The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [653]
This exchange, unfortunately, had not been quite enough to distract Percival’s attention from his new train of thought, which could be summarized in one simple question. Had this entire campaign, in which tanks, ships and aeroplanes had taken part and in which thousands of men had already died, been staged or devised by Fate or by some unseen hand simply in order to make a mockery of his own private hopes and ambitions? Percival was not accustomed to think in such terms. He was a practical man. He did not believe in ‘unseen hands’. That sort of thing was balderdash in his view. He still thought so … yet the way in which, time and again, a flaw had appeared in his defences, first on one flank, then on the other … the way in which there always proved to be just one missing element (the aircraft carrier, for instance, which would have prevented the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse but which had gone aground on the way to Singapore: how often in a man’s lifetime does an aircraft carrier go aground that it should do so on the only occasion that he needed it?), a missing element which in due course would bring down a crucial part of the defensive edifice he had been trying to construct, this had begun to have its effect on Percival as it would on any reasonable man.
It was easy, Percival knew, when a fellow got tired for him to get things out of proportion. He was tired. He knew that, admitted it straight out. Still, he was aware of the risk and was determined to be objective. He was only interested in what the evidence had to say. Well, the fact was that all these apparently random acts of fate, all these strokes of bad luck, had now begun (for the man putting his thin legs into shorts wide enough to have accommodated not only the GOC but a member of his staff into the bargain) to appear suspiciously weighted against him. For if you looked at what had happened carefully enough and remained objective, you could see that some hidden hand had been tampering with what one might reasonably expect to have been the normal course of events. It was as if, to speak plainly, on life’s ladder some unseen hand had all but sawn through a number of the more important rungs.
The defence of Malaya had been organized before the war on the assumption that the RAF would deal with enemy forces before they had a chance to get ashore. But, in the event, the RAF, suffering from a suspicious lack of planes, had been quite unable to do this. Well, never mind. They were busy elsewhere. Such things do happen. But if, having put your foot on the RAF rung and heard it snap under your weight you thought, well, you still had your other foot on the strike across the Siamese border, here, too, you would have found yourself treading all too firmly on thin air, for the man in charge of that operation had been poor old Brookers, an actor quite improbably cast in the rôle of Commander-in-Chief, Far East.
A commander, as Percival very well knew, cannot always have things his own way. But when everything is designed to frustrate him he may well begin to wonder. To be expected to fight against trained men with untrained men, to fight without naval or air support worth mentioning through a sweltering country of apathetic natives and exasperating Europeans whose only aim is to obstruct him, frankly that is too much: he begins to see that he is the victim of some pretty curious circumstances.
Consider for a moment the defence of Johore that he had been trying to organize. When he had been GSO1 to General Dobbie in 1937 fixed defences had been planned for Johore to protect Singapore