The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  Again and again we stopped at sidings and would pray for the doors to open only to have our hopes crushed as the train picked up steam and rumbled on once more. On the fourth day of this living hell we stopped again in the middle of the jungle. It could have been the same place as our first stop for all we knew. The jungle looked the same to me. We took more water and rice, just a minuscule and mightily inadequate cup of each, and rested for an hour before being rushed back on to the train.

  We travelled on through the night and into a fifth day. By now nobody stood. We lay slumped all over each other on the floor, trying to keep off the sizzling sides. I was at my absolute breaking point. Looking back now more than sixty years later I wonder how we possibly got through it. We were all out of our minds. Great hulking men keened and wept like mourning mothers. Others whispered private prayers over and over. I lay, my head resting on a stranger’s boot, ready to die.

  Just before dusk on the fifth day we ground to a halt, the doors rolled back and the Japanese ordered us off. We had arrived at a village, which we were told was Ban Pong. We were in Thailand. Our nine-hundred-mile train journey was over.

  Helping some of the sicker men off the train I noticed a young man in his teens, lying at the rear of the carriage. I remembered that earlier in the day he had had respiratory problems, wheezing uncontrollably. There had been nothing we could do to help him. One of the lads jumped back up and tapped the man’s foot.

  ‘Come on, son, we’re here – at the holiday camp. Let the games begin.’

  The youngster remained still.

  ‘You lazy lout, get up,’ said the helper, a note of desperation in his voice. He crouched down over the stricken youth’s face. The teenager’s lifeless eyes stared back sending his helper recoiling, gasping in horror.

  The dead man was lugged off the train. He had probably died of diphtheria, coupled with malaria, dengue fever or dysentery. Some of the prisoners kicked his body into the jungle to decompose alongside the fallen leaves – food for the rats and bugs. I turned my back and walked away. I did not want to see his face and carry that with me; anything that sapped the will to live had to be avoided.

  The Japanese officer’s translator told us the train journey was finished. Before we could rejoice too much the interpreter quickly added that we had yet to reach our final destination.

  We had a fifty-kilometre march ahead of us. Starting immediately. To be completed that night.

  I swayed with shock at the announcement, as if I had been punched in the face.

  I had no idea how far a kilometre was but supposed it was further than a mile. In my state I struggled to see how I could possibly make it through dense jungle. I was surprised that I had made it this far. It was a miracle it was not me decomposing in the jungle beside the train tracks.

  The Japanese served up the usual meagre helping of rice and water, and gave us a further serving of unsalted, sugarless rice to take with us. I looked at the rice that barely covered the bottom of my mess tin, wondering how long it would be before I had the chance to eat it. It had already begun to ferment in the heat. All I wanted to do was to eat it, lie down and let death take me. The thought of a march through thick jungle, in darkness, was overwhelming and I sobbed quietly to myself as guards struck us with bamboo sticks and, shouting ‘Marchee, marchee!’, assembled us into a long column. During the six days that followed it would shorten considerably.

  About six hundred prisoners – diseased, vermininfested and at our lowest ebb – began that march. A handful of Japanese guards and officers organised the line and led us into the jungle. Those prisoners who had brought with them all of their kit and clung to it so tenaciously during the train journey, now ditched all non-essentials. We hastily fashioned stretchers from bamboo poles and blankets or rice sacks, and loaded on them those unable to walk. We were entrusted with carrying the sick. It was a Herculean task. All of us were walking wounded really and in such a decrepit state that we decided to take turns carrying the invalids.

  Trudging north from the railway, leaving behind our last glimpse of civilisation, we started our death march. In the bright moonlight we traipsed into the virgin jungle along a crudely cut path that swarmed thickly with mosquitoes. The Japanese must have prepared the trail for us beforehand but it was only about five feet in width and for the most part the soldiers in front had to hack away with machetes at the encroaching growth. Other guards carried sputtering bamboo flares that illuminated our path and threw up weird shadows against the jungle canopy. We walked three abreast with guards at the front and between us in intervals. Guards also walked alongside at points, encouraging us on with thwacks from bamboo canes and prods with bayonets. If we fell by the wayside, or stumbled and fell, they beat us. The blows landed swiftly and randomly, impossible to defend against.

  We were a miserable lot. It was not a march, more of a stagger. I had to concentrate intently just to put one foot in front of the other, the undulating ground covered with treacherous tree roots that you had to be on the lookout for.

  Depending on their mood, every two hours or so the Japanese would shout, ‘Yasume!’, and we would stop to rest for five minutes, collapsing on the side of the track, flopping where we were. If you were lucky you might fall asleep. The next thing you knew a Japanese boot would be on your neck, its owner screaming at you to rise.

  At that first stop I ate the last of my rice. Just as I closed my eyes we were told to get a move on. Silently we rose, again forming into soulless columns, and began walking. It was better to be in the middle of the trio. Bamboo, while remarkable for its diverse qualities, adaptability and usefulness, cuts like razor wire. On the outside of the column you had little chance of dodging blows from the guards or avoiding scraping your arms against the overhanging vegetation. When the cuts went bad, 90 per cent of the time tropical ulcers formed.

