Eyewitness (18 page)

We were back in camp by 3 p.m. and hardly able to believe it. I have done my washing, bathed and shaved. This is a most painful process with my one rusty razor blade and my knob of bone soap. I shave only my sideboards and neck, leaving what the Navy calls a ‘torpedo’ beard, Lenin-style. But this is as much as I can endure, and tears of pain stream down my cheeks.

Now I am able to catch up on this diary. I have been taking it out each day to work, but there is only 15 minutes for dinner. Some of it I have written by firelight, and some while standing waiting on the count parades. I have not been able to catch up until tonight when, with honourable blisters, I think I can make it.

*

I remarked some time back that sex was now only of academic interest, if at all. Hunger is our main concern. Almost all our dreams are concerned with food. The
fact
of food: seeing shops filled with it; seeing someone cooking it, and so on. But one thing is common to all the dreams –
none of us ever gets to eat this dream stuff
. Something always happens. For instance: I had just bought a great pile of cream and mocha puffs, Swiss pastry, chocolate éclairs, etc., and it was all on the glass-topped counter before me. But when I felt in my pocket for the money, there was none. The wish and the reality are always struggling, and reality always wins.

*

Coral trees are bursting out in a rich blush, and a few clumps of yellow orchids are showing up on the trunks of the trees. There are some handsome birds too, which we have not seen before. They have coalblack coats and fly in scolloping swoops into the branches, towing, on long thin stems some 18 inches long, two black fanlike feathers with white eyes, like a decoy.

*

We have several sorts of shifty customers with us. They will do anything to escape work, which means that others, by having to do their share, work themselves to death. There is one, a sar-major who in civil life was a barrister. He has never worked manually in his life and says work is only for fools. He boasts that he has never had to work since he joined the Army. He has either pulled strings or paid others to do it – even his latrine fatigue. He is proud of his soft white hands. Being in the Pay Corps he is our canteen wallah, keeping a few books and eating at our expense. Once he was caught for a survey-party, and everybody gloated. But too soon: he got out of it.

There is another one too. He is dark, balding, fit and thickset – a talkative advertising man who continually justifies himself as a man of principle. He fell in today with the no-boot party. Austin said, ‘I was told you have a pair of boots, Kaley.’ ‘Oh, yes, I have; but they pinch a bit.’ His bag was searched and they found a
second
pair of boots. He said they belonged to another man, who denied it. Then he said it was unfair, he was being victimised.

*

Coming home, tired, after a day’s work we really can get self-centred. The great winding red-clay road, glaring with brown-paper dryness, is a stomach-draining pull without shade. The pale green, unblinking bamboo leaves are like blind mirrors, between which the sky shows deep blue – almost purple – and against which the mountain in shadow is a taunting, cool indigo. The painful impression of heat is in its nearness – its pitiless glaring, drying our bodies to tinder. The heat presses its boring fingers on eyeballs, making them ache; sweat splashes over eyebrows into eyes.

Climbing the Hill in the heat pulls the shoulders forward and keeps the eyes glued to the ground a few feet ahead, shirking the prospect of so long a climb. And then there is this damnable struggle between physical agony and the eye for beauty, which, I am sorry to state, filled me with a desire to see all beauty in Hades. I could not cope with it. That is fatigue; but it brings a sound, death-like sleep.

*

One of the great problems here is boiled water. We dare not drink anything else. Filling water bottles from kerosene tins is wasteful. Major Woods has built a machine for doing it. It is an all bamboo affair: a large bamboo at the top with ten spigots in it. The bottles are filled and the spigot closed without wasting a drop. A man with a tin of boiled water keeps the large bamboo reservoir topped up as the bottles are filled. There are at least 800 men to fill their bottles after work each night, and the water-boiling party have their work cut out.

The same ingenious major has harnessed the miserable creek, which flows through here, by building a dam above the camp to raise the level. From this dam he has piped water to a shower, through large bamboo pipes on trestles. This shower is a raised platform of bamboo, some 40 feet by 30 feet, above which are suspended three long bamboos, each perforated at intervals. The water constantly flows into these from the dam some 200 yards away, supplying more than a dozen showers. There are benches around the sides to put your gear on. To be able to bathe under running water is second only to eating and sleeping. And we are very grateful to the Major.

