Shells began to fall on Fort Kalang, the headquarters of the Malayan Command on the outskirts of Singapore, on the evening of Tuesday, February 10. Oil fires were blazing in the north of the island. The smoke from them lay like a black pall over Singapore. Troops were moving to take up new positions. The rumble of artillery fire, punctuated by machine-gun fire, went on intermittently.
For the past three days it had been drawing closer. Twice that morning big formations of Japanese bombers had been over, but there had been no sign of any British ╒plane all day.
The city was buzzing with the wildest rumours-that the Japanese had been pushed back into the sea, that their advance troops had reached the Botanical Gardens, only three miles up the road, that Japanese parachutists had tried to seize Singapore broadcasting station in Thompson Road, that American troops had landed at Penang. Nor was it possible to secure at military headquarters an accurate picture of what was happening.
During the morning our Command was in the process of moving back on Fort Kalang from the advanced positions in the north of the island. No reports were coming in from the field because the officers who were directing operations had no time to send them. The headquarters of the Australian military forces on the Bukit Timah road had had another terrific bombing.
GETTING AWAY
One thing alone seemed to stand out clearly. The Japanese were advancing on Singapore city, and advancing pretty quickly at that. The time seemed to have come to make a move.
Down at Clifford╒s Pier there was great confusion. The authorities were trying to evacuate the few remaining women and children. The latter had been told to be on the pier at three o╒clock, but there appeared to be nobody in charge of the evacuation. Two air raids, one immediately after the other, made confusion worse confounded. The bombs fell elsewhere, but the explosions of the anti-aircraft guns along the waterfront made many people think that the bombs were falling right on top of them. Then the order came through that the passengers were not to embark there at all, but from another wharf.
Your correspondent, taking with him nothing but a woollen sweater, three tins of tobacco, a water bottle, and a handbook of the Netherlands East Indies, engaged a small sampan. An amazing sense of relief flooded one╒s whole being as soon as one found oneself no longer upon land but on water. A small freighter was in the roads with steam up. Half an hour later it sailed.
The sea was of a deep Mediterranean blue. The evening sun threw up into sharp relief the buildings along the waterfront ╤ the Union Building, the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank, the post office, the cupola of the Supreme Court, the spire of the Cathedral, the thirteen-storey Cathay Building, Singapore╒s only skyscraper.
Black smoke hung fatefully over the whole island. There had been enough oil on the island to fill Japan╒s war-time requirements for three months. Most of it was now ablaze. In one place it rose upwards above the layer of black smoke in a great white column like the eruption of a volcano.
The sky immediately overhead was of a sunny blue, as if the heavens were supremely indifferent to the human tragedy that was being enacted on the expanse of mangrove swamp that had become in a little over a hundred years one of the great cities and ports of the world.
THROUGH THE MINEFIELDS
Darkness fell, and the little ship began to pick its way slowly and carefully through the minefields. The following morning we passed close to the shore of a small tropical island. It was such an island as one imagined existed only in the pages of sentimental novels. From its stretch of white sand, on which the surf was breaking, palms and ferns and coconut trees sprang, and farther back was the dense, variegated foliage of a tropical jungle.
But even now Singapore would not allow itself to be forgotten, even though it was some 120 miles away. The great volume of white smoke was still visible. The volcano was still erupting. Yet Singapore was dying. It was a funeral pyre in keeping with the tremendous significance of what has happened.
