The Raft & Socrates Asks Why

by Eric Linklater

  LINCOLN

  I was talking to Beethoven the other day — he’s still asleep, is he?

  VOLTAIRE

  Very soundly. It is only when sleep has locked both eyes and ears that a man will open his mouth so trustfully.

  LINCOLN

  I was talking to him, very gently and tactfully as I thought, about affairs in Germany, but he behaved like I’d been asking the price of rope of a man who’d had a lynching in the family.

  VOLTAIRE

  He once told me that he had forgotten the sound of his own language.

  LINCOLN

  You certainly don’t hear it much around here.

  VOLTAIRE

  I encountered, recently, one of those early Teutons of the Heroic Age, Sigurd the Volsung. He also was quite unhelpful about modern Germany. When I asked him his opinion of the Aryan Theory, he proceeded to recite the pedigree of a stallion he had once owned, and finally it became apparent that in his time — the Fifth Century, I believe — the only recognised Aryan stock was a breed of small but sturdy horses.

  LINCOLN

  If I remember the story of Sigurd, he did his fighting with the simple object of getting rich, and because there was nothing else he could do without making a fool of himself. And that, as a motive, has gone out of fashion; except in Germany. — But who’s coming? Are we going to have company?

  Voices are heard, growing louder as the speakers come near. They are two soldiers, both wearing tropical uniform, tattered and stained, and bleached by the sun. They pass the loggia, on a little road below the balustrade, paying no attention to the Immortals, but still talking loudly. They are tall and redoubtable figures, the one a SERGEANT in the United States’ Marine Corps, the other a PIPER of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders; under his arm he is carrying a shabby-looking stand of pipes. Walking beside them, and listening to their argument, is FLYING OFFICER ARDEN.

  SERGEANT

  Yes, sir. It was ignorance and lack of vision were to blame. We were caught with our trousers down, and why? On account of us having neither knowledge nor imagination.

  PIPER

  The very same with our Government! What did they do about Singapore? Put a couple of fifteen-inch guns at the front gate, and left the back door unlocked. They never thought Japan would have the bad manners to come that way. They’d always gone to the front door themselves, and they thought Japan would do the same, and wipe its feet on the mat, and ring the bell to tell us it was there. It was just as you say, Sergeant: ignorance, and lack of imagination!

  SERGEANT

  That’s what killed us, buddy: ignorance and stupidity. Well, what the hell!

  Sings: ‘From the halls of Montezuma

  To the shores of Tripoli,

  We’ll fight our country’s battles

  On the land as on the sea…’

  Their voices, as they pass, grow smaller and fade into silence. ARDEN leaves them and comes into the club.

  VOLTAIRE

  How refreshing to hear men who take such a realistic view of their world! Who are they?

  LINCOLN

  One is a Sergeant of our Marine Corps, but I don’t know the other. — Well, Arden, what have you been doing?

  ARDEN

  Good evening, sir. I was talking to some of the soldiers in the Transit Camp, and then I walked up the hill with two of them.

  VOLTAIRE

  Could you persuade them to return? I should like to make their acquaintance.

  ARDEN

  Yes, I’ll bring them back. You really want to speak to them?

  VOLTAIRE

  Of course.

  ARDEN

  You’ll like them, I think.

  He runs down the steps of the loggia.

  VOLTAIRE

  Socrates, you must certainly question these men. They are honest fellows, I am sure, and what is more, intelligent.

  SOCRATES

  If they help us in our enquiry, we shall certainly be indebted to them.

  JOHNSON

  Are there many soldiers in the Transit Camp, Mr. President?

  LINCOLN

  The number varies from day to day. Our Records Office, unfortunately, is very much overworked at present, and it takes some little time to get all the necessary details…

  ARDEN returns with the two soldiers.

  ARDEN

  Here they are, sir.

  LINCOLN

  Come and sit down, Sergeant. There’s a chair right here.

  SERGEANT

  Thank you, sir.

  ARDEN

  Here’s another for you, Piper.

  JOHNSON

  From the evidence you carry, I take it that you are a Scotsman?

  PIPER

  Yes, sir.

  JOHNSON

  Then pray, sir, make yourself as comfortable as you can. I was very hospitably received in your country, when I travelled there with a compatriot of yours, Mr. Boswell of Auchinleck.

  PIPER

  Indeed, sir?

  LINCOLN

  I would appreciate it, Sergeant, if you were to tell these gentlemen the story you told me yesterday. It will bear repetition, have no fear of that. — The Sergeant, gentlemen, was one of the little garrison that defended Wake Island, last winter, with such notable resolution.

