Shame and the Captives (38 page)

“Well, we'll use the broadest strokes, I suppose,” said the press man. “We've already prepared something for this evening's paper. We say there was an outbreak; we don't specify casualties amongst the prisoners, though we admit there have been some. Of course, we emphasize that they were military prisoners, not internees. In the long run we'll have to say how many. But we don't need to do that yet. We'll talk to the Swiss, of course, about the pace we should proceed at. They're reasonable chaps. How many of the prisoners, do you think, got away into the bush?”

“Figures aren't firm. Men are still climbing out of drains; one of them climbed out of the incinerator . . . Two hundred and fifty or so dead, then some twenty suicides. About eighty at large—out there somewhere.”

The press officer said, “I have been asked to state that most of the prisoners are accounted for. Without, of course, endangering the public. But if we don't say that, people will be alarmed, and some members of the public will go out Jap hunting, and end up shooting each other. So it's not desirable to say there are many at large. We'd like to use a term such as ‘largely rounded up' or ‘only a few still at large,' and emphasize that by now they are in a weakened state. Most of those missing
will
be found before dark, I take it?”

Suttor was all at once on his feet. “Look, say what you like. The bastards are being brought in by the hour. And those who aren't can die out there for all I care, and probably will if tonight is as cold as last night. But the point is, my name must not be mentioned. That's crucial. Not mentioned anywhere in any bulletin or the press. Even in any inquiry, if it comes to that. Or anywhere else the Japanese might see it and exploit it.” He stubbed out a cigarette and seemed suddenly cramped by grief. “I have a boy, you see . . . I have a boy in their hands. I'm not even sure where he is. The last I heard was Thailand. I don't want him to pay. Not when it's that old fool Abercare . . .”

The pressman took account of this, writing it down. Even that disturbed Suttor. “Use a capital
S
instead of my real name.”

The press officer nodded. “I understand your concern,” he assured Suttor. “By the way, you might need to put up with Colonel Abercare being declared a hero.”

“It's like a radio serial,” said Suttor, amazed. “You chaps make it up as you go along.”

“Well,” the man said, “you can depend on me in that regard. The world can get stuffed. This is our business, not theirs.”

When the man left, Suttor felt an ease of soul and the capacity to command return to him. He called the coroner's office in Orange, and was told that a gentleman should be there within the hour. Then, at Major Suttor's urgent orders, the recaptured were quickly fed, sitting on the floors of the washrooms and laundry. Let the buggers be confused by charity. He was concerned for their warmth, and requisitioned as many mats and mattresses and blankets as he could from the quartermaster, and ordered from a depot in Wagga truckloads of clothing and towels and soap to replace those they had willfully incinerated. Let them know these were unlimited resources and they could not fight off the tide of mercy.

Rice and stew were served on the Saturday night. Yet for men so hungry, many of them were listless at their food. It was another form of emptiness that assailed the accidental survivors. Some asked themselves why they were entitled to nourishment, and others felt they must act the same way. Even the hungry who had secretly wished for survival ate warily, uneasy to confess to their appetite. The remaining zealots felt they themselves were ghosts and that the dead lain in lines along the wire with a sheet over each of them and being visited one by one by the coroner now lived in the truer sense.

•  •  •

Suttor's fear of being held responsible by his sons' captors had, through its very weight and intensity, become muted by Sunday evening.
The pressman had inspired him with confidence, managing to place the emphasis on numbers recaptured than on numbers slaughtered. He had been relieved to receive assurances from a man sent by headquarters that there would be no news release in which his name appeared. That was the sole great comfort of the day, but a light enough to see his path by.

He realized it was now time for him to take the garrison's, and indeed the army's, condolences to Mrs. Abercare. His sense that the slaughter was all Abercare's fault had by now also moderated enough to allow this to happen, though he knew he would have to tell any official inquiry that he had been opposed to the extended notice Colonel Abercare had given, and to other flaws in the preparations.