  It got to the point where I did not trust any plant. I treated them all as poisonous or dangerous, as many were. A lot of the things that we suffered from, including ringworm, scabies, rashes and itches, came as a direct result of plant contact. The only one I knew to be safe was the hibiscus, identifiable by its lovely silky green leaves. Whenever I saw one I would pick some leaves and stuff them in my pocket. They were packed with vitamins and could be added to rice or boiled to make a stew.

  Tree snakes that hung above us from the tropical rainforest like lianas were another hazard. Roaming the Aberdeenshire countryside I occasionally saw adders and while I never exactly wanted to bring one home as a pet, I knew that they could not kill a man. I did not know just how venomous these slim green slitherers were and had no wish to find out. Yet they were so well camouflaged among the dense foliage that by the time I spotted them they were already hissing above my head, sending icy shivers down my sweaty back.

  I also tried to ensure that I was near the front of the column. The stragglers faded to the rear, which ignited the idiotic wrath of the guards, who ruthlessly beat these poor souls and all of the men in their immediate vicinity. Another benefit of being near the front was that you saw fewer men surrendering to fatigue, illness and death. The less you saw the better. Death chipped away at your spirits like a jackhammer.

  Nonetheless I did witness the pathetic and desperate sight of two men, both younger than me, being left behind. Anyone who collapsed, passed out or refused to go on was left to die. You would walk past and offer assistance, a hand up or a supporting arm under the armpits. Those too weak to be encouraged to come along were left, slipping down the onward column, which stretched for hundreds of yards. Theirs was either a slow, lingering and lonely death or the swift and brutal thrust of a Japanese bayonet.

  Some men had noticeably ‘paired up’, latching on to friends from the same regiment. They helped each other over fallen logs, egged each other on, shared food and stories. They worked on the basis that two men were better than one, and the companionship must have given them strength. I knew no one and was wholly alone. Never had I felt so alone.

  Afte
r two days of solid marching we came to a village. I heard that the clearing in the midst of the jungle, surrounded by trees on all sides and dotted with five or six bamboo huts, was called Kam Pong. The villagers were instructed to feed us and ran around at the behest of the Japanese, bowing to the guards’ every need, clearly petrified. Some of our chaps tried to quiz the natives for information – where were we, what was near us, could they hide us – but the villagers quickly turned away. Others tried to barter for food or water but met similar silence. I did not blame the locals for pandering to the Japanese; they had no choice.

  The villagers served up rice, some boiled water and an extremely spicy vegetable stew. It was delicious but it played havoc with my bowels, instantly sending me running for the jungle. Luckily I managed to do my business without getting a beating and returned to my spot. Around me the POWs were scattered like the aftermath of a mass failed parachute jump. Men lay at all angles, some of them moaning softly, others already asleep. We were told that we would spend the night here so should conserve energy and sleep. I wondered how many ‘kilometres’ we had travelled and how far we had ahead of us. Those terrible thoughts somehow sent me gratefully into a deep sleep there in the dirt – not giving a second thought to the cobras, kraits and vipers we had been warned about in training.

  Through the night I kept waking up with a start. The jungle had come alive. A whole new populace claimed the darkness. Around us echoed strange and terrible sounds – wolf-like howls and a clack-clack-clack that I took for a type of woodpecker. The din produced by crickets, bullfrogs, monkeys and all manner of creatures rose to such a crescendo that it was impossible to sleep soundly. I half expected a man-eating tiger to come and take me.

  When I woke in the morning my body ached all over. I stood and almost yelped with pain and stiffness. I was covered in the rich jungle soil. It caked us all from head to toe. The Japanese had awoken with renewed vigour and demanded an even quicker pace today, screaming in our faces, ‘Speedo, speedo!’ and beating us on. I put my head down and trudged on, fixing my eyes on the back of the sad chap in front of me, not really taking anything in. My mind was switched firmly on to autopilot. I was so out of it that my brain had shut down and was reduced to survival mode. I wondered if it were possible to sleep with your eyes open.

  We followed a river for most of the march. I would later learn it was the Mae Klong, which joined the river Kwai – a vast river that rises in the north-west of Thailand near the Burmese border and flows south for hundreds of miles to drain into the Gulf of Thailand. We kept to the right of its muddy brown expanse, shadowing its winding path. It was as wide as the mighty river Tay in my native Scotland. Even when the Mae Klong was out of sight I could hear its low rumbling. Much as we yearned to we never ventured near enough to sneak a drink from it. But the guards often waded in and bathed, taunting us by splashing each other, laughing and loudly enjoying the relief that the cool waters brought.

  As the sun dropped below the horizon like a sinking stone the river left our view. Its distant sound disappeared with the emergence of the myriad of jungle noises. After marching in the dark for some distance the guards ordered us to a halt. We would camp on the path overnight. I ate what was left of the rice in my mess tin and fell asleep. It was to be a long, broken night. I felt sick with dread, wondering what was to come next. The question of a holiday camp was now well and truly ruled out. Even the most optimistic POW realised that we had been conned.

