The Narrow Road to the Deep North (31 page)

The prisoners were starving, and increasingly their thoughts were of their evening meal, which, however meagre it was, was still real and still waiting for them; the beating was denying them the pleasure of eating it. They had been at work all day with nothing more to sustain them than a small ball of sticky rice. They had laboured in the heat and the rain. They had broken rock, carried dirt, cut and hauled giant teak and bamboo. They had walked seven miles to and from work. And they could not eat until the beating was done or Darky was dead, and their one secret hope was that, either way, the affair would be over with sooner rather than later.

More men staggered in from the Line, the number of prisoners grew to two hundred and then over three hundred. And they had to keep watching other men breaking in the mud a man like other men, and none of them could say or do anything to change this unchangeable course of events.

They wanted to rush the guards, seize the Goanna and the two others, beat them senseless, smash their skulls in until watery grey matter dribbled out, tie them to a tree and run their bayonets in and out of their guts, drape their heads with necklaces of their blue and red intestines while they were still alive so the guards might know a small measure of their hate. The prisoners thought that and then they thought they could not think that. Their emaciated and empty faces grew only more emaciated and empty the longer the beating went on. Then these men who were not men, humans unable to be human, heard a familiar voice cry out—

Byoki!

And their spirits momentarily rose as they turned to see Dorrigo Evans running towards them. When his ulcerated ankle brushed a slashed bamboo clump, Dorrigo Evans yelled harder—

Byoki! Byoki!

But the Goanna ignored the Australians’ commanding officer completely. Another guard shoved him into the front row of the prisoners as across the parade ground Major Nakamura came striding towards them with Lieutenant Fukuhara in tow, come to inspect the punishment.

Stepping out of the line, Dorrigo Evans pleaded with the Japanese officers to stop the punishment. Some men noticed how Nakamura bowed slightly, respectfully acknowledging the colonel’s superior rank, and how their colonel, rather irritatingly for the Japanese, did not return the bow.

They heard him say: This man is severely ill. He needs rest and medicine, not a beating.

And, behind him, the beating went on.

NAKAMURA WAS ROCKING
on his heels as he listened. He was itching, his mouth was dry, and he felt angry and agitated. He needed shabu, just one pill. Watching the prisoner being beaten gave him no pleasure. But what could you do with such people as these? What? Good and gentle parents had raised him as a good and gentle man. And the pain brought on in him by such suffering as he had ordered proved to him how deeply he was a good and gentle man. For, otherwise, why would he feel so pained? But precisely because he was a good man—who understood his goodness as obedience, as reverence, as painful duty—he was able to order this punishment.

For the beating served a greater good. Overnight, the task of completing their section of the railway line had increased immeasurably. And because the prisoners had today been particularly difficult, and because the guards sensed that and were in turn uneasy, the punishment of a prisoner offered a way for the guards to reassert their authority and for all the prisoners to be reminded of their sacred duty.

There was the other matter of Colonel Kota having been the one who discovered the missing POWs—thereby shaming him, Nakamura, and all the engineers and guards under his command. The punishment wasn’t about guilt, but honour. There was no choice in any of this: one existed for the Emperor and for the railway—which was, after all, the embodiment of the Emperor’s will—or one had no reason to live or even die.

Fukuhara told him the Australian colonel was going on yet again about medicine. What medicine? thought Nakamura. The central command sent them nothing—not machinery, not food, certainly not medicine, just a few old broken hand tools and impossible orders to build a miracle out of nothing in this green desert. And Koreans. Useless Koreans. No wonder they didn’t use them as front-line troops. You couldn’t even trust them to guard Australian prisoners. He needed medicine too. He needed shabu. Because if he failed to complete his section of the railway on time, he would have no choice but to kill himself out of shame. He did not want to kill himself, but he could not return to the Home Islands having failed the Emperor. He was a better man than that. And to get done what had to be done over the next few hours, he just needed a little shabu.

