The fable of explosive peril from within Compound C became well established in the gossip of the town, and on the basis of the persiflage and bulldusting of guards, the town—unlike Colonel Ewan Abercare or Major Bernard Suttor—believed from the start that one day there would be an outbreak from the camp. Indeed, some towns-people enjoyed the shiver of peril that ran through them at the idea and distracted them momentarily from the ennui of their homes in Gawell’s streets.
• • •
Major Suttor, as commander of Compound C, had—like his colonel—been informed already that the prisoners in there felt a level of dishonor at their capture.
Dishonor. Suttor was sure his son felt none, amongst all else that the poor little bugger might be feeling. David Suttor had been the victim of the incompetence and hubris of his generals. Major Suttor would wake at night sweating with rage at what had befallen his son, and grieving for the powerless feelings the boy must suffer. The young men in the infantry training camp over there, on the far side of town, got more instruction these days than his son had ever got before being dumped on Singapore’s bombed and blasted wharves and being left to wonder what—apart from submission—his orders were. No shame for him, then. Just calamity.
As well as the literature supplied to Suttor to help him understand his prisoners, a visiting intelligence officer, Captain Champion, had assured Suttor of the infamy his inmates felt, as had Sergeant Nevski, the Russian immigrant who was the interpreter in Compound C. “It’s not only that they feel their shame,” Champion told him. “They feel they must feel it. They owe it to each other. No one fellow in there ever says, ‘Hurrah, I’m alive!’ Except in his inmost soul.”
Suttor placed a lot of reliance on Sergeant Serge Nevski. Some years since, Nevski had taught literature classes in Harbin in the Japanese province of Manchukuo. As a young graduate, he had adapted himself to the new educational reality when the Japanese had marched into the region. Nevski had advanced within the university but had become a target for Japanese security police at the height of the last summer of world peace, after the Russians had invaded Manchukuo from Mongolia, fighting some successful engagements. Even though Nevski and his late father had originally fled to Manchukuo to escape the detested Stalin, Nevski found himself now treated as the enemy. After his flat had been smashed by Japanese police searching for suspicious materials, of the kind they hoped might prove him an enemy agent, he had acquired false papers, which identified him as a Pole, and traveled by train to Shanghai.
He had lived in that exquisite city in an apartment in Little Vienna, a largely Jewish sector in the International Settlement, working as a Japanese tutor for wealthy Chinese and Americans, who knew they would soon need to do business in that language. He left on an American steamer bound for Australia two days before the Japanese marched into the streets of the settlement.
Nevski had been given a temporary lectureship in both Slavonic and Japanese at the University of Melbourne and had almost certainly foreseen his future as tranquilly involved with the small groups of students who were interested in these disciplines. Then he had been conscripted into the Australian military forces.
Now, Suttor thought, Nevski was probably the best educated man in the Gawell garrison. He certainly bore an air of having descended to a menial job, and harbored that common Russian demeanor of intense and dolorous disinheritance, which Suttor had also seen in the Muscovites who ran those coffeehouses in Kings Cross that were popular with the actors and writers he knew from his radio days. And that’s what the irreplaceable Nevski had now diagnosed in the captives in Compound C: a burden of mortification. This explained why, unlike the Italians, and even the Koreans, neither of whom were Nevski’s business, the prisoners of Compound C always showed an aggressive laziness when taken out on work parties. They would not let themselves be accused of doing anything to improve the fabric of their captors’ world.
Colonel Abercare and his headquarters were wondering by the end of 1943 whether it was worth going through the paces of exacting labor from them at all. After all, most of the other prisoners were said to welcome the chance to get beyond the fences. But apparently not these jokers! Not these men whose army had advanced close enough to take their tens of thousands of prisoners, to be repelled in the last of the Pacific’s archipelagos, and to be prevented thus from taking on the arid steppes or the lush southeast of Australia, in whose wheat belt sat Gawell. If it were decided to suspend their work parties, it could save a lot of trouble and be presented as a punishment, an imposition of well-earned boredom.
