Eyewitness (17 page)

Even at the cemetery, crosses bearing the names of the dead were deliberately changed around by the Japanese in a final childish attempt to spite those who had passed beyond the reach of their inhumanity. Throughout the whole period at the jail, no milk or sustaining light food of any kind was given to even the worst cases, although the Japanese had plentiful supplies captured after the British evacuation. The diet for all prisoners consisted of plain rice pap without even soup to help it down. Despite all representations, only about 60 of the worst cases were taken from the jail to a hospital, and then only when it was often too late to do anything for them. In any case, little more attention was given in the hospital than at the jail.

On 20 December, when the strongest of this force left for Moulmein to work on the railway, they left behind 200 dead and 450 more incapable of movement. Even then they carried with them many who could not walk. In the grinding work along the railway line, numbers of these men succumbed, while in Rangoon itself the total of Dutch dead reached 260, or more than a sixth of the party.

One has only to see a man dying slowly of dysentery, becoming more and more emaciated as each day passes, to feel that his plight would draw blood from a stone. But our hosts of Dai Nippon Gun, with their vaunted code of Bushido, cared nothing and did nothing as these men rotted to death before their eyes.

Ray Parkin

Parkin says that he left ‘an interval after the war in order that circumstances may not be distorted by prejudice’ before writing
Into
the Smother
. ‘It was originally written as a diary to capture that passing moment and hold it before it had slipped from our memory forever … each entry was written without any knowledge of what the next day would bring.’

There is no more humane and inspirational writing about the Thai–Burma Railway, or any other brutalising prison experience, than
Into the Smother
– not by Primo Levi or Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Parkin somehow found that meditative mode within what was happening to him which allowed him to see beauty in a leaf, or an insect, and the virtue of hard work and self-reliance.

In the book about his time as a slave labourer in the Japanese coal-mines (
The Sword and the Blossom
, 1967) after the railway, he writes about the kind of instinctive Buddhism that he discovered in himself. Writing in the third person he

found the hint of what faith was in the invisible ends of those exquisitely fine white filaments of fungus slowly striving in Stygian silence beneath the sea. Those thread-like fingers acted as a catalyst to his thoughts.

‘Let’s face it,’ he thought deliberately. ‘What if
none
of the prisoners ever gets home? What if this war, or another one, destroys civilization? Or lays the whole face of the earth flat and dead? Then, what?’ John had felt a calm as the answer came.
These filaments would continue to grow – to bridge again the infinite with the finite.

Here he waded in and sat on a pile of wet slimy logs and wrote
by the light of his cap-lamp.

Parkin served in the Royal Australian Navy for 18 years until he was last man off HMAS
Perth
sunk in the Battle of the Sunda Strait in 1942. He was made prisoner on Java, where he met among others Weary Dunlop and Laurens van der Post. This story is told in the first volume of the trilogy,
Out of the Smoke
(1960).

The three books are illustrated with Parkin’s wonderful black and white art. After the war he worked as a tally clerk on the Melbourne waterfront, writing the trilogy, and researching and illustrating his later masterwork about Captain James Cook and his ship,
H.M. Bark Endeavour
(1997).

Ray Parkin died in 2005 as this book was being completed, at the grand age of 94. After what he had been through, it was some achievement.

*

It was 11.30 a.m. before we moved off. First, we had to get up that Hill on which men on ration parties had collapsed. There is a road there now, but many of us were fresh out of hospital and the day was well advanced in dry, sapping heat.

At the top we were allowed to rest. We had sweated freely during the climb, but as we flopped down, sweat spouted, like blood, from every pore. It was strange to see the skin spring into thousands of tiny, rushing rivulets. While we waited we saw a small phalanger glide past our heads. Only about nine inches long, it was like a fragment of the remote past. After ten minutes we moved on.

The road followed a narrow, elevated strip winding just below the serrated spine of a mountain chain. To the south were other jagged ridges of dark, stained granite resembling the sheer faces of organ pipes. It was a bamboo jungle, but in one swampy part there were a few patches of palms. In bare, burnt-out patches, some flowers – little, white irises with a pure, orange streak on their tongues – had sprung up from the recent rain with just their heads out of the soil. They grew in bunches, back to back, in half-dozens. But there was no foliage yet. Bugs and butterflies lined the route to watch us go past.

We arrived in the new camp at 2 p.m. and were given a fish soup, and some tea which really tasted like tea. I sipped mine with a spoon, to relish it. Then we were given tents, 18 feet by 12, and we put them up. Twenty men to a tent. We cut logs and covered them with a bamboo deck on which we put our belongings. It had rained on the way and been thundery. We were glad to have some shelter.

