The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [54]
Once the count was complete we formed a line for our tools. Picks, shovels and twin baskets on bamboo yo-ho poles that you carried across your shoulders were all laid out. The saws, chisels and anything else that was sharp and could have been used as a weapon were always kept down at the railway. I could not understand how the Japanese never saw a pickaxe as a potential weapon but I never came across it being used as one, so maybe they were right after all.
As I was handed my pick and shovel a Japanese guard whacked me across the legs with a strop, urging me to follow the men into the jungle. We followed a rough path, weaving through the trees. The only men left behind at camp were a handful of officers, two Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) officers and their assistants and four cooks. There were only six officers and they all shared one hut with the NCOs. Since the Japanese had removed anything that signified rank it was difficult to tell who was an officer and who was not. They had to convince others that they were who they said they were. But I could usually tell after hearing them speak. Most of the officers spoke a different language from the rest of us. And it was not just their posh accents; it was their vocabulary too. Farm labourers and factory workers did not call each other ‘old boy’ and describe things as being ‘quaint’.
It took about an hour to reach our destination, nothing more than a rare and slight gap in the jungle with a rocky cliff just visible ahead in the distance. Later the Australians would dub it Hellfire Pass and I could not have thought of a better name for it myself. The Japanese engineers told us that we had to clear everything between the white markers already pegged into the ground. The pattern was set. Trees would be chopped down by hand, huge tree roots ripped up, boulders shouldered out of our path and great thickets of towering, spiky bamboo cleared.
They divided us into squads. I was on pick and shovel, clearing all the vegetation and boulders in a thirty-foot width. In the middle of the space, where the railway sleepers and eventually the tracks would go, we had to dig down to a depth of about three feet. There we dug up the earth in a twelve-foot-wide strip, which others with baskets on yo-ho poles hauled to one side. After digging down a foot or so we invariably struck clay, which made for even tougher going.
Another squad were tasked with removing the rocks, trees and debris, another separated the roots to dry them out and later burn them. Meanwhile on the pickaxe party some men were going hammer and tong. I said to one chap near me who was slugging his pick as if in a race, ‘Slow down mate, you’ll burn yourself out.’
‘If we get finished early,’ he said, puffing, ‘maybe we’ll get back to camp early.’
But the soldiers would only find something else for us to do. And then the next day Japanese expectations would be higher. Personally I tried to work as slowly as possible. The others would learn eventually but I soon discovered ways to conserve energy. If I swung the pick quickly, allowing it to drop alongside an area I had just cleared, the earth came away easier. It also meant that while it looked as if I were swinging the pick like the Emperor’s favourite son, the effort was minimal. Nevertheless under the scorching Thai sun and without a shirt or hat for protection, or shade from the nearby jungle canopy, the work soon became exhausting. Minute after minute, hour after hour, I wondered when the sun would drop and we could go back to camp.
Around midday the Japanese called for yasume. We downed tools and sat and ate rice, which we had taken with us from camp in the morning. When I opened my rice tin I found the contents had begun to ferment. It was almost rice wine and tasted horrible. But I ate it anyway. Lunch usually lasted for around thirty minutes at the railway, depending on the officer in charge. If he were sleepy or tired, it might be longer. We used to