Shame and the Captives (27 page)

But it was as she returned later towards her bedroom window at an hour when in summer there would already have been a dawn glow, that the tedious spaces of the house and its skirt of garden and shed and fruit trees reclaimed her, and she felt the authority of her hunger fall from beneath her. If there had been a place where she could have been locked up, as Giancarlo had sought to get locked up, at that hour she would have chosen it herself.

C
olonel Abercare was driven through the northeast sector of town and towards the training camp, which was set on flatter ground three miles north of Gawell. The Ewan Abercare who approached that installation had never been more at ease with his life, not even when he'd been young and wild in India and itching with ambitions, carnal and military. He had achieved Emily's return. That was a guarantee of contentment. More keenly than ever, he knew the carnal and the military were evanescent. He had a sense from her embraces, which were at first wary, that he had partly to thank Dr. Delaney and Mozart for this thorough and new rapport—Emily was charmed and consoled by Dr. Delaney's superior kind of Mass, which annoyed other worshippers by its length. Mozart, in invoking the true body of Christ so melodically and solemnly, had somehow reconciled her to Gawell and thus, within Gawell, to her marriage.

On the military side of his life, Abercare had himself chosen the positions of the Vickers guns on the perimeter, and even in this Suttor had chosen to quarrel over it, declaring it was his understanding that machine guns should be placed much further back, at least two hundred yards from the fence. Abercare declared that the first of them should be sited close to the wire and on the edge of the camp by
the gates of Main Road. It should be left there unmanned and sitting on a trailer so that it might serve as mute discouragement to the prisoners. There, it was nearly two hundred yards from the prison huts, and it was the distance from the huts that counted. So placed, argued Abercare, it could fire down the length of the first of the camp's twelve, nearly circular, sides, three of them owned by Compound C.

The second gun he had set back on the edge of the bush so that it might fire down the midsection of the fence and so that its crew did not run the risk of being killed by the first machine gun. Abercare had seen such arrangements, according to lines of sight, made in the defense of camps during the troubles in Waziristan just ten years before, in another age, when the Fakir of Ipi was innocently considered more dangerous than Hitler and Tojo.

Suttor had registered his own convictions about the placement of guns in a marginally respectful letter. But it was Ewan Abercare's decision, and he made it. He also took the trouble now to go into the Japanese compound every day at four and inspect the demeanor of the inmates—a vain endeavor but one that must be undertaken. Abercare noticed that they seemed a little more prompt than they had previously been—it had been necessary to harry them into the ranks in the past. Did this mean they believed resistance to the process had become less necessary now that they were so sure about their futures? Or, to put it more accurately, their lack of a future. Their faces looked at him emptily, confessing neither hostility nor expectation.

“Do you think they're more tractable recently?” he asked Suttor. “A bit less cheek from them?”

Suttor said, “Perhaps.” And then he weighed the proposition. “They go through phases,” he concluded almost genially.

When the moon was new and nothing but a shadow, he had slept in his quarters in the barracks, where he could be promptly roused by the duty officer. He slept there four nights while it was still a minor crescent. Despite all the lights he had erected it was the moon that
ruled his intentions, and after the half-moon presented itself he went back to town and Emily.

As a means of pacifying Compound C, Suttor had released into the orderly hut within the wire three copies of the
Sydney Morning Herald
for those few who could read and translate for their brethren. There were a few former merchant seamen, Yokohama hands, who had the shaky capacity to write out on toilet paper rough versions of what they saw in the newspapers.

Unlike earlier toilet-paper bulletins, the claim that Saipan had fallen produced the most profound erosion of belief. Many men reasoned that if the enemy were choosing to mislead, to pretend to success, it would have been beyond their gifts to claim a capture so far north in the Pacific as that of Saipan. It sounded so credible, in fact, that Tengan and others honored it with the idea that now, by capturing these islands, the enemy was straining his lines of supply and communication so far that his string would soon run out. This was not the cry of the majority.

