Even at the end when the prison was full of rumours and the treacherous, unstable Korean guards, scenting a change in the wind of time, were beginning to fawn and make-up to our men for past misdeeds, were even whining to them about their own suppression under the Japanese, when the ground under the feet of Hara’s war lords was cracking and reverberating from the shock of the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and when the legendary twilight of the submerged racial soul of Japan must have been dark and sagging under the weight of the wings of dragons coming home to roost, Hara never trembled nor wavered once. He must have known as well as anybody what was going on, but in that tide of rumour and wild emotion running free before the wind of change, he stood like a rock.
Only three days before the end there was a terrible scene with Lawrence. Lawrence had found a Korean sentry, one of the worst, prodding a dying man with his bayonet, trying to make the Aircraftman stand up to salute him. Lawrence had seized the sentry’s rifle with both hands, pushed the bayonet aside and forced himself between the sentry and the sick man. He was immediately marched off to the guardroom, arriving there just as Hara returned from a tour of inspection. The sentry told Hara what had happened and Hara, much as he liked Lawrence, would not overlook this insult to the arms of his country. He beat-up Lawrence with his cane over the face and head so thoroughly that I hardly recognized him when he joined us again.
Three days later the end came and we all went our inevitable ways. Lawrence did not see Hara again for nearly two years. When he saw Hara then it was in dock at his trial. Yes! Hadn’t I heard? Hara was sought out and brought to trial before one of our War Crimes Tribunals. It was largely Hicksley-Ellis’s doing of course. I could have no idea how bitter that mild, lisping, sensitive fellow had become. It was understandable, of course, after what he had suffered, that he should be truly, implacably and irretrievably bitter and vengeful, and he gave his evidence at the trial with such a malign relish and fury that Hara never had a hope of a mitigated sentence, let alone acquittal. But what was not so understandable was the bitterness of the official prosecution, for bitter as Hicksley-Ellis was, his temper was more than matched by that of the war-crimes sleuths.
‘And that,’ Lawrence exclaimed, incomprehension on his broad brow: ‘was very odd to me. After all, none of them had suffered under the Japanese. As far as I know, not one of the particular bunch on Hara’s trail had even been on active service but they were none the less a bloodthirsty lot. They were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.’
He said all this in such a way that I gathered he had tried to plead for Hara and had failed. It certainly seemed highly significant to me that when Lawrence held his hand out after the trial to say good-bye, Hicksley-Ellis had refused to take it and silently turned a neat, tense Air-Force back on him. I could not resist asking therefore:
‘Did you tell the Court that Hara saved your life?’
‘Indeed I did,’ he replied, surprised that I should have found the question necessary. ‘I did that and the judge-advocate looked me up and down over a pair of the most unmilitary glasses and said in a slow, precise voice, each syllable as distinct and pointed as a letter pen-pricked on a blank sheet of paper, a trace of ponderous irony, for which I can’t blame him, in his voice: “That, of course, Colonel Lawrence, is a valuable consideration – most valuable, indeed hardly less valuable to this court than it must be to you; but it must not be overlooked that there are many others for whom life would have been no less valuable who are not here today as a direct result of the accused’s actions.”’
No, there was obviously nothing to be done. Hara was inevitably condemned to be hanged.
‘How did he take it?’ I asked with the memory of the way others had marched to the fall of Hara’s keen two-headed sword on the backs of their necks as fresh in my mind as if it were a picture painted that morning.
‘Without a tremor or change of expression, as you would have expected,’ Lawrence said. ‘After all, he had pleaded guilty from the start, said, as that hopelessly inadequate interpreter told the Court: “I am wrong for my people and ready to die!” He made no effort to defend himself except to say that he tried never to do more nor less than his duty. He called no witnesses, asked no questions even of me, and just went on standing silently and rigidly to attention in the box right to the end. Besides, all that too had been foreseen.’
‘Foreseen?’ I asked, surprised.
Yes! He explained Hara had never expected anything except death of some kind in the war. In fact, in an unconscious way, perhaps he had even longed for death. I must please not be too sceptical but try and follow what he was trying to say with intuition rather than with conscious understanding. This was the other half of what he’d been trying to say in the beginning. It was most important, most relevant and the one foundation whereon his understanding either stood erect or fell. . . . He had always felt even when he was in Japan that the Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. As a nation they romanticized death and self-destruction as no other people. The romantic fulfilment of the national ideal, of the heroic thug of tradition, was often a noble and stylized self-destruction in a selfless cause. It was as if the individual at the start, at birth even, rejected the claims of his own individuality. Henceforth he was inspired not by individual human precept and example so much as by his inborn sense of the behaviour of the corpuscles in his own blood dying every split second in millions in defence of the corporate whole. As a result they were socially not unlike a more complex extension of the great insect societies in life. In fact in the days when he lived in Japan, much as he liked the people and country, his mind always returned involuntarily to this basic comparison: the just parallel was not an animal one, was not even the most tight and fanatical horde, but an insect one: collectively they were a sort of super-society of bees with the Emperor as a male queen-bee at the centre. He did not want to exaggerate these things but he knew of no other way of making me realize how strangely, almost cosmically, propelled like an eccentric and dying comet on an archaic, anti-clockwise and foredoomed course, Hara’s people had been. They were so committed, blindly and mindlessly entangled in their real and imagined past that their view of life was not synchronized to our urgent time. Above all they could not respond to the desperate twentieth-century call for greater and more precise individual differentiation. Their view of life refused to be individual and to rise above their own volcanic and quaking earth, as if there was always a dark glass or the shadow of the great dragon’s wings of their submerged selves between them and the light of individual mind, a long blackness of their own spinning globe between them and the sun, darkening the moon for which they yearned so eagerly, and some of the finest stars. He was sorry if it sounded fantastic but he could put it no other way. Unless . . .