It is still possible today – as I found when I returned to the scene of my captivity in 1967 – to cross the river by boat from Kanburi town and walk to Chungkai through the very same country and crops of peanuts and maze as it was a quarter of a century before. The house boats on the river looked just as attractive, while the same elephants still helped disentangle the teak rafts that were steered down in leisurely fashion from up country. The main change on the river was that the slow, chugging ‘pom-pom’ boats had given way to much more racy craft with huge outboard motors and propellers at the end of long, hand-steered shafts, that surged up and down the water at a hideously noisy twenty miles an hour. The outboards were made in Japan.

Of Chungkai, nothing remains today. In places, you can see just a little of the deep trench that surrounded us in the latter part of the war, but even the camp cemetery has been moved to drier ground. At least the thousands of British, Australian and Dutch war dead rest in a singularly beautiful and well-tended place.

Returning to the scene, we were unable to orient ourselves until Boon Pong arrived. Boon Pong was the Thai whose land had been seized by the Japanese to build Chungkai camp, and who was given the POW canteen concession in compensation. For no political motives, but simply as a good Buddhist, Boon Pong had risked his neck every day for two-and-a-half years, smuggling money and medicines to us, and thereby winning the King’s Medal for Courage after the war. He arrived now by boat and helped us identify the giant tamarind tree under which the Japanese headquarters hut had stood; near it was the parade ground on which I and all the other junior officers had been ordered out at gun-point to work on the railway.

What was the need for another meagre few hundreds of extra coolies? Why, already, in 1943, the introduction into our vocabulary of the dreaded word ‘speedo’?

If the railway really had to be finished earlier, why let our health deteriorate through malaria and dysentery so that we were soon able to function at about one-third our real strength? A primitive but balanced diet could have doubled our value in a few weeks. Surely, by early 1943, Japan was confident she was winning the war.

The Japanese High Command, said Nagase, our Japanese interpreter and another veteran of Thailand in 1942, were looking ahead. They might lose control of the Pacific one day. There was already a struggle for the Indian Ocean. For this reason, the railway was an essential supply line to Burma, where Japan had about 200,000 troops. When pressed Nagase added that the Japanese of that period had been educated to believe that POWs were contemptible, that they themselves should commit hara-kiri rather than be taken prisoner. Therefore, it was not surprising if Japanese staff officers regarded POWs as expendable material.