by Nevil Shute
There was no haven for them at Port Dickson, and no ship. They were allowed to stay there, living under desultory guard in a copra barn, for about ten days; the Japanese commander then decided that they were a nuisance, and put them on the road to Seremban. He reasoned, apparently, that they were not his prisoners and so not his responsibility; it was the duty of those who had captured them to put them into camp. His obvious course was to get rid of them and get them out of his area before, by their continued presence, they forced him to divert food and troops and medical supplies from the Imperial Japanese Army to sustain them.
At Siliau, between Port Dickson and Seremban, tragedy touched the Holland family, because Jane died. They had stayed for their day of rest in a rubber-smoking shed: she had developed fever during the day’s march and one of the two Japanese guards they had at that time had carried her for much of the day. Their thermometer had been broken in an accident a few days before and they had now no means of telling the temperature of malaria patients, but she was very hot. They had a little quinine left and tried to give it to her, but they could not get her to take much of it till she grew too weak to resist, and then it was too late. They persuaded the Japanese sergeant to allow them to stay at Siliau rather than to risk moving the child, and Jean and Eileen Holland stayed up with her, sleepless, fighting for her life in that dim, smelly place where the rats scurried round at night and hens walked in and out by day. On the evening of the second day she died.
Mrs. Holland stood it far better than Jean had expected that she would. “It’s God’s will, my dear,” she said quietly, “and He’ll give her Daddy strength to bear it when he hears, just as He’s giving us all strength to bear our trials now.” She stood dry-eyed beside the little grave, and helped to make the little wooden cross. Dry-eyed she picked the text for the cross: “Suffer little children to come unto Me.” She said quietly, “I think her Daddy would like that one.”
Jean woke that night in the darkness, and heard her weeping.
Through all this the baby, Robin, throve. It was entirely fortuitous that he ate and drank nothing but food that had been recently boiled; living on rice and soup, that happened automatically, but may have explained his relative freedom from stomach disorders. Jean carried him every day, and her own health was definitely better than when they had left Panong. She had had five days of fever at Klang, but dysentery had not troubled her for some time, and she was eating well. With the continual exposure to the sun she was getting very brown, and the baby that she carried on her hip got browner.
Seremban lies on the railway, and they had hoped that when they got there there would be a train down to Singapore. They got to Seremban about the middle of April, but there was no train for them; the railway was running in a limited fashion but probably not through to Singapore. Before very long they were put upon the road to Tampin, but not till they had lost another member of the party.
Ellen Forbes was the unmarried girl who had come out to get married and hadn’t, a circumstance that Jean could well understand by the time she had lived in close contact with her for a couple of months. Ellen was a vacuous, undisciplined girl, good-humoured, and much too free with Japanese troops for the liking of the other women. At Seremban they were accommodated in a schoolhouse on the outskirts of the town, which was full of soldiers. In the morning Ellen simply wasn’t there, and they never saw her again.
Jean and Mrs. Horsefall asked to see the officer and stated their case, that a member of their party had disappeared, probably abducted by the soldiers. The officer promised to make enquiries, and nothing happened. Two days later they received orders to march down the road to Tampin, and were moved off under guard.
They stayed at Tampin for some days, and got so little food there that they practically starved; at their urgent entreaty the local commandant sent them down under guard to Malacca, where they hoped to get a ship. But there was no ship at Malacca and the officer in charge there sent them back to Tampin. They plodded back there in despair; at Alor Gajah Judy Thomson died. To stay at Tampin meant more deaths, inevitably, so they suggested it was better for them to continue down to Singapore on foot, and a corporal was detailed to take them on the road to Gemas.
