The Kamehameha Regiment

The motorcycle came in at the makai gate at five minutes past five, slowly, because of the people on the lawn, and stopped at the foot of the steps with its engine ticking, and the man on it got off and stood beside it and took off his goggles, and the King, who was on the veranda, saw that he was very young.

He was a corporal of the Kamehameha Regiment, in the Realm’s khaki with the regiment’s badge on his collar, the feather helmet over the word Imua, and he had a dispatch case on a strap across his chest and dust on him from head to foot, so thick that the khaki had gone the colour of the road. He came up the steps and stopped at the top and saluted, and held the salute, and the King saw the boy’s hand was shaking a little at the brim of his cap and that he was trying to stop it.

“Your Majesty. Corporal Kahale, sir, the Molokaʻi company. From the colonel, sir. For Your Majesty’s hand.”

He took a single envelope out of the dispatch case and held it out. It was a plain envelope, the Realm’s army issue, buff, and on the front of it, in pencil, in a hand that had been written on a knee, it said H.M. the King. ʻIolani. By hand.

“Thank you, Corporal.” The King took it. “Have you eaten?”

The corporal looked at him as though the question were in a language he had been taught at school and forgotten.

“No, sir.”

“Kaʻai.”

“Sir.” Kaʻai was at the door already. Kaʻai was always at the door already.

“Take the Corporal to Mrs Higa. And find him some water for his face. He is to have whatever he wants and he is not to be in a hurry about it.” He looked at the boy. “The colonel will not mind if you are a quarter of an hour, Corporal. I will write and tell him I kept you.”

The corporal opened his mouth, and shut it, and saluted again, and went after Kaʻai into the hall, and the King stood on the veranda with the envelope.

---

He did not open it at once. He stood and looked at the writing on it, the pencil, the By hand.

The Kamehameha Regiment was the Realm’s. It had always been the Realm’s. It had been raised in 1898, in the year of the Treaty, under the seventh article, when the Kingdom gave its defence to the Realm and the Realm, as a courtesy, had offered the Kingdom a regiment of the Realm’s army to be recruited in the islands and to bear the name of the house. It was a line regiment of infantry, the sixtieth in the Realm’s list. Its colonel was appointed by the Realm’s War Office and its orders came from the Realm’s commanding general and the King of Hawaiʻi had no more authority over it than he had over the fleet. He had never given it an order. He had never been asked to. He took its salute once a year, on Kamehameha Day, at Schofield, from a little stand with an awning over it, and the colonel dined at ʻIolani afterwards, and that was all.

The colonel did not report to him. The colonel had no reason to write to him, today of all days, with the regiment on the beaches and the island waiting for a landing.

He opened it.

Sir.

I write to let Your Majesty know that the Regiment is in the field.

We were at Schofield at eight this morning when the aircraft came. The barracks were fired on from the air and there are men of the Regiment killed and others wounded. I will write to Your Majesty with their names when I have them all and am sure of them.

Since noon the Regiment has been in positions on the beaches of the north shore and the Waiʻanae coast, by order of the commanding general, against a landing. Every company is in the line. Every island is with us.

I thought Your Majesty would wish to know it. The men would wish it known.

Imua.

It was signed with the colonel’s name and rank, in ink this time, and under the signature he had written, in the pencil again, very small: Forgive the pencil. My pen was in my quarters.

---

He stood on the veranda with the note in his hand and remembered the review.

It had been in June, on Kamehameha Day, the eleventh, a hot clear morning at Schofield with the dust coming up off the parade in the trade wind. He had stood on the little stand under the awning in a white suit, with the Queen beside him in a hat she had complained about all the way up from Honolulu, and the colonel had brought the regiment past him in column of companies, eight companies, each behind its own guidon, and each guidon had the name of an island on it in Hawaiian. Hawaiʻi. Maui. Oʻahu. Kauaʻi. Molokaʻi. Lānaʻi. Niʻihau. Kahoʻolawe, which had a dozen people on it and could not possibly raise a company and had a company all the same, recruited, by long custom, from men of any island who asked to serve under its name; there was a waiting list for it. They had marched past him with the band playing and the guidons dipping as they came to the stand, and he had taken the salute, eight times, and said afterwards to the colonel at lunch that it had been very fine, which it had.

He tried now to remember their faces, and found that he could. Not one by one. But as a company passes, and you see it as a single thing, a moving wall of faces under the caps, all looking straight ahead at a point above your head as they have been taught, with the guidon over them. He saw the Oʻahu company go by in his mind, with its guidon dipping, and saw the faces in it: Hawaiian faces and Chinese faces and Portuguese faces and haole faces and Filipino faces, and Japanese faces, a great many Japanese faces, the sons of the men who had come out to cut cane. He had seen them in June and not thought anything of it at all. They had been his subjects in the uniform of the Realm, marching past him under the name of his house. That was all they had been.

One of them, he now knew, had been Minoru Takemoto.

He had not known it in June. He had not known that his secretary had a brother. He had not, he thought, known anything at all.

---

“Sir,” said Takemoto, behind him.

