Before we enter on this fatal stage of our journey, let us recapitulate the normal position that the troops and officers were in. We had now been prisoners for fifteen months. The men had been doing daily hard coolie work in tropical weather, on insufficient rations with little or no medical attention and on 4d a day, for anything up to fourteen months. There was hardly a man who had not already been in hospital, and most of them were already familiar with malaria, dysentery, and vitamin deficiency diseases. They were probably on average one to two stone underweight and in a very poor state of resistance. Already the total kit of the average troop might be made up as follows: an old hat; a pair of boots with leaky soles, and of course, no socks; a Jap-Happy in which he worked; perhaps a patched pair of reserve shorts, his only ‘smart garment’ – no other clothes at all. Then there would be a water bottle with a worn out cork; a mess tin and spoon; a ground sheet out of which the proofing had vanished and which was sticky, smelly and leaky; two sacks, or perhaps an old blanket; a pack to carry this in; and possibly a share in a mosquito net. These were the sum total possessions of the average British soldier. Many had far, far less.

The officers were more fortunate, though I’m most concerned with the younger ones who had to do the work. They had been out spasmodically with working parties for anything up to a year, where they had constantly to bear the responsibility of mediating between the Nips and the troops and where they had frequently been hit for their pains. Many of them had been doing full coolie work of that hardest type in an officers’ working party, 300 strong, for the last six months. Their health was better than the troops’, though nearly all of them had been several times ill or in hospital; their food, too, was more supplemented, though no Thai would have dreamt of eating such stuff. Our total kit might consist of: an old valise; one blanket, plus a sacking or home-made cushion which made up our bedding; a mosquito net and an old, stinking ground sheet or gas-cape; mess tin, knife and spoon; one good one bad shirt; one good, one bad pair of shorts; some sort of boots and a much darned pair of old grey socks. That would be about the lot, and much more would anyhow have been impossible as we were our own porters.

From this it is clear that the motley gang that was now off on the real trek up country was already pretty depleted in food, clothes, bedding and, most important of all, in physical resistance to disease

CHAPTER 9