War of Words

by McDonald, Hamish

  The train reached Kuala Lumpur in the morning and many of the other passengers left the train. Others boarded, a more racially diverse crowd, including a few of Japanese appearance. As they proceeded northwards, one of these Japanese passed by Charles’ compartment as if on his way to the dining car. His glance in the doorway seemed quick and casual enough.

  At the long stop at Prai, the station for Butterworth and Penang, most of the other passengers disappeared, and a new crowd of passengers appeared. They looked Chinese for the most part, but the emphatic sound of Fukien and Cantonese dialects was replaced by a strangely soft gliding tongue which he assumed was Siamese. There was now a larger component of Japanese, including a group of well-to-do men who came aboard the four-sleeper carriages. Charles noticed the man who’d passed his compartment lingering on the platform and exchanging a greeting with one of these new passengers.

  At Padang Besar, on the Siam border, officials came on the train to look at passports. In contrast to his British counterpart, the Siamese immigration officer seemed pleased by his Japanese document. The train trundled slowly into the night, rounding tight corners and embankments, its lights spilling into jungle and the sides of cuttings. Charles was alone in his compartment now and feeling vulnerable. The windows were all wide open to let in the cool air. A quick blow, a heave, and who would know the real story?

  In the dining car, Siamese staff had taken over. The Japanese group he’d observed earlier were sitting down with sake cups and flasks on the table. It seemed best to confront them, rather than show any furtiveness, so he went up and greeted them in Japanese, introducing himself. They seemed less astonished than they should have been at hearing fluent Japanese come from the mouth of a European, but paid the formulaic compliments.

  Charles went back to his table and ate his dinner of rice with a couple of side dishes. Two of the men joined him afterwards, bringing over some sake. One of them, he learnt, was a grandson of the army general who’d been a fellow lodger at the seaside inn where Chika Sakai had taken him as a small boy one summer. He was now a major in the army himself, attached to the legation in Bangkok, and returning from a ‘liaison’ visit with colleagues to Penang. They listened to his line about Asians knowing Asians, nodding without comment, and after promising to make his laudable venture known to their superiors, said goodnight.

  Charles returned along the swaying corridors, nervously stepping across the grinding plates of the walkway between the carriages with the jungle rushing past on each side. Upon reaching his compartment he found his belongings had definitely been searched. He locked the door.

  By the morning, the train had descended to the Gulf of Siam near Songkhla, where two of the Japanese officers got off and took a bus into the distant town. The train now sped up, rattling across bridges, past little villages with orange-tiled white pagodas and temples, between paddy fields, a distant line of blue sea on the right, vertical limestone formations rising from the plain on the left. In the early afternoon, it rumbled between the wooden houses and fruit trees of Bangkok and arrived at Hua Lamphong Station.

  A rickshaw took Charles to the Thailand Hotel – given the new name of the country adopted by its military dictator, General Luang Pibul Songgram – which he’d been informed was run by Japanese managers and was the preferred accommodation for Japanese visitors. Indeed the guests all appeared to be Japanese, as were the staff, even down to the concierges. In the short twilight, Charles took a rickshaw around some of the nearby city sights and used up a roll of film taking snapshots of exotic buildings and crowds. Back in the room, his laid-out effects had been moved slightly.

  For two or three days, Charles diligently pursued his cover assignment, calling on senior professors at the Chulalungkorn University. Some spoke fluent Japanese from their time as part of the great rush of Asian students to Tokyo in the late Meiji years, others the kind of upper-class English that he’d heard from British staff officers at Gallipoli and more recently among Hayley Bell’s colleagues and family. They agreed there was much to learn about Japan, but how could his knowledge be conveyed to students who could speak only Siamese? They were polite enough to invite him to give a lecture, which he did to an audience of English-speaking Siamese and a smattering of foreign diplomats, educationists and missionaries.

  The evenings he spent in the public spaces at the hotel, eating his dinner in a leisurely way and reading the Japanese newspapers and magazines in the lobby. The staff were chatty and inquisitive. He fed them a lot of harmless detail, all of it true enough, with a lot of exclusions, about his own life, which they would have reported back for verification. In return, they gave details of the guests and their affiliations to trading companies and research bodies which Hayley Bell and his team in Singapore knew to be fronts for intelligence operations. All this he noted in a little book which never left his person.

