After they had completed their march up, exhausted as they were, they had had to set about building their own camps, a job in which they’d had no experience whatsoever. The rations and medical supplies had hardly existed, and they’d gone out to make the railway at once. Of course, they ran straight into cholera, and some camps had 75 per cent casualties or more in one month and had to be closed. It was generally reckoned that out of the total 10,000 men, approximately 6,000 had died, and among them were the singing Padre of Changi, and my friend Reginald Benson. At one camp, where there had been 20 out of 1,200 fit for work, hospital cases were carried out onto the railway, where, from their stretchers they broke up stones for ballast; frequently Nip engineers beat up Korean guards who just could not make the prisoners carry out their impossible orders. On one occasion a man had been tied to a tree to be burnt to death, but when the flames burnt through his ropes he fell clear of the fire; he was then beaten and stood in front of the Guard Room for four days.

One of our doctors, who was coming down from another camp, climbed into several trucks as they crawled by on their way south; he said that some of the creatures inside were hardly recognisable as men, and the floor of every truck was stinking with the results of dysentery. In one truck two corpses lay, who had died that morning, and it was everywhere about the same. Our Group then hadn’t had 20 per cent deaths; in less than six months these people had had 60 per cent.

There was one very famous story of a gallant but futile attempt at escape, led by a senior major, soon after they arrived near the Burma border and saw what was in store for them. They made up a party of nine men, including an Indian and a Burmese cook who acted as their guide. Between them they raised 500 dollars, and the Burmese cook had increased that to 1,000 dollars. Their plan was to make for the Ye River, float on a raft down to the coast, and there attempt to find a boat which they could sail to India. But they had reckoned without the jungle. They found that their route lay through such dense country that it was only possible to hack their way through a few kilometres a day. Their compass bearings took them over river and mountain alike, and sometimes they had to crawl up the faces of gorges and waterfalls – all this carrying heavy hit.