The Heat of the Sun (26 page)

‘Next thing I knew, our hands were bound and all of us, tied together, had to march ashore. The last I saw of that Chinese captain, he was licking his index finger, ready to count the wad
of bills he’d received as his reward.

‘The bastard had taken us back to Hong Kong.

‘They say the Japs think you’re a dead man once you’re a POW. Well, Wainwright and I were dead. Whatever we’d been before didn’t matter now. They sent us to Sham
Shui Po Camp. We were starved, beaten, humiliated at every turn.

‘Some of the torments would be funny if they weren’t so ghastly. Wainwright and I hadn’t been there long when three British officers managed to escape. After they’d gone,
details of their scheme were all over camp: swim across Laichikoh Bay, scud through the occupied territories, hook up with Chiang Kai-shek’s crowd before making it to India and freedom.
Christ knows if the poor devils got that far, or any farther than the other side of the bay, but from the way the Japs carried on you’d think it was an escape worthy of Houdini.

‘They decided we all had to sign a statement:
I, the undersigned, hereby swear solemnly on my honour that I shall not under any circumstances attempt to escape.
Would you believe
it? Me, I’d have been all for signing if only they’d keep our pathetic rations coming, but some of the Brit officers got it into their heads that this just wasn’t cricket –
Geneva Conventions and all that – and Wainwright was with them all the way. The guards lined us all up on the parade ground for days, wilting in summer heat, while the CO virtually begged us
to sign, sign, sign. We did in the end. Next thing we knew, a couple of Australians tried to break out. They were dragged back in chains and we all had to watch as they stood before the firing
squad.
Bam! Bam!

‘Those months in Sham Shui Po seem like halcyon days now, given what happened later. I’d worried about Wainwright, but he thrived; something about the man seemed immune to adversity,
or that’s what I thought then. Perhaps it was his sense of humour. Absurdity piled on absurdity: here were Wainwright and I, not even soldiers, lumped in with men who were; here was
Wainwright up to his old tricks, inventing one amazing story after another to explain how he, with that royal family voice, happened to be wearing an American colonel’s uniform – and
meanwhile doing his best to gamble his way to happiness, POW-camp style. In all this, I was his eager assistant.

‘It must have been 1943, around Easter-time I suppose, when Wainwright and I and hundreds of others were informed that we were being moved. For what? We couldn’t fathom it. But
before we knew it we’d been marched down to the harbour and herded on to the decks of a Jap freighter.

‘The voyage was a long one. The sun beat down, tropical rains fell, but we had no protection from either. Rations were
piffling
, as Wainwright used to say, and often rotten; there
was never enough water to go around and what there was stank like piss. Soon half the fellows were sick and more than a few had died. I’ll spare you details of the diarrhoea and dysentery, of
the brimming latrine buckets, of the rats that scampered over our faces as we lay in sunburned stupor on the decks.

‘Days and weeks went by. We stopped twice – at Manila, I think, and somewhere else, Saigon perhaps, where they took on more prisoners, crowding the ship even more intolerably.
Finally, we docked in Singapore. We still didn’t know why they had brought us so far. Had they taken us from Sham Shui Po all the way to Changi – one prison camp to another – only
to torment us? Why didn’t the devils shoot us and be done with it? But Wainwright said the Japs did nothing without reason. He was right.

‘We’d been in the Changi camp no more than a night and a day before the guards formed us into battalions, several hundred men in each. Singapore was just a staging post. They shipped
us off by railroad, in cattle trucks, packed so tight we could neither lie nor sit, while equatorial sun beat down on us. How many men died in those trucks, I wouldn’t like to guess.

‘For the first time in my long travails, I’d been separated from Wainwright; I was desperate to know what had become of him, but there was no way I could find out. The trains headed
north, scything up through the Malay peninsula.

‘The journey took a week; then there was no railroad any more and those of us who could still stand were forced to march, mile after mile every day over slithery jungle tracks as warm rain
beat down. If you fell behind, the guards thrashed you; if you died, they left your body to rot in the jungle. There was only the relentless trek: onwards, onwards, ever north.

‘We must have crossed from Malaya into Burma. For a time we were taken by barge up a broad, sluggish river, between green hills of jungle; at first we thought we were fortunate, welcoming
the respite from our endless march, until we realized we would be given no rations for all the days of our voyage. More men died, and the guards kicked the corpses into the river.

