David Malouf - The Great World

But their own men died and they pulled back. Big guns lifted, rained down shells. The heat and the noise grew terrific. The narrow streets of Chinatown hurled themselves skyward. Walls ripped, flew upward and came down again as lumps of plaster and dust. Locals, Chinese mostly, ran this way and that in the oily darkness with cashboxes or rolled carpets or children in their arms, or chickens or sewing-machines or little screaming piglets. Or they trotted by with half a household on their shoulders, all the chair legs pointing upward, and fell down with fire running along their backs and the load smashed and scattered, or got up and hobbled on again among the armoured cars and the field ambulances and the walking wounded that were streaming in over the causeway to the island fortress.

That was Sunday. On the Sunday night, fellows who had been fighting hard the day before in rubber plantations on the island, or hand-to-hand on factory sites, Digger among them, were at ease at last, preparing themselves for the next stage of proceedings by darning their socks, rolling them neatly, and pushing them down the side of their packs. When all was shipshape, they counted their coins, cleaned their fingernails, and jabbing into a tin of condensed milk, sucked comfort from a metal tit.

All around, at campfires and in places off in the dark, trading had started up again: a packet of cigarette papers and two frenchies for a fountain-pen; an ounce of tobacco for a tin of the best gramophone needles, steel, with a record of Paderewski’s Minuet in G thrown in.

It was as if the whole division had been constituted and shipped north for no other purpose than to ensure the movement, from one continent to another, of a million articles of no great worth or use that might otherwise have sat gathering dust in a country store, or mouldering away in a suitcase under a bed. An underground economy unknown to statistics, it was in progress at every instant here, between fights, between mouthfuls of coconut milk or bully beef, through fences, across the space between bunks. It went on even at the borehole, while the two men were engaged on that other unofficial business of easing their bowels.

Transactions. Deals. They took up so much energy, engendered so much feeling, you might have thought they were the one true essential of a fighting man’s life, of tenacious, disorderly civilian life inside the official military one, exposing in pocket form the real motives of all this international activity, compared with which all talk of freedom and honour and patriotic pride and the saving of civilisation was the merest mind-fogging gibberish.

It was a hot night thick with cloud and the pall of rubber godowns that were blazing along the docks. Firelit shadows were in play as men went about the tasks of settling and making camp. The voices in the stillness were of fellows stirring pots, playing mah-jong or blackjack, or swapping lazy obscenities.

Others, newcomers mostly but some old hands as well, were still talking about the big fight they would be in, tomorrow or the day after, that would finish the little buggers off.

Such talk was bullshit. Those who had really done any fighting — Digger, for instance, and Mac and Doug — would have nothing to do with it. The heaviness that hung over the island was not just weather, or smoke from the storehouse of the Empire going up in flames. The rumour was (it was only a whisper as yet, men were afraid to let it out) that the commanders were already negotiating.

By eleven o’clock it was official. In a meeting with the Japanese commander, General Yamashita, the commander of the Allied Forces, General Percival, had signed an unconditional surrender, to be effective from 10 p.m. Japanese time.

So all their watches were wrong — that too. They were on Jap time now, and would be for as long as it lasted. They had, without knowing it, lost their status as soldiers, and some other qualifications as well, and been prisoners of war for the last two hours.

On the Monday they began marching, fifty thousand of them it was said, into captivity, though all it meant as yet was to move twelve miles to the other end of the island; a mass of men so huge that you couldn’t conceive of it, Digger couldn’t, till you came to a slope and looked back and saw the dense massed columns passing away into ghostliness in the haze.

They took everything they could carry. The army had taught them that much. What you had you hung on to: rations, equipment, an old tobacco tin, spare sweaters and socks. But also cheap watches traded or knocked off from the Chinese, propelling pencils, fly-swats, bronze Buddhas, copies of Gone with the Wind and Moby Dick and Edgar Wallace, bolts of shantung and Thai silk, inkwells, packs of cards, flasks of Johnny Walker Red Label whisky. Each man was weighed down with twenty to forty pounds of it and staggering; his shirt pockets stuffed, and such lighter articles as bottle-openers, penknives, screwdrivers, metal cups and water-bottles dangling from the straps of his pack or his belt-loops or from a thong round his neck. They looked less like the remnants of a military enterprise, even a failed one, than the medicine men of an advanced cargo cult, or a horde of Syrian pedlars about to be unleashed on all the country towns of New South Wales. They tottered, they clanked with relics, the accumulated paraphernalia (anything that could be upended and slung across a shoulder, or unscrewed or wrenched off) of a world that had exploded in fragments around them, and would have now, in the spirit of improvisation, to be reconstructed elsewhere — on the move if that’s what it came to. But they were experts at that. They were Australians. A good many of them had been training for it all their lives.

These miscellaneous oddments, the detachable parts and symbols of civilised life, were all they had now to reassure themselves of where they had come from and what they were. What was contained in a set of surgeons’ knives or a pair of pliers and a coil of wire — and in a way that was very nearly mystical — was the superior status, guaranteed, of those who had invented them and knew their use. Civilisation? That’s us . Look at this.

But as the day wore on, and the twelve miles became a martyrdom of raw feet, raw shoulders, thighs chafed with sweat, and the sun beat down shadeless and blinding, the weight would not balance, not even against an unknown future. By nightfall even the dullest and most stubborn of them had learned something, and what he had learned could be picked up, weighed, turned over and a price put upon it, by the thousands of scavengers who moved along with them, snapping up whatever they cast aside or dropped, and would be laid out that night under lamps in shanty shops — as proof of what till now had been barely graspable: an extraordinary surrender of power, made once on paper and once in a form you could actually see and lay your hands on; in the world of commodities. What a break-up! Idlers surveying this windfall were bug-eyed with amazement at the sheer scope of it. A quartz inkwell, look, without a single chip!

It was a general stripping. In it, whether they knew it or not, they had been making decisions on which their lives would depend. Everything a man had grasped about human nature (including his own), and the unpredictability of things, was in the choice between a six-bob alarm clock and a pair of scuffed but serviceable boots.

At a point back there they had stepped, each one of them, across a line where the weight of each thing in the world, even the smallest, had been added to; but they themselves were lighter.

Sitting among so many in the sweltering dark, Digger rested against his pack, boots off at last, socks peeled painfully from the blistered flesh.

They were in an open encampment at the eastern end of the island. Changi, the place was called.