The Bridge on the River Kwai

by Pierre Boulle

  With the approval of Colonel Nicholson, under the anxious eye of Saito and Clipton’s sardonic gaze, he set to work on these tests. At the same time he traced the best possible course for the railway to take, and passed the result to Major Hughes for action. With this off his chest, and with all the necessary data for his calculations ready to hand, he embarked on the most interesting part of the work: the design and planning of the bridge.

  He devoted himself to this task with the same professional conscientiousness that he had once shown when engaged on similar work for the Indian Government, and also with a passionate enthusiasm which he had hitherto tried to acquire, in vain, through reading suitable books (such as The Bridge Builders), but by which he was now suddenly carried away as a result of a casual remark passed by the CO.

  ‘You know, Reeves, I’m relying on you entirely. You’re the only qualified man we have and I’m leaving everything in your hands. We’ve got to show we’re superior to these savages. I realize how difficult it is in this God-forsaken place where you can’t find what you need, but that makes the task all the more worth while.’

  ‘You can count on me, sir,’ Reeves had replied, feeling suddenly galvanized. ‘I shan’t let you down, and we’ll show them what we’re capable of doing.’

  This was the chance he had been waiting for all his life. He had always dreamt of tackling a really big job without being badgered every other minute by administrative departments or maddened by interfering officials who ask ridiculous questions and try to put a spoke in the wheels, on the pretext of economy, thereby frustrating every creative effort. Here he was responsible to the Colonel and to no one else. The CO was favourably impressed; although he was a stickler for routine and ‘proper channels’, he could at least see the other man’s point of view and refused to be blinded by convention and protocol as far as the bridge was concerned. Besides, he had openly admitted he knew nothing about engineering, and made it quite clear he intended giving the junior officer his head. Certainly, the job was a difficult one, and there was a shortage of proper material, but Reeves promised to make up for every deficiency by his devotion to duty. He could already feel the breeze of creative inspiration fanning those hungry flames which overcome every obstacle in their path.

  From that moment he did not allow himself a minute’s leisure. He started by dashing off a sketch of the bridge, as he saw it in his mind’s eye whenever he looked at the river, with its four majestic rows of piles meticulously in line, its bold but graceful superstructure towering a hundred feet above the water, its beams assembled according to a process he had himself invented and which he had tried in vain to make the conservative Government of India adopt years ago, its broad platform protected by a strong balustrade, allowing room not only for the railway itself but also for a vehicle track and footpath.

  After that he set to work on the calculations and diagrams, and then on the actual design. He had managed to acquire a roll of fairly decent drawing-paper from his Japanese colleague, who kept sidling up behind him to gaze at the work in progress with ill-concealed, bewildered admiration.

  He fell into the habit of working like this from dawn till dusk, without a moment’s rest, until he noticed that the hours of daylight were over all too soon, until he realized with dismay that the days were all too short and that his task would never be finished in the time he had allowed. And so, using Colonel Nicholson as his intermediary, he got permission from Saito to keep a lamp burning after Lights Out. From that day on, he spent every evening and sometimes half the night working on the design of the bridge. Sitting on a rickety footstool, using his wretched bamboo bed as a desk, with his drawing-paper spread out on a board which he had himself planed smooth with loving care, in the light of the tiny oil-lamp which filled the hut with fetid fumes, he would handle with expert ease the T-and set-square which he had taken such pains to make.

  The only time these instruments were out of his fingers was when he seized a fresh sheet of paper and feverishly filled it with further calculations, sacrificing his sleep at the end of each tiring day in order to see his craftsmanship take shape in a masterpiece which was to prove the superiority of the West – this bridge which was to be used by the Japanese trains on their triumphant advance to the Bay of Bengal.

