LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

5631 tank engine, decked with the Thai and the Japanese ‘poached egg’ national flags, brooded nearby in a cutting, an AA-gun post was set up, and the GOC presided at a ceremony at which the two regimental commanders drove gun-metal dog-spikes into an ebony sleeper to fix the final rails. One of the many legends tells how an Aussie prisoner prized out these ‘gold’ spikes and sold them for a large sum to a lurking Thai. Each commander was presented with a commemorative replica, which was cast with the date shōwa 18nen 10gatsu 25 nichi along one side, 25 October 1943. One is preserved as an heirloom in Colonel Imai’s family. For engineers a bronze medallion was struck to commemorate the occasion.⁸¹ The site of the ceremony is now buried deep under water in the Khao Laem hydro-electric dam, which is 90 metres high, 910 metres water surface-level 155 metres above sea level. The dam covers 42 km from its most southerly to its most northerly points. Power-turbines, capacity 300 megawatts, are in tunnels in the Khao Laem mountain with spillways for rivers. The Kwae Noi had to be diverted for about 500 metres during construction.⁸²

      The Three Pagodas Pass has the central pagoda marking the frontier boundary, the other two being in Thai and Burmese territory respectively. Each is about 6 metres high. They are now a shining white trio, having been restored after the war, but I have seen a colour photograph of them as they were when the railway was built, the steps crudely roughened by time, lichen-covered, lacking part of their finials at the top, encroached upon by saplings and trees. Their Thai name is phra chedi sam ong which means ‘the three religious spire-shaped temple towers’. The village near the pass is called Paya Thonzu (thonzu is a religious numerative, paya means ‘pagoda’).

      All these places were emblematic of a hideous task, hideous alike to prisoners and coolies and engineers. The Japanese made up many plaintive songs like these:

      We are men drenched in soaking rain,

      gritting our teeth, gritting our teeth ...

      But if you wait, Spring comes again,

      and boats come up again.

      Left behind at home my darling child no doubt has grown.

      How is my wife’s health? Has anything changed?

      We shiver in our dreams.

      Even when the wind drops, tigers lurk in rubber groves.

      Leaves fall and scatter. Why do they scatter?

      News, news of our homeland –

      Shall we hear soon in August?

      Why do stars loom low on a Panga Forest night?

      Now in our dreams we think, think, think of home,

      and wait for a boat to load, to greet a boat.

      In rubber groves in Panga Forest our final lodging to die,

      Sparse shade, leaves and branches overhang,

      Even today showers impend.

      If you visit our comrades’ honoured graves

      (mists crowding in, dimly dawn comes calm in the forest)

      railbed grows chilly, mists penetrate your body ...

      We made a banner of remembrance of our comrades

      who refused to die defeated, it was soiled by rain,

      it was a collection of autographs, and we set it up

      on top of a hill.⁸³

      In Chapter 30 Futamatsu remarks that ‘those who have to spend a long time in the jungle realize that their object in life becomes that of staying alive’, and that ‘the curfew orderly made men forget the toils of work and when night fell the fields and hills of home floated under their eyelids, and in their dreams they saw their family friends’. Officer prisoners and senior NCOs were lucky in one respect, that they had, or developed, a strong sense of responsibility for their men, doubly lucky when men of their own unit were in the same camp. Indian Army officers were unlucky because their men were all segregated from white men (and pressurized to join the INA, the Indian Army of Independence). The Dutch, as the RAPWI (Returned Allied Prisoners-of-War and Internees) handbook told them after release in 1945, had a strong sense of survival, had an overpowering urge to look after themselves. We found they tended to jump queues at the cookhouse, a memory which caused an amusing incident when MV Orbita carrying British ex-prisoners home in October 1945 was passed in the Mediterranean by a Dutch liner. Her identity was announced over the tannoy and a spontaneous roar went up from Orbita of ‘Eten halen’, the Dutch phrase for our cookhouse call of ‘Come and get it!’

      That too many Australian officers were privately ashamed of themselves for being undemocratic, scilicet being officers, was completely cancelled out by the astounding way an Australian soldier did everything he could to help his cobbers.

      But in the jungle along the river-banks lurked unseen a remarkable neolithic archaeological find. In 1943, a Dutch archaeologist recorded in his brief diary, ‘March/April 1943, at Bankhao, found palaeoliths’, in fact pebble tools and polished adzes. Luckily this prisoner survived. He was Dr H.R. van Heekeren, and in 1960 his Government proposed to the Thai Government a joint Thai-Danish Prehistoric Expedition. They found a large number of sites in caves and on mounds in open spaces, unearthing over forty skeletons of which ten could be determined as female and twelve as male. Twenty-six of them could be determined as under thirty years of age, eight below forty, only two over forty. They were found at levels varying between 75 and 180 centimetres. Associated finds were earthenware vessels, personal ornaments and ritual objects. The most frequent finds were stone adzes, but there were also barbed harpoons, barbed arrow-heads, spearheads, and a fishhook made of animal bones, and a knife blade made from the shell of a freshwater mussel from the river. Stone bark-cloth beaters and baked-clay spindle-whorls showed that these people wore clothes, and baked-clay pellets were possibly used as missiles with a pellet bow for hunting small game. Around one skeleton’s neck shell beads were found in the form of small buttons with a perforated hole in the middle, arranged in two rows along with cylindrical stone beads. Arca shells perforated for suspension and animal bones perforated longitudinally seem to have been used as ornaments. The finds were those of an area inhabited by a Neolithic people c. BC 2000, probably living in small settlements on mounds near the River Kwae Noi, with an economy based on some agriculture and domestication of pigs and cattle augmented by hunting and fishing. Their pottery shows well-developed manufacturing techniques and their tools reveal a differentiated inventory of stone, bone and shell manufacture. Their stature was nearly the same as that of today’s Thai, but their life-span was short, averaging at death below forty years. They buried their dead in the settlement and the abundant presence of pottery and other burial gifts suggests a belief in an after-life.

      But in 1943, above ground in the camps, on sleepless nights when, carried away by intolerable homesickness, a man went outside when the guard was not looking, above the jungle trees the Southern Cross twinkled in the night sky. In Chapter 30 Futamatsu also describes how his ‘surroundings were spread out in a hushed silence like that on an ocean floor’. The tokay’s cry rang out. When would this railway at last be opened to traffic?

      Had he but known them, he might have echoed in his thoughts songs sung by Japanese soldiers in their fruitless, battered exposure on Guadalcanal Island:

      No matter how far we walk

      we know not where to go

      trudging along under dark jungle growth.

      When will this march end?

      We hide in the dark during the day

      and dare to move only at night,

      Deep in the lush jungle of Guadalcanal.

      Our staple food, our rice, is gone,

      we eat roots and grass.

      Along ridges and cliffs we lose our way,

      leaves hide the trail.

      We stumble and get up, fall and get up…

      We are covered with mud

Скачать книгу