Long Way Back to the River Kwai

by Loet Velmans

  One day, off the coast of West Africa, our ship suddenly made an abrupt about-turn. Standing on deck, squinting into the glaring sun, we could not make out what was going on until we pulled up alongside a smaller ship, a freighter. When we saw the rope ladders hanging over its side and a flotilla of lifeboats bobbing in the ocean below, we understood what was going on. Soon our ship, too, was engaged in pulling sailors aboard. It was the crew of a British merchant vessel that had been sunk by a German battleship—the notorious Graf Spee.

  Later I listened as one of the shipwrecked men recounted how his vessel had been overtaken by a magnifi-cent apparition moving at dazzling speed; how the crew had been allowed five minutes to lower and board their lifeboats; how a single German torpedo had efficiently dispatched his ship to her watery grave; and how the Graf Spee had then vanished as swiftly and stealthily as she had appeared.

  Capetown was our first port of call. My RAF friends and I visited a bar swarming with Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen dressed in all shades of khaki, navy, green, and white. The British were on their way to the Far East, while the Australians and New Zealanders were headed for England. We drank beer, and then some more beer. The inevitable brawl broke out—my first. I would have expected it to be a fight either between visitors and locals or between different branches of the armed forces, but to my surprise, it turned out to be a confrontation between those age-old antagonists—the English and the Irish. My RAF friends tried to melt away unnoticed. I did not want to get involved in the scuffle either. I succeeded in making a getaway through a back alley when the MPs arrived to arrest the bloodied combatants.

  Back on board, my parents were waiting for me. Mother was fuming. To punish me for going to a bar and staying out late, they forbade me to go ashore again. Luckily for me, our ship sailed the next morning, and by the time we reached Durban, on the east coast of South Africa, our next port of call, the whole incident had been forgotten. Mother, deprived of her work, her home, her circle of friends, doted on me more than ever. I felt she was watching me like a hawk. She meant to discipline me, but she always ended up forgiving me. The most I ever got was a severe talking-to, which I tended to ignore or soon forgot.

  I was still a news junkie. Once a day the British troops were informed how the war was progressing. I always sidled up to the crowd of soldiers seated on the main deck as they were briefed about what was going on back home. The German air assault on Britain had started in earnest. An enthusiastic cheer went up from the deck when the German aircraft losses were announced. I don’t recall any mention of developments in Asia or anywhere else in the world. The British soldiers’ interest was focused on events affecting the families they had just left behind. My shipmates were on their way to the colonies in Singapore or Malaya or Borneo to strengthen the British regiments already there. They had been sent to reinforce the already considerable power of the British Empire in Southeast Asia, not as a warning to Japan but simply as an additional insurance policy. No one thought that Japan would ever dare attack the British lion. (Little did my fellow passengers or I know what was in store for us.)

  There were two more brief shore visits: Mombasa, Kenya, and Bombay. Bombay was our first encounter with the East. My parents were appalled by the squalor. I found the teeming crowds of people, the temples, the mosques, the smells, and the tastes wildly exciting. We walked through the bazaar, where I saw British soldiers and white women buy foods and haggle over scarves, ornamental swords, and silver trinkets. I experimented: biting into snacks and fruits that I had never seen before, despite Mother’s strong signs of disapproval. It was overwhelming; I felt that the Orient would bewitch me.

  After one more week at sea, I said good-bye to my British friends in Singapore. Our family transferred to a Dutch steamer, which took us to Batavia. Compared to Bombay, Batavia was very clean and orderly. We rented a large white villa on a fastidiously neat Dutch street. It could have been Holland, except for the tropical plants and trees, the lizards on the wall of my bedroom, and the monkeys in the backyard. Mother soon found a job as manager of the local branch of Gerzon, a Dutch fashion store chain. (Her predecessor had been on home leave when war broke out in Holland and was now trapped there.) Father and Uncle John began to import dresses from the United States, which were sold to retail stores throughout the islands. Our financial house was back in order in no time.

