The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (14 page)

The guards conducted the five of us to the main guardroom where we were brusquely ordered to stand to attention, a few feet in front of the building and well away from any shade or protection from the sun. The guardroom was a flimsy three-sided wood and thatch structure, open in the front, with a table across the gap. A guard stood at attention on the side nearest the camp entrance; a few more were seated behind the table. Among them was a large, fat and rather elegantly-dressed white-haired man, who now proceeded to address us in fluent American English. He ordered us forward. His attitude was aggressive, sneering and hostile as he checked our identities, making contemptuous references to Western duplicity and cowardice throughout the short procedure.

He ordered us back into the sun. There we stood beside a long ditch, neatly spaced like five telegraph poles along a road. The time was ten o'clock in the morning.

The morning and afternoon dragged on, every minute almost an hour. When you are forced to stand stiffly to attention in a blazing hot sun you have nothing to do but think; yet thought is a process that should be directed by the will, and under extreme stress thoughts spin away on their own, racing faster and faster like a machine out of control, one that has lost the touch of a human hand.

There was nothing we could do about it now: we stood there, knowing it was coming. The wretched little guardroom was no bigger than a domestic living room, and the few guards sprawling inside it or on guard behind us controlled the lives of several hundred men. So few to hold so many.

We stood for twelve hours with our backs to that hut. The nerves and flesh of the back become terribly sensitive and vulnerable when turned to an enemy. At any moment I expected to feel a rifle-butt on my spine, a bayonet thrust between my shoulder-blades. All we heard was their talk, their occasional rough laughter.

The intense heat of the sun, the irritation of flies and mosquitos feeding on sweat, itching skin, the painful contraction of eyes against the light and even the fear of violent death had been superseded, by the evening, by the even more powerful sensation of a burning thirst. They gave us nothing to drink, all day, but they allowed us occasionally to go to the latrine. On one of these visits I regretfully disposed of my diary. The flimsy pages covered with neat notes on books, on grammar, on lists of collectible stamps fluttered into the stinking trench.

As dusk fell the five of us were moved into a closer and more compact group in firont of the guardroom.The darkness came on with singular abrupmess. We were lit by a weak light firom behind us in the guardroom. A time signal was heard as a noisy party of Japanese and Koreans approached through the dark firom the direction of the camp offices. They looked like NCOs, their uniforms dishevelled, one or two of them unsteady on their feet. All of them carried pick-helves. They stopped to talk to the guards, as though exchanging ideas about what to do with us.

Major Smith was called out in front of our line, and told to raise his arms right up over his head. His tall, gaunt figure, his thin arms held out like a scarecrow's, looked terribly weak and pitiful. He stood there on the edge of the circle of light. I thought for a moment - a last gasp of hope - that this was the beginning of an advanced form of their endless standing to attention. A hefty Japanese sergeant moved into position, lifted his pick-handle, and delivered a blow across Smith's back that would have laid out a bull. It knocked him down, but he was trodden on and kicked back into an upright position. The same guard hit him again, hard. All the thugs now set to in earnest. Soon little could be seen but the rise and fall of pick-helves above the heads of the group and there were sickening thuds as blows went home on the squirming, kicking body, periodically pulled back on to its feet only to be knocked down again. Bill Smith cried out repeatedly that he was fifty years of age, appealing for mercy, but to no avail. The group of attackers seemed to move in concert with their crawling, bloodied victim into the darkness beyond the range of the miserable lighting from the guardroom, but the noises of wood on flesh continued to reach us from the dark of the parade ground.

They were using pickaxe-shafts: like solid, British Army issue handles, and perhaps that is indeed what they were. The guards behind us did not move. There was no expectation that we ourselves would move, intervene, run away: merely the slack, contemptuous knowledge that we were trapped. That first blow: like a labourer getting into the rhythm of his job, then the others joining in, a confused percussive crescendo of slaps and thuds on flesh and bone. They kept kicking him, getting him up, putting him down - until he stopped moving altogether, unconscious or dead, I could not tell. Nor could I tell how long it all took. How does one measure such time? Blows had replaced the normal empty seconds of time passing, but I think it took about forty minutes to get him to lie still.

The gang came back out of the night. My special friend Morton Mackay was called forward. I was next in line. As they started on Mackay and the rain of fearful blows commenced I saw to the side another group of guards pushing a stumbling and shattered figure back towards the guardhouse. Smith was still alive; he was allowed to drop in a heap in the ditch beside the entrance.

