The Art of Not Dying

THe BOAT (101 pp.)--Walfer Gibson --Houghfon Mifflin ($2.50).

The SURVIVORS (246 pp.)--Ronald McKie--Bobbs-Merrill ($3).

After the decisive battles come the mop-ups; after the sagas of armies and divisions come the stories of death in lonely corners. The Survivors, by Ronald McKie, and The Boat, by Walter Gibson, have a minor historical importance in that they fill out the sorry tale of the Japanese conquest of the Netherlands East Indies in 1942; but the strength of both books lies in their accounts of how a few score men and women confronted death.

The survivors of Author McKie's title are ten men who went down with the Australian light cruiser Perth in Sunda Strait at 12:25 a.m. on March 1, 1942 and came up again to tell the tale. They told it after the war to Author McKie, an Australian newsman, who writes in a brisk style that makes for good reading, if for something less than the national epic he frankly says he intended.

Elegance on a Plank. Perhaps the most intrepid of the Perth survivors was Engineer Lieut. Frank Gillan. When the second torpedo hit and Perth keeled over, he was trapped far below decks. Only perfect presence of mind and the lucky chance that his Mae West was only half-inflated saved him. As the water rose in the sinking hull. Gillan calmly let himself float upward with it through the pitch-dark passages of the ship, the air in his life jacket buoying him gently, but not so much as to force him against the overhead, where he could not maneuver. After a few awful minutes, he drifted out of the Perth like a ghost from the tomb.

All night Lieut. Gillan and several hundred of his shipmates went swirling down Sunda Strait toward the Indian Ocean through waters slick with oil and glaring in the searchlights of the triumphant Japs. In the morning a raft full of wounded and exhausted sailors saw the sight of their lives--Gillan sitting elegantly on a large plank, dressed in nothing but his Mae West and an officer's pith helmet. As he swept by. the lieutenant politely tipped his topi and remarked in clipped tones, "Good morning, gentlemen."

Humor was much, but what was the most help to the men of the Perth was the sense of tradition and group solidarity. The Survivors is thick with recollections of men in shark-infested waters who supported men they had never known, or gave their places on rafts to the wounded, or kept their mates awake and alive by jabbing planks in their faces. Morale of this sort held out for several days, until all the men McKie writes about had managed to get ashore on Java.

Murder in the Bow. In The Boat, it was every man for himself in one of the less altruistic episodes in the annals of the sea. Author Gibson's gory little memoir, a classic of its kind, begins when the Dutch steamer Rooseboom, carrying more than 500 evacuees from Malaya, was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean, halfway to Ceylon. Gibson was one of 135 survivors who swam to the only lifeboat left afloat, one designed to hold 28 (80 got aboard). Like many of the others, Gibson was wounded: his collarbone was fractured and a shell fragment had lodged in his leg. On the first day, the captain took stock of their supplies: a case of bully beef (48 twelve-ounce cans), two seven-pound cans of fried spiced rice, 48 cans of condensed milk, about six quarts of fresh water.

The first death came the first day. A young soldier, doing his stint in the water to "lessen the rigors of overcrowding," was stung by a sea creature and died in agony. That night, the first man went insane. The next day, 20 men built a raft of flotsam to tow behind the boat. All 20 climbed aboard. The raft sank slowly until they were half under water. In three days' time, all were dead.

Soon people on the boat began to dream "fierce vivid dreams of food and friendly gatherings." In many, the dreams became hallucinations. A soldier drank from the sea. "It's fresh!" he cried. Many more struggled to the side, instantly convinced that a miracle had happened. Some even shared the hallucination. "He's right," they said, "it is fresh!" Those who drank too much went into a coma from which they emerged "crazed and suicidal."

One night there was an unusual amount of screaming and shouting. In the morning 20 people were missing. Dully the survivors realized that five soldiers in the bow seats had formed a murder gang.

Many killed themselves. Of these, Gibson reports a "strange feature": "As people decided to jump overboard, they seemed to resent the fact that others were being left with a chance of safety. They would try to seize the rations and fling them overboard [or] pull the bung which would let in the water."

One of the strongest personalities aboard the death ship was a Mrs. Nunn, the widow of a British colonial officer who went down with the Rooseboom. She became a sort of spiritual mother for the derelicts. A few days before she died, she took a Bible that someone had salvaged and read a religious service to all her companions. Not long after that, Gibson organized a counterattack against the murder gang and threw them overboard.

Days went by in a daze of weakness. All at once, Gibson realized that there were only seven people left alive--himself, another white man, four Javanese and a Chinese girl named Doris Lim, who had been a British secret agent. The Javanese attacked the other white man and began to eat him while he was still alive. The oldest Javanese died the same night.

The next night the boat drifted to land, the island of Sipora, off Sumatra. One of the Javanese was killed in the surf, but the four survivors of about 30 days in the open sea were picked up by some Malays and nursed back to health. Later, when the Japs came. Gibson was sent to prison camp. Doris Lim, it turned out, had survived the sea only to meet death before a Japanese firing squad.

Why did Gibson live when every other white man died? Gibson gives a number of reasons. After 13 years in tropical service, he was used to the sun and a hard outdoor life. Because of his broken collarbone he was spared the exhausting sessions in the water during the early days of the trip. More important still: "I early adopted a mood of passivity." Most important of all: "I was determined not to die . . . The body can always summon the last nicker of energy. But it has to be dictated by a refusal to accept death, a determination not to die, a knowledge that one was not meant to end like this."

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