The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [65]
If an exploring anthropologist had stumbled upon us in that jungle, he would have imagined that he had made a sensational new discovery: a prehistoric tribe, uniformly filthy with long hair and beards covering clapped-in cheeks and framing sunken eyes. He would have observed in wonder the curious tottering gait unique to the halfstarved tribesmen who worshipped and sacrificed their number on a giant slab of rock. And he would have been baffled by the absence of the female of the species.
Kanyu I and II, under the iron fist of the Black Prince, were among the worst of all the camps on the railway. The Japanese had reduced us to the stone age. There were no positives. No haircuts or pay, no days off, no trading, no vegetable stews or fried duck eggs, no pantomimes or song. There was not even a single book in the entire camp. It was work, work and more work. Speedo! It simply could not have been any worse.
Not through any sense of pity or guilt, certainly, we were to be moved to a camp further up the railway. It was named, predictably, Kanyu II, almost identical to our original camp – just further down the river.
At roll-call they told us, ‘All men march.’
The same thoughts went through my mind. We have been used up, we’re no use to them any more. We’re all going to be massacred. Whatever it is it’s not going to be better. It certainly won’t be a holiday camp!
Towards the end of April 1943 the Black Prince and his merry band of psychotic villains marched us into the jungle again. It took a solid day to reach our new camp and I heaved a sigh of relief to see that we did not have to build our own huts; presumably the POWs who had been there before us had been moved forward as well, on to Kanyu III. I would later learn that Australian POWs took our place at Kanyu I and with it the deathly task of completing Hellfire Pass. They were to pay a terrible price.
Six
Bridge on the River Kwai
The Japanese put us straight to work. This section of railway, further north, would eventually join up with that of our earlier handiwork at Hellfire Pass. We began clearing jungle, just as we had at the first Kanyu cutting. The work was certainly easier than gouging our way through the rocks and boulders of Hellfire Pass but it was still horrendous. With the same guards and Japanese officers hovering around us it was the same torment. Brutality, disease, starvation and death stalked our every step.
On the first evening of our arrival, still barefoot and naked except for our Jap-happies, we did some remedial work on the huts, some of which leaned at crazy angles like jungle versions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The roofs all needed replacing with fresh atap leaves. Whether by design or otherwise, we reverted to the same sleeping arrangements as at the first camp, taking up the same places. Men took a lot of comfort from routine and familiarities, no matter how fickle or fleeting they may have been.
After a few weeks of steady progress we were nearing the river Kwai, across which the Japanese intended us to build two bridges, the first to be made of wood and bamboo, the second to be of steel and concrete. It was going to be a major engineering operation and I doubted that we would manage it in our state and with the pathetic tools we had to hand.
We carried on clearing the path for the track of the railway, while work parties went into the jungle felling trees for the bridge and bamboo for the scaffolding.
Then disaster struck. One night I awoke with dysentery calling. Holding my aching stomach I raced to the latrines in the dark but on the way back to my hut a Korean guard stopped me. He had come out of the darkness and caught me by surprise. He yammered in my face. I had no idea what he was on about.