Mackay went down roaring like a lion, only to be kicked up again; within a matter of minutes he was driven into the semi-darkness and out of the range of the lights, surrounded by the flailing pick-helves which rose and fell ceaselessly. I remember thinking that in the bad light they looked like the blades of a windmill, so relentless was their action. In due course Mackay's body was dragged along and dumped beside Smith's in the ditch.

The moments while I was waiting my turn were the worst of my life. The expectation is indescribable; a childhood story of Protestant martyrs watching friends die in agony on the rack flashed through my mind. To have to witness the torture of others and to see the preparations for the attack on one's own body is a punishment in itself, especially when there is no escape. This experience is the beginning of a form of insanity.

Then me. It must have been about midnight. I took off my spectacles and my watch carefully, turned and laid them down on the table behind me in the guardroom. It was almost as if I was preparing to go into a swimming-pool, so careful was the gesture of folding them and laying them down. I must have had to take a couple of steps backward to perform this neat unconscious manoeuvre. None of the guards made a move or said a word. Perhaps they were too surprised.

I was called forward. I stood to attention. They stood facing me, breathing heavily. There was a pause. It seemed to drag on for minutes. Then I went down with a blow that shook every bone, and which released a sensation of scorching liquid pain which seared through my entire body. Sudden blows struck me all over. I felt myself plunging downwards into an abyss with tremendous flashes of solid light which burned and agonized. I could identify the periodic stamping of boots on the back of my head, crunching my face into the gravel; the crack of bones snapping; my teeth breaking; and my own involuntary attempts to respond to deep vicious kicks and to regain an upright position, only to be thrown to the ground once more.

At one point I realized that my hips were being damaged and I remember looking up and seeing the pick-helves coming down towards my hips, and putting my arms in the way to deflect the blows. This seemed only to focus the clubs on my arms and hands. I remember the actual blow that broke my wrist. It fell right across it, with a terrible pain of delicate bones being crushed. Yet the worst pain came from the pounding on my pelvic bones and the base of my spine. I think they tried to smash my hips. My whole trunk was brutally defined for me, like having my skeleton etched out in pain.

It went on and on. I could not measure the time it took. There are some things that you cannot measure in time, and this is one of them. Absurdly, the comparison that often comes to my mind is that torture was indeed like an awfiil job interview: it compresses time strangely, and at the end of it you cannot tell whether it has lasted five minutes or an hour.

I do know that I thought I was dying. I have never forgotten, from that moment onwards, crying out 'Jesus', crying out for help, the utter despair of helplessness. I rolled into a deep ditch of foul stagnant water which, in the second or two before consciousness was finally extinguished, flowed over me with the freshness of a pure and sweet spring.

I awoke and found myself standing on my feet. I do not recall crawling out of that ditch but the sun was already up. I was an erect mass of pain, of bloody contusions and damaged bones, the sun playing harshly on inflamed nerves. Smith and Slater were lying on the ground beside me, blackened, covered in blood and barely conscious. Mac and Knight were in a like state a few yards further away. We were only a few feet from the guardroom, close to the point where we had been standing the previous night. Slater was nearly naked; a pair of shorts and some torn clothing lay on the ground behind him, mud-stained and bloodstained.

The guards simply ignored us. They stood in front of a barely moving, battered pile of human beings under the fierce sun and acted as though we were not there.

By the middle of the morning I must have felt brighter because I began to wonder why I should stay standing up when the other four were lying down. I sagged at the knees and sprawled out beside Smith and Slater. There was still no response from the guards.

About noon, the large American-speaking Japanese interpreter sauntered over from the camp offices, squatted down beside us and inspected us with a critical eye. He sent a guard for a bucket of tea, which he offered to each of us from a mess-tin. Vague stirrings of life from the others; bodies in various horizontal postures managed to drink quite a quantity of tea. I was sitting up. I tried to take the tin, only to find that my wrists and hands were so swollen and useless that they couldn't hold it. The Japanese interpreter solved the problem by pouring warm tea down my throat. I gagged on the acid lukewarm liquid, but it was a huge relief to my dreadfial thirst.

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, ftiU 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 fianeral 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 drinkj and we had to be prevented from slaking ourselves to the point of nausea. Nothing has ever tasted so refreshing.