A few days later the dentist from the H.Q. camp came down to visit us, and from him we had the first authentic news. It seemed that the Nips had known for some time that there was cholera up country, but the most recent inoculations anyone had had were six weeks old, and the stuff was only good for four weeks. Of course, they’d eventually get the vaccine up, but it would take time. Of the dozen cases in the camp, seven had already died, and the infection was mounting – six new cases that day.

The cholera was first diagnosed as such by a Russian doctor in the camp who had seen it before in China; our own M.O.s wouldn’t believe him and said it was an acute form of dysentery. After the third case, the Russian threatened to tell the Nips himself if the S.M.O. didn’t believe him: it was cholera. The camp was temporarily confined and terribly shaken; special fatigue parties were out collecting bamboo to burn the bodies.

Apart from a horrible anxiety, the cholera in the H.Q. camp had the effect of giving us more work to do, for we temporarily had to make all the bridges and culverts in their sector. By the end of another week they had about 50 cases and about 30 deaths; and we had all had our first injections. Camps up above were also infected, one of them, we heard, very badly. But so far our camp was clear.

Even a working party to the 206 area was pretty grim, and we were fanatics about flies at the time of our midday rice. Our first day over there we bumped into a young Scottish officer just short of the camp; he was collecting bamboo to burn the body of a man who had died that day. I met, too, a young M.O. He was in a very distressed condition. ‘The thing that shakes me,’ he said, ‘is that you are talking to a man in the afternoon, and he’s dead that night, and so altered that you literally can’t recognise him.’

As we worked just 50 yards outside the camp fence, making culverts, we could see the cholera section, which consisted of leaky old tents pitched on the side of a very steep hill at one end of the camp.

We learnt that the M.O.s had one orderly to each tent containing 20 cholera cases, and there were two bed-pans for the whole lot. The steep hill face was so slippery and muddy that several medical orderlies when emptying bed pans by night, had fallen into the cesspit. Saline, needed by tens of gallons to pump into the veins of the agonised dehydrated bodies was produced by the Nips only in sufficient quantity to treat one man in ten. There was a rumour that Ginger de Huguenot had arrived up from Wan Po and had volunteered to take the cholera section over.