The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (30 page)

From Ban Pong to Kanburi for thirty miles the line runs through villages and more fiat rich land, even a few factories with their own sidings: a use has been found for this section of the railway, at least. As the mountains rose up wooded and indistinct in the haze, we reached Kanburi. The big railway workshops have disappeared like everything else, and I stared at the nearly empty sidings as though I could make some evidence appear, but I saw none.

Out in front of the station, on a deserted piece of track, stood a magnificent old locomotive. It was a Garratt, an engine legendary for its mighty hauling power in the last decades of steam, a giant handsome workhorse with two sets of eight-coupled wheels; why it had been placed here I couldn't imagine, but it had the aura of a great piece of human effort and it awakened all the old passion in me. The big Garratt's iron strength looked fragile against the green of the trees and plants aroimd it in this hot, damp weather, the sheer power of the forest which had so appalled Nagase when he was searching for graves in 1945. There is some fatal sadness about these machines in the tropics: they embody so much failure and tragedy, and decaying beauty.

A short run beyond Kanburi brought us to the platform at the River Kwae Bridge; the train was longer than die platform, so we got down on to the track itself and walked beside it, next to the dried and oil-stained timber of the sleepers. The heat was ferocious and the smell of diesel rose up from the track. We came to a broad area in front of an open level-crossing which leads on to the bridge. The engine, its siren blasting, growled across the bridge, the seven coaches slowly moving through the girders of the eleven spans set on their concrete piers, and then the train disappeared westwards towards the mountains. Silence rose up, and was gradually drowned by the noise of lorries and motorcycles resuming their journeys as the level-crossing opened again. The bridge piers in the brown muddy water were cracked and pitted by the fragments of bombs dropped in 1944, when the US Army Air Force damaged the bridge. They looked as though they had not been touched for fifty years.

We booked into a hotel across the river from the town, and had lunch in the River Kwae Restaurant, where we met Tida Loha, its remarkable proprietor. She had had the generosity and imagination to give Nagase a plot of land next to the bridge so that he could build his temple of peace, and she is an astute and diplomatic woman. She has met many ex-POWs and Japanese ex-servicemen over the years, and knows a great deal about the fierce hatreds that were played out between strangers in her town during the war.

Time was now running out. Nagase and I had arranged to meet in the morning, on the opposite side of the bridge near the little museum devoted to the railway, and I could not bear to alter the arrangement even a little, so that when he and his wife arrived at his hotel at six in the evening instead of at midnight, as planned, there was a kind of panic. Ian Kerr, an associate of the Medical Foundation who had come to the meeting in case there was a crisis, saved me from having to stay in my own room, a prisoner once again in Kanburi, by taking Patti and me out for dinner, to a floating restaurant where I played with a friendly cat and tried to forget about the next day. It was late when we went to bed.

In the morning we crossed to the other side of the river and walked up the steps to a broad veranda overlooking the bridge. I sat down to watch and wait. I was dressed rather formally in a shirt and slacks, and wore a Sutherland tartan tie - surely the only tie for miles around. The sun was climbing and the air was oppressively hot, though it was not yet nine in the morning.

From about a hundred yards away I saw him walk out on to the bridge; he could not see me. It was important for me to have this last momentary advantage over him; it prepared me, even now that I no longer wanted to hurt him. I walked about a hundred yards to an open square, a kind of courtyard overlooking the river, where we had arranged to meet.

A huge smiling figure of Buddha dominated the courtyard and as I sat down I realized that there was another benign presence throwing a shadow on to the wide expanse of terrace: a carefully preserved locomotive, a veteran of the Royal Siamese Railway, built in Glasgow, I noticed, in the year of my birth. This exquisite relic could have come from a brightly-lit dream, with me sitting on an empty square, a silent steam engine close at hand, waiting for something to happen.

He came on to the terrace, walking past the engine. I had forgotten how small he was, a tiny man in an elegant straw hat, loose kimono-like jacket and trousers. From a distance he resembled an oriental carving, some benign wizened demon come to life. He carried a shapeless blue cotton shoulder bag. As he came closer I could see that he wore around his throat beads of dark red stone on a thick string. I remembered him saying to me again and again 'Lomax, you will tell us', other phrases he had recited in the voice I hated so much . . .

