I do not know how long I had been lying there in that state when I saw a movement against the sheen of the night at the open door. A dark shadow was outlined at the end of my mosquito net, and almost immediately afterwards I felt a hand tugging at my feet.
I crept out of my net as quietly as possible. Everybody else around me was fast asleep. I went out quietly to join the person who had touched me, in the shadows against the wall of our quarters. It was the New Zealand officer, who lost no time in whispering to me in a tone which carried much more than just the satisfaction and the excitement of success: ‘It worked, Colonel! It worked!’
By pre-arrangement, he said no more, because it was unsafe to talk at length in that situation, so near the guards and the entrance to the camp. We both walked across the quadrangle towards the long queue of men patiently waiting outside the latrines. Just out of earshot of the end of the queue he told me what had happened.
He had had some trouble making contact but after a great deal of fiddling had picked up a news broadcast from Delhi. Unfortunately he had not come in right at the beginning, but near enough it to realize that something tremendous had happened. He wasn’t quite certain what precisely it was, but in the course of the morning of the day which was now ended, something more like an act of God than of man had been inflicted on Japan at a place called Hiroshima.
Exactly how and what had been done he couldn’t tell. All he knew was that it was something new and terrible in human experience, more terrible even than earthquakes, tidal waves or volcanic eruptions. In fact he was not at all certain, when he recollected the emotion and excitement of the announcer’s voice, whether it was news he had heard or not just an actor in some kind of horrific radio play.
But surely, I remarked, he could have told whether this was so or not from the rest of the news of how the war was going on elsewhere, which would normally have followed. That was precisely the trouble, he whispered, there was nothing but talk of this great kind of cataclysm which had taken place or had been inflicted on Japan, and speculation over its consequences, all of which it had been difficult to piece together and assess accurately, because the reception had not been all that good.
He was certain only that he had picked up an atmosphere of something which, if true, showed that the final turn of the tide in the war might have come. He assured me that, with some minor adjustments that he would make as a result of his listening in that night, he could verify all this in detail on all three of our usual stations twenty-four hours later.
At the end of all this I myself was in doubt whether we had a piece of real news or whether he had just got hold of some kind of dramatized radio fiction. I remembered how, before the war, a large section of the population of the United States had taken a radio dramatization of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a broadcast of real news and panicked. I wondered whether something similar had not happened at Delhi that night, and I was resolved, not that we should not panic, because there was no question of this, but that we should not jump to any premature conclusions.
On this note we dispersed, but I had only to catch a glimpse of the faces of Max al Kahdri and his friends the next morning to realize that they were in the grip of some tremendous excitement, and full of some kind of intimation of overwhelming portent. They looked as if they were on the point of bursting to tell me what it was, but, as I saw the men I knew to be spies as well as some others whom I suspected of the same role watching them closely, I gave them no encouragement and kept well away from them all day.
As far as the Japanese command was concerned, however, I still could not detect the slightest trace of anything new in their attitudes. The silence and inactivity of the day before had vanished, the usual working parties were called for, and what was to us a normal day in those abnormal circumstances followed a routine course from roll-call to lights-out, except that after another Götterdämmerung sunset just clearing the purple battlements of Malabar, there hung the bright sliver of the newest of new moons.
That night the New Zealand officer got through not only to Delhi but to Perth and San Francisco, and listened exclusively in to news and world comment and reactions which gave us a clear picture of what had happened at Hiroshima. Even now after all these years I, who know little about astrology, am not a follower of astrologers and who have no wish to make an astrological point of any kind at all, feel compelled to say that it looked at the very least most strange to me that the first atom bomb dropped by man should have been dropped on so moon-swung a people as the Japanese, during the phase of nothingness between the death of the oldest and the birth of the newest of new moons.
It is to me almost as if, out of the depths of life and time from the far fast expanding perimeter of our universe and its galaxies of star-foam, some cosmic impulse had come to extinguish the moon on this occasion so that its extinction and imminent rebirth could act on the limited awareness of man as an unmistakable symbol of annunciation that the past was dead and a new, greater phase of meaning about to begin on earth, however catastrophic the introduction.
I heard all this news of confirmation from the New Zealand officer, of course, standing again at the end of the latrine queue. We both had to follow the queue through so as to establish that our presence there was not a contrived pretence. I longed to break away and get back to my own world under my mosquito net, to come to terms with the news he had just told me and, even more than coming to terms with it, try to interpret and anticipate its consequences for us. But I dared not, and to this day I do not know from where I got the self-restraint to follow the slow, shuffling, tired file of men through the latrines and out into the quadrangle again, where the sky, heavy with stars, sagged lower than ever on to the prison walls and the dark was brushed and illuminated from time to time as it were by archangelic wings of lightning from the great temple clouds sinking down into the rising tide of night to vanish below the invisible horizon before morning as they always did.
Ordering the New Zealand officer not to impart the news to any other member of our group until I had seen him in the morning, with a peremptoriness which perhaps might have sounded unappreciative of the near-miracle he had performed in getting us in radio contact with the outside world again, I went to my blanket on the stone floor.
I have remarked often enough how time stood still for us in prison, because it was one of the most difficult of all the conditions of imprisonment for us to accept, and one with which we were in daily battle deep inside ourselves; but from the moment I crept into my mosquito net, the whole nature of prison time became transformed. I found myself almost driven to the opposite extreme and complaining at the speed, the unbelievable acceleration with which it now surged forward. I did not sleep a wink, and yet it was the shortest night I have ever spent.
I seemed hardly to have crept under my net when through the phantom white mesh there was a glimmer of first light, and the hour had come for me to get up, shave and be ready for a new day. But in the lightning interval between going to bed and getting up, I had all the while in the pit of my stomach a warm feeling. I would say it was a warmth almost as if I had just consumed a bottle of champagne, if I did not suspect this metaphor of being far too feeble to convey the unique life-giving quality I was experiencing. Instinct alone suggests to me that it might well have been like the warmth experienced by a new-born child when feeling the first of its mother’s milk starting up in its stomach the process of a life of its own.