A Town like Alice

the Allied War Crimes Tribunal in the year 1946 after trial for atrocities committed at Camp 302 on the Burma-Siam railway in the years 1943 and 1944: his duty in Kuantan at that time was to see to the evacuation of the railway material from the eastern railway in Malaya and to its shipment to Siam. He lived in the house formerly occupied by the District Commissioner of Kuantan, and the District Commissioner had kept a fine little flock of about twenty black Leghorn fowls, specially imported from England in 1939. When Captain Sugamo woke up that morning, five of his twenty black Leghorns were missing, with a green sack that had once held the mail for the District Commissioner, and was now used to store grain for the fowls.
    Captain Sugamo was a very angry man. He called the Military Police and set them to work; their suspicion fell at once upon the Australian truck drivers, who had a record for petty larceny in that district. Moreover, they had considerable opportunities, because the nature of their work allowed them a great deal of freedom; trucks had to be serviced and refuelled, often in the hours of darkness when it was difficult to ascertain exactly where each man might be. Their camp was searched that day for any sign of telltale feathers, or the sack, but nothing was discovered but a cache of tinned foods and cigarettes stolen from the quartermaster's store.
    Captain Sugamo was not satisfied and he became more angry than ever. A question of face was now involved, because this theft from the commanding officer was a dear insult to his position, and so to the Imperial Japanese Army. He ordered a search of the entire town of Kuantan: on the following day every house was entered by troops working under the directions of the military police to look for signs of the black feathers or the green sack. It yielded no result.
    Brooding over the insults levelled at his uniform, the captain ordered the barracks of the company of soldiers under his command to be searched. There was no result from that.
    There remained one further avenue. Three of the trucks, driven by Australians, were up-country on the road to or from Jerintut. Next day Sugaino dispatched a light truck up the road manned by four men of his military police, to search these trucks and to interrogate the drivers and the guards, and anybody else who might have knowledge of the matter. Between Pohoi and Blat they came upon a crowd of women and children walking down the road loaded with bundles; ahead of them marched a Japanese sergeant with his rifle slung over one shoulder and a green sack over the other. The truck stopped with a squeal of brakes.
    For the next two hours Jean stuck to her story, that the Australian had given her money and she had bought the fowls from Liman. They put her through a sort of third degree there on the road, with an insistent reiteration of questions: when they felt that her attention was wandering they slapped her face, kicked her shins, or stamped on her bare feet with army boots. She stuck to it with desperate resolution, knowing that it was a rotten story, knowing that they disbelieved her, not knowing what else she could say. At the end of that time a convoy of three trucks came down the road; the driver of the second one, Joe Harman, was recognized by the sergeant immediately, and brought before Jean at the point of the bayonet. The sergeant of the Military Police said, "Is this man?"
    Jean said desperately, "I've been telling them about the four dollars you gave me to buy the chickens with, Joe, but they won't believe me.
    The military policeman said, "You steal chickens from the shoko. Here is bag."
    The ringer looked at the girl's bleeding face and at her bleeding feet. "Leave her alone, you bloody mucking bastards," he said angrily in his slow Queensland drawl. "I stole those mucking chickens, and I gave them to her. So what?"
    Darkness was closing down in my London sitting-room, the early darkness of a stormy afternoon. The rain still beat upon the window. The girl sat staring into the fire, immersed in her sad memories. "They crucified him," she said quietly. "They took us all down to Kuantan, and they nailed his hands to a tree, and beat him to death. They kept us there, and made us look on while they did it."

Chapter 4
    "My dear," I said. "I am so very sorry."
    She raised her head. "You don't have to be sorry," she replied. "It was one of those things that seem to happen in a war. It's a long time ago, now-nearly six