As the beating went on, Nakamura noticed that the Korean sergeant seemed to be putting less force into his blows, a lack of purpose that annoyed Nakamura immensely. The Koreans were, well, Koreans, and he was simply not doing the job properly. Perhaps he was weary, but it was no excuse. Nakamura had ordered the punishment, the order was necessary and justified, yet the guard seemed not to be taking the order seriously.

As Fukuhara continued translating the Australian colonel’s claims that the prisoner was guilty of nothing and had been sent back to the hospital by one of the guards because he was so sick, Nakamura continued standing there, itching badly, wasting his time, watching the Korean featherdusting the prisoner. The prisoner appeared groggy but was still managing to ride the guard’s weak blows with his body. When the prisoner staggered, it seemed to Nakamura that he was using the stagger to sway and roll with the blows of the bamboo pole and the guard was doing nothing to end this farce. The prisoner was making a joke of the punishment. It maddened Nakamura, it made his skin even itchier—he just needed to get that shabu pill, but how much longer did he have to wait, watching such ineptitude, such stupidity?

The Australian colonel had changed tack and seemed to be fashioning an argument of offended authority to stop the beating. Fukuhara told Nakamura that the Australian colonel claimed that the Korean sergeant had completely ignored him—a colonel and commanding officer—when he had spoken to him, demeaning his rank and honour.

Nakamura swung around to Fukuhara. He would end the punishment now and they could all be done with it—poor show as it had been, it had served its purpose. But as Nakamura turned, his left foot trod on his perennially trailing puttee tape, his right boot corkscrewed around, and somehow, as he tried to pick up his left foot, he tripped over his right boot and fell sprawling in the mud.

No one said anything. The beating momentarily stopped, then hastily resumed as the Japanese major got back to his feet. One side of a trouser leg was smeared with mud and his shirt was filthy.

As he scanned the faces of enemy and ally alike, Nakamura was acutely aware that everyone had seen his humiliating fall. Prisoners. Koreans. Fellow Japanese officers. He had had enough. He was tired. He had been up since three a.m. He had much yet to do, the day was already dying, and the railway was further behind schedule than ever. Nakamura—humiliated, enraged, muddy—saw a pile of tools that the prisoners had dumped. His mind was abruptly clear. He understood the intolerable Australian colonel’s issue—as an officer he felt he had been insulted. And he saw how he could resolve both the Australian colonel’s problem and his own.

He went over to the tools, chose a pick handle, weighed it in his hands and, brandishing it like a baseball bat, walked straight past the Australian colonel to where the Korean sergeant was thrashing the prisoner. He called the guard to order. Nakamura planted his feet, drew the pick handle back and, wielding it like a samurai’s sword, hit him hard across his left kidney.

The Korean groaned, swayed and almost toppled, and only with some difficulty drew himself back to attention. Nakamura raised the pick handle above his head and with a powerful swing drove it into the Korean’s neck. He finished with a backhanded sweep of the pick handle into the side of his head, and the Goanna dropped to one knee. Nakamura yelled at him in Japanese, threw the pick handle at his head, walked back to Dorrigo Evans and bowed. Without meaning to, Dorrigo Evans bowed in return.

Nakamura spoke quietly. Fukuhara translated for the Australian colonel, saying that the guard had been punished for his insolence to the Australian colonel, and now the punishment of the prisoner could continue.

In front of them, the Goanna got back on his feet, grabbed the pick handle, staggered the few steps to Darky Gardiner, steadied himself, then raised the pick handle high before bringing it down on the prisoner’s back with a new-found zeal. Darky Gardiner fell to his knees and was gathering himself to stand back up when the Goanna kicked him full in the face.

As the Australian colonel began remonstrating again, Nakamura waved his translator away.

It’s not a question of guilt, he said wearily.

Darky Gardiner’s movements were no longer graceful as his wasted, naked body tried to recover, coordinate and move again in time to defend itself from the next blow. His timing was growing jagged. As he got back up, a blow of a guard’s bamboo pole caught him in the side of the face. His head snapped sideways, he gasped and reeled backwards, trying not to fall, but his body had grown clumsy. He tripped and fell to the ground.

