Shame and the Captives

  The second gun he had set back on the edge of the bush so that it might fire down the midsection of the fence and so that its crew did not run the risk of being killed by the first machine gun. Abercare had seen such arrangements, according to lines of sight, made in the defense of camps during the troubles in Waziristan just ten years before, in another age, when the Fakir of Ipi was innocently considered more dangerous than Hitler and Tojo.

  Suttor had registered his own convictions about the placement of guns in a marginally respectful letter. But it was Ewan Abercare’s decision, and he made it. He also took the trouble now to go into the Japanese compound every day at four and inspect the demeanor of the inmates—a vain endeavor but one that must be undertaken. Abercare noticed that they seemed a little more prompt than they had previously been—it had been necessary to harry them into the ranks in the past. Did this mean they believed resistance to the process had become less necessary now that they were so sure about their futures? Or, to put it more accurately, their lack of a future. Their faces looked at him emptily, confessing neither hostility nor expectation.

  “Do you think they’re more tractable recently?” he asked Suttor. “A bit less cheek from them?”

  Suttor said, “Perhaps.” And then he weighed the proposition. “They go through phases,” he concluded almost genially.

  When the moon was new and nothing but a shadow, he had slept in his quarters in the barracks, where he could be promptly roused by the duty officer. He slept there four nights while it was still a minor crescent. Despite all the lights he had erected it was the moon that ruled his intentions, and after the half-moon presented itself he went back to town and Emily.

  As a means of pacifying Compound C, Suttor had released into the orderly hut within the wire three copies of the Sydney Morning Herald for those few who could read and translate for their brethren. There were a few former merchant seamen, Yokohama hands, who had the shaky capacity to write out on toilet paper rough versions of what they saw in the newspapers.

  Unlike earlier toilet-paper bulletins, the claim that Saipan had fallen produced the most profound erosion of belief. Many men reasoned that if the enemy were choosing to mislead, to pretend to success, it would have been beyond their gifts to claim a capture so far north in the Pacific as that of Saipan. It sounded so credible, in fact, that Tengan and others honored it with the idea that now, by capturing these islands, the enemy was straining his lines of supply and communication so far that his string would soon run out. This was not the cry of the majority.

  Such was the situation at Gawell Camp when Colonel Abercare approached his counterpart at the infantry training camp. He did not know its commander, Horace Deakin, intimately. He knew of Deakin’s good repute, but that he had not evaded the chief vice of a training officer—to despise his charges. When he was finished with them, his eighteen-year-olds were either further educated in rainforests in Queensland or else thrown with less decorous preparation into a military adventure—perhaps even the invasion of the enemy homeland, at which task, Deakin was sure, they would, despite all effort put into them, behave haplessly.

  On this visit, some days after the emergency meeting at the headquarters in Sydney, Abercare sat in Colonel Deakin’s office—Abercare sleek and Deakin hollow-cheeked—passing on the news of a potential outbreak one dark night, and reviewing the signals by which the training battalion would know it had occurred.

  Colonel Deakin asked Abercare, “Dark night?”

  “Even our informer overheard them say it. A dark night, no moon.”

  “But,” said Deakin, frowning over expressive brown eyes, “if their aim is to get killed, wouldn’t any day or night do?”

  “No,” said Abercare. “Because, again according to our source, they want to capture our company armories. As well as doing themselves harm, they want to do us some. A combination of motives.”

  They had tea, and while drinking it Deakin made it clear the defense of his camp was paramount, because of its substantial magazines. The safety of the town itself was connected to that issue. And if there was an outbreak, the signals from the camp must be clear, for he had a hundred women from the Army Service, nurses and clerks, in the training camp. “It’s unthinkable what might happen to them . . .”

  Abercare referred him to the preexisting document covering the issue—the arrangement for shots and flares, the siren.

