The Narrow Road to the Deep North(7)

When Dorrigo Evans lowered his gaze, it was to see a straight line of surveyors’ pegs hammered into the ground by Imperial Japanese Army engineers to mark the route of a railway that led away from where he stood at the head of a party of silent prisoners of war. They learnt from the Japanese engineers that the pegs ran in a four hundred and fifteen-kilometre line from north of Bangkok all the way through to Burma.

They outlined a route for a great railway that was still only a series of limited plans, seemingly impossible orders and grand exhortations on the part of the Japanese High Command. It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists?

They were handed blunt axes and rotten hemp rope and with them their first job—to fell, grub and clear a kilometre of giant teak trees that grew along the planned path of the railway.

My dad used to say you young never carry your weight, Jimmy Bigelow said as he tapped a forefinger on the axe’s dull and dented edge. I wish the bastard was here now.





8



And after, no one will really ever remember it. Like the greatest crimes, it will be as if it never happened. The suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many; maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books. Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is. And while it reigns, it is as if there is nothing in the universe that it is not.

The story behind this book begins on 15 February 1942, when one empire ends with the fall of Singapore and another arises. Yet by 1943, Japan, overstretched, under-resourced, is losing, and its need for this railway becomes pronounced. The Allies are supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army in China with armaments through Burma, and the Americans control the seas. To cut off this critical supply line to their Chinese enemy, and to take India through Burma—as their leaders now madly dream—Japan must feed their Burmese forces with men and matériel by land. But it has neither the money nor machinery to build the necessary railway. Nor the time.

War, though, is its own logic. The Japanese Empire has belief that it will win—the indomitable Japanese spirit, that spirit that the West does not have, that spirit it calls and understands as the Emperor’s will; it is this spirit that it believes will prevail until its final victory. And, aiding such indomitable spirit, abetting such belief, the Empire has the good fortune of slaves. Hundreds of thousands of slaves, Asian and European. And among their number are twenty-two thousand Australian POWs, most surrendered at the fall of Singapore as a strategic necessity before the fighting has even properly begun. Nine thousand of them will be sent to work on the railway. When, on 25 October 1943, steam locomotive C 5631 travels the length of the completed Death Railway—the first train to do so—towing its three carriages of Japanese and Thai dignitaries, it will be past endless beds of human bones that will include the remains of one in three of those Australians.

Today, steam locomotive C 5631 is proudly displayed in the museum that forms part of Japan’s unofficial national war memorial, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. As well as steam locomotive C 5631, the shrine contains the Book of Souls. This lists over two million names of those who died in service to the Emperor of Japan in wars between 1867 and 1951. With enshrinement in the Book of Souls at this sacred site comes absolution from all acts of evil. Among those many names are those of 1,068 men convicted of war crimes after World War II and executed. And among those 1,068 names of executed war criminals are some who worked on the Death Railway and were found guilty of the mistreatment of POWs.

On the plaque in front of locomotive C 5631 there is no mention of this. Nor is there mention of the horror of the building of the railway. There are no names of the hundreds of thousands who died building that railway. But then there is not even an agreed numbering of all those who died on the Death Railway. The Allied POWs were but a fraction—some 60,000 men—of those who slaved on that Pharaonic project. Alongside them were a quarter of a million Tamils, Chinese, Javanese, Malayans, Thais and Burmese. Or more. Some historians say 50,000 of these slave labourers died, some say 100,000, some say 200,000. No one knows.

And no one will ever know. Their names are already forgotten. There is no book for their lost souls. Let them have this fragment.

SO DORRIGO EVANS had earlier that day ended his foreword for the book of Guy Hendricks’ illustrations of the POW camps, having asked his secretary to block out three hours without interruption so he might finish a task he had been unable to complete for several months and which was now considerably overdue. Even finished, he felt it was one more failed attempt by himself to understand what it all meant, dressed up as an introduction to others that might simply explain the Death Railway.