi must have lost face, so deeply that even the right to avenge the insult must have gone as well. Now only his men could do that for him and, in their code, that was what they would have had to do if they were not also to lose all honour with themselves. But what was far more important, Lawrence went on, could I understand that in doing this to Yonoi Celliers had made both us and the Japanese free of whatever it was that locked our spirits so fatally together? We had been there as two halves of the same thing, two opposites darkly dependent on each other, two ends of electricity equally inducing each other, until Celliers bridged the gap and released the fatal charge?

Indeed, I agreed with Lawrence, it was most noticeable how this whole situation immediately had become an issue between Celliers and the rest. The crisis that had brought us all out into the paradeground seemed to vanish behind us like waste thrown over the stern of a ship in a fast receding wake. Only one thing obsessed both Japanese and ourselves: the odd, unpredictable thing Celliers had done to Yonoi.

It applied as much to ourselves as the Japanese. I have already described the remark of the Australian officer when Celliers embraced Yonoi. Now while the terrible beating up with fists, boots and staves went on, in even the most understanding of faces near me there was not only disgust at the punishment the man was receiving but also distaste for the way in which it had been incurred.

At this point, distressed at the recollection, I had to stop speaking.

Lawrence hastened to say: ‘Poor old Straffer. He was trying to contain a sea of dark possibilities in the nutshell of a single lucid deed. To use his own words he was at last being obedient to his awareness and making a collective situation individual. And don’t forget Yonoi! I would say it wasn’t so much Celliers versus the rest as Celliers versus Yonoi. He’d forced Yonoi to face up to his identification with him. It was no longer a thing between races but a thing between two individual men. . . . But anyway, what happened then?’

It was soon over. Yonoi, though still like a person profoundly concussed, stopped the beating and ordered the guard to carry Celliers off to the guard house. Celliers by then was unconscious and only recognizable by his long yellow hair. Then, like someone utterly exhausted, Yonoi turned his back on us and, his eyes on the ground, walked slowly away and out of the prison gates. Shortly after the infantry sections too were withdrawn. We were left standing alone on the silent parade ground, afraid to speak. At nightfall Yonoi’s warrant officer came and ordered us back to our barracks.

Officially we did not see Yonoi again. We heard no more of the issue that had brought on the affair but the next evening a new commander appeared in camp. By then a rumour was going round among our own interpreters that Yonoi had committed or was contemplating hara kiri. In view of what Lawrence had said that would not have been surprising but (as he knew already) Yonoi did not do that.

On the morning of the third day after the scene with Yonoi we were ordered to dig a hole in the centre of the parade ground. At once I feared that it was Celliers’s grave we were digging. That done, our own carpenters were made to construct a stout wooden fence in a circle thirty yards in diameter round it and to put rolls of dannert wire against it as well. Immediately I knew I had been wrong and that the hole could not possibly be a grave. But for what else then?

We found out the truth in the afternoon when we were ordered to parade as before. There Celliers, more or less cleaned up but black in the face from his beating, doubled over and hardly able to walk, was brought out of his cell into the midst of a whole platoon of guards with fixed bayonets, who half-marched, half-dragged him right to the edge of the hole in the circle of steel and wood.

Just for a moment his hands were freed and, incredibly, he seized the opportunity to straighten his body and wave one trembling hand at us while he tried to smile. His hand however was instantly seized by a guard, jerked down, and then tightly tied with rope behind his back to the other hand. His feet were similarly bound and two guards then seized him and forced him upright into the hole. They held him thus, like two foresters transplanting a sapling, while some of their comrades piled their rifles and took up spades to shovel the earth, that rich, midnight earth of the central plateau of Java, back into the hole. They did this carefully and with a studied, ritualistic eagerness, pausing every now and then to stamp down the earth with their feet firmly all round Celliers until he was buried up to the neck with not the least chance of being able to make any movement. Only his bare head, chin, and neck showed above the ground but it was noticeable that the head was erect and that the face for all its bruising looked strangely composed as if it saw something beyond that moment which caused it, from time to time, to try and smile.

The living grave complete at last, two guards with fixed bayonets were posted at the entrance to the enclosure around it. Our new prison commander then read us a lecture exhorting us to look on Celliers and reflect on the consequences of our impurities of spirit and wrong-thinking. Then he dismissed us disdainfully from his sight. Not the least macabre of the many sinister touches to that terrible afternoon was the music which suddenly blared out from the loudspeaker of the wireless turned on in the guard room when the prison gates closed on the new commander. Broadcast from a worn-out record, Rene Clair’s nostalgic accordion music ‘Sous les toits de Paris’ rang out loud and clear from one end of the camp to the other. I nearly broke down at this gratuitous refinement of tragedy for the tortured Celliers.

However, I could safely leave to Lawrence’s imagination the terrible toll in the feelings of men like ourselves who were so keenly aware of our utter powerlessness to help Celliers in the days that followed. No one in our midst could move on their normal duties about camp without seeing the bare yellow head and bruised face exposed all day long to the tropical sun. I said ‘yellow head’ but it would be more accurate to say white because so fierce was the sun on Celliers’s last days in the earth that his hair became as bleached as desert bone. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we could not get near enough again to see the expression on his face. The guards whose awareness of the terrible punishment inflicted on the man showed itself in a marked fear that we might be provoked into rushing them, kept us henceforth at a safe distance. Even so after the first day we could tell from the fallen angle of Celliers’s head that he could not possibly last very long in those conditions. The second evening after his living interment the padres of all nationalities held a special service for him, the whole camp joining in. The service ended with the singing together in many tongues of the hymn ‘Abide with me’. The Ambonese and Menadonese sang with moving fervour and at the end of the service there was hardly a dry eye in camp.

Dangerous as the consequences could be for my fellow-prisoners I went straight from the service to the Camp Commander’s headquarters to plead for mercy for Celliers. The reaction however was so outraged in every way (even an appeal for him to be given some water provoked a dangerous outburst) that I nearly revived the situation from which Celliers had rescued us. I remembered how he had beseeched me in that vital moment on the parade ground to do ‘nothing about him’ and felt forced not to repeat my approach to our new Commander. We had to watch him slowly dying the most painful of deaths. Yet he himself seemed in no hurry to die, or rather that tenacious, resourceful body of his was in no hurry to depart. However, from the motionless drop of his head I felt that his spirit was not there at all and I hoped with all my heart that it was out of reach of the pain. No moan, complaint or cry ever came from him but the evening after the service, the guard having just gone to the gate for his relief, some Dutch soldiers felt compelled to go nearer Celliers, and they said they thought they heard him trying to sing. To their amazement, in a hoarse broken voice he was crooning to himself in some kind of Dutch, and they heard these words distinctly:

I rode all through the night,

And far in the distance found the fire,

And beside the fire one who had waited long . . .

They would have liked to go nearer but the arrival of the relief guard at the gate forced them to hurry on their way.

Significant too in those final hours was the manner in which the guards themselves changed in their attitude to Celliers. At first they had looked at him without pity and turned to stand sentry with their backs to him. After the first day, however, I was astonished to see that each guard coming for his turn of duty to the living grave would first face the buried man, come to attention and bow his head respectfully to Celliers. Finally, at the end of the third day the night-watch on duty in the barracks nearest Celliers reported the strangest thing of all.

The moon was full at the time and the parade ground brilliant with its light. At three in the morning our watch was startled to see Yonoi’s elegant figure appear at the enclosure and send away the guard to the gate. For a moment he thought he was seeing ghosts because like many he believed Yonoi had committed hara-kiri some days before. Yet it was Yonoi, for his walk and build were unmistakable.

After standing in front of Celliers and looking at him for long in silence, Yonoi put his hand in his pocket and produced something which flashed like silver in the moonlight. Strange as it might seem our watch was convinced that it was a pair of scissors, for Yonoi appeared to bend down over Celliers, take his long hair in his hand and snip some of it off. . . .

Here I had to beg Lawrence, who was getting more and more agitated, not to interrupt while I stressed for confirmation that our watch distinctly heard the metal blades click in the moon silence. For a while longer Yonoi remained there in deep thought before bowing low to Celliers in the same way that the watch had seen him bow to the rising sun on the day of his Emperor’s birthday. That done he walked slowly to the gate where he resummoned the guard. And that was the last we saw of Yonoi.

