The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (19 page)
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Authors: Eric Lomax
Tags: #Prisoners of war, #Burma-Siam Railroad, #1939-1945, #Lomax, #World War, #Eric
We were kept in our cells almost all the time. The only interruption to this incarceration was that on most days, at different times, the cell doors were opened for a form of roll call. We were each required to call out our numbers, and we all managed this except Bill Smith. Sometimes someone else would call out his number for him; sometimes he would reply 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star', which the warders seemed to find acceptable.
The main events apart firom this were the delivery of the so-called meals three times a day. Each consisted of rice and tea, or at least a quantity of slightly discoloured hot water which looked like tea. This was our main fluid intake for the day, and thirst usually preceded it by many hours. The rice came in a large aluminium bowl, the tea in a small enamel dish. The other big moment was the handing out of the latrine bucket to a squad of prisoners supervised by guards, and the return of the bucket, emptied and washed, later in the morning.
One morning, at last, Fred and I were taken out of the cell apparently for some purpose other than the roll call. When we reached the open yard at the end of D Block we realized that we were here for exercise, but what we saw was a glimpse of the underworld. In the yard were about twenty prisoners, most of them apparently unable to walk. Some lay flat out; some were crawling on their hands and knees. Several were totally naked. Almost all had one thing in common: they were living skeletons, with ribs and bones protruding from shrunken flesh. Since we had not seen ourselves in a mirror or looked objectively at each other for a long time, it was a terrible shock to realize that we must look like these damned creatures - or soon would. One man was blown up like a balloon, his face so inflated that his features were unrecognizable. This was what advanced beri-beri looked like, while others seemed to have the disease in earlier or less severe forms, but still with dreadfril body swelling. Their skins were raw, pustular and peeling; some men were covered in angry scabby patches. We thought these tragic figures must be British and Australian, but they were almost beyond recognition.
Fred and I were told to join a small group of nearly naked prisoners, who were being exercised by a Japanese soldier. The exercises consisted only of standing still and waving our arms about, by number, in response to the instructions 'ich, ni, san, shi, go, rok, shich, hach', and periodically walking around in a circle. The six of us from Kanburi were in better shape than those POWs who had been any length of time in Outram Road, and we hardly felt robust. Very occasionally, when we were out in that yard, we were allowed to have a wash. There were taps in the walls of the yard; there were buckets, but it was forbidden to touch them without orders. So these filthy, scabrous men walked or crawled within a few feet of the water that could have cleaned and eased them even a little.
Without my cellmate, a sight like this might have destroyed me. But Fred Smith was an absolute hero, and I have never forgotten him. I can still quote his army number from memory: 1071124. He was an incredibly fit, strong man, shorter than me but very sturdy, and he survived the cumulative mistreatments astonishingly well. He could never understand why, although he had been interrogated three times at Kanburi, he had not been tortured or beaten. So certain did it seem that he was going to get what Thew had been given that Lance had passed him his short puttees, and he had wrapped the strips of cloth around his body under his shirt to make a thin barrier against the pick-helves; but perhaps because some Japanese officer decided that a mere artilleryman could not be central to the conspiracy of signals and ordnance officers which they had imagined for us, Fred never had to test his cotton armour.
Fred was a good and considerate companion. His father had been an engine driver - the irony was lost on me at the time - at Stewart's Lane rail depot in south London. He had grown up around there, and just before being posted to Singapore had been assigned to the Coastal Battery at Pembroke Dock, in West Wales. Because he was an artillerjonan, a regular soldier with experience of coastal guns, he had been sent to help man the mythic 15-inchers on the southern coast of Singapore Island. He would talk about his wife and son, and his worries about his wife's neglect of his son, and I detected some bitter suspicion of his wife's fidehty beneath the coded language men used in wartime about their loved ones.
Fred was an uneducated working-class man, a 'rough diamond' in the language of the day, but in the situation we found ourselves in rank and class counted for nothing. Character, decency and loyalty counted for more than previous good fortune or the possession of a commission. Fred was simply a good man. (Only once, in all my time at Outram Road, did I ever pull rank. I told two characters to stop arguing with each other, afraid that they would draw down the Japanese guards and pay heavily for their irritation and boredom. They ignored me. It would take more than an officer to put a lid on the anger these men were forced to swallow every day.)
