Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally Page A

an arrangement in place, early prepared and now in filing cabinets in either camp, which decreed that should there be an outbreak at Gawell prisoner-of-war camp, two rifle shots and three red flares would be fired into an atmosphere generally noted for clarity rather than fog. The young infantry novices from the training camp, and the warriors who taught them, would then be deployed to help the garrison contain the attempted escape or to search out escapees.
    This plan, as all such arrangements, had become blurred with the passage of time. Officers had forgotten whether it was three red flares or two. And they’d also forgotten where exactly the flare pistol and the flares were kept.
    Between them, the three companies who guarded the camp, and the young men and battle veterans of the training brigade, were extremely welcome to the cinema owners, the pubs, the sly grog shops, the starting-price bookmakers, the ministers of religion—whose congregations were pleasingly enlarged—the milk-bar owners, and even the jewelers of Gawell. To get to the Saturday-evening pictures reservations had to be made, and for some actors, including Merle Oberon and Errol Flynn, you’d better make your bookings on the Monday morning or you stood no chance of getting in the following Saturday.
    The garrison was warned about spreading any gossip about the prison, or any other speculation, when they were in town on leave.Two factors, as Abercare knew by instinct, made this naïve advice. One was that the men of the prison garrison lived a tedious existence and, even before they had properly begun to sip their schooners, sought to build up their own importance with tales of the surliness and danger of the prisoners, particularly those of Compound C. Similarly, the young men from the training establishment, who were insulted all day by their instructors, could be heroes only at the bars of the Royal, Hibernian, Commercial, and Federal hotels.
    The fable of explosive peril from within Compound C became well established in the gossip of the town, and on the basis of the persiflage and bulldusting of guards, the town—unlike Colonel Ewan Abercare or Major Bernard Suttor—believed from the start that one day there would be an outbreak from the camp. Indeed, some towns-people enjoyed the shiver of peril that ran through them at the idea and distracted them momentarily from the ennui of their homes in Gawell’s streets.
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    Major Suttor, as commander of Compound C, had—like his colonel—been informed already that the prisoners in there felt a level of dishonor at their capture.
    Dishonor. Suttor was sure his son felt none, amongst all else that the poor little bugger might be feeling. David Suttor had been the victim of the incompetence and hubris of his generals. Major Suttor would wake at night sweating with rage at what had befallen his son, and grieving for the powerless feelings the boy must suffer. The young men in the infantry training camp over there, on the far side of town, got more instruction these days than his son had ever got before being dumped on Singapore’s bombed and blasted wharves and being left to wonder what—apart from submission—his orders were. No shame for him, then. Just calamity.
    As well as the literature supplied to Suttor to help him understand his prisoners, a visiting intelligence officer, Captain Champion, hadassured Suttor of the infamy his inmates felt, as had Sergeant Nevski, the Russian immigrant who was the interpreter in Compound C. “It’s not only that they feel their shame,” Champion told him. “They feel they must feel it. They owe it to each other. No one fellow in there ever says, ‘Hurrah, I’m alive!’ Except in his inmost soul.”
    Suttor placed a lot of reliance on Sergeant Serge Nevski. Some years since, Nevski had taught literature classes in Harbin in the Japanese province of Manchukuo. As