Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [167]
From August through November, 226 men were buried at 100 Kilo Camp, and 225 more at 80 Kilo Camp. In the absence of a chaplain, Lieutenant Hamlin read the burial services at 100 Kilo. Funerals became anticlimactic and were usually sparsely attended by the three- or four-man gravedigging crew, a few friends, and an officer. The Houston’s bandmaster, George L. Galyean, was often on hand to blow taps on an old German flugelhorn he had scavenged at Batavia. “They had the bugle going all of the time. Somebody was dying all the time—all the time,” said Roy Offerle, whose older brother Oscar, afflicted with a bad tropical ulcer, died in his arms at 80 Kilo Camp on November 18.
The horrors of 80 Kilo Camp came to an abrupt end when the camp was abolished on December 4 and its sick moved to 105 Kilo Camp, where some Australians were said to have medical supplies. The shifts between railway camps had been so routine that the thought of a final move out of the jungle seemed fantastic. Until transportation could be arranged, the prisoners camped in the sodden deathscape between 84 and 122 Kilo Camps, working as railway maintenance crews. The guards could be heard talking about the move. The prisoners, they said, were once again bound for the “land of milk and honey” promised back in Singapore. The prisoners had long ago learned to be skeptical of the guards’ pronouncements, vague and suspect on the best of days.
While some were chosen to stay in the mountain camps and maintain the railway against erosion and bombing and the varied sabotages of a defiant jungle, most were shipped to camps in western Thailand. Boarding boxcars to ride the narrow-gauge railway themselves, the evacuees thought of their efforts at sabotage, of the soft pilings they had bolted in place and the weak spots in the embankments they had cultivated, and worried those might be the instruments of their own demise. “It was more or less like a Toonerville trolley,” said Gus Forsman. “The boxcars swayed an awful lot, and you wondered—especially when you went across a bridge or something like that—whether it would hold, or whether you were going to go crashing in.”
But Jim Gee, for one, felt blessed. As his train rumbled and squealed its way across the railway’s Thailand branch, he surveyed the starker terrain there and felt fortunate he had worked in Burma rather than Thailand. The other prisoners must have had a horrendous time of it. There were longer and deeper valleys to fill, breathtaking viaducts squeezed onto cliffside shelves along the River Kwae Noi, itself far faster, more voluminous, and treacherous than Burma’s monsoon-fed cataracts. “I think we all came to the conclusion that they had probably the rougher part of it,” Gee said. He took it all in and reflected on his experiences and arrived at a conclusion that only a humble man would make: “We were lucky.” Some of the trestles stood in three tiers, as much as ninety feet high. To the surprise of the passengers, they held. Against all expectation, the hand-made railway functioned.
On November 20, 1943, at 60 Kilo Camp, the steward of Branch Three, Col. Yoshitada Nagatomo, delivered a salute—a pathetically self-justifying one—to the men whose deaths he had presided over during the course of the railway project.
In my opinion it is a virtue since ancient times to pay homage to the souls who have died in war, even though they may be enemies. Moreover, you were under my command, and have endeavoured to work diligently in obedience to my orders, while always longing for the final repatriation to your countries once war is over and when peace is restored…. Now you have passed on to the other world, owing to unavoidable prevailing disease and epidemics and to the indiscriminate enemy bombings, I cannot see you in this world any more. Visualizing your