I was conducted by the indefatigable Kasayama to the Japanese commander’s office. Neither he nor Gunzo Mori were there, but a new Japanese sergeant-major, whom I had never seen before, with a staff-band round his arm, was waiting for me. He immediately led me out of the office and into a large waiting car, a Japanese soldier at the wheel. We were driven off quickly to a broad villa in Lembang. This hamlet at the foot of Tangkoeboehan-praauw, was the place where General Wavell once had his combined headquarters and where he himself had given me the secret orders for the mission which was to lead to my capture. The villa itself had belonged before the war to a Dutch oil tycoon. It had large, luxurious grounds and a wide gravelled drive leading up to a broad verandah. The grounds were full of staff cars, with military chauffeurs standing at the ready beside them.
At the sight a great surge of hope almost unmanned me. I suddenly became conscious of my own incongruous appearance. I was bare-legged and wore a pair of prison-made wooden clogs. I had on a pair of khaki shorts, nearly rotted through by the sun and kept together only by constant patching and repairing. I had on a khaki shirt in a similar condition and crude prison-made badges of rank, sewn awkwardly on to the shoulder straps of my shirt. I had lost my military hat in captivity, and wore instead a khaki cap which had been made for me by an Australian officer who had been a dress designer in civilian life. The peak of the hat had been stiffened by cardboard and I had to be careful not to wear it when it rained because the sodden cardboard would sag and the peak fall over my eyes. Fortunately the afternoon was still hot and dry.
My Australian soldiers had also, in a manner which touched me deeply, made their own idea of an appropriate military badge for my hat. Because they knew I had been born in Africa, it was not a copy of the badge of the British regiment in which I had been commissioned, but the head in miniature of what they took to be the African antelope, which the South African soldiers they had known in the Western desert wore. The metal out of which they had made it came from a fragment of a Japanese ’plane shot down before the capitulation, and somehow left lying in one of our camps. They had not been very expert in the making of the hat. Not only was it not symmetrical but in the course of a clash with a Japanese guard one day, one of the horns of the badge had been permanently crumpled. I could not have looked more of a caricature of an officer.
However, I followed the orderly up the steps and through the door with as much dignity as I could muster from within my confused and bewildered self, and with as much firmness as my depleted physique allowed. The large room into which I was ushered seemed full of senior staff officers. When they all rose as I entered and bowed to me, I knew beyond the last limit of doubt that I had been summoned for the best of all possible reasons.
Something in me indeed must have anticipated this already, because I made no attempt to remove my hat. In normal prison circumstances this would have been one of the most provocative things I could have done. As the full meaning of this immense and punctiliously polite Japanese welcome came to me, relief, emotion and a thousand and one urgent and complex feelings made me weak at the knees and I began to tremble violently within; yet I managed to acknowledge their bows with a firm but perfunctory salute.
I was politely asked to sit down in a leather armchair but refused and stood there silent, keeping upright only with an immense effort, which I hoped was not noticeable, while some decanters of wine and wine glasses appeared. The glasses were filled all round and a glass of wine offered first to me. I declined it.
Then the general and his officers all raised their glasses and the general himself, who I was to discover afterwards had been on military secondment to England, held out his glass to me and said: ‘I drink sincerely to your victory.’ They all emptied their glasses in one draught and as I still stood there silent, hoping I was not looking quite as near collapse as I felt, the general spoke again. I heard him, not like someone in the room with me so much as like a voice speaking into my ear through the receiver at the end of a long trunk-line of time and history: ‘We Japanese have decided to switch, and when we Japanese switch, we switch sincerely.’
I need not here go into the reasons why I had been sent for. It had nothing to do with life in prison but with issues graver than the question of our own survival had been, and is part of another story which must be told elsewhere. All that matters here is that when I ultimately got back to camp, after giving the Japanese a series of precise orders, I reached our old prison to find it in a state of intense activity. The senior officers in command had been politely requested, and for the first time in our prison history not ordered, to muster all the men, for departure by train that very night to the great port and city of Batavia as it was then called.
Soon after dark, some thousands of men and hundreds of their fellows to weak to walk, many near dying and carried on stretchers, marched out of the prison for the last time, all of them on the first stage of their way to liberation and home; except me myself, who was now faced with another immediate mission, physically weak as I was, and with several more years of a new sort of war in South-East Asia ahead of me. But the feeling of gratitude to life and Providence that all these men were safe at last overwhelmed everything else in me at that moment. It was a feeling as of music everywhere within and about me.
As I watched the long slow procession of men march into the night, this feeling of music everywhere rose within my liberated senses like a chorale at the end of a great symphony, asserting a triumph of creation over death. All that was good and true in the dark experience behind me, combined with my memory of how those thousands of men, who had endured so much, never once had failed to respond to the worst with what was best in them, and all that had happened to me, in some mysterious fashion seemed to have found again the abiding rhythm of the universe, and to be making such a harmony of the moment as I have never experienced.
All I was feeling then, so utterly beyond words, seemed confirmed when I looked up and saw that the clear receptive air, standing so still and high like the water of a deep well in that raised plain of Bangoeng, was beginning to fill with the light of a rising moon. That moon which symbolizes so much of the spirit of unfailing renewal, not only of the Japanese but of all men and all living things, was itself full and overflowing. It seemed suddenly to send, unbidden, another great light over the rim of my war-darkened memory, flooding my heart with a bright feeling of continuity, restoring me to the stream of all the life that had ever been and ever could be. The feeling quickly transformed itself into the most evocative of words. The words were not my own but those of one of a moving D. H. Lawrence poem, a declaration of the rights of life, based on the image of the moon, beginning with the bugle calclass="underline"
And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked …
The poem ascended from there on in my mind in great chords of music to the final affirmation that when the moon is ‘spread out and known at last’
… We are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.