Until the results of Prince Chi-Chi-Bu’s mission to Terauchi were known, we had to accept the fact that we could not be sure of our own fate. How correct we were in this was again confirmed by the fact that from 12 August to, I think, 17 August I received more cryptic warnings, initiated presumably by Kim, that the danger to us was as great as ever.
By this time rumours, and an interchange of euphoric interpretations of what had happened in the world outside, were poured into the ears of our men by their Dutch, Ambonese, Menadonese and Chinese fellow-prisoners. Everyone was seething with excitement, with belief that the war was at an end. There was wild talk among the Dutch of breaking out of the camp if they were not released soon. I had to plead desperately with the Dutch command to restrain the rumours, and to deny over-optimistic interpretations of events for a while, because unless we kept to the routine of behaviour that we had followed up to now we might provide the Japanese command with precisely the sort of excuse for which their minds might be groping in order to justify their taking revenge on us.
Yet I knew that it could only be a matter of days if not hours now before all the dammed-up emotions of three and a half years in prison would burst through the walls of restraint, and overwhelm not only the Dutch but perhaps our own men, and particularly my own small group of beloved Australians, compelling them to acts which could have terrible repercussions for us all. I was so much aware of this that I fully accepted the fact that within a day or two, even if there were no clarification of Field-Marshal Terauchi’s attitude, we would have to take all our officers and men fully into our confidence at whatever the risks of exposure to our own prison command. We would then have to explain to them and reason at length why they should continue in what would seem to them such unnatural and unnecessary restraint. I feared we would explain and reason without success, even so.
From the night of 17 August, when I think we first heard of the final Japanese capitulation, the tension for me, charged to provide for our own special fate, was as great as ever and I was in a state of perpetual argument with myself because, not only did the Japanese in charge of our camp continue to behave as if they had not yet heard even of Hiroshima, let alone peace negotiations and capitulation, but there was still no news of the outcome of Prince Chi-Chi-Bu’s mission to Saigon.
All this time we had our daily parades and roll-calls at first light and sunset as usual. They were conducted by Gunzo Mori and his guards in the same arrogant manner as before. Closely as one looked for signs of change in them, neither Jongejans nor I could yet discern even the faintest hint of a difference. If anything, their confidence and rigidity of rule seemed greater than before. The only indication that somewhere high up there might have been a sign of change to come was the fact that suddenly no more working parties were called for. All of us were confined to our camp all day long. No traders were allowed at the gates and we were sealed off from the outside world more effectively than ever before. This last, combined with the absence of change in the attitude of the prison command to us, suggested that as far as we were concerned the issue between life and death might not yet have been decided. It all continued still to look pretty ominous to me.
From 17 August to 21 August, technically a period of only four days, time did not stand still for me but at moments even appeared to be caught up in a violent state of regression in the mind of the Japanese command far back towards some terrible archaic moment in the evolution of their national spirit. How little the Japanese had changed seemed to me to come to a focus in something reported to me by one of our officers after the morning parade on 21 August. He was a Royal Air Force officer called Ian Horobin, now Sir Ian Horobin and an ex-minister of the British Crown.
Horobin was one of the men in Nichols’s first group, Moreover he was a person to whom I owed my own life. From his work at staff headquarters before the Allied capitulation in 1942, he knew of my secret mission in the jungles of west Java and the whereabouts of my base in Bantam. He had been caught by the Japanese on his way to join me. Although beaten and tortured for information he had not succumbed and given me away. He was one of the few officers with whom we had regularly shared our news, and, of course, he had been told of the final Japanese capitulation. He was a deeply religious person, and in the various prisons where we had been at times without priests he had conducted services for us and delivered some remarkable sermons, of great intelligence and originality, uplifted with a touch of the poet that he was. He had in fact written in prison a most moving poem about a particularly brutal execution that we had been made to witness early on – a poem called ‘Java Sunday’, since the execution had taken place on a Sunday afternoon, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen, to sharpen the ugliest of deeds.
On this particular morning Horobin told me that he and five other officers had joined the official Royal Air Force chaplain, Squadron-Leader Giles, at dawn, as they often did for receiving the sacrament. The place where ‘Padre’ Giles always performed this service was in a far corner of the camp. Nearby there were two massive wooden gates which had been heavily boarded and shored up by the Japanese for obvious reasons. It was, although Horobin did not know it, intended to be one of the main targets of our attack should the Japanese try to massacre us – one of the four points in prison through which we intended during the confusion of the fighting to slip one of the four men we had selected as our messengers.
There was one crack in the heavy wood of the gates through which one could see something of the world outside, if one were brave enough to risk detection by the guards; a Menadonese who tried it once had been beaten senseless and was afterwards sentenced to a week’s solitary confinement.
Just before their service of Holy Communion, Horobin said, he had dared to peer through the crack. In the light of an immense and fast spreading red dawn, he had seen the Japanese soldiers responsible for guarding the camp go on parade. The parade, he said, was like all the other parades one had witnessed in ampler days of confinement. It had ended as usual with all the soldiers bowing their heads reverently in the direction of the rising sun.
Horobin told me that not only did the soldiers look so totally unaware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the abject defeat of their country, but also so completely without any intimation of what might await them after surrender, from their trial as war criminals to which we knew from our radio the Allies were irrevocably determined to subject them, that, quite unbidden, such a rush of pity and compassion surged in him that he found himself in tears for them.
Horobin’s story moved me more than I can say because it was for me the final evidence that the way they had all lived through three and a half years of prison had turned defeat into such a victory that not even death by massacre, should it come, could rob them of it.
Then, early in the afternoon after a long hot morning, I was suddenly sent for by the Japanese. This was so unusual, because I was not the senior British officer, that it alarmed me. I had never been sent for in this way before, and I had to face the possibility that it could be a singularly bad omen. It could mean, for example, that my contacts had been discovered and had been made to talk, and that the talk would lead the Japanese to the worst possible conclusions regarding me, because of the cloud of suspicion under which I had initially been released into Nichols’s first camp.
It could be the prelude to the end of which I had been so consistently warned. For the moment a small still voice, deep within me, suggesting that the Japanese might perhaps be sending for me for the best of possible reasons, was utterly silenced. I had time only to tell my own secret second-in-command that if I were not back within a few hours he should report to Nichols and the Dutch sapper colonel, and prepare for the kind of final battle within the prison walls for which we had so long planned.