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351.

Will check my luggage at airport & go to the Israeli Embassy tram - & after midnight - wait at airport for my plane. Who wants to sleep away the day in Rome?

Had lunch at the Strand at 1' with Mary Caudle. Had met thru Fritz Shoemacher who introduced me to Cobnell, the British painter & sculptor. He is doing several commissions here & stopping with U Hla Shain to whom I sent regards. 

Came home by 2.30, & worked on the painting of U Nu till past 5 o'clock. Tonight, dinner at the Barnes'. They are a very nice couple & I have grown fond of them.

Reading again, 'Burma Under the Japanes, I like what U nu says of Hla Mauug." He is the kind of a man who could see a yard if you sowed him an inch."  He also gives a description of a japanese, Bo Saing-gyo - head of the Kempetai in Toungoo.

"Once he suspected a man of theft.  He had him strung up to a beam with his



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U Nu

hands tied behind him & broke his collar-bone.  Next day the real thief was caught, and all he said to the man with the broken collar-bone was "Get Out."  To Saing-gyo that seemed just friendly fun.  They are wily people, these Japs.  When necessary, you might have thought that Saing-gyo's face had been smeared with honey.

He writes at all times in a homey-kind of way - most sympathetic - saying of an invitation to join the Independence Committee.  "I was very reluctant because framing rules & so on makes my head ache; it does not interest me & I don't understand it."  About some politicians "some were so muddled that they would not know whether they were going north or south."

Telling his wife of the Japanese surrender he writes, "I whispered to her, Mia Mya Yi, the Japanese have surrendered, the war is over'. She was thrilled with delight.  But it was not because the war was over; it was because this was the first time I had ever told her a political secret."

Of Bo Let Ya - military training is