Eyewitness

by Garrie Hutchinson

  When we got back to camp one of our officers ordered our tent to be moved to satisfy some military exactitude in him. So, tired, and dirty and with foul tempers, we set to re-pitching it. We had a very small evening meal. Thunder and heavy rain clapped down on us.

  Another 200 from Konyu arrived in the middle of it. It rained all night and we got a bit wet in the tents. One of the half-built huts the new arrivals were in collapsed, and they came crowding into the already crowded tents. Just before dark, an eight-inch armoured centipede, red and rampant, was chased in among us by the storm. As a dismal omen, another Dutchman died: the thirteenth in seven weeks. But, to us, his death was only of passing interest.

  *

  By morning the rain had flooded the kitchen and splashed red clay and soot into the shallow kwalis cooking our watery rice. This made a gritty meal. One mug of pap and one of weak tea. Pap is at least 90 per cent water, so we start a working day on two ounces of solid and 18 ounces of water.

  Fifty of us, with 40 Japs, shouldered machetes, axes and theodolite and went over the escarpment to the railway clearing. We kept on through the dry, unshaded monotony of parched, dead bamboo leaves and bare trees. After five miles we struck north until we came to a mountain-side of massed, shelving rock – split and upturned like big axes and chisels. Loose boulders became a hazard for the next man astern.

  We spent a hot forenoon here, surveying and hacking down bamboos and trees in the line of sight. It was an almost sixty-degree slope; our feet ached and our haunches tired, playing mountain goats. Our leather boots were treacherous, while the Japanese were nimble in rubber ones. By dinner time the effort of keeping up with them left us shaking with hunger and fatigue.

  After a brief break, we were at it again for the rest of the afternoon. We were hot, weak and hungry, and feeling a little sorry for ourselves. So, it was easy to fall into a mood of homesick loneliness – here in this inhospitable city of ants, millipedes, centipedes, scorpions, bees, wasps, butterflies, dinning cicadas and grasshoppers, in which man is completely dispensable.

  At times like that you get a feeling in complete contrast to that of singleness with nature, and to the feeling of beauty that comes with it: the feeling that this life of the bush is in everyone and everything, which seems to be a guarantee that this life of arduous stumbling, of harassed thinking and inevitable doubting, of honest trying, is something worthwhile.

  *

  This day began ominously. The pap issue was small and the dinner ration light. We had a long march to a new part of the railway and began work on cuttings and embankments. Hard at it all day in the sun, we found ourselves by dinner with our water bottles dry. The soil was filled with roots and rocks, and the tools were bad. Tempers grew shorter as men grew thirstier.

  Our boss was Billy the Bastard, a small walnut-hard man with a lean, baboon face. He is a Japanese sergeant. His alternative title is Billy the Pig. All day he and his men had been nagging us with hoarse and shrill: Speedo! Speedo! Hurree uppoo! Hurree uppoo! – Pickee! Pickee! Changee, changee! Basketo, Basketo-oo! It was almost 8 p.m. when we got back. The rice issue was a little smaller than usual. We demanded an officer present: Justice! Fair Play! Humanity! was the demand of the exasperated men. There had been enough nonsense, enough paradeground rubbish! An officer came: two officers! They were heckled without restraint. The men were out to show their temper; a temper to which the officers had been blind and which had been aggravated by a number of things: the morning’s rush, breakfast, tidying tents, dinner ration queues, the count parade and the work parade.

  The count parade is before breakfast and dinner queues, and the impressive ceremony cuts down our time for more vital things. The officers, on the other hand, with less to do than most, claim batmen – while the men don’t get time to wash their rags – so that finally, when the Adjutant stood neat and well groomed before the dirty men and announced in tough disciplinarian tones, ‘Men are coming late on parade. An N.C.O. will be placed on the left to mark any man late. The late-comers will be marked A.W.L. and will forfeit a day’s pay!’ – someone shouted, ‘Pig’s arse you will! You try it!’

  Then there followed a few assessments of some of the officers by the men. ‘Bloody good boys! You ought to get out there and try swinging a pick for a day. Don’t you take our pay!’