In the meantime, if humane tradition and the Geneva Convention did not require the continuing good treatment of the prisoners in Compound C, wisdom did. In that spirit, Major Suttor had supervised the delivery of netting and timber poles for a structure like an Olympic hammer-throw enclosure, but in this case to enable baseball to be played. Baseball bats, gloves, and balls were delivered in cases of two dozen, procured from the American supply base in Sydney. Suttor, who had been until a year or so ago a serviceable early order batsman in the Crows Nest Second XI, had never seen this kind of equipment in his life, except in American films about miraculous triumphs by low-rated teams. The rules of the game his prisoners began to play in the compound, in teams applauded by hundreds of their brethren, were as opaque to him as Sanskrit. But so be it. It puzzled him that the inhabitants of Compound C should be so keen on the great summer passion of their chief enemy, of the America they had sought to supplant as rulers of an entire ocean. It was as if they wished to conquer not only the prodigious Pacific but to claim an entire enemy menu of sport as well.
Boxing gloves were also delivered at the compound gate in the avenue that bisected the four compounds, and liniment for wrestling, for which these men had an obvious passion. Volleyballs and their nets and uprights were passed into the fences as well. Cards, Go, and mah-jongg were provided. By regulation each man was to receive five cigarettes per diem, and those who did not smoke and used them for gambling on those games were tolerated.
All these goods and materials were collected without apparent gratitude by a delegation of the prisoners at the Main Road gate into Compound C. Lack of apparent gratitude was a code of conduct with them, given that they could not, or refused to be, consoled. They saw their imprisonment as so mean, their captors so contemptible, their status so reduced that they had no reason to celebrate the small mercies of boxing gloves.
It was inevitable that Abercare and Suttor would receive complaints from the compound leaders on a number of matters—about the European-style flush toilets, for example, which the prisoners argued were bad for gastric health. (Nevski told Abercare that urban Japanese actually thought upright toilets fashionable, but this did not temper the force of the complaint.) They were dubious, too, about the health results of showers, as distinct from the deep baths Nevski told Suttor were the Japanese norm and in which men communally fulfilled the important purpose of scrubbing each other’s backs. But the army hygiene experts had recommended these arrangements as the best for maintaining camp health, and Suttor told Nevski to tell the compound leaders so. The ruling confirmed to the inmates of Compound C that they were prisoners of a barbarous people of utterly unpredictable intent.
Nevski quickly became the conduit between Suttor and Abercare and the complaining triumvirate of Tengan, Aoki, and Goda, who represented the thousand men of Compound C. This display of democracy surprised Suttor, but not Nevski. The inmates seemed to keep excellent and nonpreferential rosters to do kitchen and garden duties. Since it was their own garden, they were willing to work in it, though not, of course, in the great garden beyond the fences, Australia. Having elected each of their hut and section leaders (a section being half a hut, since a wall was placed in the middle to baffle drafts) to act as a sort of legislature, they voted individually on issues such as what demands to make of Abercare and Suttor. And from a catwalk near the outer fence, you could—in good weather—see them divide themselves up equably into baseball tea
ms, or elect sporting or cultural committees.
Nevski interpreted these mysteries for Suttor. Their captives’ pride, their good order, their energy and despair seemed to Suttor a combination which in young men was poignant, as is the case for all young men caught on the hook of their culture. In the meantime, the major was pleased that he did not, at least, have to deal with the officers in Compound B, who were rarer captures. They were said to be leftovers who had avoided the entrenched necessity to sacrifice or disembowel themselves. Intelligence had heard from private soldier captives that many of their officers had said good-bye to their diminished units as the beachheads had shrunk to patches of swamp and palm and sand, and had formally washed and then killed themselves. Or else there was the option of the hopeless charge. The officers in Compound B had sidestepped both these imperatives, though they would have told you with some truth that they were sick or wounded at the time.