In the middle of May, at Ayer Kuning, on the way to Gemas, Mrs. Horsefall died. She had never really recovered from her attack of malaria or whatever fever it was that had attacked her two months previously; she had had recurrent attacks of a low fever which had made Jean wonder sometimes if it was malaria that she had had at all. Whatever it was it had made her very weak; at Ayer Kuning she developed dysentery again, and died in two days, probably of heart failure or exhaustion. The faded little woman, Mrs. Frith, who was over fifty and always seemed to be upon the point of death and never quite made it, took over the care of Johnnie Horsefall and it did her a world of good; from that day Mrs. Frith improved and gave up moaning in the night.
They got to Gemas three days later; here as usual in towns they were put into the schoolhouse. The Japanese town major, a Captain Nisui, came to inspect them that evening; he had known nothing about them till they appeared in his town. This was quite usual and Jean was ready for it; she explained that they were prisoners being marched to camp in Singapore.
He said, “Prisoner not go Singapore. Strict order. Where you come from?”
She told him “We’ve been travelling for over two months,” she said, with the calmness born of many disappointments. “We must get into a camp, or we shall die. Seven of us have died upon the road already — there were thirty-two when we were taken prisoner. Now there are twenty-five. We can’t go on like this. We must get into camp at Singapore. You must see that.”
He said, “No more prisoner to Singapore. Very sorry for you, but strict order. Too many prisoner in Singapore.”
She said, “But, Captain Nisui, that can’t mean women. That means men prisoners, surely.”
“No more prisoner to Singapore,” he said. “Strict order.”
“Well, can we stay here and make ourselves a camp, and have a doctor here?”
His eyes narrowed. “No prisoner stay here.”
“But what are we to do? Where can we go?”
“Very sad for you,” he said. “I tell you where you go tomorrow.”
She went back to the women after he had gone. “You heard all that,” she said calmly. “He says we aren’t to go to Singapore after all.”
The news meant very little to the women; they had fallen into the habit of living from day to day, and Singapore was very far away. “Looks as if they don’t want us anywhere,” Mrs. Price said heavily. “Bobbie, if I see you teasing Amy again I’ll wallop you just like your father. Straight, I will.”
Mrs. Frith said, “If they’d just let us alone we could find a little place like one of them villages and live till it’s all over.”
Jean stared at her. “They couldn’t feed us,” she said slowly. “We depend upon the Nips for food.” But it was the germ of an idea, and she put it in the back of her mind.
“Precious little food we get,” said Mrs. Frith. “I’ll never forget that terrible place Tampin in all my born days.”
Captain Nisui came the next day. “You go now to Kuantan,” he said. “Woman camp in Kuantan, very good. You will be very glad.”
Jean did not know where Kuantan was. She asked, “Where is Kuantan? Is it far away?”
“Kuantan on coast,” he said. “You go there now.”
Behind her someone said, “It’s hundreds of miles away. It’s on the east coast.”
“Okay,” said Captain Nisui. “On east coast.”
“Can we go there by railway?” Jean enquired.
“Sorry, no railway. You walk, ten, fifteen miles each day. You get there soon. You will be very happy.”
She said quietly, “Seven of us are dead already with this marching, Captain. If you make us march to this place Kuantan more of us will die. Can we have a truck to take us there?”
“Sorry, no truck,” he said. “You get
there very soon.”
He wanted them to start immediately, but it was then eleven in the morning and they rebelled. With patient negotiation Jean got him to agree that they should start at dawn next day; this was the most that she could do. She did, however, get him to provide a good supper for them that night, a sort of meat stew with the rice, and a banana each.
From Gemas to Kuantan is about a hundred and seventy miles; there is no direct road. They left Gemas in the last week of May; on the basis of their previous rate of progress Jean reckoned that it would take them six weeks to do the journey. It was by far the longest they had had to tackle; always before there had been hope of transport of some sort at the end of fifty miles or so. Now six weeks of travelling lay ahead of them, with only a vague hope of rest at the end. None of them really believed that there were prison camps for them at Kuantan.
“You made a mistake, dearie,” said Mrs. Frith, “saying what you did about us staying and making a camp here. I could see he didn’t like that.”
