The Forgotten Highlander (20 page)

‘Do it your bloody self then!’ I snapped. I regretted those words almost immediately. Musso was a nasty piece of work and slammed his rifle butt into my face. It floored me and knocked out one of my front teeth. The tooth had snapped off at an angle, painfully exposing raw nerves. After several more blows and kicks I quickly recovered and scrambled back to work, just thankful not to have been beaten to death.

The broken tooth was agonising and hours later, after we finished work, I paid another visit to the medical hut. The orderlies breezily set about me with a pair of pliers as if they were a pair of mechanics working on a rusty old tractor. One held my head tightly while the other tugged and tugged, eventually managing to wrench out the offending incisor. It was excruciating but the orderlies had evidently become quite proficient as dentists and it was all over pretty quickly.

The building of the bridge on the river Kwai took a terrible toll on us and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very, very sanitised version of events. Unlike the well-fed extras in the movie, we did not whistle the ‘Colonel Bogey’ tune. Nor did we work alongside Americans, nor did we have any semblance of uniform. We were naked, barefoot slaves. And there were certainly no pretty and scantily clad local girls wandering through the jungle.

And contrary to the film, our real-life commander Colonel Philip Toosey did not collaborate with the Japanese. I was not alone in doing as little work as possible without blatantly shirking, which resulted in sadistic beatings. Energy, every ounce of it,
had
to be conserved for survival. To bust a gut on starvation rations was absolute suicide. We had long lost our dignity and working faster certainly would not have brought any back. In fact it would have resulted in the opposite with even more of us dying.

Instead we made constant attempts at sabotage. Men whispered orders to impair the construction of the bridge wherever possible. Some charged with making up concrete mixtures deliberately added too much sand or not enough, which would later have disastrous effects. We collected huge numbers of termites and white ants and deposited them into the grooves and joints of loadbearing trunks.

Out of sight of the guards I furtively sawed halfway through wooden bolts wherever possible, hoping they would snap whenever any serious weight, like a train, was placed upon them.

We slogged on, starving and diseased, believing that things just could not get any worse – and then, in June, the monsoon arrived. For months the land mass of the Indian subcontinent had been heating up, creating an area of low pressure that now drew in mighty moisture-laden winds from the Indian Ocean. The rains flooded our huts, with rivers running through them – complete with small brown fish that some of the starving men succeeded in catching. We became permanently sodden. The camp ground transformed into a sea of mud and conditions around the latrines became unspeakable. Work on the bridge and railway turned even more hazardous, magnifying our misery, yet we were unprepared for the horror about to be unleashed upon us by the monsoon.

For the river Kwai and its tributaries harboured a killer even more lethal than the Japanese and our starvation diet. As an inevitable consequence of the lack of sanitation and the tens of thousands of bodies buried in shallow graves or dumped in the jungle, the river system was loaded with cholera bacteria and the monsoon season became cholera season. As the heightened waters of the Kwai flushed
Vibrio cholerae
throughout the land, this fearful disease cast a black shadow over the camp. Cholera arrived unseen and unheard but soon had us in its grip. I was slow to hear about it. But I sensed something terrible in the camp. More men were falling ill than usual and the Japanese kept their distance, leaving us alone. They were scared to death of catching cholera themselves. The Japanese Imperial Army had experienced the devastating impact of cholera among its troops in China in 1937 and again in 1940 – 1, and feared its swift progress like the Black Death.

Cholera outbreaks are related to standards of hygiene, food preparation and the quality of drinking water – all of which were undeniably horrific on the railway. Rats were also rife and had muscled into our lives to such an extent that we hardly shooed them away any more, and they are also carriers of the cholera bacteria, another parallel with the plague.

One of our officers gathered us together for an extraordinary general meeting. As serious-looking as I had ever seen him, he said, ‘A cholera epidemic is threatening us all. We have set up a quarantine area and you are advised to avoid it wherever possible. Need I remind you all not to drink unboiled water? If you are unsure of its origins, find out or leave it. Understood? This is our biggest test yet.’

