The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (17 page)

He kept saying to me: 'You are railway mania?', meaning, I think, 'maniac' or 'fanatic', his voice expressing genuine, angry puzzlement, and then he would try to explain this incredible excuse to his colleague, who looked darker and more brutal by the minute.

Suddenly the NCO grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out, half stumbling, the relentless force in his powerful arm, his fingers pinching my flesh where he grabbed my shirt. I remember seeing the yard, and the river bank, and the wide brown river flowing past as we stood there. I remember seeing the cages, and noticing Major Smith and Mac and Slater, and seeing that Thew and Smith were now in cages too. But I was told fifty years later, by someone who should know, that I was first taken to a bathroom, and that there was a big metal tub in it, full of water, and that my head was shoved under the water again and again. I believe my informant, but to this day I can't honestly say I remember this. Nothing: a strange selective filter allows us to hold some thing back firom ourselves. But I do remember the rest.

A bench had been placed out in the open. I was told by the interpreter to lie down on it, and I lay on my firont to protect my bandaged arms by wrapping them under the seat. But the NCO quickly hauled me upright again and made me lie on my back while he tied me to the bench with a rope. My arms were loose. The questioning recommenced. The interpreter's voice: 'Lomax, you will tell us why you made the map. You will tell us why you made a map of the railway. Lomax, were you in contact with the Chinese?'

The NCO picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question firom the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch firom above the height of the NCO's head on to my chest and stomach. It is so much worse when you see it coming like that, firom above, when it is slow and deliberate. I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body, and the branch smashed on to them again and again. The interpreter was at my shoulder. *Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.' I think I felt his hand on my hand: a strange gesture, the obscene contrast between this gesture almost of comfort and the pitiless violence of what they were doing to me.

It is difficult to say how long the beating lasted, but for me it went slowly on for far too long. The NCO suddenly stopped hitting me. He went off to the side and I saw him coming back holding a hosepipe dribbling with water. From the facility with which he produced it and the convenient proximity of a water tap I guess he had used it before.

He directed the full flow of the now gushing pipe on to my nostrils and mouth at a distance of only a few inches. Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts firom within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness, but no relief came. He was too skilful to risk losing me altogether. When I was choking uncontrollably, the NCO took the hose away. The flat, urgent voice of the interpreter resumed above my head, speaking into my ear; the other man hit me with the branch on the shoulders and stomach a few more times. I had nothing to say; I was beyond invention. So they turned on the tap again, and again there was that nausea of rising water firom inside my bodily cavity, a flood welling up from within and choking me.

They alternated beatings and half-drownings for I know not how long. No one was ever able to tell me how long all this lasted, and I have no idea whether it finished that day, or there was more the following day. I eventually found myself back in my cage. I must have been dragged there.

After dark - perhaps that same evening, or was it some other evening? How can I be a reliable wimess about time? - the Kempei NCO made a special journey to my cage and handed through the bars a mug of hot milk, made from sweetened condensed milk. This was an incredible delight, but even at the time I knew it was not an act of kindness: it was a way of maintaining ambiguity, of keeping a prisoner off-balance.

The interrogations stopped. One morning, without warning or explanation, our cages were opened and the small interpreter took charge of us. Our kit was brought out of the building and into the yard. All seven of us were told to pack one bag, for we were moving again. This was a further shrinkage of our belongings and of our humanity. We asked a lot of questions, but there were no replies from the young translator-interrogator. A truck drove up, with a number of guards on board.

We had to show the interpreter what we were packing. I showed him my Bible, and he nodded. Then I displayed a mounted photograph of my fiancee. He decided that space was at a premium, carefrilly tore the photograph from its mount, threw the frame away and handed me back the photograph.

Then Slater asked: 'Can we take money with us?' I was too disturbed to work out whether he meant it satirically or not. The interpreter replied: 'You won't need money where you are going.'

As I was climbing aboard the truck, with Mac's help, the interpreter walked up close to me and said gravely: 'Keep your chin up.' He stood there in the yard, a tiny figure standing among the larger regular soldiers. The truck pulled away.

During the journey we were able to speak quietly beneath the noise of the engine as the guards spoke among themselves. We spoke about our interrogations; I told them about my treatment with the hosepipe. Their warmth, and the solidarity of their anger, was worth so much. There was an extraordinary urgency about this whispered conversation: we were sure that this time we were about to die. Slater's incurable hopelessness seemed the right attitude to all of us.

But instead we were taken to Ban Pong station, thirty miles away, back to the beginning of the railway, and got off at the east-bound platform. It looked as though our destination must be Bangkok.

A train arrived quite soon, an ordinary local passenger train, fiill 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.

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 firont 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 firom the other six and put into a cell packed with desperately finghtened 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 firont 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 oflQcer 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, firom 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 painftil, 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.

Thew muttered under his breath once:
I can't think of anything to think about.' Fred Smith hissed back: 'Have you thought about everything already?' 'Yes,' said Thew.
Well, start again,' Fred suggested. But after a time recycling your memories is beyond a joke, and the mind chews itself painftiUy over and over, cud without nutrition.