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By Root 1711 0

Dupler for a time, pressing on him half a can of Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk that he had stolen from a Batavia dock and saved for an extreme occasion just such as this. Dupler wouldn’t take it. Although he had the physical strength to take command of his own survival, his mind wouldn’t permit it. On May 14, within twelve hours of that decision, he passed away. “He had tried to be tough with the guards at work and had been beaten into submission,” Dr. Fisher said. “His spirit had been broken and life, to a man who prided himself on toughness, was no longer worthwhile.” In Dupler’s service records maintained by the Americans while on the railway, Dr. Lumpkin listed two causes of death in addition to chronic bacillary dysentery: The first was “psychopathia psychasthenia,” a neurotic state characterized by phobias, obsessions, or compulsions that one knows to be irrational. The second was “anorexia nervosa.”

Sergeant Dupler was buried on May 15 by six American pallbearers, with Dr. Epstein the only U.S. officer able to attend. Brigadier Varley’s Australians presented a wreath made from jungle leaves and red flowers.

The deaths of Sergeants Dupler and Lusk showed that physical strength had limits set by the mind. “They were some of the biggest, strongest guys,” said John Wisecup, who belonged to that class himself. “They should never have died. There’s no way to explain it—why they did this. They just lost the will to live.”

CHAPTER 42

After Sergeant Dupler died it was a short eight days before the heavens opened up and did not close. Anvil-shaped cumulus clouds had been seen over the mountain ridges now and again through April. In early May intermittent rains began. Locals called them the bamboo rains. “It is as if the Wet were a baying animal impatiently waiting over the horizon to be unleashed,” Ray Parkin wrote. “Every so often now it has sprung over the mountains, snarled at us, and been hauled back again.” Even from his headquarters at Thanbyuzayat, Brigadier Varley could sense the cataclysm soon to be produced by the collision of the Japanese will to complete the line with the onset of the monsoon and the rampant contagion he knew it would bring. “The J. will carry out schedule and do not mind if the line is dotted with crosses,” he wrote in a long diary entry on May 18, 1943. Four days later the rains came at them with their full fury.

Even the Texans had no frame of reference for the violent meteorological manifestation of the southern equatorial winter, the South Asian monsoon. The zone of turmoil produced by the collision of the southern and northern trade winds meandered on a twice-a-year frequency between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. The stretch of hemisphere from northern Australia to southern Asia became spectacularly volatile during the season the Australians called “the Wet.” Starting in the third week of May, the rains came and didn’t stop until the entirety of the railway, from Thanbyuzayat to Ban Pong, had been soaked through and nearly submerged by the weight of a storm that had no beginning, middle, or end but simply was.

The monsoon arrived and settled over them and simply stayed there, burying them in water. It was a driving deluge that would not relent until October, pouring without letup for fifty-four days and nights. Such a period of time takes discrete shape only in retrospect, and hindsight erases the demoralizing feeling of permanence that the monsoon carried with it during its peak. Rain was not an occasion. No one talked about the coming and going of storms, about Mother Nature’s wrath. “I don’t remember any storms,” said Howard Brooks. “I just remember rain pouring down in torrents.”

The monsoon season transformed the landscape. Creeks became streams and streams became rivers, their volume and velocity increasing alarmingly fast. “Within the first day and then with ever-mounting zeal,” Rohan Rivett wrote, “it widened the muddy rivers until they began to spread prodigiously and climb their jungle-fringed banks; dominating and assertive, it intruded on every