The Forgotten Highlander

by Alistair Urquhart

  Six

  Bridge on the River Kwai

  The Japanese put us straight to work. This section of railway, further north, would eventually join up with that of our earlier handiwork at Hellfire Pass. We began clearing jungle, just as we had at the first Kanyu cutting. The work was certainly easier than gouging our way through the rocks and boulders of Hellfire Pass but it was still horrendous. With the same guards and Japanese officers hovering around us it was the same torment. Brutality, disease, starvation and death stalked our every step.

  On the first evening of our arrival, still barefoot and naked except for our Jap-happies, we did some remedial work on the huts, some of which leaned at crazy angles like jungle versions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The roofs all needed replacing with fresh atap leaves. Whether by design or otherwise, we reverted to the same sleeping arrangements as at the first camp, taking up the same places. Men took a lot of comfort from routine and familiarities, no matter how fickle or fleeting they may have been.

  After a few weeks of steady progress we were nearing the river Kwai, across which the Japanese intended us to build two bridges, the first to be made of wood and bamboo, the second to be of steel and concrete. It was going to be a major engineering operation and I doubted that we would manage it in our state and with the pathetic tools we had to hand.

  We carried on clearing the path for the track of the railway, while work parties went into the jungle felling trees for the bridge and bamboo for the scaffolding.

  Then disaster struck. One night I awoke with dysentery calling. Holding my aching stomach I raced to the latrines in the dark but on the way back to my hut a Korean guard stopped me. He had come out of the darkness and caught me by surprise. He yammered in my face. I had no idea what he was on about. At first I thought he was admonishing me for failing to salute him but I had never noticed the bugger. He was still talking frantically and pointing down at my midriff. To my horror I realised he was becoming frisky.

  ‘Jiggy, jiggy,’ he was saying, trying to grab me.

  ‘No!’ I shouted at him.

  ‘Jiggy. You me, jiggy.’

  I told him ‘No’ again, firmly. He carried on trying to grab me so without hesitating I kicked him as hard as I could, barefooted, square between his legs. He collapsed, groaning in agony.

  I bolted for my hut but his roaring had summoned hordes of other guards. Unfortunately I ran slap bang into one of them. He seized on to me and before I knew it they were coming at me from all quarters. Rifle butts and fists sent me to the ground. Someone stabbed me in the backside with a bayonet. Boots and fists flailed into my body before they hauled me up and dragged me to the front of the Japanese officers’ hut. Bleeding from the blows to the head and face, I waited for the interpreter, who had been summoned. As I swayed an NCO kept beating me, knocking me to the ground. Each time I fell he made me stand up again. Eventually the interpreter was raised, along with the camp commandant, the dreaded Black Prince. This was a moment of absolute terror. Throughout my captivity I had tried at all times to stay out of range of the brutal Japanese guards and now here I was receiving the personal attentions of the camp’s sadist-in-chief. The guards all stood to attention as the commandant asked the Korean for his side of the story. No doubt he left out the bit about making sexual advances towards me.

  When he was done the commandant asked why I had assaulted the guard. I told them the truth. The interpreter relayed my story and when he had finished the Black Prince started screaming at all and sundry. I had no idea what was going on. I just knew I was in serious trouble. They took the Korean guard away and marched me to the front of the guardhouse, where I was forced to stand to attention. Racked with pain and suffering from broken toes, I wobbled and wilted. Any sign of slumping over brought a flurry of rifle butts to the kidneys to straighten me up again. Every minute of every hour throughout the night was pure torture. On top of the pain came the constant buzzing and biting from the camp’s abundant insect life.

  At sunrise the men assembled for breakfast and roll-call before going out to slave on the railway. The guards kept me behind. As day broke I was a hopeless mess. The rising sun bore down on my defenceless body and when I lost consciousness my personal minders threw buckets of water over me and kicked me to attention.

