Shame and the Captives (45 page)

After he was knocked onto his back, he raised himself sideways for an instant. Then he fell down again and began a conclusive tremble.

“I can shoot a rabbit through the eye,” she yelled at him in the ringing of the ears. It was an outright boast and a late warning. But she was awed by what she'd done and the size of it. Her blood was still up as Giancarlo knelt to the man, who had some slight movement in him. His mouth frothed with blood. Giancarlo's knees were sunk in the bloodied dust. He looked up at Alice and yelled, “He didn't mean . . . He didn't mean . . .”

“How would you know, Giancarlo?” she howled. “You know nothing!”

He watched the man's face as if it were the face of a friend. He rubbed blood off the man's cheek—first aid, anarchist-style. But the prisoner had gulped one last time and died.

Giancarlo had the arrogance of tears in his eyes. She couldn't believe his simplemindedness.

“He was coming at me with an ax, you idiot!” she screamed. But, just as she had never fully believed in her own peril, neither had Giancarlo. He looked up at her and yelled, “
Strega
!” Witch! “
Cattiva,
” he said. “I was come to grab him.”

It struck her for the first time. I have used this handsome Japanese to rid myself of handsome Giancarlo, and Giancarlo will use him now to get rid of me.

Giancarlo stood up and grabbed the ax, bloodied not on the blade but along the handle. He turned his back on her and, as an opening to his frenzy, smashed the window of his room with the blunt end, and then walked to the doorjamb, hacking into it with blows repeated at what she thought was an impossible rate. He was breaking out. It was an act of escape. He was smashing his cell and saw her as his gaoler and didn't give a damn what she might do now. The blows, repeated and repeated, caused the wood of the walls to fly in the air. She would let him do it as long as he wanted to, she decided.

She began to shudder but still, in spite of all, did not repent of the dead enemy five steps away. Her dress was splashed with his blood. “My dress is ruined,” she murmured to herself. Her shoulder had been pummeled by the heavy rifle, too, and ached. Then, still carrying that rifle, she moved inside to call the camp. From within the house she could hear Giancarlo hacking at his walls.

I
n September 1944 a broadcast from the enemy's English-language shortwave news service was broadcast and picked up. A transcript was sent to Gawell and appeared in Major Suttor's letter tray, freezing his blood.

Bursting with indignation at the cold-blooded murder of Japanese civilian internees, we demand to know the true story of the midnight murder of these 300 innocent men, belatedly reported more than a month after the incident occurred. It is perfectly clear to the Japanese people that these unfortunates who were murdered in the prison camp cannot have been prisoners of war. They were internees: the Japanese soldier never permits himself to be taken prisoner. The unfortunate victims of the midnight mass murder had lived in Australia for years before the war. They had become accustomed to the Australian way of living and had Australian friends and girlfriends. Then, why should they uprise without cause? And why has there been no statement by the Vatican authorities or by the protecting power or the International Red Cross
regarding these killings? It should be obvious that these authorities have been prevented from making a thorough investigation. We appeal to Archbishop Gilroy of Sydney and the Apostolic Delegate from the Vatican, who have repeatedly deplored anti-Axis brutality, to insist on a thorough investigation of the matter.

The idea of the chastisement of an archbishop and an apostolic delegate played, along with so much else, on Major Suttor's already grieving mind. He grieved for the lost men of Compound C as for the lost of the garrison, and, in the latter case, above all for Warren Headon, whom he'd barely known and whose disabling of his gun had saved many of the garrison and perhaps others.

He grieved because Abercare and he and all of them had lived by habits of unvigilance. They had spoken to the garrison about the virtues of watchfulness, but the garrison had taken its cue from Abercare and Suttor's own disbelief, and from their style of life as functionaries.

He grieved most intensely for his son, and all other sons. Abercare was blameworthy but had paid for any crime of negligence. Suttor had not yet, and did not need the archbishop's counsels on top of all else. He was already the chief penitent, and would be so for the residue of his life.

The character of Compound C was changed now. New prisoners arrived, younger men who had not been fully transformed into soldiers because they had been rushed into battle. These boys were critical of generals and the way they themselves had been let down by them and by criminal deficiencies of supply. The surviving party of certainty, the ultras, no longer had the authority they once did.

When the military inquiry was appointed by Headquarters, Suttor was able to tell a reasonable story, the sort of story he related in his
nightly serial. He had been told by his legal adviser that there would have been no deaths unless the prisoners had willed them. Abercare was let off reverently by the court, and his early notice to the prisoners of Compound C was construed as an act of civilization to which the inmates had reacted with barbarism.

Though Colonel Deakin of the training battalion was much questioned as to why he had armed his sentries but sent out searchers with mere bayonets, he was ultimately excused with a mild reprimand. For the proposition behind the inquiry was—at least in considerable part—that it could find the three officers culpable or not. If it found the men culpable, they certainly did not merit gaol terms, and mere reproaches and demotions would be mocked internationally as inadequate. So all of Gawell's garrison, and Deakin, had to be exonerated.

Colonel Abercare's grave in Gawell cemetery remained honored, Colonel Deakin still commanded the trainees, and Suttor was soon after given a job in information at Headquarters in Sydney, and was delighted to leave Gawell. A new commandant was installed and a new major for Compound C. Suttor the public man remained with all his visible surfaces intact, and was treated with some sensibility by a creaky military machine. He continued to write about the Mortons, which was considered the most important job he had.

