The Heat of the Sun

body to rot in the jungle. There was only the relentless trek: onwards, onwards, ever north.
    ‘We must have crossed from Malaya into Burma. For a time we were taken by barge up a broad, sluggish river, between green hills of jungle; at first we thought we were fortunate, welcoming
the respite from our endless march, until we realized we would be given no rations for all the days of our voyage. More men died, and the guards kicked the corpses into the river.
    ‘We had been sent to build a railroad. Only later did I figure out why. The Japs needed it to back up their forces in the Burma campaign. When completed, the thing would run between
Bangkok in Siam and Rangoon in Burma – two hundred and fifty miles of jungle, hills, and rivers. Already thousands had gone before us, POWs and coolies alike, slave labour all of us, living
in bamboo huts, toiling away from dawn till dusk and beyond to fell trees, make embankments, lay sleepers and rails. There were cuttings to be dug, bridges to be built, and always the hideous
cruelties of the Japs and the jungle.
    ‘Which was worse was hard to say. When it was dry, the heat was a furnace, and dust whirled up from the railroad banks, filling our eyes and noses and mouths; then came the monsoon, month
after month of plummeting rains, turning the jungle into a slithery labyrinth.
    ‘How I survived, I can’t say. I had no courage. I had no shame. A Jap could sneer at me and I’d cringe like a dog. When the workday was done, I trudged the long miles to my hut
and fell into oblivion for the few permitted hours. I can barely remember eating, though I must have swallowed my share of the maggoty rice and rotting fish and vegetables.
    ‘Two years passed. Two years in hell.
    ‘And what had happened to Wainwright? He had survived the Somme, but I hardly imagined he could survive this. Most likely he had died in the cattle trucks in Malaya or on our march through
the Burmese jungle. There must have been ten thousand men or more, strung down mile after mile of the railroad’s route.
    ‘I fell sick. One morning as a guard passed through camp, ringing his bell, I flickered open my eyes to see only a haze in front of me. A crushing heaviness, like an anvil, pressed on my
forehead. Shivery heat coursed up my limbs. The guard struck me with his baton, demanding that I rise. I feared he would kill me there and then, but he only turned away.
    ‘Later, though at the time it seemed a fond dream, two fellows I had never seen before picked me up on a stretcher and carried me out of the camp. I was too bleary to understand what was
happening, but I remember jolting in the back of a truck over mile after muddy mile, while fellows close by bellowed out dirty songs in accents I thought were Australian.
    ‘Not until the fever had subsided did I realize I had been taken to a base hospital in Siam with POW medical staff. I found myself on a cot in a sea of cots, beneath a ceiling of billowing
canvas. Groans and jabberings of fever sounded around me; once or twice I heard a scream, but there was laughter too, and even the brassy blarings of a phonograph, somewhere far away.
    ‘“I thought they’d kill me,” I said, when I could speak. “I thought they’d kill me.”
    ‘“They’re bad, but not that bad,” said the Australian nurse who tended me.
    ‘She jabbed a thermometer into my mouth.
    ‘“Lucky bugger, you are. This place is just overcrowded and understocked with medicines, as opposed to so hopelessly unsanitary that it spreads more disease than it cures. The prize
exhibit, this one – one for the history books.”
    ‘I offered what I hoped was a questioning look.
    ‘“Well, maybe not the history books, but the papers back in Nip-land. Some big wheel from Tokyo’s coming by this afternoon to pose for pics with all of us. Our happy POWs! Who
says we treat ’em rough?” She snatched the thermometer from my mouth. “You’ll live. Think you’ll be able to stand?”
    ‘“So soon? Oh, please!”
    ‘“Parade! And you blokes better look as healthy as you can or we’re all up shit creek without a paddle.”
    ‘I promised to do my best.
    ‘There must have been a hundred fellows that afternoon, lined in two rows down a dusty asphalt strip. They’d found fresh uniforms for a few of us – dead men’s laundry, I
dare say – but we must have looked like a shabby bunch, hardly capable of winning a war. How the Japs would laugh when they saw us in the