*

The rains are bringing the jungle rapidly to life now. Hooded lilies, several iris-like orchids, wild ginger and banana (which bears no edible fruit), clumps of orchids in the branches of trees like corsages of yellow jonquils. There are waves of perfume in the bush which we sometimes walk into. Cinnamon, chocolate, and one honey-sweet like clematis. Sometimes the early morning dew on the dry bamboo leaves smells like the Australian bush – or is it just nostalgia?

On the rock escarpment, several hundred feet high above our tents, we watch large black baboons drop through the trees in careless, breath-taking drops of 20 feet and more, coming up with a smooth lazy swing. If a branch breaks, they simply discard it and take hold of the next one.

Near the camp we now have the donking of 30 bamboo elephant bells: a sound identical with our night bird. Today, tree-felling, a chap put his axe into a bamboo and was attacked by a swarm of irate wasps. His whole body is red and swollen and he is pretty sick.

*

We have been clearing rock after blasting on our section. It was picks, crowbars, shovels, chunkels and baskets as we struggled with the broken rock-spoil between the new, raw, white limestone walls of the cutting. They reflected the heat and glare, almost cooking and blinding us.

As we climbed the Hill tonight, a great straight imperturbable teak stood in the heat, unmoved by our struggle. But this morning, as we were going down, it was a different picture. The bamboos were a cool blue-green, dark and clean-shafted. The road was streaked across with rich brown shadows. Beyond, across the valley of the river, in the morning sun, the huge smooth mountain ridge was absolutely pink with, here and there, little splashes of emerald and viridian as if wet. It was so easy to look at going down; so different from that neck- and eye-cracking climb back.

*

Rumours are still with us. ‘Build three more kilometres and go to Saigon.’ ‘End of April, all men go Saigon.’ ‘American airmen no gooda – boom, boom! Kill many Nippon.’

*

After tea there was the prospect of
Yasume
tomorrow. Lights-out was not sounded, and we talked around the fires. There was a thunder storm. Then Herb Smith, from his tent, sang
The Road to Mandalay.
His splendid baritone echoed fully under the drenched canopy of the forest. At the phrase
and the dawn comes up like thunder
, one of the fellows said
that
was something you would
never
see – how can it
look
like
thunder
? But it made me think of what I had seen only this morning. It was a cool morning in a misty, rugged landscape which rose and fell like a rough sea. The hot sky was daubed with salmon-yellow mackerel clouds. The big smoky-blue ranges beyond the Kwai Noi river were like sullen sharp-crested waves seen from the height of a cliff through the mist of spume and spindrift. The heads of the trees just beneath us, in whorls of light- and dark-greens, with bruises of red, were like the surge of wrack on a rocky coast. A couple of the closer ridges were the green of transparency – close and huge, about to break.

*

I feel quite healthy, though I suppose a normal man from civvy street would not find it hard to push me over. My hands are rough, hard, cut and blistered. I keep telling myself that hard work, of
itself
, is fundamentally good: one of the basic necessities and conditions of life. This can stimulate a mind not dead to hope. I try to tell myself, what I lack in food and comfort, can be made up from all that is sheer nature around me.

Yesterday Weary refused to let the ‘light dutymen’ go to work, saying it was sending them to their graves. He was forced to hospitalise them, a compromise which automatically stops their pay. As a reprisal the Japanese have, today, ordered the officers to make up wood and water parties and sink latrines. The men have not a great deal of sympathy with most of the officers, but over the doctors it is different. When we came in and saw Weary digging in a latrine pit, I think at a word from him we would have moved over to the Guard House and flattened it.

*

The toll of work and starvation is beginning to show up here now, if reports we get are right. In one camp 85 have died; in another 300 are down with dysentery. Cholera has already been reported upstream, after a few showers. There was a sit-down strike in one camp because the sick had to work and there were no canteen facilities: they had to stand all night, and at 11 a.m., went out to work without food. About every hour they were beaten with bamboos. The English major was beaten very badly with a sword scabbard.

