The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [116]
Colonel Moore had stared down at the Japanese officer. Sakata must have been a foot shorter than himself, but after that twenty-eight-day march the British soldier couldn’t have weighed much more than the diminutive major.
Moore’s first act on leaving the commandant’s office was to call together all the Allied officers. He discovered there was a good cross-section from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, but few could have been described as fit. Men were dying daily from malaria, dysentery, and malnutrition. He was suddenly aware what the expression “dying like flies” meant.
The colonel learned from his staff officers that for the previous two years of the camp’s existence, they had been ordered to build bamboo huts for the Japanese officers. These had had to be completed before they had been allowed to start on a hospital for their own men, and only recently huts for themselves. Many prisoners had died during those two years, not from illness but from the atrocities some Japanese perpetrated on a daily basis. Major Sakata, known because of his skinny arms as “Chopsticks,” was, however, not considered to be the villain. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Takasaki (“the Undertaker”), and Sergeant Ayut (“the Pig”) were of a different mold and to be avoided at all costs, his men warned him.
It took the colonel only a few days to discover why.
He decided his first task was to try to raise the battered morale of his troops. As there was no padre among those officers who had been captured, he began each day by conducting a short service of prayer. Once the service was over the men would start work on the railway that ran alongside the camp. Each arduous day consisted of laying tracks to help Japanese soldiers get to the front more quickly, so they could in turn kill and capture more Allied troops. Any prisoner suspected of undermining this work was found guilty of sabotage and put to death without trial. Lieutenant Takasaki considered taking an unscheduled five-minute break to be sabotage.
At lunch prisoners were allowed twenty minutes off to share a bowl of rice—usually with maggots—and, if they were lucky, a mug of water. Although the men returned to the camp each night exhausted, the colonel still set about setting up squads to be responsible for the cleanliness of their huts and the state of the latrines.
After only a few months, the colonel was able to arrange a football match between the British and the Americans, and following its success even set up a camp league. But he was even more delighted when the men turned up for karate lessons under Sergeant Hawke, a thick-set Australian, who had a black belt and for good measure also played the harmonica. The tiny instrument had survived the march through the jungle but everyone assumed it would be discovered before long and confiscated.
Each day Moore renewed his determination not to allow the Japanese to believe for one moment that the Allies were beaten—despite the fact that while he was at Tonchan he lost another twenty pounds in weight, and at least one man under his command every day.
To the colonel’s surprise the camp commandant, despite the Japanese national belief that any soldier who allowed himself to be captured ought to be treated as a deserter, did not place too many unnecessary obstacles in his path.
“You are like the British bullfrog,” Major Sakata suggested one evening as he watched the colonel carving cricket bails out of bamboo. It was one of the rare occasions when the colonel managed a smile.
His real problems continued to come from Lieutenant Takasaki and his henchmen, who considered captured Allied prisoners fit only to be considered as traitors. Takasaki was always careful how he treated the colonel personally, but felt no such reservations when dealing with the other ranks, with the result that Allied soldiers often ended up with their meager rations confiscated, a rifle butt in the stomach, or even left bound to a tree for days on end.