‘We had been sent to build a railroad. Only later did I figure out why. The Japs needed it to back up their forces in the Burma campaign. When completed, the thing would run between
Bangkok in Siam and Rangoon in Burma – two hundred and fifty miles of jungle, hills, and rivers. Already thousands had gone before us, POWs and coolies alike, slave labour all of us, living
in bamboo huts, toiling away from dawn till dusk and beyond to fell trees, make embankments, lay sleepers and rails. There were cuttings to be dug, bridges to be built, and always the hideous
cruelties of the Japs and the jungle.

‘Which was worse was hard to say. When it was dry, the heat was a furnace, and dust whirled up from the railroad banks, filling our eyes and noses and mouths; then came the monsoon, month
after month of plummeting rains, turning the jungle into a slithery labyrinth.

‘How I survived, I can’t say. I had no courage. I had no shame. A Jap could sneer at me and I’d cringe like a dog. When the workday was done, I trudged the long miles to my hut
and fell into oblivion for the few permitted hours. I can barely remember eating, though I must have swallowed my share of the maggoty rice and rotting fish and vegetables.

‘Two years passed. Two years in hell.

‘And what had happened to Wainwright? He had survived the Somme, but I hardly imagined he could survive this. Most likely he had died in the cattle trucks in Malaya or on our march through
the Burmese jungle. There must have been ten thousand men or more, strung down mile after mile of the railroad’s route.

‘I fell sick. One morning as a guard passed through camp, ringing his bell, I flickered open my eyes to see only a haze in front of me. A crushing heaviness, like an anvil, pressed on my
forehead. Shivery heat coursed up my limbs. The guard struck me with his baton, demanding that I rise. I feared he would kill me there and then, but he only turned away.

‘Later, though at the time it seemed a fond dream, two fellows I had never seen before picked me up on a stretcher and carried me out of the camp. I was too bleary to understand what was
happening, but I remember jolting in the back of a truck over mile after muddy mile, while fellows close by bellowed out dirty songs in accents I thought were Australian.

‘Not until the fever had subsided did I realize I had been taken to a base hospital in Siam with POW medical staff. I found myself on a cot in a sea of cots, beneath a ceiling of billowing
canvas. Groans and jabberings of fever sounded around me; once or twice I heard a scream, but there was laughter too, and even the brassy blarings of a phonograph, somewhere far away.

‘“I thought they’d kill me,” I said, when I could speak. “I thought they’d kill me.”

‘“They’re bad, but not that bad,” said the Australian nurse who tended me.

‘She jabbed a thermometer into my mouth.

‘“Lucky bugger, you are. This place is just overcrowded and understocked with medicines, as opposed to so hopelessly unsanitary that it spreads more disease than it cures. The prize
exhibit, this one – one for the history books.”

‘I offered what I hoped was a questioning look.

‘“Well, maybe not the history books, but the papers back in Nip-land. Some big wheel from Tokyo’s coming by this afternoon to pose for pics with all of us. Our happy POWs! Who
says we treat ’em rough?” She snatched the thermometer from my mouth. “You’ll live. Think you’ll be able to stand?”

‘“So soon? Oh, please!”

‘“Parade! And you blokes better look as healthy as you can or we’re all up shit creek without a paddle.”

‘I promised to do my best.

‘There must have been a hundred fellows that afternoon, lined in two rows down a dusty asphalt strip. They’d found fresh uniforms for a few of us – dead men’s laundry, I
dare say – but we must have looked like a shabby bunch, hardly capable of winning a war. How the Japs would laugh when they saw us in the papers!

‘For a long time there was no sign of the VIPs. The photographers got to work all the same. One came and let off his flash in my face; it was as much as I could do not to snatch his camera
and fling it to the asphalt, but after all it was a Seiki-Kogaku, and I respect a Seiki-Kogaku. Guards patrolled between us, guns at the ready; the POW doctors and nurses, also under armed guard,
stood on a podium at one end. I inspected my fellow captives.

‘That’s when I saw him: Wainwright.

‘There was no doubting it: the fellow across the tarmac was skinny as a rake like me and dressed in a different uniform – Australian, for Christ’s sake, slouch hat and all
– but I’d have known him anywhere. I almost laughed. How could I doubt that Wainwright would come through it all? He was a cat with nine lives. What stories he must have to tell! And if
Wainwright could survive, so could I. But had he seen me yet? He’d made no sign.