Such was the situation at Gawell Camp when Colonel Abercare approached his counterpart at the infantry training camp. He did not know its commander, Horace Deakin, intimately. He knew of Deakin's good repute, but that he had not evaded the chief vice of a training officer—to despise his charges. When he was finished with them, his eighteen-year-olds were either further educated in rainforests in Queensland or else thrown with less decorous preparation into a military adventure—perhaps even the invasion of the enemy homeland, at which task, Deakin was sure, they would, despite all effort put into them, behave haplessly.

On this visit, some days after the emergency meeting at the headquarters in Sydney, Abercare sat in Colonel Deakin's office—Abercare sleek and Deakin hollow-cheeked—passing on the news of a potential outbreak one dark night, and reviewing the signals by which the training battalion would know it had occurred.

Colonel Deakin asked Abercare, “Dark night?”

“Even our informer overheard them say it. A dark night, no moon.”

“But,” said Deakin, frowning over expressive brown eyes, “if their aim is to get killed, wouldn't any day or night do?”

“No,” said Abercare. “Because, again according to our source, they want to capture our company armories. As well as doing themselves harm, they want to do us some. A combination of motives.”

They had tea, and while drinking it Deakin made it clear the defense of
his
camp was paramount, because of its substantial magazines. The safety of the town itself was connected to that issue. And if there was an outbreak, the signals from the camp must be clear, for he had a hundred women from the Army Service, nurses and clerks, in the training camp. “It's unthinkable what might happen to them . . .”

Abercare referred him to the preexisting document covering the issue—the arrangement for shots and flares, the siren.

“We can't be expected to necessarily notice them,” said Deakin, with a desire to fix the entire issue on his own camp and its integrity. If he had had spaciousness of mind in Syria, had been capable of any broad reading, he had lost the gift now, three years later. “Distance and wind might muffle the shots, and the siren ditto. Terrain might block our view of flares.”

“Well,” Abercare conceded, “be assured that my duty officer would be straight on to yours by phone. Would you be in a position to send support?”

“I could send out one company of my first battalion as soon as it could be arranged. This would be to contain your perimeter, or if it were breached to round up escapees.”

Abercare had hoped for a little more, but a company of more than a hundred was not to be despised.

“And that would be dispatched . . .?”

“As promptly as it can be arranged.”

Abercare passed an intelligence assessment over the table to Deakin, who read it as if it were designed to affront the tenor of his mind. “Well,” he said, “this camp here would still be the king on the
chessboard. I must employ the mass of my recruits to defend it. At least they can do that without shooting farmers' cows by accident or design. My desk is laden with farmers' complaints about ill-disciplined fire sweeping across their paddocks. That's the problem with sending them out in numbers, you see. Farmers.”

A company dispatched promptly would be very welcome, Abercare told Deakin. Then he broached the issues of morality, of diplomatic necessity, and of the risk of brutal retaliation against our prisoners up there, in the indefinite reaches of Asia and Melanesia. Morality dictated patrols should recapture any men who escaped from Compound C and should not shoot them even if they pleaded to be shot. “The diplomatic problem,” he said, “involves the good repute we have so far with the Swiss Red Cross and the Japanese section of the Swiss consulate general, to whom the Japanese command listen—if they listen to anyone. In that case, I wonder, might you send me a copy of any relevant orders you now issue? I hope you don't mind my asking.” Deakin conceded that that was all right. He looked into the middle distance. It was as if he were thinking, The final battle is close, and this is such a picayune matter. There would be no outbreak. The boys in his camp would be fighting in the streets of Yokohama, and he would still be in this bush camp and nothing would have happened.

Part of Abercare agreed with him.

•  •  •

After his preparations were in place, a comforting signal from the New South Wales headquarters reached Colonel Abercare. Plans were being drawn up in Sydney to split up Compound C, and move the Japanese NCOs away from Gawell to another camp further west. Amongst the officers of the garrison, only compound and company commanders were to be told as yet. Abercare felt an intense lifting of a pressure he had not known he felt so sharply. This would assure it. No outbreak.

