‘It’s odd,’ Celliers was saying. ‘How that star seems to follow me around. You should have seen it as I saw it in a winter sky over the high veld of Africa or one night over the hills before Bethlehem. I spotted it even in full daylight from the jungles of Bantam – but I’ve never seen it more lovely than now. There’s light enough in it tonight to fill both one’s hands to overflowing. He broke off to peer down towards the ground at our feet where the earth was still wet and glistening from a heavy downpour in the afternoon. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed, his voice young with astonishment. ‘It throws a shadow as well. Look just behind you in the wet. There’s your star shadow following you faithfully around. How strange that even a star should have a shadow.’
‘Look, Straffer,’ I changed the subject abruptly because Celliers’s voice lately seemed to me to have too much of an undertone of fate in it. ‘You know, of course, you might be landed with the command of us all at any moment now?’
‘I guessed so,’ he answered. ‘But I’ll try to get out of it, unless you all wish it? What about the other senior officers if Yonoi insists on my taking over?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘We’re not a united bunch at all as you may have noticed. You’ve joined us at a very critical moment. I’m pretty certain something frightful is about to happen and in the circumstances everyone may forget their differences and be ready to accept a new command.’
‘You say something frightful is about to happen?’ Celliers stopped in his stride, turned quickly to face me and asked: ‘What? Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘I’ve no idea. I’m not even certain that what I fear is about to happen to us. All I know is that we can do nothing to stop it coming – and that when it comes you may find yourself charged unfairly with the responsibility of dealing with it.’
I spoke for once straight out of my feelings and to my amazement Celliers, for the first time since I had known him, gave me the impression that I had really succeeded in getting close to him. He took me affectionately by the arm and looked intently at me.
‘Of course,’ Lawrence interrupted me. ‘I can guess why, can’t you?’
I shook my head and he hurried on to say: ‘But surely it was because you were speaking out of your own experience, your own suffering, and so beginning to speak the “idiom” he had learnt? If only we could all re-learn to speak out of our common suffering and need we too would be surprised to find how close we are to one another.’
Lawrence’s interjection threw much light on the turmoil of feelings that had assailed me that evening when Celliers and I stood there arm-in-arm in prison with our star-shadows beside us in the night. I could still hear Celliers saying gently: ‘I wouldn’t worry about the unfairness of what I might be asked to do, though I am most grateful for your concern. There are situations where personal “fairness” and unfairness” are utterly irrelevant. And this may well be one of them. But please tell me – if you’ll forgive so heretical a question – why you are so certain something unpleasant is about to happen?’
He used the word ‘heretical’ with an intimate teasing note. I told him that the ‘unseeing’ mechanism of the Japanese was once more at work in our midst. I was just finishing my explanation when a series of commands were shouted aloud to the sentries at the main gate.
‘You hear that?’ I asked Celliers. ‘Well, if you knew those sounds as well as I do you’ll realize they’re not normal. The guard is changing over as it does every night at this hour. But the voice of command is different. It’s taut with tension, charged with the thing which is building up in them all, just like that thunderstorm beyond the mountain.’
‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘And I’m afraid I agree with you. I recognize the atmosphere before an execution. We’ll just have to wait until it comes and if it does and I have to take charge, I promise you I’ll do so without hesitation. Thereafter we can think again . . .’
We stood there silent. In one of the hedgerows the fireflies began to come out like showers of sparks shaken by some fire deep in the earth. Again those strange solar-plexus noises of the guard at the gate broke on the night. The last light of day was gone and only the stars and the sweep of distant lightning was left to trouble the dark. The wet earth at our feet now was like an antique mirror and we stood with our feet among the stars.
Once more Celliers remarked quietly: ‘You know I can’t get over a star, so steeped in the night as that one there, throwing a shadow.’
Then arm-in-arm we went on slowly to complete our last round of the prison.
The trouble started the next day soon after our morning meal of thin tapioca gruel. I had just given Celliers a hat which had belonged to an officer executed a month before. What was more I had persuaded an Australian soldier who had brought it as a souvenir from the Western Desert, to part with the metal springbok head that South African soldiers wore on their caps, and I had fitted this to the hat. The badge was slightly damaged, the tip of one horn being broken but so slightly that it was hardly noticeable. Yet Celliers spotted the damage at once. At the time I thought it was just another proof of his alert senses. Now I realized, of course, just as Lawrence did, that there was more to it than that. As he stared at the badge I have no doubt that he was thinking of Stompie. Indeed, after thanking me warmly, I seemed to remember him muttering something about ‘most strange . . .’ However, at that moment the orderly of the day came up to me at the double to say Yonoi wanted all camp commanders immediately at his headquarters.
Soon we were standing in a row, the English, American, Australian, Dutch, Chinese, Ambonese and Menadonese section commanders, in front of Yonoi’s desk. The clerk at the table in the corner, the sentry at the door and the warrant officer in charge, had none of them looked at us once since our arrival. Yonoi himself stood at the window, his back to us, silent for close on fifteen minutes, the ticking of the clock in the office so loud in the unnatural stillness that it sounded like a dentist’s hammer tapping on the teeth in my head. When at last Yonoi broke the silence he did so with his back to us, speaking through an interpreter, always a bad sign because it suggested that a process of not-hearing was joining the one of not-seeing.
‘So!’ he said, ‘there are no armourers, gun-smiths or armament experts among the four thousand prisoners which the Imperial Japanese Army has been gracious enough to spare?’
He was referring to an order he had passed on to us from Army Command some weeks before telling us to render a full list of officers and men within these categories. The demand had struck dismay in the camp because it could only mean that the Japanese wanted to use men so qualified to help in their war effort. They had no right under international law to make such a request. Yet everyone knew from bitter experience that refusal to make a return would have appalling consequences for the men in our charge. Nonetheless some of us wanted to tell Yonoi politely but firmly that the order was illegal and that we could not comply. Others felt that we should tell a lie and say we had no armourers amongst us. For long hours the senior officers of all nationalities had debated the issue until it became clear that no agreement could be reached. Finally, by a majority vote, it had been decided to make a false return. And now the lying bird was coming back to its terrible roost in our midst.