War and Remembrance (18 page)

With all this the defenders still had the edge, Shairpe insisted. Three Jap divisions had landed. The British could muster five, with plenty of air and ground reinforcements on the way. The Japs were well trained for jungle war — lightly dressed, able to live on fruits and roots, equipped with thousands of bicycles for fast movement down captured roads — but Japan was attacking all over the Pacific; and most likely this landing force had to live and fight on whatever supplies it had brought or could seize. If the defenders would scorch the earth, and force the invaders with delaying actions to use up their food, fuel, and bullets on the long march south, the attrition in time would halt them. They could then be destroyed.

Shairpe showed on the map where strong fall-back defenses ought to
exist. General Dobbie’s report had called for building these in peacetime. It hadn’t been done — a major folly — but there was still time. The material lay ready in warehouses. A labor pool of two million Chinese and Malayans, who all hated and dreaded the Japs, was available. They could do the work in a week or ten days. Two very strong lines were needed, close in: one in Johore on the other side of the strait, the other along the north shore of Singapore Island itself, with underwater obstacles, petroleum pipes, searchlights, pillboxes, barbed wire, machine gun nests —

“But that’s been done,” Tudsbury interrupted him. “The north shore’s already impregnable.”

“You’re wrong,” Shairpe replied, his oddly girlish voice roughened by brandy. “There’s nothing on the north shore of this island but marsh.”

After a pop-eyed pause, Alistair Tudsbury said, “I saw massive fortifications there myself.”

“You saw the outer walls of the base. They’re to keep out busybodies. The base is not a defensible strong point.”

“Are you telling me that the BBC has been lied to, by the highest officials in Singapore?”

“Oh, my dear fellow, the BBC’s a propaganda channel. One uses you. That’s all I’m here for. I hope you can somehow get the Malaya Command cracking.” Shairpe thinly smiled and slapped the stick on his palm. “Phil says you’ve a heart of oak, and all that sort of thing. The Empire’s teetering in the balance, Tudsbury. That’s not journalism. That’s a military fact.”

Tudsbury stared at this calm, wet, powerfully convincing officer. “All right. Can you come back about nine this morning?” He was limping about the room in agitation. “I’ll stay up all night to draft this story. Then I want you to vet it.”

“Really? Nine o’clock? Jolly good! Keen to help.”

“But you’ve got to shield Denton,” Rule put in, “even if they twist your balls in red-hot clamps.”

Shairpe left. Rule asked if he might stay and doze in an armchair. He meant to go to a hospital at first light.

“Look, get off those wet clothes. Hang them up and have a bath,” Tudsbury said. “Then use the extra bed in my room.”

“Thanks awfully. I do stink all over. At Jitra we went wading through bogs. I had to pick forty leeches off myself. Filthy little horrors!”

“What’s happened to your hand?” Pamela said. “It looks awful.”

“Oh, an imbecile army medico lanced it at Jitra.” Rule gave the hand a miserable, worried glance. “I hope I don’t lose it. I may have a touch of blood poisoning, Pam. I’m shaking from head to foot.”

Pamela smiled. With all his daredeviling, Rule had always been a hypochondriac. Tudsbury asked, “Where’s your plane, Phil?”

“The Malacca airfield. We caught an army lorry from there. They wouldn’t refuel me. Denton and I flew there from Penang. We had to beat people off the plane at Penang, Talky, and I mean white people. Army officers, in fact!”

Pamela drew a bath and laid out fresh towels, but then she found him asleep in his clothes. She took off his boots and outer uniform, which had a foul swampy odor, and tucked the mosquito netting about him. As she rolled him about, he muttered in his sleep.

Memories assailed her. Up till now, here in Singapore, he had been the ex-lover: older, sleekly flirtatious, repellent. But this big worn-out dishevelled blond man, lying asleep in his dank underwear with everything showing, seemed much more the Phil Rule of Paris days. Russian wife and all, at least he was not ordinary! In Paris he had always been — in his jagged and tormenting fashion — fun.

“What the devil, Pamela?” Tudsbury called. “Get at the typewriter and let’s go.”

