At the sound of these two shots, Major Suttor, who had been discussing matters with the commandant of one of the Italian compounds, came running up Main Road with his own escort and entered Compound C and reached Nevski’s party. “Sergeant, what in God’s name are you doing?” he asked Nevski. He was mad eyed, and spit flew from his mouth. He wrenched the rifle out of the grasp of one of the guards, and then of the other.
“I’ll have you charged with murder, you two bastards!” he called. He turned to Nevski. “Did they need to fire? Did they?”
Nevski was surprised by the extent to which he wanted to say they did. “No,” said Nevski. “There was much slaughter later last night, too, that needn’t . . .”
“Shut up!” yelled Suttor. “I don’t want emotional words used. ‘Slaughter’ be buggered! Don’t say it! Don’t you fucking say it, you Russian bastard!”
Nevski looked at the two assassins. He saw vengeance cooling in their eyes and their sullen concession to Suttor. They knew, though, they would never be charged with any crime. What did they expect—those people of Compound C—if they tried this stuff on? The enemies of country, Empire, and race, and themselves given to atrocities worse than the cleanliness of the bullet?
Yet Suttor went on roaring at them. “Can’t you see that this is what they want? They . . . They . . .” He pointed to the dead. “They will kill ten of our prisoners they hold for every one you bastards shoot here. So, go on, kill one of them if you fucking dare, and you can add ten of ours, and so murder eleven at a fucking time! Do you want that, you fucking cut-rate soldiers? When you stand trial? Do you want to face that proposition?”
In any case, through this argumentation—but also because those guards of a mind to take blood for blood had had appropriate vengeance—no more of the living were killed, though further prisoners who had survived came up and pleaded to be. Men who did not offer their hearts as targets, however, were also rising still from the ditches by the fence with their hands raised—dissenters, Nevski knew, from the military ardor of their brethren. There was no misreading the tentative relief on some faces. Those who had wounds had carried them stoically and, wounded or not, it seemed to Nevski by their movements and submission that they had grown out of their previous soldierhood and all its fervor. They had seen battle and now immolation and had concluded either before, or now, that it was absurd. With the light of an unexpected morning on their faces, they were willing to be new kinds of men and to await a temporal liberation.
Beyond Gawell’s perimeter, wounded prisoners at large in the bush began to be retrieved by patrols from the garrison and even by accidental encounters with farmers or police. Others broke from the trees and exposed their hearts, but the fury had ended and the patrols were under the severest restraint. These retaken arrived back that day, the wounded to the compound hospital, where the garrison medical officer and a sleep-deprived Dr. Garner tended them but could not prevent the fatal hemorrhages and expiries from shock and chest wounds. Those prisoners who came back stating their disappointment at not having been slaughtered declared they knew now what they’d merely talked of before—that they could not depend on these people to remedy anything. They were stuck unexpectedly again with the chronic disorder of survival.
A major from the Department of Information, a former journalist and now a regulator of news, arrived by plane at Gawell around one o’clock and reported to Suttor’s office, finding him exhausted, bewildered, and distrait.
“This has been a frightful business,” Suttor told the man. “We can’t conceal the numbers. We have to have the coroner in and the Swiss have to be told—if not, they’ll ferret it out. And poor bloody Abercare—he was hopeless. Nil nisi bonum and all the rest of it, but just look where the poor silly bugger sited the gun they overran. We had an argument about that. Look, I’m up to my ears but I want to talk to you. To you in particular. But go out and see it all first. It’s a literal bloody shambles.”
The press officer asked, “Isn’t it their fault? They’re the ones who tried to get out.”
“It was to be expected,” said Suttor. “I have a meeting with the officer of a patrol I sent off, and I have to talk to Sydney as well. Could I see you after that? I have a huge favor to ask.”
