The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  My socks had disintegrated long before in the tropical sweat. Now in bare feet I had a new challenge. My feet were extremely soft from living in constantly wet boots and the ground was particularly unforgiving, the jagged volcanic rocks often hiding just below the surface of the topsoil. I knew that the soles would harden up but until then I would have to walk like a cripple. When using the spade I wouldn’t be able to use my foot to dig deeper into the soil and would require more upper-body strength. Having no boots also made the ever-frequent trips to the benjos, the latrines, even more unsavoury. They were revolting, vast open pits, later covered in after weakened prisoners began to collapse into them and drown. As you approached the benjos you had to wade through the mud layered with the excrement of those dysentery sufferers who had never quite made it. Flies and maggots swarmed and wriggled over this foul mush. It got so bad that we had a bucket of water at the entrance to our hut to wash our feet in. It all added to the misery.

  In moments of adversity I would often think back to my childhood and I remembered going barefoot during the long hot summers we spent down at the Aberdeenshire fishing village of Newtonhill, where I was born. My mother’s parents had retired there and lived in a house called ‘Fairseat’, which we nicknamed ‘Sair feet’. My elder brother Douglas and I used to go to the beach in the morning. We stayed there all day until teatime, having great adventures that fortunately our parents never knew about. We explored caves, went cliff-climbing and dived off a breakwater that was probably fifteen to twenty feet high. One of the local families, the Cobblers as we called them, had two boys about our age. They would come down to the beach and do much the same stuff as us. But for some reason Douglas and I never really cared for those two lads. One day I remember we had fisticuffs over a burn – standing on either side of it slugging away at each other.

  I remembered the magical summer at the age of seven or eight, when my mother’s brother, our Uncle Alfie, and Aunt Alice returned home from India, where he worked as a tea planter. They came to visit us at Newtonhill. We got home one day and were surprised to see our auntie and uncle. They took us through to the front room and I saw a white sheet propped against the sideboard. Uncle Alfie said, ‘Now boys, we have a surprise for you but you’re not going on the main road with these.’ He pulled off the sheet to reveal two sparkling, brand-new bikes. It was just amazing and beyond our wildest dreams. We went outside and tried to ride our new bicycles. Once we got the hang of it and mastered them, we went down to the village. The first thing we did was to ride past the Cobblers’ house and shout out. We were the only ones in the village with bicycles so you can imagine the reaction!

  Reflecting on my happy childhood, my job and my family was a useful tool that I used to get me through some very hard times.

  Just after losing my boots I noticed that some of the men were wearing ‘jungle slippers’ made of bark and leaves. I heard that one chap in my hut had discovered a particularly inventive way of making sandals from a jungle plant. After hobbling back from the railway I tried to find him. For a change I entered through the back entrance of the hut and noticed a chap from my work party lying alone in his bed-space.

  ‘Hello Bill,’ I said to him as I crouched down. He was from Northampton and had left his newly wed wife back in England after joining the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire regiment. I normally spoke very little on the railway but Bill had a friendly face and we always exchanged quiet words while working.

  ‘Hey Bill, it’s me, Alistair.’ He looked at me and tried to speak but nothing came out. I could tell that he was suffering from an acute strain of malaria. Through the fear in his eyes I could see that he was dying. I sat down beside him and took his hand. It was sticky but cool. His breath was laboured, life fading from him.

  I stayed with Bill all night. I nursed him the best I could, giving him some rice and most of my water. As the night wore on he began losing consciousness. He was away with the fairies and by 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. he was gone. Holding his hand I felt it go limp. He twitched for some time after he passed away. When it stopped I fetched the medical orderly and left. When I returned he was gone.

  I never went back to ask about the ‘jungle slippers’, even though I saw some men wearing them around the camp. They did not look particularly comfortable and were already falling apart so I left it. And besides, my experience with Bill in that hut had left me hollow. I even castigated myself for getting involved with another prisoner’s problems. Once you got started with sentimentality and grief you were a goner. It was a selfish tactic but I was desperate to survive. I was refusing to let the Japanese win this.

