Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Laurens van der Post
Title Page
A Bar of Shadow
Christmas Eve
The Seed and the Sower
Christmas Morning
The Sword and the Doll
Christmas Night
Copyright
About the Book
This is war as experienced in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java in 1942, but, above all, war as experienced in the hearts and souls of men.
This is the story of two British officers whose spirit the Japanese try to break. Yet out of the terrible violence and hardship strange bonds of love and friendship are forged between the prisoners – and their gaolers.
This is a battle for survival that becomes a battle of contrasting wills and cultures as the intensities of the men’s relationships develop.
About the Author
Laurens van der Post was born in South Africa in 1906, the thirteenth of fifteen children in a family of Dutch and French Huguenot origins. Most of his adult life was spent with one foot in Africa and one in England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years of soldiering in the British Army, serving with distinction in the Western Desert, Abyssinia, Burma and the Far East. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was held in captivity for three years before returning to active service as a member of Lord Mountbatten’s staff in Indonesia and, later, as Military Attaché to the British Minister in Java.
After 1949 he undertook several official missions exploring little-known parts of Africa, and his journey in search of the Bushmen in 1957 formed the basis of his famous documentary film and The Lost World of the Kalahari. Other television films include All Africa Within Us and The Story of Carl Gustav Jung, whom he met after the war and grew to know as a personal friend. In 1934 he wrote In a Province, the first book by a South African to expose the horrors of racism. Other books include Venture to the Interior (1952), The Heart of the Hunter (1961), and A Walk with a White Bushman (1986). The Seed and the Sower was made into a film under the title Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, and, more recently, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place were combined and made into the film A Far-Off Place.
Sir Laurens van der Post was awarded the CBE in 1947 and received his knighthood in 1981. He died in 1996.
Also by Laurens van der Post
In a Province
Venture to the Interior
The Face Beside the Fire
Flamingo Feather
The Dark Eye in Africa
The Lost World of the Kalahari
The Heart of the Hunter
Journey into Russia
The Hunter and the Whale
The Night of the New Moon
A Story Like the Wind
A Far-Off Place
A Mantis Carol
Jung and the Story of our Time
First Catch Your Eland
Yet Being Someone Other
A Walk With a White Bushman
About Blady: A Pattern Out of Time
The Voice of the Thunder
Feather Fall
The Seed and the Sower
Laurens van der Post
Et venio in campos et lata
Praetoria memoriae.
St Augustine
And I come to the fields and wide palaces of memory.
The book as a whole to my wife
INGARET GIFFARD
for editing this Christmas trilogy with such concern for its meaning;
A Bar of Shadow, as it was when first published, to
WILLIAM PLOMER
Note
Grateful thanks are due to the Editor and Publishers of The Cornhill, in which A Bar of Shadow first appeared. for permission to reprint it.
A Bar of Shadow
Christmas Eve
A Bar of Shadow
AS WE WALKED across the fields we hardly spoke. I, myself, no longer had the heart to try and make conversation. I had looked forward so eagerly to this Christmas visit of John Lawrence and yet now that he was here, we seemed incapable of talking to each other in a real way. I had not seen him for five years; not since we said good-bye at our prison gates on release at the end of the war, I to return to my civilian life, he to go straight back to the Army on active service. Until then for years he and I had walked as it were hand in hand with the danger of war and endured the same bitter things at the hands of the Japanese in prison. Indeed, when our release came we found that our experience, shared in the embattled world about us, fitted like a measured garment to the great and instinctive coincidence of affection we felt for each other. That moment of rounded nearness had stayed with me. There was no separation in it for me, no distance of purple leagues between him and me. I knew only too well the cruel and unnecessary alliance (unnecessary because either one of them is powerful enough) that time and distance contract for waging their war against our brief and brittle human nearnesses. But if I had managed to stay close, why should he have been set so far apart? For that is precisely what I felt. Although he was so near to me that I had but to half-stretch out a hand to take his arm, never in five years of separation had he seemed so far away as now.
I stole a quick glimpse of him. The suit of pre-war tweeds, which still fitted him perfectly, sat on his tall broad frame more like service uniform than becoming country garments and he was walking like a somnambulist at my side, with an odd unconscious deliberation and purposefulness, a strange, tranced expression on his face. His large grey eyes, set well apart under that fine and wide brow in a noble head, were blue with the distance between us. Even the light of that contracting December afternoon, receding from the day like the grey tide of a stilled sea from a forgotten and forlorn foreshore fuming silently in the gathering mists of time, glowed in his eyes not like a light from without so much as the fading tones of a frozen wintry moment far back in some calendar of his own within. Their focus clearly was not of that moment and that place and the irony of it was almost more than I could bear without protest.
I don’t know what I would have done if something unknown within me, infinitely wiser and more knowledgeable than my conscious self marching at his side in bitter judgement over this resumption that was not a resumption of our relationship, had not suddenly swept into command and ordered me to ask: ‘You have not by any chance run into “Rottang” Hara again?’
The question was out before I even knew I was going to ask it and instantly I felt a fool at having put it, so irrelevant and remote from that moment did it seem. But to my amazement, he stopped short in his tracks, turned to me and, like someone released from an emotion too tight for him, said with obvious relief:
‘It is curious you asking me that! For I was thinking of him just then.’ He paused slightly and then added with an apologetic laugh, as if he feared being misunderstood: ‘I have been thinking of him all day. I can’t get him out of my mind.’
My relief matched his, for instantly I recognized a contact that could bridge his isolation. Here was a preoccupation I could understand and follow a long way even if I could not share it to the end. Just the thought of Hara and the mention of his name was enough to bring the living image of the man as clearly to my senses as if I had only just left him and as if at any moment now behind me that strange, strangled, nerve-taut, solar-plexus voice of his which exploded in him when he was enraged, would shriek ‘Kura!’ – the rudest of the many rude ways in Japanese of saying: ‘Come here, you!’