Four Fires

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘About a week or so later a guard finds one of the empty bags and the Japs then knew they’d been robbed. The whole group, thirty POWs, were lined up in front of Lieutenant Suzuki, the commandant at the Randall Camp. He’s a pretty aggro sort of bloke even for a Jap and he rants and raves and demands the guilty blokes confess. Stealing rice is a capital offence so we don’t move and Suzuki threatens to have the lot of us. Still nobody moves and it’s getting pretty dicey. Then Murray steps forward, ‘I done it,’ he says. He tells the Jap commandant he did the raid on his own and then afterwards gave the food to the men, who, he said, didn’t know where it had come from.

  ‘Suzuki handed him over to Kyoshi Kawakami, known to one and all as the Gold-Toothed-Shin-Kicking-Bastard. Kawakami took Richie Murray down a jungle path with four other guards and bayoneted him to death. They came back wiping their blades and boasting they had blooded their bayonets.

  ‘We were all heartbroken, he’d died for us. It could easily have been me if they’d found out I was part of it. I owe my life to Richie Murray. Keith Botterill, his best friend, was in complete despair. He didn’t even know where his mate was buried. He spent days searching for Richie Murray’s body but he never found it, the Japs had buried him somewhere in the jungle.’

  Tommy is silent for a moment and is thinking, then he says, ‘But what happened to Captain Matthews and them two others was different. We heard first about Lieutenant Rod Wells from a Chinese boy who did odd jobs around the camp and who before that worked as a yardman at the Kempei-tai headquarters in Sandakan. That’s where the Jap military police put Wells into solitary confinement for three weeks on starvation rations. He was only permitted to wash when they returned the latrine bucket, which was emptied every few days.

  ‘There he was given the usual floggings to try to get him to give the names of the civilians involved in the intelligence ring. When that didn’t work, he was handed over to Sergeant Major “The Bulldog” Ehara, one of the Kempeitai’s most vicious torturers.

  ‘Ehara rapped him repeatedly on the head with a hammer until the top of his head was a bloody mess. Then a thin bamboo skewer was tapped into his ear canal, perforating his ear drum and destroying the nerves in his middle ear. The pain was so horrific, Wells lost consciousness. When he came to, he was forced to eat four cups of raw rice washed down with a gallon of water. The rice in his stomach absorbed the water and swelled, distending his stomach to the point that his lower bowel pushed out of his arse. He pushed his intestines back in with his fingers but still he didn’t talk.

  ‘Two days later they put him on the Japanese version of the rack. He was handcuffed and suspended by his wrists from one of the verandah rafters, his legs were bent behind his knees and tied so that his knees were about six inches from the floor. Then they jammed a long plank of wood about four inches square and five feet long behind his knees and two men stood on either side of the plank and racked him, tearing the tendons and muscles of his upper body. After that, the plank was placed behind his heels and the flesh torn away from his ankles. He became unconscious and in his delirium kept calling for his mother, but still he didn’t talk.

  ‘The Japs hoped it would make Gordon Weynton talk when his turn came, but the sight of Wells’s ruptured bowel and broken body only made him more determined to keep his own mouth shut. They repeatedly beat him around the head and shoulders with a riding crop until he bled profusely, pressed burning cigarettes into the flesh of his armpits and used him for jujitsu practice, but he kept his mouth shut, the bastards couldn’t break him either.

  ‘Captain Matthews was kept in solitary confinement, flogged, beaten and tortured repeatedly but he too never said a word. After this he was brought to trial, or the Japanese version of a military court, which is that you are guilty and can’t be proved innocent. The trial lasted less than one hour, the penalty decided before it began and handed out by a panel of judges. There was a prosecutor but no defence counsel. Matthews was sentenced to be executed. Wells, also expecting to die, got twelve years and Weynton got ten years.

  ‘Matthews was bundled into a prison truck with eight civilians also condemned to die. He could be seen with his face to the grille and as the truck moved off, he shouted, “Keep your chins up, boys! What the Japs do to me doesn’t matter. They can’t win!”

