The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [67]
The corrugated iron covering the semi-submerged cage intensified the stifling heat. In the darkness the sense of isolation was devastating and I became half out of my mind with pain and exhaustion.
Days came and went, the only notion of time provided by the arrival of a watery bowl of rice once a day. The next few days were the worst I had experienced on the railway, like a culmination of the extremes of temperature from the steel carriages on the way up to the railway, along with the death march and every other ounce of suffering endured since, all crammed into that tiny, back-breaking black hole. Malaria struck me down, causing uncontrollable shivers and pain that was diverted only when tropical ulcers and kidney stones reared to the fore. My hair matted, dirty and unshaven, lice crawling all over me, no soap or water, no drugs or hope, my degradation was complete.
I had counted six or seven bowls of rice by the time they allowed me out. As I crawled out of the dark cell and back to my hut, I deemed myself lucky to have spent such a short period in the black hole. I had been in for a week and it could easily have been a month. To me it felt like a century.
I reached my hut on all fours and Dr Mathieson and his orderlies got to work on me. Slowly they brought me back to life with lime juice, water and scavenged food scraps, a little milk and some duck eggs. Within a week, even in my feeble condition, I was passed as fit and sent back to work on the first railway bridge over the river Kwai. Happily I never saw that Korean guard again.
We marched back along the track we had been clearing until it opened up at the river. What I saw stunned me. During the fortnight of my imprisonment and convalescence the outline of a bridge had grown out of the water. It was a truly amazing sight. The bridge stood encased in a great bamboo cage of scaffolding and hundreds of prisoners teemed all over it like ants. It was astonishing to think that this had been built with little more than bare hands and primitive technology. The general opinion among us men had been that the undertaking was impossible. But then again we had thought the same of Hellfire Pass and we somehow managed to do that too.
Two Japanese engineers, who were always officers, stayed on site at all times. Though many were English-educated, most of them dictated their orders through interpreters. Their working methods were haphazard to say the least. Where we would have used tapes to measure distances, they guessed. It didn’t seem to bother them if some railway sleepers jutted out a foot more than others. But they were very demanding and prone to strike out with the four-foot iron bars that they carried. No doubt they were under enormous pressures themselves to get the bridge done but the way they treated the men, like animal slavers, was unforgivable.
The men used an antiquated rope-and-pulley system to drive teak piles deep into the river floor. The pile driver had a huge rock on the top of it and the prisoners raising it heaved on the ropes as if in a game of tug o’ war, while a Nippon engineer would keep them in time with a rhythmic count of ‘Ichi, ni, san, shi’. On his command they would suddenly all let go of the rope sending the rock crashing down on the pile below. Simple but effective, I thought. The laboured chanting and heaving, which went on for up to eighteen hours a day, made me think of the ancient Pharaohs and how their slaves had achieved the seemingly impossible by constructing the pyramids. There was certainly something biblical about our plight.
For those working in the muddied river, sometimes up to their necks, life could be much more difficult. The filthy water infected cuts and sores. It was also impossible to see where you were treading and many more injuries occurred that way. The additional danger of falling