  And so it went on hour after endless hour. It was relentless. My bashed eyes had now closed and my face felt swollen as blood seeped from my head, body and feet. My body burned in the unforgiving sun and the only water I got was sloshed from the bucket as they revived me after I collapsed from heat exhaustion. I prayed that it would end, prayed for a bullet through the brain. But no, they continued to play out their game of torture like a cat with a mouse.

  Sunset came. The men returned and averted their eyes – a sure sign that my predicament was serious. Nobody showed any signs of sympathy or concern, to do so was to risk reprisals on themselves. The rest of the chilly night passed in a blur of kicks and beatings. I hallucinated and felt as if I were going insane. Those bastards did not deserve to live – not in my book. Throughout the night I was more often on the ground and being sloshed with river water than I was at attention.

  Come morning my officer went to the Black Prince to protest on my behalf. He was a very brave man and predictably got slapped savagely for his troubles. After the men left for work the Black Prince instructed two guards to haul me off to the black hole. My heart sank. I knew that most men kept in there, usually for three or four weeks, did not come out alive. And if they did they had been reduced to crippled wrecks who never fully recovered. The guards threw me into one of the bamboo cages. With bent knees, I leant with my back raised and arms at my sides as they squeezed its door shut. Darkness and the filth of the previous occupants engulfed me. I knelt and sobbed, falling in and out of consciousness.

  The corrugated iron covering the semi-submerged cage intensified the stifling heat. In the darkness the sense of isolation was devastating and I became half out of my mind with pain and exhaustion.

  Days came and went, the only notion of time provided by the arrival of a watery bowl of rice once a day. The next few days were the worst I had experienced on the railway, like a culmination of the extremes of temperature from the steel carriages on the way up to the railway, along with the death march and every other ounce of suffering endured since, all crammed into that tiny, back-breaking black hole. Malaria struck me down, causing uncontrollable shivers and pain that was diverted only when tropical ulcers and kidney stones reared to the fore. My hair matted, dirty and unshaven, lice crawling all over me, no soap or water, no drugs or hope, my degradation was complete.

  I had counted six or seven bowls of rice by the time they allowed me out. As I crawled out of the dark cell and back to my hut, I deemed myself lucky to have spent such a short period in the black hole. I had been in for a week and it could easily have been a month. To me it felt like a century.

  I reached my hut on all fours and Dr Mathieson and his orderlies got to work on me. Slowly they brought me back to life with lime juice, water and scavenged food scraps, a little milk and some duck eggs. Within a week, even in my feeble condition, I was passed as fit and sent back to work on the first railway bridge over the river Kwai. Happily I never saw that Korean guard again.

  We marched back along the track we had been clearing until it opened up at the river. What I saw stunned me. During the fortnight of my imprisonment and convalescence the outline of a bridge had grown out of the water. It was a truly amazing sight. The bridge stood encased in a great bamboo cage of scaffolding and hundreds of prisoners teemed all over it like ants. It was astonishing to think that this had been built with little more than bare hands and primitive technology. The general opinion among us men had been that the undertaking was impossible. But then again we had thought the same of Hellfire Pass and we somehow managed to do that too.

  Two Japanese engineers, who were always officers, stayed on site at all times. Though many were English-educated, most of them dictated their
orders through interpreters. Their working methods were haphazard to say the least. Where we would have used tapes to measure distances, they guessed. It didn’t seem to bother them if some railway sleepers jutted out a foot more than others. But they were very demanding and prone to strike out with the four-foot iron bars that they carried. No doubt they were under enormous pressures themselves to get the bridge done but the way they treated the men, like animal slavers, was unforgivable.

  The men used an antiquated rope-and-pulley system to drive teak piles deep into the river floor. The pile driver had a huge rock on the top of it and the prisoners raising it heaved on the ropes as if in a game of tug o’ war, while a Nippon engineer would keep them in time with a rhythmic count of ‘Ichi, ni, san, shi’. On his command they would suddenly all let go of the rope sending the rock crashing down on the pile below. Simple but effective, I thought. The laboured chanting and heaving, which went on for up to eighteen hours a day, made me think of the ancient Pharaohs and how their slaves had achieved the seemingly impossible by constructing the pyramids. There was certainly something biblical about our plight.