  Mother was, as Father had feared, greatly bothered by the tropical heat, despite which she threw herself wholeheartedly into her work. Back in Holland, she had loved socializing with her colleagues, the other buyers at the Bijenkorf department store, where she had spent most of her adult life. In Batavia, she was the boss, and she found that bosses have few friends. She felt lonely and clung to me more tenaciously than ever. My resistance to her grew, and I tried to evade her attentions as often as I could. At age seventeen, I couldn’t tolerate her great motherly love. I felt closer to Father, with whom I would discuss the political and military news every day after we finished reading the local papers. I also respected Father’s knowledge of Italian opera and his love for Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli, whereas I looked down on Mother’s favorites—the operettas of Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar and the tenor Richard Tauber.

  An outstanding bridge player, Father had starred in bridge tournaments back home. Now in our high-ceilinged, fan-cooled living room in Jakarta, he helped me solve bid and finesse problems laid out in a book by Ely Culbertson, one of his heroes.

  Like most colonial families, we had four servants: a cook, a laundress, a gardener, and a djongos (boy). The djongos was married to our cook and fulfilled many functions—major domo, waiter, valet, handyman, local guide, interpreter, and general factotum. I shared the general colonial indifference to the natives. I neither knew nor cared about what happened in the buildings at the back of the kitchen, where our staff lived. I only knew that they shared their quarters with an indeterminate number of relatives. We paid them the standard wage—a pittance by our standards, but which furnished them with all that they needed, or all we thought they needed. They seemed happy, content, and always cheerful. Occasionally, when I’d go to the back to look at the monkeys playfully throwing nuts at each other, the whole staff and their families would stand around me, watching with me, clapping and laughing.

  My father and I, preoccupied with world events, paid little attention to what was going on locally. Father thought that the war in Europe would last many years, and he was also afraid that the Japanese might come down our way. We were not struck by the incongruity of our position as part of that small circle of Caucasians who lorded it over masses of indigenous people. We were tuan (sir) to the natives, whom we addressed indiscriminately as djongos. To the Indonesians we belonged to the ruling class; we were all members of the same white ghetto. As a matter of fact, we were outsiders ourselves: the highly hierarchal and un-democratic white society neither cared for, nor took an interest in, the small group of refugees from the home country. We did not belong to any of the rigorously established classes of privileged Dutchmen. Of the long-settled colonials, each had a specific role in the administration of indigenous Indonesian affairs. It was a highly organized structure. Each pillar of the colonial empire employed a set number of civil servants, military officers, teachers, planters, judges, and bankers, as well as a small number of businessmen who directed the monopolistic ownership of the archipelago’s natural resources. As a salesman and a working woman, my parents did not fit into any acceptable category. Father never complained. Once he told me that he missed meeting his friends at eleven o’clock for a cup of coffee at Scheltema, a café in Amsterdam frequented by newspapermen and business people; “We could really talk there—we might agree or disagree, but we always respected each other’s opinion.” Whenever we went out, mingling with compatriots of my parents’ generation, I realized that we were regarded as aliens.

  It was different at school. Most of the teachers were Dutch, but the majority of my classmates—all except two Dutch boys
and one girl—were either native Indonesian, Eurasians (Indiesch), or Chinese. I don’t know now if my classmates saw things as I did, but it seemed to me that we were a well-integrated group, equals in every way. Even here, however, age-old strictures and taboos remained in force. There was camaraderie in the classroom and on the sports field, but visits to a friend’s home were confined to classmates of one’s own color.

  One of my best friends was Hans, whose father was an officer in the navy. During the Easter school break of 1941, Hans and I went on a holiday camping trip in the mountains of eastern Java. On a high plateau, we were far away from the hustle and bustle of the overpopulated regions of the towns and valleys of western Java. Of course, we were accompanied by a watchful djongos who earned his keep by carrying our gear, putting up our tent, cooking our food, washing our clothes, and skillfully wielding a long bamboo stick to dispose of a very large cobra.