  Clipton had at first believed that the preliminary stages in the Western modus operandi (the elaborate administrative plans, followed by painstaking research and mechanical tests) would retard the actual building of the bridge even more than the haphazard empiricism of the Japanese. It was not long before he realized how vain these hopes of his were and how wrong he had been to jeer at all the preparatory work undertaken during the long sleepless nights caused by Reeves’s lamp. He began to understand that he had been a little too hasty in his criticism of the methods of Western civilization on the day that Reeves submitted his finished plan to Major Hughes and the construction got under way with a speed surpassing even Saito’s most optimistic dreams.

  Reeves was not one of those people who become mesmerized by symbolic preparations or who postpone taking action indefinitely because they devote all their energies to intellectual activity and think nothing of the practical side. He kept one foot firmly on the ground. Besides, whenever he showed signs of pursuing theoretical perfection too closely and shrouding the bridge in a fog of abstract figures, Colonel Nicholson was there to guide his erring footsteps. The Colonel had the practical sense of a born leader, who never loses sight of his objective or the means at his disposal and who keeps his subordinates perfectly balanced between idealism and reality.

  He had consented to the preliminary tests on condition that they were quickly completed. He had also approved the blue-print and been given a detailed explanation of the innovations due to Reeves’s inventive genius. All he had asked was that the latter should not overwork himself.

  ‘We’ll be getting along nicely, and then suddenly you’ll go sick, Reeves. The whole job depends on you, remember.’

  So he began to watch Reeves carefully, and appealed to common sense when he came to him one day with a worried look in his eye to inform him of certain particulars.

  ‘There’s one point that’s bothering me, sir. I don’t think we should treat it too seriously, but I wanted to know what you felt about it.’

  ‘What is it, Reeves?’ the Colonel asked.

  ‘The wood’s still damp, sir. We shouldn’t be using freshly-felled trees on a job like this. They should first be left out in the open to dry.’

  ‘How long would it take for these trees of yours to dry, Reeves?’

  ‘It all depends on what sort of wood it is, sir. With some kinds it’s advisable to wait eighteen months or even a couple of years.’

  ‘That’s absolutely out of the question, Reeves,’ the Colonel protested, ‘we’ve only got five months as it is.’

  The Captain hung his head apologetically.

  ‘Alas, sir, I realize that, and that’s exactly what’s worrying me.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with using fresh timber?’

  ‘Some species contract, sir, and that might cause cracks and displacements once the work is under way. Not with every kind of wood, of course. Elm, for instance, hardly shifts at all. So naturally I’ve selected timber which is as much like elm as possible. The elm piles of London Bridge have lasted six hundred years, sir.’

  ‘Six hundred years!’ exclaimed the Colonel. There was a glint in his eye as he involuntarily turned towards the river. ‘Six hundred years, Reeves, that would be a pretty good show!’

  ‘Oh, but that’s an exceptional case, sir. You could hardly count on more than fifty or sixty years in this place. Less, perhaps, if the timber dries out badly.’

  ‘We’ll just have to take that chance, Reeves,’ the Colonel firmly decided. ‘You must use fresh timber. We can’t achieve the impossible. If they blame us for any fault in the construction, at least we’ll be able to tell them that it couldn’t be avoided.’

  ‘Right, sir. Just another question
. Creosote, for protecting the beams against insect damage . . . I think we’ll have to do without it, sir. The Japs haven’t got any. Of course, we could make a substitute . . . I’d thought of setting up a wood-alcohol still. That might do, but it would take some time . . . No, on second thoughts, I don’t think we’d better . . .’

  ‘Why not, Reeves?’ asked the Colonel, who was fascinated by all these technical details.

  ‘Well, there’s a difference of opinion on this, sir; but the best authorities advise against creosoting when the timber’s not sufficiently dry. It keeps the sap and the damp in, sir; and then there’s a risk of rot setting in at once.’

  ‘In that case we’ll have to do without creosote, Reeves. You must bear in mind that we can’t afford to embark on any scheme beyond our means. Don’t forget the bridge has an immediate role to fulfil.’

