Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally

might be asked to make a stand somewhere; to go down with a battalion or company whose faces he knew. Or else he could be charged with administering some distantly placed garrison. He had never been to the Royal Staff College, after all. Yet commanding Gawell Camp, which had turned out to be his military inheritance, had not been part of his revived if modestly hopeful imaginings when the crisis in the Pacific had first begun.
    Abercare’s orders and instincts at Gawell were to keep the inmates if not in a state of happiness, at least in a state of dull acceptance, occupation, or languor. Indeed, their languor was desirable. The Geneva Convention—so he was told—was to be his bible and text. As with the true Bible, like many of the faithful, Abercare felt one careful reading sufficed. After that, largely familiar with its clauses, he put it on the shelf beside the unread texts on military law. The Convention, after all, was merely applied decency.
    Visits from the Red Cross delegates, most commonly from the immigrant Swiss general practitioner from Bowral, and from officialsat Sydney’s Swiss consulate general who worked for the Japanese bureau of the Swiss, never found serious flaws in his management of Gawell, or in his subordinate Suttor’s administration of Compound C. Abercare received regular delegations of committees elected from amongst prisoners, compound by compound, and generally was able to agree with their requests or reach a compromise. His job was thus a matter of maintaining stability. It had nothing to do with the normal military issues of advance or retreat.
    A little Department of the Army booklet on the Oriental enemy’s military culture and another on their culture in the broader sense, along with directives from garrison headquarters in Sydney, were Abercare and Suttor’s chief guides to Compound C. Abercare was issued with a similar book on the Italians, but they did not mystify him as much. For example, the booklet from the Department of the Army counseled that “the Japanese have been trained from childhood to spit on any mercy extended to them by white hands. Though our own code of decency compels us to act with moderation and even to extend treatment to their wounded, in their mind all such niceties are contemptible.” But if that was the case, then why were his written orders, repeated in many directives from Lines of Communication Headquarters in Sydney, to extend not only neutral treatment but every leniency to the inhabitants of Compound C? The army seemed to want them cosseted. He liked to think that as a civilized officer he would have behaved in that manner in any case, but as so often with Compound C, all official advice came to contradict itself in the end.
    Abercare, ruling the camp with a light hand as instructed, explained with marginal honesty to others, “My wife’s health is such that she cannot stand the extremes of weather of a place like Gawell.” Hence he lived in camp at one end of a hut in the officers’ quarters, which allowed him a sitting room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. He found it all soulless, and as hot as the bedroom was in summer, it was bone freezing in winter. This bachelor’s accommodation lay in the lines of his headquarters’ company. He had three companies allspread around the perimeter. From the side windows of his office in the north-end administration hut he could look down a gentle slope to the seemingly unbreachable and lacerating fences of Compound C.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Colonel Abercare, his officers, and the garrison were fortified by the knowledge that down the road, three miles north in a direct line, lay an infantry training camp. It possessed its core of veterans who had fought battles both in deserts and jungles, and eighteen-year-olds innocently anxious—with that anxiety without which wars could not be fought—to taste the conflict before it was resolved. There was