We looked after each other as best we could, and watched each other's physical deterioration careftilly; but the only physical weakness that I can remember Fred ever revealing, despite the thin starvation rations and the filth, was a terrible boil on his back, below his shoulders and out of reach of his hands. It got so bad that I kept showing it to the guards, and it became a huge angry red swelling threatening to poison Fred's blood. One day, without warning, a Japanese man came importantly into our cell clutching a naked razor-blade, the kind used for shaving. This was the medical orderly. He looked at Fred's back with as much interest as he would have devoted to a cockroach and ordered him to lie flat on his stomach. With a swift gesture he cut an X into the abscess. Blood and pus spurted on to the wall and floor of the cell. Fred didn't make a sound.
The worst new enemy which we faced, even compared to the dirt and hunger, was perhaps the most formidable of all: silence. It was often absolute. There could be a sick, deadly hush throughout the entire prison, so quiet that you could hear the metallic twisting of a key in a lock echoing up the levels to the long roof. A warder's boots would make a booming sound on the stone floor, and I would be afraid that the sound of a whisper would carry all the way along to him.
For they were serious about their decree of silence. It seemed particularly sadistic to make us share a cell and forbid us to speak to each other and at the same time deprive us of books and distractions of any kind. There was precisely nothing to do in that room.
Sometimes the slot would fall open when we were talking quietly and a voice would shout at us in Japanese to shut up; at other times the door would be thrown back and a guard rush in, his sheathed sword whipping down on our heads and shoulders like a hard rod, the shock worsened by fear that the blade of the sword was only a thickness of leather away from slicing us apart.
By listening to the sound of the warder's fading footsteps or hearing their voices we could tell when we were more or less safe for a few minutes, and talk in low tones. We worked out what the arrangements were for warders' shifts and meal-breaks, and learned to tell where they were from the strength of the sound their feet made on the floor. Our hearing seemed to grow more acute in the silence. Before long, we were able to identify each warder by his footsteps. We seldom found out their names, instead identifying each by some nickname: Horseface, or Mary - a guard who we thought effeminate for his very quiet feet, who we hated. He was one of those who wore rubber-soled boots to deaden the sound of his coming.
We were here because we had broken a taboo on listening to forbidden words, and their ban on talking had an obscene apmess about it, whether they were aware of it or not. We had survived two years in the camps only by endless talk; and our need to know what was happening around us was now greater than ever.
When we were taken to work we were usually on different squads, in different areas, and so Fred and I could swap notes of the snatches of whispered conversation we had had, and talk about what we had seen. Everyone on these work-details was trying as hard as possible to talk to everyone else, and the regime of silence was undermined by these countless small dialogues.
Our conversation was necessarily about our most immediate surroundings. Who has been moved into the cell down the corridor? What are people being made to work on now? Who are those new arrivals? Is Bill at death's door? Why is a prisoner sitting bolt upright in a bath out in the yard at the end of the block?
Piecing together information, very slowly, very gradually, was like rubbing at a dirty window with a tiny rag, making blurred peepholes that allowed us to catch glimpses of the world outside D Block, but also confirmed to us how bad our situation was, how dangerous it was to be in Outram Road at all. We did not know what the death rate was, but we knew that some people had got out and had never been seen again. Nobody knew where they went to, whether there was an even worse cell somewhere -underground in the dark, perhaps - or whether they were murdered. All we knew for certain was that we were living with risk day after day in this vast tomb.
By the middle of December 1943 we had established that Outram Road consisted of parallel blocks, and that the military section occupied two of them, Blocks C and D; beyond a very high wall were the other blocks, which were being run by the Japanese Army as a prison for civilians, for what crimes we could not then imagine. As far as we could tell, there were about thirty prisoners in our block. The infallible indication that a cell was occupied was its inclusion in the list for a latrine-bucket visit in the morning. Everyone in the block seemed to have been convicted by Japanese court martials of 'anti-Japanese offences' ranging from escape attempts and sabotage to more spectacular crimes. The rumour was that one man was here for attempting to steal an aircraft and fly it towards Allied territory.
We also discovered that in the past some men in our block had become so ill that they had died quietly in their cells, from a combination of disease, brutality and starvation. And still the most tantalizing information was that occasionally prisoners who were on the point of death were sent away from the gaol altogether. The best rumour was that they were sent to Changi, to a special hospital there. The other rumours came to seem less important, remote probabilities compared to the certainty that nothing could be worse than where we were.
If it seems absurd to send prisoners to gaol, what our captors were in fact doing was consigning us to a lower circle of hell. This was a place in which the living were turned into ghosts, starved, diseased creatures wasted down to their skeletal outlines.
But as always, whether on the railway or in the camps, there were people who were humane enough to take risks to help us. Some of the Japanese prison staff tried to do nothing to add to our squalor and unhappiness. I remember that the same Gunso who had guarded us before our trial in Bangkok ended up in Outram Road shortly after we arrived, and that he personally removed my splints when the bones of my arms seemed to be set.
