The battle song was played again. The men in the next room began talking excitedly. I looked at the time. It was eight o’clock. Less than twenty-four hours earlier I had been told that Sanusi was a man who did not like to take chances. Now he was the head of the state. I wondered what sort of man he really was.
There was one thing I did know. The voice of Sanusi was not the voice of the General I had heard talking to Suparto in the garden of the New Harmony Club two nights ago.
T
en minutes after the end of the speech there was a stir in the next room and talk ceased. In the quiet that followed, I heard Suparto’s voice out in the corridor. Then, there were footsteps and the door of the apartment closed. A moment or two later, Suparto and two other men walked out of the living room on to the terrace.
I had never seen a picture of Sanusi, but he had been described to me once and it was not hard to recognise him. In a country where maturity is reached early and the average expectation of life is low, a man of forty-eight is almost elderly and generally looks it. Sanusi did not. The close-cropped hair showing beneath his black cap was grey and his cheeks were cadaverous, but his body was lean and muscular and he moved with an alert grace that was anything but elderly. His companion, whom I took to be the sanctimonious Colonel
Roda, was plump by comparison and had long black hair bulging from under his cap. I could not see his face. His uniform shirt was soaked with sweat and he was carrying a leather document case.
Suparto followed them over to the balustrade, and waited while they looked out over the city. Sanusi was smoking a cheroot, and after a moment or two he pointed with it down into the square and said something which I did not hear. There was no hint of triumph in his attitude, no suggestion that he found it pleasant to contemplate the city he had conquered; he was simply a military commander casting an eye over his defences.
Rosalie was getting worried by my standing so near to the window. The sentry could not see me because I was hidden from him by the one drawn curtain, but she was afraid that if the men further along were to turn round suddenly, I should be seen watching them. I knew that she was right and moved away.
It was as well that I did so, for almost immediately they began to move along the terrace in our direction. I saw the shadow of the sentry move as he straightened up.
“An ultimatum,” Roda was saying; “surrender of the forts within an hour on reasonable terms or total destruction. Surely,
Boeng …
”
“No.” It was Sanusi’s voice and, as he spoke, the footsteps ceased. “They will surrender anyway when
they are hungry enough. But if you offer them terms now and they refuse, you will have to attack. We shall certainly lose men and I cannot spare them. In any case, it does not trouble me. A few stupid gunners shut up in forts with guns they cannot point at us. Let them stay there until they starve. What is important is to find out what we have to expect from the enemy at Meja. Which way are they moving? Which of their units can we be sure of? These are the uncertainties I do not like.”
They began to move towards us again.
“We know the units loyal to you,
Boeng
.” This was Suparto.
“We know those who promised loyalty, but how many will commit themselves to us before the result is certain?”
“All,” said Roda.
“If we had only one plane for reconnaissance …” Sanusi began and then broke off. He was level with the bedroom window now and had seen the sentry. “Why is this man here? We do not need him.”
I took Rosalie’s hand.
“He is guarding two prisoners,
Boeng
,” said Suparto evenly. “They were in the apartment when it was requisitioned for your use.”
“Prisoners? Are they hostile?”
“No,
Boeng
. But it would be unwise to release them yet. Your whereabouts must remain secret at present.”
“That is true,” said Roda. “There must be no failure of security. That is Suparto’s responsibility. The enemy would be glad to talk to such people.”
“Who are they?”
“One is an Engishman. He has been the consulting engineer up at the Tangga River dam. He is a good technician and an employee of the Colombo Authority. I thought that you would wish him to be treated with consideration.”
“You said two prisoners,” put in Roda.
“The other is a woman, an Indo”—he used the slang term for Eurasian—“from the New Harmony Club.”
There was a silence. Rosalie’s hand lay absolutely still in mine.
“The apartment,” Suparto continued, “is owned by an Australian pilot. He had lent it to the Englishman. Admittedly, it is a disagreeable situation.”
