Here, Lawrence, his face white, interrupted me. ‘Straffer went as far as that –’
I nodded and described how then Celliers had stepped back a pace from Yonoi and stood once more silently facing him. Of course, none of us will ever know what went on in Yonoi’s mind but for the only time I had ever known he, who always had been so quick and in command of all situations, obviously did not know what to do. He looked as if lightning had struck him. His face had lost its colour and was like death with dismay. He trembled on his feet and might have even fallen to the ground if his warrant officer had not acted for him. It was this old veteran of several long wars who now suddenly uttered the anthropoidal yell which always preceded a Japanese bayonet charge, jumped forward and began beating up Celliers. His example was inevitably followed by the N.C.O., Commanders of the Machine-Gun Sections and the Corporal of the Guard. Our prison in the light of the high-noon sailing serene and indifferent overhead was filled with the noises I have only heard in a jungle trying to maul out of existence its fear of the falling night. Most strangely one and all tried to outdo one another in beating up the already half-senseless Celliers.
Yet not so strange, Lawrence commented here, for the whole incident would have become immediately an affair of honour. Did I not realize that Celliers had insulted Yonoi before his men? Did I not remember how kissing between men and women, even in the most natural forms, was regarded by the Japanese as the most obscene of gestures? Did I not remember how Hara censored the few novels we had had in camp by ordering that all the pages with a mention of kisses and kissing should be torn out of the defaulting books? Surely knowing that I could see now how deeply Yonoi must have lost face, so deeply that even the right to avenge the insult must have gone as well. Now only his men could do that for him and, in their code, that was what they would have had to do if they were not also to lose all honour with themselves. But what was far more important, Lawrence went on, could I understand that in doing this to Yonoi Celliers had made both us and the Japanese free of whatever it was that locked our spirits so fatally together? We had been there as two halves of the same thing, two opposites darkly dependent on each other, two ends of electricity equally inducing each other, until Celliers bridged the gap and released the fatal charge?
Indeed, I agreed with Lawrence, it was most noticeable how this whole situation immediately had become an issue between Celliers and the rest. The crisis that had brought us all out into the paradeground seemed to vanish behind us like waste thrown over the stern of a ship in a fast receding wake. Only one thing obsessed both Japanese and ourselves: the odd, unpredictable thing Celliers had done to Yonoi.
It applied as much to ourselves as the Japanese. I have already described the remark of the Australian officer when Celliers embraced Yonoi. Now while the terrible beating up with fists, boots and staves went on, in even the most understanding of faces near me there was not only disgust at the punishment the man was receiving but also distaste for the way in which it had been incurred.
At this point, distressed at the recollection, I had to stop speaking.
Lawrence hastened to say: ‘Poor old Straffer. He was trying to contain a sea of dark possibilities in the nutshell of a single lucid deed. To use his own words he was at last being obedient to his awareness and making a collective situation individual. And don’t forget Yonoi! I would say it wasn’t so much Celliers versus the rest as Celliers versus Yonoi. He’d forced Yonoi to face up to his identification with him. It was no longer a thing between races but a thing between two individual men. . . . But anyway, what happened then?’
It was soon over. Yonoi, though still like a person profoundly concussed, stopped the beating and ordered the guard to carry Celliers off to the guard house. Celliers by then was unconscious and only recognizable by his long yellow hair. Then, like someone utterly exhausted, Yonoi turned his back on us and, his eyes on the ground, walked slowly away and out of the prison gates. Shortly after the infantry sections too were withdrawn. We were left standing alone on the silent parade ground, afraid to speak. At nightfall Yonoi’s warrant officer came and ordered us back to our barracks.
Officially we did not see Yonoi again. We heard no more of the issue that had brought on the affair but the next evening a new commander appeared in camp. By then a rumour was going round among our own interpreters that Yonoi had committed or was contemplating hara kiri. In view of what Lawrence had said that would not have been surprising but (as he knew already) Yonoi did not do that.
On the morning of the third day after the scene with Yonoi we were ordered to dig a hole in the centre of the parade ground. At once I feared that it was Celliers’s grave we were digging. That done, our own carpenters were made to construct a stout wooden fence in a circle thirty yards in diameter round it and to put rolls of dannert wire against it as well. Immediately I knew I had been wrong and that the hole could not possibly be a grave. But for what else then?
We found out the truth in the afternoon when we were ordered to parade as before. There Celliers, more or less cleaned up but black in the face from his beating, doubled over and hardly able to walk, was brought out of his cell into the midst of a whole platoon of guards with fixed bayonets, who half-marched, half-dragged him right to the edge of the hole in the circle of steel and wood.
Just for a moment his hands were freed and, incredibly, he seized the opportunity to straighten his body and wave one trembling hand at us while he tried to smile. His hand however was instantly seized by a guard, jerked down, and then tightly tied with rope behind his back to the other hand. His feet were similarly bound and two guards then seized him and forced him upright into the hole. They held him thus, like two foresters transplanting a sapling, while some of their comrades piled their rifles and took up spades to shovel the earth, that rich, midnight earth of the central plateau of Java, back into the hole. They did this carefully and with a studied, ritualistic eagerness, pausing every now and then to stamp down the earth with their feet firmly all round Celliers until he was buried up to the neck with not the least chance of being able to make any movement. Only his bare head, chin, and neck showed above the ground but it was noticeable that the head was erect and that the face for all its bruising looked strangely composed as if it saw something beyond that moment which caused it, from time to time, to try and smile.
The living grave complete at last, two guards with fixed bayonets were posted at the entrance to the enclosure around it. Our new prison commander then read us a lecture exhorting us to look on Celliers and reflect on the consequences of our impurities of spirit and wrong-thinking. Then he dismissed us disdainfully from his sight. Not the least macabre of the many sinister touches to that terrible afternoon was the music which suddenly blared out from the loudspeaker of the wireless turned on in the guard room when the prison gates closed on the new commander. Broadcast from a worn-out record, Rene Clair’s nostalgic accordion music ‘Sous les toits de Paris’ rang out loud and clear from one end of the camp to the other. I nearly broke down at this gratuitous refinement of tragedy for the tortured Celliers.
However, I could safely leave to Lawrence’s imagination the terrible toll in the feelings of men like ourselves who were so keenly aware of our utter powerlessness to help Celliers in the days that followed. No one in our midst could move on their normal duties about camp without seeing the bare yellow head and bruised face exposed all day long to the tropical sun. I said ‘yellow head’ but it would be more accurate to say white because so fierce was the sun on Celliers’s last days in the earth that his hair became as bleached as desert bone. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we could not get near enough again to see the expression on his face. The guards whose awareness of the terrible punishment inflicted on the man showed itself in a marked fear that we might be provoked into rushing them, kept us henceforth at a safe distance. Even so after the first day we could tell from the fallen angle of Celliers’s head that he could not possibly last very long in those conditions. The second evening after his living interment the padres of all nationalities held a special service for him, the whole camp joining in. The service ended with the singing together in many tongues of the hymn ‘Abide with me’. The Ambonese and Menadonese sang with moving fervour and at the end of the service there was hardly a dry eye in camp.