By morning Celliers was dead. We were summoned to the camp headquarters after morning gruel to be told that we could have the body for burial. The new commander could not have been more considerate at the interview. He looked us straight in the eye with an expression of someone who had suddenly been absolved from all sin and restored to an innocent vision of life. His gods had had their sacrifice and for the moment he was profoundly content. As pleased as a child before a feast he informed us: ‘I’ll now show you typical Japanese morality for dead.’ A bugler and a military firing-party of infantry were ordered to do honours at the cemetery, The Tanah Abang, ‘the dead earth’ as the Javanese called it, and so we buried Celliers that afternoon to the sound of the thunder he had loved so well rumbling over the purple citadel of Malabar.

After that I regret to say I tried to forget what had happened and looking back on it all now I realize I was not alone in my attitude. Deliberately we seemed to avoid talking in camp about this man who had suddenly flashed out of the dark into our prison lives like a shooting-star and had burned out so brilliantly and quickly before our eyes. I think the whole episode was so painful and tended to start up such imaginative thinking with disconcerting implications for our future lives that our overburdened prison spirit instinctively avoided it. When I met Lawrence months later I believe the incident was already so effectively repressed that I did not mention it to him, and on my release the excitement of my home-coming and taking up of a peaceful life again helped to encourage the repressive process. Yet I never forgot Celliers. At all sorts of odd moments he would be there in my memory as fresh and vivid as he had ever been in real life and raising for me the same eloquent issues he had raised with himself. When his manuscript reached me I felt compelled to go off immediately, seek out his brother, and tell him what I could of Celliers.

I was too late; the brother was dead. His widow was there alone on the farm with a son whom she said had been born to her late like Sarah’s, just a year after Celliers’s sudden visit. She was not really unhappy about her husband’s death, in fact she said it had been right for him to die because his life had naturally come to an end when Celliers had died. They knew of his death, of course, though not of the details. She was deeply moved by my account. At the end of our interview her young son had come into the room from the veld with a gun in his hand and had startled me by his close resemblance to Celliers.

I had come back home deeply uneasy, feeling I could not honourably go on ignoring the implications of Celliers’s story in my own life. I had not realized how deep it went until the night before when Lawrence had spoken to me of Hara. But now added to Celliers and his brother in my memory there were also Hara and Yonoi; the two were become four? What was I to them and they to me and what could I do about it?

Lawrence did not answer me directly. Instead he told me what obviously he had been wanting to tell me long since. After his release, when he went straight back on to active service, he was one day requested to come and act as interpreter for a war crimes investigator at a prison reserved for Japanese officers suspected of atrocities. There, among others, he had found Yonoi. He would not bother me with all the details but go straight for the main point. Yonoi, hearing Lawrence’s fluent Japanese and attracted by his manner with the accused men, had spontaneously come up to him and pleaded to speak to him alone. Having heard about Yonoi’s reputation, Lawrence was surprised to find him so subdued and oddly preoccupied. Still more had he been puzzled by Yonoi’s business with him and had remained so until I had told him about Celliers.

The moment they were alone Yonoi had confided in Lawrence that, when the war ended, he had been in charge of a women’s prison. That apparently had been the humiliating consequence of what had passed between Celliers and him. When he was arrested and searched in one of our prisons after the war something Yonoi valued more than anything in the world was found on him and taken away. Could Lawrence get it back for him? Lawrence had asked what it was.

Instead of answering Yonoi had looked him straight in the eyes and pleaded instead: ‘I am an officer and ready to die. Could you please be so good as to tell me the honourable truth. Am I to be hanged like the rest?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lawrence had answered. ‘I fear the chances are you may.’

‘In that case,’ Yonoi begged, ‘you understand us Japanese and will know how important it is to me. As my last wish would you recover this thing for me and send it to my home to be offered to the spirit of the ancestors in the shrine of my fathers?’

‘I will if I can but you mustn’t expect me to be definite until I know what it is,’ Lawrence replied.

Yonoi had paused, clearly aware that this might be his last chance to achieve a result of such overwhelming importance to him. But then he had explained in detail. This thing was just a strand of yellow hair. The British soldier who had found it on him, fed on stories of Yonoi’s brutality to women prisoners, had thought Yonoi had cut it from the head of one of his victims, and had snatched it from him and hit him with his fist. Yonoi did not complain of that. All that mattered was the fact that the soldier was wrong. It was a man’s not a woman’s hair? It was a lock of hair from the head of the most remarkable man he had ever met, an enemy and now a dead enemy, but none the less a man so remarkable that he would never forget him.

He had cut that strand of hair from the dead head purely so that the spirit of the man should be honoured and given a proper home in the hereafter. It was his intention when the war was over to give a place in the inmost hall of his own ancestors to that strand of hair. But alas, from what Lawrence now had told him, he could not hope to do it that way. Instead, would Lawrence please do it for him, for only then could Yonoi die as he ought to die?

Lawrence had promised but in the end as Yonoi was given seven years in prison instead of the expected death sentence, he had recovered the hair from the other articles of evidence produced against Yonoi and kept it for him. When after four years Yonoi was pardoned and released, Lawrence had sent the hair to him in Japan. Yonoi had written back immediately with immense gratitude. The hair had been dedicated in the sacred fire of his people’s shrine. It was, Yonoi wrote, a beautiful place at the end of a long cryptomeria avenue and among steep hills covered with maples burning like a forest fire on the autumn day of the ceremony. A long elegant waterfall poured out of the heights above the clouds and fed the stream and pools full of carp and wing-swift trout at the foot of the shrine. The air there was fragrant with the scent of leaf and pine and purified with so much water. He hoped Lawrence would agree that it was a suitable home for such a spirit. Finally he, Yonoi, had written a poem for the occasion. Presenting himself at the shrine, bowing low and clapping his hands sharply to ensure that the spirits knew he was there, he had deposited this verse for the ancestors to read:

In the spring,

Obeying the August spirits

I went to fight the enemy.

In the Fall,

Returning I beg the spirits,

To receive also the enemy.

‘You see,’ Lawrence said to me now, his voice low with feeling: ‘the seed sown by brother in brother in that far-off homeland was planted in many places. It was planted that day in your prison in Java. Yes, even in the manner they killed Celliers his enemies acted out their unwitting recognition of the seed of his deed, for they did not only bury him alive but planted him upright like a new young growth in the earth. Even the manner of their denial of the deed was confirmation of what was rejected. He was planted again by Yonoi on the hills and spirit of his native country, and here again the seed is alive and growing in you and me.’

I believe he might have gone on had my wife not entered the room just then and asked me to see to the windows and doors because a wireless warning had come through that a great gale was bearing down on us fast. When I came to check on the last window at the top of the house I stood there for a while looking out at the dying day. Yes, the great grey calm of Christmas was breaking fast. In the south-west against the pale yellow sky the clouds, ragged and torn, were coming racing towards us. The elements were loose and wild with movement and how good it was to know them once more on the move. I stood there with a heart full of welcome for the storm and it was as if Celliers had come again from all those many places in which he had been born, lived, died, been buried and enshrined, to stand behind me renewed and reintegrated, saying clearly in my ear: ‘Wind and spirit, earth and being, rain and doing, lightning and awareness imperative, thunder and the word, seed and sower, all are one: and it is necessary only for man to ask for his seed to be chosen and to pray for the sower within to sow it through the deed and act of himself, and then the harvest for all will be golden and great.’

^fn1 ‘The anchor-dropping place.’

^fn2 ‘The desired earth.’

The Sword and the Doll

Christmas Night

The Sword and the Doll

THE GALE WHICH bore down on us that Christmas night when John Lawrence and I carried the story of Jacques Celliers as far as we could, was one of the greatest in living memory. It was upon us almost before I could get down from the top of the house to re-join him in the drawing-room where the heavy curtains and shutters already were shutting out the last little light of day. He himself was sitting in semi-darkness by the large open fire and we remained there without speaking for long, listening to the rising voice of the storm. Words seemed utterly unnecessary just then, so much did the wind speak for Hara, Celliers, Yonoi, him, me and us all. Indeed no storm had ever sounded more eloquent and I pondered for quite a while on nature’s need for violence in accomplishing the transition between the seasons. I wondered to what extent too it was part of the terrible necessity of our own world to experience storms of war sometimes twice in one generation. When I reached this point in my thinking I noticed something about this storm that before I had never fully realized: the strange harmony at the heart of it. At all sorts of moments, sometimes in the lowest trough of the wind when the voice of the storm was little more than a sigh, or again on some great Everest crest when the individual sounds were torn alive and screaming from the immense trees thrashing in our tender, elegiac English earth, all the many and various noises would suddenly blend and a moment or two of pure music would float over the heaving waters of darkness and chaos. Sometimes the music had a twang-like accompaniment as if plucked from a great harp; sometimes it was like a rounded blast of Roland’s horn summoning the spirit of Man to turn about and stand; at others it was a scamper up and down the scales. But in its most gentle moments the sounds resembled the opening notes of a theme on the Shaku-hachi flute of Hara’s own people, which sings not only the song willed upon it by the player but also out of its nature of the fountain of green which once surged up through its native shoots of bamboo.

