The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [55]
After lunch we carried on. Our progress became bogged down by a huge boulder semi-submerged in the soil and right in our way. We had to pickaxe around it and try and lever it out with pick handles. It took five men to prise it from its hole and once it was out we rolled it down the hill towards the river. It was the river Kwai that flowed south to join with the Mae Klong, which we had followed during the death march. It remained to our left for the duration of my time on the railway and I never once went in it.
By mid-afternoon we had finally completed the first section. Despite enormous toil and effort over the previous ten hours, our progress had been incredibly slow. We had managed to clear the required thirty-foot width for only about twenty feet. It was the beginning for us of what would become the most notorious railway construction that the world had ever seen. The Japanese engineer came over to inspect our work. He studied the clearing from several angles, using various surveying instruments, before declaring, ‘No gooda! Do again! Deeper!’
Utterly demoralised we had to go back to the beginning and manually dredge another foot of soil. We were all in various stages of beriberi, pellagra, malaria, dengue fever and dysentery. A new illness had also started to ravage some unfortunate prisoners. Called tinea, it was nicknamed ‘rice balls’ because the hideous swelling had the tormenting tendency to attack, crack and inflame the scrotum.
There was never any warning when the dysentery might come on. You could be on a pick when the urge would hit you, sending you scuttling into the jungle to do your business. You might get away with it or you might just get a beating to add to your woes.
A Japanese officer sat on a rock in the shade, overlooking proceedings. If he saw something that he didn’t like, he would shout to guards who would come running into the area. You might be working away, completely innocent, and get an indiscriminate beating because of someone else’s minor misdemeanour. I came to know which POWs were the ones always getting into trouble and I steered clear of them as much as possible. I thought it took a strange man to always be at the receiving end of beatings and never learn to avoid them. Those men were usually the ones trying to hide in the shade or those who would see a native walking through the jungle and try to barter with them. Always looking for an angle. I did not need those kind of people around me.
By the end of the day we still had managed only a distance of twenty feet. But we had finally dug to the depth the engineers wanted, and just before dusk we wound our weary bodies back through the jungle to camp. I got my rice and water and went straight to the hut and collapsed, my whole body aching with pain. Hands, feet, back, arms, legs were all so sore, especially my back and legs. Eventually out of sheer exhaustion I fell asleep. But when I woke it didn’t feel like I had slept at all. I was incredibly lethargic and the pain had increased overnight. I was expecting a long sleep to rejuvenate me, to help me through the next day, which I had envisaged as bringing just the same amount of torture, if not worse. But I felt horrific and that is when I realised I was at rock bottom. I felt lower than the rats that had scuttled through our hut during the night. The whole camp was completely demoralised and dejected; you could see it in the empty darkness of men’s eyes. I was glad there were no mirrors – I really did not want to witness the state of my face and read the story of my own eyes.
Nevertheless I heaved my ravaged body out of the hut and got my food. I half-ran to the queue for tools, desperate to be given a pickaxe and shovel once again. I had seen the poor devils struggling on the baskets the previous day and while I was in agony from a day on pick duties, at least my muscles would become accustomed to it. Better the devil you know.
On the hike back to the railway the enormity of our task suddenly dawned on me. During the first day I remembered seeing a great