The Narrow Road to the Deep North (6 page)

Colonel Rexroth said he didn’t like his attitude. Only seeing the negative. This demands positive thoughts. Celebration of the national character. And so on.

I’ve never treated the national character, Dorrigo Evans said.

The Australians had started cheering for the German prisoner.

But I am seeing, he went on, an awful lot of diseases of malnutrition.

We have what we have, Colonel Rexroth said.

To say nothing, Dorrigo Evans said, of malaria, dysentery and tropical ulcers.

The play ended with jeers and catcalls. Dorrigo finally recalled what Colonel Rexroth always reminded him of: the beurre bosc pears Ella’s father used to eat. And he realised how hungry he was, how he had never liked those pears with their rusty skin, and how now he would have given almost anything to eat one.

Diseases of starvation, repeated Dorrigo Evans. Drugs would be good. But food and rest even better.

If their work building the railway line for the Japanese hadn’t yet become a madness that would kill them, it was already beginning to take a profound physical toll. Les Whittle, who had lost his fingers to pellagra, was now playing a rotting accordion—held together with stitching and buffalo hide patches—with bamboo sticks tied to his wrist. His singer, Jack Rainbow, had lost his vision. Watching him, Dorrigo Evans wondered if it was avitaminosis or the combined damage of several maladies that had done this—whatever the cause, he was painfully aware that food would cure this and almost all of the afflictions he saw. Jack Rainbow’s anchorite’s face was now puffy as a pumpkin, and his wasted body below also oddly bloated with beri-beri, lending an ulcer—which had eaten through a swollen shin to the bone—the appearance of a blinded pink iris that gazed out from the wound at the crowd of POWS, many as grotesquely affected, as if hoping finally to see the audience of its dreams.

The performers were now playing out a scene from the movie
Waterloo Bridge
, with Les Whittle as Robert Taylor and Jack Rainbow taking the role of Vivien Leigh. They were walking towards each other on a bamboo bridge.

I thought I’d never see you again, said Robert Taylor, disguised as the fingerless Les Whittle, in a highly affected English accent. It’s been a lifetime.

Nor me you, said Vivien Leigh, disguised as the blind, bloated, ulcerated Jack Rainbow.

Darling, said Les Whittle. You haven’t changed at all.

There was much laughter, after which they played the movie’s signature song, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

You see, Colonel Rexroth continued, it’s what we carry within.

What?

British stoicism.

It was an American movie.

Pluck, Colonel Rexroth said.

Our officers are paid by the Japanese army. Twenty-five cents a day. They spend it on themselves. The Japanese do not expect them to work. They should.

Should what, Evans?

Should work here in the camp. Digging latrines. Nursing in the hospital. Orderlies. Building equipment for the sick. Crutches. New shelters. Operating theatres.

He took a deep breath.

And they should pool their wages so we draw on it to buy food and drugs for the sick.

That again, Evans, Colonel Rexroth said. It is example that will get us through. Not Bolshevism.

I agree. When it is the right example.

But Colonel Rexroth was already ascending the stage. He thanked the entertainers, then spoke of how the division of the British Empire into arbitrary nationalities was a fiction. From Oxford to Oodnadatta they were one people.

His accent was thin and reedy. He had no gift for rousing oratory but a misplaced sense that his rank gifted him with this talent. He sounded, as Gallipoli von Kessler said, as though he were playing a flute out of his arse.

And for that reason, Colonel Rexroth went on, as members of the British Empire, as Englishmen, we must observe the order and discipline that is the very lifeblood of the Empire. We will suffer as Englishmen, we will triumph as Englishmen. Thank you.

After, he asked Dorrigo Evans if he would like to be involved in planning for the building of a proper cemetery overlooking the river, where they would be able to inter their dead.

I’d rather get the Black Prince to steal some more tins of fish from the Japanese stores to keep the living from dying, Dorrigo Evans said.