They took away my long spoon but only after I had assured him that I could manage without it. But some of his colleagues were bored, slovenly and brutal Japanese private soldiers. They were randomly abusive, and could beat us at will for minor or imagined infractions of the rules. There was a good deal of this casual violence.
Among the warders, we were astonished to discover that there were two men who appeared to be English. Before long they identified themselves in whispers through our door-slot as Penrod Dean, an Australian Army officer and John O'Malley, a British signalman. They had been among the first POWs to be sent to Outram Road and had been nominated by the Japanese as tobansj or trusties. They collected food from the kitchens, making deliveries to the cells and collecting the empty dishes. So far as was practicable they looked after the interests of the prisoners, slipping us extra rations or insistently bringing illness to the attention of the indifferent guards, at least making it more difficult for them to ignore us. I saw O'Malley carry paralysed men into the sunshine of the exercise yard in a desperate attempt to keep them alive, cradling those frail creatures of skin and bone in his own emaciated arms.
But there was very little a toban could do in the face of such systematic neglect. We had no toothbrushes, for example; my teeth were ruined by the middle of 1944. We were allowed no shaving kit either. A month or so after we arrived we were taken for a haircut. A Japanese barber set up outside a cell on the ground floor and every prisoner in turn was ordered to sit in front of him. He grasped my neck in his left hand and took up a large set of clippers in his right, and started snipping the hair on the nape of my neck, working the clippers around and up and across my head in a single movement, down my sideburns to my beard which showered its wirier hair on to the softer filaments of my head, never lifting the clippers once. I could feel the cold metal bumping on my exposed skull, which felt as fragile as an egg. It was like being shorn by a skilful, rough sheep-farmer. That shave was the only regular hygienic attention we received.
In return we were expected to do irregular work. There was no pattern to it, because I think that they wanted us to spend as much time as possible in blank isolation. The work could involve floor-washing, gardening, carrying firewood to the cookhouse or - the task we dreaded most - cleaning the Japanese toilets. The condition of those rows of holes was appalling. There is something unbearably sickening about cleaning other men's ordure.
Or else they would ask us to shift 100 kg sacks of rice, which was crippling work for men in our condition. But the most bizarre task was one that allowed a group of us to stay together for a while in the sunshine out in the yard. The guards produced a great heap of rusty and extremely dirty army equipment which we suspected had either been stored in the open or had been salvaged from a ship. There were mess-tins, and buckets and containers of all kinds, caked in rust and dirt. Our job was to clean all these and restore them to pristine beauty. The trouble was that the only tools we were given were large rusty nails, bits of wire and handftils of earth. With these primitive resources the Japanese expected sparkling results.
A dozen prisoners were gathered in the open, sitting on concrete under a lean-to attap roof that deflected the fierce heat a little. We sat cross-legged, hunched over the filthy utensils. If somebody looked sideways instead of down, a guard would lean over and punch him in the face.
Even under these circumstances we managed, with care, to talk. I had always been close to Mackay, and we sat beside each other while we scraped junk metal with wire in the hope that gleams of steel would start to appear beneath the grime. For much of the time we worked naked, partly to try to get fresh air around our unwashed and itching bodies and partly because we had very little to wear anyway. One day I noticed that Mac, who had been a well-built man, had become so thin that his anus stuck out like a short pipe.
I then discovered that I could close my hand around my own upper arm and that my stomach was very close to my spine; there seemed to be no solid body on me anywhere. My ribs were sticking out. I asked Mac how I looked, and he said that I looked like a skeleton with skin stretched over it. I had become one of the living dead who had so frightened me when I first came to Outram Road. I knew then that I was close to death, and that I had to get out of Outram Road at all costs.
It wasn't only the decline in my physical condition that led me, eventually, to take the risk of making myself deliberately worse so that they would have to move me. The balance of probabilities seemed just to be in favour of the assumption that they were not quietly murdering the sick prisoners, and I convinced myself that the percentage prospect of survival if I stayed was virtually nil; but this rationalism was beside the point: beyond reason or calculation, I wanted out of this place.
Certain events weakened me, but toughened my resolve. Early on, on Christmas Day 1943, I was given a fish head with my evening rice. I ate the head, but I could not manage to eat the eyes. They lay on my plate, little tough jellies staring up at me. I longed then for the winter feast of northern Europe, for my family and for my mother in particular, and the contrast between my memories of them and this tropical black hole was acutely depressing.
