The Widow and Her Hero

by Thomas Keneally

  The second charge was espionage, the accusation that various of the party had collected intelligence to take back to Australia, information on the strength of garrisons, movement of shipping, docking arrangements at Bintan and Bukum, bauxite mining at Lingga Island, etc, etc. While waiting for the party to return to NE1, my cousin Mel Duckworth had made notes on the passage, frequency of military aircraft, anti-aircraft defences and shipping. Now they brought these forward and questioned the Englishman Filmer, the man who had landed on D-Day but then blundered into Memerang.

  The prosecutor held up one Japanese flag, one notebook, one sketchbook, one camera, seventeen negatives. Yes, all that property belonged to Memerang, said Filmer. The flag had been waved, the photographs taken.

  In lonely years I would complain savagely to myself about Filmer. I had thought him a dupe – he reminded me of the British commander at Singapore, Percival, who was foxed into surrendering by the Tiger of Malaya, Yamashita, even though many officers under him wanted to fight on. The pattern, I believed, was repeated in a modest but terrible way by Filmer. My thesis had been that Filmer, the professional officer, blinded by fatuous codes of military behaviour – or, to invoke it again, the Stockholm syndrome – failed to attack the charges head on. In a strange way the fool felt honoured by them. Combine this with the fact that he was probably the one who opened fire on the Malay police boat off Kaso, and thus gave their presence away, and you have the reason why, whenever I've encountered Major Filmer in dreams, I've torn the flesh from him and flayed him with bitter Australian insult. Basically, my grievance against him was that he was the first to accept the Japanese charges, and he laid down the pattern for the other men to do the same. Major Minatoya asked him, Did you commit these crimes?, and Filmer said yes without qualification. When he was asked how long his group had plotted their attack, he said he only knew the details of it a few days before he left Australia, a statement which shows that compared to Leo he was one of those ring-ins Doucette had a weakness for, that he was brought along by Doucette on impulse, or because he pleaded. And yet here he was talking on behalf of the whole party, and impervious to the wrongness of that, as only a professional officer could be. He agreed with Minatoya that rank should always be worn, so that the enemy could identify officers. That was an asinine thing to say, as our side had little training in their badges of rank, and I bet their side had little training in ours.

  Did Leo resent him giving it all away like this, or was he resigned, or was he stuck by now in some grotesque officer code of honour too? Had all the Bushido nonsense got to both of them, so that they were competing for honour with the Japanese? I don't want to mock that, since they were willing to die for it. But men become dupes for codes of honour which any sensible woman could see through in a second. Yes, said Filmer, they had a Japanese flag on the junk and were thus sailing under false colours. But no, they had not themselves painted the Japanese flag on the stern of the junk. It had already been put there by the Malay owner. At least five silenced automatic weapons on the junk opened up on the patrol boat at Kaso, he admitted. He didn't mention it was almost certainly he who first pulled the trigger. He began shooting because others did, he said. As the police vessel approached, everyone thought it was Japanese, he said, not Malay police, and they yelled, Patroller, patroller! They did not know it was an unarmed vessel. No, no British or Australian flag was hoisted on the junk before they opened fire. There was barely time. Doucette did not directly order them to open fire.

  The affidavit of the surviving Malay policeman from the patrol boat was read to Filmer. Poor fellow, a local mixed up between two powers, seeing his fellows on the launch cut to pieces, and then himself diving, bleeding copiously, into the water. But it strikes me that, abstracting from race, Leo and all the other Australians had a lot in common with that Malay cop. Like the policeman on the patrol boat who was a servant of the Japanese, they were also caught up in other people's imperial dream, doing for Churchill what Churchill never did for us, with all his talk of Australians being of bad stock and bound to cave in to the Japanese anyhow.