  ‘They were driven out to an isolated clearing in the nearby jungle, where there were nine posts erected along an open pit. The nine condemned men were tied to the posts and a mark was made in the centre of each man’s forehead. There was one executioner for every prisoner. Matthews refused the blindfold he was offered. His last words were shouted out, “My King and God forever! My King and God forever!”

  ‘That night as the stars came out in an ink-blue tropical sky, the shadow of a lone piper could be seen standing on a slight rise at Kuching POW camp. A hushed silence came over the camp as the strains of “The Lament” filled the soft night air. Men stood to attention wherever they were, the camp brought to a complete standstill. The bravest man they’d ever known had died for them and for his King, his God and his country.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Tommy has been speaking for more than four hours and I expect him to want to give it away, but he’s in a groove and I can feel he’s getting more and more emotional, the words almost coming out by themselves. It’s as though he’s reached some point in the story where there’s no turning back. He must go on now.

  ‘By January 1945 the Japs know it’s all over for them. The airfield is no longer in operation and it’s doubtful they have the planes left to use it. The Yanks control the skies and they’ve wrecked the airfield with their bombing.

  ‘With no airfield, they had no more use for us and the rice ration stops and we have to rely on the little we’ve stored ourselves. The daily ration is now two and a half ounces per man.’ Tommy cups his hand in the firelight, ‘Boiled, that wouldn’t fill me hand, you could gulp it in two mouthfuls and that was it for the day. We got no pay, no cigs and we were slowly dying, every day a little more.

  ‘Each morning there’d be fewer blokes at tenko and the pretend coffins were working overtime. It took all our strength to carry the bodies to the burial ground. Then one of my mates, part of the five, couldn’t go on no longer. We’re on one side of the coffin doing burial duty and we’ve dropped the body into the grave and we’re sitting down having a smoko. I’ve got a bit of a cigarette which I’ve saved and I light up and take a puff, then hand it to me mate who’s sitting on the ground opposite me. But he don’t take it and says nothing. “Here, have a drag,” I say to him, because he seems to be looking over me left shoulder. Again he don’t move to take the gasper, so I tap him on the shoulder and he keels over, he’s dead. Me mate died sitting up without sayin’ a word.’

  Tommy looks up. ‘There’s no crying, there’s no tears, just that thread I told yiz about, it stretches just a bit tighter, death is comin’ closer, you can feel it crawlin’ into you, comin’ to stay, be with you permanent, eat at you from the inside until you’re hollow and there’s nothing left and you die lookin’ over your mate’s shoulder, not saying nothing, not even cheerio.’

  Suddenly I’m crying. I can’t help myself. The thought of little Tommy with death crawling inside of him is too much and I start to bawl. Tommy’s out of his sleeping bag and over to me and he’s holding me. He’s never done that, not even once, now he’s got his arms about me and I’m blubbing into his chest. ‘There yer go, Mole. Steady on, mate. I’m here, ain’t I? Made it, didn’t I, eh? Got yiz to the tree.’

  ‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ I blub, ‘It’s not me should be doing the crying!’

  ‘Cryin’s good, mate, get rid o’ the shit inside, like rain after a big dry.’

  Just how he says it, I realise that he’s never cried for himself, only about John Crowe and when he couldn’t remember the names of his mates. I stop after a while and apologise again, but now I’m scared he won’t go o
n. ‘Please, Dad, don’t stop now, please finish!’

  Tommy is silent for a moment, ‘Can’t stop now, Mole.’

  He pauses and looks into the dark. ‘This is a once and only, mate. It can never come out again.’ Then he starts up again like if he doesn’t, he can’t. ‘On the twenty-sixth of January, Hoshijima tells us we’re leaving Sandakan, going to another camp where there is plenty of food. There’s nine groups in all, each group leaving one day apart. We’re told the journey will take three weeks.

  ‘Me and me three remaining mates, Richie Murray and his mate Botterill, them two are never apart, Albert Cleary and his mate Wally Crease, are in the third group to go on the first march out. We stick together. The Japs have issued us with just four days’ rations, three pounds of rice, two and a half pounds of dried fish, an ounce o’ salt, the same of tabacca, which is enough to make one smoke a day, and they kit us out with an old pair of shorts and shirt, because by now we’re all down to them loincloths I told you about that look like a nappy.’ Tommy grins, ‘There’s dysentery all round and there’s more than one bloke where it’s had to work like a nappy as well.’ Tommy is trying to cheer me up from my bawling bout.

