Shame and the Captives

by Thomas Keneally

  When he rose and ran again, other and better sprinters passed him and then fell down. He began climbing the second fence and one of his hands was spiked by a rosette of wire, and clothing caught and needed to be torn away. But the first of the escapees was climbing the outer fence and getting close to the machine gun now, and on the far side of that last wire fence, the crew was working at the thing to depress its angle of fire. These two seemed close figures, and the searchlight that had been a peril to the runners was becoming one to the gunners, since it left them in their own vulnerable, busy cone of glare.

  Yet firing in its new angle of depression and at so intimate a range, it was tearing the head, the legs, the arms off those climbing the last wire. There was concerted fire from the garrison as well, in their line in front of the company quarters. They know we want their magazine, Aoki realized.

  He knew he had come through the zone of enfilading, crisscrossing fire, but for a second believed he was gone, that he had achieved the desired end. There was darkness before him, but sound continued as before. The searchlights had all died, he realized. Some calamity, which refused to overtake him, had overtaken the electrical system—a line severed by a bullet. The night ahead seemed almost dim, but it was still lit from behind him by the fires in the compound, and Aoki could see, like faces in a theater, the men at that great reaper of a gun, and the ragged line of garrison nearly but not exactly connected to it. It occurred to him that if the gun could be taken, it could be turned on the line.

  He was astonished and chagrined at having got this far, and believed it was a symptom of the clumsiness he had expected of them. But as he dropped from the last fence, he was hungry for further acts of war now presented to him. A man was not aware of the existence of such hungers until he launched himself into the storm.

  • • •

  Cassidy fed the gun with a determined concentration, contemplative as a monk, excluding the world. But Headon at the handles knew that he would perish there, that when he had in his training looked down on the parts of the Vickers spread on a tarpaulin, he had been looking at the entrails of his death. The stand did not permit the barrel to be inclined any further than it was. And the garrison line off to one side had not seemed to have the wit or the education to advance and shield him and use him as their anchor. With so many self-liberated figures now massing before him in open ground, he knew that after this belt there would be no time for Cassidy at his most adroit to get the thing reloaded. For an instant he tested himself for terror, probed the skin, but found that there was, above all, a certain anxiety there, different from fear—and peevishness. His fellow garrison troops were piss-poor, timid men, formed up by timid officers. It was in his mouth that he tasted the metallic, ashy, and utterly novel taste of his extinction. They’d take him seriously as a soldier now.

  He knew there were further belts in cans on the trailer, and yelled at Cassidy to take them back into the camp.

  “Bugger it!” Cassidy roared above the continuing fire of the gun. He was betting he could reload, but there was no chance.

  “No, clear off!” Headon confirmed. If these interlopers turned the gun on the garrison, the garrison would not know how to take it. There were prisoners on either flank now, some falling to rifle fire but others not made cautious by it. This horde could be smelled through the cordite—the smell of their ambition and strangeness, of sour liquor and barbarous fervor.

  Cassidy stood and, with a canister of belts in either hand, tried to jump over the prisoners’ heads. It was an extraordinary vault, he thought, something he didn’t know was in him, all to deny the belts to the marauders. His leg was pulled out from under him and he fell amongst them with a great thump that took his breath. These were his and Headon’s recent targets. Why should there be any mercy in them? He could not see their individual faces and their shoulders blazed with the reflection of the fires they’d set. The sweatiness of their inevitable fear and strange ambitions encompassed him.

  Headon took out the feeding mechanism from the gun and threw it over the heads of those around him, hoping it might find a clump of darkness to lie in. He could hear Cassidy screaming and pleading on the ground and the thud of baseball bats and the descent of knives.

  A number of them were on the trailer now and one, standing in front of him, was a tall boy who drew his nail-studded baseball bat back over his shoulder like someone preparing to hit a ball. Rather be killed with a cricket bat, thought Headon.

  “Finish me quick, fuck you!” Headon instructed him.

