The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [50]
On the fourth day we trooped on again. More and more men were dropping back and being left behind to die. It was noticeable now that the column was shrinking. No one tried to boost morale by song, banter or otherwise. Our spirits were broken. We just kept plodding along, praying it would end soon and that we would get better conditions. We all stank to high heaven. There was no escaping it but after a while we became used to it, like families who live beside fish markets. The Japanese probably did not smell as badly as us since they often bathed in the river. We tried not to get close enough to them to check. Our collective stench most likely increased their already ample disgust for us.
Allowing oneself to be relegated to the status of prisoner, to fall into the arms of the enemy, was highly dishonourable in the Japanese soldiers’ minds. In their distorted view of the world death was a more admirable option. The simple peasants who formed the backbone of the Japanese Army had been thoroughly indoctrinated by their fascist leaders. Like their German allies they were a chosen race, a superior people. They were ‘the sons of heaven’ and we were decadent and effeminate weaklings. Lacking the Wagnerian and Teutonic mythology that cloaked Nazi ideology, the Japanese militarists wrapped their aggressive bid for racial domination in the ancient code of bushido to legitimise it with the Japanese people. Under this samurai code Japanese soldiers committed hara-kiri when captured, undertook suicidal banzai charges and, as kamikaze pilots, crashed into enemy ships.
For us prisoners bushido, the so-called ‘Way of the Warrior’, gave the guards a licence to murder, maim and torture. The only thing more despicable to them than a prisoner was a sick prisoner, as we first discovered on our death march.
In the months to come many thousands of prisoners would follow in our footsteps and this jungle trail would claim hundreds more lives.
That night we stopped again at a village. We were fed rice, spicy stew and water, before sleeping where we sat. I slept much better, either becoming accustomed to the jungle sounds or just too dog-tired to care.
We went on our way again in the morning. We hauled our sick men along by their arms, their toes dragging in the dirt. My fears of being massacred had long subsided. If they were going to do it, they would have done so by now. I believed that we were being taken to work as slaves on something.
By now covered in scabies and lice, I had been struck down again by the dreaded malaria. As the protozoan parasites raged through my bloodstream, my spleen became tender and enlarged. Walking became ever more difficult and I stumbled more often than not. Some men, whom I had helped earlier on in the journey, gave me blankets to break the fever and to stop the rigors that shook my body like a man possessed.
We walked all day and through the next night, stopping only for brief respites beside the track. It was a final push by the Japanese to get us to our destination, whatever it was, inside six days. Whether there was a date we had to arrive by, I was unsure. It appeared that the soldiers wanted us moving at double-time, rush or not. In the late afternoon, after we had been trudging for around thirty-two hours, we arrived at our final destination – we had completed a 160-kilometre trek.
It took some time for us to comprehend that we had made it, that this small, sparse clearing in the middle of the jungle was ‘it’, the ultimate objective of our eleven-day journey. There was nothing here, not a single hut. On one side of the