The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [665]
Tormented by flies, light-headed from lack of sleep, Percival sat in his office at Sime Road, brooding over his maps and listening to the distant, monotonous thudding of the guns. The Japanese had wasted no time in moving up their heavy artillery, they were good soldiers, there was no denying it. Now they were laying down a heavy bombardment of the northern coast … particularly, as it happened, west of the Causeway. Ah, but Percival was not about to be fooled into thinking that that was where the attack would come! To bombard one sector and attack another was the oldest trick in the game. There was something almost pleasant, he found, in this constant thudding of guns, which included his own artillery shelling Johore and the hammering of ack-ack guns … it reminded him curiously of his youth, of the endless artillery exchanges of the Great War. Terrible though that had been, it now seemed almost a pleasant memory. He thought for a moment of mentioning it to Brookers … he, too, would have enjoyed the reminiscence. But then he remembered that Brooke-Popham had already returned to England. Just as well, really. The old chap was no longer quite up to this sort of thing.
It occurred to Percival that what had gone wrong in the campaign until now was that he had never been able to act positively. Time and again he had been obliged to react. Thanks to Brooke-Popham’s hesitations the Japanese commander had taken the initiative from the beginning and had never let it go. True, he himself had been the victim of the most extraordinary (indeed, suspicious) series of misfortunes. But the fact was that that unseen hand had led him by the nose. When Wavell had expressed the opinion that a Japanese attack would fall west of the Causeway, when, independently, it seemed, the Chief Engineer had started dumping material west of the Causeway, how easy it would have been to have made the assumption that this was where the attack would fall! But something inside him had rebelled. He had sensed that once again that unseen hand was trying to lead him by the nose. He had told himself: ‘Be objective!’ And so he had cleared his mind of prejudices and looked at the map again, asking himself what he would have done if he had been the Japanese commander. The answer was: he would have launched his attack on the north-east coast using Pulau Ubin, the long island which lay in the Strait of Johore, to shield his preparations from the view of Singapore Island. Accordingly, Percival had allotted to the recently arrived British troops of the 18th Division whose morale had not been dented in the long retreat down the Peninsula the sector which he considered most critical… though the whole of the northern coast must be defended, of course.
There was, however, still the possibility that he was wrong in expecting the Japanese attack to fall east of the Causeway. The Intelligence wallahs in Fort Canning, for example, were predicting an attack to the west. But what did they know about it? They knew no more than he did: they had no reconnaissance planes to help them. All the same, to be on the safe side, he had ordered Gordon Bennett to send over night patrols to the mainland to get a better idea of what the Japanese were up to. Bennett had been dragging his feet over this. He would have to give him some plain speaking.
He reached out for some papers on his desk and as he picked them up a photograph fell out of them: