Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

But we’ll make up for lost moments,

  When to Aussie we return.

  ‘There’d be sailing on the harbour,

  The Showboat our first choice.

  Or maybe we’d be dancing,

  Listening to our sweetheart’s voice.

  Although it’s only fancy,

  Our hearts within us yearn,

  But we’ll make up for lost moments,

  When to Aussie we return.

  ‘We had a few good concerts in the camp right up to July 1944 when things started turning really bad and the Japs banned concerts. By then, we didn’t feel much like singing anyhow, apart from Nelson who seemed to think it was his duty to keep our spirits up. I heard from someone that he was a really crook soldier. If it was true, he made up for it in the camp a hundred times over.

  ‘The officers remaining in the camp after October ’43 must have been chosen personal by Hoshijima with the help of the Australian liaison officer, Captain Cook. The first thing that happens is that some of the senior NCOs who’ve been receiving extra rations for doing bugger-all are elevated to the status of what the Japs call “Camp Masters”.

  ‘What’s more, Captain Cook and one or two others are having their tea at night in Hoshijima’s quarters. Can you bloody imagine, they’re eating tucker from Hoshijima’s table! There’s no bones showin’ through their flesh, I can vouch for that, their stomachs are full, tight as a drum and it ain’t from beri-beri neither. Among ourselves we refer to them as “White Japs” and we’re not gunna take orders from scum like them.

  ‘There’s Brit officers done the same before they were moved to Kuching. Twenty-five o’them would march out of the camp with polished boots and best khaki drill to eat at Hoshijima’s canteen. It’s like they’re on their way to the regular officer’s mess in peacetime. They get stuck into bananas, pineapples, doughnuts, toffee, coffee and lots of other good tucker and this feast costs them the grand total of seventy-five cents each and at the end they do a mass salute to a Jap second lieutenant who’s on canteen duty.’ Tommy turns to me, ‘I must say it wasn’t all their officers done that, some o’ them refused Hoshijima’s invitation to use his “Friendship Garden”, which is the Japanese canteen.

  ‘The worst of our lot is Captain Cook, he’s as plump as a Christmas chook and the longer he stays fat, the less authority he commands among the men. Cook isn’t an officer’s backside, he’s never been to battle and has a temporary rank, he’s an administrator, a pen-pusher. He was originally the liaison officer but now he’s the commandant of the camp, selected personal by Hoshijima to the disgust of the officers who were sent to Kuching. He can’t get the respect of the men and in July ’44 he starts reporting his own men to Hoshijima for punishment. Next thing the toadying bastard does is ask Hoshijima to build a bigger punishment cage to be positioned next to Esau.’ ‘Esau? What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot to say about that, didn’t I. Esau is the original punishment cage and you could be put into it for doing the smallest bloody thing wrong. It was an agonising form of punishment too. They placed it near the big tree facing the guardhouse. All it is, is a little oblong wooden cage made of wooden slats so you can see out. It’s on stilts about two feet off the ground with a solid floor and a solid ceiling made of planks, there’s a little door on one side you have to crawl through and once you’re inside, all you can do is sit with your knees up against your chest. The ceiling is so low you can’t stand up, you have to sit at attention through the heat of the day. At night the mosquitoes bite the living daylights out of you. Do something to annoy the Japs and you’d find yourself in Esau. They even put Padre Wardale-Greenwood in.’ ‘Oops! Here comes another VC,’ I say to myself.

  ‘He’s caught taking the place of one of the blokes in the work gang at the ’drome who is sick. He’s been doing this quite often and eventually the Japs find out. They confiscate his Bible and other religious books and put him in Esau for thirty-six hours.

  ‘Well, now Cook’s decided he needs a bigger cage.’ Tommy looks up. ‘Can you imagine an Australian officer putting in a request to the Japs to make more of these punishment cages to hold his own men?

  ‘Most sentences are now from a week to a month. You got nothing but a little water to drink for the first week. Twice a day you were pulled out of the cage and given a severe beating by the guards and then returned. A lot of men sent to the cage died.

