by Eric Lomax
You will be killed shortly … A flat neutral piece of information, almost a conversational remark. I had just been sentenced to death by a man of my own age who looked as if he were a little detached from his surroundings, and who seemed completely indifferent to my fate. I had no reason to doubt him.
I knew that I was the only Royal Signals officer for miles around Kanburi and it had already occurred to me that with my obvious knowledge of communications, they would be particularly suspicious of me; so the indictment delivered by the interpreter was as unsurprising as it was unanswerable.
The questioning started. They wanted to know about my family history: detailed and precise questions about my grandparents and other relatives, my mother and father and their occupations. The room was close, and I was already very tired and sore. The pointlessness of what we were doing began to overwhelm me. Here I was trying to explain the migrations of my Lancastrian and Scottish ancestors to a couple of uncomprehending Japanese men in a Siamese village.
They wanted to know about my work before the war, my schooling, my war record up to the capitulation of Singapore in February 1942. From that date my movements were questioned in really minute detail; when they finally placed me in the Sakamoto Butai, after several hours of halting progress, I had to account for almost every hour of my time.
They also asked about my spare-time activities before the war. I tried to explain my interest in trains and railways, tried to make them understand some of the fascination of living in the country that had started the industrial revolution. The young interpreter’s face was a cold mask of bafflement. They exchanged staccato comments about my response, but moved on.
They moved to larger and, given the circumstances, more abstract questions: Who is going to win the war? Why? Where will the Allied landings be? Then they would shift suddenly to specifics, asking me why we wanted to get the radio news, demanding to know why we could not accept the news given in the English-language Japanese bulletins and in the local newspapers. There would be a banal question like ‘Do you enjoy eating rice?’ And so on, and on, and on again.
Their real interest was anti-Japanese activities in the camp, and still more in any contacts we might have had with resistance forces or agents outside it. They hammered away at this endlessly, and I could see that for them I was a piece in some crazed jigsaw puzzle that linked Singapore, Malaya, Thailand and elsewhere – wherever they were having trouble or there was resistance to their occupation. I knew that to give even the appearance of having such contacts would be absolutely fatal; and of course we had none.
They tried to cross-check whatever they had already got from Smith and Thew, which was not much, so they wanted to know the date on which we first received the radio news, what the items were, and how often we worked the set. I tried to be vague, non-committal and prolix all at the same time. Then, once, the interpreter let slip that Fred and Lance were in fact still being kept somewhere in the building. It was a brief surge of hope to know that they were still alive.
Where I knew they knew something, I gave them straight-forward corroboration, but of course this in turn allowed them to produce a list of apparent discrepancies between my version and previous versions of events, and so it started all over again.
I thought during one suffocating, endless session – it may have been in the afternoon of the second day, though I had lost all sense of time by then – that introducing a diversion might be a good tactic. There was something earnest and studious about the young interpreter, something in the way he seemed to relish – or was I imagining this? – our exchanges about British life and culture. I found it hard to tell because I loathed his endless sing-song questions, his dreadful persistence and smug virtuous complicity with what they were putting me through; I was beginning to feel that he and I had been in this room for months. But I asked him anyway to tell me something about the Japanese educational system during some exchanges about my own education, to which they had returned, as though the clue to the crumbling of their imperial ambitions could be found in the teaching of the Royal High School. He volunteered some account of his own schooling, and we had an interesting little chat about language teaching. At that moment, and there were others, he became a hated intimate, a sort of lifeline – simply because we could share a language and a moment of curiosity about each other.
The Kempei NCO slowly became suspicious and began to interrogate the interpreter, who reminded me that it was he who was supposed to be asking the questions. The interpreter was simply meant to be a channel of communication, and when it got blocked or distorted the NCO would shout at him too. Although I felt that the interpreter was in some way a human being like me, I hated them both; hated the interpreter more, because it was his voice that grated on and that would give me no rest.
They were obsessed with radios, of course, but waited a long time before introducing the subject of transmitters. Then they went at me. ‘Did you have a transmitter? Tell us how you would make a transmitter. What materials would you need? If you made a receiver why didn’t you make a transmitter? Lomax, could you make a transmitter? You made a transmitter. Tell us what you transmitted.’ It was in these questions that they revealed their extreme ignorance about radio equipment in general, wanting to know how a simple receiver could be converted into a transmitter, for example – which can’t be done.
Answering these questions was easy enough, but trying to make them understand the truth I was telling was a different matter. I was floundering in the gap between their knowledge and mine, and was suddenly the victim of my whole upbringing and culture; for my interrogators were from a relatively backward society. It is hard to imagine this now, after half a century of astonishing technological development in Japan, but in 1943 the Japanese Army was a technically primitive organization, reflecting in this the partly feudal state of its homeland. The two men sitting across the table from me simply did not know enough to judge what I was telling them, which was that the technical problems of making a transmitter were too great, and that no group of prisoners with the pathetic materials available to them could work a miracle.
