In that mood he had observed that most of Yonoi’s colleagues succeeded in their efforts to avoid his eye, but fortunately for him, Yonoi did not. I asked why Celliers thought Yonoi had failed where the others succeeded. He had paused a long time before answering and then said slowly: ‘I guess Yonoi and I were birds of a feather caught in the same trap of our own bright plumage. He too was a fugitive from his own, inner law – just as I was.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Talk about loyalty to the old school tie. It’s not a patch on the loyalty of the old Borstal knot.’
As the day of the trial wore on, Celliers remarked how the handsome Yonoi was less and less able to resist looking at him with unguarded eyes. When finally the moment came for sentence (and Celliers had no doubt it would be one of death) Yonoi had found the courage to seize on some hair-splitting legality for a mitigation of sentence and to argue it with queer persistence and adroitness. Celliers explained to me here that the charge of’ wilfulness’ against him rested on the fact that he had gone on fighting after the superior officers on the Central Allied Command in Java had agreed to surrender unconditionally. However, Yonoi argued his special point now with such skill that finally the judge’s president gave him permission to put some questions to the prisoner. For the first time Celliers heard his clipped, slow, implacable English:
‘You!’ Yonoi said: ‘You – you say you ordered come by parachute Java. Who ordered?’
‘I received my orders from the Commander-in-Chief India,’ Celliers answered.
Pausing only to translate to his fellow judges Yonoi went on:
‘You not ordered by General in Java?’
‘How could I have been?’ Celliers asked. ‘I came from Cairo to Colombo and flew from Colombo to Java two months after the surrender. I’ve never even seen the Commander-in-Chief of Java or had any communication with his officers.’
As he spoke Celliers saw a flash of satisfaction in Yonoi’s brilliant eyes. Yonoi turned to his judges to suggest with tact and passion that the charge of’ wilfulness’ could not be held because Celliers had obeyed, as any soldier must, the orders of his own Commander-in-Chief in India, who was still fighting. He had not received any orders whatsoever from the General who had surrendered in Java. This by no means pleased the judges though it did influence them. They overruled Yonoi in that they found Celliers guilty but agreed with him to the extent that they postponed sentence, presumably in order to consult a higher authority.
After the trial Celliers lay for weeks alone in his cell in semi-darkness, but he had a feeling that the doubt raised by Yonoi and the postponement of sentence had somehow let loose forces which were fighting staunchly on his side. I myself had noticed in prison that if ever something came between our jailers and their spontaneous impulse to act they seemed incapable of concentrating on their resolve for long, and once they had hesitated the resolve tended to go by default. Time and again Celliers was told that he was to be executed, and taken out of his cell to see other unknown condemned men and women executed, yet he never believed it was going to happen to him until the evening of his release.
That day the Secret Police had removed him roughly from his cell, taken him to the guard room where the Kempeitai officer who supervised executions and Yonoi sat side by side. Yonoi again gave him that strange, intense look but said nothing. The Kempeitai officer opened his file and put some questions to him through an interpreter. That done the sergeant closed the file and looked at Yonoi. Yonoi, deeply preoccupied, nodded and continued to stare sombrely at Celliers. There was something new in that look, Celliers said, yet when his guards threw him back in his cell with a laugh, saying in Malay: ‘Tomorrow you die!’ he really believed it.
His reaction then, he told me, was really one of relief: relief that uncertainty was at an end and that his physical suffering would soon be over, but mostly relief that there could now be no further betrayal between him and his end. But, he told me with a smile, he had discovered that the human heart had its own dearest wishes even in regard to death. He found there was only one way in which he wanted to die. He had seen so many people executed, strangled, hanged, decapitated, beaten, starved to death, drowned and bayoneted. He wanted none of these ways of dying. He longed, with a passion he had never experienced before, to be shot with his eyes wide open to the natural and beautiful reality of day left to him. Once he reached that conclusion, he was concerned only with trying to persuade his executioners to gratify his final passion.
Instantly he thought of Yonoi. Yonoi, obviously, would have a great deal to do with Celliers’s execution. As a last wish he would ask to see Yonoi and appeal to him. Somehow he was convinced that such an appeal would not faiclass="underline" and after that he was at peace.
For a while he lay awake on the damp floor of his cell listening to the great nightly thunderstorm coming up. His cell at moments was so filled with lightning that it stood like a solid cube of gold against the purple Javanese night. He thought he had never seen light more beautiful nor heard sound more wonderful. When at last the rain fell and joined with the other storm sounds they brought him great comfort reminding him that, on the last tide, the abiding answer was not with man but with life; the true ‘power and the glory’ were beyond all the comings and goings of man, no matter how imperious and impressive. Then he fell asleep and had to be shaken by his jailers as the dawn broke.
However, the guards were gentler with him than they had ever been which only confirmed his conviction that he was about to die. Determined to love even this last necessity, he asked for permission to wash and shave before his execution, and one of the guards went and fetched him a bowl of lukewarm water and gave him a meagre piece of soap. He went up into the Kempeitai guard room clean and refreshed. The officer-executioner of the evening before was already there with both guard and interpreter. He gave Celliers a quick professional appraisal, his eyes lingering on the prisoner’s neck.
‘Do you know,’ he asked Celliers through the sleepy interpreter, ‘what I think of when I see you?’
‘I regret I have no idea,’ Celliers replied.
‘I look at your neck, its length and its strength and the way it fits to your head and shoulders . . . and I think how best to cut through it with one blow of my sword!’ He said it all merrily, laughing at the end as if it were a great joke.
To his own amazement Celliers found himself jerked out of the serene composure of the night by the gratuitous cruelty of the joke. The old ‘Straffer’ flared again and he said quickly: ‘And d’you know what I think as I look at you? I think how pretty a hangman’s noose is going to look round your neck when you’ve lost the war.’
But the moment he said it he felt deeply sad that he had been jerked out of his previous serenity.
Meanwhile the counter-attack had been so unexpected that the laughter withered instantly on all Kempeitai lips. The officer gasped and then furiously leaped forward and knocked Celliers down. As he fell Celliers thought: ‘That’s torn it: there goes my last hope of being shot.’