Read Online Shame and the Captives by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online

peered and nodded as if he understood the Russian.
    â€œThe same can be said for you,” the Russian continued. “You should be proud of having done your duty, not ashamed. There is a new world coming, and those extreme military codes are now obsolete and do not serve as a useful guide. You will be well fed, your complaints will be sought and acted upon, and when the war ends you can return to your people with honor. In the meantime, do your best to pass the time. Find a hobby. For time will pass one way or another, tediously or well used.”
    Then the commandant turned to the guards who were with Aoki’s party and told them to march away the prisoners. It is easy, Aoki thought, for those who lack any military code to speak of honor as extreme.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    The party first met Tengan in the orderly hut inside Compound C. They had entered the gate warily, fearful that by malign chance there might be someone there they knew, and thus they would be more acutely judged by eyes accustomed to the same landscapes and nuances of language as their own. Aoki would see the same caution in other, later-arriving men who turned up in the bus with the painted-out windows from Gawell railway station. Men with similar accents were particularly edgy with each other, since they were sure that each of them knew the same units, and in some cases the same dead men, and that those men, once evoked, would be a judgment on their captive condition.
    Tengan, his flier’s insignia attached to his makeshift hat, saluted them, but exercised what he considered his duty as an aviator of being cold to them. One of Tengan’s assistants, a loud, jovial sapper, handed out their deep-dyed clothing with a black “PW” imprinted on the back, and did not himself seem driven by any duty of hauteur. He issued them a heap of five blankets each.
    â€œTake the blankets,” Tengan growled at them. “You’ll need them for the colder nights.”
    So it seemed that this aviator had already experienced a winter here. Aoki also observed that the prison uniforms he and his party received were much darker in color than Tengan’s. In the mess he would dare, on the strength of his superior rank, to approach the table occupied by the fliers and raise the issue. Tengan told him, “There are ways of making them much paler over time. Undoing the work the enemy put into them.” With an almost boyish enthusiasm, he told Aoki to instruct his party to launder their uniforms with a mixture of soap and ashes to bring about a bleaching process. It was apparent he saw the job of lightening the color of the uniform as an arm of warfare, an antidote to the passivity and opprobrium of imprisonment.
    In his time in Compound C, Aoki would encounter many such gestures. In the first place no one who possessed an infantry cap wore it. Instead, men spent a lot of time cutting out the canvas from their sport shoes to make replicas of a campaign cap—a symbolic gesture in that they refused to wear their own hats in front of such a pathetic enemy, at the same time as they dented the enemy’s supply of canvas.
    Men would rip their blankets and wear holes in them by rubbing them against cement floors in the shower block and cook house, all with the same manic purpose of being able to ask for a replacement and thus dig a little deeper into their foe’s wool supplies. They snapped their toothbrushes in two for the same motive. They scraped their safety razors, supplied by their captors with the intention to thwart use of the blade for self-harm, up and down walls to render them blunt and make their replacement necessary. Aoki wondered whether this was a kind of group madness, substituting the true battle against enemy flesh for one against lesser fabrics.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Aoki, because he was a veteran of many years’ service and was amiable, was quickly elected hut leader, as was Goda of