by Mark Dapin
‘I could’ve had a war without uniforms, without parades, without military bullshit, with men who couldn’t surrender because they knew they’d be murdered. The same men we killed when our war was over.
‘But none of that happened. Townsville Jack hauled me onto his big, strong shoulders and carried me to the carriage. He strapped up my ankle with the sleeve of his shirt and gave up his space for me when it was his turn to lie down. So Townsville Jack spent the last two days of the journey to Thailand like a soldier at attention, although that’s the last thing he was in the whole bloody world.’
BONDI
SUNDAY 29 APRIL 1990
At two o’clock the next morning, the screaming started. Jimmy was running for cover, jumping into ditches, returning fire. I felt like I was inside his dream. I could see the jungle where he fought; I was frightened with him as he pushed away creepers and leaped over vines. I wondered if he was going to die as he called out for Mei-Li in the night.
He woke me early with eggs for breakfast. They looked up from my plate like tigers’ eyes.
‘They’re good,’ said Jimmy. ‘Eat. We’re moving out this morning.’
‘Out where?’ I asked.
‘Out of the camp,’ he said. ‘The furphy is we’re heading to Siam, but if you believed every bloody furphy we’ve been told, we’d’ve been home a dozen times by now. Have you packed your kit?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not a soldier.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get a bloody move on, we’ll get left behind.’
I stared at him hard. He looked back and laughed.
‘Gotcha!’ he said.
I’d forgotten Jimmy was a joker, a clown, the grandad who was always trying to tickle me, to pick my pocket, take my watch.
He showed me a new sketch, of a building like a golden church, and ran a blunt fingertip up the rise of the spire.
‘The first time I saw a spirit house was outside a coffin maker’s workshop in Ban Pong,’ said Jimmy. ‘We fell out of the train and into a stinking boong camp there, with rats and lice and hairy centipedes. A bloke got bitten and he died. Another bloke just died. The guards let us wander around the town, begging for food. The coffin-maker gave us bowls of congee and cups of cold tea. The next night we marched along the railway line to Kanchanaburi. It was all right to start with. These things always are. You play the “at least” game. “At least I’m not in a rice truck any more” or “At least I’m outside.”
‘We were tramping in the dark because it was too hot to move during the day. I marched with Townsville Jack. Katz was next to us, but he wasn’t really marching, just walking. That bloke couldn’t look military if you stuffed him into a shell and fired him out of a cannon. Behind us was Myer, the sad little joker.
‘Kanchanaburi was the base camp for the railway, a small town alongside a river. We marched in but we didn’t stay. We pushed on in a cloud of sick men’s farts, but we were weak and hungry and throwing away gear because everything started to weigh more as we went on, and in the end it was like we had giants on our shoulders. The soles of my boots came away from the uppers and I walked in socks on stones and through streams, and my blisters burst and my feet were shredded, grated.
‘The Nips drove us along with sticks, beating us across the haunches like we were cattle. They cracked Townsville Jack around the neck, back and legs to keep him going, but he never showed any sign of stopping and when I couldn’t take another step he let me lean on him and he carried my weight to the next camp.
‘Blokes would collapse by the side of the track and the Nips would kick them in the head to get them moving again. These fellas’d try to cover themselves, roll up like babies, and the guards would whack them in the small of the back, or wallop them across the knees. Sometimes a mate or a stranger would haul them up and drag them on. Sometimes they’d just lie there until the sick cart rolled down the track, and the medics would either take them or bury them.
‘Whenever we stopped, Thai traders swarmed around us. The Japs paid them a bounty for rounding up stragglers, who they liked to pretend were trying to escape. Escape. You can’t escape from the jungle in the dark. You can’t escape from the jungle at all.’
Jimmy’s voice had grown lower, as if it were going to ground. He was still following the lines of the steeple with his finger, tracing the route of the march through the jungle.
