Others were not so well situated. One evening in April, I noticed some filthy, depressed and tired British soldiers collapsed against their packs outside the main gate of the camp, on the road to the north. As I walked out, I realized that there were hundreds of them. They lay around with the unmoving stillness of men who are already in a bad way, and know that there is worse to come. One of the men told me that they had just walked thirty miles from Ban Pong with no food and very little water, driven by aggressive Korean guards, and that they were supposed to keep walking up country. None of them knew how far, or what awaited them when they got there.
This ragged army of neglected soldiers scattered around the grass by the side of the road was a stark reminder of the Japanese Army’s capacity for that carelessness which is really an indifference to, a crime against, humanity. These exhausted men formed the advance guard of ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces, sent from Singapore to Ban Pong in special trains. The trains from there to the higher reaches of the Burma-Siam line, which was now nearing completion, were filled night and day with new rails and equipment, so these men – ‘on loan’, one of them explained, from the Japanese Malayan Administration – were expected to hump themselves and their equipment to their work stations in the hills.
For the next two months, columns of bedraggled men passed the front of the workshops at Kanburi. We did what we could, sharing food and water with them, but they were already lost. Through some crazy oversight, they were never transferred to the Japanese Siamese Administration which, accordingly, did not feel obliged to look after them. Those responsible for their feeding and care sat in offices in Singapore, a thousand miles away.
I have tried not to anticipate, to use hindsight too much in my telling of this story so far, but the fate of these already half-addled men deserves recording here. ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces had the highest casualty rates of all the POW drafts on the railway. They were to give the work a final boost, to complete the line earlier than planned – a kind of expendable shock force. Some of them would walk two hundred miles up into the hills; one in three of them would die, and many of the rest be crippled for the rest of their lives by illness or injury.
We speculated even then that there may have been some cruel method in this madness. Admiral Yamamoto, the strategist of the attack on Pearl Harbor and probably the greatest naval commander in the history of Japan, was shot down over Bougainville Island in the Solomons on 18th April, just before ‘F’ and *H’ Forces were sent out to walk to the end of the railway. Was what happened to them some demented form of mass punishment? Did the death of their leader provoke in the Japanese a desire for some further vast humiliation of their prisoners? These were the kinds of questions with which we tormented ourselves, and to which I still have no answers.
The men passing the camp would spend the night in the open, with no protection from the mosquitos that plagued us after dark. When they walked on, they left bits of kit behind them to lighten their loads. How much would they have left, I wondered, by the end?
At about the same time the first of the civilian labourers arrived. At first there were thin columns of Asians, Chinese, Indians, Malays, Indonesians, straggling along the main road from Ban Pong towards Kanburi. Later on there was a flood, a tide of unhappy men, and sometimes even women and children, streaming towards the upper reaches of the Kwae Noi and the most distant camps on the railway route. like the POWs, they had been summoned to accelerate the completion of the railway. Unlike the POWs, however, the labourers had no organization. They were individuals, or families, with no structure or chain of command.
It was possible even then, with my small knowledge of the scale of events overtaking all of us, to guess that these pathetic labourers would die in enormous numbers and be the biggest victims of the railway.
Yet even here, in a prison camp close to men responsible for organized cruelty on this huge scale, and capable of unthinking, spontaneous cruelty to individuals, I was still able to take pleasure in the machines I loved and to which I was now so unwillingly close. We retain more innocence than people imagine, even when death is yards away. One day, soon after the departure of ‘F’ and ‘H’ Forces, from the direction of the new Burma line, a column of smoke and steam rose up. There had not been a locomotive on these new tracks before, and I was immediately aroused. The train, which was a small one of three or four stores wagons, came right into the camp. It was propelled by one of the most amazing steam engines I had ever seen. It was a beautifully preserved, tum-of-the-century machine built by Krauss of Munich, its origin described on a magnificent brass plate. I remember the joy of its sudden appearance on that dusty and degraded siding under the palm trees. Its cowcatcher stood out proudly beneath its high waisted chimney; its gleaming black boiler and brass trim brought with it ghosts of journeys between spa towns, perfumed goodbyes and lives gambled away.
My time as an involuntary professional railway man came to an abrupt end in August 1943.
Whether we were betrayed, or the Japanese just got lucky, I will never know; I have spent many nights awake, in the past half century, piecing it all together, trying to trace the leak. Perhaps someone boasted in the hearing of a guard about an Allied victory; perhaps some fool was keeping a diary of the news passed to him by the drivers who were our couriers. It mattered desperately, once upon a time, to know who had betrayed us, for in our eyes he was as much a traitor as if he had informed on us knowingly. After the war, the survivors would have gone after him with deadly intent – if we could have been sure. But all we had was the endless, painful uncertainty, rubbing like sandpaper on tender skin.
On 29th August 1943, instead of dismissing us from the normal early morning roll call, the Japanese guards kept every POW standing at attention in the assembly area. It was still half dark, quite chill in the strengthening sun. A group of them walked back into the huts; the rest, unusually alert and aggressive, surrounded us with fixed bayonets. We could hear them moving around inside the huts, at first with no great energy or purpose; then something happened to set them off. A crescendo of pulling, clattering and dragging began.
An hour passed. The sun was now high and hot, but we were forbidden to move. Over a hundred of us stood rigidly in our vests and scraps of uniform. The search went on and on, belongings piling up behind us as they threw and carried things outside the hut. I couldn’t see very much, but soon there was a small haystack of objects. And a lot of activity seemed to be centred near Thew’s comer of the long hut.
After about three hours Thew was called, a Japanese guard shouting his name. He went into the hut. We were dismissed, and turned to see piles of motorcar batteries, dynamos, boxes made of wood and tin, and an incredible variety of tools – all of them Japanese, and the remnant of what we had already sold to the local Siamese and Chinese villagers through the camp fence. A lorry drove up, and the whole heap of contraband was taken away. Thew was allowed to return to us; his shock was dreadful to behold. The guards had found the radio.
One of the men had been standing so that he could see inside our hut. The search party had seemed to take the whole business fairly casually, at first. They walked down the entire length of the dark space, picking up only a few odd articles. One Japanese, passing Thew’s bed, saw something in the folds of a dark blanket. It probably looked like a tiny triangle of white paper, as small as a postage stamp in that weak morning light, but it must have stood out against the neatly-folded wool of Thew’s bedding like a coy invitation to mischief: a little paper something out of place.