We were still sitting there in silence listening to the harmony brought forth from such violence (as perhaps Celliers had heard the first intimation of music beyond the storm in our Japanese prison camp), when my wife came into the room, turned on the light and asked: ‘I wonder if you two would mind going up and seeing the children? I promised that you’d go and say good night to them.’

Although we went upstairs at once we arrived too late. Christmas, of course, is notoriously exhausting for children and the twins, who had found sleep hard enough the night before and had been awake since early morning, were already fast asleep. In fact the little girl had been overcome by her fatigue in the act of trying to lift the Dutch doll her grandmother had given her from its miniature play-pen. Her fine black hair hung over the side of the little bed with the light in it a subtle night-sheen. Her outstretched arm held the doll firmly in hand and her face was buried deep in the white pillow. I settled her into a more comfortable sleeping position without waking her but could not loosen her grip on the doll. Whenever I tried to do so she protested instantly, moaning in her sleep. Afraid that I might wake her altogether I placed the doll, still clasped tightly in her hand, beside her underneath the eiderdown. The moment I did that a sigh of content broke from her, the flush of sleep in her cheeks deepened and her long dark lashes settled over the clear white skin.

The boy had been overcome in a more orderly moment. He still lay more or less in the position wherein his mother had settled him but he too had a hand out of the covers. It was clasping the toy-sword drawn from its sheath. His long yellow hair was disordered on the pillow and the lead soldiers were scattered over the bed where he had once more fought an enemy right up to the gateway of his sleep.

‘What a wonderful sight,’ Lawrence remarked as we tiptoed to the door to switch off the light. ‘Odd that you should have had twins so opposite in appearance, one so dark and one so fair. But it makes them more complete, in a way, than if they had been born identical.’

There was a deep undertone of envy in his voice. In this fluid, vulnerable state of our re-discovery of an intimacy tested on all sorts of occasions of life and death in the last war, his remark made me more aware than ever of the lonely role his way of life imposed on him.

But all I could think of saying was: ‘I wish you’d tell that to their mother. It might please her because I suspect she’d have preferred them both to have been fair.’

However, he did not get a chance to do so just then. My wife, who had obviously awaited our return with curiosity, was the first to speak when we rejoined her.

‘I wonder,’ she asked, ‘if the same thing struck you as it did me when you were with the children?’

‘I thought they looked dead beat, poor little devils,’ I answered. ‘What a good thing Christmas comes only once a year!’

‘Of course they’re tired,’ she replied with some resignation. ‘But it wasn’t that that I meant.’

‘They looked very happy,’ Lawrence answered when she looked inquiringly at him. ‘And very lovely too,’ he added: ‘and . . .’

‘Not that either,’ she cut in smiling, clearly happy over his appreciation of the twins and perhaps not at all displeased that he too had failed to get her particular point, confirming her preconceived view that only a woman could really see in her children whatever it was she had observed. ‘But didn’t it strike you that the girl’s last thought, like her first, was for her doll; the boy’s for his sword?’ She paused. ‘How much better the world would be if managed by women. We’d soon have no wars. All this male aggression would disappear and’ – she turned to me – ‘you know, I do feel you should stop giving your son a sword and soldiers to play with. I am certain that’s where the trouble starts.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Lawrence asked before I could reply. ‘I know numbers of people would agree with you. But I myself feel they’d be wrong.’ He in his turn paused. ‘You say that if boys had no soldiers and swords to play with there would be no wars. Do you also carry that form of reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that if little girls were denied baby-dolls to play with women would cease to have babies?’

‘I’m surprised at you,’ my wife exclaimed, her mind springing to its own spirited defence. ‘You’re using logic in a typically male fashion for a purpose for which it was never intended, and it’s unlike you.’

‘I don’t think I am,’ Lawrence countered laughing with her. ‘I spoke out of my own experience. Though I know many people would agree with you. I believe that the boy’s sword and the girl’s doll do not induce the states of mind that you suggest.’

He stopped as a great blast of wind shook the house so that the thick walls seemed to sway around us. A sound as of horses hooves’ and a battle-cry as if all the Valkyries of Germania were massing for war outside fell on our ears and the flames in the fireplace flickered low before Lawrence went on to say that both sword and doll seemed to him to be expressions of a pattern already deep in life. They were objects in the world without made to express a great invisible need of which both men and women were the subjects. It was only as apprentices of this master need, he thought, that the lives of men and women had any meaning. The two things, therefore, were not separate except as two halves of the same whole. That was why the two children had looked so complete to him, not only in being one dark and the other fair, but also in their choice of toys. Yes! sword and doll belonged to each other: without the sword the doll would have no life; without the doll the sword would have lost its meaning.

I noticed that my wife was becoming more and more interested but, suspicious of generalization and abstraction, she went straight for what was, to her, the heart of any matter: the human factor in Lawrence’s explanation.

‘You’ve just said you spoke out of your own experience!’ she observed keenly, anxious to get on. ‘But what sort of experience? General experience of life, war and men? Or did you have a particular experience in mind?’

Lawrence did not answer at once. To one who knew him as well as I did it was obvious that my wife’s question had found the inner mark of a hidden target. We waited in a silence wherein the sound of the storm spoke unimpeded to us, now howling like a pack of wolves, then suddenly throwing a bar of angel-song on the wild deep of air while the fire strained gallantly up the chimney against the downblast of wind.

‘I was speaking out of both, of course,’ he answered finally with great deliberation. ‘And I must confess that the feeling that prompted your question was almost uncannily right. I did have a particular experience in mind. Only I was not certain that I could speak about it. I was not sure I had come to terms sufficiently with the experience to discuss it with anyone, even those closest to me.’ He paused. ‘However, seeing the twins tonight, has, I think, made the experience clearer to me. Not only that. It has placed it in the company of those other things we have been talking about in connexion with Hara, Yonoi, Celliers and ourselves.’

‘Couldn’t you please tell us about it?’ my wife pleaded.

Lawrence hesitated. ‘I’d have to be intensely personal and more frank than I am both by training and instinct inclined to be.’

‘But it would be good of you.’ My wife made it unnecessary for him to explain more as she gave him an especially warm look.

I knew that look well and it never failed to move me anew. It was for me a sign of how greatly women long, in their deepest being, to help men to bring up into the light of day what is uncertain, fearful and secret within them. So deep is this instinct that they tend to be less afraid of the unpleasant facts of human nature than we are, and to mistrust profoundly only that which shuns the light of truth within us. No matter how unpleasant our secret or how awful the consequences of self-revelation may be for them, all that is best in woman feels triumphant because of the act of trust that makes emergence of the secret possible. So now, noticing the frank and warm look that she gave Lawrence (whom she had only met for the first time the day before) I knew for certain that henceforth all would be well between them.

As for Lawrence, he protested no more. Seeing my wife settling herself deep into her chair, he started straight away on his story.

The particular experience he had in mind, he explained, took place during the war, in a gleaming green and purple island of Insulinda. But, of course, the experience also had been prepared within him long before the war. If there was one thing he found more and more difficult precisely to determine it was this matter of the beginning of things. He realized it was of the utmost importance to place the beginning as accurately as possible for the sake of shape and articulation, but nonetheless the determination of origins was as arbitrary an abstract from the continuity of life as any generalization to which my wife had taken such instinctive exception earlier in the conversation. This understood, he would place his point of departure in some such moment as the one wherein we had just left the twins. He could not remember a time in his own life wherein there was not the image of a sword shining with a most compelling radiance in his imagination. To this day he had never forgotten the shock that went through him at Mallory’s description of Excalibur and King Arthur’s finding of the great sword. From that moment the whole legend of Arthur had held an inexhaustible interest for him, right to the end where Excalibur was reluctantly returned to the waters and an arm covered in white samite raised a hand to pull it down into the deeps below. Even now he suspected there was still far more to the legend than he could ever decipher and learn. But in those early days he was not bothered by such considerations though he accepted the whole legend as a decisive event in the evolution of his own spirit. Even the naming of the sword had seemed right for to him it was never purely a thing of metal but an individual manifestation of living experience. He felt compelled, too, to give a name even to the first wooden version of his own sword. He called it, he said smiling at us, ‘Brightling’ and looking back he would say it was this absolute acceptance of the living significance of the image of the sword which made him the first soldier in a family that had always been scholars, lawgivers and churchmen.