  ‘They also give us these shoes to wear because our boots are long gone. They’re made of latex rubber and they’re sort of slip-on, no laces or anything, the Jap name for them is jikatabi, I don’t know why I remember that. Problem is, it’s the middle of the rainy season, pissing down for most of every day, sometimes for days without a stop and the ground is mud and bog and more mud and the shoes ain’t got no grip and keep slippin’ and we’re fallin’ arse over tip. Soon as you stand up, you’re down again, but when we took the bastards off, our feet were cut to pieces on roots, stumps and stones.

  ‘Our group leaves Sandakan on the thirty-first of January, there’s fifty of us. About a mile down the road we are joined by Lieutenant Toyohara and forty-seven soldiers. We’re loaded down with our own baggage and the Japs’ personal belongings, as well as ten sacks of rice, ten bags of ammunition and a dismantled mountain gun. We’re like bloody pack horses with an average of about fifty pounds per man on our shoulders.

  ‘After a few miles the track becomes very muddy and we’re slipping all over the place. When a bloke falls with a fifty-pound load, he stays fallen until his mates can get him back onto his feet. We’re doing that every few minutes. Then we hit the mangrove swamps of the Labuk River basin which are flooded and the bloody place is infested with huge crocodiles. There’s not even a thought of escaping. There’s the crocodiles in the swamps, and in the jungle we’ve been bit by every manner of insect, we’ve seen elephants, wild boars and that many poisonous snakes that most of the blokes are terrified.

  ‘We’re four days into the march when I see something that’s gunna become a very common occurrence. One of our NCOs, whose name I don’t recall, is bloated with severe beri-beri, his legs are that swollen they’re like they’d belong on an elephant. He can’t go no further and he calls out, saying he’s fucked. Lieutenant Toyohara tries to jolly him along, but it don’t help. The NCO goes completely berserk and he’s pleading for someone to shoot him. All this is happening just a few yards from where we’re standing and I seen it all. There’s this Jap sergeant major whose name is Gotunda, who agrees to put the Aussie out of his misery, but he wants an authority to do it from the senior Australian present. This is a warrant officer, name of Warrington, Clive Warrington, and he writes out the necessary authority. The Jap goes up to the NCO, who’s now raving and threshing about hysterically, and points his rifle at the NCO’s head. We turn away and wait for the shot to go off. Can’t look at somethin’ like that. But the Jap sergeant major can’t do it. Fuck me dead, there’s one Jap in the whole war don’t take a delight in killing. Warrington tells him it’s okay, he has permission, so put the poor bastard out of his misery. Those of us looking on want the same, the soldier is a goner, nothing can keep him alive, best to make it short and painless. But in the end Gotunda can’t do it, he shakes his head and turns away. So Warrington takes the rifle out of Gotunda’s hands and goes over and pulls the trigger and we all give this sigh of relief. Poor bastard’s out of his misery at last. When my turn comes, my hope is some bloke will do the same for me.

  ‘It’s not the last time we’ll hear of Gotunda, the only good Jap I ever met in the war.’ Tommy stops and looks at me. ‘That’s the thing, mate, good men don’t just come because they’re of your kind. It’s like we have our saints. I reckon there’s just some good men born, can’t help themselves. They’s there to make up for the rest of us. As it turns out, Gotunda, he ain’t the enemy, he’s a good man, can’t help himself.

  ‘Though I must say, them Japanese soldiers on that march were just blokes, just soldiers, like most of the blokes marching with us. They didn’t give us a hard time. They were split into three groups, one up front, one in the middle, and one behind us, trying to keep us going at a reasonable pace. They don’t bash us and they’ll even light a fag for you and always stopped us for a ten-minute rest period every hour.