  “We can’t be expected to necessarily notice them,” said Deakin, with a desire to fix the entire issue on his own camp and its integrity. If he had had spaciousness of mind in Syria, had been capable of any broad reading, he had lost the gift now, three years later. “Distance and wind might muffle the shots, and the siren ditto. Terrain might block our view of flares.”

  “Well,” Abercare conceded, “be assured that my duty officer would be straight on to yours by phone. Would you be in a position to send support?”

  “I could send out one company of my first battalion as soon as it could be arranged. This would be to contain your perimeter, or if it were breached to round up escapees.”

  Abercare had hoped for a little more, but a company of more than a hundred was not to be despised.

  “And that would be dispatched . . .?”

  “As promptly as it can be arranged.”

  Abercare passed an intelligence assessment over the table to Deakin, who read it as if it were designed to affront the tenor of his mind. “Well,” he said, “this camp here would still be the king on the chessboard. I must employ the mass of my recruits to defend it. At least they can do that without shooting farmers’ cows by accident or design. My desk is laden with farmers’ complaints about ill-disciplined fire sweeping across their paddocks. That’s the problem with sending them out in numbers, you see. Farmers.”

  A company dispatched promptly would be very welcome, Abercare told Deakin. Then he broached the issues of morality, of diplomatic necessity, and of the risk of brutal retaliation against our prisoners up there, in the indefinite reaches of Asia and Melanesia. Morality dictated patrols should recapture any men who escaped from Compound C and should not shoot them even if they pleaded to be shot. “The diplomatic problem,” he said, “involves the good repute we have so far with the Swiss Red Cross and the Japanese section of the Swiss consulate general, to whom the Japanese command listen—if they listen to anyone. In that case, I wonder, might you send me a copy of any relevant orders you now issue? I hope you don’t mind my asking.” Deakin conceded that that was all right. He looked into the middle distance. It was as if he were thinking, The final battle is close, and this is such a picayune matter. There would be no outbreak. The boys in his camp would be fighting in the streets of Yokohama, and he would still be in this bush camp and nothing would have happened.

  Part of Abercare agreed with him.

  • • •

  After his preparations were in place, a comforting signal from the New South Wales headquarters reached Colonel Abercare. Plans were being drawn up in Sydney to split up Compound C, and move the Japanese NCOs away from Gawell to another camp further west. Amongst the officers of the garrison, only compound and company commanders were to be told as yet. Abercare felt an intense lifting of a pressure he had not known he felt so sharply. This would assure it. No outbreak.

  Further instructions came as the headquarters marshaled the necessary transport. On the morning of the first Monday of August, the NCOs would be transported to Gawell railway station in a convoy of trucks. From there a train with opaque and barred windows would take them west to the camp at Wye. Bereft of its leadership, the supposed stratagem of self-obliteration amongst the lower ranks within Compound C would be orphaned.

  The garrison somehow knew what was to happen—they had seen the new guards, assigned to take the Compound C men westwards, arrive by truck from another camp. The garrison tasks of the guards were banal, but now at last they had found out, under warning of keeping the secret, something exceptional. By lunchtime on the following Monday, after a watchfu
l weekend, there’d be barely more than half the bastards in Compound C.

  Abercare understood that secrets escaped almost by their own internal pressure, by the pressure of the vanity of those men who held them. He conferred with Suttor on the issue of informing the prisoners themselves—of finding a sensible mean between the inevitable leakage of the news, which would enrage the prisoners and perhaps make them reckless, and him or Suttor or both forthrightly telling the prisoners. Abercare thought the men should be told on Saturday afternoon, according to the recommendations of the Geneva Convention that men be given adequate time to prepare for being moved.

  Suttor suggested Abercare might perhaps have misread the provisions of the Geneva Convention. “I consulted it myself and in Chapter Eight there is a provision the prisoners must be told where they are being sent. But there is no mention of giving them enough time for farewell parties or troublemaking.”