One of them yelled incitements to resistance whenever he saw work parties from Compound C assembling in Main Road. But most officers seemed muted and somnolent, involved passionately with mah-jongg, flower cards, and Go. Their rebellion seemed restricted to being deliberately and insolently late for roll call. Some were getting plump for lack of physical exercise. If active at all, they chiefly applied themselves to bullying and sodomizing the Koreans and Formosans, army servants and dogsbodies, captured in the field along with their masters.
As for Compound C, it was essential to Suttor that when the Swiss rapporteurs visited Gawell, they could send a glowing picture to the authorities in that North Pacific archipelago of Japan, the counterweight in the northwest Pacific to Australia’s mass in the southwest, of how well their children in captivity were being treated. Thus, in a way, it gratified him that in administering Compound C, he was sending signals to the barbarians for his son’s sake.
7
Suttor had seen the bags of mail addressed to prisoners in the Italian compounds arrive, toted by groaning garrison soldiers into the office of the Italian censor, Lieutenant Danieli, the son of Calabrian raisin farmers in the Riverina, who had supplemented his dialect by reading Italian novels and such copies of L’Italo-Australiano as came his way.
Danieli would remove the stamps from the letters, as ordered (did Headquarters sell them?) and read the letters for censorable bursts of raw Fascist sentiment. If there had been any in the earlier days of the Gawell POW camp, there was very little enough now. Letters to the Italian compounds were growing less political in that sense, and the normal tone was now leftist or social-democrat talk, or simply plain curses against those who had put the letter writers in their present purgatory on earth, in the contested ground of Italy, amidst battle and resultant ruin and hunger.
Major Suttor, even though he had no direct command of the Italian compounds, was curious enough to ask Danieli about this correspondence.
“All the writers complain about is hunger and girls wearing short dresses and flirting—or worse—with the Allies,” he told Suttor.
“Ah, no new Roman Empire?”
“I’d reckon,” said Danieli, “that people from Rome southwards have forgotten all that guff.”
“I wish some of that crowd in Compound C would forget their guff,” said Suttor with a sort of bewildered longing.
Obviously there were a few men in the Italian compounds who still believed that their Duce and the Fascist vision would prevail—Fascisti fighting along with their German brothers in their enclave in Italy’s north. But their power was in decline and the Italian priest, Father Frumelli, by now had been able to act on his convictions and ban the singing of the Blackshirt hymn “Giovanezza” at the end of Mass. When the camp had first been established, there were fistfights and, on two occasions, knife fights between the Fascisti and self-declared disbelievers, including some Communists—the Fascisti thereby asserting their philosophic dominance. But the disbelievers were legion now. Indeed, some of the prisoners had sent Abercare letters offering themselves for military service with the Allies, whom their official government had now joined. The expectation of these letters, which seemed in part sincere and were certainly eloquent, was that somehow equipment and scarce shipping would be quickly provided to get them from one end of the earth to another. Some of them asked frankly for precombat leave in Italy, during which they would amaze families with tales of their imprisonment, their work on Australia’s acreages, and the nature of farmers’ families in a land as distant as you could get.
By comparison with the two Italian compounds, mail for and from Compound C was very small in quantity. The Italian compounds’ massive incoming mail, for example, was bulked out by occasional letters to each prisoner from His Excellency the Apostolic Delegate in Australia. But there was no spiritual leader to write to the men in Compound C.
Nevski was the man employed in reading the mail from people in Japan, and their letters generally said that they had heard their son, lover, husband was dead, but the Red Cross had given them hope by notifying them that their beloved one might be still living and breathing in a far-off nation. The writers of some of these hopeful letters seemed to believe—heretically in military terms—that existence was more important than blood offerings. The correspondence often contained further news of weddings and dead uncles and crops or air raids—just in case it reached a surviving soldier.