He began a formal bow, his face working and agitated, the small figure barely reaching my shoulder. I stepped forward, took his hand and said ' Ohayo gozaimasuj Nagase san, ogenkidesu kaT 'Good morning, Mr Nagase, how are you?'

He looked up at me; he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over 1 am very, very sorry . . . ' I somehow took command, led him out of the terrible heat to a bench in the shade; I was comforting him, for he was really overcome. At that moment my capacity for reserve and self-control helped me to help him, murmuring reassurances as we sat down. It was as though I was protecting him firom the force of the emotions shaking his frail-seeming body. I think I said something like 'That's very kind of you to say so' to his repeated expressions of sorrow.

He said to me 'Fifty years is a long time, but for me it is a time of suffering. I never forgot you, I remember your face, especially your eyes.' He looked deep into my eyes when he said this. His own face still looked like the one I remembered, rather fine-featured, with dark and slightly hidden eyes; his wide mouth was still noticeable beneath cheeks that had sunken inwards.

I told him that I could remember his very last words to me. He asked what they were and laughed when I said 'Keep your chin up.'

He asked if he could touch my hand. My former interrogator held my arm, which was so much larger than his, stroking it quite unselfconsciously. I didn't find it embarrassing. He gripped my wrist with both of his hands and told me that when I was being tortured - he used the word - he measured my pulse. I remembered he had written this in his memoir. Yet now that we were face to face, his grief seemed far more acute than mine. 'I was a member of Imperial Japanese Army; we treated your countrymen very, very badly.' 'We both survived', I said encouragingly, really believing it now.

A little later, I'm sure he said: Tor what purpose were you bom in this world? I think I can die safely now.'

He asked me if I remembered the 'bath house' where I was tortured. I had to admit I couldn't recall it; he said that there was an episode between the shouting in the room and the drowning with the hosepipe in the yard, when they took me into some sort of bathroom and filled a metal tub, and the Kempei Gunso held my head underneath the water. 'You remember big can?' Nagase asked, making a round shape with his hands. I had to take his word for it. I told him that I did certainly remember the Gunso's wooden ruler banging on the desk, and that I didn't like him very much. Nagase agreed that he was 'a very rough man'.

It's impossible to remember everything we talked about, but we sat there so long that the sun moved right around and we were no longer in the shade. (Patti told me later that she was having a sharp argument in the background with a journalist who spotted a story on the terrace and was trying to photograph us; I never heard a thing.) The content of our conversation hardly mattered. We laughed a lot, after a while, and were happy in each other's company. I can recall snatches of what we said quite clearly, especially some of his quaint phrases, and have an impression of the rest.

At one point Nagase suddenly began talking about my map. He reminded me that I'd tried to tell him I had a sketch of the line 'because you are mania of railway', as he put it. *I tried to believe it,' he said, 'but at that time in Japan railway mania was not so popular.' Then he said that he knew we had every kind of'mania' in our country and had tried to persuade the Gunso that I was not the leader of the group. I pointed out that the Gunso hadn't believed me anyway, and Nagase said that they had wanted a spy; they could not understand otherwise where we had found the makings of a radio, and were obsessed with preventing contacts between us and civilians. He himself had, as I suspected, searched prisoners' belongings at Singapore when they were leaving for Ban Pong and the north.

He asked where I had hidden the map in the Sakamoto Butai; it had always puzzled him why they failed to find it when they searched the huts. I explained that it was in a hollow bamboo in the wall of the latrine and that the American-speaking interpreter had only found it later when I'd been reckless enough to hide it in my kit. Nagase spoke of 'that fellow's' suffering as a 'minority man' in America before the war, and how he had a 'hard mind towards the white man'.