But he saw now the fault was shared by a number of men, from Sydney to Gawell, and that it had all been dealt with too casually, even by himself. In his earlier arguments with Abercare, he had never imagined the hecatomb that had in fact taken place; the stench of blood and cordite and shit from torn intestines and the dead. The very idea that being the father of a prisoner qualified Suttor to manage Compound C seemed now a fatuous decision by his superiors, a sort of addlebrained attempt at neatness on their part and motivation on his. Though it was true, as the press officer had said, that the overriding philosophy within Compound C had been the true killer, that fact would not be judged as severely as the military errors of the garrison.

So surely, despite what the press officer had said, Abercare would be damned by the military. And he himself might be reproached as an accessory. Just the same, the formalities of the day required he visit Mrs. Abercare and pretend to more admiration of the poor skewered man, the chief of the night's fools, than he had ever felt.

When he arrived at Parkes Street he was met at the door by Mrs. Garner, who ushered him into the living room. Mrs. Abercare, tall and pale, sat on the end of her lounge. She was an active griever, her face bruised with tears. There were other women there—not bloody
Mrs. Galloway, who should have been here (though thank Christ she wasn't). She had been found whimpering behind a chair in Abercare's quarters and driven home at last. She was probably still sleeping off her disreputable night.

Two other women seemed to be out in the Abercare kitchen, murmuring at the business of tea and cake—tannin and sugar as stiflers of grief. Mrs. Abercare rose to meet him, and he found himself adopting the manners of an earnest consoler, taking her hand in his as he spoke about her unimaginable loss. Mrs. Garner got up from her chair and said to another woman, “We should let Emily and the major speak alone for a while.”

Suttor wanted to utter a panicked, “No need.” But the other woman and Mrs. Garner left.

Emily told him to take a seat. He did, and she took her place on the lounge again.

“I got here as soon as I could,” said Suttor. “There has been so much damage to attend to.”

“Of course, Major,” said Mrs. Abercare in a still, low, compelling voice. “Did you know the body was brought to town by ambulance, and I've already visited him?”

“I . . . I had heard it had been moved from the camp. He didn't suffer, you know. It was a near-instantaneous mortal wound.”

“That's a mercy,” said Mrs. Abercare, though as a soldier's daughter she was well aware they always said that. There must have been at least seconds of mortal bewilderment, she knew, and she had not been there to soothe him. And after putting him through so many hoops for so long . . .

“He was a fine man and a first-class soldier,” Suttor found himself continuing. At this compulsive lie, tears appeared on his lids and he was puzzled at where they came from. But no man deserves to be impaled.

“One thing. You may have heard Mrs. Galloway was in the Colonel's quarters.”

“I believe she called Mrs. Garner today and filled her in on her little adventure.”

“She had been nothing but a nuisance to him, you know. He was driving to camp, met her broken down on the road, and took her to his quarters to wait so she could return to her vehicle with one of our mechanics. So, she was just waiting for a lift, that's all. As for Colonel Abercare, he was behind our line with a signaler the entire time. He confided in me,” Suttor lied, “that he thought the world of you.”

“Thank you,” she said. That was the information she seemed most grateful for. That was what she seemed to trust most. This utter fabrication.

“I knew he loved me,” she said, in a sad and evenly expressed certainty. “This was our happiest time, in Gawell. I thought, of course, like all foolish humans, it would last much longer. But I won't be leaving. I want to be close to him.”

“You're taking it so bravely,” said Suttor in genuine admiration. She looked at him when he began to tremble.

“You've had a shock,” she told him.

I
n the town there was a considerable cluster of police cars outside the police station, and policemen entering and leaving the station, and moving in a hurry between station and courthouse, where no court could be sitting at this hour. This activity was at odds with the town's somnolence. Beyond that the gardens of the town slept under frost, but as the sun mounted and the police moved out to keep watch at the edges of Gawell, the streets seemed habitual again.

At the training camp, the noise of the crisis of the night before had been three miles off and, traveling there through veils of bush that muffled the battle and soaked up many of the cries and terrors, it had barely dented the sleep of young recruits. Sentries reported that fires burned along parts of the eastern horizon. But no flares had been seen.