When he began to do service abroad he was confirmed in his sense of the significance of the image of the sword for he noticed how different nations found it necessary to have their now distinctive shapes. He would not bore us with what might be over-refinements of interpretation but a few illustrations of what he had in mind might make what was to come clearer. Had we ever remarked, for instance, on the difference of the shapes of swords favoured by two great opposing systems of the human spirit: the Christian and the Moslem, the cross and the crescent? If we had, we must have observed how like a cross, how like its Crusaders’ prototype was the European sword; and how like a new crescent moon slicing day from night was the shape of the scimitar. Only a few days before, flying to join us for Christmas, he had walked through the narrow streets of Damascus where the aeroplane had spent some hours, and had seen how the Arab aristocracy still moved in their purple shadows with a dagger, a miniature scimitar, dangling in a golden sheath like a new moon at their hips. There was no doubt in his own mind that the shape of the scimitar was inspired by the moon and this, like other Moslem practices, showed what a great tide from the moon swung in the spirit of Islam. Again it was significant that another moon-conscious people, the Japanese, also carried a slightly curved sword. For him, of course, there was no sword like the European. It was for him the least incomplete. It was shaped like a cross which in itself was for him a cardinal image of the complete spirit; a graphic illustration of the truth that life must be lived not merely horizontally but vertically as well. His own feeling was that the European sword was inspired by the sun. He said this because even as a child he had observed sword-light in the rays of the sun. Once on leave from the Army in India he had been climbing in the Himalayas at fifteen thousand feet on an unusually still and clear evening. The sky was silver-blue and speckled with the shadows of peaks on the horizon like an antique mirror. Just before the sunlight vanished below the purple rim it threw the image of a cross on the still air flashing like a great crusader’s sword over an immense black split in the far range. In Malaya too he was struck by the fact that the sword there was neither curved nor straight. Though pointed and two-edged it was shaped like a tongue of flame. The sound of its native name, Kriss, even re-echoed for him the hiss of the fire of the Malayan smith who fashioned it. He could go on at great length about these things for they had provoked his fancy for many years. However, to return to the sword. . . . Whether inspired by sun, moon or earthly fire the significant element common to all was the association with light. The sword was, he would suggest, one of the earliest images accessible to us of the light in man; his inborn weapon for conquering ignorance and darkness without. This, for him, was the meaning of the angel mounted with a flaming sword over the entrance to the Garden of an enchanted childhood to which there could be no return. He hoped he had said enough to give us some idea of what the image of the sword meant to him? But it was infinitely more than he could possibly say about the doll. The doll needed a woman not a man to speak for it, not because the image of the sword was superior to the image of the doll. It was, he believed, as old and went as deep into life. But it was singularly in women’s keeping, entrusted to their own especial care, and unfortunately between a woman’s and man’s awareness there seemed to have been always a tremendous gulf. Hitherto woman’s awareness of her especial values had not been encouraged by the world. Life had been lived predominantly on the male values. To revert to his basic image it had been dominated by the awareness of the sword. The other, the doll, had had to submit and to protect its own special values by blind instinct and intuition. Fortunately that was changing and in our own time the feminine values were emerging from age-old shadows. Men had begun to acknowledge their need of a woman conscious of her own special values. Yet the danger, as he saw it, was still lest man should set too great store by the symbol of the sword: that he should sacrifice life to the promotion of his own specialized awareness. We had only to reflect on the history of Europe to see how readily men had murdered one another for ideas to realize how far this male hubris could go. The danger to woman, he suspected, was in that she would sacrifice her own special awareness to her need of man and his sword. She tended to live her life through her men and children, bending them to her own dark unfulfilled mind, and preventing them, as she had been prevented herself, from living out their full specific lives. The balance between these two claims, Lawrence thought, had never been fairly struck and never could be so long as woman was just the annex to a specialized male need. Yet now he had a feeling that the need for the spirit of man for flesh and blood to live it out, and the need of the instant life of woman for sword-light to direct it were about to form a union. However, he was not there to philosophize or crystal-gaze on a stormy Christmas night. He hoped he had said enough to give us the general background of his state of mind on these things when the war came. It was now up to him to pass from the general to the particular.

He paused for quite a while and I got the feeling that, useful as his talk doubtless had been in order to give the climate of his story yet it had served also another purpose. It had served also to postpone the moment when he would inevitably have to pass from the general to the particular. My wife also, when we discussed it afterwards, had the same impression.

It started on the last day of February 1942 in the heart of Insulinda, Lawrence began slowly. He wondered whether any of us could still clearly recall the kind of moment that that was for us in the war? He himself had to prod his memory with a great effort of will to realize what a dark hour it had been and, since the darkness of the hour was relevant to the experience, he hoped we would forgive him if he went to some trouble to remind us of it.

In Europe, in North Africa, in Malaya and the Pacific the war had been a lengthening series of disasters for us and our friends. Pearl Harbour, the destruction of Prince of Wales and Repulse, the invasion of Malaya and the Philippines and the tidal sweep of the Japanese southwards, had come at a cruel and crucial hour for us. At that moment, like me, he had been pulled suddenly out of his regiment on the Libyan front. Because he spoke Japanese and had served in these parts he had been ordered to report to the South-East Asia Command which had been formed under Wavell to deal with the Japanese onslaught. So slight were our resources and so heavy the demands that he could find no aircraft to fly him to his destination. He was forced to make the journey in a cargo ship in a motley, slow-moving convoy. As a result, he had arrived at Wavell’s headquarters only the night after the fall of Singapore. Coming as he did straight from a front where we had just experienced our first victory in driving Rommel back beyond El Agheila, he was instantly struck by the feeling of hopelessness in the military air. It was not that our own people had lost heart, not that they doubted our final victory, nor had the courage to make a stand. But they all knew clearly that Insulinda could not be defended successfully against the Japanese, nor even held for us to gain time to organize our defences elsewhere.

Of course, everything was done by the Chiefs of Staff to keep this sombre knowledge from the ordinary soldiers and civilians. The combined military Headquarters was perched on the slopes of a volcano called, Lawrence said, with prophetic aptness, Tangkubuhanprauw ‘the-Ship-turned-upside-down’, for what else he asked could have been a more graphic image of the fate in store for those societies caught in that typhoon of war in the East? All round the Headquarters and to some extent within it, life was going on with an easy abandon almost obscene to one who had come from so austere a front as the Libyan desert. The hotels, restaurants, dance-halls and night clubs were always crowded with laughing, noisy, over-fed people. He had never seen a population so large and fat as were the Europeans in that island. What made their appearance all the more marked almost to the point of caricature were the millions of small, delicately-made, soft-spoken, ascetic-looking native peoples who surrounded them.

There was no shortage of food or drink of any kind and at his hotel the first morning after a gloomy interview with a realistic though undismayed Commander-in-Chief, he was amazed at the numbers of men in uniform who started their day with a fiery Bols followed by iced lagers. He would watch them eat a breakfast of several kinds of smoked meats, eggs, several sorts of cheeses and breads and a pot of coffee, believing they would not eat again until nightfall. But at eleven o’clock in the morning, constantly wiping the sweat like water from their faces, they would reappear for more iced beer and large plates full of thick soup of pork and beans. At about two in the afternoon, preceded by more Bols, they would have a meal which was a banquet by peacetime European standards; at sunset they had more Bols, crackling Kroepoek and other oil-fried snacks, followed by another banquet, served again by spare, gentle and grave Javanese waiters. The strain put on their bodies by sheer excess of food and drink in a tropical climate was so obvious to Lawrence that he wondered how they would ever find strength and breath enough to march far against so spartan and agile an enemy as the Japanese.

And as he wondered he realized with dismay the meaning of such abnormal eating and drinking. These people were afraid. He was in the midst of a community caught up in a fear so terrible and deep that they could not even acknowledge its existence. These huge men and their women were trying to eat away their fear. All that eating was the grown-up equivalent of the child frightened in the dark of things without shape or name turning again and again to its mother’s breast though it had long since fed enough. It was no use a resolute military command attempting to keep the population reassured by putting on a brave face, publishing optimistic communiqués and encouraging energetic preparations for defence. All the reticence of an Antarctic night cannot conceal the whispering of the ice of a fear that is encroaching and real. In the core of their being this community already knew the truth, and the knowledge was spreading fast through nerves and tissues: a great reckoning was near and a whole epoch and Empire were about to crumble and fall. Yet as they ate and drank hugely they sang over and over again their most popular ditty of the moment: ‘We zyn niet bang’ (we are not afraid). They were protesting too much just as they ate and drank too much. They were, though they may not have known it, more afraid than they had ever been before. All else was façade and camouflage of the soul hiding from the consequences of an excess banished from recognition far too long. Lawrence’s suspicion of what the moment of truth would do to them moved him deeply and left him without any desire to condemn or judge.

