by Nigel Barley
“‘This,’ said my friend, pointing him out, ‘is the villain who has done this terrible thing.’ Everyone was amazed. ‘How can this be? You are mad. He is only a tiny man’ But my friend bent down and tore off his sandal and there on his big toe was ink.’” Cheers, applause.
“So it must always be with injustice. We will not suffer it any longer just as the Rajputs of Singapore will not suffer it any longer. They will rise with us,” he shouted. “Postmen and soldiers shall be as one. Prepare yourselves! Injustice is at an end!”
Mohammed shook his head in awe. “You clever man. Very learned, very holy.”
“Indeed,” Lauterbach assented and stroked his moustache. “That is why I am developing an Islamic garden, a vision of paradise in flowers and shrubs.”
It was almost true. Out there, across from the front door of the bungalow, something blossomed where once had been a mere heap of rubble. It was not Lauterbach himself who did the work of course, especially the troublesome watering, but he directed it from the verandah, lent – as von Muecke would have said – his vision. Various sailors had seeded and trimmed a formal garden, a series of horticultural tattoos really, anchors and knotwork, even an Iron Cross, executed in peonies and box. Experimentation had led to certain subjects being excluded. After a series of unfortunate acned caricatures due to the unpredictable activities of aphids, the face of the Kaiser had been excised. Maps of the fatherland had been vetoed on the grounds that they might give useful geographical information to the enemy and the German flag had only been permitted after some hesitation by the British authorities, though not all parts of it could be made to bloom at the same moment and the black strip was a constant headache for Nature did not favour black plants. At the rear of the bed, a topiary cruiser of the Emden class had had her keel laid and a little more rain would grow in the rest of her superstructure. But this constant shifting of images disguised one fact that the British did not notice.- that the mound itself was growing daily larger. It was the dumping ground for dirt from the tunnel. And once the cruiser was complete, her shadow would entirely conceal the tunnel entrance, hidden under a square of turf, from the searchlights that ranged the camp at night.
The tunnel had been a reluctant gesture by Lauterbach towards the grim-jawed Etappe members, a bone for them to gnaw on. Just as every nation must have its flag and its army, so, it seemed, every prisoner-of-war camp must have its tunnel. In its way, it had worked excellently, sopped up their excess of patriotic energy and kept them off his back. Moreover, in this separate compound, the only source of wood for shoring up the roof was the empty beer crates, carried in full under the eyes of the guards. Lauterbach was drinking to support his nation, drinking to keep pace with the diggers. There had been a long discussion of possible starting-points and trajectories in which Lauterbach had favoured opening the shaft inside one of the deep latrine pits, since that would certainly slow down the digging – but this had not found favour. And he was far from pleased to have it so close to his own quarters since, if discovered, it would certainly be laid at his door with attendant loss of comforts and privileges. Already, the British had staged a dawn search of his bungalow but, fortunately, his little nest-egg had been well hidden. In the interests of security, he had insisted that no tools be imported but that all works be effected with a spoon and fork filched from the canteen. It would take them another three months at least to make any substantial progress like that and then he would sadly discover either that it was too narrow for him to accompany the escapers or that it must be greatly enlarged, which would put off the evil day still longer. Lauterbach insisted on a patriotic pause in tunnel construction on national holidays and on the birthdays of the German royal family and those of ally Austria and had an uncanny ability to fix those of even the least members of both royal houses. He had bought a little time but not enough. It was clear that once the diggers had free access to the tunnel mouth the rate of progress would be doubled. He sidled across to the garden, bent to sniff appreciatively at a flower and looked furtively around. The guards were leaning out of their watchtower in the other direction. A group of prisoners were staring out through the wire towards the main road and pointing at something. He reached forward to the topiary Emden and snapped off what amounted to about fifty feet of glossy, green keel and stuffed it up his tunic. That would hold them for a bit.
