At the next tent, down in the hollow again, Gus was fitted in; and I was finally dossed down in a non-Officers Battalion tent, that was really only a large piece of leaky canvas, stretched over an irregular shaped bamboo frame, allegedly large enough to hold five. Old Woolley, not attached to the Officers Battalion, but just plain sick, was in a tent nearby with other sick people.

The commander of my new hovel was John Staff, a regular captain. Then there was Major Bennett, a tall, grumpy, grey-haired fellow and a scratch golfer; he was a moaner, and never stopped grumbling – but he had a good reason: he was coolieing at over 45 years old. Outside the mosquito net rigged up inside the tent was Jacko, who lay under an eave outside on a camp bed. Over his bed was a regular rat runway, and occasionally, to show friendliness, they’d drop their messes on his blanket. Jacko, a very phlegmatic young man, and one of the three who had made that extraordinary attempt to escape from Chungkai with George Tilly, caused us a certain amount of amusement by having to be circumcised during the first week he arrived! The last inhabitant was Pat Radnor, intelligent and rather ‘bolshie’, with whom I always got on well. My own part of the tent lay under the leakiest section of the roof, where the canvas was only two feet six inches above the flat, split bamboo stretcher which was my bed. This was the normal and natural fate of the last arrival.

The total Officers Battalion at this time numbered about 70 sick officers here in 206 and thanks to the new and unwished for arrivals, there were about another 50 in the Fit camp just up the road. Originally made up from the old Wun Lun and Chungkai officers’ working parties, they had worked solidly on bridging the whole way up the line. All the Nips hated officers, and they really had had a simply appalling time. At least a third of them were fully bearded and all were exhausted and weary to a degree.

But the atmosphere of the battalion, though easily understandable, struck a newcomer as very peculiar. Quite a few seemed to have ‘let themselves go’, and wore rags so foully dirty that it shook one to realise they were officers, and they slouched around and looked furtive, for the constant fear of them all was that the Nips should pass some of them as fit before the Fit Party went up country for this last time. It was for the purpose of looking as ill as possible that most of the beards were kept on and all of them, from the two remaining colonels downwards, kept special clothes of blackened rag-wisps to exaggerate their sick looks on Nip medical inspections. This was eminently wise and it often worked. But the saddest thing to see among these officers who had been treated as coolies so long, was their really appalling greed over food.