Now over the evening air, as he faced the instrument south toward Thailand, there came a harsh brassy voice, shouting abrupt syllables.
“Rangoon burns! The defenders are defeated, and they put the torch to their own city. Today our forces bombed the city without mercy and those fires also burn. The British locked thousands of coolies upon the docks, fearing they would run away under our bombs. They perished a cruel death, unable to escape. The British officers and residents are safe in the hills. In the city their offices are being held by natives. The British care nothing for the lives of natives. But we come to liberate the slaves. Our forces are eighteen miles only from Rangoon. Do not flee, people of Rangoon! You are about to be saved.”
He turned the voice off. Could these things be true? He turned the knobs again, this way and that, but there was no other voice, nothing but that enemy voice, shouting into the skies.
“We are building roads through to the north of Burma. North and south we attack. The enemy is caught between our two hands. Take heart, people of Burma! You will be delivered from your tyrants. We are your brothers, men of one race. Will the white men ever give you equality? They do not allow one of us to enter their sacred countries. Asia for the Asiatics!”
He turned it off again. It was impossible to endure the voice, lest there be even a fragment of truth in it. This was the fear that kept him sleepless at night. Could it be that when they had fought and won their war even then freedom would not be theirs?
He sat heavily by the table, his two hands clenched and lying on the top, motionless.
Who could tell? Had the Japanese not been so cruel, had they not invaded, had they used other means than death and destruction, they might have been right. But now, whom could his people trust? There was nothing to do but to fight on, one war at a time. When this war was won, if another war waited, then that war too must be fought. But today Japan was the enemy.
He rose after a moment of such thought and locked the instrument away again, opened the door and shouted. A soldier came running and he asked, “Does any man wait to speak with me?”
It was late and he was tired, but at night there came to him often his spies who spread over the country everywhere, before and behind them as the men marched.
“Two men wait, General,” the soldier replied, saluting.
“Tell them to come,” the General commanded.
Almost immediately two men came into the room and closed the door behind them. He recognized them as two of his own men whom he had sent into Burma weeks ago. They wore the dress of Burmese farmers, and their skins were stained dark and their heads wrapped in cotton cloth turbans.
He greeted them with smiles, while they stood waiting to speak.
“You have chosen your coming very well,” he said. “If you have come from the south, is it true that Rangoon is burning?”
“Doubtless it is true,” the elder replied. “For any eye could see what must come there. We left there days ago, and we came here by foot and by cart, but we could see that the city must fall. There is no preparation made to hold it, our General. It was never meant to hold. Ships of the enemy come in from the sea, and the enemy is bearing down on it from everywhere, in spite of the heat and their thirst. They suffer from great thirst, and they fear the wells are poisoned and they dare not drink, yet they march on.”
He listened, his eyes fixed upon them. Yes, he knew that terrible courage of the enemy. Their courage was whole, like a rock without a seam. It could not be cracked, the indomitable courage of the enemy.
“The enemy comes laughing to Rangoon,” the younger man said sadly. “Now that Malaya is lost, all those forces can join them here.”
“You must not say that all is lost,” the General said in a low voice. “All is not lost when we are here waiting.”
“You are waiting indeed, Elder Brother,” the older man said. He was lean and dark and his skin stuck to his bones. “And sir, you will wait and wait, until the city falls.” He turned to the other. “Shall we not tell him what we saw?”
“Is it not our duty?” the other replied.
“Why should anything be hid from me?” the General asked.
So they told him, now one and now the other, that on the road from Rangoon to Mandalay so sure had their own people been of the enemy’s victory that upon a hundred miles of roadway they had destroyed foreign-made trucks and cars and vehicles.
At this the General struck the sides of his head with his hands. “And my men walking a thousand miles and dragging their weapons behind them!” he groaned.
The two men looked at each other and the younger said quickly,
“Yet it is better to have burned those vehicles than to have left them for the enemy to bring their men into Burma.”
“How did they burn them?” the General asked. He had rubbed his hands through his hair until it stood up on all ends, and his face was haggard with weariness.
“They poured foreign gasoline over them,” the older man said slowly.
“Gasoline!” the General yelled. “Oh my mother!”
The two men looked as guiltily at each other as if they had done the deed, for gasoline was dearer than silver since it was not to be had except at great cost of the distance from foreign lands from which it was brought.
“How many vehicles?” the General cried.
“At least two hundred,” the older man said.
“All new,” the other man said mournfully, “and each had six wheels and in one single town I saw twenty-three burned together and they were loaded with foreign machinery and rubber tires.”
The General gnashed his teeth and tore at his hair again, and cursed the mothers and grandmothers of all those who had set torch to the vehicles. “They could have run them away, curse them and all their female parents!” he roared.
“But the enemy was between them and home,” the older spy said.
“Have we not been told that nothing must fall into the hands of the enemy?” the other said. “We have been commanded not to let so much as a bowl full of rice or a stick of steel or a wheel or a rivet or a weapon of the smallest sort, be left for the enemy. Be sure those who burned the vehicles felt it sorely. I saw the tears running down their faces and the villagers who watched the fires wept with them.”
But the General would not yield. “If it had been I, the vehicles would have been saved,” he said stubbornly, and the two men seeing that he would not let his wrath be cooled, excused themselves and went away.
Late that night when the General could not sleep in his room because his anger burned in him still, he heard a commotion in the inn yard, and being still full of impatience, he leaped from his bed. He had lain naked, for he had drawn the grass-linen curtain of his bed close because of the mosquitoes, and he chose the heat instead of them. Now he stopped only to pull on his under garments as he went, and he burst out of the door impetuous with rage at this new noise.
“Mother of my mother of my mother—” he bawled and then he stopped short. The inn yard was full of women, and they stood there astonished to stare at him. He saw their eyes all turned upon him in the light of the great torch which the innkeeper held, and at their head and nearest to him was Mayli. Her face quivered with instant laughter, and so dismayed was he that he clutched his garment to him, and for a second stood his ground, forgetful of himself in what he saw.