The Chinese New Year was a non-digging day. “Too many people about. Too much disruption to the normal timetable,” Lauterbach explained to the confused Etappe. Down in Chinatown, crowds were thronging the streets, shopping, getting new year haircuts, eating carp and oranges and dancing dragons in token of good fortune as they watched flames climbing, coughing and farting like old men, up the great strings of firecrackers that hung down from the tenement buildings. In the prisoner-of-war camp, the strutting, shouting Indian troops had been replaced by shy Malays who flitted like pale shadows about the fences. With the departure of his rival, orderly Schmerz had flounced back to his duties, determined to be seen as indispensable. But Lauterbach missed the innocent credulity of Taj Mohammed. It had lent freshness to his world.
For the British, the noise and disorder of Chinese New Year was just another imperial inconvenience of living amongst natives who were in thrall to percussion and superstition and it had to be borne with condescending good humour. Without the Chinese, there was no business to be done so it would be a day of outings to the beach or golf or tennis, or aimless motoring, picnicking and tea on the lawn. In their nearby barracks, the officers of the 5th Light Infantry were taking leisurely tiffin, packing their things, preparing to embark for Hong Kong, when it occurred to some of them that the Chinese firecrackers sounded awfully like rifle fire. In fact, it was rifle fire. At the last minute a rumour had circulated – that the regiment was bound for the Western Front where it would face Turkish troops, fellow Muslims and half their regiment, the Rajput half, had mutinied. The other half, it would later appear, had not mutinied, but since they had neither ammunition nor the will to fight their fellows, they either hid or fled. The result was that Indian troops were wandering about the island in identical uniforms, some shooting down every European in sight and even Chinese when their attention wandered, while others, ‘true to their salt’, shamefacedly remained loyal. The British military responded with sluggish disbelief and then panicked. Singapore had been stripped of all European troops for the war and the sepoys could do much as they wanted. Colonel Martin sulked in his bungalow, while many of his officers lay dead and decomposing in the sun. At nightfall – he knew -the sepoys would come for him. The General Officer Commanding was unavailable over the telephone but his wife answered happily and freely offered tactical advice, counselling one besieged officer just to hang on till relief came. There was a bang and the line went dead. Probably not very helpful advice then. It remained to be clearly defined who was actually involved in this odd fighting and the very rules of engagement were yet fluid and instinctive. Non-participants outnumbered those committed to either bloodshed or active opposition. European office workers and senile pensioners were hastily summoned to the reserve and issued ancient weapons they did not know how to use. Captain Hall was heard drilling the volunteers. “Load weapons! Now, what you do is pull down that sticking out bit on the side and push a bullet in the hole. No the bullet faces with sharp end pointing the other way round.” They were ordered to set up roadblocks to deny the mutineers access to the metropolitan area so they milled about pointlessly in the road in a nice group waiting to be shot down. Everyone settled nervously to wait for someone else to make a decision about what was to be done. There was no public broadcasting. The one thought of the newspapers was to hush things up and they declared that there was absolutely no cause for alarm. The public at large had no idea what was going on and what exactly it was they were not supposed to be alarmed about. Rumours flew wildly round the European community and then the government started evacuating white women and children, sending them out to baking, overcrowded ships in
the harbour, where mems called into play all the base arts of snobbery and influence. Servants took over the city and enjoyed a time of blissful peace and quiet, drank their employers’ gin, lazed in their soft beds, laughingly tried on their clothes in mirrors. Meanwhile the mutineers wandered about in aimless mayhem.
To the military’s surprise, one of their immediate targets was the prisoner-of-war camp where Lauterbach lay unpeacefully on his belly in a hail of bullets and cursed, after all, that the tunnel had not been made big enough to accommodate him. That was the place to be. The shots outside could only mean one thing, that those fools from the Etappe had persuaded some poor sod to make a break for it and now they were all paying the price. He raised his head over the parapet of his fragile bungalow and watched amazed as Indian sepoys cut down, not German prisoners, but the Malay guards from their watchposts. Now they were firing erratically in all directions. He noted that the Germans, milling panic-stricken all over the parade ground in their distinctive naval outfits, were largely immune. It was clear, then, that the Indians’ target was Malay and British officers but it was far from obvious that they were well versed in the discrimination of uniforms at a distance. He heard shots and saw a couple of khaki-clad German prisoners stumble and fall and ducked down again. Most of the sepoys, fortunately, were terrible shots. It occurred to him that maybe they were all short-sighted.