The Black Prince is a thief, Colonel Rexroth replied. This, however, will be a beautiful final resting place and worthy of the efforts of all concerned for the welfare of the men and far better than the present practice of just marching off into the forest and burying them wherever.

The Black Prince helps me save lives.

Colonel Rexroth produced a large sketch map outlining the location of the cemetery and the layout of the graves, with different sections for different ranks. Proudly, he told Dorrigo that he had reserved a particularly idyllic spot overlooking the Kwai for officers. He pointed out that the men were beginning to die, and dealing with the corpses was now a matter of the highest priority.

It is an irrefutable argument, he said. It’s been a lot of work getting it this far. I’d love you to be part of this.

A monkey screeched in a nearby bamboo grove.

I am only doing it for the men, Colonel Rexroth said.

THE TREES BEGAN
sprouting leaves and the leaves began covering up the sky and the sky turned black and the black swallowed more and more of the world. Food grew less and less. The monsoon came and, at first, before they learnt all that the rain portended, they were grateful.

Then the Speedo began.

The Speedo meant that there were no longer rest days, that work quotas went up, and up again, that shifts grew longer and longer. The Speedo dissolved an already vague distinction between the fit and the sick into a vaguer distinction between the sick and the dying, and because of the Speedo more and more often prisoners were ordered to work not one but two shifts, both day and night.

The rains grew torrential, the teak and the bamboo closed in around them; Colonel Rexroth died of dysentery and was buried along with everyone else in the jungle. Dorrigo Evans assumed command. As a great green weight that reached to the black heavens dragged them back down into the black mud, he imposed a levy on the officers’ pay to buy food and drugs for the sick. He persuaded, cajoled and insisted on the officers working, as the ceaseless green horror pressed ever harder on their scabies-ridden bodies and groggy guts, on their fevered heads and foul, ulcerated legs, on their perennially shitting arses.

The men called Dorrigo Evans
Colonel
to his face and
the Big Fella
everywhere else. There were moments when the Big Fella felt far too small for all that they now wanted him to bear. There was Dorrigo Evans and there was this other man with whom he shared looks, habits and ways of speech. But the Big Fella was noble where Dorrigo was not, self-sacrificing where Dorrigo was selfish.

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him—all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading
him
through adulation.

And with him now in tow, they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror. All of it seemed to wait for some denouement that never came, some event that made sense of it all to him and to them, some catharsis that would free them all from this hell.

Still, there was the occasional duck egg, a finger or two of palm sugar, a joke, repeated over and over, lovingly burnished and appreciated like the rare and beautiful thing it was, that made survival possible. Still there was hope. And from beneath their ever growing slouch hats the ever diminishing prisoners still made asides and curses as they were swept up into another universe in which they lived like ants and all that mattered was the railway. As naked slaves to their section of the Line, with nothing more than ropes and poles, hammers and bars, straw baskets and hoes, with their backs and legs and arms and hands, they began to clear the jungle for the Line and break the rock for the Line and move the dirt for the Line and carry the sleepers and the iron rails to build the Line. As naked slaves, they were starved and beaten and worked beyond exhaustion on the Line. And as naked slaves they began to die for the Line.

No one could reckon it, neither the weak nor the strong. The dead began to accumulate. Three last week, eight this week, God knows how many today. The hospital hut—not so much a hospital as a place where the very worst were allowed to lie in filth and gangrenous stench on long, slatted platforms—was now filled with the dying. There were no longer fit men. There were only the sick, the very sick and the dying. Long gone were the days when Gallipoli von Kessler thought it punishment to be unable to touch a woman. Long gone was even the thought of a woman. Their only thoughts now were of food and rest.