  Leo was the next brought forward before the court, and he accepted the charges just as Filmer had. He offered the information that Doucette had worn his badge of rank while on the junk but he himself had not. He had shot at the patrol boat, and had also resisted the landing by the army at Serapem, but he was not sure if he had killed any Japanese soldier. He admitted he had sketched and photographed islands and shipping, and made notes. That is all that's in the record – no pleading, no mention of a young wife and of her hopes and rights and expectations. In that regard, I suppose, he had nothing exceptional to plead. He had worn commando grease to colour his face and had stopped wearing a beret after they all got on the junk.

  In turn, each of the other men admitted the same, in their peculiar and grievous honour.

  The afternoon showers stopped, Hidaka told Lydon, and the sun came out with its afternoon intensity, and then yielded to shadows from the foliage of the Raffles College garden. The cocktail hour. All the accused were asked to stand. Each one was asked did he have anything to say in his defence. The judge urged each of them to point out anything in their evidence which was to their advantage. None of them said anything. The silence of honour locked the tongues of Leo, Hugo Danway, Jockey Rubinsky, Chesty Blinkhorn, Sergeant Bantry, the naval rating Skeeter Moss, Mel Duckworth, Major Filmer. Each of the accused was asked if he had any objection to the statement of any other member of the party. One by one they said they didn't. You can imagine a robust fellow like Chesty Blinkhorn thinking, Wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction. Each was asked if he wanted to alter any part of his statement to the Suijo Kempei Tai or the prosecuting attorney, and they all said no. Thus, bridges burned, they all turned their inner eye to the sword's edge.

  Hidaka, in his white suit, hung his head. Prosecutor Minatoya then went into his fancy arguments as the air thickened around the heads of the accused. The Haig Convention 1907 required that all ships other than warships, entering an attack, must affix to themselves a true representation of their nationality. Hostilities conducted under false or no colours were a crime under international law. The junk flew a Japanese flag, and hence no British flag was flown, and commando dye and sarongs were deliberately used to make the junk look civilian. They should also have worn badges of rank or unit to identify them as belligerents. The fact that they were wearing Australian jungle fabric, very much like that which the Japanese used, was no adequate warning that they would attack the patrol boat.

  Minatoya then argued with less legal validity that military personnel lose their right to be treated as prisoners of war if they disguise themselves. The green military shirts most of the men wore were not enough. Then, tying himself in a knot, he further claimed that international law in any case gave way to the law of the capturing country, and so whether under international convention or Japanese occupation law, the men were doomed. The occupation law involved, he said, was the Martial Law of Japanese Southern Expeditionary Force, Section 2, Clause 1, Paragraph 1 (iv).

  Minatoya made mention of the poison they carried, the capsules which would come as a surprise to us women when we first heard of them from Mr McBride on our visit to Canberra. Their possession of such poison demonstrated that they could countenance death with composure (a supreme virtue in his eyes), just like the sailors involved in the Japanese midget submarine attack on the Chicago in Sydney Harbour three years past. The Australians had treated those heroes with full honours, and now it was the chance of the Japanese to treat Australian heroes with equivalent honour.

  Have you ever heard such utter horse-feathers? the aging Dotty had asked me in a letter. With one sentence he says they've violated international law, and with the next he deifies the poor sods. For Lydon had sent her the transcript too, including the peroration of Minatoya's address to the court. It went this way, or was later doctored to go this way: These men struck out from their native home, Australia, with the most ineff
able patriotism blazing in their souls, and with the expectations of all the people of their country upon their shoulders. They battled most sublimely to attack and evade. The last moments of such lives as theirs must be sublime and appropriate to their past history. For heroes are extremely jealous of their popular regard, the way their memory will stand amongst their people. This is a feeling the Japanese people know and respect. And so we must glorify the last moments of these heroes as they expect and as they deserve, and by doing so, the names of these men will be invoked for all eternity, in Australia and in Britain, as those of truest heroes.

  This Let's give 'em the send-off they deserve argument included the rider Even if it kills them. As Dotty said, utter horse-feathers. And before sentencing, as sudden darkness closed the day, that fool Filmer thanked Minatoya for saying his bravery was likely to be remembered in Britain and Australia. He did at least make the point that at the time they captured the junk, flew the flag and attacked the patrol vessel, he had not believed he and his fellow soldiers were engaged in any unfair or illegal combat. At the time he and the others had not realised, he confessed, that these were such grave crimes. Now he was willing to face the punishment that was due.