  For those working in the muddied river, sometimes up to their necks, life could be much more difficult. The filthy water infected cuts and sores. It was also impossible to see where you were treading and many more injuries occurred that way. The additional danger of falling objects, including logs and struts, meant that mortality rates among these men were extremely high. Making the most of my climbing skills and head for heights, I tried to work as high up the structure as possible. Some men hated working aloft but for me it meant I could work at a more sedate pace to recover from the black hole and I was out of reach of the guards and their flailing sticks.

  While the piles were driven into the river bed, prisoners made sections of the bridge on land, mostly from bamboo and teak, in a basic fabrication yard. Once they had finished a twenty-foot section elephants manoeuvred it down to the river and men built it on to the piles. After a stint on the bridge I moved to the yard and spent most of my time drilling holes, using an awl. It was a real production line: against a backdrop of shouting and hammering from the river, the logs were rolled in and hoisted on to trestles for me to drill holes into. Most of the time the logs would be too thick for the awl and I would have to drill halfway through the log, turn it over and drill in from the other side, hoping that the holes met in the middle. The metal bolts destined for the holes were already rusting and I doubted whether they would last very long. It was tough, tiring work boring into those hard jungle woods but at least I could work on my own. It also meant that I could slack off a bit and do very little, whereas those working in a group found themselves watched constantly and could not afford that luxury. When I went down to the river it was a marvel to watch the men working. To see the bridge rising from the Kwai, being built in the midst of the jungle, with no machinery or sense of civilisation, was unreal.

  Building the bridge was probably the easiest time I experienced on the railway. The work was more about craft and guile than brute strength and physical labour. But it never stopped the guards from making us work at double time or administering beatings for little or no reason whatsoever. On one occasion I received a severe beating after failing to drill a half-inch hole through a twelve-inch-diameter log. It sounded like a simple job but the awl I had been given reached only halfway through the log. Once I had drilled as far as I could I turned the log around and started drilling from the other side, hoping that it would join in the middle. But of course this time that was too much to ask. Even though I had been given an almost impossible task, a rotund Korean guard, whom we nicknamed ‘Musso’ because of his similarity to the Italian fascist dictator, noticed and went berserk. He screamed in my face, telling me what I had done wrong as if I had failed to notice.

  ‘Do it your bloody self then!’ I snapped. I regretted those words almost immediately. Musso was a nasty piece of work and slammed his rifle butt into my face. It floored me and knocked out one of my front teeth. The tooth had snapped off at an angle, painfully exposing raw nerves. After several more blows and kicks I quickly recovered and scrambled back to work, just thankful not to have been beaten to death.

  The broken tooth was agonising and hours later, after we finished work, I paid another visit to the medical hut. The orderlies breezily set about me with a pair of pliers as if they were a pair of mechanics working on a rusty old tractor. One held my head tightly while the other tugged and tugged, eventually managing to wrench out the offending incisor. It was excruciating but the orderlies had evidently become quite proficient as dentists and it was all over pretty quickly.

  The building of the bridge on the river Kwai took a terrible toll on us and the depiction of our sufferings in the film of the same name was a very, very sanitised version of events. Unlike the well-fed extras in the movie, we did not whistle the ‘Colonel Bogey’ tune. Nor did we work alongside Americans, nor did we have any semblance of uniform. We were naked, barefoot slaves. And there were certainly no pretty and scantily clad local girls wandering through the jungle.

  And contrary to the film, our real-life commander Colonel Philip Toosey did not collaborate with the Japanese. I was not alone in doing as little work as possible without blatantly shirking, which resulted in sadistic beatings. Energy, every ounce of it, had to be conserved for survival. To bust a gut on starvation rations was absolute suicide. We had long lost our dignity and working faster certainly would not have brought any back. In fact it would have resulted in the opposite with even more of us dying.

