The day before, we had been rather shocked by the conduct of one of the leaders of our party. The Nips at Kanu had allowed five sick men out of the whole group to fall out and ride by truck to Hintok. One man, a 6 feet 3 inches major, fell out with blisters on the heels! The truck duly caught us up at Hintok and would carry the sick further next day. I managed to show one of the Nips that my batman was in the middle of a rigor, and next day he would ride on the truck too. As we set off next morning I gave my batman – who of course had been unable to do any batting for me for ages and who was just a normal worker – my heavy haversack of books and small kit to bring on for me in the truck. The blistered major rode on the truck once again, though there were numbers of fever cases who were marching, and many men’s heels had so blistered that they were either marching slipshod, or even quite barefooted.

The next port of call was seventeen kilometres ahead, a big camp named Kinsayok. As we straggled along through the jungle we kept crossing the railway trace. Sometimes the trace was so little discernible as to be almost purely overgrown secondary jungle; sometimes we saw parties from the small camps we continually passed working on the embankment; and sometimes we’d even see a stretch of completed embankment stretching several hundred yards. Between Hintok and Kinsayok the road was particularly mountainous, and we crawled along limestone ledges blasted out of the hillside to take the line, and below us were precipices hundreds of feet deep, while we looked over tremendous forest country in the valleys below to distant hills blue with heat haze on the other side. It seemed that for about ten kms the railway line here would run on a series of blasted cuttings, very high embankments, and wooden bridges. Near Hintok a very beautiful deep, grass-green coloured butterfly abounded; the troops noticed them, and speculated whether Nuts had passed this way and managed to catch any.

At length we reached Kinsayok Camp. It was one of the largest camps we had seen and was near the boundary of 4 Group. We found yet another of the divisional parties there, once again out in the open, and also doing a steady twenty-five kms each night. Dennis West the violinist, and Padre Tuck, the singer, were in the party, and I was sorry to hear that Benson, my pianist friend who had a weak heart, was also in the party, though he’d fallen out early on the march.