At some point they brought in a different NCO, the first one having failed to get the answers they were looking for. So far they had not laid a finger on me, but the endless disorienting abuse relayed by the impassive young man, the barrage of ludicrous questions and the deprivation of sleep were bad enough. I sat hour after hour balancing my broken arms on my thighs, longing for rest. It all became a featureless blur, eighteen hours a day from what seemed like early in the morning till well after dark. Once or twice they woke me at night and brought me to the room. The endless wearisome repetition wore on and on. There was so little inflection in the interpreter’s voice, it filled my dreams with its flat repetitive questions.
I thought that I must be the first English person he had spoken to, after his training. His first interlocutor in another language a person he is helping to break down: would this make him feel proud? I hated him more and more. He was the one asking the questions, driving me on. I was sick of the sight of him, I would have killed him for his endless insistence, his boring mechanical curiosity about things I thought he would never understand.
I remembered all that POW talk about the moment when you are absolutely doomed and you take one of them with you. It was easier said than done with two broken arms, but it came to me all the time now and I wanted to do it. It was the interpreter I would have tried to kill.
I could not spin them a yarn, of course, or go into complete fantasy because I feared their violence when they found me out. I did not know for sure what they knew, only what they wanted to know; my task was to give them sufficient information to satisfy them without incriminating any other person. You have a fraction of a second in which to think up answers and I felt so close to disaster all the time, through one careless word. They wanted to know who our contacts were, how the information was sent up the railway, who we were buying parts from, so I would say that it was a man who wore
a shirt without insignia so we could not tell what unit he was in; that it wasn’t me who passed on the information, it was another soldier in another hut whose name I didn’t know; that we left a note outside our hut and never saw who picked it up.
I was trapped. I did not think at the time that there was anything heroic about refusing to give information, or the names of my friends, but I was certainly stubborn, and perpetually vigilant. I had to say something, and yet if I had given the slightest indication of the membership of the wider network they could have rolled it up, torturing each man to reveal his contacts. Gunner Tomlinson would have been forced to reveal the names of the men to whom he gave the edited news-bulletins, and these innocent listeners to the BBC at fourth hand made to suffer. So far, I seemed to be the only one in our group being questioned in such detail: I was in the net because they thought that the Royal Corps of Signals was the organizer of all communicative evil.
It is a strange feeling, being sentenced to death in your early twenties. It made me feel relaxed, in a strange way, to know that I was living on borrowed time. Yet day after day the psychological torment continued. With Pomeroy and Howard in mind, I did not expect any other outcome except – at best – a few Japanese soldiers facing me in the forest, being tied to a post, then a volley. It occurred to me that my family would never be able to find my grave.
They left me my imagination, and it was a worse tormentor than they could ever be. I expected death, but had no clear image of an ending that would make sense to me. I was now living in a world without rules – they could make up their own, and there were no grids or points of reference at all. The world I knew was one in which regularity was almost sacred, a world of predictable and marvellous organization; arrivals and departures were significant, but ultimately controllable events. Mine was a world in which all kinds of communication were revered and I had become dedicated, in my own way, to improving and understanding it. All this had been burst apart by violence. Communication and movement between places had fallen into the service of horror in the place where I found myself.
When I was not being questioned I lay in that cage. We had not been allowed to wash or shave since we arrived here, and I was now filthy. My cage was worse. I was not allowed to visit the latrine at night, and we were living on a rice diet. I think it was Slater, in the next cage to mine, who was not being interrogated very much, who badgered the little interpreter as he passed his cage and persuaded him that it was not good for them or us that we should have to foul our mugs and cages. We were eventually given closed lengths of bamboo to pee into during the night. But I never saw the interpreter outside that hot wooden room. Slater and I could not compare notes because of the constant presence of the guard; in any case, the less we told each other the better we knew it would be.
There was no light at night and I just lay across the floor of the cell, unutterably depressed. I tried to keep count of the passage of time by making scratches on the wall of the cage with a fish bone which I found in the rice. Squadrons of mosquitos from the river droned all round and over me during the hours of darkness and the only possible sanctuary from them was inside the blanket, but that was so suffocating that I had to endure the bites of the insects instead.
In the nightly delirium I had weird exalted visions, lying there in my shorts and shirt with my long-handled spoon for company. My mind was turning into a machine that produced texts, words and images, cutting them up and feeding them to me in disconnected and confused snatches, slogans, scenes, fantasies. I became a screen with bits and pieces unfolding across me. Sometimes the messages had a sound, quite loud; sometimes they were intensely visual. Most of them were religious, or at least came full of immense and comforting majesty; they were based, mainly, on the most exalted literature I knew, which was that of the Protestant seventeenth century: phrases like
Behold I stand at the door and knock
if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him …
lives there who loves this pain … break loose from hell
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten
Can I get there by candlelight
Yes, and back again.
