‘I don’t think so.’
‘What are the chances of help from outside?’
‘None, I fear.’
‘Have we any hope at all of holding out somewhere until help can come?’
‘I fear not.’
‘I see.’ She paused then to stare past him at the day unfolding over the blue, smoking, reeling earth. Then, her voice lower than ever, she asked: ‘You said one landing was near here, at Merak. How soon before they get here?’
‘I don’t know. That depends on the resistance put up by the army.’
‘You sound unconvinced, as if you think our soldiers won’t fight. Is that so?’
‘Not on the coast . . . but perhaps here.’
‘Only perhaps?’
‘Yes. Only perhaps. I don’t know for certain. So far the signs have not been good. But the natural place to fight would be along the rim of your great inland plateau. Perhaps that is what your commanders have been waiting to do. If that is so and all goes well this village should soon be in the front line of the battle.’
‘If all goes well?’ she exclaimed sharply repeating his phrase as if not believing she’d heard it correctly.
‘Forgive me!’ Lawrence hastened to explain, smiling for the first time: ‘I was using the word “well” purely in a special military sense. Militarily speaking it is terribly important that the enemy should be made to fight for this island. The harder and the longer he is made to fight here the more time we shall have to organize the far greater campaign in the world outside which will enable us, in the end, to win.’
‘So we’ll lose here but win elsewhere?’
‘Whatever happens here, we shall win in the end.’
‘You really believe that?’
She asked this, Lawrence said, neither out of doubt nor the need for reassurance, but because for so long she had been tricked into accepting counterfeit that now she rang each new coin of thought on the counter of her mind before taking it up. There was indeed, he said, something most noble about her determination not to let one single aspect of the truth evade her. Compared with such dignity of spirit he suspected that there was much in his response that must have appeared inadequate and unimaginative. But one thing still consoled him. He had not fallen for any temptation to hold out false hopes to her. As he looked at that lovely young head poignant in its youth and innocence he was moved as he had never been moved before.
Yet he answered truthfully, although in a voice he hardly recognized: ‘Yes, I believe it. More. I also know it . . . as you have known all these months past of the horror which is upon us now.’
It was her turn now to be convinced and there was no hubris of doubt left in her. Her spirit for all its suffering and disillusionment had the humility to be capable of conviction. The expression on her face lost its tension.
To his amazement she took his hand in hers between fingers that trembled, and said almost inaudibly: ‘Thank you for what you’ve done.’ She raised his hand, held it for a second against her cheek, then let it fall and turned quickly about as if to make for the stairs at the far end of the hall.
She did this all so swiftly that Lawrence feared her to be overcome by what she had heard. Instinctively he caught her by the arm and held her back. ‘I’ve upset you.’
Again she turned to face him. He thought his fear to be justified because tears were bright in her eyes.
But she replied, ‘On the contrary, you’ve helped me no end.’
‘Why the tears then?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you know? There are all kinds of tears,’ she replied, trying to smile. ‘These are tears of a strange, uncomfortable sort of relief.’
‘But the proprietor and the waiters who have seen us talking won’t know that.’
‘My God!’ she exclaimed, startled. ‘That’d be awful after you’ve trusted me so.’
‘It would help, I think, if you came with me now and had your breakfast as if nothing unusual has happened,’ Lawrence stated.
She made such a face at the prospect that he laughed and said: ‘I know how you feel. I’ve never had to go into action without feeling I could never eat again. But I always force myself and it’s extraordinary how it helps. Have a try.’
‘I shall, I promise you, but you know I suddenly feel like having another bath,’ she replied, ‘and putting on different clothes. It won’t take me long. Then you’ll see me eating the biggest breakfast I’ve eaten in days!’
With that she turned and went up the stairs. Lawrence hoped it was not his imagination but her step seemed lighter.
But whatever she did, it took so long that Lawrence was forced to leave the hotel and hasten to the billets of his officers and men. Before she had reappeared there he called his group together and told them, too, what he knew. His experience of small independent commands had long since taught him the necessity of sharing as much as possible his own information and plans with those under him irrespective of rank. He told them that the rest of their unit would join them before nightfall. He wanted them to overhaul their vehicles, check their supplies and, except for a duty group, climb up and down the great volcano snoring there in the sun beyond the village. When their routine fatigues were done they were to do this every day because their lives would soon depend, in great measure, on their physical powers of endurance. Meanwhile he himself and one other was going forward in the direction of the enemy to study the situation at first hand. He was certain the telephones henceforth would be buzzing with fantastic rumours and that personal reconnaissance would be their only means of getting accurate information. None the less he appointed an officer to take his place at the end of the telephone in the hotel. Whenever possible he would communicate with him, but they were not to be surprised if they did not hear from him for a day or two.
Lawrence explained that he told my wife and me all this not because he had any intention of inflicting on us the story of his military adventures, but just to make certain that we understood, in view of what followed, why he was unable to do anything more about the young woman to whom he had in such a confused way admitted a certain responsibility of heart and imagination. Yet despite his lack of time and his desperate professional purpose before leaving, he did write a note to the proprietor of the hotel begging him to get in touch with the appropriate Dutch authorities and implore them to evacuate without delay the women and children to the main town in the centre of the plateau. Their only safety, he was convinced, would be in their numbers and in being far enough away from the fighting so that by the time the Japanese did reach them the battle-fever of their soldiery would have declined. He knew that if this were done he would probably never see that young woman again: and the thought pained him. Since he had only seen her for the first time a few hours before, his reaction appeared absurd and out of proportion. Yet he had to admit to himself that if it had not been for her he might not have written that letter to the proprietor since the matter was not in his military business. Finally, having made certain that his unit would be in readiness to move off at instant’s notice, he set out on the main road towards Merak on the Sunda Strait where the enemy had landed in the night.
He was gone several days and nights. There was no need really to go into the detail of his journey. All that mattered for the purposes of what followed was that as the great indifferent mother-of-pearl days passed to be succeeded by nights glittering with the unrest of creation and resounding with the alarm signals of frightened little men, the devastating feeling of unbelonging and pointlessness which had threatened him ever since he landed in the island, deepened greatly. This was not helped by the retreat of the well-equipped, well-fed Dutch coastal division with which he became briefly entangled. His worst fears were confirmed for this division was pulling back as fast as possible in the direction of the blue and purple uplands behind him without having fired a shot at the enemy. Yet on the return journey he had taken heart because he spent an hour at the field headquarters of an incomplete brigade of his own kin. There in the long level light of a sinking sun under a sky solemn with thunder-clouds and with a view of the jungle stretching as far as he could see to where it was ultimately lost in a smoke of rain on the horizon, he watched a small force of Australians digging in for battle. The men had no fat on them and were unusually tall. They were an extraordinarily young and fine-looking force. The men worked at their defences stripped to the waist, their shoulders burnt a deep tan from two years of war under a foreign sun. They seemed cool and unafraid and though, like Lawrence, they were new arrivals in the island, they moved about calmly and purposefully rather as he imagined the Spartans must have done in the pass of Thermopylae.