  Instead we made constant attempts at sabotage. Men whispered orders to impair the construction of the bridge wherever possible. Some charged with making up concrete mixtures deliberately added too much sand or not enough, which would later have disastrous effects. We collected huge numbers of termites and white ants and deposited them into the grooves and joints of loadbearing trunks.

  Out of sight of the guards I furtively sawed halfway through wooden bolts wherever possible, hoping they would snap whenever any serious weight, like a train, was placed upon them.

  We slogged on, starving and diseased, believing that things just could not get any worse – and then, in June, the monsoon arrived. For months the land mass of the Indian subcontinent had been heating up, creating an area of low pressure that now drew in mighty moisture-laden winds from the Indian Ocean. The rains flooded our huts, with rivers running through them – complete with small brown fish that some of the starving men succeeded in catching. We became permanently sodden. The camp ground transformed into a sea of mud and conditions around the latrines became unspeakable. Work on the bridge and railway turned even more hazardous, magnifying our misery, yet we were unprepared for the horror about to be unleashed upon us by the monsoon.

  For the river Kwai and its tributaries harboured a killer even more lethal than the Japanese and our starvation diet. As an inevitable consequence of the lack of sanitation and the tens of thousands of bodies buried in shallow graves or dumped in the jungle, the river system was loaded with cholera bacteria and the monsoon season became cholera season. As the heightened waters of the Kwai flushed Vibrio cholerae throughout the land, this fearful disease cast a black shadow over the camp. Cholera arrived unseen and unheard but soon had us in its grip. I was slow to hear about it. But I sensed something terrible in the camp. More men were falling ill than usual and the Japanese kept their distance, leaving us alone. They were scared to death of catching cholera themselves. The Japanese Imperial Army had experienced the devastating impact of cholera among its troops in China in 1937 and again in 1940 – 1, and feared its swift progress like the Black Death.

  Cholera outbreaks are related to standards of hygiene, food preparation and the quality of drinking water – all of which were undeniably horrific on the railway. Rats were also rife and had muscled into our lives to such an extent that we hardly shooed them away any more, and they are also carriers of the cholera bacteria, another parallel with the plague.


  One of our officers gathered us together for an extraordinary general meeting. As serious-looking as I had ever seen him, he said, ‘A cholera epidemic is threatening us all. We have set up a quarantine area and you are advised to avoid it wherever possible. Need I remind you all not to drink unboiled water? If you are unsure of its origins, find out or leave it. Understood? This is our biggest test yet.’

  Cholera had infected a stream that ran past our camp. The Japanese had refused to build a bridge across it to stop it from spreading, so we had to use contaminated boats to cross the water. By the end of it all we would lose thousands on the railway quite needlessly to cholera. The conditions in the coolie camps were even worse and tens of thousands of native labourers, sometimes entire camps, were wiped out.

  Overnight cholera struck me down. I woke up with explosive diarrhoea and violent, projectile vomiting. My ears were ringing and I felt dizzy. Cramps started in my bowels and soon spread all over my body as it rapidly dehydrated. I was drying from the inside out, shrivelling like a picked grape left out in the sun. The cholera bacteria burrowed into the walls of my small intestine producing toxins that sucked the vital salts and every ounce of water out of my body. I was unsure what was wrong but I knew it was serious – I did not want to finish up with the life drained out of me. I had always been extremely careful to drink only boiled water so at first I was doubtful that it was cholera. I did not know much about it but I knew that the first twenty-four hours were crucial. If you see through a day and a night, you would probably survive. Most men who succumbed did so in the first few hours, a horrible death and so quick. Men who threw the bodies of cholera victims on to funeral pyres in the morning could easily contract the disease, die and be thrown on the pyre themselves in the evening. They died in agony like crazed animals and it was dreadful to see.