Starvation stalked the Australians. It hid in each man’s every act and every thought. Against it they could proffer only their Australian wisdom which was really no more than opinions emptier than their bellies. They tried to hold together with their Australian dryness and their Australian curses, their Australian memories and their Australian mateship. But suddenly
Australia
meant little against lice and hunger and beri-beri, against thieving and beatings and yet ever more slave labour.
Australia
was shrinking and shrivelling, a grain of rice was so much bigger now than a continent, and the only things that grew daily larger were the men’s battered, drooping slouch hats, which now loomed like sombreros over their emaciated faces and their empty dark eyes, eyes that already seemed to be little more than black-shadowed sockets waiting for worms.

And still the dead kept on accumulating.

DORRIGO EVANS’ MOUTH
was so full of saliva he had to wipe his lips with the back of his hand several times to stop himself dribbling. Staring down at the badly cut, gristly and overdone steak lying in the rectangular cup of his tin dixie, its sooty grease smearing the rusting tin, he could not for the life of him think of anything he could want more in the world. He looked up at the kitchen hand who had brought it for his dinner. The kitchen hand told him how, the night before, a gang led by the Black Prince had stolen a cow off some Thai traders, had slaughtered it in the bush and, after bribing a guard with the eye fillet, had given the rest in secret to the camp kitchen. A steak—
a steak
!—had been carved off, grilled and presented to Dorrigo for his dinner.

The kitchen hand was, Dorrigo Evans could see, a sick man—why else would he be on kitchen duties?—sick with one or several diseases of starvation, and Dorrigo Evans understood that the steak was to that man too, at that moment, the most desirable, extraordinary thing in the universe. Making a hasty gesture, he told the kitchen hand to take it to the hospital and share it among the sickest there. The kitchen hand was unsure if he was serious. He made no movement.

The men want you to have it, the kitchen hand said. Sir.

Why? Dorrigo Evans thought. Why am I saying I don’t want the steak? He so desperately wanted to eat it, and the men wanted him to have it, as a tribute of sorts. And yet, much as he knew no one would have begrudged him the meat, he also understood the steak to be a test that demanded witnesses, a test he had to pass, a test that would become a necessary story for them all.

Take it away, Dorrigo Evans said.

He gulped, trying to swallow the saliva that was flooding his mouth. He feared he might go mad, or break in some terrible or humiliating way. He felt that his soul was not tempered, that he lacked so many of the things they now needed from him, those things that qualified one for an adult life. And yet he now found himself the leader of a thousand men who were strangely leading him to be all the many things he was not.

He gulped again; still his mouth ran with saliva. He did not think himself a strong man who knew he was strong—a strong man like Rexroth. Rexroth, thought Dorrigo Evans, was a man who would have eaten the steak as his right and, after, happily picked his highwayman’s teeth in front of his starving men. To the contrary, Dorrigo Evans understood himself as a weak man who was entitled to nothing, a weak man whom the thousand were forming into the shape of their expectations of him as a strong man. It defied sense. They were captives of the Japanese and he was the prisoner of their hope.

Now!
he snapped, nearly losing control.

Still the kitchen hand did not move, perhaps thinking he was joking, perhaps fearing an error in his understanding. And all the while Dorrigo Evans feared that if the steak stayed there in front of him a moment longer, he would seize it with both hands and swallow it whole and fail this test and be revealed for who he truly was. In his anger at the men’s manipulation of him, in his fury at his own weakness, he suddenly stood up and started yelling in a rage—

Now! It’s yours, not mine! Take it! Share it! Share it!

And the kitchen hand, relieved that he might now even get to taste a morsel of that steak himself, and delighted that the colonel was all that everyone said the Big Fella was, stole forward and took the steak to the hospital, and with it one more story of what an extraordinary man their leader was.

DORRIGO EVANS HATED
virtue, hated virtue being admired, hated people who pretended he had virtue or pretended to virtue themselves. And the more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. He did not believe in virtue. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause. He had had enough of nobility and worthiness, and it was in Lynette Maison’s failings that he found her most admirably human. It was in her unfaithful arms that he found fidelity to some strange truth of the passing nature of everything.