About February 25th or 26th, Nuts’s camp, which had an excellent reputation at the 226 km mark, passed through us, spending a night or so just below us in what had been the old Nip brothel, and on February 29th, 1944, two parties were due to leave from our camp. It was not a good move-out. I had a boil in the inner ear that had relapsed my malaria only a week after a previous attack, and the evening before we were due to leave we had another ‘Sumatra’ of a storm. My neighbour had just started a rigor as the storm began. Now, in a bad gale the rain comes first, and then the wind; normally, the wind drops as the rain gets heavy, but on this occasion the rain poured down and the wind followed it up like a hurricane and twisted and twirled into our hut so that in one minute everyone was as wet as a newt and the hut interior looked as if it had been dipped in the river. As we’d done so many times before, we bundled all our kit up in a couple of square feet, covered it with a gas-cape and, while we waited for the storm to blow itself out, held on to the hut for dear life, for it seemed several times as if the entire building was about to be uprooted and sailed into the river.

The following day we left. Most of the doctors and the sick went in the first train – open cattle trucks – and they nearly had a truck on fire from the sparks from the very primitive engine. We waited for our train by the line all night, and it didn’t turn up – the Nip telephonic communication not having improved in the last year. But next morning, just as we’d been allowed back in camp to rest, along came our train and out we bundled again. We were lucky because we had closed cattle trucks, and as there were only six officers, led by God’s gift to the opposite sex Clive Flaherty, a famous Rugger international, we found ourselves sharing an enormous truck with five Nip guards and had plenty of room. The train started with a long, sustained whistle, and as we looked on Takanun for the last time, as is so fortunate for human beings, only pleasant memories remained; the nightmares of the first six months already seemed remote; we were sorry to leave.

PART THREE: BASE CAMPS AND LIBERATION

PART THREE

BASE CAMPS AND LIBERATION

CHAPTER 14