And the way they died! At Tonsha in the early days an officer had been severely beaten up for refusing point blank to finish off a Tamil dying of cholera, when parties of British Officers were daily going out on the sole job of collecting and burying the coolies who’d crept into the jungle to die. On another occasion an old Tamil raised himself with a groan on a stretcher where he lay with corpses about to be dumped in a communal grave; the Nip in charge, without the slightest hesitation, hit the old man over the head with a shovel and in he went with the rest. A normal way of disposing of Tamil corpses was to sling them in the flooded river, but as anyone between 200 and 240 kms can witness, they were generally just left out in the open to die, sitting or lying in pools of their own excrement, covered with countless infected flies and bluebottles. One corpse propped up against a tree was picked clean to the skeleton in 48 hours by ants, rats and other creatures, and there the skeleton still sat, just as the man had died. On another occasion, when they were still shallowly burying the bodies, a gruesome hand was left sticking out above the ground. There was no earthly devilry and suffering these people did not experience.

And on the other hand, the pathetic gratitude they showed to those that helped them! Full grown men who’d seen cholera in their own camps, often left Tamils they had succoured with tears streaming down their faces, and swearing and blaspheming at their own impotence. If the British Empire continues to be worthy of its name, let it never forget the responsibility it owes to those thousands of its citizens who deserve redress, and a guarantee of future security even more than British P.O.W.s do. As it was with the Tamils, so it was with the Burmese, Javanese, Chinese and Malays.

The fate of the ‘H’ and ‘F’ Parties from our Division, who had done the forced march of 280 kilometres straight up into the jungle, had been whispered before on many occasions; but in October and November they were passing down again through us in train loads, and from their own lips we heard a summary of their story as they travelled down to Kamburi, from where they had been told they would return to Singapore. On all lips was praise for Lt Colonel Dale, of the R.I.A.S.C. who, as one of the senior Divisional Staff Officers, had been simply magnificent in the infamous Nikki camps.