I found a definition for 'hunger' when I was sent on a rare errand without a guard to take an empty pan to the cookhouse, and as I was walking through the main hall I saw a single grain of rice on a cell doorstep. I went over and picked it up and ate it.
Then there was the itch. We were used to diseases of the skin, which were rampant in the camps because of the lack of soap, but this was an itch the like of which neither Fred nor I had encountered before. The slightest touch on one's skin produced an urge to scratch savagely. To succumb to this temptation was disastrous, and made the itch worse than ever, so we sat motionless with our skins on fire.
The itch developed into a horrible skin condition, perhaps an extreme form of scabies. Each of us in turn found little pimples appearing on our skin. To begin with they were clear and transparent; then the clear liquid turned into yellow pus, the pimples burst, erupted and the fluid dried into horrible yellow scabs. Picking them off meant losing a patch of skin. I myself lost every inch of skin on my body with the curious exception of the skin on my face and the tips of my fingers and toes. Worse still, as fast as one picked off the scabs new eruptions appeared. Those men who were too ill and weak to move and were unable to do anything for themselves gradually became encased in a brownish-yellow crust of pus, a spectacle that still wakes me at night, the nausea still fresh.
O'Malley and one or two others voluntarily took on the task of cleaning up the most helpless men by patiently picking off the encrusted scabs and washing their bodies in cold water. What they did deserves the adjective 'heroic' as much as bravery under fire.
Partly as a result of their efforts, the Japanese began to take note of the disease. A liquid which they described as 'creosote' was brought into the block in large containers, and they produced a few metal tubs. Those of us who were badly infected were allowed to have what was almost a bath, our first in several months, though still without soap, in the yard outside the block. I sat in a tub for hours. It did not noticeably improve my skin, but the feel of the water lapping around me was worth the pretence.
When the 'creosote' did not work, the Japanese administration gave us a paste or ointment which looked suspiciously like saddle-soap. We were told to strip and to coat every inch of our bodies with the ointment, telling ourselves that at least it might suffocate the tiny maggots or whatever it was that was causing the trouble. Perhaps it did; or perhaps the epidemic had run its course, for the disease slackened off soon afterwards.
By the end of April 1944 my three British fellow-officers. Bill Smith, Jim Slater and Morton Mackay were all seriously ill, and Harry Knight, the Australian major, looked no better. When I caught glimpses of them I was terrified for all of us. Only Fred Smith seemed to retain some strength despite the starvation diet. The guards sent a stretcher party one day and removed three of the others, but left Fred, Harry and me. The fact that we could totter across a yard must have excluded us. I was now the only officer left in the entire block, apart from Knight.
The old anxiety and fear surged back with renewed force. Although we had a sentence, we could not imagine this term of imprisonment coming to an end. The uncertainty was gross and desperately stressful. We didn't think we could survive years of this, and even if we did there was no guarantee of being 'released' into anything but a larger and perhaps relatively more humane prison camp. We were prisoners within a world that was itself a prison. That larger sentence of servitude was completely indeterminate, for who could say when the war would end? And if the Japanese won it, what would they do to us?
I found this uncertainty particularly difficult. I was afflicted with the strange combination of a vivid imagination and a need to locate myself exactly, to be sure of where I was and where I was going - I had the character of a mapmaker, a listmaker, of one who knew about dates and classes and varieties. Being thrown into the pit and not knowing whether I could ever find a ladder to climb out of it did me no good at all. Without reading, writing or bearings of any kind I felt that I was living through the end of whatever time had been given to me; the delirium of the last days was closing in.
We could not measure time, let alone occupy it. Our time was now entirely theirs. We could identify Sundays because the guards took time off on Sundays, and O'Malley or Penrod Dean could sometimes identify the hour or date for us, but that was never enough. When the evening came, there were twelve hours of utter emptiness to get through. Outside it was dark; inside, the electric light was on continuously. During those long nights I sharpened my desperation to get out, even though it felt like jumping firom a window in the dark, not knowing where I might land. And in the end, I used time itself against them.
They gave me my chance when they took the unprecedented step of separately identifying extremely sick men and classifying them as 'byoki'. They were then placed in a group of cells on the ground floor furthest firom the door of the block.
I had discovered that I could drive up my pulse rate by deep and accelerated breathing, so producing a state that frightened my cellmate and even me; and that there was one exception to our complete lack of any means of measuring time. In very still and very quiet conditions the faint chimes of a clock somewhere in the distance could be heard, though it was a long time before I was aware of it. I imagined it as a public clock on some tower, for it struck the quarters as well as the hours.
