I did not say to Michael, Shouldn’t your stepfather have stayed with the bulk of his troops? Though it might have changed nothing.
There is a long, low, coconut-groved reef island named C5 on Memerang maps, though others call it Pangkill. It was the sort of island that had a village whose chief task was coconut harvesting for the owner, generally a Malay nobleman or entrepreneur.
Whatever the Boss and his party had done in the Singapore roads, they were still towing the rubber boat with all of its equipment, including limpets, as if they were not finished with their brave acts, when they got to that island, Pangkill. Leo and his men were far to the east, and could now be considered safe by the Boss. There were two villages on Pangkill Island. Rufus took three men and went and spoke to the head man of the south-western one, who accepted their offer of cigarettes, and Doucette similarly visited the village on the northern end, and had a meal of fish and rice with the head man there. This head man, Rajah Buja, was their betrayer, but they couldn’t have known, for he was genial towards them. And I am sure he was genial, and wished them little personal harm. But they were complicating his world. The Japanese recruited their informers throughout the islands with the not-to-be-sneered-at prize of a sack of rice per month, a few hundred rupiah for special pieces of information. And beyond that, many informants were pressed into service more by fear for their family’s safety than by lust for reward. Rajah Buja knew the Japanese were paranoid about a fifth column, were willing to torture and hang headmen who did not pass on news of untoward contacts, and bayonet and burn villages. Buja could say to the investigators, after the war, and no doubt did, that he was simply trying to save his people.
Doucette and Mortmain would have presumed innocently that a natural alliance and nostalgia for the old British times would have given the headman an automatic feeling of fraternity and warmth towards them. If imperial powers have one naive trait, it is a total bewilderment about why outsiders might resent them. Not all Doucette’s familiarity with and love of Malay culture would have altered the betrayal. Not that Doucette had any other choice than to make human contact, show his face. For it was harder to betray a known face.
After their visits to the villages, they made a camp and slept overnight there, but their view of the Japanese anchorages off Bintang was blocked by a mole of a hill on a neighbouring little island. So Doucette and three of his party paddled over there to CE7A to keep an eye on any Japanese movement. Banana trees, lily bushes and tussocks of tall grass trees grew amongst the coconut palms. It all made a good hide. Back on Pangkill, C5, Mortmain remained with his partner. Early the next morning, a Malay turned up and told Mortmain that Rajah Buja had taken a motorised fishing boat west to Pandjang Island to report the presence of the Memerang men to the district police chief and thus, to the Kempei Tai. Mortmain immediately paddled across to lush CE7A to warn Doucette.
One Indonesian man was living on CE7A, a coconut grove attendant who worked for the little island’s owner, and his name was Ahmed Dulib. He had with him his wife and one young child. His chief job was to cut down coconuts and extract the oil from them. He had a boiler, whose fire he fed with husks, going continuously. He had already spotted Doucette’s party, four white men, each with Sten gun and pistol, in green and khaki, and a badge – the Rising Sun Australian army badge – on their caps. (He would thus have made a good witness for the defence at the trial, except there would be no defence.) In passing, Doucette asked young Mr Ahmed to cut down some green coconuts for them, and so they enjoyed the milk, and then they had Ahmed split open the fruit, and savoured the meat.
On the afternoon of that same day, while boiling down the coconut oil near their hut, Ahmed and his wife saw two Japanese landing barges approaching their beach. They were Kempei Tai troops, who landed and came running up the beach and into the hinterland towards the hut. The Japanese had a Malay interpreter who found Ahmed and asked him about white men. Had he seen any on this island?
Ahmed, for whatever reason of resistance against the occupiers, or for the sake of a peaceful life, said he had not seen any. Whatever it was, this coconut oil man and island supervisor kept denying any sight of the fugitives, and became stuck with his first denial and had to play it boldly, and did so, poor fellow. A detachment took him back to the landing barge, while the others began searching the little tropic mole. From his encampment below the island’s slight hill, Doucette had also heard the noisy arrival of the landing craft. He organised his party of five around some trees and a clump of coral-like stones on the east side of the island. They saw the Kempei Tai coming and opened fire on them with their silenced weapons. It was as if a silent wind had pushed down the leading soldiers in the Kempei Tai advance. The Japanese were terrified, disoriented.
We are told the initial gun battle lasted two hours, before the Kempei Tai troops retreated to the clearing around Ahmed Dulib’s hut, where they laid down their dead and wounded. At some stage in that two-hour battle, however, Rufus Mortmain had felt the impact of a sniper’s bullet in his chest. By the time the Japanese pulled back amidst the palm trees, Rufus must have felt cold taking over his extremities, and a terrible uncertainty of breath. I find it hard to think of his death without tears, because his vanities were such boyish ones, he lolloped like a large, lithe dog around the bonfire, and now felt the reality of being devoured by flames. An awareness of his own death would obviously have settled on him.
Poor Ahmed Dulib was taken away on the barge by the Kempei Tai, but somehow his young wife, Mrs Dulib, who had been hiding from the Japanese with her baby, came out with her little girl and visited Doucette’s group. She bent over to feed water to the gasping Rufus Mortmain. One of the soldiers in the Memerang group, Private Meggitt, had a severe but less serious shoulder wound. Doucette spoke urgently to the young woman, telling her to take her little girl and get away, for the Japanese would be back in greater force. She seemed to accept what had happened calmly, which I think astonishing and in the truest sense heroic. By which I mean, in part, innocent and short-sighted as well.
If one wanted to be cruel, and I frequently and shamefully did in Doucette’s case, one could say Doucette now chose his own death rather than his duty to Leo and the others, when Leo had chosen him over me. I have to be frank that I’d always had this argument to wage with Leo, except he could not be reached for questioning.
Anyhow, for Doucette, things had gone messy beyond belief, the grand Memerang plan was in tatters, and thus he chose irresponsibly to orphan Leo. In the last hour of light, he and the two men still standing with him gave Rufus a dose of morphine to dope him up for the journey, loaded him and Private Meggitt into a folboat, gave Megitt a paddle to use one-handed and told them to head for NC2, ten kilometres south. Somehow, Meggitt completed the paddle to NC2. What athletes these young men were. But Doucette’s decision was crazy. Rufus was dying anyhow, yet to give him a meaningless ten kilometres start, Doucette threw his own life away.