Indeed the mortality rate among us, I am certain, would have been close to the mortality rate of a German concentration camp if it had not been for the Chinese in Java. These remarkable people, just on my verbal promise that I, whose chances of survival were of the slimmest, would see that the British Government repaid them at the end of the war, smuggled thousands of guilders for me into the camp. With these guilders we were able to supplement our diet by buying fresh fruit and cereals through the Japanese and Koreans who of course had their own financial interest in these transactions.
However, these supplementary sources of food dwindled steadily throughout 1945, not only because the Japanese attitude to us hardened rapidly in proportion to the accelerating degree in which the war was turning against them, but also because of inflation. The Javanese guilder, which at the beginning of my own term of imprisonment had enabled me, for instance, to buy ducks’ eggs at one and a half cents each, had so declined in value by August 1945, that we were paying as much as ten guilders for the same egg – on paper an increase in price of over sixty thousand per cent! Such eggs and cereals as we could buy had to be used literally only for people in danger of dying – and by August almost all of us were on the fringe of this. Some drawings I possess of scenes in prison, done even some months before the beginning of this grimmest of all months, reveal to me today faces and bodies of men already not altogether unlike those of the inmates of Belsen.
I remember vividly how the senior British officer and I reviewed our situation with the band of remarkable Dutch and British doctors who were in prison with us. The senior British officer was a wing-commander in the Royal Air Force, a man called Nichols. Some day I hope to write more about Nichols and all that the thousands of men who were in prison with him owe him. He was one of the most extraordinary-ordinary individuals I have ever met. He had, in a way which was quintessentially English, both immense physical and moral courage of the most unobtrusive kind: always there to be called upon when needed, almost as if they were part of the routine of his quiet spirit, to be exercised in moments of crisis however potentially disastrous, with a sort of understatement of behaviour which never failed to have the effect of lowering the mounting fever of rage in our captors. Moreover, courage was so natural to him that in all the long inarticulate years in prison I never once detected any indication that the abnormal stresses of our captivity affected his capacity for command, as they sometimes did in officers with far less responsibility.
Unfortunately, this is not the place for the portrait which is needed of this remarkable man. All I need stress is that when, some months after the surrender in Java, I joined him already in prison, we had agreed that if we were to live as prisoners in a creative and dignified way, let alone survive, one of the first things we had to do was never to take refuge in comfortable illusions but always try to look the truth, however grim, straight in the eye. One of the most important aspects of this, it seemed to us, was to make as accurate as possible an assessment of how long our imprisonment was likely to last, and to face our men openly with our conclusions. This seemed to me not only fundamental but urgent because, at the time, another school of thought ruled the minds of thousands of men in prison with us.
Most of the prisoners were Dutch and hundreds of the remnants of their Christian Ambonese and Menadonese battalions and sprinklings of Chinese, suspected of being sympathetic to the Allied cause. The Dutch officers had decided that the only way of getting their men to make the best of their imprisonment was to live on the assumption that their liberation was near.
As a result they filled the camps with fresh rumours each day of fantastic Allied victories, mostly of impossible American landings on neighbouring islands and impending invasions of Java and Sumatra. The fantasy and ingenuity that went into the invention of unreal rumours of this kind had to be experienced to be believed.
There was one school of thought, for instance, which carried this process so far that it asserted, a year before the end, that the Japanese were already defeated and for reasons of high Allied strategy were merely holding us technically in prison until the onerous logistics of taking over the administration of the island and evacuating us all could be organized.
This was mad, of course, and touching evidence of how shattered the colonial Dutch had been by their defeat and how profound the fears aroused in their unconscious by their plight under the unpredictable, impervious and, for the moment, all-powerful Japanese army.
Both Nichols and I thought that only moral disintegration and disaster could lie in such a method of command. So as far back as August 1942, we had come to the conclusion that, with Rommel almost at Alexandria, Hitler in the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad, the Japanese pushing on towards Port Moresby in New Guinea and apparently on the verge of invading Australia itself, with the whole of the Dutch East Indies, the third largest empire in the world, in their possession, Malaya and Burma fallen and their armies battering against a thin British-Indian-army line on the borders of India itself; with large parts of the Pacific Ocean as well as the seas of South-East Asia and the Bay of Bengal in their power, we could easily be in prison for anything from five to twelve years. We told our men the worst and prepared them for a life of twelve years in prison.
What we did not tell them was that Nichols and I differed as to whether we had a reasonable chance of coming through imprisonment alive. He himself doubted it, and with his respect for the truth thought he ought to tell – if not our men – then at least our officers. I disagreed with him, not because I was afraid that our officers and men were incapable of enduring the worst, but because at the time I myself had no inner conviction or even glimmer of intuition as to what our ultimate fate would be. I felt that there was an enormous difference between conveying one’s fears, as opposed to one’s convictions, to the people under our command.
I had many fears myself and knew that Nichols’s own could easily prove right. But until fear proved a certainty I felt strongly that we had to contain it within ourselves. Our only answer, it seemed to me, was to live our days in prison as if we were men committed, to live to the end of our natural term on earth.
In return I promised Nichols that I myself would make it my special duty to keep constantly under review the possibility that we might not come out of prison alive. In so far as this possibility existed, it had two profound roots in reality; the first and most obvious one being that we might not survive because of lack of food and the inability of our undernourished bodies to withstand the onslaught of any of the infections endemic in the East. The other was rooted in the character of the Japanese military: their contempt for prisoners-of-war, all the greater because they themselves regarded captivity as the final degradation of the male spirit, and would and indeed did take their own lives in hundreds of thousands rather than endure the disgrace of falling into enemy hands. This contempt was reinforced by the profound disregard of the importance of life on earth implicit in their culture, and their belief that the life of an individual man was of ‘no more account than a feather’.