Suttor sent him off, a bit mystified, with the duty officer. The major was given a tour of the gutted compound and the survivors and others working at laying out bodies in lines of stretchers, a sheet giving anonymity to the wounds each of the dead had received. He would remark there was near silence over the site. An occasional barked command was like an assault on the solemnity of the day and the sense of bewilderment that hung over the camp and the compound. The victorious garrison seemed uncertain as to their achievement. Then he was escorted back to Major Suttor’s office.
Suttor looked still tireder now and was smoking hurriedly and moving urgently. He rushed a chair into place for the Department of Information man and quickly sat to face him.
“I’ve been waiting to confer with you,” Suttor said. “I’m aware that the way this news is managed is crucial. Excuse me, would you like a drink? Tea?”
“Perhaps later, when we’ve worked this out,” the major told him. He gave his condolences at the loss of the colonel.
“Well,” said Suttor, gesturing emphatically with his right hand, chopping the air, “I gave a hint of my feelings. But . . . he was determined to give them notice, see. And they gave him notice back. But in everything we did, there was the problem of our prisoners. Our prisoners held by them.”
Suttor crossed his hands on the desk, and the press officer noticed that they were trembling. Suttor asked again, “So how will this be handled? This whole balls-up? I will never say a word against Abercare in public, but I will say ‘balls-up’ to anyone who asks. I could tell you, item by item.”
“Well, we’ll use the broadest strokes, I suppose,” said the press man. “We’ve already prepared something for this evening’s paper. We say there was an outbreak; we don’t specify casualties amongst the prisoners, though we admit there have been some. Of course, we emphasize that they were military prisoners, not internees. In the long run we’ll have to say how many. But we don’t need to do that yet. We’ll talk to the Swiss, of course, about the pace we should proceed at. They’re reasonable chaps. How many of the prisoners, do you think, got away into the bush?”
“Figures aren’t firm. Men are still climbing out of drains; one of them climbed out of the incinerator . . . Two hundred and fifty or so dead, then some twenty suicides. About eighty at large—out there somewhere.”
The press officer said, “I have been asked to state that most of the prisoners are accounted for. Without, of course, endangering the public. But if we don’t say that, people will be alarmed, and some members of the public will go out Jap hunting, and end up shooting each other. So it’s not desirable to say there are many at large. We’d like to use a term such as ‘largely rounded up’ or ‘only a few still at large,’ and emphasize that by now they are in a weakened state. Most of those missing will be found before dark, I take it?”
Suttor was all at once on his feet. “Look, say what you like. The bastards are being brought in by the hour. And those who aren’t can die out there for all I care, and probably will if tonight is as cold as last night. But the point is, my name must not be mentioned. That’s crucial. Not mentioned anywhere in any bulletin or the press. Even in any inquiry, if it comes to that. Or anywhere else the Japanese might see it and exploit it.” He stubbed out a cigarette and seemed suddenly cramped by grief. “I have a boy, you see . . . I have a boy in their hands. I’m not even sure where he is. The last I heard was Thailand. I don’t want him to pay. Not when it’s that old fool Abercare . . .”
The pressman took account of this, writing it down. Even that disturbed Suttor. “Use a capital S instead of my real name.”
The press officer nodded. “I understand your concern,” he assured Suttor. “By the way, you might need to put up with Colonel Abercare bei
ng declared a hero.”
“It’s like a radio serial,” said Suttor, amazed. “You chaps make it up as you go along.”
“Well,” the man said, “you can depend on me in that regard. The world can get stuffed. This is our business, not theirs.”
When the man left, Suttor felt an ease of soul and the capacity to command return to him. He called the coroner’s office in Orange, and was told that a gentleman should be there within the hour. Then, at Major Suttor’s urgent orders, the recaptured were quickly fed, sitting on the floors of the washrooms and laundry. Let the buggers be confused by charity. He was concerned for their warmth, and requisitioned as many mats and mattresses and blankets as he could from the quartermaster, and ordered from a depot in Wagga truckloads of clothing and towels and soap to replace those they had willfully incinerated. Let them know these were unlimited resources and they could not fight off the tide of mercy.