‘One night we stopped at a romusha camp for Asian workers, and there were coolies scattered around, some of them dying, most of them dead. Cholera had been through them, and we were expected to sleep with the corpses or burn them. They were only little fellas to start with, but they’d shrunk like children. The Japs said they were Tamils. I didn’t know what a Tamil was – still don’t, really. The only thing I can say for sure is they die easily.
‘The coolies built the railway. There were hundreds of thousands of them on the line – Tamils, Burmese, Malays and Chinese – chattering like monkeys, dying like roos in a cull. They couldn’t organise, didn’t know how to look after themselves. They lived in their own shit. There was nothing we could’ve done to clean the place up, even if we’d’ve had the strength. I pushed a body aside and maggots wriggled out of its mouth like teeth scampering away from a tongue. After that, I didn’t look around. I found a way to focus on whatever was in front of me, and to make sure I was standing behind something big and reassuring, like Townsville Jack.
‘The Japs lined us up for cholera vaccinations. Their doctor punched my arm with a needle like he was stabbing me, or branding me Property of the Imperial Japanese Army, because that’s what I was. Quilpie knew it was a trick, so he kept jumping the back of the line and never got his needle. They breed them tough in Western Queensland, but no bugger ever said they breed them bright.
‘By a creek in the jungle we built our own camp. We made huts even the boongs would’ve abandoned, nests for spiders and scorpions strung together out of bamboo and palm leaves lashed with creepers. While one team put up the cookhouse and stores, the Japs gave the rest of us hammers, picks and buckets and set us to work on the line.
‘The railway track followed the river along the cliffs. Thailand from the mountains looked the way I imagined China, with waterfalls, temples and caves. I didn’t have a picture of what Thailand might look like because I’d never had to bloody think about it.
‘We started work before dawn and finished up before the heat of the afternoon. We had to build a railway into rock, but the Japs had no machinery for us. The idea was to do it by hand.
‘“I don’t fucking believe it,” said Townsville Jack.
‘Me and Townsville Jack worked the hammer and tap. I held and turned the drill while he knocked it into the ground with a plumb hammer. When we’d sunk a hole, we scraped out the rock dust, poured in water and planted a stick of dynamite. Once the dynamite blew, other blokes came in to carry away the rubble. Hammering wasn’t digging, but it was close. The trick was to let the hammer do the work, said Townsville Jack, and I think he felt he could’ve landed a worse job, and probably had at some time, in Townsville or thereabouts.
‘Two lots of blokes watched us work: our officers and Jap guards. Life upcountry was a big “at least” for the officers, at least at first. They didn’t have to work, just draw up the lists of men who were fit to go on the line. Anyone can tell another man to do what they won’t do themselves. It’s not a talent or a trade, it’s a vanity. We looked after the officers. We went out to work to keep them fed and clothed. They were like our children.
‘The Japs paid us twenty-five cents a day for working and the officers thirty dollars a month for not working. Even after all the Japs’ deductions for rent, rice and rags, the sirs could afford to keep themselves in tobacco and duck eggs. They bought breastmilk from nursing mothers in the villages, and kept stashes of food hidden in the secret compartments of trunks I’d carved for them.
‘There was a lot of bullo coming from the officers about us all being in the same boat, but ou
t of the Aussies in F Force who left Changi to build the railway, more than a thousand diggers died, but only three officers. It was safer for an officer on the line than on the battlefield. The best officers came out with the working parties and tried to look after us. The worst complained about giving money to the hospital fund.
‘A lot of the guards weren’t Japs, they were Koreans. I wouldn’t’ve known a Korean from a Tamil before I left Sydney. It’s funny the things you learn, and the places where you learn them. We called the guards after the seven dwarfs, because they all had silly wispy bloody beards and none of them was taller than a chimneysweep. There was Dopey, who was stupid, and Sleepy, who was even stupider. There was Happy, who was always scowling, and Grumpy, who was always smiling, and Bashful, who was the biggest basher of them all. There was Sneezy, who didn’t really have anything to do with sneezing, we just needed somebody to be called Sneezy, and then there was Doc, who looked the cleverest because he had a high forehead and thick glasses, but I’ve met koalas with more brains than that idiot. I’ve known brighter bloody carp.
