He it was who helped me organize the steady flow of money into the camp from the Chinese outside. He had his own subtle and highly effective system of contact with his friends who were still free. Both he and I thought it as well that I should not know about his contacts. To this day I have no clear picture in my mind of how he managed so detailed and reliable a system of contacts. Whenever the contacts through Donaldson failed, Mr Tan invariably appeared and passed on to me, in impeccable Dutch, the latest information, often of the must crucial content, without any show of emotion, as if he were never anything more than a kind of radio announcer giving me the latest weather report.
Accordingly my contacts with Kim were maintained so well that, within a week or so of our re-settlement, a detailed message from him reached me that, unless some miracle intervened, a massacre of prisoners everywhere in South-East Asia appeared inevitable.
One of the most difficult problems for me in life has always been to draw a distinction between fear and wishful thinking on the one hand and valid intuition on the other. Fears of the unknown future, I had already suspected long before the war, had an unfailing knack of passing themselves off as authentic apprehensions of the reality to come. The suspicion had become a conviction in war, painfully reinforced by the three years of prison experience behind me. There was no doubt in my own mind now, after this warning from Kim, that the most critical moment of our lives in prison was approaching, and that the drawing of a valid line between what was nothing but fear and what was an authentic sense of what lay round some dangerous corner of time (which is the function of intuition in the human spirit) was both more urgent and more difficult than ever. So, making use of all the experience and truth of which I was capable, I tried to reappraise these two elements, which seemed to be fighting a histrionic duel with each other for possession of my thinking at the time.
Despite Kim’s fatalistic forebodings, and my own awareness of the perils to which ‘the vengeance of history’, as well as orthodox Japanese military psychology exposed us, I came to no final conviction of disaster. Indeed I arrived at something almost as uncomfortable: a belief that no conclusion was as yet possible. Like Kim, I was full of fear of what might be our end. Yet still I could not find any clear intuition in myself that our fears would necessarily prove accurate. All that I possessed of intuition still prompted a belief that, as far as we were concerned, the issues of life and death were still being weighed in the balance, and that we would not know until the very last moment which of the two would be our fate.
I myself, paradoxically, took heart from this state of in-conclusiveness, although it made the day and nightlong battle between fear and hope in me almost unbearable. Yet, whatever courage I derived from this continual tension, I felt compelled now to prepare as never before for the worst. I realized I had to assume that a massacre would take place, and plan without delay to resist it by whatever means we could. These means, considering our physical plight, the conditions of our confinement and the lack of arms of any kind, were pitiful to say the least. It was obvious to me that should the Japanese decide on a massacre, few of us, if any, could survive. The most one could hope to accomplish by resisting a general massacre would be to enable a few of us to escape in such confusion as we might create at the last moment, so that they could carry out news of what had happened to us to our families and the world.
For the first time I took into my confidence others, whom I felt I could trust and who would best serve the purpose I had in mind. I picked first on a Royal Air Force squadron-leader, an officer who seemed to me fearless and physically almost immune to the consequences of years of malnutrition. He still appeared, if not as fit as at the beginning, far fitter than anybody else in the camp, and full of amazing energy. I told him then, under a pledge of secrecy even to his senior officers, all that I feared. I stressed even more to him than to myself that this was a fear and not an intuition, but nonetheless a possibility against which any commander should take every precaution of which he was capable.
The two of us together made a survey of all the men and officers in the camp, and drew up a list of some hundred and twenty British men who were not only the fittest we could find but men whom we could trust. We divided the camp into six sections and in each section picked the best possible platoon of twenty men, under the command of the fittest officer in the area. Even so, the security risk of sharing our full purpose with so many men thrown in daily contact with thousands of persons of so many different races and cultures was far too great to be run. Accordingly we did not tell them the truth but merely explained in the beginning that we wanted them to think of themselves as a kind of élite for the military police force we would need to help an orderly take-over from the Japanese in the confusion which we expected would follow surrender. We prepared them, through calm and measured discussion, to be ready day and night when summoned by the officer in command of their platoon to assemble in their part of the prison and await orders.
All this was easy to organize, but, comforting as it was to have some sort of plan in mind, the disconcerting fact remained that we were still a body of men who, however resolute, were completely without arms. There was not even any loose wood lying about in the prison for us to use as weapons should the Japanese decide to invade the camp in force to exterminate us. We could have decided, of course, to break up our wooden bunks and use the wood as quarter-staffs or our idea of Zulu knob-kerries, but the task of dismantling our beds would have taken so long that we would be shot down or bayoneted before we could do so in time for the purpose, since the hour of massacre, if it came, would undoubtedly come with little warning and at great speed.
Our strategy too, in the first instance, would obviously have to be kept behind the inner walls of our prison so that the Japanese could not use their machine guns on us. We would somehow have to induce them to come into the prison itself, where we would have a chance of engaging them in some kind of hand-to-hand combat. We dismissed it as unlikely that they would march us out of prison, because once out in the open they would need far greater forces for accomplishing their purpose; and even with such forces, opportunities for scattering and escaping would be greater for many more of us than if the Japanese did their work behind prison walls.
I had no doubt myself that, should they decide on the worst, they would favour the method most economical of their man-power because they would need every possible soldier they could muster for beating off the Allied attacks. There would have been no point otherwise in taking so much trouble to force us into our present terrible state of concentration.
We had therefore, happily, only the one main contingency to plan for – a final battle within the walls of the prison; and one great problem – finding arms for ourselves. The best way that occurred to me of solving the latter – we had no knives even, beyond a few used in the camp kitchen which was under close and constant supervision – was to obtain stones. I had seen stones used with devastating effect against armed police in Africa, as well as in communal riots in India. If we had an adequate supply of stones available in our camp, and provided we acted in such a manner that the Japanese and their Korean accessories were forced to enter the camp itself, I felt we would have some chance of overcoming some of them and capturing a few rifles and bayonets to help us in our resistance.
This chance would be all the greater because, provided we succeeded in keeping our plan a secret, the Japanese, instead of surprising us, would themselves be taken by surprise. From what I had seen of them they were not particularly good in unexpected situations. Resourceful as they were in their planning, and brave as they were in the execution of any pre-conceived scheme, they tended to be at a loss when their plans failed them. They tended to work rigidly by conscious rule, but when conscious rule vanished some profound law of their spirit made them bunch in moments of crisis. Indeed I had seen the unexpected send them swarming in a kind of self-protective frame like bees around a queen and held together there as if in the vortex of what is perhaps the deepest and most powerful collective sense of any nation in existence. A surprise attack could well make them bunch, and once bunched they would be extremely vulnerable to a resolute and sustained stoning.