  This is the first demonstration the men have made. So far the officers have been able to use ‘normal army channels’ to delay and block – seemingly to preserve their own little privileges. When the parade broke off there was an air of satisfaction among the men: they had expressed themselves.

  The next morning we got more pap than we could eat at one sitting; the dinner ration was, compared to the usual, ‘full and plenty’. It will take more than a Daniel Webster to convince the men that this was coincidence. A major went out with the embankment gangs to see the conditions. He did a good job. He argued with the Nip engineers, and went very close to a bashing. They told him to clear off back to camp, but he refused. In the end he hopped in to help the lads get finished. It may not sound much, but this was the man, I am told, who had no courage in action, and little moral courage at other times. The talk tonight is not of our rights and wrongs – but of this man.

  *

  Out with the surveyors again over the rugged rock slides where we drove the last peg at the 156 kilometre 320 metre mark. From this peg we had a fine view of the Kwai Noi winding away in the distance below. The thin coiling of its green-blue, unreflecting surface could easily have been smoke curling through the trees. The tree-tops seemed soft and feathery. Some leaves were bursting out in reds and greens: here and there a splash of blossom or fruit; red fruit in trefoil bunches; pale lilac blossom, like acacias. But, in the main, the top of the jungle was a sea of new leaf-green and the mauve-pink of bare branches. The near hills showed vertical rock slashes and jagged ridges: in the distance the blue mountains rolled away to the horizon.

  At dinner we lit a fire to scorch some dried fish for the Japanese. This was over and we were finishing our rice, when a slithering rustle brought a hooded cobra amongst us.

  ‘Snake!’ – But the Japanese did not understand.

  ‘Cobra !’ – And they moved as one. The snake flattened his hood, but the axe severed it. In fifteen minutes, enemy and allies were sharing the modest five feet of the unfortunate snake. It was like strong rabbit. While we were sucking our teeth with a kind of holy satisfaction, Buck casually remarked, ‘And that is what will happen to a tiger, if he’s silly enough to come this way.’

  *

  A day of tree-felling at the 150-kilometre peg. We had 30 metres by 150 to do, marked by red flags on bamboo poles, halfway up a steep rocky hillside. The trees grew out of the rocks and their roots seemed to have split them. They were teak, mahogany, coral, acacia, kapok and others I had no idea of. There were plenty of traps. We started at the bottom to avoid crushing anybody below and to avoid a tangle: the vines in the branches often will not let the trees fall. Then came the tricky part: picking the right ones to free, and dodging quickly when they came; for they never fell true, and brought down tops from nowhere. When they hit they bounded downhill like something alive. Blackie was lucky, he had his shirt torn on his back by a close one. I just had time to give him a quick shove.

  We were back in camp by 3 p.m. and hardly able to believe it. I have done my washing, bathed and shaved. This is a most painful process with my one rusty razor blade and my knob of bone soap. I shave only my sideboards and neck, leaving what the Navy calls a ‘torpedo’ beard, Lenin-style. But this is as much as I can endure, and tears of pain stream down my cheeks.

  Now I am able to catch up on this diary. I have been taking it out each day to work, but there is only 15 minutes for dinner. Some of it I have written by firelight, and some while standing waiting on the count parades. I have not been able to catch up until tonight when, with honourable blisters, I think I can make it.

  *

  I remarked some time back that sex was now only
of academic interest, if at all. Hunger is our main concern. Almost all our dreams are concerned with food. The fact of food: seeing shops filled with it; seeing someone cooking it, and so on. But one thing is common to all the dreams – none of us ever gets to eat this dream stuff. Something always happens. For instance: I had just bought a great pile of cream and mocha puffs, Swiss pastry, chocolate éclairs, etc., and it was all on the glass-topped counter before me. But when I felt in my pocket for the money, there was none. The wish and the reality are always struggling, and reality always wins.