  ‘Apart from those two snags, sir, I’m quite certain we can build a bridge here which will be perfectly all right from the technical point of view and reasonably strong.’

  ‘That’s it, Reeves. You’re on the right track. A reasonably strong bridge which is all right from the technical point of view. A bridge, in fact, and not a Heath Robinson contraption. That’s what we want. As I’ve said before, I’m relying on you entirely.’

  Colonel Nicholson left his technical adviser, feeling pleased with the simple phrase he had coined to define his objective.

  5

  Shears – or ‘number one’ as he was called by the Siamese partisans in the remote hamlet where the envoys of Force 316 were now in hiding – was likewise the sort of man who devotes a great deal of thought and care to systematic preparation. In fact the high regard in which he was held at Headquarters was as much due to the caution and patience he showed before taking any action as to his cheerfulness and determination when the time for action arrived. Warden, Professor Warden, his second-in-command, also had a well-earned reputation for leaving nothing to chance unless circumstances dictated otherwise. As for Joyce, the third and youngest member of the team, who was still fresh from the course he had been on at the Plastic and Destructions Company’s special school in Calcutta, he seemed to have his head screwed on the right way, in spite of his youth, and Shears valued his opinion. And so, during the daily conferences held in the two-room native hut which had been put at their disposal, any promising idea was carefully considered and every suggestion thoroughly examined.

  One evening the three of them were studying a map which Joyce had just pinned up on the bamboo wall.

  ‘Here’s the approximate course of the railway, sir,’ he said. ‘The reports seem to tally pretty well.’

  Joyce, who was an industrial designer in civilian life, had been detailed to keep a large-scale map marked with all the intelligence available on the Burma–Siam railway.

  There was plenty of information. During the month since they had safely landed on their selected dropping-zone they had succeeded in winning the friendship of the local population over quite a wide area. They had been received by the Siamese agents, and been housed in this little hamlet inhabited by hunters and smugglers and hidden away in a corner of the jungle well away from the nearest line of communication. The natives hated the Japanese. Shears, who was trained to take nothing for granted, had gradually been convinced of the loyalty of his hosts.

  The first part of their mission was successfully under way. They had secretly established contact with several village headsmen. Volunteers were ready to rally round them. The three officers had started instructing them and were now training them in the use of the weapons employed by Force 316. The most important of these was ‘plastic’, a soft brown paste as malleable as clay, in which several generations of chemists in the Western world had patiently contrived to amalgamate the best features of every known explosive and several others besides.

  ‘There are any amount of bridges, sir,’ Joyce went on, ‘but if you ask me, most of them aren’t up to much. Here’s the list, from Bangkok right up to Rangoon, complete as far as our information goes.’

  The ‘sir’ was for the benefit of Major Shears, his ‘Number One’. Although discipline was strict in Force 316, such formality was nevertheless not usual among members of a special mission; and Shears had asked Joyce several times to stop calling him ‘sir’. He had not been able to break him of the habit – a pre-war habit, Shears imagined, which made the young man cling to this mode of address.

  Yet so far Shears could find nothing but praise for Joyce, whom he had selected from the Calcutta school on the instructors’ reports as well as on the candidate’s physical appearance, but most of all on his own instinctive judgement.

  The reports were good and the comments flattering. Young Joyce, it seemed, who was a volunteer like all the other members of Force 316, had always given complete satisfaction and had shown exceptional keenness on every part of the course – which was something to be said for him, in Shears’s opinion. According to his personal file, he had been a draughtsman on the staff of a big industrial and commercial concern – probably only a minor employee. But Shears had not enquired any further. He felt there was no profession that could not eventually lead to the Plastic and Destructions Company, Ltd., and that a man’s pre-war career was his own business.

