I have said before that we lacked real leadership and I never felt it more as I looked at the silent row of anxious vacant faces of the officers beside me. To give him his due, Hicksley-Ellis (whom Lawrence had already described as a foreign cartoonist’s idea of an Englishman with no chin, a rush of teeth to the front, a whispy untidy moustache, pink face and large popping eyes) seemed ready to act. Knowing his infallible knack of irritating Yonoi, I was about to forestall him when Yonoi, his voice barely under control, repeated his question and then, without waiting for an answer, ordered us to parade with all our men within five minutes on the open ground in the prison. We hurried from the building knowing that the worst was about to happen and our only chance of mitigating it was to carry out the order with dispatch and precision. I heard an Ambonese officer say to his Menadonese colleague: ‘Say your prayers quickly, brother, for God alone can help us today.’
We were not yet back in our lines when the bell at the gate of Yonoi’s headquarters started to peal frantically and the buildings outside our prison walls where guards as well as Japanese infantry were housed began to resound with those odd abdominal military commands. We were barely assembled on the parade ground, officers in front of each group of men, when all the gates were thrown open and the Japanese soldiery came running in from all sides. Except for their mortars they were armed in full preparedness for battle. They quickly set up heavy black machine-guns at all four corners of the parade ground, their crews going to earth in firing positions beside them while the rest of the sections began fixing their bayonets. For a moment the sound of the metal snapping into position and the machine-gun crews testing the mechanisms and magazines of their weapons rang out ominously all around us. But once that was done a deep silence fell over the camp.
We stood there thus for an hour, the blazing sun beating down directly upon us, looking at the silent Japanese infantry in firing positions, the black muzzles of their guns sighted on our dense lines and from time to time swinging along the crowded formations as the machine-gunners practised their aim. There was no sign of Yonoi or indeed of any officer in command. Each section must have been carefully briefed beforehand and stood or lay at the ready under command of its N.C.O.s.
Again, stronger than ever, I had a feeling of unreality. The great glittering day opening out around us, the thunder-clouds coming up like explosions from the sea and rolling high over the reeking volcano tops towards us proclaimed the universe to be about its normal business. The birds around us were singing as clearly and urgently as ever. The shining air over the gleaming paddies outside was humming like a guitar string with the burning wings of myriads of dragonflies and water insects. And even in the great tree by the prison gate immediately behind one of the machine-gun sections the flying lizards had begun to glide gracefully down to earth from the branches where they housed to search for food. Only we seemed locked out from that overwhelming sea-swell of life around us and I felt black in my heart that all else should appear so unconcerned at our fate.
So a full hour went by in this fashion. We dared not speak since we knew from experience how easily any sound or movement of body could provoke our jailers on these occasions.
But Celliers who was standing next to me did ask in a whisper: ‘What’s the form now? Do they often do this sort of thing? What started it?’
I managed to tell him that it had never happened quite like this before with so great a show of force, and briefly explained the ostensible cause adding: ‘I’m sorry it’s happened on your first day out. But it’s no good pretending that anything might not happen at any moment. They might even be getting ready to massacre us all.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw to my amazement something close to a smile on his face. He said in a whisper so confident that I felt the dead heart in me grow warm again. ‘Nonsense. I won’t let them massacre anybody. I think I know just how to stop them.’
‘You know?’ I asked, my voice like that of a stranger in my own ears.
‘I do. But be careful,’ he whispered back, long pauses between each phrase. ‘I don’t like the way that bloke in charge of the machine-gun over there is watching us. His eye has not left my face these past few minutes.’
We remained silent then until, at the end of the first hour, Celliers asked me: ‘I wonder if you can hear it too?’
‘Hear what?’ I asked alarmed by the urgent tone of his question.
‘The music,’ he answered.
Puzzled, I listened more intently than ever. Apart from the normal electro-sonics of that tropical island and the throb of its volcanic heart beating at the temples of the thin-skinned earth of the island there was no sound to be heard.
I told him so but he insisted, saying: ‘There’s the most enchanting music in my ears. It’s all around us. It’s lovely and it’s everywhere.’
Though still a whisper his voice was full of a strange exaltation. I stole a quick glance at his face and the look on it was hardly of this world. I imagined then (and did so until recently I went to Celliers’s home and spoke to his brother’s wife), that the horror piling up around us coming so soon after his suffering in the hands of the secret police was disturbing the balance of his senses. Now I am not so sure. His sister-in-law told me that after comparing times and dates – as Lawrence would know there was a wide difference between Javanese and South African time – she had woken up in the night at that precise moment and noticed her husband was not in bed beside her. Suddenly afraid she had tried to light a candle when he spoke to her out of the dark, saying: ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m here by the window.’
She could just make out his dark silhouette against a window glistening faintly like water with star-shine between him and the night. But his voice was uneasy and she asked: ‘Why are you standing there? What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know,’ he had answered. ‘I was woken up in my sleep by a sound of music. Can’t you hear it too? It’s still going on somewhere out there beyond the stars.’
She shook her head but knowing her husband’s gift of strange intuition felt more frightened than ever.
Then, before she could answer, he said again: ‘Dear God in heaven, can’t you hear it? I wonder what it is?’ He had paused and turned. ‘Oh! I’m so afraid for Ouboet suddenly. . . . For the first time I fear for him.’
At that he had put down his head and began crying quietly without a sound of any kind, the tears coming out of him, she said, so effortlessly that it was as if her husband was a vessel overflowing with water. She could not comfort him and they slept no more that night. But for close on a week he went about singing the little tune he had composed in his father’s garden thirty years before, and once he had turned to her and said with quiet certainty: ‘I think Ouboet is in terrible trouble and needs me. I’m singing for him.’ After doing this for close on a week he suddenly stopped and sang that tune no more.
However, knowing nothing of this, I stood there in the full glare of sunlight beside Celliers on that terrible morning uncomforted by his belief that he was listening to a tidal harmony of sounds and voices. I said nothing because I felt he had already suffered enough and if he found comfort, like Joan of Arc, in hearing heavenly voices he deserved to be allowed to cling to it. Nor had I time to say anything for a series of commands had rung out at the gate and the guard was rushing to present arms. Yonoi, followed by his warrant officer, a veteran of the wars in Manchuria and China, together with an interpreter walked in. He barely acknowledged the salute of the sentries and came straight to the centre of the parade ground looking neither to left nor right of him. Once there he turned to face our ranks, placed his supple legs in shining jack-boots wide apart and firm on the ground, his hands clasped behind his back. He was almost directly opposite us and about fifty yards away. I was dismayed to note from the angle of his head that, although he was facing us, his eyes were glancing over our heads.