I was preoccupied with other things. One night I walked out of our quarters with a former Shanghai police officer called Wyld who had somehow ended up in Singapore in time to be captured. We were going to meet a Portuguese (and therefore neutral) civilian called Mendoza, to whom we had been recommended by Lim, a Chinese boy who sold us eggs. We walked very carefully in the dark through the gardens and plantations of a former European residential area.
Mendoza lived in a fine bungalow on the main road to the hill we were transforming. After some guarded small talk, Wyld put a gold ring carefully on the table in front of him and made our proposal. We wanted to be put in touch with the local Chinese sympathetic to the Kuomintang and to be smuggled to China, or at least the Burma Road, which ran along the top of Siam and Burma into China.
This was a crazy venture, much more dangerous than I could have imagined at the time. But Wyld was a superb linguist, and Chinese was one of his gifts. We thought that this would get us through.
It gradually dawned on us that the boundary keeping us in was as much psychological as it was physical; that we could walk for miles in the pineapple plantations around Kranji without seeing a single Japanese, that we could sell stolen Japanese equipment to the local Chinese traders, but there was nowhere to go to: north of us was the long peninsula, separated from Burma and therefore from India by high mountains choked in forest; south or west were the occupied Dutch colonies of Java and Sumatra; east, nothing but the sea.
Behind our billet was a little hill. One large POW climbed it every evening, just before the daylight failed, in as stately a manner as he could. He hooded his eyes with his hand like a pantomime scout, gazed around the whole horizon with great solemnity and called out in a remarkably loud voice, ‘I see no fucking ship.’
If the state of Limbo, which some religions recognize, is characterized by this sort of helpless mockery and despair, and populated by ghosts suspended between human life and hell, I think I will recognize it when I see it.
In June we finished our work of levelling and earthmoving, and were sent back to Changi. We never heard from Mendoza, who now of course had no way of contacting us. I returned to a dwindling camp. In our absence the process of slow strangulation had tightened its pressure. They were now taking huge drafts of men away, thousands at a gulp. Twenty-five covered goods wagons packed with POWs left from Singapore Station; three thousand Australians were sent away by ship; a thousand taken to Japan. Every month more were taken away.
We lived in a world of half-verified information, smuggled news and above all, of rumour. The stories that circulated around the camp added to our pervasive anxiety. Always you wanted to believe that the worst could not be possible.
The rumour coming back now was that these huge work-details were wanted for a grandiose scheme. The Japanese were building a railway. Some inhuman visionary on the Imperial staff in Tokyo had dreamed up a way of avoiding the Allied destroyers and submarines in the waters around Malaya. The Japanese needed, we could guess, a way of getting supplies from Japan to Burma and on to India, which they were surely planning to invade. So they decided to build a railway across the spiky mountain chain between Burma and Thailand, a route so terrible that our British colonial engineers, as I knew from my reading, had rejected it as too brutally hard. I could not believe it; nor could I believe that I had become a prisoner only to be sent to work on a road for the machines that had given me such intense pleasure when I was free.
The final emasculation of the army took place in the late summer. First we were beheaded. Lieutenant-General Percival and the Governor of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, and all officers above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, were removed in a single transport; in all, four hundred top brass disappeared, sent to some mysterious destination.
There were now about 18,000 of us left. A new Japanese commander had been appointed. General Fukuye Shimpei, and he made his mark by issuing an order that every remaining POW had to sign a ‘non-escape form’. Only four prisoners signed. To show us that he meant to be taken seriously, Fukuye shot four prisoners on the beach near Changi. Allegedly, they had tried to escape. Of course we heard about all the cruel details; Fukuye intended that we should. He had ordered Colonel Holmes, our most senior remaining officer, to appear on the beach in the late morning of 2nd September with six of his colleagues. The four POWs were tied to posts in the sand; a firing squad of members of the Indian National Army, the renegade nationalist force supported by the Japanese, were led out in a calculated piece of political theatre. British soldiers were to be shot by their former subjects. The first shots failed to kill them; slow volleys finished them off as they lay on the bloody sand.
Less than an hour later, while this story was flashing around the camp, the Japanese ordered every single prisoner to move to Selarang Barracks, near Changi. The order added that anyone not there by 18.00 hours would join our comrades on the beach. In the blazing afternoon we walked two miles, carrying our sick, our heavy cooking equipment and our supplies, to this modem barracks built for a single battalion of Gordon Highlanders.
The barracks consisted of seven three-storey blocks around three sides of a parade ground. There were soon over 16,000 of us crammed into a space designed for 800; and 2000 seriously sick men were still in the big Roberts Hospital. Our discipline and organization meant that every unit was given a place somewhere. Every inch of space was occupied. Bodies covered the entire parade ground; sat hip to hip on the flat roofs, crowded on to balconies, stairwells and barrack-room floors. The latrines filled up. We dug through the tarmac of the parade ground to make more, but nothing could quench the overpowering smell of human excrement piling up, the congestion of sweat and discomfort. Fragmentary pieces of food were passed around. There were no proper cooking facilities, so we began to improvise them; there was one water tap for the population of a town.
On the second night, which was also the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the Australians organized a concert. Lit by oil-lamps, their ‘choir’ stood at one side of the parade ground and sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’, the lonely anthem of isolated men. Every voice in the square took up the refirain, a chorus of 16,000 sending the wistful, defiant air out past the barrack blocks into the darkness. ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ followed, and the recital finished with a crashing version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. What would Elgar have made of these thousands of voices rolling out to the beat of his surging march, as Japanese guards paced around the edge of the light with bayonets fixed?
The following day, our situation was clearly intolerable. Our medical officers pointed out the dangers; worse still, the Japanese administration announced that they intended to move all the patients from Roberts Hospital to join us. They were prepared to let loose epidemics among this mass of men and condemn the sick to death. Colonel Holmes issued an order instructing us to sign the piece of paper. We lined up in front of tables and did it. It read: ‘I, the undersigned, solemnly swear on my honour that I will not, under any circumstances, attempt escape.’