The safest place above ground was perhaps the chapel. No wait. These were Muslims. Memories of the Indian Mutiny flooded in, with Europeans shot down before Christian altars by leering Lascars. The hospital. Hospitals had a more convincingly cross-cultural sacred status. He tucked a bottle of water and a hunk of Etappe sausage in his haversack and set off at a fast waddle, cutting behind the main buildings. When he arrived at the sickbay via the back door, the patients were all gathered round the front windows, offering excellent targets. This would not do at all.
“Get back to your beds!” he roared from behind. Some leapt a foot in the air, others dashed blindly for cover. A man with a broken leg rolled in agony on the floor. Bray, the attendant, stood dithering. He was a ‘conchie’, a man opposed on principle to any bloodletting other than the purely medical, and therefore treated universally by British and German alike as a mass murderer
“If I were you,” Lauterbach remarked to him with a calm he did not feel and stowing his food securely under a table, “I would get out of British uniform and into a white coat.”
He went around the ward, arranging it to look more like a hospital, scattering charts on the desk, tastefully displaying the instruments of medical emergency on bedside tables. When, a few minutes later, the sepoys clattered in with their hobnail boots, rifles nervously poking at the occupants, he was standing behind a big steel box with a red cross on it and taking the temperature of a protesting patient while talking loudly in authoritative German.
A bearded soldier in a turban, clearly the leader, tugged the bedclothes down off the first patient and asked if he were English. Lauterbach recognised Schulz, now revealed in comical Charlie Chaplin pyjamas, washed too often and far too small.
“German,” he declared roundly. “We are all German here.” Schulz grabbed back the sheets in offended modesty and clutched them up around his breasts. They looked around suspiciously, eyes resting on Bray. Lauterbach addressed him firmly in a child’s German tongue-twister.
“Die Katze tritt die Treppe krumm in Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum.”
“Ja,” nodded Bray wisely. “Ja.” and executed what was not a bad heelclick for a civilian in sandals.
The Indians laughed, shouldered their arms and marched out the way they had come, one fist in the air.
“Long live the Kaiser! Long live Enver Pasha!”
Further shots, shouts and a scream came from outside.
“I think,” said Lauterbach to Bray, “You should prepare for more casualties.”
There was a sudden noisy melee around the main gate. He peered cautiously round the doorframe to see what was happening. More Indian troops had arrived and were smashing off the lock. But what kind of Indians were these? Loyal? Mutineers? In the heat and dust there seemed to be a general scrum. The Germans were being attacked. No. Wait. They were being embraced by ecstatic Indians, pressing hairy, bearded kisses upon their shocked, squirming faces, gesturing at the gates now thrown wide, virtually pushing them out. “Free,” they shouted, “free.” A group of them spotted Lauterbach and ran over.
“You see? I come for you. We friend.” At their head, under the turban, in immaculate military dress, was the face of Taj Mohammed.
“But how …? What …?”
“You are free. We make you our leader. Our brother in Islam. Tell us what to do. We will take the forts, kill all the English.”
Brown men rushed up and seized Lauterbach, slapped a soldier’s turban on his head, hefted him on their shoulders and bore him, laughing and clapping around the parade ground, stamping rhythmically and grunting in some dark, native chorus normally used for the manhandling of fieldgun barrels over obstacle courses. The leader tripped and buckled under his weight but they recovered and laughed and swung him from shoulder to shoulder like some great Hindu god. Lauterbach choked, sweated, pulled the turban from over his eyes, laughed too and then abruptly froze as he raised his gaze to see intrigued British officers, crouched on the brow of the nearby hill, watching the whole thing, with impunity, through field glasses as if in the dress circle of a theatre. A terrible shivering gripped him. His bowels loosened. Incitement to mutiny, assuming command of rebel troops, murder, mayhem, treachery, wearing British uniform – the charges extended the length of a corridor that led to death at the end of a swinging rope. Perhaps, he thought vainly, they would not be able to identify him, would not know his name.