  Abercare went and got the Geneva Convention from his shelf, and a volume of Red Cross recommendations regarding prisoners. The fact he got two codes, thought Suttor, meant he wasn’t sure in which one of them the recommendation was. But Suttor said nothing. To do Abercare justice, he did not look like a man desperate to prove a point. He found the place in a pamphlet on Red Cross recommendations. “Here it is,” he said. He read a passage that declared the International Committee of the Red Cross recommended that before prisoners were moved to another camp, they be given at least twenty-four hours’ warning, although a longer warning might in most cases be recommended.

  Suttor nodded but said, “That doesn’t sound very binding. Recommended? In these circumstances?”

  Abercare surrendered himself yet again to the inevitability of never liking the man, and never being liked. If we were an infantry battalion in the field, Abercare knew, he would need to get rid of Suttor—by organizing his promotion if other means failed.

  “Well . . . how long would you give them if you had your way?” Abercare asked, leaching the question of any tone of annoyance.

  “A day, if that?” Suttor suggested. “These are special circumstances involving prisoners who have made speeches about suicide and mayhem. I know how much notice the citizens of Gawell would want to give them. An hour.”

  “With due respect for the citizens of Gawell, the prisoners would not feel kindly towards any of us on one hour’s notice. It would be good vengeance but a destructive policy. But a little under two days makes sense for all of us. They must have time to pack and say their good-byes.”

  Suttor said, “This is an enemy that has refused to ratify the Geneva Convention.”

  “But we have, and we fulfill our commitments.”

  Suttor, nakedly aggrieved now, said, “I hope that helps my son. And all the others spread across North Asia.”

  “Telling them before the men go to town for a drink on Saturday night is wise. And as well as that, the news will cause a lot of drinking of grappa and bombo. It’s likely half of them will be tight for the last two nights. And even without the new searchlights, these were wrong nights for any attack from inside the compound—especially if the prisoners had any ambition to capture the armory.”

  “And we’ll get a big tick from the Swiss and the Red Cross,” said Suttor, calmer now but still intractable and shaking his head. “For what that’s worth.”

  • • •

  For his daily inspection of the compound, Major Suttor took three armed guards and Nevski, who never wore a sidearm.

  Suttor’s instructions had always been not to be overly diligent about searching. Homemade weapons were to be confiscated, but he did not want to find the stills they possessed, which turned their polished rice leftovers into the clear liquor they called bombo. Neither he nor Abercare were concerned if their prisoners stupefied themselves with booze. They did not seem to be aggressive drunks, and bombo, like the news of Saipan, was a means of pacifying the compound.

  In the same spirit, Abercare had decided that it would create great suspicion if the captives saw the machine guns permanently manned. It was enough to mount them on trailers with belts of bullets in tin cans arrayed plentifully around their bases. The nights abetted this policy—even apart from the searchlights that drenched the compound with yellow, migraine-inducing light, they were bright, and the moon rose fuller every night. With the searchlights beating down from the outer camp and from within the Main Road, and beneath the vertical eye of the moon, every timber of every hut was delineated.

  Nevski, Suttor noticed whenever he entered the compound with him, walked through with his chin high. It had always been thought that the Russian might be able to cultivate some of the Japanese as sources, or at least friends. This hope took no account of the previous war between Russia and Japan, which had destroyed Nevski’s life at the university in Harbin. Suttor saw that there existed a special hostility directed by the inhabitants of Compound C towards Russians. Nevski’s clinical and careful behavior had failed to make him a favorite there. He was a true scholar and had a true scholar’s pedagogic reserve. He was a good, but not winning, soul.

  “ ‘Shitdrip,’ ” Nevski told Suttor they sometimes called him.

  “And, ‘fart voice.’ And yet,” he said, defending them, “they are not a very foul-mouthed people. They are surprisingly fastidious.”