For instance once an air-raid alarm caught him on a main street. A large motor-car suddenly drew up beside him. It was driven by a huge civilian and held four, bright full-bosomed, plump young women, laughing much too loudly and brightly.

‘Jump in and come and watch the bombing, we’ll get a good view of it from that hill there!’

The driver’s invitation was uttered in the bluff, faintly arrogant tone that prosperous Europeans in that part of the world tended to use to foreigners. More, he spoke as if he were conferring a favour on Lawrence and offering him a seat in the front row of the stalls on the first night of some new play. Lawrence declined politely, somewhat shocked by so unreal an approach to war.

As he walked on one of the girls exclaimed loudly behind him: ‘Oh, let the poor frightened Englishman alone! He’s probably not yet got over his flight from Singapore and would prefer a nice safe little shelter.’

She immediately followed up the remark by starting the inevitable refrain: ‘Maar wy, we zyn niet Bang.’ The rest joined in and, singing, they vanished from his life.

Yet Lawrence could assure us that, insulting as the remark was intended to be, it failed to annoy him because he was by then convinced that the woman in the classic manner of the unaware was merely attributing to him the fear that she could not face in herself. Even so he himself did not realize fully how wide, deep and real this fear was until the morning after Wavell and his entire Headquarters had been evacuated swiftly and in great secrecy at dead of night.

The evening before the evacuation his Commander-in-Chief had sent for him. He was told that there was no doubt that the Japanese were about to land on the island. The Dutch and Allied warships and the Dutch aircraft in particular had fought gallantly to hold off invasion but had been so destroyed or damaged by vastly superior forces that they were now immobilized. He wished he could assure Lawrence that the land forces would do as well; but he feared resistance on the ground would be slight and easily overcome. Yet it was of the utmost importance that resistance should go on for as long as possible. Every day gained in delaying the Japanese was precious. Even when organized resistance ceased he was hoping that it would be possible to carry on a protracted guerrilla war against the Japanese. That was where Lawrence came in. He would not give Lawrence orders but merely tell him about the situation and then he could decide for himself – because as Lawrence soon would see it was a pretty grim proposition. He, the Commander-in-Chief, needed an officer who would take command of a group of volunteers from all units and nationalities on the island. Once the main battle was joined (as it still just might be) between the defenders and the Japanese invaders, he wanted this particular unit to slip around the flank of the enemy and harass its lines of communications from the dense jungle which bordered most roads in the island. If there should be no main battle and only a token resistance – and this had to be considered as a grave possibility – then it would be more important than ever that such a special force remained in being and continued activities from some jungle hide-out. Once the Commander-in-Chief was back in India he would do his utmost to get supplies by air and submarine to this guerrilla force; but he doubted if there would be much that he could do for a long time to come. Therefore the force would have to live off the country and rely on its own initiative and the wits of its commander to survive. It would be unfair to pretend that its chances of survival would be great against so ruthless an enemy. However, in such jungle-country it might just be possible. All he could say for certain was that if it succeeded in persuading the Japanese that there were sizeable forces still holding out in the depths of the jungle and so prevented them from diverting troops to reinforce their onslaught elsewhere, it would be invaluable to the wider plan of the Allies. Throughout the Commander-in-Chief took Lawrence into his confidence in the most complete and imaginative way to make certain that his officer could believe, as he did, that what he asked was truly necessary.

Even so, after replying that he would, of course, do what his Commander wanted, Lawrence had returned to his room in the near-by hotel which was still full of feasting and singing people, with a feeling that he had come to an end too. He was like someone who had walked into a fatal trap and had just heard the door shut on him. He lay awake most of that night listening to the convoy hurrying down the mountain road by his hotel as it carried the vast Headquarters Staff and their baggage to ships and seaplanes waiting for them in the one harbour on the south coast not yet blocked by the enemy’s navies. As they moved out it was as if he heard a vengeful history move in stealthily on bare feet like a giant, knife in hand, to take their place. When the sound of the last truck had vanished down the road another sound took over. The night-watchmen in those wooden villages which, beyond the electric lights of the European towns, stand on stilts like sleeping herons over their own charcoal reflections in the star-filled paddy-waters, began to rap out urgent signals to one another on their bamboo alarm gongs. Lawrence was certain it was not his over-strained senses deceiving him: there was fear in that signalling too. At breakfast the next morning his apprehensions were confirmed. The laughter and defiance had gone from the red faces of the gin and beer-swilling men like the text of the previous day’s lesson which had been wiped off the school blackboard by some caretaker in the night to make room for the lesson to come. The expression that now greeted him was nothing but the dark face of the fear of which he had spoken. Also there was something else of even greater significance. All the Javanese servants in the hotel, the Sundanese hawkers in the streets, the Madurese cleaners and scavengers, the Sumatran clerks and intellectuals, had discarded the compliant head-dress of rich glowing turbans of blue, gold and brown batic, that they had favoured for centuries, and in its place they had donned the stiff, uncompromising, black hat of the emerging Nationalists of the islands.

It was bad enough that Lawrence had to go and collect his few personal belongings in the abandoned headquarters which, crowded and busy like a beehive only the day before was now empty except for himself and the cleaners. Everything around him emphasized how precipitate the evacuation had been. The floors were littered with discarded possessions, each room a still-life of the rejected and doomed. Second-best uniforms and soiled greatcoats hung limply over chairs and tables; socks, ties, shirts, worn shoes and boots covered the floors; half-open desks and drawers held torn files and empty official envelopes, and several volumes of Jane Austen and Trollope, books favoured by professional British staff officers who discovered amid the brutalities of the war a longing for the gentility and refinement of life, were scattered about. In an American naval office lay two books: Forever Amber (a title dumb with irony seeing that all the lights ahead had long since turned red), and a fat volume of Gone With The Wind. Finally there were the copies of Who’s Who and Debrett in a British staff room. Both books looked to Lawrence to be scarlet with the discomfort of those mentioned within them because their kin had turned their backs on an Oriental enemy.

He himself had been through the chaos of retreat and evacuation before and could make his peace with all these reminders of how alone he was now. But it was not so easy to come to terms with the sight of the slight, silent, little men of the islands going from room to room collecting what was of use to them, and all wearing those stiff, black caps on their heads. Beyond all need of words there, for Lawrence, was the slumbering meaning of three-and-a-half soporific centuries suddenly emerging in an undeniable image: a new hat to symbolize a new state of mind. Overnight the teeming millions of that lovely long necklace of the jewelled islands of Insulinda had been transformed in one moment of darkness and fear into a whole people of judges – and like judges at a trial for murder they were putting on their black caps in readiness for the pronouncement of sentence of death on the culture and the men and women who had imposed it on them, from without, for so long. Today, Lawrence turned to us, we could judge how accurate was that fear by what had happened in those islands since. Whenever people tried to blame the Japanese, British, Americans or Communists for the course this piece of post-war history had taken, he had only to remember the black hats of the humble cleaners in the great abandoned buildings on the slopes of the mountain of the ‘Ship-turned-upside-down’, to realize how false was such blame. He would then see again vivid in memory those lithe little sweepers wielding their brushes like new brooms of history to sweep the litter of centuries clean from the door of a future of their own. Not by persuasion of any invader but out of a people’s own inner nature and texture of being was the future born that day, and for good or ill a tide in all our histories turned. Lawrence stressed all this, he now said, because, looking back, it was of the utmost importance to what followed in his story. It had been difficult enough to command his own heart in a battle against a growing sense of his individual doom. We could imagine then how doubly hard it was to hold it intact when a sense of the doom of an age and a cancellation of such a long confident assertion of the purpose of a great Empire, were joined to it. For the first time in the war, he, Lawrence, had been in danger of seeing no meaning whatsoever in what he was about. And thereby hung his tale. . . .

He left the forlorn Headquarters, therefore, as soon as he possibly could and went about the business of collecting his unit with a bleak heart. Just before noon he set out with the advance party of the little force so clearly predestined for disaster, to take up a preliminary position on the fringes of the great raised plateau, the formidable natural fortress which the self-indulgent masters of the island had claimed with unabashed melodrama they would ‘defend to the last drop of their blood’. His road out of town took him past the island’s most fashionable hotel. The wide veranda was crowded with Dutch staff-officers and their women. Their noonday gins apparently had done something to revive their spirits because seeing his trucks go by some of the men started up a large chorus of ‘We zyn niet bang: we are not afraid’. But he had heard more convincing performances of the ditty before, and in particular he noticed that the women no longer joined in and that somehow added another dimension to his own private dismay.