  Terror struck now, like a shaft entering him. He did not choose to fall but felt himself going. A tremendous, sudden, and world-ending wallop bore him away, his components of body and personhood flying apart along hectic avenues of yellow and blue light, tearing him away from torches and trams and sisters.

  Cassidy, close to finished, bleeding from knife wounds as well as other blows, saw them laying into Headon’s body with their clubs, and had the impression that Headon, draped over the rim of the trailer, was dancing under the blows, telegraphing agonies to him. Cassidy had time to see a merciless young man straddle him, knife in hand.

  • • •

  When Aoki climbed up onto the blood-fouled trailer, using the top of one of its tires to ascend, most men lay dead around it or had moved on to attack the line of the garrison, whose fire was more admirably concentrated now. A confidence and a bloody enthusiasm had entered them, and surprised him as much as it might—on reflection—surprise them. He saw some of his comrades sloping away north, having already and reasonably enough despaired of taking the magazine. He knelt across the legs of the pummeled corpse that lay half-in, half-out of the trailer, and inspected the gun. An essential segment of it had been thrown away—he could tell that at once. As well as that, the brave gunner, worthy of a better battalion, had hauled the belt crookedly so that the last few rounds had jammed. All the bravery of the fellow’s soul had come together in those two acts of disablement.

  “It’s beyond hope,” he yelled to those still around him, who looked expectant and were waiting for him to turn the gun around and begin the business of damage beyond the wire. The rifle fire from the garrison dropped two prisoners as he spoke. All Aoki could think to do was point the machine gun high in the air and tighten the clamp that fixed it there and jump down. He descended from the trailer and stood considering other options amidst all the havoc. Still bullets maliciously evaded him. Then, he decided in fury, you can outlay your strength in a search. He turned without haste and sloped away northwards up a slight slope to become lost amidst granite boulders. Others followed.

  • • •

  Goda waited in the orderly hut while around him the barracks blazed. He heard the machine guns and rifles, but only one runner got back to tell him some men had crossed all three wire barriers. So he set out, calling to any of those sheltering in ditches or prone on the earth—he could not tell whether from death or cowardice. His mood was somber. He caught up with the tail of the more southerly assault and felt again that half-forgotten peculiarity of advancing into machine-gun fire. He was aware of the surprise of impact that men around him howled forth, yet he remained unhurt.

  Extraordinarily, Goda, much nimbler than Aoki, lived likewise and nonetheless through all the phases of crossing the wires, and climbing over blankets and bodies. He dropped from the last fence amongst shredded victims of grenades, which were being dropped from the tower above. He knew that if he stood still he might himself be so torn about, but then he saw men fall cleanly from machine-gun fire and chose that option. Men, as was natural in a battle, which this was more or less, were skirting the span of the gunfire and disappearing into the boulders and the darkness. And then the searchlights went out, and all seemed dim, but only for a moment for the eye was an adjustable organ.

  Goda turned towards the garrison and got close enough without being felled to see both that the machine gun there was no longer in action on anyone’s behalf, and that, as well, the garrison line had foun
d its military regularity and discipline now, as a line might after it has recovered from its disbelief in what is happening. The option which had presented itself to Aoki, to be gone and to cause disruption as a phantom in the countryside, was the one left to Goda.

  Near the gate he could see the frightened faces of the garrison firing and emptying their rifles and searching for new clips in their pouches. He began to climb the wire just inside the gate, gashing his hand, but trying to retain his shaft with its knife blade in one palm, using only fingers for ascent. He was impelled by having seen the commandant calling to a signaler, and his malice towards that fool was illimitable.

  He would have been discouraged to know that Aoki and Tengan—even though Tengan had been armed with a stake into which a blade had been embedded, and despite his stopping many times to howl defiance—amongst Goda’s section of men in Main Road had been similarly and perversely immune; that there seemed to be a malign plan to save the council of three.

  Like most of the men, Goda found his weapon inconvenient and threw it away. It had been hard to climb the three fences and retain it. Now he had only his own intractable and irreducible soul.

