The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [64]
There was an undercurrent circling among us men, a desperate feeling of wanting to do something. But of course we were powerless. By the time I opened my eyes the body and head had been taken away and only a pool of dark red blood remained, leaching into the Siamese soil. I fought the impulse to be sick as I felt the pit of my stomach rising. A feeling of hopelessness overwhelmed me. We were at the mercy of a barbaric madman who enjoyed killing for the fun of it.
I had been witness to some terrible things as a POW and apart from the spread-eagled torture this was the worst yet. I just thanked my lucky stars that I was not part of the burial party because that must have been extremely traumatic.
Without any further ado our stunned work party was shepherded back to Hellfire Pass. We walked in desolate silence, each lost in his own thoughts until we arrived at the Pass.
It was part of a two-and-a-half-mile curved section of railway that required seven bridges and five arduous cuttings. Ahead of us the Japanese took our sappers, the British Army engineers, to start blasting away at Hellfire Pass. They climbed on top of the rock with bags of dynamite, their job being to blast away sections of rock twice a day for the rest of us to pound and shatter with eight-pound sledgehammers. The Japanese never gave us any warning of an impending explosion and suddenly the whole ground would shake at the almighty bang. Brightly coloured birds of paradise would flee their roosts squawking and we would hit the deck to avoid the deadly spray of rock shrapnel that would follow. The Japanese always made the British engineers light the fuse. On more than one occasion the poor sod who couldn’t flee fast enough over the treacherous ground would be blown up with the rocks – much to the obvious delight of Dr Death, who found it hilarious.
Like the disposable and economical machines we had become, we hammered away at drill pieces to bore holes into the rock for the explosives and then smashed up the boulders and rocks, making them as small as we could. It was back-breaking work, made tougher by the harshness of our natural and unnatural environment, pathetic diet, and catalogue of diseases, illnesses and injuries, not to mention our general fatigue, depression and broken spirits.
The rocks, once splintered into semi-manageable pieces, would be picked up by hand and loaded into baskets. Other prisoners would then haul these away and dump them beside the railway, where the rocks had to be broken up further to be made into ballast for the railway sleepers. Eventually the guards pulled sick men out of hospital huts by their hair and dragged them down to work on the railway beside these piles of dirt and rock that needed breaking down. Using small hammers with twelve-inch handles they had to sit there and tap feebly away all day in the blazing sun. Nobody was immune from work.
I spent seven or eight months hammering away at that bloody rock. On top of the cutting Dr Death sat gloating and occasionally relieving his boredom by hurling stones and boulders at us slaving down below. Once again, failure to meet our daily quotas meant working on into the dark by firelight and the eerie glow of lamps,