Rice and stew were served on the Saturday night. Yet for men so hungry, many of them were listless at their food. It was another form of emptiness that assailed the accidental survivors. Some asked themselves why they were entitled to nourishment, and others felt they must act the same way. Even the hungry who had secretly wished for survival ate warily, uneasy to confess to their appetite. The remaining zealots felt they themselves were ghosts and that the dead lain in lines along the wire with a sheet over each of them and being visited one by one by the coroner now lived in the truer sense.
• • •
Suttor’s fear of being held responsible by his sons’ captors had, through its very weight and intensity, become muted by Sunday evening. The pressman had inspired him with confidence, managing to place the emphasis on numbers recaptured than on numbers slaughtered. He had been relieved to receive assurances from a man sent by headquarters that there would be no news release in which his name appeared. That was the sole great comfort of the day, but a light enough to see his path by.
He realized it was now time for him to take the garrison’s, and indeed the army’s, condolences to Mrs. Abercare. His sense that the slaughter was all Abercare’s fault had by now also moderated enough to allow this to happen, though he knew he would have to tell any official inquiry that he had been opposed to the extended notice Colonel Abercare had given, and to other flaws in the preparations.
But he saw now the fault was shared by a number of men, from Sydney to Gawell, and that it had all been dealt with too casually, even by himself. In his earlier arguments with Abercare, he had never imagined the hecatomb that had in fact taken place; the stench of blood and cordite and shit from torn intestines and the dead. The very idea that being the father of a prisoner qualified Suttor to manage Compound C seemed now a fatuous decision by his superiors, a sort of addlebrained attempt at neatness on their part and motivation on his. Though it was true, as the press officer had said, that the overriding philosophy within Compound C had been the true killer, that fact would not be judged as severely as the military errors of the garrison.
So surely, despite what the press officer had said, Abercare would be damned by the military. And he himself might be reproached as an accessory. Just the same, the formalities of the day required he visit Mrs. Abercare and pretend to more admiration of the poor skewered man, the chief of the night’s fools, than he had ever felt.
When he arrived at Parkes Street he was met at the door by Mrs. Garner, who ushered him into the living room. Mrs. Abercare, tall and pale, sat on the end of her lounge. She was an active griever, her face bruised with tears. There were other women there—not bloody Mrs. Galloway, who should have been here (though thank Christ she wasn’t). She had been found whimpering behind a chair in Abercare’s quarters and driven home at last. She was probably still sleeping off her disreputable night.
Two other women seemed to be out in the Abercare kitchen, murmuring at the business of tea and cake—tannin and sugar as stiflers of grief. Mrs. Abercare rose to meet him, and he found himself adopting the manners of an earnest consoler, taking her hand in his as he spoke about her unimaginable loss. Mrs. Garner got up from her chair and said to another woman, “We should let Emily and the major speak alone for a while.”
Suttor wanted to utter a panicked, “No need.” But the other woman and Mrs. Garner left.
Emily told him to take a seat. He did, and she took her place on the lounge again.
“I got here as soon as I could,” said Suttor. “There has been so much damage to attend to.”
“Of course, Major,” said Mrs. Abercare in a still, low, compelling voice. “Did you know the body was brought to town by ambulance, and I’ve already visited him?”
“I . . . I had heard it had been moved from the camp. He didn’t suffer, you know. It was a near-instantaneous mortal wound.”
“That’s a mercy,” said Mrs. Abercare, though as a soldier’s daughter she was well aware they always said that. There must have been at least seconds of mortal bewilderment, she knew, and she had not been there to soothe him. And after putting him through so many hoops for so long . . .
“He was a fine man and a first-class soldier,” Suttor found himself continuing. At this compulsive lie, tears appeared on his lids and he was puzzled at where they came from. But no man deserves to be impaled.
“One thing. You may have heard Mrs. Galloway was in the Colonel’s quarters.”
“I believe she called Mrs. Garner today and filled her in on her little adventure.”