  JOHNSON

  Pray, sir, where is Wake Island?

  SERGEANT

  In the Pacific Ocean, sir, about two thousand miles from Hawaii, on the direct route to Hong Kong.

  JOHNSON

  Can you describe it for us?

  SERGEANT

  Well, it isn’t much to look at, and you wouldn’t choose it for a health resort. The whole area’s no more than a square mile, and the maximum height above sea-level is eight feet. There’s heavy brush to the eastward, growing fifteen feet or thereabout. The shape of the island is something like an Indian arrow-head, with two smaller islands on the wings, that partly enclose a lagoon full of coral reefs and fish. We were pretty glad of the fish.

  JOHNSON

  A very compendious description, sir.

  LINCOLN

  A speck in the ocean. Little, and lonely, and ill-fortified. And so low in the water. Why, when a storm was blowing, the whole island must have been awash.

  SERGEANT

  Yes, sir! It got pretty nearly as wet as a battleship in a gale of wind. But we’d have held it all right if we’d gotten the defences finished in time. We weren’t ready for them, that was the trouble. There were six or seven hundred contract labourers on the island when the Japs came. They’d been working well enough, but they hadn’t hardly started. Then the Japs arrived with their battle-fleet and a flock of bombers like you see gulls over a dead whale, and beat the tar out of us. There were times when you thought they’d crack the island wide open, and sink it. You get a heavy salvo, and there’s lumps of coral flying up, and chunks of coral coming down, and sand so as you can’t see a yard in front of you, and then the brush goes on fire. Maybe the bombardment would quieten down at times, but it just started again like some guy had slipped another nickel in the jukebox. But they didn’t do that for nothing. No, sir! We gave ’em plenty. We sank a cruiser and spoiled the look of two or three others. We sank a destroyer and a submarine and shot down twelve of their planes for certain, and maybe more.

  LINCOLN

  That was with a garrison of four hundred men?

  SERGEANT

  Yes, sir. I reckon there must have been nearly four hundred of us.

  LINCOLN

  And you kept up your defence, against all odds and expectation, for more than two weeks?

  SERGEANT

  Sixteen days, sir.

  JOHNSON

  Sir, they were days which all Christendom should remember.

  SERGEANT

  It’s kind of a pity they were wasted, but that’s the way things go when you aren’t ready. — How about your Malayan jungle, Jock? That worth remembering?

  PIPER

  I wouldna say it was worth
remembering, but it’ll take a big lot of forgetting. All that fighting for nothing! Down through those rubber trees, and the sweat running off you like rain off a roof. Everything we wore was just rotted with sweat. And the Japs coming out of the trees like something out of a nightmare. They got round behind us. They came in ashore among the mangrove swamps, and when we’d beaten off an attack in front, there’d be more of them waiting behind. But there were a lot fewer when we’d finished. Then we got down to the butt-end of the peninsula, and we were the rear-guard. All that was left of the others crossed over the causeway into Singapore island, and we held the last position. There weren’t so many of us either, but we’d done a good job till then, and we’d nothing to be ashamed of. There’s many an army had to retreat, and a good retreat, a weel-fought retreat, is no disgrace to anyone, especially among rubber trees. — I never want to see another rubber tree as long as I live. — But then came our turn to go, and we marched onto the causeway, on a dark night full of the stink of mangroves and burning houses, with the pipes playing. But after that it wasna so good. After that it was hellish. I’m no going to talk about it. It’s bad enough when you have to think, for it was just a calamity.

  SOCRATES

  And who, in your opinion, was responsible for the disaster?

  PIPER

  Who else but the Government? They hadna taken the trouble to learn what was what, and think clearly, and make proper plans. That was the whole reason.

  SOCRATES

  And do you, Sergeant, blame your Government for the failure to fortify your little island in the Pacific?

  SERGEANT

  Well, we ought to have been ready for the Japs, and we weren’t. And if you can’t blame the Government, who can you?

  SOCRATES

  It seems to me that both of you are right, and your Governments indeed are culpable. The first duty of a government is to secure the safety of its people and all their interests. If it fails to do this, it has failed in everything.

  PIPER

  It’s the politicians are to blame. I wouldna trust a politician.

  SOCRATES

  But you do not, of course, condemn either people or institutions for a single mistake. It may be, for all I know, that with the exception of these recent blunders your Governments have behaved, for a long time, with faultless wisdom.

