There was nothing our Dutch medical man could do for Hawley and Armitage. He saw a squad of Japanese soldiers carry away the broken and lifeless bodies and drop them down a deep latrine in the Japanese section of the camp.
Gilchrist, possibly because he was so small, possibly because of his advancing age, or possibly because of that inexplicable capriciousness of the fanatic mind, was not touched at all. Gregg, the fourth man, also escaped a beating. The doctor had again sat up late at night and counted the number of the strokes. This time he reached four hundred before being called out.
For two or three days we lay in our refuge, too stiff and sore to move, but with thoughts racing through our heads, idea succeeding idea until we were sick with mere speculation. We could tell that they were not finished with us. Lying there, unable to move, we expected them to come and finish us off. Suspense became a cruel insult added to physical injury. We knew that there was a whole sequence of steps; that each one of them would be unpleasant and that we could not look ahead, could not say to ourselves ‘that’s the end of it now, we have reached some kind of sanctuary’. All we had was the agony of fear of worse to come.
Our food v/as very good, the best the camp could supply. Many little delicacies were smuggled to us by the other POWs, and we drank gallon after gallon of lime juice. With each passing day we felt better. We each found that our skin was losing the intense black of the bruising; pale patches began to show up as our bodies mended themselves. The physical healing happens so fast; it is the rest that takes time.
One morning a party of smartly-turned-out Japanese officers walked without warning into the hospital hut. Among them was the foppish white-haired interpreter. They inspected us aggressively, made a remark to the doctor about there being no permanent damage and swept out again. We were, evidently, still very much on their minds.
When I went through my kit with the help of Mackay and Slater, I found only one thing missing: my hand-drawn map of Siam and Burma showing the route of the railway.
CHAPTER SIX
AT FOUR o’clock in the morning of 7th October 1943 the five of us were roused from our sleep. Three or four figures were standing quietly in the shadows at the door of the hospital hut. I caught glimpses of them as they paced about. The insignia on their collars was unfamiliar to me, but it was unmistakable for all that; these were men whose presence was more terrifying than any number of drunken sergeants running amok. They represented something colder, more calculating, an organization that lurked on the edges of the worst imaginings of all the prisoners on the railway. The Kempeitai’s reputation was like the Gestapo’s; worse, for us, because we knew more about what this Japanese secret police unit had done in China during.the 1930s.
A lorry was waiting outside. I was the last out. I tried to pack such kit as still survived, the long splints on both arms making every small task painful. Mac helped me to get my things together, as he had been doing for days now. I joined the others outside and we climbed on to the truck. As dawn was breaking we were driven swiftly through the main gates of Kanburi POW camp. We thought that this could easily be our last journey, and the cold light was perfect.
The truck again took us only a very short distance; we were moving tortoise-like through their circles of punishment. We found ourselves being driven into the town of Kanburi itself and along a narrow street parallel to the Mae Klong River. The street consisted of a long row of sizeable buildings, the houses of Siamese and Chinese merchants. I had seen it many times in daylight. The ground floors were normally used as shops, warehouses and offices, and the upper floors as living accommodation. We stopped at one of these merchant’s premises, a tall building which had a special protective wall built out on to the street, with an armed sentry at the narrow entrance. We were not aware until then that the Kempei had a local headquarters. Our war had suddenly become one in which secrecy, suspicion and paranoia were weapons.
We were quickly hustled out of the truck and through a gloomy passage into the yard at the back of the building. The yard was a long narrow one which ran as far as the river bank. Although we seemed so close to the broad slick expanse of muddy water, the banks were high and the river far below us. The left-hand side of the yard was bounded by a wall; and along part of its length there were blocks of little hutch-like cells or cages. They resembled drawers in a filing cabinet. We were each ushered into one of these cells through a small, low door about two feet square. The front of each cage was made of bamboo lattice-work; each cell was about five feet long, little more than two and half feet wide, and less than five feet high. The top was solid, a flat surface presenting itself to the sunlight like a hot plate.
We were allowed to take into our box one blanket each, a drinking cup or mug and the shirts and shorts which we happened to be wearing. The rest of our kit and our footwear were removed. They had taken away the last shreds of our dignity and caged us like animals.
The little doors were locked and we were left to our own thoughts. I lay down on the floor, diagonally across the cell; I am over six-foot tall, and I had to lie cramped, my arms held up to prevent my own weight crushing the unset bones; but there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The cumbersome wooden splints and bandages were desperately constraining, and there was no point in crouching upright under the roof. The heat was suffocating after the sun came up and it seemed to suck the air out of the cage.
We couldn’t communicate with each other – shouting was certainly out of the question, as there was a hard-faced sentry in the yard, the long spike on the end of his rifle casting a shadow across the ground in front of the cells. In the forenoon, they gave us a small bowl of heavily-salted rice formed into leaden balls. There was another helping of this dehydrating mush in the evening. I was very suspicious of this and I ate as little as possible of the rice; I thought it might be a way of making us ragingly thirsty and of breaking us down; but two bowls of intensely salty rice daily was all we got for the rest of our stay in that place. I felt more and more hungry, and was thirsty all the time.
At least I was supping with the Japanese with a very long spoon. One of the medical officers in Kanburi camp had made me a spoon fastened to a wooden handle so that the whole thing was about eighteen inches long. This was the only way I could feed myself, since I couldn’t raise my arms enough to use a normal spoon, and the Japanese wanted me alive enough to let me keep my special utensil.
The cell became literally an oven by the afternoon, an enclosed box containing heat. Ants, vicious large red ones, crawled all over it and over me; the immobility of my arms in their splints was a fierce frustration, preventing me from sweeping away insects from my legs and back.
It is impossible to account precisely for the next few days; I could not even account for the normal interchange of night and day and my mind was confused, sometimes even to the point of oblivion.
I think that there is no doubt that one full day and night elapsed before the interrogation started, but after that time became a blur. Sometime early in the morning I was taken by two guards into the main building. I passed some of the other cages and was able to see dim figures reclining inside, but they did not stir. Once in the house I was pushed towards the front, and into a room constructed entirely of wood, a dark tropical hardwood that gave the chamber a permanent twilit atmosphere. Across a plain narrow table, also made of dark timber, two Japanese were seated.