  32

  The young man who dropped ten yards from Abercare was someone he knew, and there was a second’s lunatic impulse to greet him. This known fellow held a shaft of wood with a blade stuck in it. He ran purposely, and Abercare saw him coming too fast for anyone to be called on. The rage on his face looked like a mask because of his handsomeness. The fury there was both to be expected but also distorting. He realized this was the hubristic flier, one of the triumvirate—the young fellow with pretty features and astounding eyes.

  Abercare nearly addressed him, ordering him to stop. The lieutenant had by now moved away, and Suttor, his pistol drawn, had turned back to support his troops. The signaler near Abercare saw the prisoner and reached for his rifle. The prisoner drew the stern of the shaft down, seemed to assess Abercare’s face a second, and then drove the improvised weapon upwards into Abercare’s sternum. Abercare breathed in hugely for a second and stood on in searing amazement with the shaft and its knife point fixed in him. The young man was visibly pleased but did not wait there to assess the damage any further. Abercare weighed the strange intrusion of the shaft. It was of a different order from pain, and larger.

  “Don’t hit our men,” he told the signaler, who had found his rifle and was firing after the escapee, who was flitting through the camp. The signaler’s shot did not seem to delay him as he streaked north towards the bush.

  Tengan had run some way to get to Abercare, northwards along the line of the fence, and of course he expected he would be shot now; now that he had done that hardhanded task, he was full of awe and a desire not to be shot precisely for that but to be shot for who he was—a prisoner. This kept him running. It was automatic, and later he would not be delighted at it. But it seemed to him then that they had failed to stop him from the front, and during his strike against the despicable commandant, and when they did not fell him from behind he simply kept running, with the dawning awareness that given the size of what he’d done, he would draw them away, hunting him, wearying and angering them, giving them motives to finish him in a notable way. Let them go to that trouble, and let them be vicious about it.

  The truth at the time, however, was that Tengan couldn’t have said why he ran onwards after impaling Abercare.

  Back by the gate, Abercare, half turned with the improvised point in him, saw the shots aimed at his assassin miss. Ah, he thought, the arrogance of that young man is profound. He called Suttor, who turned and became instantly attentive.

  “My God,” he said. “Sir . . .”

  Abercare said, “Mrs. Galloway is still in my quarters.”

  Had she risen and ranted to be let out, or had she by some alcoholic mercy slept through it all?

  “The gossips will tell Emily,” he continued. “It was a car breakdown . . .”

  These words seemed to him each like blows self-delivered against his own trunk rather than items spoken in the ordinary way. He was reduced to placing on Suttor the hopeless obligation to stanch those worthies, that poisonous estate, who would have opinions about Mrs. Galloway being in the camp.

  “I’ll send a guard,” said Suttor.

  A medical orderly had appeared and said, “Oh, Jesus, sir.”

  “Do we take it out?” Suttor asked the medical orderly. For no friend of the Mortons had ever been impaled. Suttor had not even researched the issue. He shouted some orders about guarding the colonel’s quarters, that Mrs. Galloway was waiting in there.

  “Lie down, why don’t we, sir?” the medical orderly suggested. But Abercare was aware that Suttor had—without trying to—released the gossip germ.

  “You may be right,” he began to tell his adversary. “Vanity . . .”

  He wished to make things clearer, but the power had gone from his voice. He fell sideways, the medical orderly guiding him down. His signaler dropped his rifle and supported him.

  “Very kind,” Abercare, obscenely penetrated, told the signaler and the medical orderly through the wall of noise.

  Suttor also knelt and tried to hold him up with a hand under his right armpit. Suttor was crying as if Abercare were his beloved leader. As if this were like the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.

  “Emily,” he told Suttor, and Suttor seemed to half understand and nodded.