When a telephone call came from the duty officer up at the prison camp to his counterpart at the training camp, distant noise could be heard over the line. The duty officer at the camp said it was urgent—some of the prisoners had got away—but the officer at the training camp did not awake irritable Colonel Deakin with the news until four in the morning. Colonel Deakin was accustomed, because of the campaigns he had taken part in, to sleeping through distant thunders.
It was obvious, his officer told him, that the outbreak or demonstration was being well contained, since there had been no further call for help. But, he said, prisoners were at large.

The colonel now called the camp and heard from a dazed-sounding Major Suttor that Colonel Abercare had been fatally wounded and was lying under a bloody sheet in the garrison hospital. “As for them, it has been a slaughter,” Suttor confessed in a rattled voice. “They wanted it to be a slaughter.”

Deakin promised Suttor some aid in finding or repelling the escapees and Suttor sounded like a man in need of such promises. “They have had time to walk five, ten, or more miles,” said Suttor. “But they've had to sleep too. They're not supermen.” He added, “They should be like stray cattle.” At least he hoped so, Deakin could tell.

Suttor suggested sending patrols out to a perimeter to the northwest and then moving them towards the prison, hunting for the strays. “They should be arrested and not killed,” said Suttor in a tone of frenzied insistence. “There have been too many killed.”

Deakin agreed. But the sanctity of his camp and local farmers were still on his mind—certainly, the farmers would call Sydney and condemn him if they or their stock were in any way harmed by the chase after the prisoners. He had no doubt headquarters welcomed such calls, which in their eyes proved his incompetence.

After the conversation with Suttor concluded, Deakin issued orders that two companies, about one hundred young men in all, should be roused, fed, and sent out on patrol towards the prison camp under the direction of their officers, who were also their educators. If it was true the escaped men were a rabble, the companies sent out would gather them in. If they had designs, however, on the brigade's magazine, then the troops on the perimeter of the camp must battle them.

In Deakin, age, middling rank, an undue sense of persecution by his superiors and the rural population combined to generate a decision that would later amaze authorities. Believing that in broken country
and amongst screens of trees and boulders his young men could not be trusted to avoid shooting cattle, farmers—even themselves—in crossfire; or would become so overexcited as to shoot the prisoners all dead instead of acting as police; or else, on the other hand, lose their rifles to those at large, the colonel decided that the men of the company he intended to send out should be issued only with bayonets, while the officers, who had experience of such things, would carry their sidearms. Thus six-sevenths of his troops would guard the camp with rifles against the predators and one-seventh would be sent forth as good as unarmed to round them up before they could threaten the place.

“It comes from the highest quarter that they're to be arrested not slaughtered,” a veteran captain told his veteran lieutenants as they waited all morning and into the afternoon for trucks to arrive. “This is diplomacy, we're told, not warfare.” The officers stood examining a map of gullies and ridges to the north, amidst them the branching bush roads, then the points where each patrol would be dropped and the bearing each should take. And the distance to be maintained between each man-child as they advanced, searching.

The trucks arrived in the end. It was afternoon.

•  •  •

Aoki found himself amongst an informal group of eight men fleeing, as ordered, for the ridges. The number grew to perhaps sixteen. A few carried bludgeons of baseball bats and dowel sticks, and some must have knives hidden, but he had nothing except his rank, which attracted men to join him.

They found streams in gullies and drank from them. At midmorning he called that they should rest. Yes, they might be overrun as they slept but that meant nothing, did it? They obeyed as if they were still campaigning—they liked to think they were—and Aoki and two others offered to keep watch. After two hours, he was relieved and settled to sleep himself. He dreamed of China and headbands.
Traveling on the roads out of Manchukuo at the start of that campaign, the youths of the regiment had worn silk scarves on which were painted national symbols, charging steeds, chrysanthemums, or tidal waves. By the time they had reached central China, their silk scarves—his, too—were ones they had stolen from Chinese merchants, and were of a particular kind, portraying sexual obscenities, hairy-cunted girls and heedless, multiple pricks. The headbands of Aoki's dream were—if anything—more extreme, and demonstrated that he and his comrades had become the forces of lust as well as the forces of the nation, an idea that did not enthuse him.