  On the other hand, all Joyce’s visible qualities would not have been sufficient to warrant Shears’s taking him in as the third member of the team, if they had not been backed up by others which were less easy to define and for which he relied on little else but his own personal impression. He had known volunteers who were excellent during training, but whose nerve failed them when it came to certain duties demanded by Force 316. He did not hold this against them. Shears had his own ideas on this subject.

  He had therefore sent for this future companion of his in order to try and find out what sort of a man he was. He had asked his friend Warden to be present at the interview, for the Professor’s advice in a selection of this sort was always worth considering. He had been favourably impressed by Joyce’s appearance. His physical strength was probably not much above the average, but he was fit and seemed a well-balanced type. His clear, frank answers to the questions he was asked showed he had a practical mind, that he never lost sight of his objective and was well aware of what he was letting himself in for. Apart from this, his keenness showed unmistakably in his eyes. He was obviously dying to accompany the two veterans ever since he had heard the rumour of a dangerous mission being planned.

  Shears had then brought up a point which he considered important, as indeed it was.

  ‘Do you think you’d be capable of using a weapon like this?’ he had asked.

  He had shown him a razor-sharp dagger. This knife was part of the kit which members of Force 316 took in with them on every special mission. Joyce had not batted an eyelid. He had replied that he had been taught how to handle the weapon and that the course included practising with it on dummies. Shears had repeated the question.

  ‘That’s not exactly what I meant. What I want to know is: are you quite sure that you’d be really “capable” of using it in cold blood? Lots of men know how to use it, but aren’t able to when it comes to the point.’

  Joyce had understood. He had silently thought the matter over, then solemnly replied:

  ‘That’s a question I’ve often asked myself, sir.’

  ‘A question you’ve often asked yourself?’ Shears had repeated, looking at him closely.

  ‘Yes, sir, really. And I must admit, it’s worried me quite a lot. I’ve tried to imagine myself—’

  ‘And what was the answer?’

  Joyce had hesitated, but only for a second.

  ‘Speaking quite frankly, sir, I don’t think I’d disappoint you if it ever came to the point. I don’t honestly. But I couldn’t say for certain. I’d do my very best, sir.’

  ‘You’ve never had a chance of using one of these in anger, is that it?’

  ‘That’s it, sir. My job never called for that sort of thing,’ Joyce had replied,
as though offering an apology.

  He seemed to be so genuinely sorry about it that Shears could not help smiling. Warden had immediately joined the conversation:

  ‘I say, Shears, this chap seems to think that my old job, for instance, is a special qualification for this sort of work. A professor of Oriental languages! And what about you – a cavalry officer!’

  ‘I didn’t mean that exactly, sir,’ Joyce had stammered in his embarrassment.

  ‘Ours is the only firm I know,’ Shears had philosophically concluded, ‘in which you’d find, as you say, an Oxford graduate and an ex-cavalryman doing this particular sort of work – so why not an industrial designer as well?’

  ‘Take him,’ was all that Warden said when asked for his advice as soon as the interview was over. Shears had done so. Thinking it over, he had been fairly pleased with the candidate’s answers. He was just as suspicious of men who overestimated themselves as of those who underestimated. The sort he liked were those who were capable of distinguishing the tricky part of a mission in advance, who had sufficient foresight to prepare for it and enough imagination to see it quite clearly in their mind’s eye – so long as they did not let it become an obsession. So from the start he had been satisfied with his team. As for Warden, he had known him for a long time and knew exactly how far he was ‘capable’.

  They pored over the map for some time, while Joyce pointed out the bridges and described the particular features of each. Shears and Warden listened carefully, with curiously tense expressions, although they already knew the subaltern’s report by heart. Bridges always provoked a passionate interest in every member of the Plastic and Destructions Co., an interest of an almost mystical nature.

  ‘These are just footbridges you’re describing, Joyce,’ said Shears. ‘Don’t forget, we want a really worth-while target.’

  ‘I only mentioned them, sir, in order to refresh my memory. As far as I can see, there are only three worth bothering about.’