  Like on the death march some men found the going easier by teaming up and making a close bond with another prisoner. They would fight railway life together, sharing whatever food or water they had, helping each other wherever they could and always having their back. They even took beatings together to share the blows and the pain. It was not the way for me. I watched the heartache of men losing their best pals and suddenly being left alone. They never usually lasted very long and soon followed their mates to the grave.

  By now the cuts on my feet and legs had turned into painful – and dangerous – tropical ulcers. When I suffered scrapes on the railway, or had a rash, I could not tend to it until yasume-time or until I was back at camp. Then I wrapped leaves around the cuts at night to keep the flies off but it was useless, and the ulcers usually spread. They rotted your flesh, muscle and tendons; people were left with gaping holes as the flesh simply fell away. An ulcer would eat deep into your flesh, so deep you could sometimes see the white of bone. Even worse, if you were not careful they could become gangrenous, and many men lost legs that way – by improvised amputation, without anaesthetic or drugs.

  I went to the medical hut for advice. In common with most of the men, tropical ulcers had engulfed my feet, ankles and lower calves. I had avoided the medical hut until that point. It was set aside from the sleeping huts and about the same size as ours. The RAMC officer in charge was Dr Mathieson, a likeable character from Paisley, just outside Glasgow, where he had studied medicine. He had come to Singapore about the same time as me and would later, in much different circumstances, save my life. On this my first encounter with him he would at least save my legs.

  Sneaking under the cloud of black flies that circled outside the hut like a swarm of miniature vultures, I entered nervously. The overpowering stench immediately had me gasping. Stepping across the cadaverous forms of five or six men who appeared to be rapping on death’s door, Dr Mathieson introduced himself.

  I had not spoken for so many days that when I went to reply my parched throat failed me.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing me a half-coconut cup of water, ‘get this down you.’

  I sipped the cool water down and thanked him, asking how his patients were.

  Dr Mathieson, in his mid-thirties at that point, appeared weary beyond his years. He was probably on self-imposed half-rations just to keep some spare for his patients. The men had spoken highly of him and many of our doctors were revered as saintly figures.

  The doctor took me by the arm and led me down to the far end of the hut away from the men. In a soft west-coast accent, he said, ‘Half of these men will die within days. The other half? Who knows? If I had access to some proper clinical treatments, drugs or instruments, they might live but that is not possible as I’m sure you know.’

  I could only nod in agreement. The squalor and stench of death inside the hut was appalling.

  ‘What can you do for them?’ I asked.

  ‘Quite simply not a lot. I try and give them some hope if nothing else.’

  He pointed with his boot at a chap sleeping and said, ‘He’s got ringworm. On his testicles. I’m surprised he’s able to sleep. I’ve been applying a coating of wet clay to see if that helps.’

  I nodded as he went on. ‘It’s easy for these men to give up and when they lose hope the fight just seeps right out of them. On countless occasions I have seen two men w
ith the same symptoms and same physical state, and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to sheer willpower.’

  I considered this for a moment and looked around the hut. You could tell the men who were dying by the look on their faces. Their gaze was lost before it reached their eyes and no amount of positive attitude and care from Dr Mathieson could change their destiny. It certainly was not the medical staff’s fault – their hands were tied. No, blood was firmly on our captors’ hands. I told myself right then and there that I would not stop fighting.

  ‘Do you have anything for malaria?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘Don’t eat for a day. That may help for a bit. If you’re still sick, crush up three spoonfuls of charcoal and get that down you. Apart from that there’s very little I can do, even though the world’s largest quinine factory is over on Java. I don’t imagine any of it getting passed on to us, do you?’

  He said, ‘The Japs think that poor health is a sign of weakness of the spirit. They think that beating us only makes us stronger. That is the kind of people we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘What can you do for this?’ I asked him, lifting a foot on to a bamboo chair.

