On 21st September we found out what they intended for us.
Eariy in the morning four unshaven and untidy Japanese soldiers filed into the officers’ hut. I recall that one of them was fat. One of the others said they were here to remove five officers to ‘another camp’. There were nine officers living in our hut, and it so happened that seven of us were there when they came. This was what we had been waiting for; the end was coming with a group of squalid, indifferent camp guards. We did not need to speak among ourselves to feel intensely of the same mind about what was happening. I sat down. The fat Japanese read out the names of those he wanted: Major Smith, Major Slater, Major Knight, Lieutenant Mackay and Lieutenant Lomax.
As he spoke, a truck drew up outside. In the background. Captain Hawley and Lieutenant Armitage sat still. They said nothing for there was nothing that they could say or do. The Japanese gave us instructions to pack up at once and to get into the truck waiting outside. Beyond the reference to another camp we hadn’t a clue where we were going.
The next few minutes were quiet panic. I dismantled my battered mosquito net and my old canvas camp bed and rolled them up. Everything else went into my kitbag, with some clothing and smaller things in a big shoulder pack and a haversack. The fragments of furniture made and collected over such a long period were discarded in the space of a moment; the rickety table, the bamboo stool, the clothes line and hooks and shelves: they had all become useless. The only thing of interest now was survival.
While bustling about I had to do some very quick thinking, which is not always good thinking. Since we were now in very great danger the prospects for us were poor, if the initiative was left in the hands of the Japanese. I knew that there was a good chance of a firing squad or hanging party at the end of the road they would bring us down. I considered – if you can call such an impulsive decision considered – that if we were going to make a break for it and head northwards, up country towards the Burma Road, then we would be better off with a map than without one. I decided to carry it with me, wherever we were going. It was my talisman of certainty; it gave a sense of direction to the blind steps we were now taking.
I asked permission to use the latrine and walked back to the attap and bamboo shelter around the hole in the ground. In my shirt pocket I had my ‘diary’, notes on books and incidents since the fall of Singapore written in minute script on small pieces of toilet paper, and I thought about throwing it down the latrine; but it seemed a pity to lose it, and it was so harmless. I could not think straight. After peeing for the sake of appearances, I reached into the hollow bamboo in the back wall where I kept the map. It came out without difficulty, and with it a black scorpion, very irritated, darting and wriggling. I shook it to the ground from the folded edges of the paper and it lunged at nothing with its venomous tail. The black ones were more dangerous, I’d been told. I have often wondered what would have happened to me if I had been stung by that insect.
No one saw me retrieve the map, which I tucked into my shirt. When I returned to the hut I slipped it into a Royal Signals instrument mechanic’s leather bag in which I kept the smaller items of my kit. The scruffy guards kept a little way off. Their lack of interest in us screwed the tension up even further. It was as though we were being called by some large and slovenly organization for a job interview.
The five of us boarded the truck and sat on our untidy heaps of baggage. Japanese guards came and sat very close to us; they made us understand that any attempt at escape would have fatal consequences. The truck banged into gear and pulled off.
POWs moaned and groaned about everything, all day and every day; probably the whole British Army complained endlessly. It was a way of getting through the boredom of warfare and the worse tedium of captivity. Our men were nevertheless very much aware that their officers did the best they could, and that officers often had to take real risks on their behalf in standing up to the Japanese camp administration, and of course they knew about the discovery of the radio. When something went wrong, and they knew that something had now obviously gone very wrong, the ‘other ranks’ closed firmly behind us and gave us unshakable support. All the prisoners in the vicinity of our hut waved us ofif. Some saluted raggedly; some saluted us magnificently. Most of them never saw us again.
We were driven quickly out past the guardroom, the hard wooden seats of the lorry jolting us around, and then to the right, along the main Kanburi road. Driving panic and tension seized me; you feel as you approach extreme danger a throbbing in the head and a heaviness in the limbs, the impulse to flight being held down by a weight you can’t shift. We barely spoke to each other; we barely had time. After a mile we were driven through the entrance to the main camp at Kanburi, where they had taken Thew and Smith. This main camp held several hundred men and the Japanese military here were in charge of all the POW camps on the lower stretch of the railway.
The truck pulled up just inside the main camp entrance, near the guardroom. We were ordered down and our kit was dumped on the ground. They told us to sort it out, and we gathered our pitifully shabby belongings and took responsibility for every piece of baggage. After a long delay some Korean guards searched our kit, but there was now little left which would be of interest to even the most diligent searcher – except for one thing. The Korean who rummaged through my kit failed to find it.
The guards conducted the five of us to the main guardroom where we were brusquely ordered to stand to attention, a few feet in front of the building and well away from any shade or protection from the sun. The guardroom was a flimsy three-sided wood and thatch structure, open in the front, with a table across the gap. A guard stood at attention on the side nearest the camp entrance; a few more were seated behind the table. Among them was a large, fat and rather elegantly-dressed white-haired man, who now proceeded to address us in fluent American English. He ordered us forward. His attitude was aggressive, sneering and hostile as he checked our identities, making contemptuous references to Western duplicity and cowardice throughout the short procedure.
He ordered us back into the sun. There we stood beside a long ditch, neatly spaced like five telegraph poles along a road. The time was ten o’clock in the morning.
The morning and afternoon dragged on, every minute almost an hour. When you are forced to stand stiffly to attention in a blazing hot sun you have nothing to do but think; yet thought is a process that should be directed by the will, and under extreme stress thoughts spin away on their own, racing faster and faster like a machine out of control, one that has lost the touch of a human hand.
There was nothing we could do about it now: we stood there, knowing it was coming. The wretched little guardroom was no bigger than a domestic living room, and the few guards sprawling inside it or on guard behind us controlled the lives of several hundred men. So few to hold so many.
We stood for twelve hours with our backs to that hut. The nerves and flesh of the back become terribly sensitive and vulnerable when turned to an enemy. At any moment I expected to feel a rifle-butt on my spine, a bayonet thrust between my shoulder-blades. All we heard was their talk, their occasional rough laughter.