Book
Review
Working on the Railroad
Jonathan
Mirsky
Remember
Colonel Bogey's March? That uplifting tune in The Bridge on
the River Kwai ? And Alec Guinness, the pukkah but crazy commanding
officer, his upright officers, and the salt-of-the-earth other
ranks? And that opaque Japanese commander? Seven Oscars! Of
course one mustn't expect accuracy in blockbuster films. But
Denys (as he likes to be called) Peek's book about the three
years and more he spent working on the railway the Japanese
forced their prisoners to build through Thailand to Burma
during the second world war makes it impossible for me to
watch that film again. He claims to remember perfectly the
events of 50 years ago. Usually I distrust total recall over
such stretches of time; in this case I suspend disbelief.
At first I thought 50 pages of prison-camp horror would be
enough, but Peek drew me in with his detail, his lack of sentimentality
and his downbeat account of kindness, comradeship, brutality
and cowardice.
What
makes the book unusual - and I have read quite a few PoW accounts
- is not Peek's abiding hatred of the Japanese. If I had survived
what he did, while more than 20,000 PoWs had died (many fewer
than the number of dead Thai, Malaysian and Burmese slave
labourers), I would hate the Japanese too. He is generous
enough, anyway, to recall his horror watching newsreels of
German atrocities "carried out by nations we used to
think were civilised and, indeed, almost our kith and kin".
No, what surprises is Peek's hatred of Churchill and the other
war leaders he alleges ordered the abject surrender of Singapore,
where Peek had lived for most of his 20 years. Even worse,
he writes, were the inadequate equipment and training of the
British forces in Singapore, although thousands of volunteers,
like him, flocked to the colours and were eager to fight.
"Surely," Peek writes, "the truth will come
out some day when the stringencies of war have gone and guilty
men can be named in public."
Almost
as unsettling is Peek's condemnation of the officers in the
camps who, with a few exceptions - one or two colonels and
all the doctors - shirked their duty to look after their men
by rarely appearing among them, speaking to them rudely when
they did, while enjoying relatively good rations, wearing
uniforms instead of loincloths, reading, playing bridge and
even fishing. Of one such officer, he writes: "To what
extent is this colonel's obsession with his precious self-dignity
responsible for the camp's abysmal squalor, the hundreds of
deaths already and the hundreds more which will surely happen?
[To his men] he is, despite his Military Cross, a moral coward
at the lowest level, putting his personal dignity before their
desperate needs."
The needs
were desperate. Almost everyone had diarrhoea all the time,
there was no toilet paper, the latrines overflowed, and men
emptied their bowels squatting with their bare feet in the
shit of their comrades. There is plenty of detail of how skin
ulcers - which cost Peek's brother his leg - look, feel and
smell, and how the men strove to preserve their modesty by
mending their bedraggled loincloths (they had no other clothes
except hats).
The PoWs
felt a kind of pride in constructing the railway with primitive
tools, while hoping the RAF would blow it to bits; they worried
that after the war they would be branded as collaborators
for having built it. The prisoners admired the intelligence
and grace of working elephants and calculated that each PoW
worked as well as one-14th of an elephant. It was a very British
time. When Peek, after months of separation, finds his brother,
facing leg amputation under the crudest conditions, they clasp
hands. "Hello, Ron. It's been a long time, but I'm here
at last." "Hi, Den. I knew you'd come." Many
officers, some of them clinging to their swagger sticks, Peek
contends, sucked up to their captors, but "we know of
no soldiers who actively collaborated with the enemy".
It was
all so ghastly that a tiny moment could tilt one over the
edge. Peek is bathing in rainwater off a roof with a rare
bit of soap. A frog appears and some of the soap lands in
its eyes. The creature desperately wipes them. "And I,
although unwittingly, have done this to him. Tears spring
from my eyes. I wept not just for the frog, but for all of
us." Next time at the video shop, skip The Bridge on
the River Kwai.
This
review was first printed in The Guardian
Copyright
(R) thedailystar.net 2004
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