State of Siege

Sanusi eyed him coldly. “We will consider all the possibilities, Ahmad. Your advice will be asked later. The second possibility is that we attempt to hold the centre of the city.” He paused and this time Roda was silent. “The third possibility is that we negotiate with them.” He looked at the lieutenant-colonel. “Well, Aroff? Your opinions?”

Aroff wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “As to the first possibility, Boeng, I agree with Ahmad.” He spoke huskily and kept clearing his throat. “As to the second, I have no objection to dying. As to the third, I do not understand how we can negotiate anything except surrender, and for us that only means dying in a different way. I say that it is better to die like men than to die shamefully in a prison yard.”

“Major Dahman?”

“I say the same, Boeng.”

“Ahmad?”

Roda stared round at them belligerently. “Are we whipped dogs? What is all this talk of dying?”

Aroff stiffened. “Can you give us guns, Ahmad?” he snapped. “Can you give us tanks? Can you, at this late hour, persuade the men who were to have fought with us to desert General Ishak? If so, we will talk of living.”

“We are not whipped dogs,” Sanusi interposed; “and neither are we children. What is your opinion, Ahmad?”

“We should negotiate, Boeng. Consider. We are in a strong position here. They have tanks, yes, and they have guns, but they cannot stand at a distance and kill us all with high explosive. At Cassino, a few Germans held an army corps. At Stalingrad, it was the Germans who broke, not the Russkis. Ah yes, I know it is different with us. We are cut off from our supplies. Our ammunition will not last for ever. But if they want to kill us they will have to assault us, and that will be an expensive operation for them. They will prefer to negotiate.”

“For our surrender, certainly they will negotiate,” retorted Aroff; “but what terms can we expect?”

“An amnesty within two years. The terms to be witnessed by a neutral observer, the Indonesian Ambassador perhaps.”

“They would be fools to agree.”

“Why? We have a following in the country. They will not make themselves secure by killing us. Besides, think of the good impression it would create abroad.”

Aroff turned protestingly to Sanusi. “ Boeng, this is madness.”

Sanusi started to say something and so did Roda. At the same instant, there was a quick rushing sound. Then, the floor jumped, a blast wave that felt like a sandbag clouted me in the chest and my head jarred to the whiplash violence of exploding T.N.T.

For a second I stood there, stupidly staring at the other men in the room who were staring stupidly at me. Then, I turned and blundered out on to the terrace. The shell had burst against a window embrasure on the floor below, and fumes and smoke were pouring up over the balustrade. As I began to cough, the staff captain pushed past me with an angry exclamation that I was too deafened to hear, and went to look down over the balustrade. Then, the fumes got him, too, and he turned away. I looked back into the room. Roda was holding the back of his hand against his forehead as if he were dazed. Sanusi was shouting something at him. I stumbled along the terrace to the bedroom.

Rosalie was sitting on my bed with her hands over her face, trembling violently. I was not feeling too good myself. If that was a sample of the shooting we could expect from the naval gunners, we were not going to last very long.

I put my arms round her and she looked up at me. The whistle of the second shell rose to a climax and we both ducked involuntarily. The burst that followed made a glass on the table tinkle against the water bottle standing beside it, but that was all. It was about three hundred yards over.

I produced the old platitude: “If you can hear it coming it’s going to miss you.”

It has never yet comforted anyone who was badly frightened, and it did not comfort her. The destroyer was firing its four guns singly, so that the bombardment was reasonably steady, but I soon realised that the first hit had been a fluke. When, after twenty minutes, the first burst of firing ceased, they had not succeeded in dropping another shell within fifty yards of the Air House. Perhaps they were not trying for it. For Rosalie, however, every round was aimed, not merely at the building we were in, but at our room in it. I moved one of the beds around so as to give us some protection from a burst on the terrace, and we lay down on the floor behind it, but I don’t think she felt any more protected.