A train arrived quite soon, an ordinary local passenger train, full of Siamese civilians. Seats were easy to find: local people moved rather than sit next to the Kempeitai.
The train moved off eastwards. After a while we passed the big camp at Nong Pladuk, on the north side the line, which was one of the largest POW camps in Siam. On the south side were the extensive new railway yards, with rows of wagons, flatcars and shunting engines, and a large number of Japanese C56 steam locomotives. I had first seen one of these at Prai, on the way here, but that seemed a very long time ago. The presence of all this machinery could only mean that the Burma-Siam Railway had been completed in record time. The engineers must have felt proud of themselves.
I wondered whether many people who travelled through to Burma on that line across the viaducts cut into the hills by hand would know what it had cost; and I wondered how long it would remain intact.
Despite what had been done to us, most of the information about the construction and operation of the radios, and our lines of communication for distributing the news, and even the purpose of my map, remained our secret. Silence was the only reprisal we could take. Now, apart from the assumption that we were on a train on our way to the royal capital of Siam, we had no idea what was facing us.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AT THE MAIN railway station in Bangkok the Kempei agents led us out on to the platform, among the Siamese travellers in their vivid sarongs, and handed us over to a squad of soldiers. Their numbers and their attitude of alert defiance, as though challenging us to try to escape, signalled our importance to some security-obsessed bureaucrat further up their hierarchy. My six companions were immediately handcuffed, while I had a rope tied around my waist, with one of the guards holding the loose end. They paraded us through the midday throng, in which life was hurrying along to its normal imprecise schedules. The civilians barely glanced at us, or studiously ignored us, for the sight of a man with his arms held out in front of him in splints being led like a donkey on a rope, accompanied by six bruised wretches in handcuffs, was not something to notice too openly. We moved through that crowded station like ghosts.
A Japanese truck was waiting for us. We were driven away, and it was a strange feeling to be in one of the few motorized vehicles on the streets. War had subdued this city, leaving it practically no traffic except bicycles and the occasional cart. The quiet was oppressive as our truck roared through banging its gears and trailing dirty fumes. We passed the German Embassy, a big stone building picked out by the fire-engine red of the swastika flag fluttering on its roof. For a while we ran parallel to one of the electric tramway routes, with elderly single-deck tram cars clanging slowly along. They made a homely noise.
We reached a large nondescript building, with guards standing to attention outside it on an entirely empty street. The Kempeitai ran this place, judging from the uniforms of the men who took us inside and led us to our cells. I was separated from the other six and put into a cell packed with desperately frightened Siamese and Chinese civilians, some of them in tears. I noticed that the cell was square, and this seemed very strange; later I realized that most cells are oblong. I was reduced already to noting the smallest changes in the small spaces in which I was imprisoned wherever I now went.
I have never been able to discover where that building was. Next day all seven of us were reassembled and moved again, this time to the grounds of a grand house, some other requisitioned mansion in the Japanese Army’s secret estate. There were various outbuildings in the grounds, and one of them had been turned into a large cell with a walkway for a guard along the front of it and bars through which he could see and speak to us. We were hustled inside and told to sit; when we did, the Japanese officer shook his head and demonstrated the posture he wanted us to adopt: he was determined to make us sit cross-legged.
We occupied that cell for thirty-six days, sitting with our knees spread and ankles locked, from seven in the morning until ten at night, with the exception of a bare hour of daily exercise in the yard. They did not expect us to move or to talk during those hours in the cell. We suffered the cramps and rigors of unsupple muscles forced into this unfamiliar position. You discover the weight of your own body in surprising ways: the crushing pressure of your leg on your heel becomes unbearable, for example, and comfort is a minute shift of position that gives momentary relief before the new alignment begins to ache. My hips were still very painful, and I had to hold out my broken arms and rest them on my knees, so that is how I sat – like a caricature of a praying Buddhist.
Major Smith, so much older than the rest of us, could not manage the position at all, and his distress was acute, his knees splayed out at the weirdest angles and he was constandy in such pain that he was ready to risk the guards’ anger and abuse by sticking his legs out straight in front of him. After a while even the guards gave up trying to bend him into the shape they desired and allowed him to sit as he normally would. In this as in all other situations, poor Smith was the most vulnerable of us.
Some of the army guards who had to enforce these absurd secret-police rules of deportment were better than the average run of men doing prison duties. One of them tried to talk to us in English, which was not only a welcome relief from sitting cross-legged in depressed silence, but gave us hope that we could get information from him. He was a ‘Gunso’, a sergeant, a regular army professional with no interest in petty cruelty. He asked us questions about the British Army, and about our food and climate, and we tried to pump him about what was waiting for us in the big house. He couldn’t say, and probably had very little idea himself; I wondered whether he would be a member of our firing-party, if it came to that.
One of the guards told us one day that the previous occupant of our cell had been a POW, a Scotsman named Primrose. He described his uniform as though it had a skirt, and said that he had been charged with the murder of a fellow-prisoner. We were deeply curious about this Scottish soldier in his kilt and probed our guard as much as we dared. The story that came out was one of those legends that later circulated around the network of prisons and camps, a rumour that was so strange it could be true. Primrose was a lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and in the middle of 1943 had been in a camp far up the railway. The Japanese sent in a huge labour force of Tamils, who were as usual treated like atomized slaves, starved and brutalized and dying in handfuls every week. Cholera broke out in the Tamil camp, and the Japanese railway administration found a novel way of containing the epidemic: they shot its victims.
When a single British POW caught the disease he was moved to an isolation tent on the outskirts of the camp, to await ‘disposal’. Primrose happened by the tent in time to see two Japanese guards carry the feverish soldier out to a tree. One of them prepared to shoot him, from a considerable distance; the guard was clearly nervous and incompetent, and would almost certainly only wound the prisoner, prolonging his agony needlessly. Primrose grabbed the rifle and shot the man himself with a single round to the heart. And for this he was charged with murder.
I wondered what had happened to him: had they already killed him for his act of loving violence? For years I remained fascinated by what Primrose had done, his decisiveness and compassion. It seemed so symbolic of what they had reduced us to, that he should have to kill one of his own men out of kindness.
The days dragged slowly by in mindless boredom and discomfort. Apart from our more humane guards, we had no distractions or stimulation of any kind. They fed us rice with some nondescript fishy sauce, and lukewarm tea. Apart from our trips to the toilet hole, we squatted on the ground.