“Lauterbach! Lauterbach!” the troops began to chant obligingly. A British officer frowned and made a note.
“For Christ’s sake why don’t you spell it for them?”
“L-A-U-T—” Mohammed drew proudly on his mastery of the name on Lauterbach’s door, demonstrating his own learning by shouting it to the world.
“Put me down!” screamed Lauterbach in mental agony. Mohammed looked puzzled and released his grasp, unbalancing the load so that Lauterbach tumbled in the soft dirt under a pile of malodorous Indian bodies. A knee struck him in the mouth. Someone trampolined painfully off his stomach.
“I cannot join you,” he gasped, struggling to rise. “It is not possible.”
Mohammed frowned. “Then you are our enemy too.”
“No, no. We wish you well. But we have no weapons. We are mere sailors, unused to land fighting. We would be a handicap to you. We are not army men.” He thought briefly of giving them Schulz as leader but it would confuse them. “It is not as if the port was full of German ships. Then we could do something.”
“German ships,” someone shouted from the rear. “The port is full of German ships. Lauterbach has promised German ships.” They hugged each other, resumed their dancing, raised him aloft again and chanted his name and his promise in excellent English for all to hear. Finally, they gave him three cheers and left shouting loudly their resolve to return later with guns for all the prisoners and marching away to English patriotic songs, the only ones they knew how to march to.
“Well done, Lauterbach, quite magnificent.” It was Feldschwein and the rest of the Etappe, creeping out from hiding, smirking. “A splendid brave gesture. Germany can be proud of you. How long do you think you will be able to hold out once the English mobilise their forces? Shall we get the other chaps organised? No point in your staying here, though. Will you make your final stand in one of the forts or take to the hills for a long guerrilla campaign and wear them down?”
Lauterbach shook his head. “You don’t understand. The whole thing is hopeless. The British can call on some fifty ships in this area alone to put down the rebellion. They can bring in troops from the mainland, or use the big gun emplacements out in the islands to blast them to pieces.
In the long run, the Indians haven’t a hope in hell.”
Feldschwein gripped his shoulder in a wizened claw. Tears started to his eyes. “Quite so, Lauterbach. We fully appreciate the glorious futility of your gesture. You may be assured that Berlin will hear of the way you have laid down your life for the fatherland. As long as there are prisoners here, we will maintain the shrubbery model of the Emden as a fitting monument to you. You know, there was a time when I had my doubts about you, Lauterbach. It seemed to me you were lacking in team spirit with a nasty streak of tolerance. I’m glad I was wrong.”
Lauterbach’s mouth gaped. Of course, he was doing this all wrong, speaking the wrong language. These people spoke the same weird tongue as von Mueller.
“Herr Muell— I mean Feldschwein,” he snapped grimly and moustache-twirling. “You surely do not think that an officer and a gentleman, a member of His Imperial Majesty’s forces, could really collaborate with mutineers? Men who have broken their sacred oath of loyalty to their command? You are aware that hot-blooded troops of colour, when out of control, are gripped by but a single passion – lust – their only thought is the rape and ravishment of white virgins, the dashing out of the brains of innocent children. Where do you imagine the rest of the sepoys are at this moment? What forbidden pleasures are they enjoying? Are you prepared to accept responsibility for all that? Do not some of you have wives and children still in the colony?” He glared in simulated outrage, hands on hips, making his bulk an unanswerable argument. There was a terrible brooding silence as dire images flared across the minds of the audience as from a cinematograph. Feldschwein began to look doubtful. “Er well … If you put it that way …” He began browmopping with the handkerchief again.