Further instructions came as the headquarters marshaled the necessary transport. On the morning of the first Monday of August, the NCOs would be transported to Gawell railway station in a convoy of trucks. From there a train with opaque and barred windows would take them west to the camp at Wye. Bereft of its leadership, the supposed stratagem of self-obliteration amongst the lower ranks within Compound C would be orphaned.

The garrison somehow knew what was to happen—they had seen the new guards, assigned to take the Compound C men westwards, arrive by truck from another camp. The garrison tasks of the guards were banal, but now at last they had found out, under warning of keeping the secret, something exceptional. By lunchtime on the following Monday, after a watchful weekend, there'd be barely more than half the bastards in Compound C.

Abercare understood that secrets escaped almost by their own internal pressure, by the pressure of the vanity of those men who held them. He conferred with Suttor on the issue of informing the prisoners themselves—of finding a sensible mean between the inevitable leakage of the news, which would enrage the prisoners and perhaps make them reckless, and him or Suttor or both forthrightly telling the prisoners. Abercare thought the men should be told on Saturday afternoon, according to the recommendations of the Geneva Convention that men be given adequate time to prepare for being moved.

Suttor suggested Abercare might perhaps have misread the provisions of the Geneva Convention. “I consulted it myself and in Chapter Eight there is a provision the prisoners must be told where they are being sent. But there is no mention of giving them enough time for farewell parties or troublemaking.”

Abercare went and got the Geneva Convention from his shelf, and a volume of Red Cross recommendations regarding prisoners. The fact he got two codes, thought Suttor, meant he wasn't sure in which one of them the recommendation was. But Suttor said
nothing. To do Abercare justice, he did not look like a man desperate to prove a point. He found the place in a pamphlet on Red Cross recommendations. “Here it is,” he said. He read a passage that declared the International Committee of the Red Cross recommended that before prisoners were moved to another camp, they be given at least twenty-four hours' warning, although a longer warning might in most cases be recommended.

Suttor nodded but said, “That doesn't sound very binding.
Recommended?
In these circumstances?”

Abercare surrendered himself yet again to the inevitability of never liking the man, and never being liked. If we were an infantry battalion in the field, Abercare knew, he would need to get rid of Suttor—by organizing his promotion if other means failed.

“Well . . . how long would you give them if you had your way?” Abercare asked, leaching the question of any tone of annoyance.

“A day, if that?” Suttor suggested. “These are special circumstances involving prisoners who have made speeches about suicide and mayhem. I know how much notice the citizens of Gawell would want to give them. An hour.”

“With due respect for the citizens of Gawell, the prisoners would not feel kindly towards any of us on one hour's notice. It would be good vengeance but a destructive policy. But a little under two days makes sense for all of us. They must have time to pack and say their good-byes.”

Suttor said, “This is an enemy that has refused to ratify the Geneva Convention.”

“But we have, and we fulfill our commitments.”

Suttor, nakedly aggrieved now, said, “I hope that helps my son. And all the others spread across North Asia.”

“Telling them before the men go to town for a drink on Saturday night is wise. And as well as that, the news will cause a lot of drinking of grappa and bombo. It's likely half of them will be tight for the last two nights. And even without the new searchlights, these were wrong
nights for any attack from inside the compound—especially if the prisoners had any ambition to capture the armory.”

“And we'll get a big tick from the Swiss and the Red Cross,” said Suttor, calmer now but still intractable and shaking his head. “For what that's worth.”

•  •  •

For his daily inspection of the compound, Major Suttor took three armed guards and Nevski, who never wore a sidearm.

Suttor's instructions had always been not to be overly diligent about searching. Homemade weapons were to be confiscated, but he did not want to find the stills they possessed, which turned their polished rice leftovers into the clear liquor they called bombo. Neither he nor Abercare were concerned if their prisoners stupefied themselves with booze. They did not seem to be aggressive drunks, and bombo, like the news of Saipan, was a means of pacifying the compound.