  The prisoners did not seem to react to the company of new guards that had been introduced, a few truckloads at a time, into the camp. These transfer guards, a little excited to have a break from the arid plains out there at Wye, settled into the mess, and discussed and compared the camp they came from and the one, less monotonous in terrain, they now found themselves in. In the meantime, in the railway yards, which could not be seen from Gawell Camp, the train with the blinded and barred windows had arrived and been located on a siding.

  24

  Sergeant Nevski and an escort of guards appeared in the Compound C mess hut at lunchtime on Saturday.

  “Present yourself at the gate in Main Road at two o’clock,” Nevski told Aoki. “Bring Mr. Goda and pompous young Mr. Tengan. There is something of significance you must discuss with the colonel.”

  “Significance?” asked Aoki.

  Nevski declared axiomatically, a little like an annoying scholar, “If I told you the significance now, it wouldn’t be significant, would it? Just be punctual.”

  The three men were at the gate at the nominated time, and were marched up Main Road, through the huts of Suttor’s company and so to Abercare’s office a little beyond. There Abercare had had chairs placed around the room to accommodate them in the manner of a conference, and he invited them to sit. He offered them some of his Navy-cut cigarettes. Aoki would have accepted if judgmental Tengan had not been there with his automatic and universal rejection of mercy.

  For translation by Nevski, Abercare declared that the subject he was about to broach with them was fixed in place and was not open for discussion by them or him. They must accept it, it came from superior authorities, and there was no way out of it. They and other men of rank from Compound C were to be separated from the NCOs and sent west to the camp at Wye.

  “It will occur on Monday morning,” he explained. “I have told you today purely out of courtesy and based on the recommendation of the Red Cross. I hope this courtesy will be respected. It is granted so that you can say good-bye to your men and to your friends, and attend to whatever possessions you choose to take with you.”

  The prisoners said nothing. Each of them was astonished, and it was news on a scale one needed to weigh over time. The announcement hung in the room and exerted its weight on Abercare as well.

  Aoki gestured for Tengan to speak first, as the first of the prisoners to know Compound C and the one who reached certainty very quickly. Tengan turned to Nevski as if to demand a fair translation, and then spoke in a voice whose level of threat was not remarkable, since it was his normal tone. “This will not be a good thing,” Nevski translated him as saying. “Your army might be different. But in ours the bond between
NCOs and the men is unbreakable.”

  Abercare studied them but as ever learned not a great amount, except that the older men, Aoki and Goda, had shown a marked respect for the aviator in letting him state their case. Aoki said then, “Senior Sergeant Goda and I agree with the sergeant that the men will be very angry.” Goda made an assenting gurgle in his throat.

  “Well,” said Abercare, depending on Nevski’s translation, “there is no point in anger. It is your duty as one of their leaders to reconcile the men to what cannot be avoided. This cannot be avoided and, after all, by the standards of all you’ve been through in your military lives, it is a small rearrangement. The war will soon be finished and then reunions can occur. You’ll have a long sea voyage home to become reacquainted with each other.”

  All three of them rose and, as they did each morning, bowed to him—performing the respectful concession to his rank even within his army of clowns and savages. It was all so solemn that it could have passed as satire, Abercare thought. He had a sense that the meeting was ending perhaps too promptly, even if everything that could be said had been.

  Nevski was appointed by Abercare to escort Tengan, Aoki, and Goda as they marched in a severely dignified file back to Compound C. The sun seemed to be benign at this hour and beneath it men were sitting at pine tables in the open playing cards or Go and mah-jongg. There was some baseball practice in progress, and that satisfying bock! when bat struck ball full-on. From the recreation hall came the plaint of stringed instruments and Sakura’s complaining, ironic voice rehearsing some ballad.

  There had been a supposition by Abercare and Suttor that the three might discuss their situation with Nevski and thus give some illumination on their true feelings, their degree of cooperative sentiment. But they said nothing, so Nevski asked before he left them, “How do you feel about all that, gentlemen?” But he knew it was a clumsy question. They did not answer. There was a guttural belch—he could not have said from which one.