Shame and the Captives (37 page)

“Don't hit our men,” he told the signaler, who had found his rifle
and was firing after the escapee, who was flitting through the camp. The signaler's shot did not seem to delay him as he streaked north towards the bush.

Tengan had run some way to get to Abercare, northwards along the line of the fence, and of course he expected he would be shot now; now that he had done that hardhanded task, he was full of awe and a desire not to be shot precisely for that but to be shot for who he was—a prisoner. This kept him running. It was automatic, and later he would not be delighted at it. But it seemed to him then that they had failed to stop him from the front, and during his strike against the despicable commandant, and when they did not fell him from behind he simply kept running, with the dawning awareness that given the size of what he'd done, he would draw them away, hunting him, wearying and angering them, giving them motives to finish him in a notable way. Let them go to that trouble, and let them be vicious about it.

The truth at the time, however, was that Tengan couldn't have said why he ran onwards after impaling Abercare.

Back by the gate, Abercare, half turned with the improvised point in him, saw the shots aimed at his assassin miss. Ah, he thought, the arrogance of that young man is profound. He called Suttor, who turned and became instantly attentive.

“My God,” he said. “Sir . . .”

Abercare said, “Mrs. Galloway is still in my quarters.”

Had she risen and ranted to be let out, or had she by some alcoholic mercy slept through it all?

“The gossips will tell Emily,” he continued. “It was a car breakdown . . .”

These words seemed to him each like blows self-delivered against his own trunk rather than items spoken in the ordinary way. He was reduced to placing on Suttor the hopeless obligation to stanch those worthies, that poisonous estate, who would have opinions about Mrs. Galloway being in the camp.

“I'll send a guard,” said Suttor.

A medical orderly had appeared and said, “Oh, Jesus, sir.”

“Do we take it out?” Suttor asked the medical orderly. For no friend of the Mortons had ever been impaled. Suttor had not even researched the issue. He shouted some orders about guarding the colonel's quarters, that Mrs. Galloway was waiting in there.

“Lie down, why don't we, sir?” the medical orderly suggested. But Abercare was aware that Suttor had—without trying to—released the gossip germ.

“You may be right,” he began to tell his adversary. “Vanity . . .”

He wished to make things clearer, but the power had gone from his voice. He fell sideways, the medical orderly guiding him down. His signaler dropped his rifle and supported him.

“Very kind,” Abercare, obscenely penetrated, told the signaler and the medical orderly through the wall of noise.

Suttor also knelt and tried to hold him up with a hand under his right armpit. Suttor was crying as if Abercare were his beloved leader. As if this were like the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.

“Emily,” he told Suttor, and Suttor seemed to half understand and nodded.

Abercare could feel the vitality of all their arms at various parts of his frame, the astonishing corporeal nature of them compared to the mist he was becoming. He was still aware of the huge thing in him, larger than agony, too vast for screams, taking him away before he could get the essential words out. He was washing away in a cold sea. Ah, he thought, the inland sea that once flowed here. It was dragging him up this hill away from the camp. From here he could see below, he could almost count, the burgundy units of his failure.

Where was his breath?

•  •  •

The garrison line became ascendant and there would be murmurs afterwards that its firing went on too long: later-appearing prisoners
clumped together; rather than offering a serious charge, they did not seem possessed of the impetus of the earlier wave, and staggered forward as if exhausted by traversing the triple fence. Others, the garrison line firing into their flanks, fled across open country northwards and into the boulders on the low ridge and the kurrajong trees, intending either to continue their defiance there, or else demoralized. These, too, were fair game for the line.

Suttor's duty lay between commanding the men shooting into Main Road, where the merest display of an intention to crawl was now punished by fire, and the main garrison line which, although fortified by an escort that had now arrived from Wye, was in some cases hungover and outnumbered by the captives.