“She had been nothing but a nuisance to him, you know. He was driving to camp, met her broken down on the road, and took her to his quarters to wait so she could return to her vehicle with one of our mechanics. So, she was just waiting for a lift, that’s all. As for Colonel Abercare, he was behind our line with a signaler the entire time. He confided in me,” Suttor lied, “that he thought the world of you.”
“Thank you,” she said. That was the information she seemed most grateful for. That was what she seemed to trust most. This utter fabrication.
“I knew he loved me,” she said, in a sad and evenly expressed certainty. “This was our happiest time, in Gawell. I thought, of course, like all foolish humans, it would last much longer. But I won’t be leaving. I want to be close to him.”
“You’re taking it so bravely,” said Suttor in genuine admiration. She looked at him when he began to tremble.
“You’ve had a shock,” she told him.
33
In the town there was a considerable cluster of police cars outside the police station, and policemen entering and leaving the station, and moving in a hurry between station and courthouse, where no court could be sitting at this hour. This activity was at odds with the town’s somnolence. Beyond that the gardens of the town slept under frost, but as the sun mounted and the police moved out to keep watch at the edges of Gawell, the streets seemed habitual again.
At the training camp, the noise of the crisis of the night before had been three miles off and, traveling there through veils of bush that muffled the battle and soaked up many of the cries and terrors, it had barely dented the sleep of young recruits. Sentries reported that fires burned along parts of the eastern horizon. But no flares had been seen.
When a telephone call came from the duty officer up at the prison camp to his counterpart at the training camp, distant noise could be heard over the line. The duty officer at the camp said it was urgent—some of the prisoners had got away—but the officer at the training camp did not awake irritable Colonel Deakin with the news until four in the morning. Colonel Deakin was accustomed, because of the campaigns he had taken part in, to sleeping through distant thunders. It was obvious, his officer told him, that the outbreak or demonstration was being well contained, since there had been no further call for help. But, he said, prisoners were at large.
The colonel now called the camp and heard from a dazed-sounding Major Suttor that Colonel Abercare had been fatally wounded and was lying under a bloody sheet in the garrison hospital. “As for them, it has been a slaughter,
” Suttor confessed in a rattled voice. “They wanted it to be a slaughter.”
Deakin promised Suttor some aid in finding or repelling the escapees and Suttor sounded like a man in need of such promises. “They have had time to walk five, ten, or more miles,” said Suttor. “But they’ve had to sleep too. They’re not supermen.” He added, “They should be like stray cattle.” At least he hoped so, Deakin could tell.
Suttor suggested sending patrols out to a perimeter to the northwest and then moving them towards the prison, hunting for the strays. “They should be arrested and not killed,” said Suttor in a tone of frenzied insistence. “There have been too many killed.”
Deakin agreed. But the sanctity of his camp and local farmers were still on his mind—certainly, the farmers would call Sydney and condemn him if they or their stock were in any way harmed by the chase after the prisoners. He had no doubt headquarters welcomed such calls, which in their eyes proved his incompetence.
After the conversation with Suttor concluded, Deakin issued orders that two companies, about one hundred young men in all, should be roused, fed, and sent out on patrol towards the prison camp under the direction of their officers, who were also their educators. If it was true the escaped men were a rabble, the companies sent out would gather them in. If they had designs, however, on the brigade’s magazine, then the troops on the perimeter of the camp must battle them.
In Deakin, age, middling rank, an undue sense of persecution by his superiors and the rural population combined to generate a decision that would later amaze authorities. Believing that in broken country and amongst screens of trees and boulders his young men could not be trusted to avoid shooting cattle, farmers—even themselves—in crossfire; or would become so overexcited as to shoot the prisoners all dead instead of acting as police; or else, on the other hand, lose their rifles to those at large, the colonel decided that the men of the company he intended to send out should be issued only with bayonets, while the officers, who had experience of such things, would carry their sidearms. Thus six-sevenths of his troops would guard the camp with rifles against the predators and one-seventh would be sent forth as good as unarmed to round them up before they could threaten the place.