The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [49]
The villagers served up rice, some boiled water and an extremely spicy vegetable stew. It was delicious but it played havoc with my bowels, instantly sending me running for the jungle. Luckily I managed to do my business without getting a beating and returned to my spot. Around me the POWs were scattered like the aftermath of a mass failed parachute jump. Men lay at all angles, some of them moaning softly, others already asleep. We were told that we would spend the night here so should conserve energy and sleep. I wondered how many ‘kilometres’ we had travelled and how far we had ahead of us. Those terrible thoughts somehow sent me gratefully into a deep sleep there in the dirt – not giving a second thought to the cobras, kraits and vipers we had been warned about in training.
Through the night I kept waking up with a start. The jungle had come alive. A whole new populace claimed the darkness. Around us echoed strange and terrible sounds – wolf-like howls and a clack-clack-clack that I took for a type of woodpecker. The din produced by crickets, bullfrogs, monkeys and all manner of creatures rose to such a crescendo that it was impossible to sleep soundly. I half expected a man-eating tiger to come and take me.
When I woke in the morning my body ached all over. I stood and almost yelped with pain and stiffness. I was covered in the rich jungle soil. It caked us all from head to toe. The Japanese had awoken with renewed vigour and demanded an even quicker pace today, screaming in our faces, ‘Speedo, speedo!’ and beating us on. I put my head down and trudged on, fixing my eyes on the back of the sad chap in front of me, not really taking anything in. My mind was switched firmly on to autopilot. I was so out of it that my brain had shut down and was reduced to survival mode. I wondered if it were possible to sleep with your eyes open.
We followed a river for most of the march. I would later learn it was the Mae Klong, which joined the river Kwai – a vast river that rises in the north-west of Thailand near the Burmese border and flows south for hundreds of miles to drain into the Gulf of Thailand. We kept to the right of its muddy brown expanse, shadowing its winding path. It was as wide as the mighty river Tay in my native Scotland. Even when the Mae Klong was out of sight I could hear its low rumbling. Much as we yearned to we never ventured near enough to sneak a drink from it. But the guards often waded in and bathed, taunting us by splashing each other, laughing and loudly enjoying the relief that the cool waters brought.
As the sun dropped below the horizon like a sinking stone the river left our view. Its distant sound disappeared with the emergence of the myriad of jungle noises. After marching in the dark for some distance the guards ordered us to a halt. We would camp on the path overnight. I ate what was left of the rice in my mess tin and fell asleep. It was to be a long, broken night. I felt sick with dread, wondering what was to come next. The question of a holiday camp was now well and truly ruled out. Even the most optimistic POW realised that we had been conned.
Vivid and disturbing nightmares of the surrender at Fort Canning disrupted what sleep I did manage to get. The raging face of the Japanese soldier who took me prisoner at bayonet point haunted my subconscious. I still have those nightmares to this day and the image of the man’s face is as clear as if it happened yesterday.
I never dared to take my boots and socks off overnight. They would almost certainly have gone missing. Lying there in my