The Narrow Road to the Deep North(14)

He took a deep breath.

And they should pool their wages so we draw on it to buy food and drugs for the sick.

That again, Evans, Colonel Rexroth said. It is example that will get us through. Not Bolshevism.

I agree. When it is the right example.

But Colonel Rexroth was already ascending the stage. He thanked the entertainers, then spoke of how the division of the British Empire into arbitrary nationalities was a fiction. From Oxford to Oodnadatta they were one people.

His accent was thin and reedy. He had no gift for rousing oratory but a misplaced sense that his rank gifted him with this talent. He sounded, as Gallipoli von Kessler said, as though he were playing a flute out of his arse.

And for that reason, Colonel Rexroth went on, as members of the British Empire, as Englishmen, we must observe the order and discipline that is the very lifeblood of the Empire. We will suffer as Englishmen, we will triumph as Englishmen. Thank you.

After, he asked Dorrigo Evans if he would like to be involved in planning for the building of a proper cemetery overlooking the river, where they would be able to inter their dead.

I’d rather get the Black Prince to steal some more tins of fish from the Japanese stores to keep the living from dying, Dorrigo Evans said.

The Black Prince is a thief, Colonel Rexroth replied. This, however, will be a beautiful final resting place and worthy of the efforts of all concerned for the welfare of the men and far better than the present practice of just marching off into the forest and burying them wherever.

The Black Prince helps me save lives.

Colonel Rexroth produced a large sketch map outlining the location of the cemetery and the layout of the graves, with different sections for different ranks. Proudly, he told Dorrigo that he had reserved a particularly idyllic spot overlooking the Kwai for officers. He pointed out that the men were beginning to die, and dealing with the corpses was now a matter of the highest priority.

It is an irrefutable argument, he said. It’s been a lot of work getting it this far. I’d love you to be part of this.

A monkey screeched in a nearby bamboo grove.

I am only doing it for the men, Colonel Rexroth said.





16



THE TREES BEGAN sprouting leaves and the leaves began covering up the sky and the sky turned black and the black swallowed more and more of the world. Food grew less and less. The monsoon came and, at first, before they learnt all that the rain portended, they were grateful.

Then the Speedo began.

The Speedo meant that there were no longer rest days, that work quotas went up, and up again, that shifts grew longer and longer. The Speedo dissolved an already vague distinction between the fit and the sick into a vaguer distinction between the sick and the dying, and because of the Speedo more and more often prisoners were ordered to work not one but two shifts, both day and night.

The rains grew torrential, the teak and the bamboo closed in around them; Colonel Rexroth died of dysentery and was buried along with everyone else in the jungle. Dorrigo Evans assumed command. As a great green weight that reached to the black heavens dragged them back down into the black mud, he imposed a levy on the officers’ pay to buy food and drugs for the sick. He persuaded, cajoled and insisted on the officers working, as the ceaseless green horror pressed ever harder on their scabies-ridden bodies and groggy guts, on their fevered heads and foul, ulcerated legs, on their perennially shitting arses.

The men called Dorrigo Evans Colonel to his face and the Big Fella everywhere else. There were moments when the Big Fella felt far too small for all that they now wanted him to bear. There was Dorrigo Evans and there was this other man with whom he shared looks, habits and ways of speech. But the Big Fella was noble where Dorrigo was not, self-sacrificing where Dorrigo was selfish.

It was a part he felt himself feeling his way into, and the longer it went on, the more the men around him confirmed him in his role. It was as if they were willing him into being, as though there had to be a Big Fella, and, having desperate need of such, their growing respect, their whispered asides, their opinion of him—all this trapped him into behaving as everything he knew he was not. As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation.

And with him now in tow, they together staggered through those days that built like a scream that never ended, a wet, green shriek Dorrigo Evans found perversely amplified by the quinine deafness, the malarial haze that meant a minute took a lifetime to pass and that sometimes it was not possible to recall a week of misery and horror. All of it seemed to wait for some denouement that never came, some event that made sense of it all to him and to them, some catharsis that would free them all from this hell.

Still, there was the occasional duck egg, a finger or two of palm sugar, a joke, repeated over and over, lovingly burnished and appreciated like the rare and beautiful thing it was, that made survival possible. Still there was hope. And from beneath their ever growing slouch hats the ever diminishing prisoners still made asides and curses as they were swept up into another universe in which they lived like ants and all that mattered was the railway. As naked slaves to their section of the Line, with nothing more than ropes and poles, hammers and bars, straw baskets and hoes, with their backs and legs and arms and hands, they began to clear the jungle for the Line and break the rock for the Line and move the dirt for the Line and carry the sleepers and the iron rails to build the Line. As naked slaves, they were starved and beaten and worked beyond exhaustion on the Line. And as naked slaves they began to die for the Line.