‘Looking at the guards, you couldn’t see how the IJA could possibly have beaten us. But the guards weren’t fighting troops. You don’t waste good men on minding skeletons. They were the scum of the army: retards, rapists, thieves, hunchbacks – and they were all so bloody short. But you also had the poor, skinny, hopeless blokes who never wanted to join the army in first place, because they didn’t like fighting or they were too gentle or too religious or too clever. Every now and then you’d get one of them as your guard, and it’d be almost like dealing with a human being. And you had to realise that the railway wasn’t the best billet in the Nip army either. They were dying too, not of beri-beri maybe, and certainly not of bloody starvation, but cholera doesn’t know if you’re a buck-teethed bandy-legged bastard or a six-foot-four ringer from the bush. It turns your mouth into an arsehole either way. They died out there too, the Japs and the Koreans: not in our numbers but with the same bloody pointlessness. They died guarding prisoners who had Buckley’s chance of escape. But then some nights I think, What if we’d just risen up? What if all us zombies had climbed out of our graves and come at the bastards? What if all down the line the camps had rebelled at the same time?
‘For sure, we’d’ve lost men – hundreds, maybe thousands of them – but we lost thousands anyway. For sure, we’d’ve starved in the jungle – most of us – or been captured by natives or eaten by tigers (not that I ever heard of any bugger getting eaten by a tiger), but some of us would have survived. You know how I know that? Because there’s always one fella who gets away, who escapes the massacre, who hides under the corpses, who breathes through a reed in the river, who finds a friendly village headman . . . There’s always somebody.
‘Those poor bastards on the Sandakan death marches, they all died. All but six of them. What could have been worse than that? Why didn’t they fight? Why didn’t they try to grab the guns off the guards? Slit their throats as they slept? I know, David. Do you understand that resignation is a kind of hope? Can you see that? People talk about the Holocaust. They talk about sheep to the slaughter. They talk and talk and talk, but nobody who hasn’t lost their freedom knows what it’s like to be a prisoner. Nobody who wasn’t there.
‘The Japs had a code called bullshit. According to bullshit, we had surrendered when they would have given their lives for the Emperor and died like shattered jewels – if they had been fighting troops, that is, and not bloody prison guards. So, because we had given up, we were less than soldiers, less than men, and that meant they could do anything they liked to us.
‘I got bashed on my first day on the line by Happy, because he’d noticed me. The trick was to blend in with the mountain, but now and again you caught their eye and there was nothing you could do but cop it sweet. Happy got it into his head that I was loitering at the drill, and gave me a kick in the pants to help me along. He wasn’t too pleased with his first kick, so he booted me again. I lost my footing and landed on my face, but I got up in time to catch another punt in the small of my back.
‘I’d been kicked worse in Bondi. I’d been bashed harder at school, but I’d never felt so helpless, so worthless, so bloody surrendered. If I’d fought back, he’d’ve killed me.
‘An officer named Cowley stepped in front of Happy and said, “The man’s had enough,” so Happy got started on Cowley. The Japs had some funny ideas, although not the sort that’d have you laughing. They thought that if a bloke went down when they whacked him, he was showing disrespect, because in the IJA you took your punishment standing. They thought they could get hit without falling, and we had lost the war without fighting.
‘Cowley stayed upright but he lost two teeth and never came out on the line again. The Japs liked to humiliate the officers, but it was tall fellas who copped it the worst, because it made the slopes feel big to bash them. They liked to stop Townsville Jack and slap him in the face, or sweep his legs out from under him while he rested on his hammer, or roll rocks at him from the top of a cliff. They were trying to knock him down like a skittle. But they saved their worst for Bluey, because they could sense he was weaker and he’d be the first to break.
‘Some blokes are just unlucky. They latch on to the wrong thing early on and they can’t shake it off. Bluey had the dummy called Little Bluey, but he must’ve robbed a theatre, or inherited it from an uncle, because he was the worst bloody ventriloquist in the world.