  SERGEANT

  It was Big Business in the United States that sold Japan most of its armament. Till the summer of 1941 they were getting their automobiles and gasoline and airplanes and scrap-iron direct from us, and the bombs that fell on Honolulu, a few months later, were made of good American metal. That doesn’t smell of wisdom, unless my nose is out of joint. And though the United States is naturally the richest country in the world, for years before the war it was stinking with poverty. That’s not an advertisement for faultless wisdom, is it?

  PIPER

  It was the same with us, just the same. There were about three million on the dole in Britain at one time. And our foreign policy was more bankrupt than that.

  SOCRATES

  But both your countries are democracies, are they not?

  SERGEANT

  They certainly are. We don’t want any of your kings and emperors in the United States.

  PIPER

  No more than we want a dictator in Britain. Democracy’s good enough for us.

  SOCRATES

  And since they are democracies, your Governments do not merely represent the people, but are the people. They are a concentration of the popular mind. And if, as you seem to think, they have been guilty of criminal negligence, there must be some grave fault, not merely in your ministers, but in your whole population.

  PIPER

  There’s been something wrong somewhere.

  SOCRATES

  Then why have you been fighting, with resolution as it appears, and probably with gallantry, for countries which are clearly unworthy of you?

  SERGEANT

  Say, Mister, what are you getting at?

  SOCRATES

  I am trying to find the reason for your going to war in the service of two nations whose people, on your own admission, are negligent and slothful; and whose rulers, apparently unfitted for their task, cannot deserve your confidence.

  PIPER

  What’s confidence got to do with it? It’s a poor sort of man that only bets on a certainty.

  SOCRATES

  In what way is he poor? Is he not richer in common sense than a man who will stake all he has — that is to say, his life — on a wrestler who has not trained for the fight?

  SERGEANT

  Now listen! I’m an American citizen, and as such I’m entitled to say exactly what I please about any Senator or Congressman that ever went to Washington. But when my country gets in a jam, I don’t lie down and squeal, I start shooting. And why? Because I’m a man, not a rat. That’s why.

  PIPER

  And that goes for me too.

  SOCRATES

  But if you are men, you should listen to reason, and I ask you again if it is reasonable to fight for an authority which, as you have stated, does not fulfil its obligations, and may be incapable of fulfilling them?

  VOLTAIRE

  Ignorance and stupidity, you said, were the cause of your death. Are you fighting to perpetuate ignorance and stupidity?

  SERGEANT

  If you two guys went around in some American city asking questions like that just for the hell of it, you’d wake up some morning cold and stiff and wonder what had hit you.

  SOCRATES

  That is almost exactly what did happen to me, a long time ago.

  SERGEANT

  Then it’s a pity you didn’t learn your lesson.

  SOCRATES

  How can a man learn anything except by asking questions of those who know?

  PIPER

  You might have learnt something, just by keeping your eyes open, if you’d been living in Central Europe for the last few years. You might have seen things that happen in German prison-camps, things that happen when the Gestapo comes around, and things that happened in Warsaw and that wee village in Czechoslovakia where they murdered every man and stamped the houses flat for the sheer lust of cruelty. And they’re no new things either. They happened in the last war too. My old man was a sailor, and he was killed by a German submarine that torpedoed their ship and then came up and shelled an open boat. That’s what Germany means, and that’s what we’re fighting against. And the defeat of Germany is cause enough for any man who just hopes to leave the world a place where his bairns can grow up in health and decency and some degree of safety.

  SERGEANT

  You might have learnt as much, or more, if you’d been in Nanking in 1938, when the Japs celebrated their victory with mass rape and murder. I wasn’t there, but my wife was. She was a nurse, and what she saw was enough to make any man get up and fight. The trouble was we didn’t pay attention. They were Chinese that suffered, and I guess we thought it was none of our business what happened to them. But that’s where we were wrong, and now we’ve learnt our mistake. My wife’s a widow now, and she’s got a child I’ve never seen. But if that child can live his life in a world where there’s never another Nanking massacre, then I reckon we didn’t waste our time on Wake Island.

  SOCRATES

  Your feelings do you a great deal of credit, and I sympathise with all you have said. But is there, in the present constitution of your countries, or anywhere upon earth, the promise or beginning of such a world-wide government as might bring to being the general security for which you hope? That offers, not only to your children but to the Chinese, a fuller and better life? If there is no such prospect, no widespread and explicit determination to organise a more sensible world, then it still seems to me that you have sacrificed your lives to no purpose.