  ‘Tropical ulcers. A disease of food, filth and friction. Do you know what maggots look like?’

  ‘Maggots?’ I asked, frantically inspecting my foot, praying that I was subject to some sick joke.

  ‘Yes, maggots. They’ll fix you right up. Go down to the latrines, find yourself a handful of those wee white beasties and sit them on your ulcers. They will chomp through the dead flesh and before you know it you’ll be right as rain.’

  Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘Remember to count how many you put on carefully. You don’t want to forget one and leave it in there to eat itself to death.’

  I left the medical hut, shaking my head, still wondering if I were being had. Letting maggots eat my skin did not sound particularly appetising but I was willing to try anything. I knew I had to stop the rot that was devouring my legs.

  The latrines were nothing more than holes in the ground but now with bamboo slats across them. A bunch of jungle leaves usually lay piled near by or you took your own foliage or toilet paper if there was no river water collected for the job. I did not have to go far to find what I was looking for. I gingerly scooped up a handful of maggots, watching them squirm and wriggle. Without thinking about it too much I found a quiet spot near by and sat down, placing just two or three on a nasty ulcer on my ankle. The maggots, which were about a quarter of an inch long, instinctively knew what to do. They started gnawing away at my skin with the most minuscule of bites. The sensation was of tingling, unearthly yet not altogether unpleasant, until the realisation that maggots were eating your raw flesh came racing back to the forefront of your mind. I can still feel that sensation to this day.

  But to Dr Mathieson’s credit it certainly worked. Within days the wounds had started to heal and new skin grew back. It was a trick that I persisted with throughout my time on the railway, passing it on to other men when I thought I could do so without being dismissed as a Jap-happy sicko.

  No matter how much the Japanese increased our workload, or how hard they pushed us, we generally could not manage to progress more than twenty feet per day. After sixty straight days on the railway – with no days off; no public or bank holidays – we had reached the dreaded slab of rock that barred our path for the next five hundred or six hundred yards. The mere sight of that rock must have been enough for one prisoner, who made a bid for freedom.

  I was unaware that anyone had escaped until one morning at tenko a sorry-looking chap was dragged before us. He had been beaten horrifically, his swollen and bloody features virtually unrecognisable. The interpreter told us, ‘This man very bad. He try to escape. No gooda.’

  Two guards threw down on the ground in front of us the battered wreck of a human frame and made him kneel. He did not plead for mercy or beg for assistance. He knew his fate and waited silently, resigned to it. The Black Prince, who seemed to have dressed up especially for the occasion, strode forward and unsheathed his long samurai sword. He prodded the prisoner in the back, forcing him to straighten up. Then the Black Prince raised his sword, its stainless steel glinted in the sunshine. It was a moment of such horror that I could scarcely believe it was really happening. I closed my eyes tightly. This was one of the many instances of barbarism on the railway that I would try to shut out of my mind. But I could not escape the chilling swoosh of the blade as it cut through the damp tropical air or the sickening thwack of the sword coming down on our comrade’s neck, followed by the dull thump of his head landing on the ground. I kept my eyes firmly shut but swayed on my feet and felt a collective gasp of impotent anger and revulsion. It was a scene from another age. I thought of the French Revolution when the crowds went mad for the guillotine. But I thought it so macabre, so chilling, that I failed to see how anybody could find that an enjoyable experience, no matter how much you hated someone.

  There was an undercurrent circling among us men, a desperate feeling of wanting to do something. But of course we were powerless. By the time I opened my eyes the body and head had been taken away and only a pool of dark red blood remained, leaching into the Siamese soil. I fought the impulse to be sick as I felt the pit of my stomach rising. A feeling of hopelessness overwhelmed me. We were at the mercy of a barbaric madman who enjoyed killing for the fun of it.

  I had been witness to some terrible things as a POW and apart from the spread-eagled torture this was the worst yet. I just thanked my lucky stars that I was not part of the burial party because that must have been extremely traumatic.