Chaps from Timor, the 2
^nd
/40
^th
, are here and we have eagerly swapped tales of camps and conditions. Our first impression is that the food seems better, perhaps it is simply that it doesn’t taste mouldy. There is an order in force here which was also issued to English at Konyu. It states that, whenever eggs are fried, the yolks shall be broken to prevent any profane resemblance to the Nippon flag which, of course, we have now christened the ‘fried egg’.

Another early impression is the woe-begone manner of many of the Dutchmen here.

We went to bed crowded, but much more content than one could have thought possible. It could have been the change, and an expectancy of things – be they what they might – just around the corner.

*

With the night fires still casting a glow up to the tree canopy, reveille sounded. There was a hoarse, ‘Huh! Ho!’ from the Jap guards and a shrill imperious whistle from the Dutch. Then Austin calling, ‘All Out, O Battalion!’

We dressed in the dark and paraded at 8 a.m., and went straight to breakfast – pap, with a splash of tea. Immediately we formed in the queue for our work rations, gulping down breakfast to make room for them in the same dixie. Plain rice and two small vegetables, and rice rissoles.

At 8.45 a.m. we marched out to the site of the railway. The first few hundred yards of our way was across a short flat valley which looked as if it would be a swamp in the Wet. It lay between two escarpments. We climbed an arduous zigzag up the southern one, and up a rock wall for the last 60 feet on a rope. It was granite and limestone, pocketed with crystal quartz.

Once over the top we went down a long slope between scattered boulders and bamboo. It led toward the river. We followed the furrows made by elephants hauling out teak logs when the red, clayey soil had been wet. Dried out, these elephant pads made good paths. It was another two miles to the railway clearing.

Here the timber had been felled. We turned elephants and dragged it clear to the sides. The clearing was 30 metres wide, and each hundred of us have to clear a stretch 150 metres long. It was what the Japanese call a finish-come-back job, and, as new brooms, we finished quite early. The size of the logs we could move by single-minded effort surprised and pleased us. The alternative was laboriously to chop them up. The cicadas were kicking up a din and our heads rang with them. We sweated and became covered with black bush bees, who drank our perspiration and encouraged other species to do the same.

We started for home up the long two-mile hill, through a maze of boulders, and finally dropped, almost vertically, on to our camp. The bamboos among the boulders are small and ‘smoothskins’ – no thorns of canes. Blue-green, emerald, lichen-coloured, cane yellow and odd purple patches; crisp, brush-stroke leaves, pencilled stems – it is like walking along a Japanese scroll painting.

When we got back to camp one of our officers ordered our tent to be moved to satisfy some military exactitude in him. So, tired, and dirty and with foul tempers, we set to re-pitching it. We had a very small evening meal. Thunder and heavy rain clapped down on us.

Another 200 from Konyu arrived in the middle of it. It rained all night and we got a bit wet in the tents. One of the half-built huts the new arrivals were in collapsed, and they came crowding into the already crowded tents. Just before dark, an eight-inch armoured centipede, red and rampant, was chased in among us by the storm. As a dismal omen, another Dutchman died: the thirteenth in seven weeks. But, to us, his death was only of passing interest.

*

By morning the rain had flooded the kitchen and splashed red clay and soot into the shallow
kwalis
cooking our watery rice. This made a gritty meal. One mug of pap and one of weak tea. Pap is at least 90 per cent water, so we start a working day on two ounces of solid and 18 ounces of water.

Fifty of us, with 40 Japs, shouldered machetes, axes and theodolite and went over the escarpment to the railway clearing. We kept on through the dry, unshaded monotony of parched, dead bamboo leaves and bare trees. After five miles we struck north until we came to a mountain-side of massed, shelving rock – split and upturned like big axes and chisels. Loose boulders became a hazard for the next man astern.

We spent a hot forenoon here, surveying and hacking down bamboos and trees in the line of sight. It was an almost sixty-degree slope; our feet ached and our haunches tired, playing mountain goats. Our leather boots were treacherous, while the Japanese were nimble in rubber ones. By dinner time the effort of keeping up with them left us shaking with hunger and fatigue.

After a brief break, we were at it again for the rest of the afternoon. We were hot, weak and hungry, and feeling a little sorry for ourselves. So, it was easy to fall into a mood of homesick loneliness – here in this inhospitable city of ants, millipedes, centipedes, scorpions, bees, wasps, butterflies, dinning cicadas and grasshoppers, in which man is completely dispensable.

At times like that you get a feeling in complete contrast to that of singleness with nature, and to the feeling of beauty that comes with it: the feeling that this life of the bush is in everyone and everything, which seems to be a guarantee that this life of arduous stumbling, of harassed thinking and inevitable doubting, of honest trying, is something worthwhile.