  After passing my final high school exams in the spring of 1941, I worked for a couple of months for Borsumij (Borneo Sumatra Trading Company), a Dutch conglomerate with ownership interests in a number of shipping companies, plantations, and other major colonial enterprises. I was to be an apprentice trader once again, this time not in diamonds but in commodities. I was given basic instruction in the intricacies of selling my company’s share of Indonesia’s agricultural and mineral wealth on the world’s markets.

  Having grown up in Holland with the concept that the East Indies were an integral part of the Netherlands—for now and for all time—I was blissfully unconscious of the pomposity with which we Dutch comported ourselves; nor was I particularly bothered by the white man’s discriminatory practices. I had not yet understood that we were hoarding, rather than sharing, our technical, agricultural, industrial, financial, and economic expertise and skills. Nor did I realize that among native Indonesians, only a privileged few were permitted to obtain an education beyond the elementary level.

  Dressed in one of my white linen suits, which were washed and pressed daily by our laundress, I arrived at the office at seven and took my seat at a desk in the large trading room filled with managers, clerks, and other trainees. Preparing for the oppressive humidity that would soak us in a matter of hours, my colleagues and I would immediately take off our jackets, but an unwritten dress code forbade us to loosen our ties.

  One fine day in the summer of 1941, my civilian status came to an end, and I was drafted into the Royal Dutch East Indian Army. I was happy to go. Little did I realize that I was moving from one rigid colonial system into another. From the day we had arrived in the Indies, Father and Mother had been apprehensive about the prospect of my military service. But the draft papers, giving me thirty days’ notice, certainly did not come as a surprise. I had reached the age of eighteen, and this was, after all, wartime. I was billeted in the barracks of Bandung, a hill town in western Java, north of Batavia.

  Bandung looked very much like a Dutch town, an unusually prosperous Dutch town at that. Even its center was peaceful and quiet compared to the hustle and bustle of metropolitan Batavia. Only the green lushness of the hilly landscape made it seem worlds apart from the flat, monotonous Dutch countryside I had left behind. On Sundays, bicycling back to the barracks after a game of bridge at a friend’s house, I enjoyed the calm and pressure-free atmosphere that was a part of the spirit of the city and all its inhabitants, irrespective of race and color. The streets I biked through were not only tranquil and nearly free of traffic but as neat and clean as if the proverbial Dutch housewife had just attacked them with her broom.

  Boot camp was not easy for me. I had never been particularly athletic. I had a hard time keeping up with my co-conscripts and was often the last to arrive at the finish when ordered to run on the double, scale a wall, jump a ditch, or surmount miscellaneous other obstacles. Our instructor was a veteran of the regular professional army who after more than ten years of service still had not managed to rise above the rank of corporal. In drill exercises he seemed to take pleasure in singling me out, berating me for the clumsiness with which I manipulated my rifle. The corporal had it in for me in many ways. He found me deficient in standing to attention and in responding to his other commands. He found fault with the way I wore my puttees and with my performance during morning exercises. “You laugh too much; you are too happy!” he yelled. Tattooed snakes, lions, and eagles protruded from the sleeves of his khaki shirt and stuck out below the rim of his army shorts. My friends and I had a good time speculating what other animals might be creeping around those parts of his body that were not exposed. “You no-good rich kid!” he yelled and made me pump and stretch out my right arm, with my rifle as ballast, a hundred times. It was a painful punishment, which I was often physically unable to complete. But I learned how to dramatize, exaggerating the discomfort. Since the corporal yelled all the time, his yelling did not particularly bother me—which infuriated him all the more.

  The worst part of the training was when we had to crawl on our bellies under low-strung barbed wire. The mud was sticky and smelly, and the insects swarmed down on us and would not leave us alone. Each exercise lasted about an hour but was repeated again and again, from seven until noon. Promptly at twelve, we stopped. I had had it. I couldn’t wait to get out of the rice paddy and run all the way back to the nearest shower. But my corporal often made me go back and repeat the entire exercise. I had been too slow, he said. Even that did not dampen my spirit; I felt invincible.