“They should have been handed over to the troops for disposal,” Roda said irritably. “If …” He paused.
In the next room the telephone had begun to ring. One of the men there answered it. The call was for the General.
Sanusi turned away to go into the living room. “The matter is unimportant,” he said; “it can be considered later.”
A moment or two after, we heard him curtly answering the telephone. I looked at Rosalie. Her whole body was rigid.
“You see, now,” she whispered; “I am the danger to you.”
“Nonsense.”
“It is always the same when there is trouble. There must be someone to blame, someone to hate. The Chinese are too powerful and would combine together. But nobody cares about the Indos because we are weak. Besides, I am here with you. That will make them want to kill. They will say that I have made this place unclean, and there will be a pleasure for them in the killing.”
I managed to smile. “Oh now, wait a minute. I don’t think it’s as bad as that. What you say might be true of some of them, but Sanusi’s not a savage.”
“A good Moslem does not speak as he does.”
“I wouldn’t know. He sounds reasonable.”
“And Colonel Roda?”
“I expect he does what he’s told. And you heard Suparto. He doesn’t want us harmed. In any case, they’re all going to have far too much to do to trouble about us. They may not even stay here. This is only a tactical headquarters. If things go on as they’re going now, Sanusi’ll soon be moving into the Presidential Palace. We’ll be able to laugh at all this.”
“You are very kind to me.”
“Kind?”
“You know very well that if I were not here there would be no great danger for you.”
It was she who was smiling now, faintly, as she watched my face. I got up impatiently and lit one of my dwindling supply of cigarettes, but I knew that she was not deceived. Neither was I.I had heard the change in their voices when Suparto had told them about her. For these men, with their desperate pride of race and hatred of Europeans, she already stood for treachery; and the fact that she was there with me made the iniquity of her existence doubly obscene. To kill us both might seem like an act of purification. Everything depended, really, on how necessary such an act might become to them. And that in turn depended on events. I had been right, I felt, about one thing. If things went well, Sanusi would be quick to install himself in more becoming surroundings. We would be forgotten. What we had to fear was a set-back to their plans.
I went as near as I dared to the open window. Sanusi was still on the telephone. Occasionally he would ask a question. “How many?” “Who is in command?” Evidently, he was receiving a report. Probably, it concerned the dispositions of the “enemy’s” forces about which he had expressed so much uneasiness. I thought again of De Vries and his assertion that Sanusi was reluctant to take chances. There might have been something in that after all. Was it Colonel Roda who had tipped the scales in favour of the move? Or Suparto?
The telephone in the next room tinkled as Sanusi hung up. At the same moment, I became aware of a
faint throbbing sound. For a moment, I thought that it was something to do with the radio station below. Suddenly, the sentry outside shouted: “
Kapal terbang!
”
The men in the next room hurried out on to the terrace. I could hear the planes clearly now, and it sounded as if there were several of them. There were shouts from the square below. Colonel Roda began pointing up into the sky.
I looked round. Rosalie was sitting passively on the edge of her bed. I blundered over to her, grabbed one of her arms and dragged her down with me on to the floor.
From where I was lying, I could see through the open window on to the terrace. There was nobody standing there now. Then, I saw the planes. They were coming in over the north-west corner of the square; three old twin-engined American fighter-bombers, flying in a ragged line-abreast formation at about twenty-five hundred feet. As they roared overhead I could see extra bombs in the racks below the wings. The whole Republican Air Force, or, at least, all of it that could get off the ground, was out.
The bow-legged officer ran on to the terrace and gazed up after the planes. Rosalie started to get to her feet. I pressed her back on to the floor. It was possible that the Air Force was throwing in its lot with Sanusi, in which case the planes would be going in to land at the civil airport out by the racecourse; but it was also
possible that they were not. The behaviour of the men on the terrace had not suggested that they were expecting such a welcome reinforcement. The low altitude and steady course of the planes might simply mean that their pilots knew that there were no ground defences for them to worry about, and that they had time to make their bombing runs carefully. If there were going to be any bombing, of course; if this were not just a threatening gesture.
