Even so, after replying that he would, of course, do what his Commander wanted, Lawrence had returned to his room in the near-by hotel which was still full of feasting and singing people, with a feeling that he had come to an end too. He was like someone who had walked into a fatal trap and had just heard the door shut on him. He lay awake most of that night listening to the convoy hurrying down the mountain road by his hotel as it carried the vast Headquarters Staff and their baggage to ships and seaplanes waiting for them in the one harbour on the south coast not yet blocked by the enemy’s navies. As they moved out it was as if he heard a vengeful history move in stealthily on bare feet like a giant, knife in hand, to take their place. When the sound of the last truck had vanished down the road another sound took over. The night-watchmen in those wooden villages which, beyond the electric lights of the European towns, stand on stilts like sleeping herons over their own charcoal reflections in the star-filled paddy-waters, began to rap out urgent signals to one another on their bamboo alarm gongs. Lawrence was certain it was not his over-strained senses deceiving him: there was fear in that signalling too. At breakfast the next morning his apprehensions were confirmed. The laughter and defiance had gone from the red faces of the gin and beer-swilling men like the text of the previous day’s lesson which had been wiped off the school blackboard by some caretaker in the night to make room for the lesson to come. The expression that now greeted him was nothing but the dark face of the fear of which he had spoken. Also there was something else of even greater significance. All the Javanese servants in the hotel, the Sundanese hawkers in the streets, the Madurese cleaners and scavengers, the Sumatran clerks and intellectuals, had discarded the compliant head-dress of rich glowing turbans of blue, gold and brown batic, that they had favoured for centuries, and in its place they had donned the stiff, uncompromising, black hat of the emerging Nationalists of the islands.
It was bad enough that Lawrence had to go and collect his few personal belongings in the abandoned headquarters which, crowded and busy like a beehive only the day before was now empty except for himself and the cleaners. Everything around him emphasized how precipitate the evacuation had been. The floors were littered with discarded possessions, each room a still-life of the rejected and doomed. Second-best uniforms and soiled greatcoats hung limply over chairs and tables; socks, ties, shirts, worn shoes and boots covered the floors; half-open desks and drawers held torn files and empty official envelopes, and several volumes of Jane Austen and Trollope, books favoured by professional British staff officers who discovered amid the brutalities of the war a longing for the gentility and refinement of life, were scattered about. In an American naval office lay two books: Forever Amber (a title dumb with irony seeing that all the lights ahead had long since turned red), and a fat volume of Gone With The Wind. Finally there were the copies of Who’s Who and Debrett in a British staff room. Both books looked to Lawrence to be scarlet with the discomfort of those mentioned within them because their kin had turned their backs on an Oriental enemy.
He himself had been through the chaos of retreat and evacuation before and could make his peace with all these reminders of how alone he was now. But it was not so easy to come to terms with the sight of the slight, silent, little men of the islands going from room to room collecting what was of use to them, and all wearing those stiff, black caps on their heads. Beyond all need of words there, for Lawrence, was the slumbering meaning of three-and-a-half soporific centuries suddenly emerging in an undeniable image: a new hat to symbolize a new state of mind. Overnight the teeming millions of that lovely long necklace of the jewelled islands of Insulinda had been transformed in one moment of darkness and fear into a whole people of judges – and like judges at a trial for murder they were putting on their black caps in readiness for the pronouncement of sentence of death on the culture and the men and women who had imposed it on them, from without, for so long. Today, Lawrence turned to us, we could judge how accurate was that fear by what had happened in those islands since. Whenever people tried to blame the Japanese, British, Americans or Communists for the course this piece of post-war history had taken, he had only to remember the black hats of the humble cleaners in the great abandoned buildings on the slopes of the mountain of the ‘Ship-turned-upside-down’, to realize how false was such blame. He would then see again vivid in memory those lithe little sweepers wielding their brushes like new brooms of history to sweep the litter of centuries clean from the door of a future of their own. Not by persuasion of any invader but out of a people’s own inner nature and texture of being was the future born that day, and for good or ill a tide in all our histories turned. Lawrence stressed all this, he now said, because, looking back, it was of the utmost importance to what followed in his story. It had been difficult enough to command his own heart in a battle against a growing sense of his individual doom. We could imagine then how doubly hard it was to hold it intact when a sense of the doom of an age and a cancellation of such a long confident assertion of the purpose of a great Empire, were joined to it. For the first time in the war, he, Lawrence, had been in danger of seeing no meaning whatsoever in what he was about. And thereby hung his tale. . . .