  Some of the hobbyists and researchers think Hidaka was later given the job not only of translating the trial into English but of prettifying it as well – if any of it could be called pretty. That his job was to make it all seem less a show trial, something decided before Leo and the others even entered the court. Some researchers have told me too that the Memerang men were tried and liquidated entirely for the sake of the Oriental value of face, and that they were to die not for their efforts in Memerang but for the earlier success of Cornflakes. After that previous raid, it turns out that the Japanese brought into Singapore from Saigon a special investigative unit of the Kempei Tai, the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, to investigate the blowing up of the port's tonnage.

  The Kempei Tai were convinced that the ships destroyed in Singapore by Doucette's Cornflakes in 1943 had been targeted not by raiders but by local saboteurs working with some influential civilian prisoners of war at Changi, whom they accused of being in communication with the Allies by radio. They arrested former executives of British oil companies, wealthy Chinese they suspected of belonging to sabotage cells, and humbler Chinese – a woman who ran a soup stall at Keppel Docks. Many of the people arrested were killed. The arrests also extended to Malays, twenty of whom were still in prison that afternoon Leo's trial began. They were under sentence of death for their nonexistent roles in the sabotage really created by Cornflakes. As Mark Lydon says in his book, 'Hidaka would early let Leo Waterhouse's group know that other men were under the death sentence for a supposed part in Cornflakes, and that seems to have influenced the way the Memerang men behaved at their trial.' Now the Kempei Tai knew who the culprits were, since they had captured Rufus's diary, and they thus found out that all the questioning and torture, water treatment, beatings and electrodes on the genitals of last year's local captives had produced false confessions and unjust executions.

  On the question of face, General Okimasa and Court President Sakamone and the Kempei Tai officers asked themselves with a fractured but potent logic: how could the twenty Malays, men in their prime, fathers of families, a humorist here, a balladist there, a sketcher here, a teller of profane jokes there, be under death sentence, and the ten Memerang men not? But it meant, as the hobbyists and researchers have frequently assured me, that for some periods of time during their capture, the limitations of torture having been proven the year before, Leo and the others had it easier than the locals, Chinese, Malay and Britons, who had been arrested.

  So I had assimilated all that, and stowed it away within me the way people do. The rivers of our blood flow and flow, and grind down into smoothness into a sort of habitable geology, what is too sharp to be known. I knew the details of the trial from the late 1960s on. I had the English language transcript provided to me by Lydon, and from then until the present it lay in my desk drawer at home, where I would frequently encounter it and flinch, a duty of pain I felt I owed it. I was familiar with the names of Okimasa, Sakamone the fanatic, Minatoya the prosecutor, and above all with that of Hidaka.

  The severest test occurred in the early 1990s, when Hidaka, reconciled to having been discovered, was brought to Australia by the now middle-aged Mark Lydon and by an Australian film producer who wanted to have his technical advice for a proposed film. Lydon called us and said Hidaka would very much like to pay his respects to me. I shouldn't have gone along with it – what could the meeting mean and how could I balance his part in the trial and execution, and his undoubted kindnesses into one feasible greeting and one safe little discourse? But then how could I ignore the half-century of transformation, which made us fortunate participants in the business of our region, which made Japan 'our major trading partner'. After discussing it with Laurie, I suggested to Mark Lydon he bring Hidaka to our place for afternoon tea.

  I was still full of that terror which had lasted nearly fifty years. Every time I approached Leo's death I was repelled by the temperature of the event itself and saw refracted through its heat a new version to which I had somehow to adjust. I remembered Doucette's guilt about his inadequate rejoicing at news of Minette's survival, which was paralleled by my sense that I had never adequately mourned. Now that Mark Lydon was bringing Hidaka to my house, the whole file was open again, nothing was settled, I might hear anything. The fear that there were limitless versions of the thing to absorb was, despite what I thought of as my good sense, acute and like a form of madness. Combined with that, I suspected that a good, brave wife would have sought Hidaka out years since, would have been frantic to meet him earlier.

