More dangerous still was the fact that, consciously or unconsciously, they were instruments of complicated processes of a kind of accumulated revenge of history on the European for his invasion of the ancient worlds of the East and his arrogant assumptions of superiority which had made him use his power in the physical world to bend the lives and spirits of the people of Asia to his inflexible will. The fact that the European had brought also to the Far East his great Roman virtues was for the moment forgotten. All that mattered was that for centuries his powerful presence had prevented the peoples of the Far East, so diverse in character and culture, from being their own special selves.
These processes of frustration indeed had been carried on for so long that it was almost as if the peoples of Asia had only to come into the presence of a European to be hypnotized out of being themselves, and forced to live a kind of tranced life in his presence that was not their own. But now the spell was broken, and the built-up flood of resentment following centuries of frustration had broken through all restraints. Out in full spate, in the open at last, it swept the Japanese, normally so disciplined, but now drunk on what for the moment appeared to be invincible military power, into a chaotic mood of revenge on those who belonged to the world which had been responsible for that resentment.
Again, I could write a book on this aspect of our imprisonment alone, because I had already been aware of it on my first visit to Japan, as far back as 1926, and had come away from the Far East knowing that these forces, of the ‘vengeance of history’ as I called it to myself even then, had already been set in motion by the Japanese victory in their war against the Russians at the beginning of the century, and were steadily gathering strength beneath the rough surface of the international scene.
So much were the Japanese themselves caught up in the psychology of this aspect of their conquest that it completely dominated their view of their European prisoners. They never saw us as human beings, but as provocative symbols of a detested past. They had only to look at us for this urge of resentment to quicken in their blood to such an extent that I still marvel not so much at the excesses they perpetrated as at their restraint.
I remember saying to Nichols at the time that one of our gravest dangers was that we were imprisoned at a moment when not just the chickens but all the pterodactyls of our history in the Far East had come home to roost. Throughout our imprisonment this was, I believe, one of the elements most threatening to our survival and the genuine cause of the gravest excesses that were inflicted on us from time to time.
I myself had no doubt that in time the Japanese would be defeated, but what I could not tell, in the light of all this, was how they could ever be defeated in such a manner that they themselves would be relieved of these overwhelming compulsions, of this unconscious sense of a duty, a mission of history to carry the feud aflame in their blood to a final cataclysmic end in which they and all the people they had captured would have to perish.
I knew of no nation at the time for whom honour, however perverted, was so great a necessity as for the Japanese. Honour, and a life in which they did not lose honour with themselves seemed to them as important as, if not more important than, food. I knew their history and their literature well. I needed no reminders, even in prison, of the destructive forms their individual and collective sense of honour could assume.
I was convinced of only one thing: that unless they could be defeated in such a way that they were not deprived of their honour by defeat, there was nothing but disaster for them and us in the end. This, more even than starvation or disease, I saw as the real danger that would threaten us every minute of the days and nights of our long years of captivity, either through a breakdown in the restraint of an individual Japanese commander and his guards, or through the deliberate choice of the overall Japanese command to pull down their own sprawling military temple, Samson-like, and to destroy the European Philistine along with themselves rather than endure defeat with ignominy.
I found proof of all this in the fact that as the war turned increasingly against them our own treatment became harsher. Almost everyone in prison with me reasoned all the time that as the Japanese increasingly saw ultimate defeat approaching they would become more lenient in their treatment of their captives because of a mounting desire to appease the victors on the day of surrender. I took the opposite view and my sense of our peril in this regard rapidly heightened as the year 1945 advanced, and became singularly acute from the moment of the German surrender.
By this time this sense of peril did not depend as it had done in the beginning solely on my reading of history and my understanding of the Japanese national character, but also on concrete intelligence. Apart from ensuring our survival by smuggling money for the purchase of food into our camp from the Chinese whom I have mentioned, which I had in agreement with Nichols made one of my special duties, I had also taken upon myself freely the task of accumulating all the intelligence I could about life outside our prison walls; particularly of the nature and extent of the forces of nationalism stirring in the islands, as well as the conscious policy and plans of the Japanese military.
Intelligence in the first category was comparatively easy to organize. Through my Chinese friends again a steady flow of information reached me in camp, and never once dried up until near the end. Through them I knew in minute and accurate detail of the new mood and temper of the indigenous peoples outside, and this was to prove of extreme value to our High Command after the Japanese capitulation. For the Allies arrived in that secluded theatre of war without intelligence of any kind in the real sense of the term.
But more relevant to the immediate theme, I knew about all the prisons for soldiers, European civilians and Eurasians that the Japanese had established all over the islands.
I knew that in Java alone close on 100,000 Europeans were impounded in Japanese prisons, in very much the same conditions as those in which we were being held, and that for them too the conditions of imprisonment were daily deteriorating in an alarming fashion. I was able to form some idea of the total numbers of people the Japanese had imprisoned in the outer islands of Indonesia, as well as in Malaya, Thailand, the old French Indo-China and Borneo; and though I could not put an accurate number to the total it was clear that it ran into hundreds of thousands.
Far more difficult was the problem of intelligence about Japanese military policy. I had only two sources from which I could gather this. One was from a secret radio which a small group of officers operated under my direction.
Both Nichols and I, in spite of the fact that if the radio were discovered not only the officers but we ourselves would be promptly executed, as some officers and men had already been for the same reason in another camp, thought it imperative to run the risk. We regarded accurate knowledge of how the war was going as of fundamental importance in our battle for the truth, which was the foundation of all we did for our men in the camp and which determined the use we made of our slender resources for supplementing our inadequate and shrinking diet.
It was our only sure defence against slow demoralization by the fantasies and illusions which the infinitely resourceful and wishful rumourmongering of a world in isolation and constant peril was perpetually pitting against the sense of reality of the thousands of men and officers under our command. So, despite the obvious risks, we operated a secret radio throughout our period of imprisonment.
How the radio was built and run by a few resourceful and gallant young officers, their many hair-raising escapes from detection, is again a story in itself. However, all that is relevant here is that without the intelligence provided by this radio we could not have lived our life in prison in what, I believe, was the triumphant manner we did.