The road towards the expected ‘invasion area’ twisted among steep forest-covered hills and along golden valleys between great grey volcanoes asleep in the hot sun. Yet they were active enough to give the impression that if he went nearer he would hear their fires snoring within. The sky above was a great unblemished mother-of-pearl shell, and the beauty of the day sparkled and glowed over an island earth so rich and generous that it rewarded the people who tilled it with five harvests of rice every two years. All seemed to mock the darkness within him, Lawrence said. At moments he felt as if he were in a nightmare dreaming of war and of his trapped, pre-ordained role within it. As the afternoon went on over the gleaming paddy fields immense thunder-clouds formed to do and undo their long volcanic hair like gods regarding their own reflections in the quick-silver water. There was no wind (just as there were no seasons in that part of the world) only an endless repetition of this same still, fecund, mother-of-pearl moment in the ardent volcanic nature of the land through which he was moving. The only traces of movement were a tremble of heat in the air as of transparent poplar leaves shivering in a breath of summer, and a constant throbbing imparted by the urgent beat of the deep volcanic heart of the earth to the silence singing in Lawrence’s ears. By every paddy field tremble of heat, shiver of light and throb of earth were encouraged by the agitation of the dense swarms of blue and silver dragonflies, zooming over the burning waters on transparent wings. In each paddy water slender women stripped to the waist, their faces purple under the shadows of their wide hats of yellow straw, moved rhythmically, hip to hip, as women had done for a thousand years of planting new rice alongside the old. Always somewhere behind them a great water-buffalo moved with ponderous steps like a statue of the Beast in some ancient legend come to life. Always too a naked little boy with a burnished skin sat like an image of the young Buddha on the broad back of the buffalo whose immense power seemed to have found direction and meaning in the service of such delicate companionship. Beautiful as the scene was, Lawrence stressed, it made him feel increasingly unrelated to what he was doing. He had not realized until then how much one depended in moments of trouble on the support of the earth and the familiar sights and sounds among which one had been born. He longed desperately for a miracle to give him a glimpse of even the most commonplace of his native English scenes: a lane between water meadows, spotted cows chewing the cud in the grass and buttercups while the pale sun drew haloes round their backs, and behind them a lath and plaster cottage grew blue smoke like a plant in a red chimney pot. That would have been enough, he had thought, to bring him back to centre and destroy this devastating feeling of unbelonging which was biting so deeply into him. But all that remained was that great shining day utterly indifferent to him and his mission. Even some sign of recognition from the people in the fields would have helped, but though they could not have failed to hear the noise of his trucks they did not pause in their work to glance upwards from beneath their big hats as he hurried by. Once he waved and called out a greeting in Malay to a little boy washing his buffalo which was lying, eyes shut ecstatically, in a stream within a few yards of the bridge where Lawrence crossed. But the boy gave him no answering sign and went on splashing water over the buffalo with his quick, brown hands as if he had not heard. The boy, the women, the silent sleeping mountains, the shining earth, the smoking jungle and its lofty unruffled plumes of palm all stood as if deliberately with heads averted, oblivious both to him and his mission. Open and frank as day and scene both appeared yet such aversion made them secretive and subversive. There was not, he observed, any darkness so great as darkness in the sun. Thereafter in the odd villages he passed it did not need the sight of clerks or street vendors in black caps to make it quite clear to him that this was more than just peasant indifference to change. It continued thus until evening, when at last he came to the village on the lip of the plateau where he planned to wait for the Japanese invasion: only there could he judge how best to commit his little force.

The village was built on the side of an immense Janusheaded volcano looking both ways: to the purple highlands from which he had just come, and also towards the sea. At that hour with the red sun going down between Krakatau and Java Head in the Sunda strait and its light setting on fire one huge summit of cloud after the other, the earth below by contrast looked black and already abandoned to the night. The plain and the redeemed marshes below the village and between the volcano and the sea were no longer visible, but he could tell the whereabouts of the islet-locked ocean by its effect on the northern sky where the sunset fires were abruptly extinguished and the moisture-charged air rose swiftly to hang like a thick mauve curtain between the day and the night. It was its exalted situation above the malarial plain and its nearness to the sea which had made the village a favourite health and pleasure resort of the more privileged persons working in the great port on the coral coast. The village contained several big luxurious hotels and the roomy holiday houses and week-end villas of many prosperous merchants and higher officialdom. But there was no holiday atmosphere about it on this evening of fire in the western sky and darkness on the earth. An air-raid alarm had sounded just before Lawrence arrived and no light shone in the fast deepening twilight to welcome him. The streets were silent and empty. At the entrance to the village square the challenge of the policeman who stopped the convoy rang out with a loudness which sounded almost profane. Luckily the policeman knew about the convoy. He was there, in fact, to conduct the men and officers to their billets.

It had not been easy to find decent room for them, the policeman explained. The hotels and houses were full to overflowing with fugitives, mostly women, children and old men who had been pouring in from the outer islands. It had been terrible to see them coming in because most of them had left their homes, husbands and belongings at a moment’s notice in order to escape the Japanese who had an uncanny knack (he said it with a trace of acid cynicism) of always showing up a hundred miles ahead of where only a few hours before the latest official communiques had placed them. The refugees had arrived packed like cattle in trains with few belongings other than what they stood up in and not knowing what had become of the fathers, sons and husbands who had been left behind. Though he was dutifully polite and scrupulous in his attention to the needs of Lawrence and his men the policeman explained all this with an undertone of accusation, as if he, too, blamed the British and their failure to hold Malaya for everything. When all the men and officers were under cover and at last provided for, he escorted Lawrence to the most modern hotel in the village. Lawrence would have preferred to remain with his men but he had no option since he had been ordered to be night and day at the end of a reliable telephone until the battle with the enemy was truly joined and this hotel had been chosen, the policeman said, precisely because it had the best telephone system in the place.

By then the darkness was almost complete. Only the lightning flashing from some yellow head of curled cloud, filled the black night with profound unrest and made the silence stutter with the distant mutter of thunder. Out of smoking hedges swarm after swarm of fireflies began to break like sparks blown from the great blacksmith working his forge in that volcano towering purple against the sheets of lightning which flared from time to time behind it. Whenever his eyes recovered from the flashes of light, Lawrence was amazed how dense and how near the jungle crept even to so long-established a settlement. In a state of heightened perception brought about in him by that immense world-drama so swiftly sweeping to its climax, the jungle appeared like a tiger crouched patient, watchful and at ease in the night, ready to spring on the village the moment the back of man was turned. From it, as from the fields, streams and paddy waters, rose a noise of ecstatic crickets, singing lizards and booming bullfrogs that was deafening. It sounded as if all the small, secret forces of creation, whose enemies prowled by day, were joined there in the chorus of gratitude to the night which alone gave them their chance of fulfilment. Immediately above Lawrence was a great patch of clear sky. When the lightning flared it was like a deep lagoon ringed with coral strands of cloud, but in the darknesses between it was charged with the same unrest of creation which vibrated in the earth around him. The Milky Way emerged too with a profuse deep-sea phosphorescence as if the mother of light were spawning in those coralled waters.

Then near the hotel this urgent rhythm of sound and light and this song of the unrest of secret creation was joined by a new sound. The shock of it made him stand still for a moment, and listen to a thin, protracted wailing. He looked around and could just make out the dark outline of a long veranda running right round the L-shaped wings of bedrooms which branched out from the main body of the hotel and stretched right up to the entrance from the road. There a shimmer of light (which provoked a wordless grumble in the policeman’s throat), shone behind a curtained window. The wail suddenly ceased, to be followed by a fresh-born sneeze and a murmur of relief and a volume of subdued but satisfied and affectionate whisperings. Obviously a child had just been born to some refugee mother. But so bleak and locked-out did Lawrence feel himself to be from all creative processes that the realization merely added to the pressure of his apprehensions of the horrors to come. Indeed he stood there instinctively repeating in his mind, as he was destined to many times in the days ahead, the last verse of his favourite psalm: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. But that did not really help much just then, and he walked on to the main building noticing as he went up the steps the shadowy outlines of slight Indonesian ayahs moving to and fro along the verandas with babies in their arms all of whom they were trying to rock to sleep in the fresh air outside their tepid blacked-out rooms. The shuffle of their feet was only just audible in the glittering sound going up from the earth to the spawn-star sky with its urgent pulse of thunder and wings of lightning beating the bounds of night.