  Laurie was wonderful at such times. He had not yet suffered his stroke, and he attended to everything, meeting the guests at the door, making the tea. As Hidaka came into the living room, nodding, bowing to Laurie, not yet daring to smile, he proved to be a lean old man of average height whose mouth was beginning to slacken with age. He seemed to have a respiratory disease, and I noticed his fingers were nicotine stained and his nails blue-ish from lack of oxygen. I could tell at once that he and I were both playing this for Lydon, Hidaka playing along with Mark who had set up his air ticket from Tokyo to Sydney. At a moment like this one, I was sure, Hidaka was asking himself whether he should have taken the trip, despite the honour he received in the Australian tabloids under the film-company generated headlines such as 'JAPANESE TRANSLATOR BEFRIENDED DOOMED AUSSIES'.

  Under Laurie's understated stage management, we sat down to drink tea, and began to talk about Hidaka's flight and whether he was able to rest properly here. And yet in no time the matter of the trial came up as if by its own force. I don't even remember the sequence of sentences, but there it was, amongst us. Like a slaughtered beast on the carpet, it demanded comment, and I could see Mark Lydon sitting forward, eager to assess what Hidaka and I would say in each other's company.

  My superiors order me to dress immaculately, the old man told us, with his chronic wheeze.

  This was the most important and portentous trial he had ever seen, but he was not required as a translator – a translator of military rank sat with the judges. He wondered what his superiors would think when the prisoners who were brought in winked at him and smiled at his posh suit. And the prisoners did, one of them, Sergeant Bantry, unleashing a little sharp, almost inaudible whistle.

  As Laurie made unconscious affirmative and comforting sounds deep in his throat, at Lydon's request Hidaka went through the order they stood in. It is engraved on my soul, said Hidaka.

  That was a sentiment I believed, and I heard my husband Laurie also give his accepting growl. At the end of the line, on the left, No 10, was Jockey Rubinsky, twenty years old. Big Chesty Blinkhorn beside him, same age. Sergeant Bantry, the non-swearer. No 5 was Private Appin who survived Doucette's last stand. No 6 was the young naval rating Moss, and then a much-beaten and sickly army officer named Din
ny Bilson. Lieutenant Danway stood at No 4 in the line. At the other end, Nos 3, 2 and 1 from the left, were Melbourne Duckworth, Leo and Major Filmer. They all wore Japanese army boots, and their hair was close-cropped. I try to imagine Leo thus, very thin, with cropped hair.

  And General Okimasa was there the whole time, wasn't he? Lydon asked Hidaka, as if I did not know that.

  All the time, Hidaka confirmed. He did not leave for a minute. So it was . . . the important trial.

  Lydon loves all this straight-from-the-horse's-mouth stuff. The order in which people stood, and so on. Did Okimasa sit on a rattan chair or an armchair? The reason Memerang's supposed crime under Japanese military law was translated by him as 'perfidy', an old-fashioned and stately word, is that Mr Hidaka had learned his English from Shakespeare, Tennyson and PG Wodehouse.

  But I could see old Hidaka was gasping, even after such a short time, and so, secretly, was I.

  I smiled and said to Lydon, Listen here, Mark, curb your enthusiasm. I think Mr Hidaka is tired.

  Of course, Mark admitted. One thing though. Mr Hidaka saw them while they were waiting for the verdict. To paraphrase him, without putting him to the trouble of telling it all again . . .

  As the afternoon-long trial ended, said Lydon, the accused were taken away by their guards, to wait in halfdarkness on benches in the garden. Hidaka had not been stopped from visiting them. Their spirits were high, and they spoke quite loudly and in lively terms, and Hidaka had organised cigarettes to be handed round.

  Thank you, Mr Hidaka, I said, as earnestly as I could.