He had come up from the basement without the King hearing him, as Kealoha had in the morning. He had taken the headset off. He stood just inside the door to the veranda with his hands at his sides and his spectacles on, and his face had the stillness it had had at the head of the stair half an hour ago, when Nāone took his hand off his shoulder and went down.

“Kaʻai said there was a dispatch from the regiment, sir.”

“There is.” The King held it out. “Read it.”

Takemoto came out onto the veranda and took the note and read it. He read it twice, the way Nāone read things, testing each sentence. Then he gave it back.

“Every company is in the line,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then Minoru is on a beach, sir. Tonight. The Oʻahu company.” He looked out over the lawn, west, towards the red sky. “With a rifle. Facing the sea. In case the Emperor’s soldiers come in the dark. That is what he is doing now. He is lying in the sand at Haleʻiwa or Waiʻanae or somewhere, facing the water, with his rifle, waiting for them.”

The King said nothing.

“And my father’s name is on a list, sir,” said Takemoto. “Number two hundred and seventy-eight. In case he is one of them.” He said it very quietly, without any emphasis at all, the way he read out the numbers in a paper, in a column on the right. “The Kuhina Nui told me. At the top of the stair. He said that he did not think the King should be the one to tell me, and that he did not think I should hear it from a clerk at the court tonight, and that he had known my father for twenty years and so it might as well be him.” He paused. “He said that the King had read every name. He said you had read my father’s and gone on reading.”

“Yes.”

“He said you did not cross it out.”

“No,” said the King. “I did not.”

Takemoto turned and looked at him then. The King made himself look back. It was, he thought afterwards, one of the two or three hardest things he did that day, and he did a great many hard things that day; harder than the refusals, which had cost him nothing but a voice that would not shake. He made himself stand on his own veranda and look at Haruo Takemoto’s face, with the red light from the west on it, and not look away, and not say anything that would make it easier for either of them.

“Both of those things are true,” the King said at last. “Your brother on the beach and your father on the list. Tonight. At the same time. I cannot make one of them not true. I would not know how. I think if I tried I would make something worse.”

“I know, sir.”

“I am sorry, Haruo.”

“I know, sir,” said Takemoto again. He took off his spectacles and looked at them, and polished them on his handkerchief, slowly, both lenses, and put them back on. “I did not come up to ask you for anything. I want you to know that. I would not ask you. My father would not forgive me if I asked you, and I would not forgive myself.” He folded the handkerchief. “I came up to say it to you. Both of those things. Out loud. To somebody. Because I have been saying them to myself for half an hour at the switchboard and I found I had to say them to someone else or I could not go on saying ʻIolani Palace, and I thought,” he stopped, “I thought that you were the only person in the Kingdom who would understand that they were both true at the same time, and not try to tell me that one of them was not.”

---

The sun went down at twenty past five.

They watched it from the veranda, the two of them, not saying anything more. It went down into the smoke over the plain, and for a minute the smoke was lit from behind and every part of it showed, the whole great leaning column from its black base at the anchorage to its long brown smear out over the sea, edged with red, like a thing drawn in ink on a lit window; and then the sun was gone behind the Waiʻanae range and the smoke went dark all at once, and the fires at its foot showed through, a dull red glow along the whole of the western horizon, low, steady, that did not flicker at that distance but only breathed.

On the lawn below them the people had begun to move. Not to leave; a few were leaving, by the Richards Street gate, families picking up their blankets and their children and going home before the dark, in twos and threes, along the empty street. But most of them were staying. They were moving closer together. They were gathering in under the banyan and along the wall of the barracks and round the foot of the steps, the way people move closer to a fire, though there was no fire, and no light at all now in the grounds of ʻIolani except the last of the day in the sky overhead and the red glow in the west; and the King understood, watching them, that they did not mean to go home. They meant to stay the night where they were. On his lawn. With the gates open.

“Sir,” said Takemoto. “The judge sits at six.”

“I know.”

“The Kuhina Nui says the Realm’s officers have brought their cases across. He does not know which. He says they are sitting in the corridor of the court with their files on their knees, in a row, like men waiting to see a dentist.” He paused. “He says there are a great many files.”

“Yes,” said the King.

“I will go back to the switchboard, sir.”

“Haruo.”

“Sir.”

The King did not know what he had meant to say. He found that he had nothing to say at all; that there was nothing in the whole of Mr Pell’s education, or his father’s, or the old woman’s in the room at the back of the barracks, that was any use at all on a veranda at twenty past five on the seventh of December, with the red light going out of the west and a young man’s father on page nineteen.

“Go and have something to eat first,” he said. “Mrs Higa has fed the Corporal. She can feed you.”

Takemoto looked at him for a moment, and then something happened to his face that the King had never seen happen to it, and was gone, and he bowed, from the waist, the way his father bowed, the old way, and stayed down longer than usual; and then he straightened up, and went in.

The King stood on the veranda alone, with the colonel’s note in his hand, in the pencil that had been written on a knee. Above him, on the roof, in the last of the light, the flag still stood out in the wind, the eight stripes and the Union, black now against the darkening sky, and he could just make it out. In forty minutes the Guard would bring it down.