‘The VIPs arrived at last. We heard the whip of mighty blades and a roar; a shadow passed over us, and a Mitsubishi carrier fighter came bumpily to its rest in fields beyond the tents. The
guards, on their mettle now, patrolled between us, guns cocked, bellowing at us in Jap. I could hardly believe anyone too important would visit this far-flung corner, but it seemed we would
pretend. Crackly loudspeakers blasted out the Jap national anthem.

‘Now came the official party: a fat general, decked with ribbons; a bearded admiral; a doddering old man in a scarlet sash – and a younger fellow, upright and handsome, who walked
ahead of the others. For a crazed moment I thought he might be Emperor Hirohito himself, but whoever he was, he was important.

‘As the VIPs passed between us, we were supposed to salute. I raised a hand to my temple: Wainwright did the same. I winked at him and grinned. I don’t think he saw me, so I tell
myself that what happened next wasn’t my fault.

‘We’d been in the sun a long time. Wainwright must have been light-headed; years in hellholes had done their worst. Either way, his brain was addled, though I think his last gesture
had a touch of Wainwright about it all the same. He stepped out of line, turned on his heels – and thumbed his nose at Hirohito.

‘There were gasps, cries. A guard struck Wainwright with a rifle butt. His slouch hat rolled across the tarmac, and he slumped to his knees and swayed.

‘Now Hirohito stood before him. He pulled up Wainwright’s head by the hair, slapped his face, then turned away, barking out an order. A shot rang out.

‘They left the body, face down, where it fell.

‘I trembled, as if in a fever again. To think that Wainwright had been through so much! To think that all of it should end like this! The heat was fierce. Already, insects would clamour
for his blood, swarming in black rivers over his eyelids, nose, and lips. The VIPs proceeded towards me. I didn’t care what happened to me now. They’d killed Wainwright and they could
kill me. Hirohito’s eyes flickered, wryly I thought, over the faces next to mine.

‘Then he stood before me.

‘“Murderer,” I said, and spat in his face.

‘The moment that followed seemed suspended, unreal. Blackness welled before me. I had so expected to be shot that I almost believed it had happened already, but when my vision came back I
was alive, a guard pinched the back of my neck in the one truly vice-like grip I’ve ever felt, and Hirohito, with the same supercilious eyes, dabbed his face with a handkerchief and issued
quiet orders to his retinue.

‘I would have cursed him if the words would leave my lips. How could it be that I was not yet dead? It was cruel, for at once, like a scene change at the opera, everything was altered: no
VIPs, no band, no guards, no prisoners ranged in shabby lines; only Wainwright, lying dead where he had fallen, and the man who had spat at Hirohito shackled to a flagpole, six feet away, in the
full glare of the tropical sun.

‘No one watched me. Night fell, as it falls in those latitudes, with the quickness of a theatre curtain coming down. Rain, in syrupy drops, soaked me to the skin. Hours passed. I shivered;
I raged with hunger; I pissed and shitted myself, but still nobody came. Perhaps, I thought deliriously, I had died after all. I talked to Wainwright: “Can you hear me, old pal? No need to
lie doggo now! Here we are in the afterlife, and the Japs can’t get us.”

‘The rain eased, though the sky kept dripping; the moon, like a round rancid cheese, insisted its way through the clouds, and in the sickly light I saw Wainwright’s corpse dance
towards me, flesh falling already from its face, taunting me that Yanks were bastards and I was a bastard more than most, abandoning an English gentleman to die like this. I called out: “But
I didn’t! Wainwright, I didn’t, I swear. They separated us. I wanted to find you.”

‘Then it was gone; the corpse lay unmoving again, but I feared it would rear up a second time, then a third, capering around me in dizzying derangement. But the ghost was nowhere in sight
when I felt the knife at my neck.

‘“Don’t move.” The voice was a whisper. “Move your head and I cut your jugular.”

‘I didn’t need more persuading.

‘“I wondered what happened to you, and now I know. Not so cocky these days are we, Mr Le Vol?”

‘The urge to gulp came upon me and I struggled to hold it back, picturing my Adam’s apple sliced open by the blade. My new companion edged around to face me. The moon was behind him;
his features were in shadow, but I knew him now. Eight years had passed since the first time I saw him; he had lost a certain boyishness, but still I should have recognized him at once. How many
times had he stood over me in that dungeon in Nagasaki? He had ordered my tortures. He wasn’t Hirohito. His name was Isamu, Prince Yamadori’s nephew.