Stumping here and there, waving his arms, he dictated a broadcast called “Conversation with a Defeatist.” At the Golf Club, he recounted, he had talked with a crusty old retired army colonel, full of alarmist opinions. Denton Shairpe’s views came out as this old carper’s words. Defeatism tended to conjure up such nightmares, Tudsbury pointed out, and the story showed a human side of the Singapore defenders. He himself was sure that the fixed defense lines existed, that the fighting retreat was going wholly according to plan, and that the north shore of Singapore Island was a bristling death trap. This episode merely proved that free speech still prevailed in Fortress Singapore, that democracy in Malaya remained self-confident.

When he finished, Pamela opened the blackout curtain. The sky was gray. Rain was still coming down hard.

“Adroit, what?” her father asked, when she failed to comment. “Tells the story, yet they can’t fault me.”

She said, rubbing her eyes, “You’ll never get away with it.”

“We’ll see. I’m going to catch an hour’s sleep.”

Major Shairpe, much spruced up and wearing a pith helmet, arrived on the dot of nine. Making a few small rapid corrections on the script in pencil, he piped, “I say, you’ve got the hell of a retentive memory, Tudsbury.”

“Long practice.”

“Well, it’s a smasher. Most ingenious. Congratulations! Hope it has some effect. I shall be listening for it up-country. Jolly glad Phil got me to come.”

Pamela dropped the script at the censor’s office and went shopping.
Buyers were crowding in and out of the stores, mostly run by Chinese, and still crammed with peacetime goods at far cheaper prices than in London — silk lingerie, jewelry, gourmet food and wines, kid gloves, elegant shoes and purses. But in nearly every store there now hung a copy of the same sign, newly printed in vaguely Oriental red lettering:
Cash Only Please
—
No More Charge Accounts or Chits.

“Is that you, Pam?” Tudsbury called as she dropped her bundles on the map table.

“Yes. Any news?”

“Rather. I’ve been summoned to Government House.” He emerged from his room freshly shaved and ruddy, in a white linen suit and a rakishly tilted hat, with a pugnacious gleam in his eye. “Berlin all over again!”

“Did Phil ever wake up?”

“Long since. He left a note in your bedroom. Cheerio!”

Rule had written in childish block letters:
“Excuse left hand printing luv. Appreciate thoughtfulness mosquito netting. Sorry you had to put on bathrobe due my sudden attack of memory and desire. My hand’s killing me. A toi, Malraux.”

She threw the note into a wastebasket, and fell fast asleep on a couch. The telephone woke her. An hour had passed.

“Hello, Pam?” Tudsbury sounded excited and gay. “Throw together a bag for me. I’ll be travelling for about a week.”

“Travelling? Where to?”

“Can’t talk now.”

“Shall I also pack?”

“No.”

He soon arrived, his suit dark-patched with sweat at the armpits. “Where’s the bag?”

“On your bed, all ready.”

“Let me have a stiff gin and bitters. The fat’s in the fire, Pamela. My destination’s Australia.”

“Australia!”

“I am in very, very hot water, my dear.” He threw off his jacket, opened his tie, and fell into an armchair with a creak. “It’s
worse
than Berlin. By God, that script raked raw nerves! The governor and Brooke-Popham were fairly jigging with rage. I got the unruly native treatment, Pam. These two lords of creation actually tried to bully me. Bloody fools, they’re the ones who are in trouble. But they’re determined to throttle anybody who wants to shake them out of their dream world. It was an hour of revelation, Pam, bitter and ominous revelation. What I saw was dry rot, pervasive and terrible, at the very top. Ah, thank you.” He gulped the drink.

“What am I to do? Follow you?”

“No. Brooke-Popham’s about to be relieved. Find out what you can. Keep notes. I’ll hurry back and cover this battle, but that script must go on the air.”

“Talky, there’s censorship in Australia.”

“Nothing like this. It can’t be. The unreality, the unreality! The self-contradiction! Do you know, they first said they had the fixed defense lines. Then no, they admitted they hadn’t, because the labor wasn’t available! As for Shairpe’s native labor pool idea, they called it ignorant poppycock. Malaya’s mission is to earn dollars. Every native taken from the gum trees or the tin mines hurts the war effort — this, mind you, with mines and plantations falling day by day to the Japs! Also, the government can’t compete with the pay scale of the planters and mine companies. To commandeer the labor at government rates would take three months of correspondence with the War Office. That’s how their minds are working, Pamela, with Penang gone and the Japs roaring south.”