Cholera had infected a stream that ran past our camp. The Japanese had refused to build a bridge across it to stop it from spreading, so we had to use contaminated boats to cross the water. By the end of it all we would lose thousands on the railway quite needlessly to cholera. The conditions in the coolie camps were even worse and tens of thousands of native labourers, sometimes entire camps, were wiped out.

Overnight cholera struck me down. I woke up with explosive diarrhoea and violent, projectile vomiting. My ears were ringing and I felt dizzy. Cramps started in my bowels and soon spread all over my body as it rapidly dehydrated. I was drying from the inside out, shrivelling like a picked grape left out in the sun. The cholera bacteria burrowed into the walls of my small intestine producing toxins that sucked the vital salts and every ounce of water out of my body. I was unsure what was wrong but I knew it was serious – I did not want to finish up with the life drained out of me. I had always been extremely careful to drink only boiled water so at first I was doubtful that it was cholera. I did not know much about it but I knew that the first twenty-four hours were crucial. If you see through a day and a night, you would probably survive. Most men who succumbed did so in the first few hours, a horrible death and so quick. Men who threw the bodies of cholera victims on to funeral pyres in the morning could easily contract the disease, die and be thrown on the pyre themselves in the evening. They died in agony like crazed animals and it was dreadful to see.

I lay in my bed, unable to rise for the work party. By then I was semi-conscious and I thought this was the end. I was hallucinating. Vivid red flashes stormed my eyelids. I knew I had to seek help. After psyching myself up I managed to rise and wobble to Dr Mathieson’s hut. As soon as I walked in he knew that I had cholera. It was a death sentence and he was reluctant to tell me. Instead he simply said, ‘You’ll have to be isolated. You’ll be looked after.’

His orderlies led me to a cream-coloured bell tent, like we had used in the Scouts. As they peeled back the tent’s front flap, a deathly stench leaped out. Unknown to me this was the ‘death tent’ and I was the unlucky thirteenth occupant of a dimly lit space already full of men. When I saw their state, their eyes rolled back, rasping, unintelligible voices, raised legs with knees bent – the bizarre telltale sign of a cholera sufferer – I knew that my number was up. The orderlies were putting me in here to die. The fight was fading from me and I lay down on the canvas floor with a sense of of complete and utter desolation.

I have no idea how long I lay there. I was no longer aware of those around me or if anyone came and tended to me. My mind drifted. I allowed myself some thoughts of home, even though they were jumbled and vague. I became upset when I couldn’t picture the faces of my mum, dad and Aunt Dossie. I even struggled to remember what Hazel looked like. Feverish dreams rampaged terrifyingly through my mind. The walls of the tent seemed to move and expand like an inflated balloon, only to pop and come crashing back on top of me. A sudden death seemed as inviting as a warm bath.

Eventually, on what must have been the following day, some orderlies carried me out of the tent and back to the hospital hut. Out of the thirteen men in that tent, Dr Mathieson told me months later, I was the only survivor. His medical staff tried to keep me alive by giving me as many sips of sterilised water as possible. They also forced some coconut milk puree down my throat, as water alone was not enough. While treatment should have been relatively simple, the lost fluids needing to be replaced with a liquid mixture of sugar and salts, the Japanese refused to give us any extra supplies, even though progress on the railway had dropped off and the outbreak threatened to wipe out the whole camp – them included. I was only half
compos mentis
and just wanted to sleep. But the orderlies kept tapping my cheeks to keep me awake and engaged me in conversation to keep my mind and soul engaged. They found the dog-eared black-and-white photographs in my bed-space and asked about my family. I rambled on about Aberdeen and playing practical jokes on Dossie. They asked who the pretty blonde girl was – the photo more worn than others. The lovely Hazel. I thought of her and how we used to dance at the Palais de Dance, how she was the only girl who could keep up with my twinkling toes, now reduced to bloodied and mangled stumps. The orderlies tried to make me laugh, asking how far I got with Hazel, and I told them about our long walks through the dandelions of Duthie Park, how I would try to get her alone, those piercing blue eyes all to myself.

Florence Nightingale could not have faulted their patience and unwavering care. If I had given up hope, they never did. And by this time I had very little hope left in me. The idea of suicide was a constant threat, not just for me but for many men. Some gave in and threw themselves from the bridge or head first down the latrines. There was no doubt that clinical depression had muddied most of our minds.

