“It comes from the highest quarter that they’re to be arrested not slaughtered,” a veteran captain told his veteran lieutenants as they waited all morning and into the afternoon for trucks to arrive. “This is diplomacy, we’re told, not warfare.” The officers stood examining a map of gullies and ridges to the north, amidst them the branching bush roads, then the points where each patrol would be dropped and the bearing each should take. And the distance to be maintained between each man-child as they advanced, searching.
The trucks arrived in the end. It was afternoon.
• • •
Aoki found himself amongst an informal group of eight men fleeing, as ordered, for the ridges. The number grew to perhaps sixteen. A few carried bludgeons of baseball bats and dowel sticks, and some must have knives hidden, but he had nothing except his rank, which attracted men to join him.
They found streams in gullies and drank from them. At midmorning he called that they should rest. Yes, they might be overrun as they slept but that meant nothing, did it? They obeyed as if they were still campaigning—they liked to think they were—and Aoki and two others offered to keep watch. After two hours, he was relieved and settled to sleep himself. He dreamed of China and headbands. Traveling on the roads out of Manchukuo at the start of that campaign, the youths of the regiment had worn silk scarves on which were painted national symbols, charging steeds, chrysanthemums, or tidal waves. By the time they had reached central China, their silk scarves—his, too—were ones they had stolen from Chinese merchants, and were of a particular kind, portraying sexual obscenities, hairy-cunted girls and heedless, multiple pricks. The headbands of Aoki’s dream were—if anything—more extreme, and demonstrated that he and his comrades had become the forces of lust as well as the forces of the nation, an idea that did not enthuse him.
One of the lookouts woke him, and on still air came the sound of a truck grinding to a halt at some place within a medium distance. Some of the men were peering around rocks to see what it meant. On a rough track below them an enemy officer jumped from the truck and a number of young men followed. There was a signaler with a radio of some sophistication, a kind Aoki had not seen before and that seemed to come from a new or even future age. Yes, he thought, by the sight of that thing, that back-carried square device, they are probably winning.
A scuffling of grass showed that three of his party were running back over the ridge, fleeing the enemy whose machine guns they had last night faced down, but expecting the young soldiers standing in the road to be handed previously unimaginable weapons. These absconders felt they had tried hard enough for validation’s sake, Aoki surmised. You could imagine feeling that way.
But to the bemusement of every one of the remaining escapers, the men in front of them weren’t given weapons at all. The officer gave his final instructions, showing them a map of the hilly terrain. At the officer’s orders they formed a line, then spaced themselves out and began to advance with nothing but their bayonets in scabbards flapping against their upper thighs. Aoki felt exasperation, a sort of insult.
The enemy officer led off the line. He climbed through some fence rails and, turning, watched his young soldiers, or whatever they were, do the same and then form the desired line that would bring them uphill to Aoki’s hidden party. After open ground they embarked on a sparsely forested slope. Under long shadows from the shafts of the eucalyptus trees, one of Aoki’s party crawled to him and gave him a baseball bat and saluted.
The young men came on, as if more bewildered by this familiar ground than Aoki felt. When they were thirty or so paces off, Aoki rose with a roar. The other men also revealed themselves, howling amongst the granite rocks that caught the northwest sun and shone a genial gold.
Two of them knelt and opened their tunics to expose their undershirts and the hearts they harbored. The rest had seen what Aoki had, that the young soldiers did not have adequate weapons, and thus they screamed and advanced in threat and fury, calling on the enemy officer to fire at them. The man who was the object of these furious pleadings, Aoki saw, had the face of a veteran, a face leathered by a variety of suns. It showed a strange, blunt knowledge of the kind Aoki shared in, and he was thus, in his way, Aoki’s peer. He took out his pistol. He called on his line to draw bayonets and stand. He withdrew his own pistol and fired a shot in the air to halt the demonstration of Aoki and the others. The sky above seemed to be shivered by the noise. Again prisoners fell to their knees, opened their jackets, pointed to their sternums. Aoki remained upright and tried to lock the enemy officer’s eyes on his own.
But before that the enemy officer yelled instructions to the pale signaler, who began reporting frantically into his radio.
Aoki screamed in defiance, the others screamed with him. The signaler turned, receiver in hand, wireless on his back, and, appalled by their strange utterance—or so Aoki surmised—began to run downhill. The veteran officer became aware that the youths on his flanks were beginning to waver and abandon him, leaving these howling, crazed figures to some other regiment, turning and vaulting indentations and rocks on their career downhill.
So his next bullet is for me, Aoki believed, and then someone will move in and finish him off in turn. Two old-timers perishing together. His eyes were directly on the officer’s, and the officer saw that. He aimed his revolver at Aoki’s chest. Aoki was amazed when the revolver misfired once and then a second time. He watched as a young man still remaining on the hill near the officer approached the man and with eyes aghast and purpose trembling on the edge of self-sacrifice, suspended on that filament between valor and selfishness as armies defined both, seemed to be consulting him on whether his faithfulness was required. Then grief and sudden regret won over the boy’s eyes and he, too, fled.
