Internment

Adjustment to the novel life one is condemned to lead behind barbed wire begins the moment one has been assigned one's quarters. This adjustment is at first purely physical; but long before one has mastered the routine of living in such a place, there are naturally attempts at adjusting oneself to it also mentally. The obvious and most general first adjustment comes by way of resentment, disguised in most cases by a forced jocularity, which tries to laugh off the whole thing. "Are we downhearted?-NO", used to be the slogan for this sort of attitude during World War 1. In my own case this kind of light-heartedness came naturally as a reaction against the period of uncertainty preceding it: for we had lived for months in a daily atmosphere of anxiety, as to whether our place (an S.V.D. seminary in Manila) would be commandeered by the Japanese army or not, and where we could go in such a case. The wearying part of this had been that one day it seemed quite certain that the Japanese would never take this place, whilst the arrival of another military party of inspections the next day made it certain that they would. When, therefore, on July 8th, 1944, the thunderbolt struck, cancelling our previous release on parole, I for one, felt a great relief that all uncertainty and futile conjectures were over and that now one found onself actually interned, with no more anxieties as to what course to take and what decisions to make. There was nothing now to do, but to wait and "suffer fools gladly

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