For this is precisely how I finally interpreted the news. This cataclysm would end the war, and a new phase of life would inevitably result from it. This cataclysm I was certain would make the Japanese feel that they could now withdraw from the war without dishonour, because it would strike them, as it had us in the silence of our prison night, as something supernatural. They, too, could not help seeing it as an act of God more than an act of man, a Divine intimation that they had to follow and to obey in all its implications. The continuation of the war by what we, for want of a better word and for fear of telling the truth call ‘conventional means’, would have left them locked in the old old situation of a battle of opposites in which their whole history, culture and psychology would have demanded death either in fighting or by their own hand.
But this was something miraculously new, something not foreseen in their or our own philosophy. It was something on so gigantic and undeniable a scale, such a manifestation of new power at work in life, that even they would know, as we who had been its terrible instrument of delivery would have to learn to know, that all the old ways, laws, rules, conventions and creeds which had brought us to this terrible impasse, had been judged invalid by life and something else would have to take their place.
At last I was able to distinguish with confidence and clarity between what was either wishful thinking or fear of the future on one hand and valid intuition on the other. The war with Japan was practically at an end. Yet, as I was shaving, I was still aware that it was a valid intuition under a shadow of suspicion which warned me still to be on my guard so far as we ourselves were concerned. Although the war in general appeared to be over, the issue for all of us in South-East Asia, my intuition seemed to warn, was not yet finally decided in favour of life.
It was in this spirit that I told Nichols, and the officers in our confidence, of what had happened. I begged them that we should not spread the news wider but keep it strictly to ourselves until we knew what its implications were to be for us. We had, I remember, a tremendous argument over this, in which I stood alone for a time. Everyone thought that it would be cruel not to spread the news immediately throughout the prison.
I thought the cruellest thing that could happen would be to raise our prison mood into a state of euphoria and then suddenly find it denied by events in South-East Asia, which were still under the command of the inflexible Field-Marshal Terauchi, apparently as imperious and independent as ever of the orders, let alone the wishes, of his masters in Tokyo. I doubt whether I would have won the argument if, that very day, our Chinese contact had not suddenly sparked into life and transmitted a brief but urgent warning from Kim to be more on our guard than ever.
No explanations and no news of any kind accompanied the warning. It had obviously been most difficult to get through at all. Its epigrammatic form and manner of delivery suggested clearly that it had been transmitted not only under great difficulties, but in conditions of extreme danger. I took Nichols apart and told him for the first time of the course of my years of lonely vigilance. Imaginative and far-seeing person that he naturally was, he rallied to my side. Although the camp was buzzing with rumours of all kinds like a hive of bees about to swarm in the spring, we kept our counsel but, just as we had done in the past, without revealing any specific news we used the facts to guide rumour and speculation among our own men into what we felt were the safest and least harmful channels.
There was too, of course, another dread possibility to be considered. In a theatre of war so far removed from Japan, the horror of Hiroshima could have the opposite effect of which my intuition and knowledge of the Japanese suggested to me it would have in Japan proper. The things human beings imagine are always so much worse than those they experience. Experience, however horrible, carries within itself its own built-in immunities for men but imagination, charged with the task of inventing a substitute for experience, always goes far beyond the realms of reality. Imagined injury and suffering I have always found, for instance, are far more difficult to come to terms with than suffering experienced and lived through to the end, no matter how terrible the suffering.
We had too to look at the truth of Hiroshima as we had done at all aspects of our conditions since the beginning of our captivity, not only steadily but whole, and to admit in the round that, once the news of the dropping of two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki spread throughout South-East Asia, down from Field-Marshal Terauchi to all his commanders and officers and men, a spirit of revenge, for what they would instinctively regard as a blasphemous outrage on their sacred land, would be added to the other motives they had for fighting to the end.
In particular, it could add fire to the many complicated inclinations towards revenge, on all the Europeans in their power, which I have already examined in detail. I think this aspect, more than any other of the arguments we had had among ourselves, convinced Nichols and the officers in the know that for the moment we had to be even more restrained and circumspect than ever before.
One significant sign was that the prison command themselves, from Korean guards and soldiers to the incorrigible and inexpressible Kasayama, the smouldering, volcanic Mori and their placid musical lieutenant, showed no indication whatever of being aware of what had happened in Japan.
I had from the moment I broke the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Nichols also taken Jongejans fully into our confidence. Apart from knowing that there was no one in the camp I could trust more, I needed his own evaluation of the event to clarify and verify my own. We found ourselves in agreement. Moreover, even armed with all this certain knowledge as with a kind of microscope for scrutinizing the behaviour of the Japanese with whom he was in daily contact, Jongejans at the end of every one of the few days which followed, reported to me that he could not observe any change in Japanese attitudes.
Clearly they had not been told because Terauchi had not changed and this fact, added to the spark of a warning from the Chinese, suggested that somewhere high up in the Japanese chain of command the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had registered in a way to give cause for alarm on our behalf.
I think it was not until five nights after we first had news of Hiroshima – the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later – that there was talk on the air of peace negotiations having been set in motion by the Emperor of Japan. The fact that the Emperor himself, this sacred personage who in the living mythology which motivated the imaginations and inspired the actions of the Japanese people was a descendant of the great Sun Goddess herself, had emerged into the vulgar glare of the news, seemed itself of the highest significance. Both Jongejans and I thought this confirmed our evaluation of the consequences of Hiroshima, and that it had indeed opened up for the Japanese a valid avenue of escape from the dilemma of a classical end to war. Only changes initiated and endorsed by the nearest human equivalent to a God of his people could succeed, in the circumstances, to relieve the fanatical military forces of their compulsion to fight to the last.
We had no idea at the time of how powerful these fanatical forces still were, despite their disastrous years of defeat and terrible retreat in the Pacific. We had no inkling then that even the Emperor had only just succeeded in escaping suppression, if not assassination, at the hands of fanatical young service officers.
All I knew then was that, round about 12 August, overtures for peace by the Emperor were openly discussed in the world; but I knew also that in our own theatre of South-East Asia there were rumours that Field-Marshal Terauchi was rejecting his own Emperor and refusing to follow him in his way to peace.
In fact I soon learned that Terauchi’s stand had already so alarmed the Emperor and his advisers that he was sending his brother, Prince Chi-Chi-Bu, to Saigon to persuade the Field-Marshal to obey Tokyo and play his part in the general surrender that was about to take place.