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Subject: IN: WASHPOST - The Admiral's Baby
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From: Alex G Bardsley <bardsley@access.digex.net>
Subject: IN: WashPost - Book: The Admiral's Baby
To: apakabar@access.digex.net (John MacDougall)
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 22:38:39 -0500 (EST)
X-URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1997-02/16/026L-021697-idx.html
_________________________________________________________________
In the Years of Living Dangerously
By T. H. Watkins
Sunday, February 16 1997; Page X01
The Washington Post
THE ADMIRAL'S BABY
By Laurens van der Post
Morrow. 340 pp. $27.50
SECRET: For the Minister Only -- Sir: as requested, I herewith present
a summary evaluation of the late Col. Laurens van der Post's account
of his postwar service on behalf of His Majesty's government on the
Indonesian island of Java, 21 August, 1945 to 31 May, 1947. It is, I
believe you will agree, a most remarkable document, coming from a man
in his 89th year and best known for his work on the peoples and
environment of the African continent (see especially his book The Lost
World of the Kalahari), not the islands that spill into the Java Sea.
In The Admiral's Baby, the first full public account of the events in
question, the colonel's story begins where another ends: on a moonlit
night in Bandoeng, Java, after the Japanese surrender. He and his
fellow war prisoners had just been released after three years in
captivity (see the same author's The Night of the New Moon). The
colonel could have gone home, but he was the highest-ranked British
Army officer left in Java. The Japanese needed him. Until Allied
troops could get there, the Japanese had been charged by their High
Command to protect all released prisoners and maintain the peace. Not
an easy task. The island seethed with a nationalistic determination to
challenge the colonial rule of the Dutch, who, before expeditiously
(some said precipitously) surrendering to the Japanese in 1942, had
controlled Java and its neighbors since the Napoleonic Wars. The
Dutch, for their part, seemed to believe that they could return as if
nothing had changed. Van der Post knew the people of Java well, had
spent enough time in Japan before the war to have learned the
language, and, having been born in South Africa, could speak High
Dutch. He seemed the perfect mediator.
And so he was, at least by his own account. There is no reason to
doubt it. It is true that he succumbs occasionally to a rather
spurious modesty, revealing, while blushing handsomely, that everyone
from His Majesty King George V to Admiral Lord Mountbatten considered
his work to have been unique, brave, brilliant and of great value to
his nation. Well, it appears that it was all of that -- not just
during the chaotic and often bloody weeks before the arrival of enough
British troops to keep Dutch supporters and Indonesian nationalists
from murdering each other but in the months that followed, when the
colonel desperately tried to broker an arrangement that would both
recognize a valid nationalism at work and allow the Dutch to maintain
their powerful economic presence. He saw the opportunity, he writes,
as one of those "moments of innocence" when "the past is wiped from
the mind," leaving only "a signal from life that what has happened
must never be allowed to happen again. . . ."
Still weak with malaria and the debilitating effects of his prison
experience, the colonel exhausted himself trekking into the interior
to meet with Ahmed Soekarno (Sukarno) and other nationalist leaders
hidden in the jungles of the Sunda; bickered constantly with devious
Dutch officials; got shot at intermittently; and wrote endless
memoranda (his longest report, an admirably lucid chronicle outlining
every nuance of the situation in Java since the end of the war, is
reproduced in its entirety in The Admiral's Baby). He even traveled to
Number 10 Downing Street and to the Hague with his plea for
conciliation.
It was not to be. In the end, his effort sank in what he describes as
"a porridge of negation." An agreement was indeed reached, but after
the departure of British forces, the Dutch, "blind to the history of
their own making," refused to honor it, starting a four-year war that
they lost. The failure left van der Post more anguished than bitter,
perhaps wondering, as the American economist Paul Schuster Taylor once
wondered, if what we learn from history is that we learn nothing from
history.
Sir, I think you will find The Admiral's Baby a sometimes exciting,
often sad, and always moving narrative, redolent of a high-minded
patriotism and an unembarrassed idealism (if perhaps just a whiff of
elitism, too: I wonder whether the Indonesians truly felt that they
owed a debt of gratitude to Britain for its relatively benign, if
brief, rule under Stamford Raffles 200 years ago; colonialism is
colonialism). And if the colonel's mystical divagations sometimes get
in the way of the story, that story and his central role in it are of
a stature that makes it easy to accept them as tolerable
interruptions.
Oh, yes -- you will want to know the origin of the account's title. It
is taken from a message sent from Admiral Sir Wilfred Patterson,
commanding the Fifth Cruiser Squadron, to Admiral Lord Mountbatten,
Supreme Commander Allied Forces South East Asia, regarding the
difficulty of dealing with the Javanese situation while hampered from
above: "We can continue to rock the baby to sleep only if you people
outside the house would not make so much noise."
This anecdote provides a rare note of humor in a report otherwise
gravid with appropriate solemnity, and I believe it may be forgiven.
Respectfully submitted.
T. H. Watkins, an editorial consultant to the Wilderness Society, is
completing "By Chaos Out of Dream: A History of the United States in
the Age of the Great Depression." His 26th book, "Southern Utah
Wilderness: A Portrait, a History, and a Battle," will be published
this fall.
@CAPTION: Laurens van der Post in Java, 1947