Our part of Kanu Camp was an area of tents in a field of lalang grass, and we found the Divisional parties asleep in the open once again, having rested one day at Tarsao, and then marching another 25 kms right through us by night. They would be off again that night and we shouldn’t see them again. At Kanu, near our tents, we found two Div. H.Q. majors, one already sensibly stripped to the waist, making an attempt to build a bamboo shack in the jungle. We asked them what they were doing and they said that some Nips had just lumped the two of them there with a handful of men and about six tools and told them to build a hospital! The Nips had thought that the dark blue arm-bands of the two majors meant that they were doctors – so they must build a hospital! It was over a month before the error was checked up on, and they lived there in their little homemade hut for nearly two months, borrowing their rations from Kanu Camp proper, a kilometre and a half up the road.

On the 9th May, after the next day’s march, we arrived at Hintok. This was known as the ‘Mountain Camp’ because it was sited immediately at the base of a very impressive jungle covered mountain. It was a purely Australian camp and was surrounded by a bamboo palisade as if to protect it against wild animals. We spent the night under an atap roof on a very wet floor and the Australians were as friendly as they could be – there was little enough they could do to help us, for their rations had been skeleton stuff for months. They had, however, a fair M.I. room that patched us up generously. Several things were unusual about Hintok: the latrines were made of wood, were clean, and sixteen feet deep; they had made a complete water system out of hollow bamboo pipes, and had rigged up showers in a bath place entirely carpentered from bamboo; and they had a silver bugle blown by a first-rate bugler, who made the calls sound more beautiful with the mountain’s echoes than I’d ever believed a bugle could sound.