All these events occurred between July and November 1943, and we’ll begin with a visit to the Tamil ‘Base Hospital’ at 204 kms, which I made myself. In charge of this so-called hospital were two young British doctors, and in their camp at the moment were a thousand or two seriously ill Indians suffering from every conceivable disease, but very largely from huge, untreated ulcers. The only drug in the entire hospital was a limited quantity of Pot. Permang., and bandages were made from tearing up the filthy clothes of the men who’d died the previous day. I saw a sick parade come slowly forward and watched a weak solution of Pot. Permang. put on gaping ulcers that it turned the stomach to look at. One wretched Chinese I remember hobbling along and having it put on a foot with the worse complications of Singapore Foot I’d ever seen; the foot was swollen to the size of a balloon and from the tips of the bloated toes almost to the ankle, the whole organ was a mixture of purple and raw flesh. They had no anaesthetics and not one surgical instrument. On the previous day nine men had died, and up to 11 o’clock that morning another two. The coolies had only been in Thailand about four months, and these doctors estimated that at a minimum 100,000 had already died.

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.