No archbishop's or apostolic delegate's letter ever arrived at Gawell. As for the protecting power, the Swiss, its representatives had, by the Sunday following the outbreak, stood with him in grievous Compound C, in the atmosphere of putrefaction as first one corpse and then another was taken from the outer compound into the canteen block for examination by the coroner. The Swiss and he shared that companionable horror.

There had been a few distractions. A woman on a Gawell farm had killed a Japanese escapee who had threatened her with an ax, and then the Italian prisoner on the farm had inexplicably “gone
troppo” and attacked his own quarters with the same ax. He was put in the hoosegow of one of the Italian compounds and quickly forgotten by Suttor.

•  •  •

Aoki was charged within a few hours of his advice to some of the prisoners concerning Oka. He found himself in the high-security corridor of a prison somewhere near Sydney. Other Japanese prisoners came and went there, but he was awaiting a major trial.

Over three days of testimony, he told—through his translator—the truth. He claimed he had murdered Lieutenant Healy, the officer who had accompanied the recruits who'd carried mere bayonets, but there was no conclusive evidence of that—the fleeing militiamen's backs had been turned—and it was thought he was indulging suicidal tendencies in saying it. In the end the court found him a mere accessory, an abettor and not a prime cause, and condemned him to a ten-year sentence in a military gaol on the outskirts of the city named Sydney.

This, in effect, meant that he was sentenced to the haunting, phantom reproaches of the immolated ones of Compound C. His guards watched him to prevent his suicide. They confiscated cutlery after every meal, sent him an army barber to shave him once a week, and otherwise deprived him of all sharp objects.

It may have been that his sanity was saved by a remarkable young diviner, a man of striking eyes, of ascetic tendencies, who could meditate for three hours at a time without moving.

In one of the camps west of Gawell, he had killed a fellow prisoner at the man's intense pleading. Even though his powers of divination were frowned on by many established Shinto priests, he himself had an ambition to be a priest, if he could ever manage it.

Bewildered by the accident of his relentless survival, Aoki inevitably sought the striking young man's help. Sadly, the prison authorities had confiscated the plaques with symbols on them that were one of
the essential tools of divination. Aoki's companion was thrown back onto other stratagems of his craft: He counted the footsteps of guards in the corridor and observed over a period the height and direction of birds above the exercise yard. He consulted cups as well. This took him days of assessment, calculation, and reflection. When, during their recreation hour, he was at last ready to speak to Aoki, he told him that all the tools of divination to which he had had recourse indicated that Aoki was by some spiritual force excluded from chasing death. This much was evident from his history alone. He must bear his grief and wait for death to approach him. That was the formula of his life.

In the derangement of his mind at that time, the proposition was like a revelation. The news that there were definite forces ordaining his survival was a comfort at last, and explained why his desire to attain death had been thwarted at every turn.

His sentence was commuted five months after the conflict ended, and he was shipped home in the middle of 1946. By then, Neville Herman had been eight months returned and was farming again and living with his father and his wife. He was a mature man and ready for life, not closed to it like his father. He and Alice adopted a child, and then another. They seemed an exemplary couple and had many friends in the Gawell tennis club. Neville bought out the Hammonds, on whose farm Giancarlo had once sheltered, became a shire councillor and a member of the board of the New South Wales Country Cricket Association. Baseball had been extinguished in the region.

Young David Suttor came home, too, after a stint in Changi and another on the Burma railroad and then in Changi again. He weighed, on arrival at the quay in Sydney, 45 percent of his weight at capture, but while weight was susceptible to remediation, it took four months in what people called a mental hospital to make him ready for life on the streets. At the end of 1946 he left his family for London and became the popular novelist Major Suttor never was and took lovers amongst the most famous of British painters and actors.

It was only later in life that Aoki wondered if the diviner had diagnosed his symptoms of survival to save his mind and his continued life. But such had been the force of the young meditator's character that these doubts did not enter his mind until he was nearly sixty years of age.

I
must gratefully acknowledge the help of Professor Michael Lewis of the University of Sydney, an expert on Japanese history and culture. If in various instances even his good services do not prevent me from errors, that is not his fault.

Other sources include:

Teruhiko Asada,
A Night of a Thousand Suicides
(Sydney, 1970).

Charlotte Carr-Gregg, “Japanese Prisoners of War in Australia, the Cowra Outbreak, August, 1944,”
Oceania
, vol. XLVII, no. 4, p. 253, June 1977.

Hugh V. Clarke,
Break-out! The Japanese POW Break-out at Cowra, 1944
(Sydney, 1964).

Harry Gordon,
Die Like the Carp: The Story of the Greatest POW Escape Ever
(Sydney, 1978).

———,
Voyage from Shame: The Cowra Outbreak and Afterwards
(Brisbane, 1994).

National Archives of Australia, “Cowra POW Outbreak,” A1066; A1608; SP1714/1; A373; A430; A7711; SP 112/1; A5954; SP 1048/7.

Seaforth Mackenzie,
Dead Men Rising
(Sydney, 1951).