He told me what he had done in the last year of the war after he had recovered from his malaria: translating propaganda leaflets dropped by our planes, patrolling the perimeter of the camps searching for spies and parachutists, generally appeasing the futile hunger for information of a defeated empire; he spent a lot of time hiding from bombers and fearful of treading on delayed-action bombs.

He wanted to know if Captain Komai, who was held responsible for the deaths of Hawley and Armitage, had beaten us personally; he had met his son a few years eariier. I said that I thought he had probably done so, but I couldn't be sure. Nagase assumed that I had been tortured again at Outram Road, and I had to explain that there are rare occasions when overt torture is not the worst punishment. He was kind enough to say that compared to my sufifering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too. 'Various sufferings, various sufferings in my heart and mind . . . ' He told me how he had studied history and become totally opposed to militarism; about his wife, Yoshiko, who was quite wealthy, about his English-language school and her teaching of the tea ceremony.

Later that morning we went into the museum next to the terrace. The long rooms were stiflingly hot. Laid out on the floor were rusty chains which had been used to move the wooden sleepers; a few spikes; some ropes and saws. There was a set of big rusty iron hooks - couplings for goods vans - and a few of the little four-wheeled bogies used to push more and more heavy timber and iron up the line and on to the backs of already-exhausted men. They looked insignificant lying there, the wheels jammed with rust and useless except to remind people what had been done with them. The big iron cooking vessels, called kwalis, of the kind we used for cooking rice when I was mess officer were laid out as though for offerings on a long table.

By then we had introduced Mrs Nagase and Mrs Lomax to each other, and they were finding a common language of sympathy and understanding. Nagase said he had often walked past the site of the Kempeitai house when he came to Kanburi, so we decided to go to visit it together. The building has of course been demolished and the site built over. We were driven by Tida Loha, who helps so many of the former POWs who visit Kanburi, and Patti sat in the firont of the car with her. I sat in the back between Nagase and a Japanese firiend of his, and my wife turned around while we were moving through the crowded streets and just looked at us. Our eyes met and we smiled: I knew she was thinking; there I was sitting between two Japanese men on my way back to that place, and all three of us smiling and laughing.

The Kempei house was well and truly gone. The yard where the 'monkey houses' were kept is now occupied by a family dwelling. Places where such things have been done can be wiped out so easily. Torture, after all, is inconspicuous; all it needs is water, a piece of wood and a loud voice. It takes place in squalid rooms, dirty back yards and basements, and there is nothing left to preserve when it is over. Marks on the body can fade quickly too, and it is thanks to people like Helen Bamber that the hidden traces which can't simply be built over are uncovered and brought back into the light.

After our inconsequential return to the place where we had first met, we visited the war memorials. To reach the Allied cemetery at Chungkai we took a long-tailed craft which ripped along the river like a speedboat past reed-beds, cultivated fields and green walls of trees. The heat was amazing. Even the river seemed to be sprouting under it - weeds, lily pads, trailing bits of vegetation. When we alighted we walked through the red-roofed portico and a cool gallery. The traditional legend is picked out on the entrance: 'Their Name Liveth For Ever More'. The vast graveyard is immaculately clean, gardened and swept. Bronze tablets are set into blocks of glittery limestone, shaped like lecterns. Some of the tablets are dedicated simply to 'A Soldier of the 1939-45 War, Known Unto God'. Might the vanished Bill Williamson be lying here unclaimed?

We walked around, Patti and I drifting off together and leaving Nagase and Yoshiko behind. We talked a little, and there was then a moment of doubt; I think I finally expressed, among those lines of graves, a resolution for which I had been searching for years.

The Japanese War Memorial, which POWs were forced to build some time in 1944, is a sadder and more neglected place. A cenotaph now showing blotches of weather and stress was erected in a compound surrounded by low trees; it is ill-kept and deserted. The cenotaph incorporates plaques to the dead of other countries, like an afterthought. Some ex-POWs, who can never forgive, throw stones at the memorial when they come here; the scars are visible on the stained concrete. Mrs Nagase told us that morning that her brother was killed in the last days of the war, somewhere in Burma, one of the many young men who were never given a chance.