  Without any further ado our stunned work party was shepherded back to Hellfire Pass. We walked in desolate silence, each lost in his own thoughts until we arrived at the Pass.

  It was part of a two-and-a-half-mile curved section of railway that required seven bridges and five arduous cuttings. Ahead of us the Japanese took our sappers, the British Army engineers, to start blasting away at Hellfire Pass. They climbed on top of the rock with bags of dynamite, their job being to blast away sections of rock twice a day for the rest of us to pound and shatter with eight-pound sledgehammers. The Japanese never gave us any warning of an impending explosion and suddenly the whole ground would shake at the almighty bang. Brightly coloured birds of paradise would flee their roosts squawking and we would hit the deck to avoid the deadly spray of rock shrapnel that would follow. The Japanese always made the British engineers light the fuse. On more than one occasion the poor sod who couldn’t flee fast enough over the treacherous ground would be blown up with the rocks – much to the obvious delight of Dr Death, who found it hilarious.

  Like the disposable and economical machines we had become, we hammered away at drill pieces to bore holes into the rock for the explosives and then smashed up the boulders and rocks, making them as small as we could. It was back-breaking work, made tougher by the harshness of our natural and unnatural environment, pathetic diet, and catalogue of diseases, illnesses and injuries, not to mention our general fatigue, depression and broken spirits.

  The rocks, once splintered into semi-manageable pieces, would be picked up by hand and loaded into baskets. Other prisoners would then haul these away and dump them beside the railway, where the rocks had to be broken up further to be made into ballast for the railway sleepers. Eventually the guards pulled sick men out of hospital huts by their hair and dragged them down to work on the railway beside these piles of dirt and rock that needed breaking down. Using small hammers with twelve-inch handles they had to sit there and tap feebly away all day in the blazing sun. Nobody was immune from work.

  I spent seven or eight months hammering away at that bloody rock. On top of the cutting Dr Death sat gloating and occasionally relieving his boredom by hurling stones and boulders at us slaving down below. Once again, failure to meet our daily quotas meant working on into the dark by firelight and the eerie glow of lamps, making the place look like hell. Until
finally the only damage done by our falling sledgehammers was that caused by gravity rather than the force of our swing. We could not take any more and surprisingly the Japanese recognised that. Now just skin and bones we were so skinny that a scrawny guard could lift each of us with one arm.

  If an exploring anthropologist had stumbled upon us in that jungle, he would have imagined that he had made a sensational new discovery: a prehistoric tribe, uniformly filthy with long hair and beards covering clapped-in cheeks and framing sunken eyes. He would have observed in wonder the curious tottering gait unique to the halfstarved tribesmen who worshipped and sacrificed their number on a giant slab of rock. And he would have been baffled by the absence of the female of the species.

  Kanyu I and II, under the iron fist of the Black Prince, were among the worst of all the camps on the railway. The Japanese had reduced us to the stone age. There were no positives. No haircuts or pay, no days off, no trading, no vegetable stews or fried duck eggs, no pantomimes or song. There was not even a single book in the entire camp. It was work, work and more work. Speedo! It simply could not have been any worse.

  Not through any sense of pity or guilt, certainly, we were to be moved to a camp further up the railway. It was named, predictably, Kanyu II, almost identical to our original camp – just further down the river.

  At roll-call they told us, ‘All men march.’

  The same thoughts went through my mind. We have been used up, we’re no use to them any more. We’re all going to be massacred. Whatever it is it’s not going to be better. It certainly won’t be a holiday camp!

  Towards the end of April 1943 the Black Prince and his merry band of psychotic villains marched us into the jungle again. It took a solid day to reach our new camp and I heaved a sigh of relief to see that we did not have to build our own huts; presumably the POWs who had been there before us had been moved forward as well, on to Kanyu III. I would later learn that Australian POWs took our place at Kanyu I and with it the deathly task of completing Hellfire Pass. They were to pay a terrible price.