As the first light of dawn breaks through the clouds it is time to get on parade. The troops go out first, and we follow immediately to check the numbers. They stand there in fives, filthy old hats on their heads; some with bare feet, some with old, broken up boots; every man wears a Jap-Happy stained with mud and sweat, his mess tin and spoon stuck in the string belt. Some put their mess tins in a haversack. Nearly everybody has three or four days’ growth of beard, and many are fully bearded. Most of them are very thin, with big, swollen ‘rice-bellies’ and there are various sorts of skin diseases, dermatitis and ringworm, in huge patches on every part of their bodies.

While we wait in the drizzle for the Nip engineers to arrive in their cheap mackintoshes, we look around us once again. Everything is grey-green. A thick mist rises slowly each morning out of the jungle on either side of us, looking as if the trees were cloud topped; during the course of the morning it slowly vanishes. On all sides we hear the Wak Waks whistling like plaintive banshees; the optimists say that that means the rain will soon stop.

Now our administrative Nips move forward from where they have been chatting to meet the engineers who are walking in from their camp, a kilometre up the road. The engineers are led as usual by the old gunso (sergeant) with the squint, and he wastes little time. He goes round with a stub of pencil and a board and details the parties for embankment, cutting, bridging and timber collecting, and off we shamble with our respective Nip engineer privates in charge. We pass the tool tent on our way, draw out all the tools that Taramoto had said he would teach us to love, and which we’d cheerfully bury in the head of any and every Nip we could.

Today it’s our turn for the big bridge, a bloody awful job. So far they’ve got the foundations secure, after they’d fallen down once; and the upright baulks are in for the first 40 metres, covering four large bays. We’re now having to haul up the first cross-pieces with primitive hand tackle and our own strength. There are always about six Nips on the bridge, all giving different and contradictory orders; and they invariably go completely mad when a certain, dumb Nip officer comes along and stands there silently watching us. As long as he stays, there is chaotic work, and no rest at all.

The men dump their kit under logs out of the rain and are at once at work. Some are hauling on ropes, some are up on the bridge trying to haul the baulks upright, some are sorting out the next timbers. Two fortunates – worked on strict rotation, and curiously enough never queried by the Nips who take it as an old British Army custom – are brewing some hot concoction jokingly referred to as tea.