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By Root 2770 0

on the floor where he had been standing. The Major handed him an aspirin and a glass of water; when he had swallowed them he lay back in the darkness, watching giddily as the room began to revolve slowly like a roundabout. Gradually, the bed, too, began to spin, dipping and rising, faster and faster. He had to cling on tightly, as to the neck of a wooden horse, or be hurled out against the walls by centrifugal force. Although the night was still, great gales of hot air poured in through the open shutters and tugged at the mosquito net. Time passed. The light was switched on. Now faces were swirling round the bed: he recognized the Major’s anxious features and Dupigny’s wrinkled face, pickled in cynicism like a walnut in vinegar, and Dr Brownley chuckling like a fiend, but then Matthew closed his eyes, knowing he must be delirious, and fell into a troubled sleep. In his dreams he was back in Geneva … the pale, sorrowful ghost of Matsuoka appeared and whispered: ‘Matthew, why do you persecute me like this? You know I am only trying to do what is best.’ And then he smiled and his face turned into that of a cobra. Outside in the darkness some small creature uttered a cry as it was killed by a snake.

Now, a few miles away at Katong, Sir Robert Brooke-Popham also lay dreaming of the Japanese. Brooke-Popham slept on his back, legs apart, arms away from his body, wrists and palms turned upwards, an attitude of total surrender to sleep, perhaps, or that of a man felled suddenly in the boxing-ring by an unexpected blow. His honest, friendly face looked older now that sleep had allowed the muscles of his jaw to sag, older than his age indeed for he was not much over sixty; but this long Sunday had been spent in interminable conferences and he was exhausted. Moreover, these conferences still had not resolved the problem which faced him. Should he order troops across the border into Siam in order to forestall a possible Japanese landing there?

Malaya, very roughly, was carrot-shaped with Singapore at its tip and Siam, more roughly still, providing its plume of green leaves. The obvious place to defend Malaya’s northern border with Siam was where the green plume grew out of the carrot, at the thinnest part, for there you would need least troops to do the job. Alas, there was a snag to this, because the border, although it obligingly started at the thinnest part on the western side of the carrot, instead of heading straight to the east to snip off the leaves neatly where they should be snipped off, wandered south for some distance into the pink flesh of the carrot itself at its fattest. Nor was the problem simply that Malaya’s real border, by wandering hither and yon through the bulging part of the peninsula, was a good deal longer than it need have been: the fact was that there were only two roads south into Malaya through the jungle and mountains and both of them began some fifty miles across the border into Siam, one at a place called Singora, the other at Patani.

So what was he going to do? (Or, to put it another way, what should he have already done?) Should he order the 11th Division to invade Siam and occupy Singora before the Japanese could land? There was hardly still time to do so, anyway. Ah, but he did not know (although he might suspect) that the Japanese were even thinking of landing there. This was a terrible dilemma for a man who was not as young as he used to be. After all, one rash act might plunge Britain into war with Siam and her patron, Japan, when by abstaining it might be avoided. This was the fix which Brooke-Popham had found himself in. During the past week the Chiefs of Staff in London had authorized him to go ahead and launch his forestalling operation (which had been named Matador) into Siam if he thought a Japanese landing there was imminent. Well!

Nor was it only a question of occupying Singora. There was the other road, too, the one which began at Patani and ran south-west towards the Malayan border. To hold this road would also mean pushing into Siam, though it should not be necessary to occupy Patani