The open space of the former Chungkai parade ground is now the playground of a Thai elementary school. But the village has readopted its Thai name, Kau Poon, Chungkai, say the Thais, must be a Japanese name.

‘Why do you show so much interest in the railway now?’ I asked Nagase, for I knew he had been back to Thailand several times recently.

‘I was one of a party sent up country by the British, after the war,’ he said, ‘to disinter their dead in the jungle camps and bring them down here for re-burial. It made me think much about my own people and about war. It influenced my whole life. That is why I agreed to meet you in Thailand. Perhaps I wish to help compensate, in a small way, for some of my country’s former misdeeds.’

I turned to Lieutenant Inoh, a former Japanese camp commander who had also rejoined us in the jungle. ‘And what about you, Mr Inoh? Did you order your officers out to work in the same way?’

‘Fortunately,’ he answered, ‘I was commanding a small camp quite near here and had no surplus officers to send out.’

‘What do you think would have happened at Chungkai if we’d refused to work? Were your machine guns bluffing?’

‘I think they were bluffing. But if you had refused, you would all have been beaten up. That would have been the next pressure.’

Before going up-country, I went to look at the so-called Bridge on the River Kwai. For the Thai Tourist Office has most subtly confused one of our very real bridges with the product of novelist Pierre Boulle’s imagination.

To my surprise, precisely on the site of what used to be Tamakam Camp, there is now a group of thatched buildings which function as restaurants, a curio shop and even, just recently opened, a night club. They all made use of the magical word Kwai, which, in fact, is simply a corruption of the Thai word Khwae, which means any branch of any river. I found that if you ask the visiting tourists what they came to see, they just look perplexed and tell you that, of course, they came to see the bridge the movie was based on.

Most ex-POWs would agree that the Kwai film was magnificent cinema. But what rankles is that a satirical story by a Frenchman who was never in Thailand had become confused in the public mind with an historical fact.