  *

  Coral trees are bursting out in a rich blush, and a few clumps of yellow orchids are showing up on the trunks of the trees. There are some handsome birds too, which we have not seen before. They have coalblack coats and fly in scolloping swoops into the branches, towing, on long thin stems some 18 inches long, two black fanlike feathers with white eyes, like a decoy.

  *

  We have several sorts of shifty customers with us. They will do anything to escape work, which means that others, by having to do their share, work themselves to death. There is one, a sar-major who in civil life was a barrister. He has never worked manually in his life and says work is only for fools. He boasts that he has never had to work since he joined the Army. He has either pulled strings or paid others to do it – even his latrine fatigue. He is proud of his soft white hands. Being in the Pay Corps he is our canteen wallah, keeping a few books and eating at our expense. Once he was caught for a survey-party, and everybody gloated. But too soon: he got out of it.

  There is another one too. He is dark, balding, fit and thickset – a talkative advertising man who continually justifies himself as a man of principle. He fell in today with the no-boot party. Austin said, ‘I was told you have a pair of boots, Kaley.’ ‘Oh, yes, I have; but they pinch a bit.’ His bag was searched and they found a second pair of boots. He said they belonged to another man, who denied it. Then he said it was unfair, he was being victimised.

  *

  Coming home, tired, after a day’s work we really can get self-centred. The great winding red-clay road, glaring with brown-paper dryness, is a stomach-draining pull without shade. The pale green, unblinking bamboo leaves are like blind mirrors, between which the sky shows deep blue – almost purple – and against which the mountain in shadow is a taunting, cool indigo. The painful impression of heat is in its nearness – its pitiless glaring, drying our bodies to tinder. The heat presses its boring fingers on eyeballs, making them ache; sweat splashes over eyebrows into eyes.

  Climbing the Hill in the heat pulls the shoulders forward and keeps the eyes glued to the ground a few feet ahead, shirking the prospect of so long a climb. And then there is this damnable struggle between physical agony and the eye for beauty, which, I am sorry to state, filled me with a desire to see all beauty in Hades. I could not cope with it. That is fatigue; but it brings a sound, death-like sleep.

  *

  One of the great problems here is boiled water. We dare not drink anything else. Filling water bottles from kerosene tins is wasteful. Major Woods has built a machine for doing it. It is an all bamboo affair: a large bamboo at the top with ten spigots in it. The bottles are filled and the spigot closed without wasting a drop. A man with a tin of boiled water keeps the large bamboo reservoir topped up as the bottles are filled. There are at least 800 men to fill their bottles after work each night, and the water-boiling party have their work cut out.

  The same ingenious major has harnessed the miserable creek, which flows through here, by building a dam above the camp to raise the level. From this dam he has piped water to a shower, through large bamboo pipes on trestles. This shower is a raised platform of bamboo, some 40 feet by 30 feet, above which are suspended three long bamboos, each perforated at intervals. The water constantly flows into these from the dam some 200 yards away, supplying more than a dozen showers. There are benches around the sides to put your gear on. To be able to bathe under running water is second only to eating and sleeping. And we are very grateful to the Major.

  *

  The rains are bringing the jungle rapidly to life now. Hooded lilies, several iris-like orchids, wild ginger and banana (which bears no edible fruit), clumps of orchids in the branches of trees like corsages of yellow jonquils. There are waves of perfume in the bush which we sometimes walk into. Cinnamon, chocolate, and one honey-sweet like clematis. Sometimes the early morning dew on the dry bamboo leaves smells like the Australian bush – or is it just nostalgia?

  On the rock escarpment, several hundred feet high above our tents, we watch large black baboons drop through the trees in careless, breath-taking drops of 20 feet and more, coming up with a smooth lazy swing. If a branch breaks, they simply discard it and take hold of the next one.

  Near the camp we now have the donking of 30 bamboo elephant bells: a sound identical with our night bird. Today, tree-felling, a chap put his axe into a bamboo and was attacked by a swarm of irate wasps. His whole body is red and swollen and he is pretty sick.

  *

  We have been clearing rock after blasting on our section. It was picks, crowbars, shovels, chunkels and baskets as we struggled with the broken rock-spoil between the new, raw, white limestone walls of the cutting. They reflected the heat and glare, almost cooking and blinding us.