  On the fourth day, Major Adachi from the Japanese embassy came to see him, with an invitation to meet his chief, the military attaché Colonel Takeda. He was ushered to a large car outside, driven by a Japanese man with a short army haircut with a second man sitting in the front, also of tough appearance.

  The car drove through a gate between high walls topped with barbed wire, which opened from the inside as the car approached. They got out under the portico of a bland building. Adachi led the way up a flight of stairs to the second floor where Charles was ushered into a meeting room decorated with bonsai trees and a photograph of the emperor.

  After a few minutes, an inner door opened. Adachi came in with an older man in Japanese army uniform, grey hair cropped short, a large moustache and hard little eyes. They bowed. Charles offered the senior officer his card with two hands. They sat. Tea was poured by a male orderly.

  Charles went through his speech about Asia, noting that Japan and Siam were the two Asian nations that had held out against the tide of European colonial occupation, and therefore could be the axis upon which the civilisations of Asia could be strengthened and renewed. He had made it his life mission to address the mistaken perceptions of cultural superiority in the West so that the European powers could come to terms with this natural readjustment of the world balance of power.

  Takeda seemed to like this, and growled that the Westerners were ‘certainly in for a long-overdue lesson before much longer’.

  The colonel then launched into a long speech about the importance of Siam. It lay between the French and British colonies of Indochina, Malaya and Burma, and close under the southern portals to Yunnan in China.

  Since the last century, the British had cultivated and manipulated the Siamese leaders, as they had the Japanese, only to dump them abruptly in 1921 when they became a serious naval and commercial rival. In Siam, the British influence was now on the wane following the abdication of the Anglophile king in 1935. The royal court was a force in abeyance, with the 11-year-old successor still away at school in Switzerland. General Pibul was an admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, and attracted by the patriotism and purity he saw in the young Japanese officers. ‘We are now getting closer to a point where decisive action will be forced upon us,’ Takeda said. ‘Our forces are advancing down the coast of China. Events in Europe may dramatically change the balance of force in the Asian region. We must be ready!’

  By the end of this, Takeda was shaking with fervour. Adachi’s eyes were shining. As Takeda stood up, he refocused on Charles and said: ‘I hear you are quite a swordsman, let us have a bout before you go.’ Adachi put Charles in the car and sent him back to the hotel.

  Later a card arrived, inviting him to the dojo in the embassy compound the following evening. All equipment would be available. Charles spent the next day alternately resting and limbering up his body. Some of his snapshots of Bangkok had been developed in the little photographic shop in the hotel arcade. He sent several in an enthusiastic, rather prattling letter to his nominal principal at Raffles College, including a mention of a meeting with a fine man
, Takeda, at the Japanese legation and his offer of a display of Japanese swordsmanship that evening. Charles took care to post the letter from another hotel nearby.

  With rising trepidation, he went to the embassy late in the afternoon and presented himself. Adachi appeared, and took him around the side of the building to a large pavilion in the rear gardens. Shouts and the whacks of wooden swords came from it. Charles felt a quickening of blood, and smiled at Adachi.

  In a side room were laid out the familiar jacket and skirt-like trousers, the heavy helmet with its flaps down the neck, the leather arm guards, a leather and bamboo breastplate, heavy apron and the gauntlets. He unfolded them carefully, changed, and took up the wooden sword, weighing it in his hands and making a swing. He felt his mind emptying.

  Charles entered from the lower seat. Takeda came into the gymnasium, already kitted out, from the kamiza, the higher seat on the eastern side, where the sun rises. The other players bowed, and left. Adachi and two others stood as referees, holding red and white flags. The duellers moved to the centre.

  Charles thought of the character Tsukue Ryunosuke. A moment of fear crossed his mind. Then his training took hold, as he strove to achieve the unmoving mind, the fudoshin, where emotions like anger, fear and surprise cannot lead one astray.