Inside the hotel reception hall he found the proprietor making a perfunctory show of working by candlelight at his desk. He was obviously in a tense nervous state because as Lawrence walked in, he jumped up nervously. To Lawrence’s dismay he was another huge fat man smelling strongly of drink. Yet he was not drunk. That was one of the odd things about the island. Lawrence had not seen a single drunk among the island Europeans though many among the British and American troops who could drink only a fraction of the liquor that people like the proprietor could consume.

However, reassured by Lawrence’s uniform and the presence of a policeman whom he knew, the proprietor now greeted him with meticulous politeness. That done he apologized for the darkness inside the hotel saying that as soon as the air-raid alarm was cancelled he would switch on the electric light. He explained that on such sultry evenings he and his guests would rather have little light and open windows than bright lights with doors and windows shut against the blackout. He suggested, therefore, that as the air-raid alarms had never lasted long he would show Lawrence to the hotel drawing-room, give him a drink and leave him there in comfort until he could occupy his bedroom by proper light. It was not much of a room, he added, because God knew, the hotel was hopelessly overcrowded with distraught women, feeble old men in their dotage and tired overwrought children, but at least it had its own telephone and . . .

He broke off suddenly to ask out of longing for reassurance against the shadow of the intolerable fear which was darkening the intuitions of the island community: ‘Is it true that the American Navy has destroyed the Japanese invasion fleet off Bali and that fifteen divisions of Marines are now landing at Sourabaya to help us?’

Knowing what he did Lawrence could have denied the rumour outright but he did not have the heart to do so. He merely answered that he had heard nothing either about so stupendous a naval victory or so great a landing. Whereupon the man, his bloodshot eyes tragic in the candlelight, sighed deeply and exclaimed: ‘Ag! Even if the news is not entirely accurate, there must be something in it. No smoke without fire, you know! In any case I believe we’ll have good news soon. It cannot go on like this, always being bad, then worse and yet still worse. I’m certain the Americans won’t leave us in the lurch, as . . .’

Lawrence believed he was about to add ‘as the British have done’ but he stopped and cut short a note of rising emotion just in time in order to ask artlessly in the eager voice of a fundamentally kindly and simple person: ‘Do you know whether it is true that Princess Juliana gave birth to a son last night?’

Lawrence replied again that he was sorry he could not confirm the rumour. At that he was led into a large, dimly lit veranda-room and shown to a chair by a small vacant table. It was the last empty place. The room was crowded with people indistinct in candlelight made dimmer with cigarette smoke. Judging by what he could see as well as by the quality of subdued voices surging around him, the people in the room were mostly women. No one appeared to have noticed his entrance and he sat there for half an hour undisturbed, listening to the conversation and from time to time seeing the unheeded lightning like an arch-angel messenger alighting on the sill of an open window.

Everybody as far as he could gather was talking about the war and from time to time being bitter about the British. Indeed, he felt uncomfortably like an eavesdropper. However, more striking and significant to him was the undercurrent of fear tugging at the sleeve of the uncomprehending spirit of these islanders, and over all the air of tension produced by a stubborn determination to go on as if the present were but a brief interlude and nothing in their lives really had changed for ever. At all sorts of odd moments this fear would break through their conscious defences. Some apparently meaningless trifle from their recent experience, the insignificant shell enclosing the subtle poison of decline and fall, would appear in the surf of their conversation like a small unpalatable crustacean dragged to the shore in a fisherman’s net. Thus he heard a woman near him suddenly put an end to a conversation about the Dutch royal family by saying: ‘You know an odd thing happened the morning we left our home outside Palembang. Just before the news came through from the Governor’s palace that all the children, women and old men were to hurry to their evacuation centres, the eldest of our Mandurs^fn1 came to the estate office and asked to see my husband. He had been with us for thirty years and was the head of all our coolies. I can’t tell you how good, decent and respectful he has always been. But suddenly there he was at the door of the estate office, asking, if you please, for three dozen tins of condensed milk!’

‘What on earth are you saying, Mevrouw?’ the voice of an old man exclaimed in the dark nearby. He sounded outraged as if there had been some enormity in the head coolie’s request. ‘What are you saying? a mandur made ‘zo ’n Brutale verzoek’ (such an impertinent request?).

‘Indeed, he did.’ The woman confirmed emphatically. Evidently reassured because someone else found the episode as untoward as she did she went on more confidently. ‘What’s more, my husband asked him why he wanted the milk. Was he not satisfied with the lavish rations he had drawn all these years? But the man just looked past my husband, and said he had no particular reason for asking: he just wanted three dozen tins of condensed milk!’

‘I hope your husband told him where to take himself and his impudence,’ that blurred old voice, or another one, intervened.

‘Not at all,’ the woman replied her voice riding high with emotion. ‘That was the strangest part of it all! A week before my husband would have dealt most firmly with the Mandur because we’ve been far too good to him to justify such demands. But my husband, completely taken aback, just stared at the man for a moment or two, then took out his keys, unlocked the store and tamely gave him the milk!’

‘That was a mistake, a grave mistake,’ the tired old voice again commented, and went on without respect for the purity of its metaphors. ‘That milk was just the thin edge of the wedge trying out your husband’s grip on this confused situation. I bet that chap was back within the hour asking for more! Give these fellows a teat and they take the whole cow! Hé, he, hé!’

He cackled, pleased with his joke. But no one else joined him.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know whether he came back or not,’ the woman said. ‘The alarm came through almost immediately after. Within the hour I was gone with the children. But ever since I’ve been quite unable to get the thing out of my mind. I feel it means something but I don’t know what.’

She stopped speaking, her words darting through that dim-lit room like a bat carrying in the twilight hour the full message of the night about to fall. So quiet had it become, Lawrence said, that you could almost hear the silence squeak. He had just time to think – this is meaning in pantomime: it was the milk of human kindness that these indigenous people were thirsting for all these years – when the voice of another woman broke in: ‘And I’ll tell you something else that I can’t understand: the owner of this hotel allowing these waiters to go about in those awful black hats and doing nothing, absolutely nothing about it at all?’

‘Hush, hush, my dear,’ another woman exclaimed as a waiter moved deftly without a sound on neat, small bare feet into the room. Silently, he tripped his way between the tables to serve drinks to some people near Lawrence. Ice fell with a sudden, precise, cool and utterly impersonal tinkle in several glasses, and the waiter vanished through the open door but not before Lawrence had seen clearly outlined against the glow within it the black hat on his head. Then the voice of appeasement spoke up again: ‘Hush! my dear, you must really be more careful! I know we never speak Dutch to these people but they must have picked up a phrase or two by now and could easily understand what you’re saying. . . .’

‘And what do I care if he does? I would like all the world to hear!’ The woman who had started it answered shrilly, with an overtone of hysteria in her voice: ‘If that proprietor were only half a man, he would never have allowed such insolence to begin, let alone tolerate it for so long. Ag! Dear God! What is to become of us with only such men left to protect us?’

She started to cry without restraint so that the whole room was affected by it. Lawrence feared they would all lose their self-control and join in but just at that moment, the siren of a nearby sugar-mill proclaimed the end of the air-raid alarm. At once all the lights went on, and the shock of light was as good as a slap in the face and removed the danger of any spread of that particular form of hysteria. The women sat up straighter in their chairs, automatically patting and smoothing their dresses.

Lawrence then saw that the room was filled with women of all ages, except for the one old man who sat crumpled over a drink in his chair, his red-rimmed eyes blinking at the light. At a table opposite Lawrence a middle-aged woman had her arms round a younger one and was trying to comfort her. As Lawrence watched her sobs grew less and presently she allowed the older woman to help her to her feet and begin leading her from the room.

As she did so, someone at a table behind Lawrence made a remark he could not catch. It was uttered low but in a tone of such unusual quality that Lawrence turned his head to look. He heard another woman loudly rebuke the owner of the voice: ‘It is easy enough for you, my dear, to disapprove. If you had three little children to think about as she has, poor dear, you would understand her outburst better. Believe me, you are very, very lucky not to be married and to have no husband and children to worry about at a time like this: very lucky indeed!’

Lawrence heard the reply distinctly: ‘I wasn’t disapproving. And it was precisely because of the children that such hysteria worried me.’ The voice paused as if in two minds to go on or not, then decided to do so. ‘And my dear, what strange ideas human beings have about luck.’ It was said quietly without bitterness or reproach but with a strange sort of nostalgia.

