The Steel Tsar (4 page)

Yet for all that I went warily through the drifting smoke. I had no wish to be plunged into the nightmare of capture by the Malay bandits.

At last I emerged into hot sunshine, saw blue, calm sky above me and the rich, variegated greens of a forest below. I looked about for signs of the bandits and their captives but I could see nothing.

Beyond the forest was a faint line in the sky. It was the horizon of the sea. The airship had almost succeeded in crossing the island and would have done if the wind had not driven it against what I now saw was the highest mountain in the region. I would try for the ship’s destination of Djogjakarta and pray that the city was still in Dutch hands. My best bet would be to cross the intervening land to the sea and then follow the beach more or less westward until I got to the town, or, with luck, find a road on which I could get a lift.

There was no point in trying to do anything for the captured survivors myself. Once in Djogjakarta I could tell the authorities what had happened and hope that Dutch hovergyros would go out with soldiers and save the people.

And so I began my journey to the sea.

It took three days, first through the thick jungle and out onto the plains until I came to the paddy fields which I had to wade through, making wide detours around villages in case the local peasants were, as was often the case, in league with the bandits.

It was an exhausting trip and I was half-starved by the time I saw the beach ahead, not an hour’s march away. In some relief I began to wade through the last paddy, my ruined boots dragged at the clinging mud and then I stopped, hearing a familiar sound in the distance.

It was the drone of an airship’s engines. I looked up and located the source. A silver flash in the sky.

Tears came into my eyes and my shoulders slumped as I realized my struggle was over. I was delivered. I started to yell and wave, though it was unlikely that the crew could even see me at that height, let alone distinguish me for a shipwrecked Englishman!

But the ship
was
coming down. It did seem to be looking for me. Perhaps a rescue ship from Surabaya? I cursed myself for not staying near the wreck where I might have been seen earlier. Up to my waist in water, surrounded by the neat rows of rice plants, I waved my parang and yelled still louder.

Then I saw the motif on the ship’s hull and instantly I had plunged up to my neck among the plants, pulling them over my head.

The ship bore the red disc of the sun blazoned on its flanks. It was a vessel of the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.

For a few moments the ship circled the area and then flew off towards the mountains. I waited until it had disappeared before daring to emerge from the water. I had become a timid creature in the past twenty-four hours.

More warily than ever I crept to the seashore until at last I lay exhausted in the shadow of the rock on a warm beach of black, volcanic sand against which beat the heavy white surf of the Indian Ocean.

The presence of the scout ship over Java was ominous. It meant that Japan felt strong enough to ignore Dutch neutrality. It could even mean that Japan, or the bandits who served her, had taken the island.

I wondered if there were now any point in my trying to reach Djogjakarta. I knew that the Japanese were not kind to their captives.

The sound of the surf seemed to grow louder and louder and more and more restful until soon the questions ceased to plague me as I stretched out on the soft sand and let my weary brain and body sink into sleep.

A
t noon on the next day I saw the fishing village. It was a somewhat ramshackle collection of log and wattle huts of various sizes. All the huts were thatched with palm leaves and some had been raised on stilts. The dugouts, moored to rickety wooden jetties built out into the shallows, were primitive and hardly looked seaworthy. The huts were shaded by tall palms whose curving trunks and wide leaves appeared to offer greater shelter than the houses themselves.

I shrank back behind a hillock and deliberated for a few moments. There was a chance that the villagers were in league with either the Japanese or the bandits or both. Yet, for all I was desperate to get to safety, I was tired of hiding, I was dreadfully hungry, and had reached a point where I did not much care who those villagers were, or to whom they felt loyalty—just as long as they fed me something and let me lie down out of the glare of the sun.

I made my decision and plodded forward. I thought I knew the kind of white man these people would be most prepared to tolerate and feed.

I had reached the centre of the village before they began to emerge, first the adult men, then the women, then the children. They glowered at me. I smiled back, holding up my pack. “Medicine,” I said, desperately trying to recall my vocabulary.

They all looked to me as if they could use what I had to offer.

A few villagers emerged from the general crowd. These all carried old guns, parangs and knives which, in spite of their age, looked pretty serviceable.

“Medicine,” I said again.

There was a stirring from the back of the crowd. I heard words in an unfamiliar dialect. I prayed that some of them spoke Malay and that they would give me a chance to talk to them before they killed me. There was no question that my presence was resented.

An older man pushed his way through the armed villagers. He had bright, cunning eyes, and a calculating frown. He looked at my bag and uttered a couple of words in his dialect. I replied in Malay. This had to be the headman, for he was far better dressed than his fellows in a yellow-and-red silk sarong. There were sandals on his feet.

“Belanda?”
he said. “Dutch?”

I shook my head. “
Inggeris
.” I was not sure if he saw any difference between a Dutchman and an Englishman. But his brow cleared a little. He nodded.

“I have medicine.” Carefully I enunciated the Malay words, for his dialect was not one with which I was familiar. “I can help your sick.”

“Why do you come like this, without a boat or a car or a flying machine?”

“I was on a ship.” I pointed out to sea. “It caught fire. I swam here. I wish to go to—to Bali. If you want me to cure your sick, you must pay me.”

A slow smile crossed his lips. This made sense to him. I had come to bargain. Now he looked at me almost in relief.

“We have little money,” he said. “The Dutch do not pay us for our fish now that the
Orang Djepang
war against them.” He pointed up the coast towards Djogjakarta. “They fight.”

I disguised my despair. So now there was no point in trying to reach the town. I would have to think of another plan.

“We have rice,” said the headman. “We have fish. But no money.”

I decided to continue with my original idea. If it worked I would be a little better off. “I want a boat. I will cure what sickness I can, but you must give me one of the boats with the engines.”