“He just wants to get rid of us,” Jean said wearily. “They don’t want to bother with us — just get us out of the way.”
They left next morning with a sergeant and a private as a guard. Gemas is a railway junction and the East Coast railway runs north from there; the railway was not being used at all at that time, and there was a rumour that the track was being taken up and sent to some unknown strategic destination in the north. The women were not concerned with that; what concerned them was that they had to walk along the railway line, which meant walking in the sun most of each day, and there was no possibility of getting a ride in a train.
They went on for a week, marching about ten miles every other day; then fever broke out among the children. They never really knew what it was; it started with little Amy Price, who came out in a rash and ran a high temperature, with a running nose. It may have been measles. It was impossible in the conditions of their life to keep the children segregated, and in the weeks that followed it spread from child to child. Amy Price slowly recovered, but by the time she was fit to walk again seven of the other children were down with it. There was nothing they could do except to keep the tired, sweating little faces bathed and cool, and change the soaked clothes for what fresh ones they could muster. They were at a place called Bahau when the sickness was at its height, living at the station in the ticket office and the waiting-room, and on the platform. They had bad luck because there had been a doctor in Bahau three days before they arrived, a Japanese army doctor. But he had gone on in his truck in the direction of Kuala Klawang, and though they got the headman to send runners after him they never made contact with him. So they had no help.
At Bahau four children died, Harry Collard, Susan Fletcher, Doris Simmonds, who was only three, and Freddie Holland. Jean was most concerned with Freddie, as was natural, but there was so little she could do. She guessed from the first day of fever that he was going to die; by that time she had amassed a store of sad experience. There was something in the attitude of people, even tiny children, to their illness that told when death was coming to them, a listlessness, as if they were too tired to make the effort to live. By that time they had all grown hardened to the fact of death. Grief and mourning had ceased to trouble them; death was a reality to be avoided and fought, but when it came — well, it was just one of those things. After a person had died there were certain things that had to be done, the straightening of the limbs, the grave, the cross, the entry in a diary saying who had died and just exactly where the grave was. That was the end of it; they had no energy for afterthoughts.
Jean’s care now was for Mrs. Holland. After Freddie was buried she tried to get Eileen to care for the baby; for the last few weeks the baby had been left to Jean to feed and tend and carry, and she had grown very much attached to it. With both the older children dead, Jean gave the baby, Robin, back to its mother, not so much because she wanted to get rid of it as because she felt that an interest must be found for Eileen Holland, and the baby would supply it. But the experiment was not a great success; Eileen by that time was so weak that she could not carry the baby on the march, and she could not summon the energy to play with it. Moreover, the baby obviously preferred the younger woman to its mother, having been carried by her for so long.
“Seems as if he doesn’t really belong to me,” Mrs. Holland said once. “You take him, dear. He likes being with you.” From that time on they shared the baby; it got its rice and soup from Eileen, but it got its fun from Jean.
They left four tiny graves behind the signal box at Bahau and went on down the line carrying two litters of bamboo poles; the weakest children took turns in these. As was common on this journey, they found the Japanese guards to be humane and reasonable men, uncouth in their habits and mentally far removed from western ideas, but tolerant to the weaknesses of women and deeply devoted to children. For hours the sergeant would plod along carrying one child piggyback and at the same time carrying one end of the stretcher, his rifle laid beside the resting child. There was the usual language difficulty. The women by that time were acquiring a few words of Japanese, but the only one who could talk Malay fluently was Jean, and it was she who made enquiries at the villages and sometimes acted as interpreter for the Japanese.