As the guards took turns kicking Gardiner, Nakamura murmured a haiku by Basho. Fukuhara looked at him queryingly.

Yes, Nakamura said. Tell him.

Fukuhara continued staring.

He likes poetry, Nakamura said.

It is very beautiful in Japanese, Fukuhara replied.

Tell him.

In English I think not.

Tell him.

Smoothing the side of his pants with his hand, Fukuhara turned to the Australian. He drew himself up straight, so that his neck seemed even longer, and recited his own translation:

DORRIGO EVANS LOOKED
at Nakamura, who was scratching violently at his thigh. And Dorrigo Evans understood that for the railway to be built, that railway that was the only reason for the immense suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings at that very moment—for that senseless line of embankments and cuttings and corpses, of gouged earth and massed dirt and blasted rock and more corpses, of bamboo trestling and teetering bridges and teak sleepers and ever more corpses, of innumerable dog spikes and inexorable iron lines, of corpse after corpse after corpse after corpse—for
that
railway to exist, he understood that Darky Gardiner must be punished. At that moment he admired the terrible will of Nakamura—admired it more even than he despaired of the beating of Darky Gardiner—the grim strength, the righteous obedience to codes of honour that allowed no doubt. For Dorrigo Evans could find in himself no equivalent life force that might challenge it.

With his fixed face and ascetic’s ragged tunic, in his thrashing of the Goanna, in the bark of orders he had just given, Nakamura no longer seemed to Dorrigo Evans the strange but human officer he had played cards with the night before, not the harsh but pragmatic commander he had bartered lives with that morning, but the terrifying force that takes hold of individuals, groups, nations, and bends and warps them against their natures, against their judgements, and destroys all before it with a careless fatalism.

The Goanna had stooped down and scooped Darky Gardiner up in a fireman’s lift. He threw him onto his shoulder and then back up to a standing position. There was an odd pause, as though the beating was over, but once Darky had his balance the three guards started once more with the bamboo poles and pick handle until he fell again. And so began a pattern of beating, falling, kicking and dragging back up to beat again.

And watching this—as the Goanna yet again stood Darky Gardiner up in order to beat him down again, as he quickly backhanded him twice—Dorrigo Evans felt as if some terrible vibration was shaking the earth, and that all their beings could not help but drum with it. And that ominous drumming was the truth of this life.

This must stop, Dorrigo Evans was saying. It’s wrong. He’s sick. He’s a very sick man.

It wasn’t even an argument, though, and Nakamura just raised a hand and talked over him in a new, kindly voice.

Major Nakamura say he have some extra quinine, Fukuhara said. To help sick men work. The Emperor’s will decrees it, the railway needs it.

And the drumming went on, louder and louder.

Dorrigo Evans understood that Nakamura was trying to help, but that he could do nothing about the beating he had ordered. Quinine would help others. Nakamura could help whom he could help, and quinine would help him help them. But he could not stop the drumming. He could not help Darky Gardiner. The railway demanded it. Nakamura understood that. Dorrigo Evans had to accept it. He too had a part in the railway. Nakamura had a part. Darky Gardiner had a part, and his part was to be brutally beaten, and all of them—each one in his own way—had to answer to the terrible drumming.

The jerking movements of Darky Gardiner’s body and arms and legs as he tried to protect himself—all these were for the guards now just natural obstacles, like rain or bamboo or rock, to be ignored or cut or broken. Only when he ceased to struggle did they stop standing him up, and his cries gave way to a long, slow wheezing, like a torn fire bellows, and their grim work slowed to a more moderate tempo, taking on the nature of manual labour.

Something was happening inside Dorrigo Evans as he watched. Here were three hundred men watching three men destroying a man whom they knew, and yet they did nothing. And they would continue to watch and they would continue to do nothing. Somehow, they had assented to what was happening, they were keeping time with the drumming, and Dorrigo was first among them, the one who had arrived too late and done too little and now somehow agreed with what was happening. He did not understand how this had come to be, only that it had.

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal. For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.