So interested were the women in each other that Lawrence was free for a moment to watch them unobserved. What the one woman looked like he had no special recollection except that she resembled many others present: a large, full-bosomed matron, the worthy wife no doubt of another experienced planter in the outer islands, and with an air of basic well-being which even the anxieties of the moment could not altogether obscure. Of the other, the owner of the voice, the detail was extraordinarily fresh in his memory.

She was young, perhaps twenty-two or three, and tall for a woman. He could tell that even as she sat at the side of the table, one long, well-shaped bare leg over the other and hands with unusually broad palms and long fingers together in her lap. She had on leather sandals and unlike any of the other women in the room wore a loose skirt of native material, a deep, rich, brown batik with blue and yellow butterflies and flowers printed on it. Tucked into it like a blouse she had on a boy’s plain white open-necked shirt, a red silk handkerchief nonchalantly inserted in the pocket over the heart, and the sleeves neatly rolled up to just above the elbows. On her left wrist she wore a bracelet of burnt Djokja silver and round her throat a delicate gold chain with a locket of what looked like a virgin Sundanese nugget, the size of a pigeon’s egg. Her shoulders were neat, her neck long and elegant; her head well poised and shapely. Her forehead seemed high and broad for a woman, her face longish and inclined to an oval. She was not thin and yet had nothing fat about her. The cheeks below their high almost mongolian bone, indeed, were slightly curved inwards. Her wrists and ankles were slim and the bone beneath the skin of hands and face gave him the impression of being so fine that she looked in that assembly like a well-bred hunter in a paddock full of carthorses. Her mouth was full and the eyes well apart, big, slightly slanted and of a blue so intense that they looked almost purple. Her hair was extremely fair, thick and yet of so fine a texture that as it fell straight from the parting in the middle to her neat shoulders it shone like lamplight about her head. She used no make-up of any kind and the smooth European skin had not yet been stained by the climate to a weak coffee colour, as those of the other women present were. In fact it was still of a whiteness so fresh and intense that he could only describe it as brilliant. There was indeed, Lawrence now told us, an early Marie Laurencin painting of which she might have been the model. Though Laurencin was by no means his favourite painter, she was the only painter who had conveyed something of the impression this young woman made on him. Laurencin’s vision, whatever else one might care to say against it, was fundamentally of woman as woman saw herself when her own vision was still fresh and she had painted a young French girl who looked just like that refugee girl, sitting with her long hands in her lap in the hotel drawing-room in Insulinda, the face a little heraldic, but with spirit behind it, vivid as a dream; woman in fact he would suggest, before her encounter with man. Yes, that was how she had appeared to him, in that blinding movement immediately after the lights were turned full on, not only a woman but the woman in all women. Tired, preoccupied, filled as he was with a sense of fast-approaching disaster and totally unready for such a reaction, an emotion as of having made a great discovery possessed him.

Long as it takes in the telling all these impressions were contained in the briefest of moments, because very soon the woman became aware of him too and looked up straight into his eyes. He had felt forced to turn quickly away then, but not before he had seen her interest at seeing a stranger in strange uniform watching her so closely startle the clear look in her eyes like water on a still bright day troubled by a cats-paw of wind. He hoped to look at her again but just then the proprietor came to take him to his room. As Lawrence walked out, the rest of the women too saw him clearly for the first time. They stopped talking at once and watched him amazed; even the crumpled old man came erect in his seat. Lawrence was not out of the door before the sound of excited speculation about him and his purpose there broke out like a beehive resuming work at dawn.

It was to be in any case a night of great unrest. Twice before midnight his telephone rang and woke him just when he might have slept. Each time it was his liaison officer at the Dutch military headquarters, still on the slopes of the sleeping volcano of Tangkubuhanprauw, giving him the latest dispatches. All showed that the iron noose about the island was closed and rapidly tightening. The last light of day had disclosed two vast Japanese fleets of warships and transports making for the island: one coming up fast from the north and aiming at the middle of the long coastline; the other from the west heading for the harbour and railhead on the Sunda strait, not far from Lawrence’s position. Not a single dispatch hinted at even a remote chance of help or hope of relief. Indeed when Lawrence asked what was the feeling at Headquarters the officer on the far end of the line hesitated before he blurted out: ‘Well, sir, if you really want to know what I think, they’ve had it, and if we don’t find a snug spot of cover in the jungle we shall soon be gone for a Burton.’

All this was made more disconcerting for Lawrence by the manner in which it had to be conveyed to him. Lawrence had arranged with the officer beforehand that since they had no time or staff for codes or cyphers they would speak to each other in schoolboy gibberish, hoping that would be enough to confound any foreigner listening in. So he had to smile hearing the cool Sandhurst voice on the line rendering ‘We shall soon be gone for a Burton’ as ‘E-way all-shay oon-say e-bay one-gay or-fay anna-way urton-bay.’

Then again there were the night-watchmen in the villages and hamlets in the jungle near by. Their great bamboo gongs, full of portent and fear-fever, went tok-tok-tokking all through the long hours in between the telephone calls. Once when his own unrest took him to the window of his room he suddenly heard the urgent noises outside overwhelmed by a deep, continuous vibration rather like that of the waters of a great river in the distance falling infinitely into some unimagined chasm in the earth. He touched the glass of the window with the tips of his fingers and felt it shivering as with cold. For an hour or more this deep abysmal agitation troubled the night and then as suddenly as it had begun, it ceased. He had no doubt from past experience that the disturbance came from big guns firing far away to the west and that it was direct intimation that his own particular hour, whatever it was to be, was near. With that realization the image of the woman, complete with the startled look when she had first noticed him, came vividly to his mind and he heard again that voice exclaiming: ‘My dear, human beings have strange ideas about luck.’

He was up very early and hurried down to his breakfast so that he could get to his men as soon as possible. He had thought he would be the first in the dining-room but already she was there. She was sitting at a table alone, waiting for her food, her hands folded characteristically in her long lap and breathing in deeply the fresh air from the window at her side, while the morning wove the young light through her hair. He sat down several tables away, also by an open window, facing her. A waiter, wearing the inevitable black hat, appeared silently at his side. He ordered his breakfast, asked the waiter to be as quick as possible, and glanced up to see the girl watching him intently. She made no attempt to avoid his look and he found himself standing to attention, in the way men did in those islands, and bowing to her. Slowly her left hand came up and was held briefly in a kind of boyish greeting above her neat shoulder.

At that very moment the proprietor, shuffling along at a portly double came into the room, calling out loudly: ‘Colonel Lawrence, Colonel Lawrence, quick! quick! You’re wanted by Headquarters on the phone. They say it’s most urgent.’

‘Curse the man!’ Lawrence exclaimed to himself as he dropped his napkin on the table and turned sharply away to follow the proprietor: ‘Why not just say I’m wanted on the telephone and leave Headquarters out of it.’

However, he had no chance of speaking his mind to the proprietor just then for the bleary-eyed man, still smelling of gin and beer, seized him by the arm and impelled him towards a public call-box in the hall.

‘I bring your call to this box,’ he explained in his breathless throaty voice. ‘You’ll be alone there and save time running upstairs to your room.’

With that he opened the glass door, pushed Lawrence inside, shut the door on him and then walked backwards to take up position about four yards away where, with arms folded and feet apart, he could keep his eyes on the face of the leading actor. Almost at once he was joined by his waiters, all in black hats. When Lawrence put the receiver to his ear and leant back against the glass wall of the box, a finger closing the other ear in order to shut out all external sound, he saw this strange little gathering standing there, hypnotically united in a trance induced by their sense of impending disaster as they had never been in normal life.

‘Hallo, Lawrence here!’ He tried to say it as if he were expecting no more than an invitation to dinner.

‘Is that you, sir?’ The voice of his liaison officer was unmistakable for all the long-distance crackling on the line. It too gave an imitation of unconcern. ‘I think this is it, sir. The Nips are landing now in a big way on the north coast between Semerang and Surabaya. Then the last of our fleet, three crippled warships, ran into the main western invasion force in the Sunda Strait last night, did heavy damage but were all sunk in the end. The Nips have got the railhead at Merak and are landing in force on the beaches for miles around. So far there is no report of any land skirmish or action of any kind and . . .’ The voice hesitated and then resumed, ‘And look here, sir, I think I had better come clean on this . . . I don’t know for certain but I believe these fellows have no intention of opposing the Nips at their beach-heads. I think they’re going to pull back all their units on to this plateau as fast as they can, and if they fight at all, fight in the hills and passes along its edges. I think you must be prepared to see the Nips on your doorstep pretty soon now.’