The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [60]
When a prisoner was caught stealing from the Japanese officers’ storeroom, or if a man turned on a guard, they received the next grade on the sliding scale of Japanese torture. I called it the ‘Indian rope trick’, one favoured by Indians in the old cowboy films. The helpless prisoner would be tethered spread-eagled to the ground. They wrapped wet rattan – the same string-like bark used to lash our bamboo huts together – around his ankles and wrists, and tied him to stakes in the ground. As the rattan dried, the ties would slowly gash into the skin, drawing blood and tearing into sinew and cartilage as it pulled limbs from their sockets. It reduced even the toughest men to agonised screaming, and they would be there all day. I would be almost glad to get out of camp in the mornings just to avoid hearing their cries of unbridled pain. It was a way of torturing all of us. Often when we returned from a day on the railway the men would no longer be there. Nobody asked where they had vanished to. I certainly did not want to know. After such a horrific ordeal death at the end of a Japanese bayonet would have been welcomed.
The worst of the Korean guards was the ‘Mad Mongrel’. He was slightly more Western-looking than the rest, with a hard, angular face. A lot of prisoners struggled to tell the difference between the guards, who no doubt thought we all looked the same too. But I could tell and the more time you spent with them, the better you knew which ones to try and avoid. The Mad Mongrel patrolled the railway with a bamboo cane, striking out indiscriminately and often. He had been chosen by Dr Death and the Black Prince for his exceptional cruelty and sadism. On the railway their favourite punishment was getting us to kneel on gravel with ramrod-straight backs. If we sagged, blows to the kidneys straightened up our failing frames.
One day on the railway the Mad Mongrel saw something in my work party that riled him. Before I knew anything was wrong he charged up to me and slammed his rifle butt into my forehead. It knocked me clean off my feet. I was seeing stars but despite being dazed and shaken I got up quickly, to avoid being kicked to a pulp on the ground. I still bear the horseshoe scar, a lifelong gift from the Mad Mongrel.
Within those first few months my trusty army boots that had done me so proud since being issued back at the Bridge of Don barracks finally succumbed to the rigours of the railway. As I negotiated a slope with two baskets filled with rocks on my shoulders, the sole came away from the upper, sending me head over heels down the hill, rocks bouncing out of the baskets and crashing on top of me. I shielded my head with my arms and when I dusted myself off saw that both of my boots had split in two. Many of the men were already going barefoot and it was something I had long feared. I tried to repair the boots by lashing them together with a piece of rattan but it did not last.
My socks had disintegrated long before in the tropical sweat. Now in bare feet I had a new challenge. My feet were extremely soft from living in constantly wet boots and the ground was particularly unforgiving, the jagged volcanic rocks often hiding just below the surface of the topsoil. I knew that the soles would harden up but until then I would have to walk like a cripple. When using the spade I wouldn’t be able to use my foot to dig deeper into the soil and would require more upper-body strength. Having no boots also made the ever-frequent trips to the benjos, the latrines,