I could have lain there for days or weeks. It was hard to be certain. A Japanese doctor visited the camp and inspected me. Eventually the medical officers persuaded him, along with the Black Prince, that I was of no further use. My days working on the railway were over, at least while in the condition I was. Permission came through for me to be sent down river to the mass hospital camp at Chungkai.

I was leaving a camp that had reduced us to animals, starved half-dead beasts of burden. It had brought out the best and the worst in us. My carers showed endless compassion but the camp was also full of men who would steal food from the sick and dying.

The next thing I knew I was being carried down to the river on a stretcher and loaded on to a forty-foot barge with a dozen or so other ‘heavy sick’, many with gaping tropical ulcers or recovering from cholera. As we were towed by a tugboat down the river, I was still so weak that I ignored everything around me and could not even bring myself to respond to the others making idle chitchat on the peaceful journey downstream. Calmly scything through the jungle I knew I was leaving the hell of camp life.

After an overnight stop, where we slept in a cutting on the riverbank, we arrived at Chungkai hospital camp. It was then that I realised how lucky I was. A massive place, it was located in a jungle clearing beside the Meelong River, near where the railway commenced and about a hundred kilometres from Bangkok. To think that all of the men in that square mile were either sick or recovering from illness and injury really tells a tale in itself. There were nearly ten thousand survivors gathered in the camp in various states of decay. It was the first time that I could grasp the vast, industrial scale of the railway.

On arrival at Chungkai British orderlies met us at the riverbank. Our state horrified them. They carried me by stretcher to a hospital hut, where they categorised me and left me alone. Lying on a short bamboo cot with no bedding, I looked around. In the long, bright hut lay about thirty others all in much the same decrepit state. Cholera had been the final straw for my health and I could no longer walk. Dysentery, malaria, beriberi and gaping tropical ulcers that engulfed both ankles and lower calves had been enough but cholera finished me off. Mentally, losing control of my legs was too much. Either I was too damned weak or they were irreparably damaged, because no matter what my brain instructed them to do I could no longer even
move
my legs.

I was so devastated that I thought I may as well be dead. Having led such a full, active and sporting life, losing my legs was worse than going blind for me. I had real fears that I would never walk again and so depression set in. I could not see a glimmer of light at the end of tunnel – only blackness.

Some orderlies came into the hut and gave us all a liquid meal, which had some egg in it and milk – either goat or coconut, I could not be sure. If I tasted it now, it would probably be foul but at the time it was wonderful. The best thing I had tasted in over a year.

I lay in that hut for over a week with the black dog of depression nipping at my sorry heels. The cheery orderlies and doctors tried talking to me to lift my spirits but my mind was unresponsive. I could see that they were not trying to help me walk again so I felt that they were just pacifying me. Like all of the patients I dreaded the nightly agonising round of the orderlies who scraped out our suppurating ulcers with a sharpened dessert spoon. The only highlight of my day was food. I was definitely a difficult and moody patient.

One of the doctors was a very tall Australian medical officer, and he conducted my general examination. I was greatly impressed by him during my brief consultation. A striking figure with an aura of authority and leadership, he seemed never to waste his words or actions – as if every single minute were utterly necessary and priceless. The orderlies all worshipped him.

They told me his name was ‘Weary’ Dunlop. He worked miracles at Chungkai and enjoyed the adulation of his men for taking numerous beatings from the Japanese to prevent sick men from being sent to work.

Shortly after his capture on Java in March 1942 he had personally saved the lives of four patients. The Japanese had stormed into the prison hospital and demanded that it be broken up. Their commanding officer ordered that four of the boys – two paraplegics and two blind lads – should be bayoneted. Colonel Dunlop put himself between the Japanese bayonets and a young British serviceman, Billy Griffiths, who had been blinded and lost both hands when he walked into a booby trap. In the tense stand-off that followed the Japanese backed down. (After the war Griffiths became a leading figure in the development of disabled sport in the UK and both men were reunited on the
This Is Your Life
television programme.)