‘Dear God!’ Lawrence interrupted here, shaking his head sadly. ‘Haven’t we all covered the same ground ourselves? But is that all there can ever be to it?’
I went on to tell him that by the time Celliers had returned to North Africa the Japanese had overrun Burma and Malaya; Singapore had fallen, and Java and Sumatra had surrendered almost without a fight. The future everywhere looked black. Then a gloomy Headquarters at Cairo had asked Celliers since he spoke Dutch whether he would be prepared to jump by parachute with a small select band into Java to keep up a ‘nuisance’ guerrilla warfare against the Japanese? He had agreed and some months later he and four companions were parachuted into a remote valley in Bantam. He was reticent about what had followed. Of course we didn’t have much chance to talk because he was not with us very long, and the experience also, I suspected, was very close and painfuclass="underline" it had been the reason for his long secret confinement and torture. The wound of the memory was still so fresh that any question tended to set it bleeding again. Still, he did unbend to me enough for me to gather that his mission had been a total failure.
All along it had been founded on the assumption that the peoples of the Sunda lands in Java would cooperate with him against the Japanese. In fact, not only did they keep him at a sullen distance but both his specialists were brutally murdered. The promise of the General Staff that support and supplies were to be sent by submarine was never kept. Even Celliers’s radio signals were never acknowledged though for two months he tried to call both Colombo and Delhi at the agreed hour on the prearranged wave-lengths. He admitted all this without any special emotion: he appeared to have made his peace with it long since. He had had in all only one serious brush with the Japanese.
One day he had made contact with a platoon of Ambonese infantry wandering in deep jungle. Lawrence would remember those sturdy native soldiers from the island of Ambon for we had had many of them in prison with us. They were the finest of all the soldiers in the old Netherlands East Indies Army, devout Christians, and born mercenaries in the best sense of the word. They and the Menadonese, so akin to them, were almost the only Colonial troops there who had seen action. This particular platoon were on patrol in West Bantam when the frantic surrender came. Their Dutch officer had left them in charge of a sergeant-major and gone out for news of the surrender. He had never returned and the Ambonese made no secret of the fact that they believed he had deserted them to put on civilian clothes to escape internment. They had no clear idea of what would become of them but had instinctively remained together avoiding the Japanese. They had made straight for the wildest part of Bantam, getting rice from the peasants, and each night as the darkness fell they sang their sombre Dutch hymns. To meet Celliers, an officer who spoke Dutch even though he was in British uniform, seemed to them a direct answer from God to their prayers. They attached themselves instantly to him with a willingness that stirred him profoundly. Their supplies were almost vanished, their money and field medicines gone, and Celliers’s small party were even worse off.
Realizing that they could not hold out for long in such a way Celliers suggested that they ambush one of the Japanese convoys which ran supplies regularly from the roadstead at Palaboehanratoefn1 to the highway’s junction at Soekaboemi.fn2 They did so promptly but with mixed results. They got the supplies, money and ammunition they needed, but the Japanese escort made such a valiant stand that three of the Ambonese and one of Celliers’s officers were killed. Another was so badly wounded that rather than abandon him to the enemy, Celliers killed him himself with a lethal dose of morphia.
Knowing that the Japanese would retaliate quickly and in great strength, Celliers now withdrew with his party to the west. Alone now with his staunch, hymn-singing yellow soldiers, he went deeper into that dense silent jungle of the southern Sunda land guarded by giant and reeking volcanoes lazily blowing fumes like cigar smoke into the faces of the great white thunder-clouds striding the high sky above them. Each day the increase of air activity and the way in which the peasants shrank from them while even the children at their approach disappeared swiftly into their elongated houses of bamboo and straw mounted on stilts above the flashing paddy water, warned Celliers that agents of powerful enemy forces determined on retribution, were in the vicinity.
One evening they had made camp on a mountain top on the edge of a lovely valley many roadless miles from any known centre of Sundanese life. The mountain was called Djaja Sempoer: ‘Peak of the Arrow’; the valley Lebaksembada: ‘That which is well made.’ Celliers was confident that they could indefinitely play hide-and-seek with the Japanese in the immense jungle and primeval forests which rolled in great waves through valleys and over volcanic tops like green ocean water driven before a typhoon. The Ambonese soldiers were gathering round an old warrant officer who was also their lay-preacher for the evening service. The sun was setting and Celliers remembered how tender was its light on the broken-off summit of the formidable volcano of Krakatoa just visible in the Sunda Straits far to the west. He was watching it, deep in thought, when the Ambonese began to sing in Dutch: ‘Blyft met my Oh Heer!’: ‘Abide with me, Oh Lord!’
Instantly Celliers had been taken far back in memory to the hills in Palestine and, in a moment of revelation, he had seen what he called his ‘betrayal’ in other terms. As now I told Lawrence I could still remember the exact words that he had used: ‘Listening to those simple Christian souls singing among the pagan woods,’ he had said, ‘I knew then that I had not been obedient to my own awareness of life.’
‘My God!’ Lawrence exclaimed, stirred for a moment out of his role as tense listener.
Yes, I emphasized, that was what he’d said, and later in hospital Celliers had explained to me that he had come to realize that life had no meaning unless one was obedient to one’s awareness of it. He attributed the sense of meaninglessness which had afflicted his world before the war to just that fact: it had been disobedient to its own greater awareness. I asked him what ‘awareness’ had meant to him as he sat there in the sunset hour on the Peak of the Arrow? He’d replied it was easier to say what it was not, rather than what it was! It was certainly not merely cerebral effort or achievement. It was not what we called knowledge, for, as he saw it, our knowledge tended to pin us down, to imprison us in what should be no more than a frontier position. What he meant by ‘awareness’ was perhaps a sense of the as yet unimagined wholeness of life; a recognition that one could live freely only on the frontiers of one’s being where the known was still contained in the infinite unknown, and where there could be a continual crossing and re-crossing of tentative borders, like lone hunters returning from perilous sojourns in great forests. It was, to put it pictorially, he said, a way of living not only by moonlight or sunlight, but also by starlight. He spoke with great feeling and said that as his men had been hymn-singing there on the mountain top he had realized that from henceforth he must learn above all to love the necessity of search for a greater wholeness in life. His tragedy, as of many of his generation, was that they had not been helped to think of love in its truly heroic sense. He, as they, were condemned by what he called the ‘betrayal of the natural brother in their lives’, and could see little in the world around them beyond the hatred caused by their own rejections.