The Japanese man lectured us, his sneering voice triumphant over our heads. He told us that Thew and Smith had been through his hands a little while before, that it had been necessary to give them a certain amount of ‘treatment’; that they had told the story of the manufacture of the wireless sets and the reception and distribution of the news, that the Japanese knew the extent of our involvement and that we would shortly be questioned. He said that we might get off lightly if we made suitable full confessions, but that if we were difficult or obstructive in anyway there would have to be, regrettably, a repetition of the previous night’s ‘incident’. Then the interpreter looked at us in a strange half-respectful way and said with considerable dignity: ‘You are very brave men; yes, indeed, you are very brave men.’
He moved away and we collapsed again. The sun was now high and we had no protection. Slater told me afterwards that he felt himself naked in the burning sunlight, unable to move, and felt someone trying to cover him with a scrap of shirt and some shorts. I remember scraping them up somehow with my broken arms and pushing them towards his body: his nakedness looked so vulnerable. He didn’t betray any interest at the time and appeared to be in a kind of coma. We lay around in that state until late afternoon, when the guard commander, suddenly inspired by the thought that we had had enough rest, shouted at us to get up. He became quite violent, his voice screaming at us, full of petty vanity and anger, so we tried to respond. Slater and I managed to rise but the others continued to lie there mutely. The guard commander ignored us again after that. We remained outside and at the side of his hut throughout the afternoon, evening and night of 22nd September.
Early the following morning the main POW workforce in the camp gathered into squads and prepared to march out on to the railway and towards the bridge they were building over the river.
Every squad which marched out of any camp was required by the Japanese to salute and to give an ‘eyes right’ or ‘eyes left’ to the guardroom as it passed. It was always a matter of pride with every POW that this should be done in as slovenly a manner as possible, often with an outbreak of coughing or sneezing as a detachment neared the guards.
That morning, the leading squad looked just as a POW detail usually did, a group of half-starved and angry men wearing the weirdest of garments; some wore ragged shorts, some what we called G-strings; some were in dirty shirts, or army-issue string vests, and most of them had old hats or home-made headgear against the vertical sun. They shuffled along preparing to express the usual defiance. This time, however, the man in charge of the squad called out ‘Eyes Right!’ as his men approached the five of us, before they even reached the guardroom. The shuffling bunch of malcontents disappeared; every man marched past stiff and erect; each man gave his ‘eyes right’ with faultless precision. Sandhurst cadets could not have done any better. Each successive squad took the hint. Can any group of officers anywhere ever have had such a tribute?
Later that morning we saw what appeared to be a small funeral procession approaching. It stopped at the guardroom. Up close it showed itself to consist of a POW with a red cross on his sleeve, two teams of stretcher bearers and a Japanese guard. This guard spoke to the commander, the stretcher parties lifted up the two bodies which looked worst, while the rest of us were told to follow on foot. The POW with the red cross introduced himself as a Dutch doctor from the Netherlands forces in Java. He took us to the camp hospital and told us that his instructions were to repair us.
The hospital was a small building with an earthen floor, a central passageway flanked by low bamboo platforms down each side of the hut. The quiet medical orderlies helped us up on to one of the platforms and laid us out like sardines. The remains of our clothing was stripped off and they washed us gently from head to toe with warm water. They gave us freshly-made lime juice to drink, and we had to be prevented from slaking ourselves to the point of nausea. Nothing has ever tasted so refreshing.
When most of the dirt and blood had been removed it was possible for the doctor to assess the damage. For my part, both my forearms were broken and several of my ribs were cracked. One hip was clearly damaged. There did not seem to be any skin on my back. What astonished even the doctor was that there was not a single patch of white skin visible between my shoulders and my knees, down both sides of my chest, hips and legs. Most of the skin was in place, but it had turned a uniform blue-black, swollen and puffy, like velvet in texture. I was in such pain I could not begin to locate its source. The four others were in as bad a condition; everyone had broken ribs; but by some chance I was the only one with fractured limbs.
The medical staff soon had us bandaged up, while the doctor himself set the broken bones in my arms and put them in splints. There was no anaesthetic, but the additional pain hardly seemed noticeable. It struck me that this was the second time my bones had been reset without the muffling of drugs. That scoutmaster in Edinburgh had not known the half of it.
We tried to settle down and sleep for the remainder of the day, sipping lime juice whenever we wished, but we were half-paralysed with pain. The astringent fruit juice was almost the only medicine that the doctor had in his little hospital. Somebody meanwhile must have gathered up our scattered kit from around the guardroom and brought it over to us. My spectacles and watch were still intact.
The Japanese, we learned, had ordered that under no circumstances was anyone to talk to us except the hospital staff and that even this contact was to be confined to discussion of our wounds. So of course we spent hours talking to that wonderful doctor. We heard how Smith and Thew had been treated, and how they had now vanished. The beating they gave us was premeditated carefully: the Japanese had given instructions that no-one in the camp was to leave his hut that evening, and that anyone doing so would be shot on sight. All that night armed guards had patrolled the camp boundaries and the lanes between the huts.
When the beating started, the doctor had begun to prepare for us. He sat up all night listening in order to gauge what our condition would be if and when we were handed over to him. He had counted the blows of the pick-helves, and counted nine hundred strokes by the time the beating ended just before dawn.
I woke up in the afternoon to be told that there was again a little group of officers standing outside the guardroom and that they had come from the Sakamoto Butai. From their descriptions it was obvious that it was the turn of Hawley, Armitage, Gilchrist and an officer called Gregg, who I did not know well. They stood there all day, the medical orderlies coming back with unchanging reports of their stiff, flyblown discomfort in the sun. Once again, at about ten o’clock at night the squad of thugs went into action.
We could see nothing, but we heard a lot. We listened to the dull sounds of wood on flesh, to the tramping of heavy feet on the ground, to the roars and screams of anguish, and to the shouts of the drunken NCOs. It went on and on; we lay awake for hours.
Early the next morning the doctor was called out by a guard. He was gone for a while, and when he returned he said that two of the men were in trouble and that he would do what he could for them. His voice was tense, and even in our pain we could see he was holding something back. We kept expecting our four friends to be brought into the hut, but no-one arrived.