‘He was a handy fella otherwise – good with tools and engines – but Little Bluey was the thing that set him apart, so Bluey clung to him like shit to a sheep. He spent a year in Changi rehearsing his act, but he couldn’t get on the concert party because his lips went ten to a dozen every time he said a word, while Little Bluey’s mouth generally stayed as still as a painting.
‘Bluey should’ve been anything but a ventriloquist, but a ventriloquist was the only thing he wanted to be. He reminds me of Arnold Zwaybil, who wanted to be Frank Sinatra but sounded like Donald Duck.
‘Before we left Changi somebody’d said we should take a canary, and an officer had the idea of building a radio into Little Bluey. Quilpie, who was a bit of an electronics expert, fitted it up. Little Bluey was a much better dummy after the operation, because you couldn’t see Bluey’s lips moving when he talked. There wasn’t a lot of radio reception most of the places we went, but then there wasn’t much we could’ve heard that might’ve helped us either.
‘The dummy was the most recognisable thing in the camp. He had orange hair, bright red lips and big bulgy eyes. He looked like the clown at Luna Park. Only an idiot would hide something in Little Bluey, so the only time the Japs ever picked him up was to knock Bluey over the head with him. The guards hated Bluey because he was six foot four. They thought it was some kind of insult to the Japanese, that he was saying, “The reason you’re short is that I’m tall. Otherwise, you’d look the right size.” So they used to beat him every day, for some bullshit crime like blunting a drill, until he fell onto his knees and they could look him in the eye.
‘Because Bluey was so big, he needed more tucker to keep going, but every bugger was starving. The Japs only gave half rations to the sick, so the working men had to share their food with the fellas in hospital.’
‘I thought you said there were no hospitals,’ I said.
‘There was no bloody St Vincent’s,’ said Jimmy. ‘There was no Royal Prince Alfred. A hospital was just another bamboo hut where we put the sick. There was no equipment in the hospitals, no drugs. The only thing they had in common with hospitals was diseases.
‘Bluey was in and out of hospital. Sometimes the Japs beat him so hard they broke his bones – and that got easier as his bones got brittler – and the doctor had to strap him up and splint him and send him back onto the line.
‘So every single bloody morning Bluey got up and went to work knowing that he was about to cop the beating of his life, in front of his mates in a foreign country for no reason except that his fam
ily had always been as lanky as the streetlights at home in Warracknabeal, Victoria. I watched them whale into Bluey one day, while a good officer shouted and screamed and waved his arms around and the Japs acted as if the noise was just a monkey laughing in the jungle.
‘Bluey stood up for as long as he could while Happy punched him, then Bashful kicked him in the back and he dropped to his knees, but this time Bluey didn’t put his hands up to protect his head, he clapped them together to pray. And while Dopey and Sleepy belted him around the ears, Bluey begged God for help.
‘Dopey thumped him on the top of the head, like he was trying to drive him into the ground, while Happy kicked at his chin. Bluey didn’t flinch and he kept his eyes closed, so he couldn’t anticipate the next hit. His head rocked from side to side, and blood ran from his nose and mouth.
‘The sky was different that day, as blue as buggery but filled with long white drifting clouds. And you’ve got to remember, the blokes were hungry, so hungry we were hallucinating steaks, seeing mirages of potatoes in the trees. Half the men on the line were giggling mad from the pain and exhaustion and sheer bloody endlessness of it all. After a while, even the violence didn’t seem real. How could it keep on happening? Why would it? If there was a god, where was He? And God meant a lot to some blokes, especially the country boys. Often, He was half the reason they’d gone to war, to fight godless Orientals and knock a bit of God into them. You can only believe in nothing for so long before you stop believing in yourself. But if you believe God is good and then He never, ever does anything to help, no matter how bloody terrible the situation gets, then you have to think maybe it’s all bullshit and everything’s pointless, and most of the blokes weren’t ready to do that just yet.