Another day – and this happened soon after we’d arrived in 203 – I was bellowing out the time to the men on the pre-dynastic piledriver, and we had a short rest as a sick party of British troops marched slowly by; they were sick remnants of ‘H’ and ‘F’ parties. Among them I saw Benson the pianist, just able to walk. I left my men and walked a few yards along with him, trying to cheer him up and saying that the railway was due to be finished anyway in two months. But he complained of his heart and said he didn’t think he could last much longer; the Korean escort had already driven some of them to death with the aids of bayonets and exhaustion. On my return to the piledriver I was lucky, for the Nip had only got a piece of rope in his hand and I had expected at least a piece of heavy bamboo!

A final example: We met a party of Australians, coming down. We thought they must have finished their sector and asked them the news. They said they were the surviving 400 out of a party of 1,200 and had come down here to rest a few weeks before going back. In addition to all the usual diseases they had Tropical Typhus as well. There was a Test Match wicket-keeper in the party. How was the railway up above? we asked. There wasn’t any bastard railway – there was only f . . . ing jungle. The road? That disappeared with the monsoon. That’s why the bastard Nip was sending up all the Tamils.

That advent of Asiatic labour, brought up to die in thousands by the preachers of ‘Pan-Asia’, is perhaps the blackest and foulest on the record of the I.J.A. These unhappy, simple people will appear again on the scene, but to instance their treatment we may consider the Tamil camp we built in four days at the 201 K mark. On the first day we cleared and burnt about four acres of jungle above the river bank. On the second day two medium sized atap huts were built for the Nips and as store huts. On the next two days we prepared the accommodation for the Tamils, and this consisted of tents – one canvas thickness only, whether the inner or outer flap didn’t matter – pitched high off the ground, with no end or side flaps at all. Inside the tents we built two rows of split bamboo shelves, one a foot above the floor, one four feet above it. In one tent lived 50 men! There were no latrines, nothing else at all. They drew their food, plain rice and dry fish, from the Nip cookhouse. This was in the very middle of the Monsoon.