  Charles found himself acting the part of Ryunosuke. He put his sword in the anti-hero’s favoured position of ‘to the eye’ and waited on Takeda’s move. The colonel seemed nonplussed, perhaps expecting his Westerner’s passions to spill out in a rash move. Eventually he broke the pause, uttering a loud ‘Kiai!’ and stamping his foot as he then called a lunge at Charles’ right side. Charles quickly countered.

  They circled and parried, sweat running down under their helmets and padding. No points were scored, until Charles made his favourite move perfected in the Joyokan, his old fencing salon at Yokohama, all those years before. He feinted a strike at the head, and as Takeda raised his sword to parry, quickly called ‘Wrist!’ and landed a blow on Takeda’s glove.

  They rested, and tried again. Takeda was very good, an even match. Charles thought it opportune to let him win a point, accepting a sweep at his side that was moderately winding even with the armour. Takeda seemed frustrated that a foreigner could perform so well. As they bowed at the start of the third round, Charles felt a transcendent calmness take over, beyond anger. He imagined a real fight to the death, with real swords of damascened steel.

  The evening had come down, and the dojo was now lit with bright electric lights. They took their positions, and again Charles took the impassive posture of Ryunosuke. Takeda’s face was a cruel, implacable mask. His imagination had pushed reality aside. There seemed no way out of this but to fight and probably die, or receive a horrible injury.

  Suddenly, Takeda lunged with another loud ‘Kiai’, and Charles blocked the swipe. The clatter of wood in his ears was a chime of clashing steel. They thrust and hacked and swept, blocking each other’s deadly moves. To Charles the dojo seemed to resound with the ring of steel on steel, its air to fill with the scent of ozone from electric sparks. Charles felt a small cut on the neck from a narrow miss. Twice he pushed Takeda back.

  As the fighting became more ragged and the strikes more ambitious, Adachi stepped forward and cried, ‘Yame!’ (‘Halt’). Takeda and Charles stepped back. Adachi conferred with the other two subordinates, and held his flags together over his head, red in front – the signal for hikiwake – a draw. Charles bowed. Takeda hesitated and followed suit. Charles decided to thank Adachi for ‘saving his life’ and that seemed to restore Takeda’s dignity. He smiled and invited Charles to stay for dinner.

  Adachi led Charles to a bathroom, where the attendant washed his wound as he let the hot water ebb away the tension and fear. He dressed in the clothes provided and was guided to another pavilion where the others were waiting, also in yukata. They began drinking Kirin beer and eating course after course of food that was brought in by young Siamese women dressed in kimonos.

  As the alcohol took hold, Takeda began singing. Charles picked up the refrain of the familiar war song, and followed with one of the patriotic ditties of his childhood about the assault on Port Arthur: ‘As summer time began, dark clouds formed over North China …’

  He told Takeda of his dreams of one day becoming a soldier, as a youngster, how he’d been disappointed not to be accepted into the Imperial army when he turned 20. How, though a Westerner by race, he had been raised a Japanese and felt Japanese inside.

  Takeda returned to his harangue of the previous day, repeating his summary of General Pibul’s leanings towards Japan and the totalitarian tide that would sweep away notions of democracy. ‘The props are falling away from British power,’ he declared. ‘France and Holland will fall to Hitler, maybe England will have to sue for peace as well. With the help of the Siamese we will force our will on the French colonials – Pibul is secretly on our side, even if that fool of a British ambassador is trying to rally the royalists. From our footholds in Indochina and here, we’ll land on the neck of Malaya and sweep down behind the British defences of Singapore. Then on to Borneo and then the Indies. And the Philippines too! Our navy will hold off the Americans. With the Indies in our possession, their oil embargo will be meaningless. From there, to Burma and India. Your dream of Asia dealing with Asians will be achieved this way, my friend, not from your lessons!’

  Adachi looked slightly perturbed at his chief’s lack of discretion, so Charles exaggerated his drunkenness, and struck up another song. None too soon, there came the moment to gulp down a bowl of plain white rice, and depart amid noisy farewells. An embassy driver was roused from the guardhouse, and Charles was taken back to his hotel.

