Jerusalem is recalled as part of the Australian soldiers’ wartime experience in the Middle East, and as a setting where their attitudes were unsettled by encounters with people they had previously treated as targets of ethnic hostility. The city enters the novel not through a present-day visit but through memories shared later among prisoners of war in Java.

Jerusalem in the Soldiers’ Recollections

While imprisoned in the Javanese highlands, the Australian soldiers pass time by recounting episodes from their service in the Middle East. Their memories include Palestine and Jerusalem, where they encountered Arab working women after having shouted abuse at Arabs from military trucks. The recollection places the encounter within a wider account of soldiers moving through the region and remembering people they met along the way.

Narrative Significance

The passage sets the men’s earlier conduct against the human encounters that followed it. Jerusalem marks one point in that shift: the soldiers’ recollections do not erase their hostility, but place it beside an experience that complicates their simple division of people into hostile groups. Because the episode is told retrospectively among prisoners, the city is also part of a remembered past they revisit together while captivity narrows their present.