*

This day began ominously. The pap issue was small and the dinner ration light. We had a long march to a new part of the railway and began work on cuttings and embankments. Hard at it all day in the sun, we found ourselves by dinner with our water bottles dry. The soil was filled with roots and rocks, and the tools were bad. Tempers grew shorter as men grew thirstier.

Our boss was Billy the Bastard, a small walnut-hard man with a lean, baboon face. He is a Japanese sergeant. His alternative title is Billy the Pig. All day he and his men had been nagging us with hoarse and shrill:
Speedo! Speedo! Hurree uppoo! Hurree uppoo! – Pickee! Pickee! Changee
,
changee! Basketo, Basketo-oo!
It was almost 8 p.m. when we got back. The rice issue was a little smaller than usual. We demanded an officer present: Justice! Fair Play! Humanity! was the demand of the exasperated men. There had been enough nonsense, enough paradeground rubbish! An officer came: two officers! They were heckled without restraint. The men were out to show their temper; a temper to which the officers had been blind and which had been aggravated by a number of things: the morning’s rush, breakfast, tidying tents, dinner ration queues, the count parade and the work parade.

The count parade is before breakfast and dinner queues, and the impressive ceremony cuts down our time for more vital things. The officers, on the other hand, with less to do than most, claim batmen – while the men don’t get time to wash their rags – so that finally, when the Adjutant stood neat and well groomed before the dirty men and announced in tough disciplinarian tones, ‘Men are coming late on parade. An N.C.O. will be placed on the left to mark any man late. The late-comers will be marked A.W.L. and will forfeit a day’s pay!’ – someone shouted,
‘Pig’s arse you will! You try it!’

Then there followed a few assessments of some of the officers by the men. ‘Bloody good boys! You ought to get out there and try swinging a pick for a day. Don’t you take
our
pay!’

This is the first demonstration the men have made. So far the officers have been able to use ‘normal army channels’ to delay and block – seemingly to preserve their own little privileges. When the parade broke off there was an air of satisfaction among the men: they had expressed themselves.

The next morning we got more pap than we could eat at one sitting; the dinner ration was, compared to the usual, ‘full and plenty’. It will take more than a Daniel Webster to convince the men that this was coincidence. A major went out with the embankment gangs to see the conditions. He did a good job. He argued with the Nip engineers, and went very close to a bashing. They told him to clear off back to camp, but he refused. In the end he hopped in to help the lads get finished. It may not sound much, but this was the man, I am told, who had no courage in action, and little moral courage at other times. The talk tonight is not of our rights and wrongs – but of this man.

*

Out with the surveyors again over the rugged rock slides where we drove the last peg at the 156 kilometre 320 metre mark. From this peg we had a fine view of the Kwai Noi winding away in the distance below. The thin coiling of its green-blue, unreflecting surface could easily have been smoke curling through the trees. The tree-tops seemed soft and feathery. Some leaves were bursting out in reds and greens: here and there a splash of blossom or fruit; red fruit in trefoil bunches; pale lilac blossom, like acacias. But, in the main, the top of the jungle was a sea of new leaf-green and the mauve-pink of bare branches. The near hills showed vertical rock slashes and jagged ridges: in the distance the blue mountains rolled away to the horizon.

At dinner we lit a fire to scorch some dried fish for the Japanese. This was over and we were finishing our rice, when a slithering rustle brought a hooded cobra amongst us.

‘Snake!’ – But the Japanese did not understand.

‘Cobra !’ – And they moved as one. The snake flattened his hood, but the axe severed it. In fifteen minutes, enemy and allies were sharing the modest five feet of the unfortunate snake. It was like strong rabbit. While we were sucking our teeth with a kind of holy satisfaction, Buck casually remarked, ‘And
that
is what will happen to a
tiger
, if he’s silly enough to come this way.’

*

A day of tree-felling at the 150-kilometre peg. We had 30 metres by 150 to do, marked by red flags on bamboo poles, halfway up a steep rocky hillside. The trees grew out of the rocks and their roots seemed to have split them. They were teak, mahogany, coral, acacia, kapok and others I had no idea of. There were plenty of traps. We started at the bottom to avoid crushing anybody below and to avoid a tangle: the vines in the branches often will not let the trees fall. Then came the tricky part: picking the right ones to free, and dodging quickly when they came; for they never fell true, and brought down tops from nowhere. When they hit they bounded downhill like something alive. Blackie was lucky, he had his shirt torn on his back by a close one. I just had time to give him a quick shove.