He left the forlorn Headquarters, therefore, as soon as he possibly could and went about the business of collecting his unit with a bleak heart. Just before noon he set out with the advance party of the little force so clearly predestined for disaster, to take up a preliminary position on the fringes of the great raised plateau, the formidable natural fortress which the self-indulgent masters of the island had claimed with unabashed melodrama they would ‘defend to the last drop of their blood’. His road out of town took him past the island’s most fashionable hotel. The wide veranda was crowded with Dutch staff-officers and their women. Their noonday gins apparently had done something to revive their spirits because seeing his trucks go by some of the men started up a large chorus of ‘We zyn niet bang: we are not afraid’. But he had heard more convincing performances of the ditty before, and in particular he noticed that the women no longer joined in and that somehow added another dimension to his own private dismay.
The road towards the expected ‘invasion area’ twisted among steep forest-covered hills and along golden valleys between great grey volcanoes asleep in the hot sun. Yet they were active enough to give the impression that if he went nearer he would hear their fires snoring within. The sky above was a great unblemished mother-of-pearl shell, and the beauty of the day sparkled and glowed over an island earth so rich and generous that it rewarded the people who tilled it with five harvests of rice every two years. All seemed to mock the darkness within him, Lawrence said. At moments he felt as if he were in a nightmare dreaming of war and of his trapped, pre-ordained role within it. As the afternoon went on over the gleaming paddy fields immense thunder-clouds formed to do and undo their long volcanic hair like gods regarding their own reflections in the quick-silver water. There was no wind (just as there were no seasons in that part of the world) only an endless repetition of this same still, fecund, mother-of-pearl moment in the ardent volcanic nature of the land through which he was moving. The only traces of movement were a tremble of heat in the air as of transparent poplar leaves shivering in a breath of summer, and a constant throbbing imparted by the urgent beat of the deep volcanic heart of the earth to the silence singing in Lawrence’s ears. By every paddy field tremble of heat, shiver of light and throb of earth were encouraged by the agitation of the dense swarms of blue and silver dragonflies, zooming over the burning waters on transparent wings. In each paddy water slender women stripped to the waist, their faces purple under the shadows of their wide hats of yellow straw, moved rhythmically, hip to hip, as women had done for a thousand years of planting new rice alongside the old. Always somewhere behind them a great water-buffalo moved with ponderous steps like a statue of the Beast in some ancient legend come to life. Always too a naked little boy with a burnished skin sat like an image of the young Buddha on the broad back of the buffalo whose immense power seemed to have found direction and meaning in the service of such delicate companionship. Beautiful as the scene was, Lawrence stressed, it made him feel increasingly unrelated to what he was doing. He had not realized until then how much one depended in moments of trouble on the support of the earth and the familiar sights and sounds among which one had been born. He longed desperately for a miracle to give him a glimpse of even the most commonplace of his native English scenes: a lane between water meadows, spotted cows chewing the cud in the grass and buttercups while the pale sun drew haloes round their backs, and behind them a lath and plaster cottage grew blue smoke like a plant in a red chimney pot. That would have been enough, he had thought, to bring him back to centre and destroy this devastating feeling of unbelonging which was biting so deeply into him. But all that remained was that great shining day utterly indifferent to him and his mission. Even some sign of recognition from the people in the fields would have helped, but though they could not have failed to hear the noise of his trucks they did not pause in their work to glance upwards from beneath their big hats as he hurried by. Once he waved and called out a greeting in Malay to a little boy washing his buffalo which was lying, eyes shut ecstatically, in a stream within a few yards of the bridge where Lawrence crossed. But the boy gave him no answering sign and went on splashing water over the buffalo with his quick, brown hands as if he had not heard. The boy, the women, the silent sleeping mountains, the shining earth, the smoking jungle and its lofty unruffled plumes of palm all stood as if deliberately with heads averted, oblivious both to him and his mission. Open and frank as day and scene both appeared yet such aversion made them secretive and subversive. There was not, he observed, any darkness so great as darkness in the sun. Thereafter in the odd villages he passed it did not need the sight of clerks or street vendors in black caps to make it quite clear to him that this was more than just peasant indifference to change. It continued thus until evening, when at last he came to the village on the lip of the plateau where he planned to wait for the Japanese invasion: only there could he judge how best to commit his little force.