The Narrow Road to the Deep North(129)

They’ll all die, said Dorrigo Evans.

Again Lieutenant Fukuhara translated; Major Nakamura listened and then spoke. The lieutenant turned to Dorrigo Evans.

Major Nakamura say that very good thing, Lieutenant Fukuhara said. It save Japanese army much rice.

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest—and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura—and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant.

As the parade went on, as additional men on light duties or cooking or in the hospital were rounded up and brought in, as they stood there sick and starving, as the occasional man collapsed from exhaustion and was just left lying in the mud, the prisoners watched a long column of Japanese soldiers appear, marching along the rough track that ran along the far side of the parade ground, which, when not impassable from the monsoon, served as the supply road for the railway.

The Japanese soldiers were on their way to the Burmese front, hundreds of miles of weary jungle away. They were filthy and exhausted but still they pressed on into the night, with no more than grunts and groans, pushing and pulling artillery axle-deep through the mud. Some seemed ill, many so young that they might still have been in school, and all looked miserable.

Dorrigo Evans had not seen any Japanese troops up close for several months. In Java he had come to respect them not as the short-sighted buffoons the Australians had been told by their intelligence officers to expect, but as formidable soldiers. But these Japanese soldiers, who had clearly been marching all day and long into the night on their way to the horror of another front, looked as much the wretched of war as the POWs themselves, broken, bedraggled, exhausted. Dorrigo caught the eyes of one soldier who carried a hurricane lamp. They loomed large on his child-like face, and looked soft and vulnerable. He could not have been more than seventeen years old. What he saw in the Australian officer, Dorrigo Evans had no idea, but it was not hate or the devil. He stumbled, then halted, still staring at the Australian. Perhaps he saw something; perhaps he was too tired to see anything. Dorrigo Evans felt an overwhelming urge to put his arm around him.

Suddenly, a Japanese sergeant—seeing the soldier gawking—strode over and thrashed him brutally around the face with a bamboo cane. The soldier immediately drew himself erect, barked some word of apology and focused his gaze back on the jungle ahead. It was clear to Dorrigo Evans that this soldier no more understood his beating or purpose than the POWs did their miserable fate. How far away was his home? wondered Dorrigo. Was it a farm? Was it a city? Some place, some valley, some street, a lane, an alley, that he perhaps dreamt of, a place of sun and winds that caressed and rains that refreshed, of people who cared for him and laughed with him, a place far away from this stink of decay, the smothering green, the pain and brutal people who simply hated and taught hate, who made the world hate. As the boy soldier trudged away, Dorrigo could see he was bleeding about the face where he’d been whipped, that his simple uniform was filthy, torn and mildewed, and that he had no heart for any of this. And yet, when called upon, he—this soft-eyed boy with the lamp—he too would kill brutally and in turn be killed.

The Japanese sergeant who had so savagely beaten him now took a break. Watching the column file past into the blackness of the jungle, he lit a cigarette and took a puff. When another NCO approached, he handed the smoke to him with a smile and a joke. And as the column of children was swallowed by the darkness, Dorrigo Evans felt as if the whole war was passing before his eyes.

After the column had vanished into the jungle, the rain came in a deluge. The sky was black, and other than the few kerosene lanterns and guards’ torches, there was no light. The only sound was that of the rain rolling down from the nearby teak trees in gushes, the rain sweeping back and forth, and the rain felt to Dorrigo Evans a solid, moving, living thing, and the rain and the great teak jungle in which their camp sat in that small clearing seemed to form a prison that was endless, unknowable, and slowly killing them all.

Finally, it was established that all the prisoners were there. Dorrigo Evans lifted his lantern and his gaze, worried that he might be giving the impression that he was downcast, his spirit broken by all that they had suffered. He could not do that to them. He had to do far worse. He looked at the seven hundred men, whom he had held, nursed, cajoled, begged, hoodwinked and organised into surviving, whose needs he always put before his own. Most wore only a Jap happy or wretched rags that masqueraded as shorts, and in the greasy, sliding lantern light their skeletal bodies for a moment horrified him. Many shook with malaria, some shat themselves as they stood there, and it was his task to find among them one hundred men to march one hundred miles further into the jungle, towards the unknown, into the passage of death.