*

The railway is becoming a reality now. All the clearing is finished, the surveying done, and we are now to build the banks, cuttings and bridges. Big pressure is being exerted, and more and more are being forced out to work. The railway is mapped and already they are said to be at Tarsau with the rails. But there is a great deal to be done here. I have heard it said that the project is manned with 150 men per kilometre. They are working down from the Burma end also: the whole length of the line seems to be going ahead simultaneously. We are beginning to wonder what will happen in the wet season. These small rains have already given us a sample.

*

Last night there was a very heavy atmosphere and rising cloud flickered with lightning. By 10 p.m. the storm broke and rose to a booming shriek, plucking at everything on the ground. We were glad our beds are raised on logs. Gusts of wind threatened to take the tent bodily over the 400-foot wall at our backs. The storm reached a crescendo with incessant blue-white lightning and short, brutal crashes of thunder. The tent was filled with an atomised spray which wet us through. I used my gas cape to protect my drawings and diary. A large branch dropping like a huge dart, pierced the next tent and quivered, firmly imbedded, in the ground between the feet of the inmates whose disgust could be heard above the thunder.

Daylight told us a more detailed story of what had happened. The storm had cut a swathe half a mile wide. The general effect was of giant straw washed across a tufted field by a flood. It must have been a ‘twister’ to have made such a flat path of devastation, winding back and forth across our only road and completely obliterating it in places.

We were given axes at the railway and began to cut a road back to the fork at the top of the Hill. This was to allow the elephants to get down to the workings. We met eight of them at the top with their loads of water in bamboo bottles.

On the way, we came across a tree from which saddle cloths for the elephants had been cut. It was a red barked tree which had been cut to a depth of two inches and completely circled and stripped in two places six feet wide. The cloths were hung nearby to dry. A number of these are packed on top of the beasts before the rig goes on, which is secured by martingale and crupper, but no girth. This is the same kind of tree we stripped for lashings and ties for the baskets.

The fork, which is the junction of the road up the Hill and the Tarsau–Konyu–Hintok road, was reached and from here we began to cut our way back to Hintok.

Trying to cut sprung and springy bamboo, and hauling it from a tangled chaos of canes, vines and locking thorns, is exhausting work, and even the Japanese had to give us rest periods. It is during these periods I try to write, while looking at what I am writing about. All the smallest creatures of the bush seem to have been upset, and have become unfriendly. At the moment, sweat-covered, I am a mass of walking, crawling, nipping bush bees. They cover my hands as I write.

Clumps of bamboo which stood 80 to 100 feet high yesterday, with each stick as thick as a man’s thigh, now lie uprooted and flat on the ground; or twisted and bent like reeds at points from 10 to 40 feet from the ground. Their engineer-designed, strong, tubular structure is split and flattened, like ribbon, by a force of wind hard to imagine. They are laid along the path of the storm as if to say, ‘He went
that
way!’

Bamboos tell a clear tale, but the trees seem incoherent. Big ones have been torn out by the roots and each lies with several tons of soil still clinging to it, sticking into the air ten or twelve feet. Trees with twelve-foot girths have snapped like matches – the crowns torn off them, like so many flowers picked between finger and thumb. Some, crashing, have taken others with them: some hang like robbers, swinging on vines from other trees.

We have to be careful cutting into bamboos which are full of wasps’ nests. Jim and George have already been attacked. The bamboo barricades are the toughest job: whole clumps of them have been pulled up by the roots like reeds. Clumps which were 20 feet through, now lie as walls 20 feet high. Ninety men have been chopping all day and only now, as I write in the late afternoon, is the first truck coming through.

*

An ox-cart convoy of Thais stayed all night in the camp. The carts have huge, heavy, wooden wheels with
no
metal fastenings. But they don’t seem able to carry more than a couple of bags of rice. Among the Thais was one small young women whose black hair was American bobbed. She wore a straight-topped bodice of white, a pair of blue trousers, and she had bare, muddied feet which matched her raven black hair. She was neatly made and stood leaning carelessly against one of the big wagon wheels. A very nice picture: but she was spitting betel freely at her feet.