  Abercare could feel the vitality of all their arms at various parts of his frame, the astonishing corporeal nature of them compared to the mist he was becoming. He was still aware of the huge thing in him, larger than agony, too vast for screams, taking him away before he could get the essential words out. He was washing away in a cold sea. Ah, he thought, the inland sea that once flowed here. It was dragging him up this hill away from the camp. From here he could see below, he could almost count, the burgundy units of his failure.

  Where was his breath?

  • • •

  The garrison line became ascendant and there would be murmurs afterwards that its firing went on too long: later-appearing prisoners clumped together; rather than offering a serious charge, they did not seem possessed of the impetus of the earlier wave, and staggered forward as if exhausted by traversing the triple fence. Others, the garrison line firing into their flanks, fled across open country northwards and into the boulders on the low ridge and the kurrajong trees, intending either to continue their defiance there, or else demoralized. These, too, were fair game for the line.

  Suttor’s duty lay between commanding the men shooting into Main Road, where the merest display of an intention to crawl was now punished by fire, and the main garrison line which, although fortified by an escort that had now arrived from Wye, was in some cases hungover and outnumbered by the captives.

  Frightened at first, the garrison grew in self-assertion and vengeance against a population they had been urged, against their better instincts, to treat with abnormal patience. Suttor did not possess the gifts to stop them. He cried, “Cease fire!” but came to know that in this garrison fury he needed to call his platoon commanders and have them visit each man with the command. He sent his sergeant major to do it. Even so there was irrationality and recklessness in him to let the vengeance roll on—for Abercare’s sake and for his son’s, and in his madness these two poles of affection became entangled on this unspeakable night.

  The shooting ceased in the first grayness, and the last of the fires in the compound became embers at about the same time. Suttor noticed that frost had descended and stiffened the earth and its vegetation, and had formed on the bodies of men. In that light the hundreds of blankets and maroon overcoats stuck to the wire, strung out like notations on lined music paper, bespoke a calamitous purpose he felt he could not read, but whose meaning, he was sure, would turn out to be appalling.

  • • •

  At nine o’clock on Sunday morning, accompanied by a detachment of guards, Sergeant Nevski entered Main Road amidst the reek of bur
ned huts and corpses, of all the palliasses, spare clothing, cards and books and keepsakes that had been consumed in Compound C. He could certainly tell that when it came to the huts, men’s bodies must have been caught inside those fires, must have killed themselves there beforehand and left their flesh for the flames. Or perhaps they had been murdered as dissenters—he did not know. There was in any case the horrific overlay of burned flesh. Though the bodies in Main Road and in the compound whose gates gaped open had been near refrigerated by the night, there was the odious smell of blood shed en masse.

  He noticed men—some subtly stirring—lying in ditches on either side of the road. He was in a grieving mood already, and like many soldiers did not know how to accommodate his grief. He believed that the firing from the garrison line had gone on too long, felling confused and uncertain figures, the aftermath of the frenzy of the front-runners. Nevski was nervous about the control, or lack of it, he could exercise over these guards accompanying him, yet such an entrance into the slaughter zone was necessary. Behind him and his section of guards came the work parties of Koreans and Formosans, detailed to find and lay the bodies in rows for the coroner. One of them, Cheong, said to his friend, but in a shaken voice, “This is what people they are, the stupid pricks!”

  Some men now rose from the ditch by the compound fence, and tore their jackets open and exposed their chests and pleaded to be shot. Others simply knelt up and pleaded for nothing; they might at some hour bless their survival. Nevski, knowing the inmates better than the guards did, and appalled by the humps of dyed uniforms scattered everywhere, standing out so vividly on the white-green dust of early light, began to choke at these sights and cried out preventively, “No. Don’t fire!”

  But sleepless, and having seen Colonel Abercare impaled before their eyes, or seen his draped corpse; having likewise seen Headon and Cassidy pulped near their gun; having always despised the contemptuous prisoners anyhow, two of the garrison soldiers with him accommodated the prisoners. Nevski heard the terrible cracks of rifles by each of his ears, and that cursed cordite smell assailed him again as it had in clouds in the small hours.