  Most of my fellow recruits were Eurasians. I felt relaxed in their company; we all enjoyed a great feeling of camaraderie. In the barrack-room banter, I became one of the lead comics, cracking jokes, inventing funny new epithets and ever dirtier expressions. There was some teasing and a lot of sexual innuendo. We saved our most creative efforts for the curses aimed at our corporal.

  Most of us had just graduated from high school. As such, we were slated to become officers. A few of my friends and I rebelled, however, refusing to go into officer training; any appeal the military life might have held for us had vanished during the first weeks of our induction into the army. But the hierarchal system was relentless. I was promoted despite myself. Soon I was made corporal, then sergeant. I took no particular pride in my new rank but was glad to be rid of my drill instructor.

  If I had thought being stationed in Bandung would mean being rid of Mother, I was mistaken. She arranged for a room to be put at my disposal in the house of a colleague, the manager of the Bandung branch of Gerzon. The servants in that house took care of my laundry, pressed my uniform, and cooked a meal for me whenever I asked them to. If I had been permitted to take my rifle home, they would have cleaned that, too. As it was, one of the men in my barracks volunteered to do this for me, for a modest fee.

  Every Saturday morning an envelope was left in my room, filled with a generous amount of cash. Mother’s letters from Batavia arrived twice a week, and when I failed to respond to her urgent pleas to come home on weekends, she took the train and lay in wait for me at the gate to our barracks.

  Saturday night was the big night out—but only when I could manage to escape Mother. Seated at the lively bar of Hotel Homann, Bandung’s only luxury hotel, sipping Scotch and smoking Egyptian cigarettes, I imagined myself a sophisticated man of the world. In truth, however, I watched enviously as other young men, in and out of uniform, danced with attractive young women whose parents had allowed them to go out on a date. By the end of the evening, one or two similarly unattached young men usually joined me, and we would pass the time deep in political or philosophical discussion until the bar closed.

  Refugees tend to seek each other out; the new social crowd my parents were drawn to was composed of other newly arrived refugees from Holland. On one of my visits home I met Betty, a tall, beautiful blond. Her parents had been the proprietors of a prosperous beauty salon in the heart of Amsterdam. I fell for her, head over heels. She allowed me one fleeting kiss and an awkward squeeze, but otherwise my advances were not encouraged. She would flirt over my shoulder
with every other young man in the vicinity, which did little to improve my self-esteem. After returning to Bandung, I lost track of her. My short-lived infatuation left me feeling more sexually frustrated than ever.

  After lights-out, our dormitory buzzed with whispered descriptions of sexual exploits. It was too hot and humid to put my head under the pillow. I was forced to listen to the boasts and fantasies of what seemed like an entire company of young Don Juans.

  I hoped we would never have to meet an enemy. To me, our army seemed like a joke. We had just received new Canadian light and mobile antitank guns—weapons that were guaranteed to blow Japanese tanks to pieces. The trouble was that the gun sights were missing. They were nowhere to be found; we assumed they had been sent to another country, or unloaded on some faraway Indonesian island. Meanwhile, without the gun sights, the guns were useless. We could not take aim.

  There also was a problem with our new two-way radio communications. For some unfathomable reason, these functioned pretty well only when two parties communicated at a very short distance—within earshot of each other. As for our army-issue boots, these came only in one, very large, size. Most of us had to stuff them with newspaper to make them fit, resulting in painful blisters and the indignity of ink-stained feet.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. To us this news was eclipsed by the more direct threat to our region by the unexpected Japanese incursions in Southeast Asia. I saw a deadly threat in the swift southward advance of Japanese armies into Siam (Thailand), French Indochina (Vietnam), and Malaya (Malaysia), all occurring simultaneously. Clearly, this was all headed in our direction. I had a recurrent dream of escape, but how and where? I could desert, but Australia, India, and America were thousands of miles away, and the Japanese seemed to be everywhere else. I was trapped.