I am Alpha and Omega the beginning and the end the first and the last and did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green. O for that warning voice which he who saw/The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
At the worst moments time became completely separated from my inner world of pain and sleeplessness. Once I came out into the yard, after what I thought was an all-night interrogation and saw the dawn light oiling the river at the end of the yard, filling our cages with luminous shadow. Then suddenly it went dark and I realized that I had been watching the sun set.
They brought back the first NCO. He would bang on the table with a big wooden ruler, waving it threateningly to get my attention. ‘Lomax, you will tell us.’ He was becoming more and more aggressive.
One morning I was taken into that room and there on the table, spread out carefully, was my map. It looked so fine, so neatly done. The NCO and the interpreter stood at the window with their backs to me. The room was silent. They left me standing there for a long time.
Then they turned and from both of them came a storm of fake anger. They had obviously known about it all along, but were now trying to shock me. This is a very good map … why did you make it? From where did you steal the paper, where did you get your information? There must be other maps from which you got your information … Where are they? Were you planning to escape on your own? With others? Who are they? And then they kept returning to one thing: who we were planning to meet up with, whether there were villagers who had promised to help us, whether we received instructions by wireless, whether any villagers had radios. Were you in contact with the Chinese? And so on.
The young interpreter was now getting deeper into his role as interrogator, as though he were enjoying it. They were really worked up. I could feel their frustration at being sent around in circles by my stubborn refusals. There was a violent electricity in the air.
They wanted to know why I had drawn the railway on my map. I tried to convince them that I was a railway enthusiast, that I had made the map so that I would have a souvenir of Siam and the railway, and know where the stations were. They could not imagine that this was partly true: I had not lost my instinct to record and list and trace. I spoke to them about trains, loaded them up with information about British standard gauge and how interesting it was to see a metre-gauge railway in operation, and the problems of exporting locomotives designed for one system to countries with different systems. The interpreter struggled to find the right terms, about gauges and boiler sizes and engine weights.
He kept saying to me: ‘You are railway mania?’, meaning, I think, ‘maniac’ or ‘fanatic’, his voice expressing genuine, angry puzzlement, and then he would try to explain this incredible excuse to his colleague, who looked darker and more brutal by the minute.
Suddenly the NCO grabbed my shoulder and pulled me out, half stumbling, the relentless force in his powerful arm, his fingers pinching my flesh where he grabbed my shirt. I remember seeing the yard, and the river bank, and the wide brown river flowing past as we stood there. I remember seeing the cages, and noticing Major Smith and Mac and Slater, and seeing that Thew and Smith were now in cages too. But I was told fifty years later, by someone who should know, that I was first taken to a bathroom, and that there was a big metal tub in it, full of water, and that my head was shoved under the water again and again. I believe my informant, but to this day I can’t honestly say I remember this. Nothing: a strange selective filter allows us to hold some thing back from ourselves. But I do remember the rest.
A bench had been placed out in the open. I was told by the interpreter to lie down on it, and I lay on my front to protect my bandaged arms by wrapping them under the seat. But the NCO quickly hauled me upright again and made
me lie on my back while he tied me to the bench with a rope. My arms were loose. The questioning recommenced. The interpreter’s voice: ‘Lomax, you will tell us why you made the map. You will tell us why you made a map of the railway. Lomax, were you in contact with the Chinese?’
The NCO picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. It is so much worse when you see it coming like that, from above, when it is slow and deliberate. I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body, and the branch smashed on to them again and again. The interpreter was at my shoulder. ‘Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.’ I think I felt his hand on my hand: a strange gesture, the obscene contrast between this gesture almost of comfort and the pitiless violence of what they were doing to me.
It is difficult to say how long the beating lasted, but for me it went slowly on for far too long. The NCO suddenly stopped hitting me. He went off to the side and I saw him coming back holding a hosepipe dribbling with water. From the facility with which he produced it and the convenient proximity of a water tap I guess he had used it before.
He directed the full flow of the now gushing pipe on to my nostrils and mouth at a distance of only a few inches. Water poured down my windpipe and throat and filled my lungs and stomach. The torrent was unimaginably choking. This is the sensation of drowning, on dry land, on a hot dry afternoon. Your humanity bursts from within you as you gag and choke. I tried very hard to will unconsciousness, but no relief came. He was too skilful to risk losing me altogether. When I was choking uncontrollably, the NCO took the hose away. The flat, urgent voice of the interpreter resumed above my head, speaking into my ear; the other man hit me with the branch on the shoulders and stomach a few more times. I had nothing to say; I was beyond invention. So they turned on the tap again, and again there was that nausea of rising water from inside my bodily cavity, a flood welling up from within and choking me.