The night of the new moon

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the Wing-Commander W. T. H. Nichols of this story, because without him and his steadfastness there might have been neither story-teller nor story to tell.

Laurens van der Post

THE NIGHT OF THE

NEW MOON

I saw the new moon late yestreen

Wi’ the auld moon in her arm…

Illustrations

All the illustrations in this book are drawings made during the early months of imprisonment under the Japanese at Bandoeng in Java. Nichols and I, who had come to it with our men from confinement in far grimmer circumstances at a place called Soekaboemi – the name for us always was profoundly ironical because it means ‘the desired earth’ – were to look back on our first term in Bandoeng as the ‘golden age’ of our captivity. The Japanese, surprised by the speed and extent of their conquests in South-East Asia, had not yet had time to develop a definite prisoner-of-war policy, nor to create a special prisoner-of-war administration. We were, to start with, at the haphazard mercies of the Japanese fighting forces and brutal as their treatment of us could be, they were better than the special prison administration which was set up later, run as it was by inferior officers and warrant officers in command of fanatical Korean guards. We suffered on the whole under the Koreans more than we had done at the hands of regular Japanese troops.

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