A moment or two later, I knew that it was not. The sound of the engines which had almost died away was beginning to get louder again, and the bow-legged officer hastily retreated into the living room.
After Sanusi’s broadcast, I suppose it was inevitable that the Government would make some attempt to put the radio station out of action; but when it came, the attempt was still a very unpleasant shock. In war it is relatively easy to be philosophical about being bombed or shelled indiscriminately; but when you become, or the building you are in becomes, a selected target for enemy fire, things are different. It is not just that the degree of danger has changed; quite often it hasn’t; but that the affair is no longer impersonal. From being a man like yourself, dutifully scattering high explosive where it seems likely to inflict the most casualties, the enemy has suddenly become a vindictive maniac intent on your personal destruction. You become resentful,
and begin, most sensibly, to think of ways of killing him first. There is nothing more enraging than to have to stay where you are, a passive, stationary, impotent target, and let him take pot shots at you. That is what it was like at the top of the radio building.
They came in one after the other in line-ahead, and just high enough to avoid bomb blast from the ground. As I heard the first one beginning his run, I realised that there were big glass window panes two feet from our faces, and dragged a rug from the floor over our heads. At the same moment, someone down in the square opened up with a machine gun.
The sound of the plane became suddenly louder and there was a series of slithering noises as the bombs started to fall. Then, the explosions came. He must have let go everything he had, for the floor bucked and trembled for close on ten seconds. There was a pandemonium of falling plaster and breaking glass and then, as a sort of finale, a torrent of earth and stones poured down on to the terrace.
One of the bombs had fallen into the garden of the Ministry of Public Health next door, and the earth and stones were merely the falling débris of that explosion; but, of course, it sounded as if the building were collapsing. Rosalie cried out and there was a yell from the terrace. I flung back the rug and saw that the sentry was still at his post outside the window, crouching against
the balustrade under the bamboo sun roof, which had collapsed. He had been hit by the roof when it fell, and was gingerly rubbing his shoulder. The curtains had been sucked out by the blast and were now caught up on the open window frame, but the glass was still intact and so was the ceiling. The blast damage was probably on the lower floors. Then I heard the second plane on its way, and dived under the rug again.
The first stick of bombs had straddled the Air House, and it was just as well that the pilot in question had no more bombs. He was too accurate. Next time, he might have scored a direct hit. The second stick was wide and ploughed along a street running parallel to our side of the square. It made a lot of noise and a few more windows went in the rear of the building; but, as far as we were concerned, that was all. It was the third plane that did the most damage to the sixth floor. Most of its bombs fell in the square, but one of them hit the portico of the Ministry of Public Health. We did not know that until later, however; at the time, it seemed like a direct hit on our own building. It was not a big bomb, but it exploded on a level with the second floor and most of the blast came our way. The floor heaved. Something hit me hard in the back. Then, there was a long, low rumbling and silence. I became aware of a thin, high singing in my ears.
My right arm was across Rosalie’s shoulders and I could feel her trying to get up. I went to fling back
the rug and found that there was a weight pressing on the top of it. That made me panic. I struggled to my knees and fought my way out of the rug. Suddenly, I choked, and then began coughing as I breathed in a cloud of plaster dust. I still could not hear properly, but I knew now what had hit me in the back. It was a large piece of the ceiling.
I dragged the rug off Rosalie and helped her to her feet. She was white with dust and coughing helplessly. I led her over to the bed, dragged a sheet of plaster off it and made her sit down. My ears were still painful, but the drums in them were beginning to function again. I could hear coughs and hoarse shouts coming from the next room. Through the cloud of dust, I saw that the windows had shattered and that the curtains were hanging in ribbons. I started to cough again, and, at the same moment, I heard the planes returning. Then, one of them opened up with his cannons and roared overhead.