“Singapore will fall,” Pam said, wildly wondering how she could get out of this place.

“Not if Shairpe’s view prevails. I’ve lent myself to this government’s suicidal sham. Now I must make amends. Thank God Phil brought Shairpe here — hullo, here we go!” He sprang at the ringing telephone. “Yes? Yes? — Ah, beautiful! Superb. Thank you — Pam, they did it! They bumped a poor American merchant off the flying boat. I’m on my way.”

“You’ll be in Australia for Christmas, then. And I’ll be here.”

“Pam, what’s to be done? It’s the war. This should be a historic broadcast. The BBC can sack me afterward. I don’t really care. Once the deed’s done, and the dust settles, I’ll come back, or you’ll fly to Australia.” Tuds-bury babbled all this as he combed his hair, straightened his tie, and ran to get his bag. “Sorry to bolt like this. It’s only for a few days.”

“But will the Japanese come in those few days? That’s what I’m wondering.”

“Do you think I’d abandon you to face that? They’re three hundred miles away, and advancing only a few miles a day.”

“Well, good. Given the choice, I’d rather not be raped by platoons of slavering Orientals.”

“See here, do you feel I’m treating you badly?”

“Oh, Talky, on your way! Merry Christmas.”

“That’s my girl. Cheerio.”

Major Shairpe had told the plain truth. Fortress Singapore was a phantom. What the Tudsburys had seen from the arriving aircraft was the simple fact. It wasn’t there.

When an empire dies, it dies like a cloudy day, without a visible moment of sunset. The demise is not announced on the radio, nor does one read of it in the morning paper. The British Empire had fatally depleted itself in the great if laggard repulse of Hitler, and the British people had long since willed the end of the Empire, by electing pacifist leaders to gut the military budgets. Still when the end was upon them, it was hard to face. Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality. Such an illusion was Fortress Singapore.

It was not a bluff Nothing is clearer from Churchill’s memoirs than that he himself believed that there was a fortress at Singapore. Of all the people on the spot — army officers, naval officers, colonial administrators, all the way up the grand chain of command — there was not one man to tell the Prime Minister that Fortress Singapore did not exist. And the British belief in the “bastion of Empire” was infectious, at least for Europeans. Hermann Goring warned a visiting Japanese general, months before Japan struck, that Fortress Singapore would hold out for a year and a half. This same general later captured Singapore in seventy days.

Nor was the illusion generated out of thin air. Singapore did command the main eastern trade routes, at the water passage between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. In the lean pacifist years, many millions in military funds had been poured into it, for the Japanese threat had been anticipated. Early in the century the English had themselves built Japan’s modern navy, with great profit to British shipyards. The quaint feudal Japanese had caught on fast, defeating Czarist Russia’s navy to the warm applause of the British press. But when the smoke of the First World War cleared away, the shift in world forces made it conceivable that those same quaint Nipponese might one day try to vex the Empire. Accordingly, the gigantic naval base at Singapore, capable of servicing the whole Royal Navy, had been constructed. The plan was that if ever trouble from Japan threatened, the main fleet would steam to Singapore, to end the trouble by awe or by force. That the Germans might make trouble at the same time, requiring the main fleet to stay at home, seems to have been overlooked.

So Singapore was stocked with food, fuel, and ammunition for a siege of seventy days. That was the time the fleet would need to muster up and get there. Great fixed cannon pointed seaward, to hold off any attempted assault by the Japanese fleet before help came. All this did give the feeling of a fortress.

Yet the sea did not entirely moat Singapore. An attack could come by land from the north, down the wild Malayan peninsula and across the narrow Johore strait. But the planners judged that four hundred miles of jungle made a stouter barrier than fortress walls. Moreover, actual walls on the island’s north side, they felt, would suggest a fear that the Japanese might
come from the north one day, and that the British army might not be able to stop them. The British ruled in Asia by an aura of invincibility. With the main fleet seventy days away, what pressing need was there for such a mortifying precaution? The walls were not built. Instead, to make assurance doubly sure, Singapore Island’s stockpile was doubled to last one hundred forty days.