The first was that suddenly all contact with Kim and the Chinese outside ceased. Neither Donaldson and Mr Tan, nor any of the various odd bodies in the working parties used outside the camp by the Japanese, who brought me scraps of useful information from time to time, could provide any clue as to why contacts that had survived so many different tests should suddenly have been broken. For days I faced the possibility in my own mind that they might have been detected and rounded up as suspects and could now be facing torture at the hands of the Kempetai, the all-powerful Japanese military secret police, who were such experts in all matters of torture that they invariably extracted any secrets from the most determined people in their hands. As the days went by, however, and I myself was not sent for, I began to assume more and more that this last, and most dreaded of all explanations as far as I was concerned, seemed unlikely.
It could only be that the Japanese in South-East Asia were expecting the ultimate invasion to be near and had put such unusually severe emergency measures into operation that our contacts had found that they could no longer function safely. This was confirmed by the second of the three events I have mentioned. All the Dutch and English senior officers were suddenly summoned to parade one afternoon in the prison quadrangle. The summons though extremely quick and unexpected was not quick enough, I was happy to note, to escape our system of early warning. I had time enough to tell the Royal Air Force squadron-leader who was my secret second-in-command to prepare to alert his platoon officers for the plan we had evolved for just such a contingency. But within a minute of being paraded I began to feel reassured that this, whatever it was going to be, was probably not the prelude to massacre, because we were confronted only by the strange and terrible Gunzo Mori, his satellite Kasayama, and the usual posse of excitable armed Korean guards.
Mori had summoned us in a great rage because we had refused to provide the Japanese command with a list of names of any technicians among us who could have helped them in the local armaments industry that the Japanese had set up. We had pretended that there were no such people among us, and the Japanese command, quite rightly, took us for liars. It was a striking indication, even in this perverted form, of how instinctively the Japanese attached far more importance to inner values than outer ones. A person’s thought, and his way of thinking, in a sense seemed always to matter more to them than what a person did. We had at times in the past been confined to our prison barracks without food and water for days because we were held guilty of ‘wrong thinking’. Ordered not even to converse with one another, we were forced to sit behind walls in silence so that we should contemplate the imperfections of our mind and spirit. Far back at the beginning, before I joined up with Nichols and his men, I had even been condemned not so much for trying to carry on the war against the Japanese but for having shown ‘a spirit of wilfulness’ in not obeying the orders of General Ten Poorten to all the Allied forces under his command and surrendering immediately to the nearest Japanese military commander.
I had also on several occasions been beaten because the vegetables I tried to grow in our various prison camps, to augment our diet, were not growing fast enough, or because the pigs which I tried to breed on such swill as we could gather from the Japanese kitchens and our own, in the hope that they might be a valuable supplement of proteins to a diet dangerously deficient in them, developed malnutrition afflictions of their own, the sows casting still-born litters or just dropping dead themselves from heart exhaustion. And the cause of it all, according to the Japanese, had been something ‘wrong in the spirit’ that I brought to these matters, never the lack of proper food or fertilizers.
Much of the rage to which we were exposed on this occasion, I was certain therefore, was due to a sense of perverted idealism in Mori and his assistants. In some way, I suspected, he was seeing himself as an instrument of righteousness correcting a manifestation of evil in us. I thought too that the rage was made all the more dangerous because he was aware, as all the Japanese had been aware from the beginning, that however much they ruled our lives and had complete power over our bodies, they had utterly failed to change our mind and spirit. On the contrary, imprisonment in one way had improved the quality and texture of the spirit of our men and helped them to become finer instruments of life than they had ever been before. Somehow the Japanese were aware of this and could neither understand nor forgive us for it.
The parade had been called in such a hurry that we stood in line in haphazard order without regard to rank or seniority. I came about twelfth in the front rank of officers. The first officer in the line was a Battle of Britain pilot, Wing-Commander ‘Micky’ MacGuire – still in the Royal Air Force today – knighted, an air-marshal and a senior member of the general staff of the combined British services. He had played no part in preparing the false return which was the ostensible cause of this Japanese outburst of indignation. But that fact did not spare him from being the first to be punished.
Being the first, he was called out of the line and made to stand to attention in front of Mori, who at that moment looked to me like some Samurai character out of one of the ‘Noh’ plays about to exact revenge for an outrage to his honour – a vastly popular theme of the classical Japanese theatre, as I had noticed some twenty years before. His little sulphur satellite, Kasayama, with his usual ostentatious servility to his master, had not forgotten, even in the haste with which the scene had been set, to carry along with him a heavy wooden armchair for Mori to sit in, should he wish to do so. But Mori had ignored it.
He just stood beside the chair for some time screaming at MacGuire in the way the Japanese did when all their emotions were most deeply engaged – the sound coming not so much from their throats as from somewhere immediately behind their navels. He was using words so fast and of so vulgar and crude a kind that I recognized only a few of them, but enough to follow the accelerating drift of passion in them. At the same time his hand would repeatedly go to the hilt of the sword at his hip as if he were tempted to draw it and do away with MacGuire on the spot.
In the end it was not the sword but the wooden chair that he chose as his weapon. He suddenly bent down and lifted the chair from the ground. Small as he was, he was broad-shouldered and immensely strong. He raised it high into the air and brought it down with such force on the head of the tall, emaciated MacGuire, who even at the best of times was a slender person, that the chair was shattered. MacGuire was left tottering and dazed, fighting with all his determination and courage (of which he had more than most men) to stay upright on his feet. Even this was not enough for Mori, because he then proceeded to hit MacGuire with his fists and kick him with his jack-booted feet before pushing him, weak and in a state of profound shock, back to join our line.
He then called out the officer next to MacGuire and each officer in turn was beaten up, both with fists and a piece of the shattered chair, with Kasayama now joining in more and more with kicks to help the punishment along. This to me, still unbeaten, and trying to appraise the situation and its full potential of consequences for us, was one of the worst moments of the afternoon, because I knew, as no one else in the camp did, how this powerful collective sense of the Japanese and their converts, which I have already mentioned, tended to take over in such situations. For instance, even on lesser occasions when we had been slapped and beaten for minor offences, every other guard or soldier on duty had somehow felt compelled, as if by some instinctive sense of honour, to join the beating in their turn and show their solidarity of spirit as a Russian Marxist would have had it. I could visualize that before long the rest of the guard, already on the verge of flocking to Mori, might join in unbidden, but worse still, for the first time in years I saw a machine gun being mounted at the gates. I began to wonder if my interpretation of the cause of the parade had not been too naive and that this might not be just a pretext for the ultimate solution I had feared.