The officer seemed unsurprised and inspected his pistol as if to discover its problem. Aoki limped forward towards him, no longer screaming war cries, though the others continued as they closed in. Everyone knew what was necessary—Aoki and the man with the failed sidearm in his hands, one in which a round had jammed. The man raised the revolver and hurled it far downhill, beyond finding—or so at least he clearly hoped. He was naked to assault now. He was about to turn and retreat but seemed indecisive, as if he, like Aoki, had had enough of the world.
Aoki drew back the baseball bat earlier given him and struck the man with a force that surprised even him—the gravity of it and the dense impact on the flesh and bone of the man’s head was so unfamiliar, as if he had never delivered wounds before. He knew what it was like for the poor fellow as he toppled—the real, diminished, all-at-once-beloved world plummeting away from him, and on its surface the young men running like antelopes, hurdling shrubs, unencumbered by heavier arms.
Aoki, his leg aching, stood back to let one of the younger men slit the officer’s throat. Others came in and dug knives into the man, and one fellow bludgeoned him again. When the officer had received enough damage to have died over and over again, Aoki’s party of men looked at each other as if to say, this is too small a triumph. Except it did give them a reason to expect a desired vengeance against them. The man had bled amidst the stalks of rough grass. Little had been achieved except that Aoki had at least proved himself to the enemy as a killer, and thus surely should be granted an inescapable death as a matter of course. But the coming freezing, alien, and unprovided-for night seemed a tedious veil he must pass through first, and an unexpected one since he and his companions had not foreseen it, and had not imagined that adolescents would be set against them with mere bayonets.
Aoki sent them looking for the thrown revolver. This was the second time within a day he had seen a valiant man throw away a mechanism. He himself stepped around the scarlet mash of the man’s head and found some loose cartridges in his pocket. If retrieved, the revolver could serve, with these few bullets, equally for taking further life or for self-destruction.
Now he limped downhill himself, joining the search. The crass landscape had turned subtle in the dying light, full
of rock niches and crevices, rank grass and concealed animal holes, and the sort of shrubs that deeply hid objects.
When full dark came on and the moon had not risen, he called the searchers together again. Where were the followers, some of the men asked, the better-armed patrol? Did these people not speak to each other? Weren’t they connected by reports?
Aoki’s party set out to stumble across country, leaving the valorous corpse behind them.
• • •
In Carcoar, where Alice had found refuge, Ronnie Sutcliffe was back that Sunday night, coal dust embedded in his overalls. He hauled the dented metal tucker box he carried by a huge strap around his shoulder onto a kitchen bench. He was full of news.
“They reckon there’s been an outbreak over in Gawell,” he told them. “The Japanese. Not the dagos. They know when they’re on a good thing.”
A strange pulse, not without its side-pleasures, went through Alice. A call to the colors. To duty. “I’ll have to go back in the morning,” she said.
“What?” asked Ronnie, grinning. “To protect Duncan Herman and his POW? They’re big enough to look after themselves. Though the radio says they’ve accounted for most of them.”
Ronnie escorted Alice to the cold phone box near the post office, which seemed to be set at the deepest point of the valley, under a rising moon that cast sharply delineated shadows. Before this expedition, Ronnie had called on an ageless bachelor gatekeeper who lived within shouting distance of the cottage to bring his shotgun and sit with Esther. Even though Gawell was so far away, the Japanese could move like the devil. Remember Malaya?
“Haven’t seen a thing, Alice,” said Duncan when Alice got through to him.
“No, you haven’t seen a damned thing,” she was madly tempted to tell him.
“Don’t you worry. They reckon they’ve got most of them back anyhow. I hear our blokes got the machine guns going at them. Hammond came round and told me some of our fellows are dead just the same. The colonel, he reckons. People say he’s not a big loss.”
She wanted to ask, Is Giancarlo all right? What does he think of it?
Duncan unwittingly supplied as good an answer as he could. “Johnny and I—we’re just going about our business. I’ve got the .22 in the truck and the .303 in the kitchen.”
Where, apparently, it would by its very presence deter Japanese.
“You’re better off in Carcoar, just in case any strays turn up round here. Johnny says he knew some of them. He’s not very scared of them.”
But, Alice told him, she was determined to come back first thing. He told her to be careful on the train. But he reckoned there’d be soldiers aboard, just in case.
The phone went dead, and she had no more pennies to buy time. Ronnie took her back to the house under the honed, cold stars. He said, “Friends of mine want to drive over there with rifles in the morning and sort them out, the ones at large. But if they’re so keen, let ’em join the army. I’m not going to leave Esther.”
Alice said, “That colonel . . .”
“Brutes!” said Esther, with a shudder.
Alice could hear that Ronnie did not sleep that night, but moved about the house. When she crept out of her bedroom to the toilet, she glimpsed him resting in an armchair with a small-bore rifle.
Nothing happened, and there were clear reasons for that, of course. Gawell. Why would the Japanese want to walk so far when there were so many farmhouses around Gawell to tempt them into plunder and mayhem? And there were houses, too, in Gawell, full of women and children. Alice hoped troops were out to screen the town. She hoped that the streets were guarded. She tested herself to see if these phenomena gave her grounds to hate Giancarlo, a former ally of these unspeakables. Was there in him some obscure responsibility for all this?