Mrs. Frith surprised Jean very much. She was a faded, anaemic little woman of over fifty. In the early stages of the journey she had been very weak and something of a nuisance to them with her continued prognostications of evil; they had trouble enough in the daily round without looking forward and anticipating more. Since she had adopted Johnnie Horsefall Mrs. Frith had taken on a new lease of life; her health had improved and she now marched as strongly as any of them. She had lived in Malaya for about fifteen years; she could only speak a few words of the language but she had a considerable knowledge of the country and its diseases. She was quite happy that they were going to Kuantan. “Nice over there, it is,” she said. “Much healthier than in the west and nicer people. We’ll be all right once we get over there. You see.”
As time went on, Jean turned to Mrs. Frith more and more for comfort and advice in their predicaments.
At Ayer Kring Mrs. Holland came to the end of her strength. She had fallen twice on the march and they had taken turns in helping her along. It was impossible to put her on the litter; even in her emaciated state she weighed eight stone, and they were none of them strong enough by that time to carry such a load very far. Moreover, to put her on a litter meant turning a child off it, and she refused even to consider such a thing. She stumbled into the village on her own feet, but by the time she got there she was changing colour as Mrs. Collard had before her, and that was a bad sign.
Ayer Kring is a small village at a railway station; there were no station buildings here, and by negotiation the headman turned the people out of one house for them, as had been done several times before. They laid Mrs. Holland in a shady corner and made a pillow for her head and bathed her face; they had no brandy or any other stimulant to give her. She could not rest lying down and insisted on sitting up, so they put her in a corner where she could be supported by the walls. She took a little soup that evening but refused all food. She knew herself it was the end.
“I’m so sorry, my dear,” she whispered late in the night. “Sorry to make so much trouble for you. Sorry for Bill. If you see Bill again, tell him not to fret. And tell him not to mind about marrying again, if he can find somebody nice. It’s not as if he was an old man.”
An hour or two later she said, “I do think it’s lovely the way baby’s taken to you. It is lucky, isn’t it?”
In the morning she was still alive, but unconscious. They did what they could, which wasn’t very much, but her breathing got weaker and weaker, and at about midday she died. They buried her in the Moslem village cemetery that evening.
At Ayer Kring they entered the most unhealthy district they had passed through yet. The central mountains of Malaya were now on their left hand, to the west of them as they marched north,
and they were coming to the head waters of the Pahang river, which runs down to the east coast. Here the river spreads out into numerous tributaries, the Menkuang, the Pertang, the Belengu, and many others, and these tributaries running through flat country make a marshy place of swamps and mangroves that stretched for forty miles along their route, a country full of snakes and crocodiles, and infested with mosquitoes. By day it was steamy and hot and breathless; at night a cold wet mist came up and chilled them unmercifully.
By the time they had been two days in this country several of them were suffering from fever, a fever that did not seem quite like the malaria that they were used to, in that the temperature did not rise so high; it may have been dengue. They had little by that time to treat it with, not so much because they were short of money as because there were no drugs at all in the jungly villages that they were passing through. Jean consulted with the sergeant, who advised them to press on, and get out of this bad country as soon as possible. Jean was running a fever herself at the time and everything was moving about her in a blur; she had a cracking headache and it was difficult to focus her eyes. She consulted with Mrs. Frith, who was remarkably well.
“What he says is right, dearie,” Mrs. Frith declared. “We won’t get any better staying in this swampy place. I think we ought to walk each day, if you ask me.”
Jean forced herself to concentrate. “What about Mrs. Simmonds?”
“Maybe the soldiers would carry her, if she gets any worse. I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s cruel hard, but if we’ve got to go we’d better go and get it over. That’s what I say. We shan’t do any good hanging around here in this nasty place.”
They marched each day after that, stumbling along in fever, weak, and ill. The baby, Robin Holland, that Jean carried, got the fever; this was the first ailment he had had. She showed him to the headman in the village of Mentri, and his wife produced a hot infusion of some bark in a dirty coconut shell; Jean tasted it and it was very bitter, so she judged it to be a form of quinine. She gave a little to the baby and took some herself; it seemed to do them both good during the night. Before the day’s march began several of the women took it, and it helped.