  It was time to get out quickly with the information he had uncovered. Charles sent effusive notes of thanks to Takeda and Adachi, paid his hotel bill in advance up to the following day, and ferried his clothes in his briefcase to another hotel nearby where a porter let him fill up a newly bought portmanteau. His evacuation complete, Charles took his old suitcase down the back stairs and left it outside, removing all labels. Soon he was aboard a train rolling down to the Malayan border at Sungai Kolok on the east coast. His ruse worked, and he was across the frontier the next morning without incident.

  From there Charles worked his way by local bus down to Kuantan, where Hayley Bell had told the state’s police officer-in-charge, Guy Madoc, to be aware of his possible arrival. Charles gave a note as casually as he could to a policeman going into Madoc’s headquarters. Two hours later a car pulled up outside his hotel to take him down to Singapore. Only then, with two plain-clothes officers guarding him, did he put down on paper the words of Colonel Takeda that he’d recalled, over and over in his head, on the journey south.

  Charles met Hayley Bell in the Botanical Gardens, and told him of the trip. His report, quoting the Japanese military attaché in Bangkok as the source, outlined a plan to take advantage of the impending confrontation of the big powers in Europe. Japan would use Pibul’s ambitions to regain lost territory for Siam to help overbear a weakened and preoccupied France. When it decided the moment was opportune, Japan would strike immediately after or simultaneously with the declaration of war, as it had against the Russians at Port Arthur. From bases in Indochina, the Japanese would land forces at Songkhla and other points in the south of Siam and probably the northeast of Malaya. The advancing forces would have detailed knowledge of topography, lines of communication and prepared defences from years of meticulous intelligence work utilising professional and amateur spies. They would move quickly across to seize the neck of the Malayan peninsula, and advance on Rangoon and Singapore at the same time. The advance would be marked by maximum speed and surprise, supported by relentless air attack, to cause panic and mask the weakness of numbers and tenuous supply lines. It would be like the first blow of the swordsman, rendered with a shout and a thump of the foot.

  Hayley Bell had it typed up, and se
nt to Vernon Kell, the chief of MI5 in London, by courier. He seemed greatly pleased. Charles gathered it supported previous scenarios, more suppositional than based on actual information, by Jo Vinden at Military Intelligence and John Becker, the roving soft-drinks man.

  Even so, Hayley Bell’s report had remarkably little impact in Singapore. Hayley Bell called on the governor to give him a personal briefing. ‘No one but a fool, Hayley Bell, would suggest the Japs want to attack Singapore,’ Sir Shenton Thomas said.

  By then, the agreement with Hitler, waved in the air by Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, had eased anxieties there as well as in London. The colony’s British population settled back into its routine of dinners, dances, vigorous sport in the early mornings and late afternoons, excursions and race days.

  Hayley Bell, on the other hand, found himself under attack from senior officials. As well as Sir Shenton Thomas, the new Malaya theatre commander, General Bond, also rebuked him for suggestions that might ‘cause alarm’ and ‘weaken morale’ among the non-European populations. The British ambassador in Bangkok, Sir Josiah Crosby, was outraged at the intrusion of a secret agent from Singapore onto his territory, and insisted his diplomacy was holding Siam to strict neutrality.

  The MI5 office had not won many friends when it reported that cars hired from local garages to take staff officers and colonial officials to observe army manoeuvres had come provided with Japanese chauffeurs. Nor had Hayley Bell himself, after he’d issued an official complaint that many of the colony’s most sensitively placed officials were refusing to have their household servants registered and subjected to background checks.

  At his bungalow gatherings, Hayley Bell would almost weep in frustration. ‘There’s no fleet, no land protection, no adequate air power, just half-built airfields with no one to protect them, waiting for the Japs to use,’ he would say. ‘The troops we’ve got here are stale and comfortable. New ones will take a lot of time to get used to the climate. And this fatuous idea that “the jungle will protect us” – as if they have any idea what the jungle really is! Well the Japs do. I’ve seen them training in Formosa, wading through the swamps.’