Frightened at first, the garrison grew in self-assertion and vengeance against a population they had been urged, against their better instincts, to treat with abnormal patience. Suttor did not possess the gifts to stop them. He cried, “Cease fire!” but came to know that in this garrison fury he needed to call his platoon commanders and have them visit each man with the command. He sent his sergeant major to do it. Even so there was irrationality and recklessness in him to let the vengeance roll on—for Abercare's sake and for his son's, and in his madness these two poles of affection became entangled on this unspeakable night.

The shooting ceased in the first grayness, and the last of the fires in the compound became embers at about the same time. Suttor noticed that frost had descended and stiffened the earth and its vegetation, and had formed on the bodies of men. In that light the hundreds of blankets and maroon overcoats stuck to the wire, strung out like notations on lined music paper, bespoke a calamitous purpose he felt he could not read, but whose meaning, he was sure, would turn out to be appalling.

•  •  •

At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, accompanied by a detachment of guards, Sergeant Nevski entered Main Road amidst the reek of burned
huts and corpses, of all the palliasses, spare clothing, cards and books and keepsakes that had been consumed in Compound C. He could certainly tell that when it came to the huts, men's bodies must have been caught inside those fires, must have killed themselves there beforehand and left their flesh for the flames. Or perhaps they had been murdered as dissenters—he did not know. There was in any case the horrific overlay of burned flesh. Though the bodies in Main Road and in the compound whose gates gaped open had been near refrigerated by the night, there was the odious smell of blood shed en masse.

He noticed men—some subtly stirring—lying in ditches on either side of the road. He was in a grieving mood already, and like many soldiers did not know how to accommodate his grief. He believed that the firing from the garrison line had gone on too long, felling confused and uncertain figures, the aftermath of the frenzy of the front-runners. Nevski was nervous about the control, or lack of it, he could exercise over these guards accompanying him, yet such an entrance into the slaughter zone was necessary. Behind him and his section of guards came the work parties of Koreans and Formosans, detailed to find and lay the bodies in rows for the coroner. One of them, Cheong, said to his friend, but in a shaken voice, “This is what people they are, the stupid pricks!”

Some men now rose from the ditch by the compound fence, and tore their jackets open and exposed their chests and pleaded to be shot. Others simply knelt up and pleaded for nothing; they might at some hour bless their survival. Nevski, knowing the inmates better than the guards did, and appalled by the humps of dyed uniforms scattered everywhere, standing out so vividly on the white-green dust of early light, began to choke at these sights and cried out preventively, “No. Don't fire!”

But sleepless, and having seen Colonel Abercare impaled before their eyes, or seen his draped corpse; having likewise seen Headon and Cassidy pulped near their gun; having always despised the contemptuous prisoners anyhow, two of the garrison soldiers with him
accommodated the prisoners. Nevski heard the terrible cracks of rifles by each of his ears, and that cursed cordite smell assailed him again as it had in clouds in the small hours.

At the sound of these two shots, Major Suttor, who had been discussing matters with the commandant of one of the Italian compounds, came running up Main Road with his own escort and entered Compound C and reached Nevski's party. “Sergeant, what in God's name are you doing?” he asked Nevski. He was mad eyed, and spit flew from his mouth. He wrenched the rifle out of the grasp of one of the guards, and then of the other.

“I'll have you charged with murder, you two bastards!” he called. He turned to Nevski. “Did they need to fire? Did they?”

Nevski was surprised by the extent to which he wanted to say they did. “No,” said Nevski. “There was much slaughter later last night, too, that needn't . . .”

“Shut up!” yelled Suttor. “I don't want emotional words used. ‘Slaughter' be buggered! Don't say it! Don't you fucking say it, you Russian bastard!”

Nevski looked at the two assassins. He saw vengeance cooling in their eyes and their sullen concession to Suttor. They knew, though, they would never be charged with any crime. What did they expect—those people of Compound C—if they tried this stuff on? The enemies of country, Empire, and race, and themselves given to atrocities worse than the cleanliness of the bullet?

