Dangerous as the consequences could be for my fellow-prisoners I went straight from the service to the Camp Commander’s headquarters to plead for mercy for Celliers. The reaction however was so outraged in every way (even an appeal for him to be given some water provoked a dangerous outburst) that I nearly revived the situation from which Celliers had rescued us. I remembered how he had beseeched me in that vital moment on the parade ground to do ‘nothing about him’ and felt forced not to repeat my approach to our new Commander. We had to watch him slowly dying the most painful of deaths. Yet he himself seemed in no hurry to die, or rather that tenacious, resourceful body of his was in no hurry to depart. However, from the motionless drop of his head I felt that his spirit was not there at all and I hoped with all my heart that it was out of reach of the pain. No moan, complaint or cry ever came from him but the evening after the service, the guard having just gone to the gate for his relief, some Dutch soldiers felt compelled to go nearer Celliers, and they said they thought they heard him trying to sing. To their amazement, in a hoarse broken voice he was crooning to himself in some kind of Dutch, and they heard these words distinctly:
I rode all through the night,
And far in the distance found the fire,
And beside the fire one who had waited long . . .
They would have liked to go nearer but the arrival of the relief guard at the gate forced them to hurry on their way.
Significant too in those final hours was the manner in which the guards themselves changed in their attitude to Celliers. At first they had looked at him without pity and turned to stand sentry with their backs to him. After the first day, however, I was astonished to see that each guard coming for his turn of duty to the living grave would first face the buried man, come to attention and bow his head respectfully to Celliers. Finally, at the end of the third day the night-watch on duty in the barracks nearest Celliers reported the strangest thing of all.
The moon was full at the time and the parade ground brilliant with its light. At three in the morning our watch was startled to see Yonoi’s elegant figure appear at the enclosure and send away the guard to the gate. For a moment he thought he was seeing ghosts because like many he believed Yonoi had committed hara-kiri some days before. Yet it was Yonoi, for his walk and build were unmistakable.
After standing in front of Celliers and looking at him for long in silence, Yonoi put his hand in his pocket and produced something which flashed like silver in the moonlight. Strange as it might seem our watch was convinced that it was a pair of scissors, for Yonoi appeared to bend down over Celliers, take his long hair in his hand and snip some of it off. . . .
Here I had to beg Lawrence, who was getting more and more agitated, not to interrupt while I stressed for confirmation that our watch distinctly heard the metal blades click in the moon silence. For a while longer Yonoi remained there in deep thought before bowing low to Celliers in the same way that the watch had seen him bow to the rising sun on the day of his Emperor’s birthday. That done he walked slowly to the gate where he resummoned the guard. And that was the last we saw of Yonoi.
By morning Celliers was dead. We were summoned to the camp headquarters after morning gruel to be told that we could have the body for burial. The new commander could not have been more considerate at the interview. He looked us straight in the eye with an expression of someone who had suddenly been absolved from all sin and restored to an innocent vision of life. His gods had had their sacrifice and for the moment he was profoundly content. As pleased as a child before a feast he informed us: ‘I’ll now show you typical Japanese morality for dead.’ A bugler and a military firing-party of infantry were ordered to do honours at the cemetery, The Tanah Abang, ‘the dead earth’ as the Javanese called it, and so we buried Celliers that afternoon to the sound of the thunder he had loved so well rumbling over the purple citadel of Malabar.
After that I regret to say I tried to forget what had happened and looking back on it all now I realize I was not alone in my attitude. Deliberately we seemed to avoid talking in camp about this man who had suddenly flashed out of the dark into our prison lives like a shooting-star and had burned out so brilliantly and quickly before our eyes. I think the whole episode was so painful and tended to start up such imaginative thinking with disconcerting implications for our future lives that our overburdened prison spirit instinctively avoided it. When I met Lawrence months later I believe the incident was already so effectively repressed that I did not mention it to him, and on my release the excitement of my home-coming and taking up of a peaceful life again helped to encourage the repressive process. Yet I never forgot Celliers. At all sorts of odd moments he would be there in my memory as fresh and vivid as he had ever been in real life and raising for me the same eloquent issues he had raised with himself. When his manuscript reached me I felt compelled to go off immediately, seek out his brother, and tell him what I could of Celliers.
I was too late; the brother was dead. His widow was there alone on the farm with a son whom she said had been born to her late like Sarah’s, just a year after Celliers’s sudden visit. She was not really unhappy about her husband’s death, in fact she said it had been right for him to die because his life had naturally come to an end when Celliers had died. They knew of his death, of course, though not of the details. She was deeply moved by my account. At the end of our interview her young son had come into the room from the veld with a gun in his hand and had startled me by his close resemblance to Celliers.
I had come back home deeply uneasy, feeling I could not honourably go on ignoring the implications of Celliers’s story in my own life. I had not realized how deep it went until the night before when Lawrence had spoken to me of Hara. But now added to Celliers and his brother in my memory there were also Hara and Yonoi; the two were become four? What was I to them and they to me and what could I do about it?
Lawrence did not answer me directly. Instead he told me what obviously he had been wanting to tell me long since. After his release, when he went straight back on to active service, he was one day requested to come and act as interpreter for a war crimes investigator at a prison reserved for Japanese officers suspected of atrocities. There, among others, he had found Yonoi. He would not bother me with all the details but go straight for the main point. Yonoi, hearing Lawrence’s fluent Japanese and attracted by his manner with the accused men, had spontaneously come up to him and pleaded to speak to him alone. Having heard about Yonoi’s reputation, Lawrence was surprised to find him so subdued and oddly preoccupied. Still more had he been puzzled by Yonoi’s business with him and had remained so until I had told him about Celliers.
The moment they were alone Yonoi had confided in Lawrence that, when the war ended, he had been in charge of a women’s prison. That apparently had been the humiliating consequence of what had passed between Celliers and him. When he was arrested and searched in one of our prisons after the war something Yonoi valued more than anything in the world was found on him and taken away. Could Lawrence get it back for him? Lawrence had asked what it was.