  Vivid and disturbing nightmares of the surrender at Fort Canning disrupted what sleep I did manage to get. The raging face of the Japanese soldier who took me prisoner at bayonet point haunted my subconscious. I still have those nightmares to this day and the image of the man’s face is as clear as if it happened yesterday.

  I never dared to take my boots and socks off overnight. They would almost certainly have gone missing. Lying there in my boots I remembered a scene from a Western I had seen at the Capital Theatre in Aberdeen, in which the cowboys were all sleeping on the ground, around a campfire. One chap, drunk on moonshine, was without a pair of boots and proceeded to steal a pair from the guy beside him. It was the way he did it that tickled me. He took an age to slip them off and was very careful not to wake the sleeper. The image stuck with me for some reason and I thought, I’m not going to let that happen to me.

  On the fourth day we trooped on again. More and more men were dropping back and being left behind to die. It was noticeable now that the column was shrinking. No one tried to boost morale by song, banter or otherwise. Our spirits were broken. We just kept plodding along, praying it would end soon and that we would get better conditions. We all stank to high heaven. There was no escaping it but after a while we became used to it, like families who live beside fish markets. The Japanese probably did not smell as badly as us since they often bathed in the river. We tried not to get close enough to them to check. Our collective stench most likely increased their already ample disgust for us.

  Allowing oneself to be relegated to the status of prisoner, to fall into the arms of the enemy, was highly dishonourable in the Japanese soldiers’ minds. In their distorted view of the world death was a more admirable option. The simple peasants who formed the backbone of the Japanese Army had been thoroughly indoctrinated by their fascist leaders. Like their German allies they were a chosen race, a superior people. They were ‘the sons of heaven’ and we were decadent and effeminate weaklings. Lacking the Wagnerian and Teutonic mythology that cloaked Nazi ideology, the Japanese militarists wrapped their aggressive bid for racial domination in the ancient code of bushido to legitimise it with the Japanese people. Under this samurai code Japanese soldiers committed hara-kiri when captured, undertook suicidal banzai charges and, as kamikaze pilots, crashed into enemy ships.

  For us prisoners bushido, the so-called ‘Way of the Warrior’, gave the guards a licence to murder, maim and torture. The only thing more despicable to them than a prisoner was a sick prisoner, as we first discovered on our death march.

  In the months to come many thousands of prisoners would follow in our footsteps and this jungle trail would claim hundreds more lives.

  That night we stopped again at a village. We were fed rice, spicy stew and water, before sleeping where we sat. I slept much better, either becoming accustomed to the jungle sounds or just too dog-tired to care.

  We went on our way again in the morning. We hauled our sick men along by their arms, their toes dragging in the dirt. My fears of being massacred had long subsided. If they were going to do it, they would have done so by now. I believed that we were being taken to work as slaves on something.

  By now covered in scabies and lice, I had been struck down again by the dreaded malaria. As the protozoan parasites raged through my bloodstream, my spleen became tender and enlarged. Walking became ever more difficult and I stumbled more often than not. Some men, whom I had helped earlier on in the journey, gave me blankets to break the fever and to stop the rigors that shook my body like a man possessed.

  We walked all day and through the next night, stopping only for brief respites beside the track. It was a final push by the Japanese to get us to our destination, whatever it was, inside six days. Whether there was a date we had to arrive by, I was unsure. It appeared that the soldiers wanted us moving at double-time, rush or not. In the late afternoon, after we had been trudging for around thirty-two hours, we arrived at our final destination – we had completed a 160-kilometre trek.

  It took some time for us to comprehend that we had made it, that this small, sparse clearing in the middle of the jungle was ‘it’, the ultimate objective of our eleven-day journey. There was nothing here, not a single hut. On one side of the clearing lay an array of tools. Pickaxes, shovels, two-handed saws and scythe-like instruments. Seeing them made me wonder again what our purpose here was. An aerodrome perhaps? Were we at a strategic point for the Japanese to launch an air assault on India? The men were gathered, chattering about our future possibilities, when the guard in charge g
ot our attention.

  Through his interpreter he told us: ‘This is your camp. You make home here. Build own huts. All men work on railway.’

  A railway! A railway, here in the middle of nowhere. It seemed mad and it certainly never occurred to me that this would be our task. How would they get the sleepers into the jungle? Not to mention the steel railway lines. The British had considered the construction of a railway to link Burma with Siam many years before but concluded it could not be done. Not without massive loss of life anyway.

  Finally we had been told of our purpose but I do not think that it sank in properly. All we cared about was that the march was over. Surely things would start looking up. We could not envisage the enormity, misery or savagery of the challenges ahead. I just felt glad to stop walking.

  The soldiers had arranged arc lamps in one corner of the clearing, which they led us to now and instructed us to start construction of our sleeping quarters. We all stared at each other blankly. One of the guards, noticing our bewilderment, pointed to the scattered tools and made an A-frame with his arms, yammering away in a language we did not comprehend.