Yet Suttor went on roaring at them. “Can't you see that this is what they want?
They . . . They . . .
” He pointed to the dead. “They will kill ten of our prisoners they hold for every one you bastards shoot here. So, go on, kill one of them if you fucking dare, and you can add ten of ours, and so murder eleven at a fucking time! Do you want that, you fucking cut-rate soldiers? When you stand trial? Do you want to face that proposition?”

In any case, through this argumentation—but also because those guards of a mind to take blood for blood had had appropriate vengeance—no
more of the living were killed, though further prisoners who had survived came up and pleaded to be. Men who did not offer their hearts as targets, however, were also rising still from the ditches by the fence with their hands raised—dissenters, Nevski knew, from the military ardor of their brethren. There was no misreading the tentative relief on some faces. Those who had wounds had carried them stoically and, wounded or not, it seemed to Nevski by their movements and submission that they had grown out of their previous soldierhood and all its fervor. They had seen battle and now immolation and had concluded either before, or now, that it was absurd. With the light of an unexpected morning on their faces, they were willing to be new kinds of men and to await a temporal liberation.

Beyond Gawell's perimeter, wounded prisoners at large in the bush began to be retrieved by patrols from the garrison and even by accidental encounters with farmers or police. Others broke from the trees and exposed their hearts, but the fury had ended and the patrols were under the severest restraint. These retaken arrived back that day, the wounded to the compound hospital, where the garrison medical officer and a sleep-deprived Dr. Garner tended them but could not prevent the fatal hemorrhages and expiries from shock and chest wounds. Those prisoners who came back stating their disappointment at not having been slaughtered declared they knew now what they'd merely talked of before—that they could not depend on these people to remedy anything. They were stuck unexpectedly again with the chronic disorder of survival.

A major from the Department of Information, a former journalist and now a regulator of news, arrived by plane at Gawell around one o'clock and reported to Suttor's office, finding him exhausted, bewildered, and distrait.

“This has been a frightful business,” Suttor told the man. “We can't conceal the numbers. We have to have the coroner in and the Swiss have to be told—if not, they'll ferret it out. And poor bloody Abercare—he was hopeless. Nil nisi bonum and all the rest of it, but just look where
the poor silly bugger sited the gun they overran. We had an argument about that. Look, I'm up to my ears but I want to talk to you. To you in particular. But go out and see it all first. It's a literal bloody shambles.”

The press officer asked, “Isn't it
their
fault? They're the ones who tried to get out.”

“It was to be expected,” said Suttor. “I have a meeting with the officer of a patrol I sent off, and I have to talk to Sydney as well. Could I see you after that? I have a huge favor to ask.”

Suttor sent him off, a bit mystified, with the duty officer. The major was given a tour of the gutted compound and the survivors and others working at laying out bodies in lines of stretchers, a sheet giving anonymity to the wounds each of the dead had received. He would remark there was near silence over the site. An occasional barked command was like an assault on the solemnity of the day and the sense of bewilderment that hung over the camp and the compound. The victorious garrison seemed uncertain as to their achievement. Then he was escorted back to Major Suttor's office.

Suttor looked still tireder now and was smoking hurriedly and moving urgently. He rushed a chair into place for the Department of Information man and quickly sat to face him.

“I've been waiting to confer with you,” Suttor said. “I'm aware that the way this news is managed is crucial. Excuse me, would you like a drink? Tea?”

“Perhaps later, when we've worked this out,” the major told him. He gave his condolences at the loss of the colonel.

“Well,” said Suttor, gesturing emphatically with his right hand, chopping the air, “I gave a hint of my feelings. But . . . he was determined to give them notice, see. And they gave him notice back. But in everything we did, there was the problem of
our
prisoners. Our prisoners held by
them
.”

Suttor crossed his hands on the desk, and the press officer noticed that they were trembling. Suttor asked again, “So how will this be handled? This whole balls-up? I will never say a word against Abercare
in public, but I will say ‘balls-up' to anyone who asks. I could tell you, item by item.”