The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [47]
We travelled on through the night and into a fifth day. By now nobody stood. We lay slumped all over each other on the floor, trying to keep off the sizzling sides. I was at my absolute breaking point. Looking back now more than sixty years later I wonder how we possibly got through it. We were all out of our minds. Great hulking men keened and wept like mourning mothers. Others whispered private prayers over and over. I lay, my head resting on a stranger’s boot, ready to die.
Just before dusk on the fifth day we ground to a halt, the doors rolled back and the Japanese ordered us off. We had arrived at a village, which we were told was Ban Pong. We were in Thailand. Our nine-hundred-mile train journey was over.
Helping some of the sicker men off the train I noticed a young man in his teens, lying at the rear of the carriage. I remembered that earlier in the day he had had respiratory problems, wheezing uncontrollably. There had been nothing we could do to help him. One of the lads jumped back up and tapped the man’s foot.
‘Come on, son, we’re here – at the holiday camp. Let the games begin.’
The youngster remained still.
‘You lazy lout, get up,’ said the helper, a note of desperation in his voice. He crouched down over the stricken youth’s face. The teenager’s lifeless eyes stared back sending his helper recoiling, gasping in horror.
The dead man was lugged off the train. He had probably died of diphtheria, coupled with malaria, dengue fever or dysentery. Some of the prisoners kicked his body into the jungle to decompose alongside the fallen leaves – food for the rats and bugs. I turned my back and walked away. I did not want to see his face and carry that with me; anything that sapped the will to live had to be avoided.
The Japanese officer’s translator told us the train journey was finished. Before we could rejoice too much the interpreter quickly added that we had yet to reach our final destination.
We had a fifty-kilometre march ahead of us. Starting immediately. To be completed that night.
I swayed with shock at the announcement, as if I had been punched in the face.
I had no idea how far a kilometre was but supposed it was further than a mile. In my state I struggled to see how I could possibly make it through dense jungle. I was surprised that I had made it this far. It was a miracle it was not me decomposing in the jungle beside the train tracks.
The Japanese served up the usual meagre helping of rice and water, and gave us a further serving of unsalted, sugarless rice to take with us. I looked at the rice that barely covered the bottom of my mess tin, wondering how long it would be before I had the chance to eat it. It had already begun to ferment in the heat. All I wanted to do was to eat it, lie down and let death take me. The thought of a march through thick jungle, in darkness, was overwhelming and I sobbed quietly to myself as guards struck us with bamboo sticks and, shouting ‘Marchee, marchee!’, assembled us into a long column. During the six days that followed it would shorten considerably.
About six hundred prisoners – diseased, vermininfested and at our lowest ebb – began that march. A handful of Japanese guards and officers organised the line and led us into the jungle. Those prisoners who had brought with them all of their kit and clung to it so tenaciously during the train journey, now ditched all non-essentials. We hastily fashioned stretchers from bamboo poles and blankets or rice sacks, and loaded on them those unable to walk. We were entrusted with carrying the sick. It was a Herculean task. All of us were walking wounded really and in such a decrepit state that we decided to take turns carrying the invalids.
Trudging north from the railway, leaving behind our last glimpse of civilisation, we started our death march. In the bright moonlight we traipsed into the virgin jungle along a crudely cut path that swarmed thickly with mosquitoes. The Japanese must have prepared the trail for us beforehand but it was only about five feet in width and for the