Giancarlo wasn’t very scared of the escaped men, Duncan had said. In the dark she clung to her strange anger about this. She was alarmed at how her even-tempered self had been borne away so easily. As she failed to sleep in her cold room, under Ronnie’s protection, joy at her coming return to Gawell, and desperation and anger and fascination all swept through her, like a succession of low, intimate clouds. Giancarlo could afford not to be very scared. He had even tried to learn their language, sharing barracks with them in the early days of Gawell prison camp.
She let the rage at his unconcern, his alliance with them, keep rolling on above her so that it might submerge desire. He made no pretense these days about his lack of skill in English. He had read her mother-in-law’s novels and borrowed Duncan’s papers and any magazines that came her way, and circled phrases of which he had dubious knowledge with indelible pencil. Cunning bugger he’d been, cunning bugger he was. As if preparing for something she wasn’t privy to, some deep connivance with what had happened.
Yet her rage at last shattered. His studiousness seemed by a calmer light to be praiseworthy. So the memory of his bent head, the dark hair, the sculpted mouth, the boyish down on his cheeks set her off aching again, and pain and anticipation kept her awake until dawn, and she was delighted that in a few hours’ time she would be on her way back again, fleeing the failed antidote of Esther and Ronnie.
• • •
The party of escaped prisoners that had met the line of boys with bayonets and called for the officers’ blood fragmented overnight, as men made their excuses, said good-byes, and dropped, exhausted, to sleep on the comfortless ground. Aoki limped on, to show it could be done, until late—the enemy would have to travel a distance to find him, and the idea of being a nuisance comforted him. Three younger men accompanied him, and he told them not to be so polite as to lag to keep pace with him but to make their own speed. They stood by him, though. They took a few hours of freezing sleep in a core of cold amongst granite boulders, and then progressed, according to orders, along a ridge, this one running southwesterly. The idea of ridges, though—that if they were spotted by an army patrol, they would put the enemy to the trouble of climbing a hill and scuffing boot leather, and that this itself was a sort of victory—seemed a little fatuous now.
As morning came on and the comfort of the sun shone on their right shoulders, seeing a patrol would, in this light, be welcome, and Aoki would descend with the murder of the officer on his shoulders to welcome the retribution they must surely by now have learned uniformly to take. And if not immediately so, he had three young men who could testify to his killing of the officer the day before.
Morning advanced and he was grateful almost to tears to the young men who’d stuck with him. But then . . . where did these three men who had attached themselves need to go? They were weaker than they would admit. Their mood was contradictory, a little like Aoki’s. They could not help envisaging a future. It was simply human to do that. It was something the brain did. And they stuck to him for comfort too.
They stopped again in an embayment of stones and slept for some hours, now that it was warm, and slowly woke. They knew there was water over the ridge but one of them dared to talk about hunger, and duckling and pancakes, almost in a philosophical tone, as if he were interested in them as very essences. Just the same, the chief complainant about food had been a barber until two years ago. What further could be expected of him?
Aoki himself ached to resolve this tension between escape and the pain of his progress in this alien and indifferent country, country so hard on his damaged leg and so unrelenting in its emptiness that it almost revived the concept of a future, and thus sparked hazy images of his wife—particular endearments, or instances of coupling.
It was afternoon by now. They pursued the hill’s spine in this country of eroded, stone-scattered spines. Aoki was afflicted with a temptation to absolve the others of all duty. The further they went, the more wanly young they looked. They were not urgently hunted, that was it. The enemy had failed its duty of pursuit and fury. Couldn’t Aoki say, “Take the risk. Give it up. We’ve missed the chance and the air’s out of the balloon. Will they really shoot you? Young men with such wanly fresh face
s, such increasingly bewildered eyes? If they do—a good farewell and an escape from this unreadable terrain. If not, go back to the pancakes. Go back, at least, to the mutton and rice.” He wondered again about the sort of army the enemy possessed. It did not send urgently and by thousands after its escapees, but dispatched young ditherers and shitheads, who stumbled off to peep behind trees. The hills and pastures were not ruthlessly scoured by any force he had seen. Yesterday’s encounter had been a jaunt, a children’s outing. The young men might go. But he would stay out here, surely worth their while chasing, with the blood of the machine gunner and of the fellow with the seized pistol on his uniform.
There were definite reasons he should pursue his lonely search. He wanted to die for women’s sake, though not in any romantic sense. He did not think of women as these young men, unrelieved of their juices, so often did. He had not overcome the normal problem of veterans in summoning the face and outline of his wife, whose pictures he’d lost. But Chinese women taken as revenge, and seen at times of berserk drunkenness and conquest, often recurred cruelly and with acid clarity. China had confused the focus of clear desire, had muddied love by offering supposed rewards—those of sexual rapine. In copulating for the Empire and the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, in driving home the lesson between the thighs of a dazed or screaming Chinese woman, he had become unfit for the higher fulfillment, the devotions of a monogamous bed. He had forgotten love’s husbandry.