Of course I went at once to be hit across the face with the back of the guard’s hand. Korean guards in front of the secret police had to be more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. But suddenly there was a loud bellow behind me. Yonoi had appeared unobtrusively through a side gate and, seeing what was happening, had shouted to stop it.
‘I can see him doing it,’ Lawrence said. ‘He was always a great stickler for discipline. He disapproved of punishment unless ordered by himself.’
‘On this occasion he went much farther,’ I told Lawrence. ‘He told the corporal to stand to attention while he gave him a terrible beating about the head and face with his cane, that piece of Javanese rottang he always carried, remember?’
Just then, I am certain we both had Yonoi’s face vividly before us. He was a striking person we both agreed, perhaps the most handsome Japanese we had ever seen. He had an ascetic, almost a priestlike face, round head and an aquiline nose. His eyes were well spaced and though slanted in the manner of his race, were brilliantly compelling. He was also taller than most, and straightly made. He was the tidiest Japanese officer I have ever known too, his uniform always well cut and spotless and his jackboots polished and shining. He carried himself with a conscious air of distinction which most of us put down to vanity but which, I now said to Lawrence, may have been concerned with some special notion of honour that was inaccessible to us?
Lawrence nodded his head in agreement, remarking that one understood nothing about Yonoi and his people unless one had some intimation of the deep moon-honour always beckoning them in the great darkness that surrounded their overcrowded little lives. That was one of the things which had made life so difficult for us as prisoners of war. We were separated from our captors by many things, not the least of them being different conceptions of honour. In Yonoi’s code it was the abandonment of all honour for a soldier to be taken prisoner alive – But he was digressing, Lawrence said, and begged me to continue.
It took Yonoi some while to recover his self-control after beating the guard. His face had gone white and he stood muttering sounds that came not from his tongue or throat but, rather like a ventriloquist’s, straight from within his stomach. The Korean clearly expected the beating to begin again at any moment though the blood was flowing from his nose, ears and forehead. He just succeeded in standing upright and finally Yonoi turned his back on him and spoke to me. He was the only prison commander I knew who would try his tongue at English.
‘You! Officer!’ he asserted, speaking the words with difficulty and with great pauses for recollection and application between each. Then he pointed to where Celliers was swaying uncertainly on his feet. ‘That person also officer. . . . That officer very weak. . . . Take good care! Make well! Lakas! Quick!’
He watched me with narrowed eyes as I went to Celliers. Not until I had Celliers firmly by the arm did he turn to go back into the guard room where he began a loud reprimand to the entire guard. He was still at it as I helped Celliers towards the crowded cantonments we had converted into a hospital. As usual, when there was evidence of ‘a hate’ about, my fellow-prisoners had all withdrawn out of sight into their barracks. I could hear their tense whispers behind the thin bamboo walls discussing what might come out of this row at the gate where Yonoi still growled like some angry animal.
‘Well, Straffer,’ I said, trying to conceal my shock at the change in his appearance. ‘This is a surprise! You look all in – but we’ll soon take care of that. We’ve got one or two first-class doctors in camp with us. Not too badly off for medicine either. And from time to time we can buy food for the sick from the Chinese merchants outside. We’ll soon get you well!’
A slight smile played over his haggard, sun-creased face. ‘Lucky to be here at all. Thought I was going to have my head cut off today – in fact I was taken out this morning to be executed in public. But for some reason they didn’t fulfil either my expectations or their intentions.’
It was said with a free gaiety that at any time would have been remarkable. I remember that it occurred to me that the old ‘Straffer’ Celliers I had known in the Western Desert wouldn’t have reacted in quite the same way. Part of him might even have resented such an order of release.
However, at that time I had no idea how deep the change in him went so I remarked amazed: ‘But how did you get away with it? They’ve executed quite a few of us recently. How did you do it?’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ he answered, smiling again. ‘I think they let me off because they liked the look of me.’
‘He said that?’ Lawrence exclaimed.
‘And quite without bitterness,’ I replied.
‘Well, in view of this’ – Lawrence tapped the yellow manuscript on his knees with a long finger – ‘You must have thought that interesting?’
‘But I hadn’t read the manuscript then,’ I said. ‘All I thought at the time, if I thought anything, was that the new “Straffer”, in the last analysis, was just as relieved to escape death as any of us.’
I concluded by telling Celliers that one day he must tell me what really happened, for he was not in a condition for it at that moment. Lawrence would know from his own experience what Celliers’s physical state must have been like after prolonged confinement and torture – so I’d skip the details. But our doctors were amazed that he should be still alive and without permanent injury to his system. But physical well-being seemed to be Celliers’s particular speciality.
With care and a liberal ration of our hospital fare which we were still allowed in those early days to buy from the Chinese for our invalids, he recovered. I saw him regularly since Yonoi asked after him daily when I went to his headquarters to report. That a prison commander should take such a close interest in a prisoner had never happened before and it made a great impression on me. I just couldn’t understand it. I was increasingly confounded when the doctor reported to me that from time to time Yonoi would appear without warning in the open entrance of the hospital cantonment. He would stand there looking at the corner where Straffer lay, taking no notice of anyone else. He would just stand there staring at Straffer as if – as one Australian doctor put it to me – they were two of a kind. The doctor added: ‘Made me uncomfortable. Something not quite healthy about it.’
The strange thing was that Yonoi’s interest never brought him to speak to Straffer on any occasion. After standing there for some time he would summon the doctor in charge and say: ‘Officer there: make well!’ Finishing in that expressive Malay word: ‘Lakas! quick!’
It seemed that Yonoi’s spirit, too, was in a hurry of its own.
But to return to Celliers’s story . . . I learnt from him in the days that followed that something of significance had happened to him which had sent him hurrying home on leave to South Africa. Celliers told me that for a time he had had a terrible struggle with himself to know what to do about the war. He had thought out many plans and had even thought of transferring to a Red Cross unit. But in the end he had rejected all these solutions. He had felt that a person with a history such as his could not suddenly contract out of a situation which he had helped to bring about, and seek some specially privileged solution of the spirit. He was convinced that we were all accessories to the fact of war, and that once war had become a fact we could not avoid our own role in it. I remembered a phrase he had often repeated in our discussions in hospital. None of us, he claimed, were pure enough to claim a special solution for ourselves out of ‘our own human and time context’. We could none of us afford, without fatal excess of spirit, to by-pass any of the stages through which life itself was forced to go. The spirit’s battle for life was so important that one had to accept the challenge on whichever level it was presented, no matter how exalted or how humble or horrible. One had even to respect the need of the spirit for death in certain living issues and just take what decency and proportion one could lay claim to into the killing. Celliers made no pretence of thinking that this was the final answer but that was as far, he said, as he could carry it at the moment.