But neither the New Zealand officer nor Donaldson lost their nerve. Both remained at their respective posts and although a great deal of muffled sound and shuffling still went on in the guard room and voices continued chattering by the gates, the gates themselves remained shut. Ten minutes later there was a slight tap at the window, the window was silently raised and Donaldson climbed through it quickly, shut it as silently and together we walked off in the direction of the latrines.
As we walked towards the queue of waiting men I could tell how great the tension had been for Donaldson because the news he had to communicate to me in a whisper came out of him like an explosion of breath from a person who had dived deep into dangerous waters and had been forced to hold his breath for too long.
‘I’ve done her, the bitch, Colonel!’ he gasped, ‘I’ve done the bitch! We’ve got all we need!’ We had hardly reached the queue when a night patrol entered the gates.
The next night the New Zealand officer, in the dark underneath his mosquito net, began to repair or rather re-shape our radio. It was difficult, delicate and slow work, and if I remember rightly it took three nights and three dawns to give him the necessary light before the work was finished. They were among the longest days I have ever known, because everything in the atmosphere around us told me that the climax was near. Also, quite apart from the change in the atmosphere, I could not explain Kim’s failure to communicate with me nor the inability of the subtle, imperturbable and infinitely resourceful Mr Tan to get news of his and my friends outside in other ways.
I was particularly aware at night of how time dragged on at this moment, and how great was the strain. I always went at night before lights-out to one or two of the sections of the prison in which our men were housed. The Japanese still insisted on keeping officers and men on the whole in separate quarters. I did this nightly round, not out of a sense of duty nor just out of the affection I felt for the men who had shared the long years of captivity with us, but also for the purely selfish motive that I had never yet gone among them without being revived and strengthened by my contact with them.
Great as was my admiration for the British officers in prison with us, it could not be compared with the respect I had for the ordinary soldiers, sailors and airmen who formed the majority of British prisoners. They seemed to me, even in the categories from which one might have least expected them, to possess qualities of the highest order as, for instance, men from the slums of the great cities of Britain like London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool, whose physical appearance often showed the consequences of severe malnutrition during the years of their neglect by the ruling classes before the war, like the rickets of childhood which gave them bowed legs and Rowlandson bodies and faces.
Yet their spirit was always high, cheerful and invincible. I had never yet known a crisis, however brutal, in which they had lost their nerve. Appeals to their pride and honour had never been in vain. Always they had responded instinctively in a measure as great if not greater than officers born, bred, well-nourished from childhood, schooled and trained for precisely this sort of trial. Their need of honour, of a life of self-respect too, was as important as their need of food. They were, as I said in the beginning, all slowly dying from lack of food at the time, but there was no hint of impending death in their conversation or sign of defeat in their emaciated faces. Instead there was only an extraordinary and intense kind of gaiety that to me was far more moving than any signs of depression, melancholy or defeat could possibly have been.
Talking to them I would find myself assailed by a fierce kind of tenderness for them, that was like fire. I wonder if anyone, except perhaps Wilfred Owen, has ever paid enough attention to this kind of male tenderness that men feel for flesh and blood in war, not even exclusively flesh and blood of their own kin but also of their enemy. It is so perhaps, because the British have this ridiculous feeling of embarrassment when faced with emotion and feeling, of which they have such great and sensitive reserves themselves. Any open acceptance of either, however, tended to be discouraged as if it were a kind of un-masculine weakness. Yet it is a unique reality of war, and not being British I was open to it – much to the embarrassment of my more conventional fellow officers at times. I had no inhibitions in encouraging and welcoming it, but felt immeasurably strengthened by it always to do what I felt I had to do.
I would go back after these visits to my own mosquito net, both uplifted by my nightly contact with such men and aflame with determination somehow to protect them and with a re-glimmering of hope, despite the odds and the evidence, that I might still be able to help to achieve this. By daylight, and in the course of the exacting prison days that followed, these feelings would be overlain by routine duties but would never utterly vanish. I only had to resume my rounds again at night to find it there, flaring up again like coals blown into the fiercest of flames.
I remember too that in the course of these three long days, getting up as I always did every day long before roll-call so that I could wash and shave myself before facing the Japanese, I would watch the moon, which in that sky before a dawn, clear as crystal-water after the rain of the evening before, was almost as magical as it is in Japan. The moon I noticed then was rapidly on the wane. At the end of that long night during which our radio was fully repaired again, it rose in its last phase of waning just before the sunrise, with Venus as morning star ahead of it. The planet looked so large and of such an abundant liquid clarity that I felt, if I held my hands cupped out towards it, they would be filled and overflowing with its lovely light. It may sound unduly superstitious, but watching the moon in its last phase, I thought it as much a portent as the soothsayer did Halley’s comet, when he warned Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar to beware the Ides of March. It seemed no idle coincidence to me that the moon, which plays the great symbolic role in the movement of the Japanese spirit that I have stressed so much, should be in the last phase of dying just when the end for the Japanese in this war appeared to have drawn so near.
The day that followed was one of the longest of all. It was singularly quiet. No call for working parties came from the Japanese and no traders appeared at the prison gate. Both the Dutch and British commanders who reported at the Japanese camp commander’s office for the daily meeting, the ‘Tenko’ as the Japanese called it, were sent back by an unusually subdued and quiet Gunzo Mori with the abrupt comment that they were not needed.
Jongejans, who had been kept behind for a discussion of various routine affairs, also returned to tell me later that the camp commander had not even put in an appearance at his office. He himself had never known our captors quite so still, subdued, indifferent to us, as if they were all inwardly profoundly preoccupied.
As always on these occasions, the men gathered together to pursue their studies in the various classes which we had organized for them, and maintained unfailingly whatever the conditions and temporary interruptions, throughout more than three years of imprisonment. With no working parties out of the camp, the classes had not been so well attended for months.
One of the several classes which I myself conducted was a course in Japanese. I think it is a significant illustration of the triumph of our men over the resentment one might have expected them to have on account of their brutal treatment, that it was one of the most popular classes of all. I saw many faces there that day which I had not seen for some weeks – in fact so great was the attendance that we only just managed to squeeze into a part of one of the men’s quarters where I sat on a bunk totally surrounded.