As War Made Them

THREE CAME HOME (317 pp.)--Agnes Newton Keith--Little, Brown ($3).

When the Japanese moved into North Borneo in January 1942, the British colony in Sandakan got its orders: "Meet the enemy, resist passively, do not cooperate. We cannot defend you. Goodbye!" Among the 80 men, women & children was Agnes Newton Keith, U.S. author whose Atlantic Monthly $5,000 prizewinning Land Below the Wind had made Borneo seem like a grim, if fascinating, place for so genteel a lady (TIME, Nov. 19, 1939). She had decided to stick it out with her two-year-old son and her British husband, who was North Borneo's Director of Agriculture. Three Came Home is Mrs. Keith's blow-by-blow account of 3 1/2 years in Jap prison camps--an ugly, brutal story, quietly and sometimes humorously told.

For the first four months things weren't too bad in Sandakan: the Japs looted thoroughly but neither killed nor raped anyone. Mrs. Keith was beaten up by soldiers while pregnant and ill and had a miscarriage--but that was only a mild foretaste of things to come. The prisoners were moved to Berhala Island just offshore. Women & children were housed in one crowded, ill-ventilated barrack; the men some distance away in another. Said the Jap commanding officer: "You are a fourth-class nation now. Therefore your treatment will be fourth-class, and you will live and eat as coolies. In the past you have had proudery and arrogance! You will get over it now!"

Proudery and arrogance dissolved rapidly on Berhala. The prisoners shared the floor with swarms of vicious rats. The diet consisted of rice sweepings, a tough, rubbery green vegetable and tea. For latrines there were two tin buckets. Filth and vitamin deficiency brought on dysentery, influenza, beriberi and several other diseases, mostly untreated. When the guards weren't slapping faces in anger, they were patting bottoms lewdly. Yet some of those same guards would unexpectedly share their food with the children, permit wives to see husbands in defiance of rules, even assist in smuggling provisions and medicines from friendly Asiatics on the mainland. But the kindnesses were whimsical, starvation and brutality the rule.

Shared Sin. After eight months on Berhala the prisoners were moved to the main camp at Kuching. The women worked at forced field labor on a daily diet of one cup of rice gruel, five tablespoons of cooked rice, a few greens, tea, a little sugar. Soldier prisoners bargained with their guards for skinned cats and rats; "all of us were eating weeds and grass, and plenty of us would have liked to eat each other." For complaining of attempted rape, Mrs. Keith was beaten so badly that two ribs broke. Yet she was the favorite of Camp Commander Colonel Suga, who had read and liked her Borneo book. When the first Allied planes came over Kuching, most of the prisoners were too weak to feel joy. Mrs. Keith, always thin, had lost 30 lbs. when the Australian ground troops took Kuching without a fight. Her six-foot husband came out weighing 80 lbs.

Mrs. Keith returned to the U.S. with few illusions about human nature: "In camp we had all of the sins. . . . Some people ate in corners, stuffing themselves secretly, while others starved. ... A common enemy did not bind us together, hunger and danger did not do so, persecution did not, our sex did not. One thing only bound us to comparative peace: the lesson that life was hideous if we surrendered to our hatreds; more livable only when we tried to be decent."

Three Came Home doesn't try to tap tear ducts or beg reader sympathy. Mrs. Keith's story is full of suffering but singularly free of resentment. In a prefatory note that reads like a considered epilogue she rises above personal bitterness: "The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true of the rest of us. We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily."

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