  ‘Right off, Cook’s got seventeen of us in his new cage. We’re there for insubordination. He’d ordered us to go clean out the latrine pits, but we’d done it the last time and it was another hut’s turn so we objected but he didn’t give a damn. He reports us to Hoshijima and demands that we be severely punished. We get forty days, with no water for the first three days.

  ‘On the third night they make us drink water until we’re sick. “Clean yer gut out so you don’t shit in a pit that’s full,” Cook says as he passes us that night. He’s with Warrant Officer Sticpewich, another bastard who most of the blokes think is a collaborator. Though it’s never proven, we were pretty certain among ourselves. We ask ourselves how come him and Cook are not losing any weight and we’re all starving. They’re both the same in 1944 as they were in 1942. Also, Sticpewich ain’t an officer, so how come, eh? You don’t have to be a genius to work it out.

  ‘For the first seven days in Esau, we get no food and are not allowed to talk. At night they take us out and the guards beat the bejesus out of us, which the Japs call physical exercise.’

  Tommy turns to me. ‘What you gunna hear next, you’re not gunna believe. The Pommie cooks who have been sent to work in the kitchen can’t do nothing for us, but they time it so when we’re out of the cage and we’ve been beaten up, they come out with the swill, the kitchen rubbish. It’s supposed to feed the guard dogs, which are penned up near the cage and are starving same as us. They pour the swill into a trough and we all go for it together, us and the dogs. We fight the dogs for the scraps.

  ‘If you’ve ever tried to take a bone out of a starving dog’s mouth, you’d know what it was like. You’d wrestle the dog to the ground and grab the bone and he’d bite onto your wrist, but you didn’t feel nothing. It was you or him and usually you’d win. The guards would stand around, holding their bellies, they’re laughing so much, we’re the evening entertainment, a huge joke. Then the guards would herd us back into the cage for the mozzies to feast on during the night. That was all Cook’s doing and he done worse than that to some of the other men. What kind of a low-down mongrel is that, eh? I’m ashamed to think that him and the rest we named “White Japs” are Australian.’

  Tommy pauses. ‘Where was I? Sorry about goin’ on like that! Yeah, that’s right, back to the airfield.’

  I’m amazed how Tommy can keep it all going, the story I mean. It’s like he must have gone over it in his mind hundreds of times all these years and to my knowledge told nobody. Just bounced it around in his head. Maybe he’s told John Crowe, but he’s never said. Now it’s coming out, I can’t believe he remembers it so clearly, like it’s all happened yesterday.

  ‘It takes us nearly a year after E Force arrive to complete the east–west strip. Though what we’ve done is sufficient to be used by Japanese fighters and bombers. Then in September 1944 we start the north–south runway,’

  Tommy sighs, ‘Yer know something, Mole?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Humans are creatures of habit. We love habit. We wake up every morning feeling sick and hungry, but we don’t think, like how are we gunna survive today or that we’re prisoners of war. We wake up thinking today’s gunna be the same as yesterday and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. It’s just work and you can’t escape it. After a while you don’t ask yourself no more questions. You just close down and do what you’re supposed to do and hope you don’t get Mad Mick’s pick handle this shift or the next.

  Life narrows down to staying alive just the one day, th
ere’s no past or future, just today. It’s an instinctive thing.

  ‘Smiling at the guards and nodding yer head, that’s automatic. You get so good at it you can read the mood of a guard just by his expression. It’s like you know instinctively what to do to get through the day without creating any flak. You know the rules. No matter how unfair they are, you know them. Later you think what a weak shit you were, but at the time, it’s all about avoiding trouble, about not using up the thin thread of life at your disposal. Every blow, every bruise, makes you that much weaker. So you’ve worked out how many you could take before you are in the hospital or on the way out.’ Tommy looks up at me, ‘After a while, you become an expert on measuring the amount of life you’ve still got in you.

  ‘You calculate the price of everything you do, because the one thing you learn as a POW is that everything has a price. Nothing is done without a consequence. There’s four hundred men in hospital with all the things I mentioned before. There’s maybe the same convalescing, which is another name for dying slowly. You don’t try to get into the hospital if you can manage to stay out.