  ‘It’s not all that great for them neither, they’re slipping and falling, though their boots have got more traction than our latex slip-ons. They’re doing it tough. But they’re a pretty disciplined mob all round. At night, camped in some filthy swamp, with swarms of vicious mosquitoes eating us alive, they’d sit there with needle and thread, sucking on the end of a bit of cotton, squinting to thread the needle. Then they’d mend their shirts and shorts where they’d been torn along the jungle track. They’d wash them out and hang them on bushes to dry next to their fire and they’d put on spare ones in the meantime. Last thing, they’d polish their boots and clean their weapons. Next morning they’d line up for inspection, same as if they were in a barracks. We were lucky, we didn’t have no Formosans with us. Those who did took a beating whenever they fell over or slowed down a bit.

  ‘But now at the forty-nine-mile peg we reach a so-called food dump to find nothing there. The blokes in front of us have taken the lot. But here’s where Sergeant Major Gotunda comes in again. He takes a boat down river to a native village and manages to get seventy pounds of rice for us and a huge bag of vegies. It ain’t much for fifty blokes and had to last us for days but it’s the difference between life and death. We pool our rice so we each get exactly the same and make it last. We cook it in a five-gallon billy, adding fern tips and anything else we can find like grubs and insects we’ve learned to eat before.’

  Tommy glances at me, ‘I don’t want to sound like it’s big-noting meself or nothing, cause it ain’t, but I’m a bushie from way back and, like I’ve said before, I’ve took an interest in the jungle at Sandakan. Scrounging around in the bush is what I’ve always done.’ He looks at me, ‘What I’ve taught you to do. Keeping a sharp eye out you see things others don’t. It’s not much, but I can spot a bit of kang kong, which is a kind of wild spinach that grows in the swamps. There’s fat grubs that live under bark, jungle fruit, wild chillies, fern tips and lots o’ other little bits and pieces you wouldn’t eat in a fit but now they mean everything. Sometimes you’d come across a bit of open country, a bit of sunshine, and we’d hunt for grasshoppers or lizards taking the sun. In creeks we’d look for freshwater shrimps, frogs, even tadpoles. Anything that had a body that was soft was good for the rice pot.

  ‘The rain doesn’t stop and the jungle keeps going on and on, it’s rainforest so thick that no sunlight penetrates its canopy. Finally we’re out of the mud and reach the sixtymile mark, but it ain’t that much better. We have to cross several rivers where there’s leeches thick as pencils that get stuck into what little blood we’ve got left. The march flies attack us and the mozzies are always there, swarms of them so thick that sometimes you can’t see through it. At night we pack mud all over our skin, thick layers of it, so they can’t get through. In the morning we break the crust off our skins and wash.

  ‘After about twelve days we reach the mountains and t
he next scheduled food dump. There’s no food here neither except for six cucumbers and a tiny bit of rice. There was no way the Jap guards were gunna share their emergency rations of dried buffalo meat and bean powder and the next food dump is about forty miles away. We’re on a tributary of the Labuk River and the jungle is thick as ever when we climb the Maitland Range. Every step is uphill and we lose five men on the mountain. They can’t go on and the Japs have got their orders so they bayonet them or shoot them, then roll them over the side of the track and leave them there to rot. We don’t see death like it’s a tragedy. It’s just your time’s come up, the wheel has turned and the peg come to rest on your number. We’ve lost six blokes so far, it don’t seem that much considering what we’ve been through.

  ‘With no food, except them six cucumbers and a handful of rice each, it looks like the rest of us won’t make it neither. Now here’s a good thing we didn’t expect. We’re sloggin’ through in the jungle and, out of the bushes on the side of the track, comes an arm and a hand holding out a piece of tapioca or sweet potato. I swear you couldn’t see them, dark hands holding the food and we’d grab a hold of them, desperate. You’d see nothing else, a hand darts out, gives you somethin’. We don’t know where they come from, we’re miles from any native village. It turns out they’re jungle people, like pygmies, small as children, but they knew we were starving and they come to help. I didn’t think it at that time, but later I realise all people are the same. Given their natural instincts they do two things, they kill or they care. Them little people in the jungle, they didn’t have nothing to gain, they could have stood back, but they done what’s right. They’re probably still exactly the same as they were then, still minding their own business, doing what they’ve always done. Far as I’m concerned, they’re the salt of the earth. We heard later they’re called the Murut people. What can you say?