The headman’s eyes narrowed. The boats were their most valuable possessions. He sniffed and he frowned and he pursed his lips. Then he nodded. “You will stay with us until ten men fall ill and are cured and five women and five male children,” he said, lowering his eyes.

I guessed that he was trying to hide any hint in his eyes that he might be getting the best of the bargain.

“Five men,” I said.

“Ten men.”

I spread my hands. “I agree.”

* * *

A
nd that was how I came to spend more weeks than I had planned in a remote and faintly hostile little Javanese fishing village, for the headman, of course, had tricked me.

The men proved disappointingly healthy and the women and children seemed constantly sick of minor complaints so that, with my limited medical knowledge, I treated many more people than had been called for in the original bargain, but I never seemed in sight of making up the male quota. The headman had realized at once that he was on to a good thing and it was soon evident that even when the men did fall sick they did not report to me but stuck to their usual methods of cure. At least two died while I was there. They were prepared to forego any attention from me so that I should continue treating the women and children.

For all that, I was scarcely angry. The routine was an anodyne to my weary brain and I lost myself in it. My awareness of any reality beyond the confines of the village grew steadily more vague. Chaos had come again to the outside world, but the day-to-day life of the village was the model of simple order and I might have lived my life there if the outside world had not, at last, intruded.

Looking back, I understand that it was inevitable, but I was surprised when it happened.

One morning I saw a cloud of dust in the distance. It seemed that the sand of the beach was being disturbed, but I could not distinguish the cause of the disturbance.

Then as the dust cloud came closer I realized what it meant and I ran to hide in the doorway of a hut.

The dust was thrown up by the tyres of military cars—big, square utilitarian things with heavy-duty steam turbines driving their massive wheels. And the military cars were crammed with Japanese soldiers. Almost certainly they had conquered the whole island by now and, as certainly, had heard some rumour of my presence in the village. They were coming to investigate.

It was at this point that I decided to sail for Australia. There was nowhere else to go.

* * *

A
lthough I had failed to fulfill my original bargain with the headman, I still had the moral right to do what I did, for I had dealt fairly enough with the villagers. And I would leave what there was of my medical kit behind for them.

Taking only a petrol can full of water, I crept down to the shore, using a jetty as cover. Then I waded to one of the outboards and began to untie it. All the villagers were watching the oncoming cars and it was my only chance to escape. I started to push the boat slowly towards the open sea while the villagers ran about in excitement at the arrival of their new masters.

I was lucky. A current soon caught the dugout and carried it more rapidly away from the shore. At last the villagers saw me, realized what was happening just as the Japanese cars drew up in the village square. I was now some distance out and having trouble trying to climb into the dugout without upsetting it.

The villagers began to gesticulate and point towards me. With a heave I managed to get into the wildly rocking boat and tried to get the battered outboard going.

It fired after only three false starts. I adjusted the tiller and headed for the open sea, noticing with satisfaction that there were two spare cans of fuel stowed amidships.

I heard pistol shots, then rifle shots.

Then a machine-gun started up and bullets buzzed about my ears and struck the water all around me. I kept changing course and at one point did a complete circle and headed in the opposite direction to Darwin, my proposed destination, hoping that this would confuse them when they came to radio their headquarters and instruct them to send out airships and patrol boats to look for me.

The gunfire stopped for a moment. I looked back and saw the tiny figures of the villagers. They seemed to be kneeling before the Japanese.

Then the machine-gun started up again, but this time it did not fire out to sea.

* * *

A
few hours later I began to think that the chances of pursuit had disappeared. I had sighted only one airship in the distance and soon it would be night. I had been lucky.

As I chugged out over the smooth and blazing mirror of the ocean, congratulating myself and with my thoughts increasingly turning to abstractions, I did not realize that the Japanese patrols must have been searching waters where I might logically be. It seems that I had already lost my bearings, in more senses than one.

As the burning days and the cold nights passed, I began to realize that I had no chance at all of reaching Australia, and I started to indulge in debates with my starving, thirsty self on the nature of life, the nature of death and the nature of what seemed to me a continuing struggle between Chaos and Order, with the former tending to come off rather better in the long run.

And it was this babbling and foolish wretch—once a practical and pragmatic soldier in a more orderly world—who eventually sighted Rowe Island and decided, reasonably, that it was nothing more than a splendidly detailed illusion.

R
ove Island was discovered in 1615 by the British explorer Richard Rowe.

In 1887 it was found to contain formations of almost pure calcium and in 1888 was annexed by Great Britain. That year the first settlers arrived and by 1897 they had obtained a concession from the mother country to work the phosphate deposits. From being uninhabited before 1888, it had by the first third of this century achieved a population of more than two thousand, mainly Malay and Chinese miners who had come there to work for the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company, which was the island’s sole industrial concern.

Rowe Island lies—or lay—in the Indian Ocean, 224 miles south, 8° east of Java Head and 259 miles north, 79° east of the Keeling Islands. It is 815 miles from the ruins of Singapore and 1,630 miles from what is left of Freemantle, Western Australia. Its European population used to number a hundred or so: the Official Representative and his staff; the manager and administrative staff of the Welland Rock Phosphate Mining Company; various private residents there for their health (Rowe Island was a very healthy place); a young lieutenant commanding the small garrison of Ghoorkas; some restaurant-, shop- and hotel-keepers; various missionaries and the airpark and dock officials. When I arrived most of these, of course, had already gone and neither airships nor steamers came to collect the island’s only export.

The settlement had a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Catholic church, a Methodist chapel and a mission hospital run by the Church of England. The hospital was staffed by a group of young Pakistani nursing nuns under the direction of a layman, Dr. Hira, a Sinhalese. The hospital’s missionary and his wife had departed for Australia soon after the Destruction of Singapore.