  ‘One of me four mates is forced to go into hospital, he’s got a severe ear infection and his whole body is covered in a weeping tinea. There’s nothing he can do except report sick. When he got into the camp hospital, he found the whole joint overrun with bedbugs and scabies. If you’ve ever had scabies, you’d know it drives you mad with irritation, there’s some blokes got hundreds. Hospital is no rest cure. It is something you try your best to give a miss. Hospital is one of the certain steps towards the end, it’s a qualification for death.

  ‘Sometimes I’d be that buggered, scabies driving me crazy, ulcers eating both me legs away, rice balls so I’m tearing at me scrotum, Mad Mick and the basher gang having a go, so everything hurts, yer bones and muscles and sinews, and you want to rip yer skin off. The one thing that saves you is that you’ve forgotten how to cry, forgotten how to feel sorry for yerself. Any bloke who felt sorry for himself just had to take a look at his mate. When it got so bad I reckoned I’d chuck the whole thing in, I’d stand under that great tree and think about this Alpine Ash, this Maloney tree. The one good thing we Maloneys done, keeping this tree a secret. I’d look up into the canopy of that great jungle tree, struck by lightning, battered but not broken, same as this old tree, and I’d say to meself, “Them fuckers can’t beat me. They can smash me, do what they like, but they can’t break my spirit. I will survive, I have a purpose, I have a tree and we both have to anchor the earth.”’

  I listen to Tommy and I can’t really believe what I’m hearing. It’s like he’s writing some poem in his head and he doesn’t quite understand it’s beautiful. He’s saying things it’s going to take me years to understand. Then in the middle of everything, he stops and goes on with the story, like nothing’s happened.

  ‘By January 1944, there’s no more electricity and water in our camp. The Japs have took the cables and the pipes to run into their own barracks and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  ‘We collect rainwater and we have to wash in the swamp, which by this time had become badly polluted. The latrine buckets have rotted and we have to dig pit dunnies, but as soon as they’re full, the Japs don’t let us dig new ones and we have to empty the pits by hand and dump the shit onto the tapioca patch and the swamp nearby. Pretty soon dysentery and skin infections become a truly major problem. Many of the blokes are now walking around barefoot in a bit of a loincloth that looks like we’re wearing a baby’s nappy, and everyone’s got tropical ulcers.’

  Tommy looks at me, ‘You’ve seen the scars on me legs, Mole. Let me tell you, they’re nothing, some of the men had ’em so large their entire leg bone could be seen from the ankle to the knee.

  ‘We had no medicines to speak of by this time, only copper sulphate, and then after that was finished, hydrochloric acid. Some blokes carved these syringes from wood and would line up of an evening in front of an orderly, who’d use these syringes to suck the pus out of the ulcers. Blokes also came in for treatment before they reported for work, hoping to get through another day on the airfield and not die.

  ‘Then, after he’d sucked out the pus, the medical orderlies each had a spoon with one edge sharpened and they’d cut away the dead flesh around the ulcer and paint the wound with a copper-sulphate solution.

  ‘Mate, the pain o’ the solution was something terrible, bloody near unbearable, until later when the copper sulphate run out, they used hydrochloric acid to do the same! Jesus, now that really hurt!

  ‘By October ’44, the Allies are bombing the airfield, which is good, because in the end the Japs could only use it for three months, but we’re sent out to fill in the craters and our own planes come over and strafe the camp, thinking it’s a Jap barracks. That’s happened a good few times and there’s a good few of our men get killed in these raids.

  ‘Things are turning against the Japs and now there’s no mercy shown. There’s a few of them know their turn is coming and they’d as soon kill you as look at you.’ Tommy stops and then says, ‘I can remember some of their names, the worst ones. Let me see, there’s Boy Bastard, Ming the Merciless, Mad Mick of course, Gold-Toothed-Runt, Gold-Toothed-Shin-Kicking-Bastard, Duck’s Arse, Black Prince, Stutterer, Sourpuss, The Indian, Coffee King, Panther Tooth, Black Bastard, Moritake the Butcher, and heaps more I don’t recall right now. They were all killers, the whole lot of them, and they took great pleasure in cruelty.

