The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [53]
Over sixteen months we would hack our way through hundreds of kilometres of dense jungle, gouge passes through rocky hills, span ravines and cross rivers, building bridges and viaducts with rudimentary tools. It was a huge civil engineering project that would be lubricated with our blood, sweat and tears. But most of all blood.
On starvation rations and with no access to medicines of any kind, we lived in camps buried deep in the remote jungle where Red Cross inspectors or representatives of neutral foreign powers could never find us. A whole army of sixty thousand men had vanished into the jungle at the mercy of our Japanese masters.
On that first morning the guards woke us by rattling canes across the bamboo walls at dawn. It was a sound that would become all too recognisable to us.
‘All men worko! Speedo! Speedo!’
A chorus of ‘Aye, aye,’ rang around the awakening hut. One brave lad replied, ‘Keep your head on you Jap bastard, it’ll be knocked off soon.’ This sort of bravado would fizzle out later when we discovered that many of our guards could understand English.
There was no time, facilities or desire for a wash and shave; it was straight out to form the line for breakfast.
‘Cheer up lads, it’s ham and eggs this morning,’ one prisoner offered from the front.
‘Naw it’s no. It’s porridge the morning,’ said another.
Some of the men in the queue cursed the early-morning jokers for mentioning such fantastic delicacies. Thinking and talking about food had become a form of torture – it just drove you mad. We all knew it would be plain rice, just rice. Just like every other stinking day.
The cooks had already been up for a couple of hours – about the only downside of being a camp cook – to heat two 12-gallon cast-iron saucer-shaped pots of rice, ‘kualies’, and boil drinking water in cauldrons over an open fire. The cooks were fed last, and best. But sometimes when the cooks had had enough, I would manage to get the burned skin of the rice scraped from the kualies. It may have been burned but it tasted so much better.
After breakfast we were paraded in the half-light outside our huts for the count. It was a full squad, a kumi, on the railway today. Tenko, roll-call, was conducted by guards and overseen by the Japanese version of a drill sergeant, a gunso, who made the RSM from the Bridge of Don barracks seem like a playful puppy. It all took time and was done in Japanese. The camps all operated on Tokyo time. Not that it made any difference to us; the bayonet and the boot were our timekeepers.
The count, or bango, was conducted in Japanese with numbers one to ten being ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, ju. Number eleven was ju-ichi, which took the tenth number and the first, while number twelve was ju-ni, and so on. It took some longer than others to get their head around. But you learned seemingly impossible tasks very quickly under the threat of a rifle smashing into your face. The Japanese had especial trouble understanding some of the Scottish and English accents and when inadvertently we offended them they would go berserk. If someone stumbled and forgot what number they were, someone would shout it out for them but it didn’t always work and the guards would give the man a beating. Sometimes several beatings would be administered and the count could take up to an hour, which would result in further blanket punishments or reduced rations. I quickly learned that it was best to avoid being in the front rank at tenko, where most beatings were handed out.
In the vast sprawling camp at Changi it had been easy for me to keep out of the way of our troublesome and irritable captors but on the railway they stalked our every move and it was necessary to fully learn the humiliating kow-towing protocol that they insisted