Bed bugs, the stinking things, these crazy things mean Thailand to you.

We worked in mud just like a sea,

When we came up in May we never knew this had to be.

A cigarette that bears the Red Cross traces,

A bale of new shorts hid in sandy places,

Those petty pilferings, these crazy things mean Thailand to you.

The blunted needles for inoculations,

The agonies of jungle ulcerations,

On how the Blue Stone stings!! These crazy things mean

Thailand to you.’

The audience at the end of the show just stood up and cheered for minutes. The reference to the ‘bale of new shorts hid in sandy places’ arose out of a rather dangerous theft of a little while ago. Somebody stole a complete bale of 80 pairs of new shorts from the Nip Q.M. store. When the Nips discovered it they confined everybody to the camp so that no wood or ration parties could go out and said that the ban would not be lifted till the shorts were returned. Who the main culprit was, nobody knew but, not knowing their history, several very respectable officers had been buying these shorts at five dollars a pair. All these had to be handed in, and still more than 70 pairs were missing. Colonel Featherstonhaugh made a speech to the whole camp in which he quite justly said that we were being punished for an anti-social piece of thieving; those shorts must be returned forthwith.

Half an hour later an officer was squatting on the latrine, when he heard a rustling in the atap partition that separated off the men’s section; a stick eventually was poked through, and in a cleft at the end of the stick was a piece of paper . . . Then came the sound of footsteps disappearing at the double, and silence. The piece of paper turned out to be a roughly drawn plan of the river bank with various trees and bushes marked on it. At one place there was an X and the word ‘Treasure’ written there. The Camp Police dug at the spot indicated, and the remaining 70 pairs of shorts came to light. When Major King gave the shorts in, having made up the absolutely correct number from a few ‘spares’ such as Q.M.s always have, the Nips were so astounded and pleased that they didn’t demand to punish the culprits themselves, but left that to us; and as nobody was ever quite sure who had pinched how many, the affair was forgotten.