  ‘When we wasn’t working on the airfield, repairing it, we was burying the dead because at the beginning of 1945 we’re starting to die in increasing numbers. At first we had coffins, boxes made of crude planking, but then the wood started to run out so we’d nail some planks together to make a platform and put it inside a coffin with a false bottom. We’d cart the coffin, with the body inside, to a burial hole, undo the hinged false bottom and drop the body into the pit. It was the best we could do.

  ‘Catholic blokes had no priest. That was Cook’s doing as well. He sent Fathers Rogers and O’Donovan to Kuching even though they pleaded to stay with the men. So our blokes couldn’t receive the last rites and be granted absolution.’ Tommy turns to me, ‘It don’t matter none, wherever we ended up, purgatory or hell, it couldn’t have been worse than where we’d come from. But we had second best, Padre Wardale-Greenwood made a special point of saying the prayers for the Catholic boys. He’d apologise at the graveside, “Sorry, lad, your own priest can’t be here, but I’ve asked God if He minds if a Protestant sends you into the arms to our Lord Jesus Christ, His son, whom we both share. He reckons it will be all right, He’ll fix the books up when you get up there.” Then he’d say a prayer in English and a blessing in Latin. That bloke should have got the VC,’ Tommy says, forgetting that he’s given it to him two times already.

  ‘Wasn’t there, like, some sort of underground resistance?’ I ask Tommy. ‘Like the blokes on the Burma Railway who built a radio and could get news of the Allies.

  ‘Yeah, that was the main reason the officers were moved out to Kuching. We done the exact same as the railway mob in Burma. Our organisation was run by an amazing bloke, Captain Matthews, who was called “The Duke”. He was awarded the Military Cross in the Malayan campaign and he should’ve got the VC for what he done here, only he couldn’t because he was a POW so he got a posthumous George Cross from the King for gallantry. That’s sort of the civilian VC,’ Tommy explains, though I already know about the George Cross. ‘The officers who survived in Kuching called him “the bravest man we ever knew”.’

  ‘So what happened?’ I ask, anxious for the details.

  ‘Mate, I wasn’t a part of the underground so I didn’t know all that was going on. But there was plenty, we’d joined with a civilian underground movement run by civilians of all races in Sandakan and they’d helped us to smuggle in radio parts and gave us news of the outside world. It ran for nearly a year until it all come unstuck because a Chi
nese collaborator and Indian informer working on the airstrip betrayed the set-up to the Japanese.

  ‘The Japs found the radio and arrested Captain Matthews, Lieutenant Rod Wells and Lieutenant Gordon Weynton, the three of them were the main operators of the radio and the camp underground network. Then they brought in the dreaded Kempei-tai to find the civilians involved in the town operation.’

  ‘Kempei-tai, they were the Japanese military police, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yeah, murdering bastards the lot of them, the real experts at torture, we were very frightened of them. They eventually arrested fifty-three civilians they reckoned were involved with the espionage ring though our blokes never told them anything. I never heard what happened to the civilians, but I know eight of them were eventually executed with Captain Matthews.

  ‘They took our three blokes, Matthews, Wells and Weynton, first to Sandakan, where they tortured them, and then to Kuching, where they were tried at a Japanese court martial and found guilty of plotting against the Japs.’

  Tommy pauses and picks up the stick and moves a few embers about, then says, ‘Some blokes are just unbelievably brave, like you can’t understand how they could do what they did. Remember Richie Murray?’

  ‘You mean the bloke you couldn’t hit, the welterweight boxer?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s him. He’s a lowly private and a bit of a larrikin but one of those blokes you’d follow anywhere he said, a natural born leader, and blokes looked up to him. Later, when we were at another camp at Ranau, Richie Murray and his best mate Botterill and two other blokes went under the wire and down the track a bit to where there was this Japanese food store. I agreed I’d be cockatoo, you know, watch out to see there are no Japs coming. They were planning to escape and needed the food to take with them. They stole rice and some small calico bags containing biscuits. When they get back they give some of the biscuits to the sick blokes, which is just about everyone in the hut, I cop a couple for being a look-out and they hide most of the rice in the jungle, but also some rice and the rest of the biscuits under the floor of the hut.