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.

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.