  As we climbed the Hill tonight, a great straight imperturbable teak stood in the heat, unmoved by our struggle. But this morning, as we were going down, it was a different picture. The bamboos were a cool blue-green, dark and clean-shafted. The road was streaked across with rich brown shadows. Beyond, across the valley of the river, in the morning sun, the huge smooth mountain ridge was absolutely pink with, here and there, little splashes of emerald and viridian as if wet. It was so easy to look at going down; so different from that neck- and eye-cracking climb back.

  *

  Rumours are still with us. ‘Build three more kilometres and go to Saigon.’ ‘End of April, all men go Saigon.’ ‘American airmen no gooda – boom, boom! Kill many Nippon.’

  *

  After tea there was the prospect of Yasume tomorrow. Lights-out was not sounded, and we talked around the fires. There was a thunder storm. Then Herb Smith, from his tent, sang The Road to Mandalay. His splendid baritone echoed fully under the drenched canopy of the forest. At the phrase and the dawn comes up like thunder, one of the fellows said that was something you would never see – how can it look like thunder? But it made me think of what I had seen only this morning. It was a cool morning in a misty, rugged landscape which rose and fell like a rough sea. The hot sky was daubed with salmon-yellow mackerel clouds. The big smoky-blue ranges beyond the Kwai Noi river were like sullen sharp-crested waves seen from the height of a cliff through the mist of spume and spindrift. The heads of the trees just beneath us, in whorls of light- and dark-greens, with bruises of red, were like the surge of wrack on a rocky coast. A couple of the closer ridges were the green of transparency – close and huge, about to break.

  *

  I feel quite healthy, though I suppose a normal man from civvy street would not find it hard to push me over. My hands are rough, hard, cut and blistered. I keep telling myself that hard work, of itself, is fundamentally good: one of the basic necessities and conditions of life. This can stimulate a mind not dead to hope. I try to tell myself, what I lack in food and comfort, can be made up from all that is sheer nature around me.

  Yesterday Weary refused to let the ‘light dutymen’ go to work, saying it was sending them to their graves. He was forced to hospitalise them, a compromise which automatically stops their pay. As a reprisal the Japanese have, today, ordered the officers to make up wood and water parties and sink latrines. The men have not a great deal of sympathy with most of the officers, but over the doctors it is different. When we came in and saw Weary digging in a latrine pit, I think at a word from him we would have moved over to the Guard House and flattened it.

  *

  The toll of work and starvation is beginning to
show up here now, if reports we get are right. In one camp 85 have died; in another 300 are down with dysentery. Cholera has already been reported upstream, after a few showers. There was a sit-down strike in one camp because the sick had to work and there were no canteen facilities: they had to stand all night, and at 11 a.m., went out to work without food. About every hour they were beaten with bamboos. The English major was beaten very badly with a sword scabbard.

  *

  The railway is becoming a reality now. All the clearing is finished, the surveying done, and we are now to build the banks, cuttings and bridges. Big pressure is being exerted, and more and more are being forced out to work. The railway is mapped and already they are said to be at Tarsau with the rails. But there is a great deal to be done here. I have heard it said that the project is manned with 150 men per kilometre. They are working down from the Burma end also: the whole length of the line seems to be going ahead simultaneously. We are beginning to wonder what will happen in the wet season. These small rains have already given us a sample.

  *

  Last night there was a very heavy atmosphere and rising cloud flickered with lightning. By 10 p.m. the storm broke and rose to a booming shriek, plucking at everything on the ground. We were glad our beds are raised on logs. Gusts of wind threatened to take the tent bodily over the 400-foot wall at our backs. The storm reached a crescendo with incessant blue-white lightning and short, brutal crashes of thunder. The tent was filled with an atomised spray which wet us through. I used my gas cape to protect my drawings and diary. A large branch dropping like a huge dart, pierced the next tent and quivered, firmly imbedded, in the ground between the feet of the inmates whose disgust could be heard above the thunder.