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.
Acknowledgments
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).
THOMAS KENEALLY began his writing career in 1964 and has published twenty-nine novels since, most recently the New York Times bestselling The Daughters of Mars. His novels include Schindler’s List, which won the Booker Prize in 1982, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker Pr
ize. He has also written several works of nonfiction, including his boyhood memoir Homebush Boy, The Commonwealth of Thieves, and Searching for Schindler. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney, Australia.
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ALSO BY THOMAS KENEALLY
FICTION
The Place at Whitton
The Fear
Bring Larks and Heroes
Three Cheers for the Paraclete
The Survivor
A Dutiful Daughter
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
Blood Red, Sister Rose
Gossip from the Forest
Season in Purgatory
A Victim of the Aurora
Passenger
Confederates
The Cut-rate Kingdom
Schindler’s List
A Family Madness
The Playmaker
To Asmara
By the Line
Flying Hero Class
Woman of the Inner Sea
Jacko
A River Town
Bettany’s Book
Office of Innocence
The Tyrant’s Novel
The Widow and Her Hero
The People’s Train
The Daughters of Mars
NONFICTION
Outback
The Place Where Souls Are Born
Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish
Memoirs from a Young Republic
Homebush Boy: A Memoir
The Great Shame
American Scoundrel
Abraham Lincoln
The Commonwealth of Thieves
Searching for Schindler
Three Famines
Australians
FOR CHILDREN
Ned Kelly and the City of Bees
Roos in Shoes
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by The Serpentine Publishing Company Pty Ltd
Originally published in 2013 by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keneally, Thomas.
Shame and the captives: a novel / Thomas Keneally. — First Atria Books hardcover edition.
pages; cm
1. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Australian—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, Japanese—Fiction. 3. Prisoners of war—Australia—Fiction. 4. Prisoners of war—Japan—Fiction. 5. Escapes—Australia—Cowra (N.S.W.)—Fiction. 6. Australia—History—20th century—Fiction. 7. Cowra (N.S.W.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.K46S53 2015
823'.914—dc23 2014034535
ISBN 978-1-4767-3464-4
ISBN 978-1-4767-3466-8 (ebook)
Contents
Author’s Note: Where the Tale Comes From
Autumn 1946: Japan, Unspecified Prefecture
Part I: Australian Spring and Summer 1943–44
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part II: Australian Autumn 1944
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Fallout
Acknowledgments
About Thomas Keneally
Shame and the Captives Page 35