These letters were delivered to the triumvirate of camp leaders at the gate of Compound C, for they were often addressed to names not on the prison camp register, so many of the inmates having assumed false names. But since the Red Cross had their suspicions about assumed names, the mail was still passed on. In a few cases Nevski, having made a list of Compound C addressees, was able to observe as unobtrusively as possible who the camp leader gave the letter to, and so discover a man’s true identity, and place it on the nominal role as at least an alias with whom the Red Cross might try to communicate.
Most of the mail to prisoners in Compound C went unanswered by the men to whom the letters were addressed. As Sergeant Nevski knew and warned Abercare, the addressee prisoner often handed his letter to his hut leader, who wrote back under a fictional name, so that his own shame would not be exposed, and told the parents, the lover, the wife, that their man had been killed while bravely confronting his captors, and that the Red Cross had therefore sadly passed on incorrect information. Thus, by conviction or under pressure from their military peers, prisoners decided that their people should not know of their location.
Living in easygoing Aoki’s hut, for example, were some young fanatics of whom Tengan would have been proud and who seemed to Aoki to be even more extreme than the young marine Hirano, to whom Aoki had brought water when the boy was sick on the train south. A youth named Omura, a wireless operator from a ditched reconnaissance plane, seemed to be a true nihilist. He was more profoundly serious than Hirano, for whom, Aoki believed, severity was either a pose or an attempt to fill the nullity of prison days with something of overarching nobility. Then there was a young soldier named Domen, who sang in the most heartbreaking tenor, and a younger kid named Isao. Aoki managed a friendly association with these four strident youths, who all bore watching. Aoki and Goda wanted to lead a relatively tranquil life in Compound C until the right moment came to embrace the end, at the hands of the garrison or, if not that, at one’s own. That remnant of time still left could be compromised, as could the chance for final gestures, by some premature action by such men as these, something that might result in the compound being broken up and part of the men being shipped away.
And though he was an older man, considered by all to command his own soul, and though he and Goda had privately traded jokes about Tengan’s reaction to the farm-woman who had recently offered them the lemonade, Aoki found he was not immune to the opinion of these stringent young men. They sat and watched him, with the greatest grave respect, as he sat, in turn, at a card table and answered the requests for information. Aoki felt it was correct to make an offer to all men that they could accept the l
etters from home, taking them to themselves for a while and cherishing them. But even that was more painful than comforting for the individual. And as for any individual answering a letter—it would be a false mercy to incommode and disgrace their families with the news that the child whom the family had ceremonially mourned, lived on in disgrace.
The eyes of young militants like Hirano watched Aoki as if he were not aware of this reality or the imperative duty it placed on him; as if he had not uttered it before; as if his old-soldier idea of waiting for the end in whatever social and physical comfort he could manage made his principles shaky. He felt like saying to Hirano, “Don’t glare at me, Private. I’ve got it under control.” But they knew he had talked it all over with taciturn Goda, as if there were anything to discuss, as if there were some softer, unwise option the two older men would settle on. In fact, Goda had similar plans as Aoki for dealing with the unwelcome letters. That was to answer every one of them in terms that denied the son’s or husband’s presence there, to cancel a clan’s cheap hope but reaffirm its more substantial honor. That was in the end the best thing.
Nevski was not surprised that the letter should be unwelcome. The nihilism of Compound C had been clear from the beginning, even if it did seem to take Abercare and Suttor by surprise every time. Each man was given Red Cross postcards when he was brought to Gawell, according to Article 36 of the Geneva Convention, to allow him to send his family the news of his capture and state of health by ticking certain boxes. In the middle of the previous winter Serge Nevski had told Major Suttor that all these postcards were falsely addressed, to streets and towns that he knew, from his Japanese gazetteer, were fictional. They included addresses such as “Triumphant Monkey Hole in the Wall” and “Shitdrip Alley.”